soccer is too working class
for a very nice French guy I talked to in LA last weekend. Dad of two, comic book illustrator -- gentrifier of East LA -- blueprint of your nice liberal guy right?
Wrong!
He was all about class aspirations that made him distance himself from all things having to do with "le foot." Um, so imagine his confusion to talk with me -- but then another woman chimes in and says to him that girls should play more team sports because then they would be more successful in business and I am left to make a dialectical about face and ask, "Why should play be preparation for work?"
Shouldn't some forms of play remain play -- or is that actually too pseudo-aristocratic?
Blogging will remain spotty until I finish my book ms, which is continuing apace. Please send me items of interest to post during this "special time."
Wrong!
He was all about class aspirations that made him distance himself from all things having to do with "le foot." Um, so imagine his confusion to talk with me -- but then another woman chimes in and says to him that girls should play more team sports because then they would be more successful in business and I am left to make a dialectical about face and ask, "Why should play be preparation for work?"
Shouldn't some forms of play remain play -- or is that actually too pseudo-aristocratic?
Blogging will remain spotty until I finish my book ms, which is continuing apace. Please send me items of interest to post during this "special time."
2 Comments:
>>He was all about class aspirations that made him distance himself from all things having to do with "le foot."
Exactly how does an artsy French dad articulate his class aspirations in relation to symbols of class identity? (Is it possible that he was being ironic?) This fascinates me. Please elaborate.
He probably thought of soccer as being the class of working class roughs -- a sort of jock without class -- and he was the nerdy comics geek who had to separate himself from these guys.
It's also secretly got traces of city/country divide. It's no accident that even the white guys on the French team are from working class neighborhoods in small industrial towns
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