About a year and a half ago, I had the good luck to be invited to Beijing University by professor and poet Jiang Tao, and with his letter of introduction, I had run of the campus. It wasn’t a period where I was trying to write a lot of poems, or even really explore or have a lot of fun — the goal was to obtain as much salient material as possible so that I could read it at length back in Los Angeles, and audit contemporary poetry classes in my spare time — but even without leaving the track between my apartment and the Beida library, reality insisted on intervening in my studies. By reality, I mean absurdity; by absurdity, I mean Sniper Ball [sic].
So I was loafing around the back entrance of the library (I was waiting for a courier from the bookstore at Dangdangwang: if you spend a certain amount they send a guy on a moped to deliver your books personally) when a nondescript, middle-aged man pushed a circular into my hand. Beijing is more or less used to the presence of foreigners, but there is still a set of local expectations about who foreigners are likely to be. Generally (of course with exceptions!) we are expected to be 1) illiterate in Chinese, 2) of above-average wealth, and 3) only visiting. This makes us ineligible for the vast majority of advertisements, many of which are for things like ?10 off a haircut, or car washes. So I was more or less surprised at being targeted, and suspected some fishy religious/sexual overture. Which, actually, I did end up sort of having a religious experience, because what he gave me was the following (I’ve added translations, in blue):
Why would a man hand out such a thing on a college campus? Consider the verso:
To sum up, this guy was trying to sell the concept of Sniper Ball to investors, and start a league (apparently ambitiously modeled after FIFA). He was handing out flyers to drum up support, and Beijing University must have seemed like a natural spot: plenty of rich kids, lots of sports fans. I was probably targeted because of #2, above.
What transcendentally fascinates me about this is both the language — Google Translate from/to Mandarin is always good for making word salad — and the situation. Someone woke up in the morning, had a hundred of these sheets of paper printed, commuted to the university, and handed them out to strangers. It’s a weird mix of the do-it-yourself ethic of Ragged Dick and Murakami-esque “advanced capitalism” in which everyone needs an investor before they lift a finger. The game itself is the product of some certain amount of hard work, but ultimately seems unplayable (what’s to stop the cue ball from rolling down the inclined plane into someone’s goal without anyone ever touching it?), even quixotic. At the same time, though, it joins a long tradition of things that look like they’d be fun — along with the board game Crossfire and the ball pits at child-oriented restaurants. The whole concept is just barely reasonable enough that the little apology for the form (“there may be inaccuracies, I do not speak English, please forgive me”) is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking. One can imagine a similar, almost unending set of apologies: sorry I don’t have a website, sorry I don’t have a prototype, sorry the game’s not totally finished…if you forgive me, we can work past these unfortunately necessary lacunae together!
Which I suppose is the crux of what keeps me thinking about Sniper Ball, and what keeps me from writing a poem about it. It is honest to say that many of our undertakings — ok, ok, at least my undertakings — are made possible by some particular lack of self-consciousness. If we could see our selves and surroundings in perfect, accurate detail it’s likely that we wouldn’t need to hustle and fight to the extent that we do, and we certainly wouldn’t need to perform the endless experiments that end in art. At the same time, we are so nakedly greedy, so convinced that our own undertakings merit temporal reward, so willing to shuck and jive. I’m torn between the urge to laugh at Sniper Ball and to play along — actually, I’m half-convinced that I’m already, like it or not, a member of the “Brotherhood of the Ball.” To comment on such in art would be to feign a certain distance from it.
So I’m stuck, conceptually, writing poems again about my role in all of this, all of which has very little, in the end, to do with the Sniper Ballness of Sniper Ball. You are, however, a better person who has no such limitations, so I can safely entrust the original material to you. Email anything that happens — I recommend the title “Door (Transparent Door)” — or leave a comment: additionally, if you want to contact Li Meng and shower him with wealth, I’d be happy to translate for you (I promise not to use Google).
Next week: How to Avoid Electrocution in Austria.