Leverkusen

Congrats to Leverkusen for securing the club’s first Bundesliga title, in the sixth-to-last round of matches, with a five-zero rout of Bremen. After the fourth and fifth goals the fans stormed the field and had to be shooed back to the stands. My brothers and I are especially pleased for the starting left-back, the esmeraldeño Piero Hincapié. He almost scored what would have been the title-clinching goal, but Bremen’s goalie made a heroic and ultimately pointless save.

Xabi Alonso is the sport’s managerial celebrity du jour. Indeed, this team reminded me of the 2010 Spaniards who, in game after game, would keep opponents pinned back and then eke out a winning goal in the dying minutes (although this match was more like the blowout final of the 2012 Euros).

R.I.P. Dick, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 16: Calisto; a Father’s Day joke

The Cornell Chronicle has published the best overview so far of Dick’s life and career. I especially like what it says about Dick’s contribution to the philosophy of science, and I like the reminiscences of Cornell PhDs Koltonski and Jezzi.

I also like the word “reminiscences.”

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The screenshot of this month’s body-text font has been chosen with Dick in mind. The passage is not a quotation from one of Dick’s books or articles. Rather, it showcases his patience. It’s the most self-indulgent footnote in the dissertation I wrote for him, which I set in Calisto.

Dick’s comment: What is tackling?

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Happy Father’s Day.

On how I begin to write in the morning

My dissertation has taken a tedious turn. I’ve been trawling for mentions of the term ‘reasonable’ among the obscure speeches and declarations of King James II, as well as in the debate on religious toleration between John Locke and Jonas Proast. And not only in those sources: also in legal dictionaries, and in Merriam-Webster.

Soon – I dread this – I really ought to check the OED.

I wonder if it was a good idea to try to detail the pre-Rawlsian history of this moral concept. Then I remember my supervisor’s advice. “Pages,” he would say. “You need a certain quantity of pages.”

Consequently, a long footnote about Xabi Alonso, Xavi Hernández, N’Golo Kanté, and Claude Makélélé has remained in the dissertation for several months. I can’t bring myself to take it out.

The other day, I ate lunch with my old pastor, and he expressed confidence that, whatever I turn in, it’ll be of superb quality. I didn’t tell him about that footnote.

What helps me to start writing every day is this. Online, I’ve found the dissertations of many of my acquaintances. I pull them out and read a few lines. Then I read a passage of my own dissertation. My own writing unfailingly is less erroneous, less trivial, less clunky, and funnier. I decide it’s quite good, relatively speaking. And so I write all day long, except when tutees interrupt me.

Spain, pt. 386: On tackling

This is from my brother Stephen:

Xabi Alonso on English soccer:

There is a pause as Alonso reaches, again, the crux of the issue. A single English word he returns to that, unpacked, analysed and investigated, explains much. “I don’t think tackling is a quality,” he says. “It is a recurso, something you have to resort to, not a characteristic of your game. At Liverpool I used to read the matchday programme and you’d read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They’d ask: age, heroes, strong points, etc. He’d reply: ‘Shooting and tackling.’ I can’t get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play. How can that be a way of seeing the game? I just don’t understand football in those terms. Tackling is a [last] resort, and you will need it, but it isn’t a quality to aspire to, a definition. It’s hard to change because it’s so rooted in the English football culture, but I don’t understand it.”

The tackle is perhaps the greatest expression of an English conception of the game — physical, epic, emotional. By definition, reactive. …

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Come to think of it, what is the Ecuadorian word for tackling? I’m not sure. The behavior lacks referential magnetism.

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So it goes for soccer — and for religion — and for romance more generally. Fleeing solipsism, we embed ourselves into those narratives which seem most universal, only to discover, bitterly, that the tropes which are most sacred to us are widely disregarded or despised: not just by foreign interpreters, but also by our colleagues, and even by our loved ones.

There are some who are shocked or saddened because I’m not fond of Lent or Christmas; and I pity those who can’t sense that a backpass may be performed simply to sustain a pleasing rhythm.