"If the joy of fandom still escapes you, let me come at it from another angle and leave you with one of my favourite passages on fandom, this from New Yorker writer Roger Angell.
In the cynical, complicated and stressful modern world, there's something to be said for the simple emotional connections that come with being a fan, Angell said: "It is foolish and childish on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut ... is understandable and almost unanswerable.
"What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.
"And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail and foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift."
dstaples@edmontonjournal.com
"If the joy of fandom still escapes you, let me come at it from another angle and leave you with one of my favourite passages on fandom, this from New Yorker writer Roger Angell.
In the cynical, complicated and stressful modern world, there's something to be said for the simple emotional connections that come with being a fan, Angell said: "It is foolish and childish on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut ... is understandable and almost unanswerable.
"What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.
"And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail and foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift."
dstaples@edmontonjournal.com
I apologize for the double post within a post, I must be having computer problems.
