Roberto Martinez and Albert Camus

[toffeestillidie]

Hi all,

I wrote an essay comparing Everton under Roberto Martinez to the concept of the "absurd man" in The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. I'm posting it here instead of in the Everton forum because while the core of the essay is about football, it's mainly a philosophical essay and I sort of just use football as a vehicle to explore the philosophy.

It's pretty long, and I don't really provide any insights about the actual football that most of you don't already know, but if you're interested in philosophy, particularly existential philosophy, you might enjoy it.

This is a rough draft that I want to clean up, so I would really appreciate any feedback, and would especially appreciate if you could correct any factual errors I made about Everton, since I typed most of the Everton-related discussion from memory.

Here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qigNIdjVioXQ5OwGCMBWwKZq4AYFF5zNxqJOiQHmx_E/edit?usp=sharing

 

[orly]

Hi all,

I wrote an essay comparing Everton under Roberto Martinez to the concept of the "absurd man" in The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. I'm posting it here instead of in the Everton forum because while the core of the essay is about football, it's mainly a philosophical essay and I sort of just use football as a vehicle to explore the philosophy.

It's pretty long, and I don't really provide any insights about the actual football that most of you don't already know, but if you're interested in philosophy, particularly existential philosophy, you might enjoy it.

This is a rough draft that I want to clean up, so I would really appreciate any feedback, and would especially appreciate if you could correct any factual errors I made about Everton, since I typed most of the Everton-related discussion from memory.

Here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qigNIdjVioXQ5OwGCMBWwKZq4AYFF5zNxqJOiQHmx_E/edit?usp=sharing

Hi mate,

I've always been a big admirer, if not a wide reader of Camus works (the myth, the plague and the outsider being the three I have read) so it's great to see someone link it with Everton!

Not sure about your essay though. Style-wise it is a little odd - you've got 'fight to a comfortable win' for a start, then 'juxtaposed... [the]slight and the minuscule' which again, doesn't make sense, that's closer to tautology than it is juxtaposition.

'Satis' in Latin is better translated as 'enough' and not 'satisfy'

Love the idea of Moyes and the 'cat amongst the cats' and if anything, he is the modern Sisyphus - a man utterly resigned to rolling the Everton stone up the slope, never quite reaching the pinnacle, and watching it start again every pre-season

For me, you seem fantastic at analysing Everton and fantastic at analysing Camus, but I'm not sure the two subjects ever really link. Great read though and something a bit different

 

[toffeestillidie]

Hi mate,

I've always been a big admirer, if not a wide reader of Camus works (the myth, the plague and the outsider being the three I have read) so it's great to see someone link it with Everton!

Not sure about your essay though. Style-wise it is a little odd - you've got 'fight to a comfortable win' for a start, then 'juxtaposed... [the]slight and the minuscule' which again, doesn't make sense, that's closer to tautology than it is juxtaposition.

'Satis' in Latin is better translated as 'enough' and not 'satisfy'

Love the idea of Moyes and the 'cat amongst the cats' and if anything, he is the modern Sisyphus - a man utterly resigned to rolling the Everton stone up the slope, never quite reaching the pinnacle, and watching it start again every pre-season

For me, you seem fantastic at analysing Everton and fantastic at analysing Camus, but I'm not sure the two subjects ever really link. Great read though and something a bit different

Thanks for the feedback mate! You're right about some of the phrasing, the juxtaposition I was referring to was supposed to be Osman's precision vs Lukaku's power, but the way it's written right now I can see how that's a little convoluted. I definitely need to clean up the language. Also cheers for correcting the "Satis" bit.

And I agree that Moyes works well as the modern sisyphus. When I started writing I had meant to include a lot more of Camus' essay in it, but I struggled a lot to summarize his work succinctly, and eventually had to focus on a smaller subset of the overall essay. I really wanted to include Camus' references to "Don Juanism" (in reference to the implication that Martinez could likely leave for Barca) and "Conquest", but by the time I got to that point I was a little burnt out.

And I was a bit afraid that, as you say, the comparison between the two subjects might come off as forced. At any rate, I didn't write this for any particular reason, I just haven't used the philosophical side of my brain for much since I graduated college and wanted to exercise it, so I'll probably persist with fixing this up for now, and if many of the others I've shown this to agree that the comparison may not work, I can swerve it no harm done .

But thank you again for taking the time to read it and for sharing your comments, I really appreciate it!!

 

[Pat's Van]

I think Roberto should be more comparable with the father Buddha from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, not that I ever knew anything about philosophy though.

Good luck with it chum.

(I did read it, you're very clever)