Book reviews

I met Rupert at a concert by The Necks in January 2010 at the Corner Hotel: spitting distance from Punt Road oval. I was talking with Tina Douglas, a Melbourne-based painter, before the show. She had brought her friend, Rupert along with her. He was agitated, talking a lot – annoyed about something. I only exchanged formalities with him. Curiously, he left before the show started. The Necks played their usual two sets: one hour-long piece, slow and improvised, followed by a shorter, probably 20minute piece after a beery interval. Mesmeric, atmospheric, hypnotic being the usual words the crop up when talking about The Necks. There’s something special about seeing their music unfold live. Something that can’t be captured by listening to it on CD or through one’s little machine.

It was only at the end of the concert, that Tina started talking about Rupert. She talked about him being obsessive and never knowing anyone so fully taken up with their own painting. She mentioned how he used to be a footballer, but, he had given up after a falling out with the coach. She didn’t mention the names ‘Collingwood’ or ‘Mick Malthouse’, but, it slowly clicked that the Rupert who had been earlier and then left also early was Rupert Betheras: a member of Collingwood’s grand final sides of the early 2000s. He was also known for his role in bringing Liam Jurrah to Melbourne: a venture that would have its own trajectory. Rupert was known as an industrious player; hard working and probably not the most ‘naturally gifted’ as they say. I remember him playing in long sleeves. I also remember that I liked something about that valiant Collingwood side that only lost by a couple of goals to the mighty Brisbane.

***

Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies, London: Penguin Books, 2012.

Here is Leanne Shapton’s website: leanneshapton.com

I am reading Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, yes I am.

Shapton is a Canadian artist and former elite swimmer, who almost made it to the Olympics. Nowadays, it seems that she is equal part author, publisher, illustrator and recreational, but regular swimmer.

Swimming Studies tells the story of her rise as a swimmer, or rather, her experiences as a competitive swimmer. For, in this book at least, she cares little for the glory of winning or setting of personal best times. Instead, she focuses on the sensations of being in water, of using her muscles, and the smells that are a part of the everyday life of a swimmer.

The book – perhaps it is most easily classifiable as a memoir – is also a tale of family and domestic life. Leanne shares her swimming with her older brother, Derek. She eventually becomes a faster swimmer than him, for she has, according to her coaches a natural affinity with the water. She asks if it bothered him and he replies to say, no, ‘it meant more to her’. Yet, Leanne never really betrays this sense of full emotional engagement with her competitive swimming. Although she states that, at one point, she is ‘clinically depressed’, this is not directly linked to her swimming. It’s just another temporary sensation. The reader is only left to guess that perhaps it might be.

Shapton seems to swim because she is good at it. And that it is something she has grown up doing. Swimming is a skill that she has developed through her 5am morning practices for which she depends on her mother’s endless to-ing and fro-ing from training. There seems to be much love between them; but, it is not the tenor of the book. Shapton instead recounts the smells and rhythms of her mum’s life, rather than stating open affection. Her mother becomes another part of the aesthetics and everyday life around the thing of swimming.

Swimming Studies is enhanced by the inclusion of photographs of the swimming suits Shapton has collected throughout her times as both elite and recreational swimmer. The suits are neatly photographed on a vintage cloth mannequin, and each suit is accompanied by a brief note on where it was brought and where she wore it for the first time. The suits give an indication of the the changing attitudes towards the female body: something to be covered as much as possible, to being something athletic and capable of moving fast. The suits shift from hindering mobility to enhancing it.

The shapes of pools

Shapton addresses swimming in an original manner. She remembers the textures of swimming, its smells and its sounds. Her portraits of other swimmers, her re-drawing of the shapes of pools (above) and her paintings of swimmers swimming capture something very watery about the feeling of swimming. For me, the weakness of this book is its relative absence of plot or central focus. The plot, the subject matter, the focus are somewhat diluted. It feels like reading a series of disconnected notes on the practice of swimming. So be it. Perhaps it is aimed at being a Walter Benjaminian encounter with the overly focused and directed world of competitive sport. The strength for me, of this book, are the very personal and bare insights Shapton gives regarding her ambivalence as a swimmer. The inclusion of her paintings make up for any textual weakness.

