- I was asked this past week why I post so little Residents. I didn't have a good answer. There, have forty one minute songs.
- Some blog maintenance this weekend - loading is slowing up again so I'll check the blogrolls for sites that have either not updated for three or more months or have disconnected their feed. Not-updating blogs will be moved to Moribund, dead blogs removed.
- There are a number of new joints in New Here and Newest Gags First and Second. Please check them out as they float to the top of the blogrolls. As always, please send me sites you read you think I might like. As always, thanks for reading.
- So, World Cup. I love it. Forgive me.
- A dance of light and shadow.
- This bloody, beautiful World Cup.
- A Colombian on The Best World Cup Ever.
- This could be The Best World Cup Ever?
- Well, the group stage was the best I remember and I understand your joy at three exhilarating wins if you're Colombian: if knockout plays at, or, please Baal and Diablo, exceeds the level of group I might never lose this fucking habit.
- The Global Game (subscription required, but you should be reading Harpers anyway): The World Cup at which I first grasped the fading of old-style nationalism was 2006, in Germany. That summer you could see a shift to a kind of carnival nationalism: people from around the world dressed up, each in their own national colors, and then watched games together on public squares with giant screens. Oliver Bierhoff, the German team's general manager, remarked with surprise that fans had become less interested in results. Above all, they were out to have fun. It was no longer a matter of national virility, or life and death...
- I don't buy in whole the essay, but worth a read.
- Inside the new stadiums you could be anywhere: Inside Brazil’s stadiums of old—the original Maracanã, the Mineirão, Castelão, Verdão, etc.—there were no clocks, just crappy scoreboards with broken lightbulbs. Everyone knew to look at their watches or listen to the radio if they wanted to keep up with the time and the score. Indeed, many of the best known, most beloved stadiums in Latin America are minimalist structures designed to hold tens of thousands of people for two hours as they jump up and down, light fireworks, and tumble over each other. They are not be the most comfortable places to watch a soccer match (or do anything else), but they are actual places. Stands are for standing. If they weren´t, they would be called something else. The new stadiums are cleaner and more comfortable, but they are non-places. These Brazilian stadiums could be anywhere, which makes them feel as though they are nowhere in particular. Once inside, the outside is closed off and the spectacle is secured.
- Luis Suarez, former street-sweeper.
- USMNT is on the far easier side of the bracket. And it's a shame there can be, at most, only two South American team can make the semifinals, Argentina one, one Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, whichever survives that sub-bracket. So yes, Brazil v Argentina in the finals is still the chalk bet.
- My counter to my anti-Bradleyism: yes, considering that Bradley has spent the last five years of his life training to pop balls over offside traps for a true striker it's entirely possible his suckitude is a direct result of Altidore's injury and that he and Dempsey, in current roles, don't talk.
- RIP Allen Grossman.
- On Josipovici's new novel (for those of you who do) on/about/considering the life of Joseph Cornell (for those of me who do). I ordered it last night.
- As well as Carson's pamphlets on Albertine. I'm telling you, please Baal and Diablo, I'm not taunting you, if I'm somewhere where I can read without distraction Clamors Erupt works, which is one of the themes don't you know.
TOWN ON THE WAY THROUGH GOD'S WOODS
Anne Carson
Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does you heart stop?
Once I saw a cloud over Bolivia so deep.
Mountains were cowering do you ever?
Look in the quick you see the secret.
Word inside the word?
As in an abandoned railway car.
One winter afternoon I saw.
The word for "God's Woods."
