out of shape

It's nearly two months since the fall marathon I ran and I've let myself get into slow and tubby (for a runner) condition. I let the diet go right after the race but kept up as much running as I could; then when it got cold in November I tweaked my quad and didn't run for a week, took it easy when I started up again and haven't been training hard since; then there was Thanksgiving. Eight pounds tell the tale. It's not muscle mass. I went to the gym to lift weights in order to rehab the quad--but that was only three times, the last time in the gym two weeks ago.I knew this would happen and I let it happen and was welcoming it during training last fall and summer, but now I know for a spring marathon I soon have to start cutting out the junk food. 

wallet photos

Does anyone carry wallet-sized phots any more?  Or is this practice becoming obsolete?

elegy for my fitness

Post marathon, I feel my fitness waning day by day - went for a run this afternoon and felt sluggish and winded and even uncoordinated.  But that's OK. 

I love the week leading up to the NYC marathon because of all the running coverage in both the NYT and the WSJ.  Never is marathoning more visible.

More on Dewey

In "The Psychology of Effort" Dewey quotes a man trying to make a decision.  The man says, "In deciding a question that had to be settled in five minutes, I found myself turned in the chair, til I was sitting on its edge, with the left arm on the back of the chair, hand clenched so tightly that the marks of the nails were left int eh palm, breaking so rapid that it was oppressive, winking rapid, jaws clenched, leaning far forward and supporting my head by the right hand.  The question was whether I should go to the city that day." 

The point is that mental activity takes a physical toll.  Pragmatists are obsessed with moments of indecision (they're the only intellectuals who are embarassed by the traits of intellectuals) and the psychic havoc they wreak.  Thus William James will counsel readers to cultivate habits--make as few decisions as possible, waste as little willpower.  I've been writing twelve to fourteen hours a day for a month or so, cranking out the lingua franca of professional academia...and so "The Psychology of Effort" is my go-to text to know that it's OK to be tired by all this, that writing is real work, that every word, in fact, is a decision, and decisions take effort, and effort makes you tired.  I write a lot on this blog about the moments when the run becomes doubtful, when I contemplating skipping--sometimes I skip and am glad, other times I don't skip.  I had a workout of 5x1mi planned for this afternoon, but then I decided to go on a short run instead.  The short run turned into a lovely 80 minute amble in the waning light of the first brisk day of the fall--which appears to be the lovely prelude to a snowstorm.  I never get bored running and I wonder where the 80 minutes go.  It's a strange ecstatic state.  Well, better capitalize on this euphoria and see how much editing I can get through ...

The Debt

Great movie--go see it.  suspensful, satisfying, morally complex tale of hunting Nazis--told through in a style that's more or less a horror film.

What is it about David Foster Wallace that makes everyone so anxious to have an opinion about him?

Good article in yesterday's NYT.  Ex-reader of Derrida-turned-lawyer lays blame for imprecise language, imprecise thinking, and imprecise morals at feet of famous writer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Fresh off a recent jaunt up into the northernmost parts of NPR land (but really, it's a mental geography, isn't it?), I take her point about "sort of"/"kind of," and I would add to the list another pathetic temporizer, "way in which."  

Now, the writer is a lawyer, and she embeds a personal story in this piece in which she narrates her conversion from theory to the "plain language" of the law, noting a corresponding change in literary tastes to the bluntness of Mark Twain.  (Now, anyone should know that Twain's blunt tone holds loads of irony far more acid than Wallace's, and why she should imply that bluntness somehow arrests the dizzying motion of irony is beyond me.)  She replicates some nostrums about deconstruction that are far too common in NYT/New Yorker land, that it was an excess of the 80s and 90s, that it's tra-la-la Gallic and ridiculous, that it's an age-appropriate phase for 20-year-olds, and that like college grads who go to law school, we should all outgrow it and get back to realist novels.  (Which explains why a shitbag artist manque like Franzen can be held up as the savior of the novel.) 

All deconstruction is is a way of reading that follows what's already in text, and what poets have always known, that despite a writer's best intentions he or she can't pin down their work to a single meaning because langauge always says more than we think it does.  Which is just to say, words have echoes and connotations that we can't forsee in advance.  The problem with deconstruction isn't that it's a recipe for immorality (though people treat it phobically as a symptom of decline and fall) but that it's obvious and should go without saying.

I realized on a long run this weekend that my hip flexors need strengthening, and I'm going to start doing this exercise to work on that: get into push up position, then pull your right knee up to your right elbow, repeat with left, and do this for a minute.  Tried it this morning after 80 minute run and it felt good.  Weak hip flexors keeping my turnover and speed from being what it could be.  Tried to inject three marathon-pace miles (miles 14-16)  into a 22 mi long run, and broke down at 2.5.  Was fine aeorobically, but my hips were cashed...finished run at around 6:45 pace.

a few random thoughts

Haven't blogged in a while, but here are a few things I've been thinking about, including a household hint.