***

There is a helluva lot of action in Betheras’s paintings. His paintings are full and thick. There is no place for the eye to rest. They must be made quickly – at least in the After Collingwood (2008) series. Marking Tracks (2011) indicates a quieter, more refined style. Finally some empty spaces emerge on the canvas. A difference between Shapton and Betheras is in that Shapton makes her painting from her experience as a swimmer; what she learned as a swimmer. Betheras’s works are an indication of someone breaking away from his identity as a footballer; leaving footy, perhaps. And thus, in one image, there is a Collingwood player with its face erased. Betheras must have been an enigmatic footballer to Collingwood fans; for indeed, so few players give up the game when they can still play it. Moreover, he gave up the relative fame of being a footy player in Melbourne for the insecurity of being an artist. Shapton and Betheras that the doing and playing of sport is a productive partner in the development of an aesthetic.

This is a terrible season. This season is one disappointment after another. And yet, we keep coming back for more. We have to show our loyalty. We have to show our resilience. Yet again. Yet a-bloody-gain. The team is lost for a solution. Dimma’s demeanor has evolved from being angry at losing, to being convinced that ‘we would work our way through it’ to accepting that ‘we an average team’ to ‘doing it for the fans’. ‘No we are not even thinking about finals.’ Yes, that is true. But, over summer, the pass mark was not only to make the finals but to also win a final. I hear that line from The Castle, ‘tell im heez dreemin’.

The pleasures of literature seem considerably safer than the losses of footy, sport. The irony being, if one doesn’t emotionally invest in a football game, or doesn’t invest in a team, it’s intense vicarious pleasures are also not enjoyed. Perhaps ‘Indonesian literature’ is distant from the everyday life of the Richmond Football Club and the weekly habits of going to games or watching them with friends at pubs or at home on a quiet evening. But, during the 2010 season I set myself a task of translating at least 2-3 poems by Afrizal Malna per week before I would go to a game or watch a game. They were the minimum tasks I would complete before giving myself the fraught pleasure of watching the Tiges.

Now, I’m maintaining my reading, but doing it more so in parallel with watching footy, watching sport. The two have to become united. The sport of literature. The literature of sport. There are cross-overs and divergences. Sport is a creative act, neither beneath nor above the arts. I disagree with Coetzee and the snobs who snub sport as being beneath their consideration. Sport – in its multiplicity of forms, cultures, practices – is a universal part of human culture. And thus it is worthy of serious consideration, analysis. Below, I continue my reading of sport – this time, a brief analysis of some soccer-based short stories by Seno Gumira Ajidarma.

***

Seno Gumira Ajidarma (born 1957, Boston), one of Indonesia’s most prominent authors, has contributed to the discourse on soccer in Indonesia through the means of short stories, journalism and academic writings. These writings reflect his trajectory as a writer and also the professions and jobs that he acquires.   The earliest of Seno’s writings on soccer that I have found are his two short stories: “Kematian Seorang Pemain Sepakbola” (Death of a Footballer, 1988) and “Sukab Menggiring Bola” (Sukab Dribbles the Ball, 1996). The former is in the collection, Manusia Kamar (Room Person, Jakarta: Haji Masagung) and the latter is in Negeri Kabut (Fog Lands, Jakarta: Grasindo).

