All in all, it wasn’t a great World Cup. I give it a solid B. As a spectacle, it really went off the boil after the second round.

The World Cup I remember the most vividly is Italia 90, and I remember it for all the wrong reasons. Negative play. Time wasting. Lots of 0-0 draws and 1-0 victories. As a direct result of the dire nature of the tournament, FIFA updated some of the rules. They liberalized offsides and made it so goalkeepers couldn’t handle the ball on backpasses. This helped speed up the game and 1994 was a much better tournament for it.

In the wake of this year’s tournament FIFA needs to listen to Franz Beckenbauer and crack down on the play-acting and time wasting. What will I remember about this tournament? A few moments of wonder: Spain’s fourth against the Ukraine; the wondergoal Argentina scored against S&M; Maxi Rodriguez’s left-footed volley against Mexico; Beckham’s free kick against Ecuador. And a few moments of madness: the red cards of Mastroeni, Pope, Rooney, and Zidane; the farce passing as refereeing in the group stage; the card flurry fiasco of Holland vs. Portugal. But perhaps what I’ll remember most is the Oscar-worthy performances of Portugal and Italy, fourth-place and champion respectively. They raised play-acting to a whole new level.

Sad, really, that diving, lying, cheating, and whining reaped such rich rewards. Let’s hope FIFA sorts it by 2010.

As I mentioned, I finished reading Jeff Ford’s Empire of Ice Cream yesterday and thought it was terrific. I’ll come back to these stories again and again. The ones I find the most fetching are the semi-autobiographical ones where you can’t quite tell where the fantasy creeps in, or if it does at all. The detail Jeff brings is one of first-hand experience and there’s no point in giving the old “the resemblance of any personages herein to any persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental” disclaimer because we know his characters are real, if perhaps composites. And while it’s a mistake to think the narrator is Jeff himself, it’s hard to imagine it being someone very different.

Stories that I think belong in what I’m calling, with tongue firmly in cheek, The Fordia Cycle:
* Creation (Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories)
* The Woman Who Counts Her Breath (FWA)
* The Honeyed Knot (FWA)
* Bright Morning (FWA)
* Present from the Past (Silver Gryphon)
* A Night in the Tropics (Empire of Ice Cream)
* Botch Town (EIC)
* The Trentino Kid (EIC)

When reading Jeff’s larger body of work there’s also a great deal of overlap. For instance, Jeff relates a story from his youth on his blog that has its twin in “Night in the Tropics”. In “Botch Town,” the narrator mentions his mother’s unfinished story “Something By the Sea,” a title of one of the stories contained in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant. And the narrator’s gruff-but-loving, machine-oil-smelling father and eccentric, artistic mother have a great deal of carryover from “Creation,” to “Present from the Past,” to “Botch Town.” And I noticed a lot of the sentiment of “Botch Town” spilled over into Jeff’s excellent novel The Girl in the Glass. But I’m sure the resemblance is purely coincidental…

In conclusion, if you don’t read Jeff Ford, you should. Happily, I have yet to read several of his novels but it’s a deficiency I’m sure to make up soon.

Current Mood: Monday |
Currently Listening To – Mississippi Fred McDowell – “Blues Masters”