In Praise of Athletic Beauty (and the New England Patriots)
Since it's playoff season, let's talk about sports. It's not every day that Sports Illustrated sees fit to include a university press book in their "Year in Books" round-up, but they liked Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's In Praise of Athletic Beauty enough to include in their 2006 year-end feature:
How would Kant, who tried to define beauty, feel about a perfectly turned double play? He'd love it, says Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The Stanford comparative literature professor's In Praise of Athletic Beauty is a thought-provoking--and academically rigorous--defense of the grace and aesthetic worth of sports.
Gumbrecht's book also figures in a recent New Yorker feature by Adam Gopnik called "The Unbeautiful: What's Happening to Football?" (not online, but it's in the January 8 issue):
As our efforts to explain and predict are baffled, we retreat into pure pleasure. Then the question becomes: Enjoy what, how? Fortunately, a new book helps lead us back to becoming the armchair aesthetes we were all along.
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His central thesis, to round it out a little crudely, is that we watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone else's ability...In other words, when we watch Joe Namath or Chad Pennington or even Eli complete a pass what we feel isn't pathetic and vicarious but generous and authentic: we give up a bit of ourselves in order to admire another.
Neither Chad nor Eli had a great day yesterday (although no one had a worse weekend than Tony Romo)--maybe we'll send out some complimentary copies of Gumbrecht's book to them so they've got something to do during the offseason. And while this blog's author is a lifelong Washington Redskins fan (sob), I'll bite the bullet here and say it...GO PATS!
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