 “Death of a Footballer” tells the story of Sobrat, the striker of a team that is on the brink of winning the Indonesian domestic league title. Sobrat has been transformed from a hopeless and untalented youth, into the team’s and competition’s leading goal scorer. His mother discouraged him from playing soccer; and his coaches ordered him to find other jobs rather than waste his time at soccer. Eventually they would give in, owing to his persistence, and let him train with the team on the condition that he would do other jobs such as the cleaning of the club rooms, as well as the massaging of the other players after training. Although supposedly Jonggring Salaka’s third-in-line goal keeper, he is finally deployed in attack after injuries to the other strikers. This turns out well, and, he seems to be fulfilling his wish of ‘glorifying the name of his country’. He is idealistic about the meaning of sport: it should not be corrupted by money. And indeed, he turns down overtures to engage in match-fixing. Sobrat meditates in the centre of the pitch at Senayan stadium and imagines the goals he scores. His 17^th goal for the season, which he scores in the last minuted of added time, seals the team’s fate as that year’s champions and his fate as the league’s top scorer. But, it is also at that moment which he dies, instantly. Spectators think he has fainted, overcome with emotion: but no he is dead and the coach is crying. No one can explain his death.

“Sukab Dribbles the Ball” takes the discourse of soccer into a more fantastic and literary realm. The character of Sukab is a recurring feature of Seno’s stories, and, in this story, once again he is a figure of whimsy, reflection and gentle resistance. Sukab embodies a desire towards artistry and play. In contrast to the aforementioned Sobrat’s goal scoring and league-title-winning feats, Sukab, on the other hand, is a soccer-player as artist. Sukab dribbles the ball throughout cities, jungles, amongst the ruins of civilisation, deserts, across seas in search of the greatest goal keeper so that he can score the greatest goal of all-time. As he dribbles from town to town, city to city, each city confronts him with their best team as a means of honouring his skills. He dribbles past them all. His dribbling-journey attracts crowds and the media; a helicopter follows him and broadcasts his adventure live. His journey comes to an end when he reaches the North Pole, and in his white uniform, becomes disguised against the backdrop of the great white-expanse. He kicks the ball into the last remaining goal: the gaping hole in the Ozone Layer.

These two short stories are typical of Seno’s style: they are elaborations of everyday life in Indonesia. The two characters – Sobrat and Sukab (perhaps they are interchangeable) – are whimsical losers who perform something great, spectacular and admirable and are lauded by those around them. Yet, they have no interest in their glory and the adulation they receive. Both stories offer little in the way of conflict and provide only indeterminate conclusions. Through these two brief stories, Seno asserts the importance of the play, aesthetics and critical possibilities of soccer.

Soccer pitch, Yogyakarta, photo by Onyenho

***

Methinks that perhaps it would be comforting to watch a Tigers game and only treat it as an aesthetic event. Perhaps: watch the first quarter and leave or turn off the television. Perhaps only listen, watch or attend the last quarter. Here is the irony: the people that do watch the game irrespective of the scoreboard, are those for whom the scoreboard matters the most: the coaching staff, the players. Dimma et al always find something to appreciate or critique regardless of what happens – win (occasionally), lose (frequently) or draw (sometimes). It is us fans who are so fixated on winning and losing. We’re addicted, perhaps to the Tiges losing. Perhaps the players know this and thus they returned us to our natural habitat of turning up and watching them lose. I’m imagining Sukab playing for the Tiges. I imagine him in the shape and form of Dustin Martin. Sukab as Dustin Martin endlessly fends off defenders, takes his bold strides and endlessly looks for that goal off in the distance – some 60meters away so that he can kick it through post-high. His chest swells, he looks up, he gives the don’t argue over and over again. Win good Tiges. Or, lose brilliantly, aesthetically, playfully.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic and David Lagercrantz, I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, trans.Ruth Urbom, London: Penguin, 2011.

