Mother baseball. I enjoy speculating about its bloody beginnings as a fertility rite. Funny that with all the verbiage about the s...port no one mentions the obvious structural relationship between a baseball stadium and a womb: in design, a stadium is both a circle and a "Y," two notorious female symbols. The curved and sloping shape of the stands is like a plush endometrium in which we fans cozy up to watch a lone batter square off against the universe.... I especially like to think about that when announcers describe players' bats as fast, corked, dead, quiet, live, or as loaded barrels--and pitches as high hard ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, ...but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with con...sidering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums.... It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadi...um; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In football, on each play eleven men act in unison, and in each action not the individual but the corporate unit acts. When Bart S...tarr completed a pass for the Green Bay Packers, all the Packers could be said to share the deed; one man alone is quite helpless. When Joe Di--aggio stepped to the plate in Yankee Stadium with his unforgettable stance and fluid swing, Di--aggio stood in spotlighted solitude, and none of his teammates could act in his behalf. Football is corporate, baseball an association of individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium... of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the Yankee... Stadium of ancient times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »