Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Fun Remembered
PASSAGE #1:
From Don Dellillo's "Underworld"
"How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I don't even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns.... How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process."
PASSAGE #2:
From Sarah Vowell's "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" (on finding the point in the primordial pointlessness of play... Pop-a-Shot, by the way, is an arcade game in which you try to shoot as many mini basketballs as you can in 40 seconds)
"I think Pot-a-Shot's a baby game. That's why I love it. Unlike the game of basketball itself, Pop-A-Shot has no standard socially redeeming value whatsoever. Pop-A-Shot is not about teamwork or getting along or working together. Pop-A-Shot is not about getting exercise or fresh air. It takes place in fluorescent-lit bowling alleys or darkened bars. It costs money. At the end of a game, one does not swig Gatorade. One sips bourbon or mararitas or munches cupcakes… In other words, Pop-A-Shot has no point at all. And that, for me, is the point. My life is full of points – the deadlines and bills and recycling and phone calls. I have come to appreciate, to depend on, this one dumb-ass little passion. Because every time a basketball slides off my fingertips and drops perfectly, flawlessly, into that hole, well, swish, happiness found."
from Christopher Noxon
From Don Dellillo's "Underworld"
"How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I don't even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns.... How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process."
PASSAGE #2:
From Sarah Vowell's "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" (on finding the point in the primordial pointlessness of play... Pop-a-Shot, by the way, is an arcade game in which you try to shoot as many mini basketballs as you can in 40 seconds)
"I think Pot-a-Shot's a baby game. That's why I love it. Unlike the game of basketball itself, Pop-A-Shot has no standard socially redeeming value whatsoever. Pop-A-Shot is not about teamwork or getting along or working together. Pop-A-Shot is not about getting exercise or fresh air. It takes place in fluorescent-lit bowling alleys or darkened bars. It costs money. At the end of a game, one does not swig Gatorade. One sips bourbon or mararitas or munches cupcakes… In other words, Pop-A-Shot has no point at all. And that, for me, is the point. My life is full of points – the deadlines and bills and recycling and phone calls. I have come to appreciate, to depend on, this one dumb-ass little passion. Because every time a basketball slides off my fingertips and drops perfectly, flawlessly, into that hole, well, swish, happiness found."
from Christopher Noxon
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