I am reading Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s autobiography yes I am. In the late 1990s, Malmo Football Club (Malmo Fotbollforening, MFF) was relegated to the second division. The documentary Bladarar shows some of their fans in tears as the final whistle of the year blows, sealing their fate. The stands are almost empty and the fans appearances’ indicate their lost sense of hope; their slow coming to terms with the inevitable demotion. The scenes of anguish are a universal of mass sporting occasions: angry tough men expressing their frustration with macho aggressiveness or resigned passivity. The documentary quickly merges into the next season, after only a comments from the managerial staff about the club’s failure in the 1999 season. Now in the Swedish second division, the stadiums are a sparser and less grand. The number of supporters have diminished but the hard core remain. They continue to express their frustration: shouting advice, condemnation and insults from somewhat closer to the pitch. Perhaps, indeed, getting in the ears of players. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a young player of Bosnian and Croatian background from the district of Rosengard, emerges in this context. The man is brash and he puts noses out of joint as a matter of style. By the end of the documentary, MFF are back in the top division and Malmo has been sold to Ajax of Amsterdam. Mr.Ibrahimovic continues to wind people up, but, he’s made it further than most of them; he’s been sold for a record amount for a Swedish player.

Housing solutions in Rosengard

This is an autobiography which not only tells the rise of a footballer, but, also the life of immigrants in Sweden as well as the social and cultural conditions of Rosengard – an infamous neighborhood of Malmo. Zlatan is proud of his origins from Rosengard, but at times he struggles against his tendencies to behave in a manner normal to Rosengard, but that are elsewhere considered to be rough, aggressive and arrogant. In the face of authority and a perception of him being arrogant and a renegade, Zlatan most often, chooses to outdo their preconceptions and act more aggressively, more arrogantly. But the man has a winning smile and charm. He can turn it on when he needs to. Moreover, at least in this memoir, he does have the ability to be relatively self-aware, critical and highly calculating in his negotiations of the broader football world. Unfortunately, his ‘self-awareness’ often manifests itself in statements such as, ‘I needed to be left alone so that I could damage some stuff’.

Zlatan on a quiet day

The secrets of success for the teams Ibrahimovic plays for are not difficult. Regarding Inter Milan’s second successive Scudetto in 2009, he writes: “Inter Milan hadn’t won it in seventeen years. They’d had a long hard spell, filled with suffering and bad lack and shit. Then I came, and now we’d brought home the league title two years in a row, and the whole place was a three-ring circus” (Ibrahimovic 2011, p.239). This isn’t the only occasion in which Ibrahimovic formulates such a simplistic analysis of success. Elsewhere, he lays the blame of his conflicts with figures such as Pepe Guardiola, Lionel Messi, Oguchi Onyewu and Rafael van der Vaart squarely at their feet. After the fallout and his drop in commercial value while at Barcelona, Zlatan (he continually refers to himself in the third person), writes, “thanks to a single person, my price tag had gone down by 50million euros” (Ibrahimovic 2011, p.300). Although he is given the silent by Guardiola throughout his time at Barcelona and under-performs because of it (according to him, of course), he thrives on the difficult-to-please attitude dished out by Jose Mourinho.

Zlatan is at his most poignant when writing of his childhood home. These the book’s brief moments of his less aggressive side – i.e. the moments when he acknowledges his arrogance and hustling of others. “Sometimes, maybe, I go too hard on people. I dunno. That’s been a thing with me from the very beginning. My dad would go off like an angry bear when he drank, and everyone in the family would be scared and get out of there. […] My entire childhood was filled with tough people who would go off on a hair-trigger […] and ever since then I’ve had it in me, that watchful side: what’s happening? Who wants a fight? My body is always ready for a battle” (Ibrahimovic 2011, p.291).

Is there room enough for both of them?

The book contains two sections of support material: ‘cast of characters’ and ‘career timeline’. He doesn’t have many friends and he ascribes the bare essentials to his characters. “Jurka: My mum. Born in Croatia. She worked as a cleaner”, as for his father: “My dad. Born in Bosnia. He has worked as a bricklayer and property caretaker”. Most only exist because they have had some sort of brief connection with Zlatan. The career timeline is filled with his successes, as one could cynically presume. He tells us his goal for the Swedish national team in 2012, was “one of the best goals of all time”. No doubt.

