June 19, 2010 World Cup 2010 On the Awfulness of England By Will Frears I had thought earlier that I might write in praise of indolence—of the joys of spending six hours lying on the sofa watching football. It had crossed my mind to say to those who complain that this World Cup isn’t living up to their expectations: “It’s still the World Cup, it’s still fucking awesome. Would you rather we had no World Cup at all? Would you rather have to account for what you did all day?” That was before I watched England against Algeria. All credit is due to the Algerians, who are responsible for any stylish and entertaining soccer found anywhere in the vicinity of Cape Town yesterday. They were not to know when they set up in the now de rigueur defend-and-counter attack style of this World Cup that England would be so abject, so utterly dire. At least the French team made it very clear that they didn’t care. England strode onto the pitch, all chests blown out and with something to prove. What they proved was that it wasn’t the ball or the trumpets or the defending-is-the-new-attacking thesis that could spoil this World Cup. It was England. The country that claims to have invented the game put in a performance so dull that all the excitement of the previous two days—of Mexico and Serbia and the U.S. comeback and all the refereeing travesties—could evaporate under the entitled nihilism of England’s football team. At the end, Wayne Rooney stared down the barrel of the camera and snarled, “”Nice to see your own fans booing you, you football ‘supporters.'” The disdain of the England supporters for their team and talisman’s woeful display is, I think, the most encouraging sign yet.
June 18, 2010 Letter from Our Southern Editor Open Letter to The Awl By John Jeremiah Sullivan Brothers and sisters, with all respect, your declaration of war is an admission of defeat. We beg you to reconsider this folly. First you tell us—in what begins to sound like a rage-filled howl against the light—that there is “no such word as snuck.” Then you send us a link to an Internet site, where we learn that snuck “has reached the point where it is a virtual rival of sneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world.” With enemies like that, who needs friends? You instruct us to look at the OED, yet when we do, we find not only a snuck entry there (“chiefly U.S. pa. tense and pple. of sneak v.”), but also dozens of usage citations, going back to the nineteenth century, many of which are taken from such known language slouches as Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner . . . Speaking of Faulkner, the coincidence of our being crackers is not, as you imply, irrelevant in this case. The very first appearances of snuck are almost exclusively Southern, and opposition to it has always been inseparable from the idea that it sounds country, or vulgar, or demotic. That’s probably why the dear “ass-people” at your high school taught you never to say snuck. They wanted the best for you, and didn’t want your college professors making fun of you in class. That’s only proper. High school is the time and place for rigid prescriptivism of the kind you’re trying to put over on us. Later on, though, you put away high-school things. You wake up to the idea that English is an ocean, full of words that live, change, and die, and that your task is not to fix them in place but to master their flow, as best a person can. A story I heard during the course of my own education changed my mind forever on this subject. When William Tyndale was doing his translation of the New Testament in the sixteenth century—the one that got him killed—there was a certain ancient word for which he lacked an English equivalent. His solution was to mash together a French word, beauty, and an old Saxon one, full. That’s how we got beautiful. By your logic, we should stop using it, since, after all, it wasn’t a word. Nothing is, until it is. Snuck is a beautiful, almost onomatopoeic word. We’ve asked you for a good reason not to use it. In return you’ve given us the opinions of a long-ago ass-person (enjoyable term in itself—your coinage?). That person has been oppressing you. Set yourself free. Yours in the cause, JJS
June 18, 2010 World Cup 2010 The Zombie Cup—It Lives! By David Wallace-Wells It seemed for about a week that this would be a tactical tournament—a dullish Cup, shadowed by Inter’s Champions League triumph, marked by negative play and cautious counterattacking lineups, and ultimately crowning, perhaps more decisively than a champion, the incisive geeksite ZonalMarking.net. German efficiency seemed the closest we’d get to actual electricity. How quickly things change—and how high a German defeat lifts the hearts of fans the world over. For my money, Joachim Löw can still boast the tournament’s top performing side, as well as its top performing cashmere: Germany looked as dangerous a man down against Serbia as any team this side of Argentina, and, having gone down to that inferior squad, may no longer be plagued by the panic of preeminence that seemed to trip them up in a lackluster first half. Ghana, beware. The true maestros of today’s early-game tournament resurrection were, of course, the referees. There will surely be howls of outrage in the coming hours and days over the nine yellow cards (six in the first thirty-six minutes) in Serbia’s defeat of Germany, and over the preposterously disallowed U.S. goal against Slovenia, which would have delivered three points to the Americans and made them the first team in the tournament’s history to recover from a 2-0 halftime deficit and actually win. But as fans of the game, we shouldn’t be howling—or howling too long, anyway. However erratic, those decisions are not injustices, they are refereeing, and a happy reminder that soccer is not a game of numbers, like poker, mastered by biding one’s time, but a game, beneath the tactics, of chance. You buy your ticket and you take the ride.
June 18, 2010 World Cup 2010 The Most Unpredictable World Cup Ever? By Will Frears Spain lost. France was (I feel quietly confident in using the past tense) awful. Brazil struggled to break down the obdurate North Koreans. As I write this, Germany just lost to Serbia who already lost to Ghana making Group D impossible to predict. Japan beat Cameroon. England is running a you-be-the-goalkeeper campaign for the World Cup lottery. Chile and Uruguay both look pretty tasty. Italy isn’t looking unshaky. Only Argentina is fulfilling their historical imperative and they haven’t had to defend yet. Obviously, it’s been low scoring and the ball is a disaster but this is delightful chaos. FIFA had arranged it so that if Brazil and Spain won their groups, they would not meet until the final. Now, if Spain finishes second, which is quite likely, the two will meet in the next round. And if Switzerland can hold on for two draws, they will have the easiest route to the finals. This could be the most unpredictable World Cup ever.
June 18, 2010 In Memoriam José Saramago (1922–2010) By The Paris Review Click here to read the Art of Fiction interview with José Saramago from the Winter 1998 issue.
June 18, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Assholes Revisited, Milton’s Sonnets By Lorin Stein Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.You answered how to be an asshole. But how about what to do when you’ve been dealt one? In other words: I got dumped. Quick: where’s the revenge section of the bookshop? —Greta, New York City In Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, a middle-aged Englishwoman embarks on her first love affair and—after many heartbreaking and cringe-inducing misadventures—discovers that the best revenge is a night alone in a fancy hotel. As Rita Konig would say, J’AGREE. If nights alone are not your idea of poetic justice (or if you want to work on your French), I suggest the libertine novella No Tomorrow, by Vivant Denon. Here a jilted young nobleman takes revenge on his mistress the other way—by going to bed with her friend. (Who, needless to say, has her own agenda.) The New York Review Classics has bulked out this slim bagatelle (newly translated by Lydia Davis) with the original text. So you can compare as you set your vendetta out to chill. Read More