Off with her head Headline from the BBC: Thatch…
Off with her head
Headline from the BBC: Thatcher statue decapitated. �A man has been arrested by City of London Police in connection with the incident.� One hopes he will be presented with a medal. Man of the Year!
The excellent Tim Parks, whose book of essays To Hell and Back I�ve just read in a couple of days (how often does one say that about essays?), has another essay, this time on the World Cup, in the New York Review of Books. Typically, being a US publication, the essay is out of date as the tournament is over. But it�s mainly about the meaning of being a fan, a fan of a particular club that is, and, in Parks’ case, a fan of an Italian club. Parks lives in Verona and has written A Season with Verona, a book on a year following his side, Hellas Verona, around Italy during a Serie A season. Parks appears to be the perfect living author to me: cosmopolitan, into Thomas Bernhard, into football (not �soccer�) and a good critic. He discusses the importance of hate in the game. It�s great that he isn�t one of those snooty middle-class liberals who misreads the significance of supporting a team (and hating another), or a thug who murders literature.
Lastly, I thought I was late in my review of Jean-Yves Tadie�s biography of Proust, but Andre Aciman�s, also in the NYRB (again, what a combo � football and Proust in one mag!), comes nearly two years after it was published. But it was worth the wait. This long essay is superb, and an excellent encouragement to read In Search of Lost Fish.
Time.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Oxbow lake
- Tim Parks: Family Reading Matter
- Alexandria Biblioteka The Serbian novelist, poet …
- "Repetition": a repetition
- Tim Parks Interviewed 3 AM Magazine have finall…