Conviction, for me, is one of the main ingredients for compelling writing. Zlatan, with his co-author David Lagercrantz, to put it mildly, writes with conviction. This book probably created some more enemies – not that he would care or notice. There is quite a degree of finger pointing and naming. Perhaps Mr.Lagercrantz could have been a more critical co-author in order to uncover some of the complexities of Zlatan’s teams’ successes. But, for Zlatan, there is only one way – to go harder and harder, to be brasher and brasher and to become more and more successful – whatever it takes.

“I’m about to score one of the best goals ever. Watch me.”

By the end of the book Zlatan is playing for Paris Saint Germain, owned by Qatar Investment Authority. It’s a long way from the miserable finances of MFF. Youtube is filled up with clips of his antics, goals, and quotations. His smile is infectious and it is difficult not to like him. In a recent interview, after arriving at PSG, he is asked if he would like to win the Champions League. He responds by saying of course he would and that it would be important to him, but, at the same time it wouldn’t because his career has already been fantastic. The art of being Zlatan involves this unshakeable self-belief (arrogance) coupled with  his equally immovable charm and an ability to maintain a get-out-clause, should an unlikely failure happen.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, London: Penguin, 2000.

Retro Fever Pitch

I am reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, yes I am. This is Hornby’s first book, and now, it has been reprinted probably dozens of times, continuously repackaged in a different cover with a different font and page layout – just in the manner of soccer teams and their endless slight variations on the team’s colours. The popularity of this book indicates its ability to cross genres and to attract audiences beyond those of just soccer fans or Arsenal supporters. Fever Pitch is the memoirs of a die-hard Arsenal fan in the pre-Wenger era. And for this, it serves an educative function for those who are only familiar with the attractive football as played by Wenger’s successive teams. The ironic chant of ‘boring, boring Arsenal’ is given its context here: the team was known for its conservative, defensive, ugly football – always being compared unfavourably to other teams such as Tottenham and Chelsea.

The olden, olden days, Highbury 1927

And so, Hornby’s memoirs ‘as an Arsenal fan’ trace the complexities of his fandom within the context of a dismal team giving little pleasure to their thousands of supporters. Disappointment and smashed dreams are the persistent tropes of the supporters life. Hornby traces this trajectory of disappointment from his childhood, teenage years and to adulthood. The fans are resilient and masochistic to the point of despair: they will themselves to watch Arsenal games in spite of the time, distance and helpless state of the team. Where their team falters, the fans stay loyal. Hornby writes, ‘the Arsenal team I saw on that afternoon [Arsenal v Stoke, 14th September 1968] had been spectacularly unsuccessful for some time. Indeed they had won nothing since the Coronation and this abject and unambiguous failure was simply rubbing salt into the fans’ stigmata. Many of those around us had the look of men who had seen every game of every barren season. […] Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something that I’d been waiting for’ (Hornby 2000, p.13).

The stadium at the end of the street

Hornby relates his trajectory into football fandom and Arsenal fanaticism through the prism of his parents’ separation. The narrative is poignant for he writes openly, honestly and self-deprecatingly. The football provides a means for the young-Hornby to be together with his father, even if the conversation remains stilted. The football serves as a necessary distraction which they both can participate in. Nick’s fanaticism, though, becomes a point of difference and contrasts against the relaxed and fair supporter style of his father. Nick’s nervousness on game days becomes a kind of debilitating obsessiveness in which he demands to be at games (and in the seats) some two hours prior to kick off. On other occasions, he is unable to enjoy his scout camp out of knowledge that he is missing a home Arsenal fixture. Hornby most vividly articulates his sense of betrayal by his father, after he sees him applaud the opposing and underdog Swindon Town after they defeated Arsenal in the League Cup final at Wembley in 1969. Nick cares nothing for his father’s lectures on ideas of sportsmanship and fair play. He has been betrayed by his team who has let down his hopes of seeing them lift a trophy and perhaps more egregiously, his father who has seen it fit to applaud the those that smashed his dream.

