We are not going to be remarking at length on the style of our alma mater's play in football this season, which seems to draw too liberally from a misimpression it has managed to sustain through many years, of aloof contempt for achievement.
(The front four, gaudily emerging from the courtyard of Pyne Hall, exists only in repulsive fantasy, the essence of this popular volume). Suffice it to say our performance on the field owes much to Macbeth's experience of Birnam Wood, such is the zealotry of our tight ends to yield to sudden trees that reception better reserved for themselves.
But we know something about these spontaneous presences, so often associated with the magical as to lend great startlement to our collisions. The apparition of the unexpected aviator has vexed us all before.
What, indeed, are we to make of this chronic embodiment of judgment on our unpreparedness? Wasn't it always just as likely, that such obstructions would plant themselves in our way from the ground below, as from thin air? Now the sudden aviator stands athwart our gridiron weekend as an admonition to give gravity its due. Lads who take flight for pigskin need to know the rate of speed of obstructions on the ground, is greater than that of theirs in air. And watching them.
Fergoshsakes, beat Cornell!
Lovely photographs. :) Go college football!!
ReplyDeleteViolence pervades this sport, our modern gladiators to kill or be killed any life lost in the field is a life wasted, terribly so. pgt
ReplyDeleteBravo little augury! For me, the best part was always the band.
ReplyDeleteAh but the bands are where the real mayhem's wrought.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the worst violence -- struck against our finely tuned sensibilities or formative intellects -- is always the mayhem perpetrated by the bands at half-time (marching or otherwise). I remember, my freshman year, sitting in the godforsaken stands at Schoellkopf Field (now heavily renovated, of course), and watching the Columbia University band -- my goodness, I wish I knew what they had been smoking -- perform a stinging, and exceptionally accurate, parody of Cornell's Big Red Band. For renegades like myself, it was delicious; for the true Red believers, it was blasphemy. I could not have cared less how the game went, either in spite of or because of the presence of Ed Marinaro as our quarterback. The real draw was the half-time insanity. I suppose it is because of recollections such as these that we collegians tend to look back on our Ivy days with a good deal more fondness than they empirically deserve. But you know that.
ReplyDeleteOh, and yes -- the images here are wonderful. But you know that, too.
ReplyDeleteWell the next time I want to smoke out the Slabber I will enlist the lady from Maine before conjuring the hostesses of the Scottish play - who, nevertheless, foretold precisely the 21-19 outcome of this Saturday commute, on the strength of a turnover to a spontaneous tree.
ReplyDeleteOnly two ironies remain on this morn of bleak predicted fate. The first is an unexpected difference over the endearments of remembered parodistic shenanigan, which our current midterm election campaigns throw into such halcyon relief. These were days, the Slabber admits, in which 'exceptional accuracy' gave indispensable dignity to sting, and made one proud to defend wit even at one's own expense. Mr Murdoch's minions stole that from our youth, as the Slabber's own persistent telling makes too plain.
The other irony comes in enduring a compliment on imagery to an Elgin in Greek marbles from the Acropolis, itself. Ouch.