Read D.J. Taylors book On the Corinthian Spirit yesterday in two sittings. One from page 103 to the end of the book and the other from the beginning to page 103. Samuel Johnson used to recommend non-linear reading — largely because he found reading something of a chore, but I do find it curiously enjoyable. After all, very few books are written in a linear fashion so why should you read them as such. You don’t look at a painting from the top left hand corner and then slowly make your way down to the bottom right corner, do you?
Anyway, as I was saying, I read D.J. Taylor’s book about amateurism in sport and found it a mixed pleasure. On the one hand, it is short and informative. On the other, it is incredibly slight and quite unsatisfactory. Taylor clearly advocates that we ought to embrace some of the gentlemanly spirit of the Edwardian amateur without ever writing in a less than straightjacketedly professional way.
This blog is enjoyable to write because I do it in a spirit of abandonment without any idea of remuneration. Am I an amateur? Maybe, but hopefully not in the modern sense of ‘obviously incompetent’. In the olden days amateur was the best thing to be, it connoted all that was good about sportsmanship and good form, especially compared to the mercantile ‘professional’.
Would the world be abetter place if we id away with the professional sportsman? undoubtedly. You wouldn’t get this terrible situation where teams like Chelsea can buy their way to trophies. The best players would be spread out around the country. We could get some local pride, as they have with the Basque-only policy at Athletico Bilbao.
In the same way that Anthony Burgess divided novelists up into A (slaves to plot and convention) and B (bigging up language and originality), so you could divide them into professional and amateur. Burgess is clearly professional, whereas Beckett and Joyce where amateurs. Samuel Johnson (the anti-blockhead) was a professional, Keats was an amateur. There is a lot to be said for turning away from the attractions and degradations of money, but equally it can be an enormous help for focusing the mind. Imagine if I had to earn my money writing — what a calamity that would be for the world. I don’t even know where I would begin. Probably I would try to get work writing blog posts for money or copywriting for brochures — something incredibly lowly at any rate. What else could I do?
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