Begun in July, the no sugar diet has been a success so far, with only one exception made for a piece of wedding cake that it would have been rude to turn down.  Avoiding both obvious and hidden sugars (and hidden sugars abound), I've been able to get pretty near racing weight while being able to eat enough good calories to fuel intense training through high quality carbs, protein, and fat.  Basically, this means lots of fruits and vegetables, plenty of whole grain bread (watching the ingredients for hidden corn syrup and trying not to eat bread with ingredients I've never heard of), eggs, peanut butter, meat and fish (but not processed lunch meats), cheese, milk, frozen burritos, more-than-occasional slices of pizza, and frequent trips to Chipotle (high in sodium, a little austere and unwelcoming in decor, but otherwise a perfect combo of runner macronutrients).  To get all the way down to racing weight, I'll just give up the cheese, pizza, burritos, and eating out for the month of September and to the extent possible, eat only home-cooked meals, no cheese.  I've strugged to get to race weight for prior marathons and have basically done it by going light on dinner for three weeks before a race, but this doesn't work all that well for be and has frequently been punctuated by lots cookies and snacking the whole day through.  Why not eat an afternoon box of cookies if you're going to suffer through roasted onions and asparagus, light on the olive oil, at dinner?  

Quick household hint: Regular peanut butter adds lots of sugar so I've switched to the natural kind.  But natural peanut butter is gross and oily and a pain in the ass to open and stir and ultimately makes you appreciate the miracles of modern industrial food processing.  What to do?  When you get home from the grocery store, simply turn the jar of peanut butter upside down--the oil will separate, but at the bottom of the jar and the peanut butter will be less oily, and you can open it without a mess.   

On an unrelated note, Tammi and I watch a lot of TV-on-the-internet, including, lately, old episodes of Sex and the City, season four most recent.  Two quick observations:

1) Sex and the City provides an archaeology of communications technology, an index of how many new gadgets have penetrated our lives since the show's run from 1998-2004.  There's one episode where Carrie wrestles with whether to get AOL and when she does, how to communicate with the estranged Aiden.  The old cell phones, of course, are great too.  Related to this is Carrie's seemingly now obsolete profession as a columnist (by 2005 she would've been a blogger, by 2008 a Tweeter) and the show's now obsolete conceit of voice-over diary.  Writing on your clunky mac in a sweatshirt and your underpants is more akin to Doogie Howser (which pioneered the computer diary voiceover) than anything we know today.  To us, computers and private thoughts just don't mix; in the form of blogs (which are now obsolete), journals record not solitary voices recollecting emotions in tranquility but snipe violently at the world, in increasingly shorter form, projecting more than introspecting.  This isn't good or bad, it's just a measure of how SATC, ten years on, dates. 

2)  What's up with Miranda?  I never realized what a poisinous, censorious bitch she is.  All the other characters are charitable, good listeners, open to new kinds of experiences.  Miranda's phobic, sarcastic, paranoid, and constantly demeans others.  They write the show as if she and Carrie and closest, but I can see no reason why Carrie's friendship with Miranda wouldn't become a burden over the years.  Miranda affirms nothing, praises no one, brings the group down like the out-of-tune alto in a bad sax quartet playing Christmas music in front of TJ Maxx.  And she's another instance of how the entertainment industry always makes redheads evil. 



adventure race

Yesterday I completed a relay race across the mid-Alantic state where Tammi and I live.  The race had a staggered, handicapped start, with slower teams (based on 5K PB) starting at six, and increasingly faster teams starting every few minutes or so until 10:30.  Less challenging than distance itself--divvied up between seven runners, into legs of no more than nine miles--can be the heat and the logistics, carrying runners, in two cars, from one leg to the next, leaving one car to provide water and support to the runner on the course.  When we started it was about 82, my first leg began about 11:45 and carried me over a beautfiful country road, through open farmland under a cloudless sky.  The natural beauty of my surroundings did little to cool me off, though.  With the sun directly overhead, the road was mercilessly shadeless, but I was able to power through the heat without too much trouble, thanks in part to being well acclimated after a few weeks of high temps here.  My last let started around six pm, and was significantly shorter and cooler.  It ended at the beach, too, and it's a great sensation to end a race with a dip in the cool Atlantic along with the other runners who were happily bobbing in the waves. (NB: I took off my wedding ring before the swim on the advice of a friend who once lost his swimming in a lake.  Anyone else take that precaution?)

By the middle of the race, about 40-50 miles in, our team started passing the teams who had started earlier, and many of the runners we caught up to seemed to be suffering in the heat (as we were), runners of all shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities trudging over hot blacktop under a midafternoon sun, soaked in sweat but persevering nonetheless, sun-baked moving statues of determination.  As one of my teammates marvelled, "If this hurts for us, think about how much it hurts for them!" -- "Us" being a group of serious and experienced runners, "them" being the folks who came out to relay because of a sense of adventure, a desire to take up a challenge, to prove something to themselves, because of the durable novelty of covering great distances on foot.

le joggeur

This is cool--Sascha Goldberger, a French photographer, took pictures of people just after a run, and then called them in later to duplicate the pose after cleaning up:
















