I'm re-reading Wuthering Heights at the moment and damn, if it isn't absolutely impossible to read of Joseph, the misanthropic factotum at WH without the mien of David Batty coming inexorably to mind.

The maudlin angst that characterised much of the Andrei Arshavin transfer "story" this summer, together with his flowing blond locks, led me to consider the possibililty that he was subconciously re-enacting Chekov's Three Sisters, with himself cast as a composite of all three major female leads, FC Barcelona standing in for Moscow, and Gazprom/Zenit filling the roles of all of the unseen forces that keep them in the country.

i've just finished if on a winters night a traveller by italo calvino, and the jarringly disjointed narrative didn't half bring to mind following newcastle united these last few years. if you imagine the manager as author, we don't just chop and change, we have almost wholesale changes in literary (footballing) style and vocabulary (playing staff, i guess) every chapter (season).

Albert Camus