Goodbye to all that

Hornby’s style is transparent: making fun of himself and his plight. Hornby writes that since the book was first published some 20 years ago he wouldn’t have missed more than 20 games. Probably there are even more fanatical fans than him, who have missed fewer games over longer periods of time. In the meantime he has passed on his Arsenalism to his children: it was with them that he witnessed Arsenal’s defeat to Birmingham City in the 2011 Carling Cup Final. Going to the football offered an empty space in which Nick found it possible to be silent with his father. In one way or another he reproduces this pattern. Hornby’s book is humorous for it states what is obvious to many who have grown going to the football (whether it be Association Football or Australian): there is much suffering to be had before one experiences ever so fleeting and temporal moments of the sublime. But all that perennial suffering and boredom is somehow worth it.

Each week, I will write a brief commentary on a book I am reading that in one way or another, relates to sport. If it is not a book that I am reading, it will be a book that I have read and consider to be important for one reason or another. I might also write of websites, podcasts or blogs.

***

Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011, London: Faber and Faber, 2013.

I am reading Auster’s and Coetzee’s Here and Now, yes I am. These are two great and famous novelists. Early in their letter writing, the subject quickly turns to sport. Coetzee turns to sport after they have exchanged observations about the global financial crisis – Coetzee stating that it is just a plaything of numbers. He then writes of his guilty pleasure in spending many hours watching Test cricket. The game he refers to is the Melbourne test of 2008, played between Australia and South Africa. He writes of his utter absorption and of his conviction that watching sport is a waste of time: ‘I have an experience (a second hand experience), but it does me no good that I can detect. I learn nothing. I come away with nothing’ (Coetzee 2008, p.31).

What Coetzee saw

Coetzee, throughout the letters, frequently comes across as the grumpier of the two men. Auster, on the other hand, has a touch of lightness and humour in his writings. It seems odd that the two are such good friends: perhaps their friendship is facilitated by their distance. Indeed, Coetzee is known for his distaste for others – particularly those who have had the misfortune of interviewing him. Coetzee, in his formulation quoted above, doesn’t recognise that he has a first-hand experience of watching a game of cricket. He also fails to see a parallel between his work as a writer of fiction and the playing of sport by some for a mass audience of others. Coetzee is a purveyor of his so-called ‘second hand experiences’. The guilty pleasure he finds in watching countless hours of sport is a descendent of the earlier guilty pleasures readers of the rising medium that has become the ‘novel’. The novel, before it became classified, was considered an indication of a fanciful imagination and a reader’s detachment from reality.

He smiled, once

While Coetzee renders sport below literature, Auster finds a parallel. He compares sport not to the ‘books that you and I try to write’ (Auster 2008, p.37) but to thrillers or detective novels. That is, a literary genre that is formulaic and follows a set familiar tropes. For Auster, it is this formulaic-ness that facilitates the pleasures of sport. It allows for the pleasures of ‘the known’. He compares the pleasures of watching sport to that of food and sex: part of the pleasure comes from the anticipation, expectation and desire to experience it again and anew at the same time. Like Coetzee, he feels an ambivalence to sport – although Auster’s articulation is perhaps a little more nuanced. He writes that ‘one feels stupid’ for having spent an afternoon watching men collide with one another. And that he has removed himself from his professional occupation of writing books and reading books. Auster’s letter was written from Paris and he is full of regret for not being able to watch the New York Giants play in a playoff (Auster 2008, p.38).

Smoking the pen

Auster and Coetzee use their letters to swap thoughts with one another. Most of them are unfinished. Perhaps they developed their thoughts while meeting up on their holidays in Portugal or France. Much context is missing. Nonetheless, their brief jottings on sport do present some of the persistent conundrums of watching, playing and considering sport. Auster and Coetzee however treat sport as being beyond their literary realm. Curious, really, given that they ‘waste’ so much time on it.

Somewhere, Paul Auster watches (photo from ESPN)