Literature | In 1937 appearance, Joyce joined Hungarians ‘in the middle’

Jun 16 | Why has a 1937 alignment of literary stars not featured in Vienna in the European Championship’s cultural program? Vladimir Nabokov lectures in a Parisian literary salon and espies James Joyce “sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team.”

Books | ‘Global Game’ anthology en route from University of Nebraska Press

The Global Game: Writers on Soccer is scheduled for November release—the product of some three years of compiling, winnowing and permissions seeking by myself and editors Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, along with strong support and belief from the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln and heroic efforts from a network of translators, working in Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and Slovenian. (Apr 24)

Health | The goalkeeper’s anxiety at the filtered cigarette

Portsmouth goalkeeper David James writes an entertaining column for Guardian Unlimited, most recently meditating on the cultural contact between football and smoking and confessing his own “15-year 20-a-day habit” (“It’s Time for the Whole Game to Stub Out My Filthy Habit,” Mar 16). (Mar 19)

Poetry | ‘View well this Ball, the present of your Lords …’

We publish an excerpt from Matthew Concanen the Elder’s 1720 canto describing a six-a-side football match in Dublin—at variance with a traditional view that only the frenzied folk football variety was contested at the time. The players “around the field in decent order stand …” (Mar 13)

Books | For centuries, life has had its uppies and downies (w/ podcast)

Jedburgh, Scotland, Mar 12 | Hugh Hornby, author of a comprehensive account of Britain’s 15 surviving festival football games—Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain (English Heritage, 2008)—was busy signing books during the Jedburgh Ba’ Game on Feb 14, but says that the Uppies “may have prevailed by an odd hail.”

That he terms the annual rituals “mass-participation games” indicates that the emphasis is on taking part, not the result. With 27-minute podcast.

Books | Alan Sillitoe, channeling the angry young football man

Alan Sillitoe’s work was on the syllabus in my short-story class as a college freshman. Naturally, the story considered most representative was “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” consisting of a teenage cross-country runner’s interior dialogues upon liberation each day from the Borstal fetters (“I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me …”).

But a fresh assessment on Sillitoe’s 80th birthday today suggests that the short story “The Match,” which takes its tone from the terrace gloaming at Notts County’s Meadow Lane, might be the best introduction. (Mar 4)

Books | Murakami runs from soccer, to the distance

As a sidebar to the Feb 29 entry (“A multihued archipelago, tuned to soccer’s harmonics”), part-time Hawai‘i resident Haruki Murakami reflects in a recent Spiegel Online interview on his sporting interests and their relationship to his writing (“When I Run I Am in a Peaceful Place,” Feb 20). (Mar 1)

Trinidad & Tobago | Watching the match by not watching it

Global Voices profiles writer and blogger Nicholas Laughlin of Port of Spain, whose innovations include watching a football match by not watching it. (Feb 25)

Music | ‘Kwass Meda,’ a soccer field ‘where we will be joyous’

At the conclusion of the 2008 African Cup of Nations, we offer a new translation of Ejigayehu Shibabaw’s, or Gigi’s, song “Kwass Meda” (Soccer Field). The song features on the 2000 release One Ethiopia, with the translation from Amharic by Solomon Abebe and his nephew, Befekadu. (Feb 11)

Poetry | Slippery white pitch / Tricky footing for linesmen (w/ video)

Atlanta, Jan 20 | The freakish confluence of Arctic cold with Gulf of Mexico–spawned low pressure on Jan 19 seemed to bode great things for the three-seven-year-old Metropolitan Atlanta Casual Soccer League.

Snow started falling at 10 a.m., an hour before matchtime. Children shouted in the cold. Atlantans had the steering wheels of 2½-ton sport-utility vehicles in their viselike grips, praying for safe passage over slightly damp pavement.

Books | A majestic history built around games (w/ podcast)

Jan 5 | The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, by David Goldblatt, appears at booksellers in North America this week, and we wonder how many will read the title’s four words as a direct challenge to the myth of American centrality in all things. With 50-minute podcast.

Books | Drumsagart Thistle, Nick Hornby and the literary imagination

Jeffrey Hill’s book Sport and the Literary Imagination: Essays in History, Literature and Sport (Peter Lang, 2006)—recently reviewed online by the Sport Literature Association—includes chapters on the foundational works by Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) and Nick Hornby.