Bookworm International Literary Festival 2012: Alan Bissett and Rowan Simons

This year's Beijing International Literary Festival was not all picture books and read alouds for us. In addition to seeing Justin Hill last week, I saw a panel of authors who have written about sports, specifically football (soccer). Alan Bissett hails from Scotland and is the author of several books, including Pack Men, a novel with the 2008 UEFA Cup as the backdrop. British Rowan Simons has lived in China for twenty-six years, and has written Bamboo Goalposts about his experiences trying to share his love of football in China, including founding a recreational league Club Football (I mentioned Simons in this post, btw). Once again I was unsuccessful in recording the moderator's name, but he did a fine job.



More after the jump.



I thought I could organize my notes into lovely paragraphs, but I think the bullet format will work here as well.

• Even though Simons' Bamboo Goalposts is memoir and Bissett's Pack Men is fiction, both use sport as the vehicle to tell an outsider's story. For Simons, the outsider was he, arriving in China where a game he loved and thought he knew so well was treated so differently. When he wanted to start ClubFootball, a recreational organization, he actually encountered some difficulty from the Chinese authorities. They thought he was crazy for wanting to operate a football league for people who aren't very good at football. Bissett likened football to Star Wars, a subject about which every boy and man are supposed to have an opinion, and those that don't are considered odd. In Pack Men, the actions of the football fans are keenly observed by a character that does not share the same opinions and prejudices of the Rangers fans he has joined for the day. When Bissett himself witnessed the scene in Manchester that day, he thought it was like "a scene from Tolstoy....but nothing like it."

• Language, especially slang and cursewords, are a large part of the football world and thereby these two books. Simons chose to render conversations in Chinese, for instance, as very literally translated English. It comes across as a bit pidgin, but he wanted the English-language reader, likely unfamiliar with Chinese, to get a sense how the language conveys a different way of thinking. He also noted that when he has done color commentary of professional matches for Chinese TV, many of the common idioms used ("You'll never score a goal with a haircut like that") cannot be translated in any way into Chinese, so he has to find other ways to express these same sentiments. Further, when he has been slated to aid with commentary on the radio, the Chinese that is used is so flowery and unfamiliar to him he remains silent for much of it. Bissett in Pack Men has the glorious Glaswegian accent, full of color, long-a sounds, and ample cursing ("Ken whit I'd dae?"="Know what I'd do?"). For Bissett, too, he has the long history of sectarian animosity played out between Glasgow's two football clubs upon which to draw. Protestants are Rangers fans, and Catholics love the Celtics.  This comes through in Pack Men, even though the Rangers aren't playing the Celtics that day, at one point when one of the Rangers fans starts singing about being "Billy Boys" and up to their "knees in fenian blood."

• On the subject of the aggression and violence that is often associated with football, both men had a few insights. Particularly for Chinese football fans, Simons has noticed that the chanting and insults and swearing at the matches provides a relief valve, an outlet that is otherwise not available in Chinese society. Bissett threw out a Chomsky quote, about sport being a dress-rehearsal for war, concluding perhaps that is why governments encourage sport. 

In response to the idea that sport and war are closely aligned, I would have to counter with a quote of my own choosing. He's no Noam Chomsky, but Nick Hornby has written quite a bit about sport, including one of my favorite books, Fever Pitch. He was actually writing about Death and the Penguin, in a fun coincidence, when he wrote this: "Sometimes it seems as though everything in the arts (and I include sports in the arts) is about time and space---giving yourself room to move, finding the time to play." I think I like this better than the Chomsky.