See them at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/before-and-after-shots-of-jogg.  "I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society," Goldberger is quoted as saying. "The difference was very surprising."  Surprising how?  In that there isn't much of a difference?  Anyhow--it's funny, I would never have read his photos that way, and frankly, I think this guy's a bad reader of his own work.  The difference between nature and culture...Self-presentation...Really?  Is that all the intellect it takes to be a French artist these days?  Come on.  That's why we in the English biz have something called the intentional fallacy.  Just because the artist says he meant something, doesn't mean that his art means what he thinks it means.  Besides the implicit Gallic fascination with, and singling out and shaming of, the exercising body, what strikes me about these photos is just how un-brute like all these fleece-swaddled city are anyway, how much a part of their culture the clothing and the gazes of these joggers makes them appear, just how very posed the off-the-shoulder-jacket of the girl above seems.

To show that I am even more pretentious than a French artist, I will one up him by quoting a bona fide rogue French intellectual on running.  Here is one of my favorite passages of former rugby player Pierre Bourdieu:

"[A]ll the strictly health-oriented practices such as walking and jogging are also linked in other ways to teh dispositions of the culturally richest fractions of the middle classes and the dominant class...It is therefore understandable that they should find satisfaction in effort itself and to take the deferred gratifications of their present sacrifice at face value.  But also, because they can be performed in solitude, at times and in places beyond the reach of the many, off the beaten track, and so exclude all competition (this is one of the differences between running and jogging), they have a natural place among the ethical and aesthetic choices which define the aristocratic asceticism of the dominated fractions of the dominant class" (Distinction, 214).

Upward mobility, effort for its own sake, asceticism: Bourdieu nails the entwinement of some of the main cultural values of endurance sports.

heat waved

Define irony, Winona Rider commanded Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites: The mismatch between intended meaning and literal meaning, or between what we think and what's actually there.  When I left for a 20 miler this morning at 6.20, it was about 80 degrees, and the sun was coming up bright and strong, and clutching a chilled water bottle, I was fully prepared to call the run if it got too hot, and the route I had planned was a series of shady roads looped around local drinking fountains.

The heat wasn't intolerable, but neither did it go unnoticed.  I drank the 16oz bottle between miles eight and ten, and then stopped at a drinking fountain at mile 16, and then again at 18, and when I finished the sun was bright and high and as when I began leaves, some of which had dried and gathered in the street, were still.  But as I write it's cooling off, getting cloudy and breezy, and the hoped-for storm just might be imminent.

Here's a good article arguing for a junk-food tax:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

While it's hard to believe such a salutary measure would past muster with the anti-government fanatics who decide on such things, Mark Bittman makes a decent case for the health-care cost savings, for the distorted incentives that subsidies provide, and for the revenues it would generate that could be put into further public health measures.

But the fuck-em-let-em-die, they-made-their-own-choices side of the argument believes that the government has no role to play in correcting or reducing any of the negative externalities of the free market, so they'll never be convinced by any of these arguments, least of all healthcare cost savings argument.  This is because they think we shouldn't be giving anyone anything for free--the government doesn't owe anyone anything.

You always hope that this libertarian conservatism is like a heatwave in the political weather, something that's feverish, uncomfortable, and temporary, but I'm afraid it's the new normal, and now politics has to countenance all sorts of argument that twenty years ago would would have seemed absurd.  What's disappeared from politics is any notion of the social--why it's a good thing, why we have obligations to it.  We're soon to have an object lesson in these arguments when the anti-social folks take over.

heat wave

The heat makes everything seem like the post-apocalypse, we're all wary of going outside, it's so uncomfortable...Yesterday I ran well before 7 am and it was still extremely slow and uncomfortable.

I'm not going to run today, but that's OK, extreme weather forces a day off.  I started training for the Chicago marathon on July first, and I have a few good weeks, and now one down/recovery week, in the log.  Some races and workouts have told me I'm getting fitter--so I have to keep the pressure up.  This time around, I'm focusing on more of the little things I hate to do: stretching, diet, speedwork.  I'm also trying to extend weekday morning non-workout runs into the 11-12mi/80 minute range.  Looking back on my training, runs in this range, which tend to get me out of the rut of a blah-blah 10mi run comfort zone, have preceded PRs.  I'm also going to focus this time on running a greater percentage of miles at marathon pace--picking a pace and training at it.  It's what Italian coach Renato Cavato calls specific endurance. 

What else.  Because of the extreme weather I had the kid I tutor in English read Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which I think of every time I decide not to risk the heat:

"He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends."

In Man v. Nature plots, Nature wins, so don't tempt the elements.  The version most of us read in high school is a 1908 revision of an original story from 1902 which more explicitly lays out the contrast that works in the above passage between precept and experience--the protagonist decides to chuck precept and learns the hard way that precept was right all along. 

Unlike Klondike exploration, however, training is individualized to physiology, and one's cannot discount one's own experience as an adequate preceptor.  So my precept about experience: take the tips, but listen to your own experience.


 

400s

Did some 400s yesterday and they felt good.  I'm finally getting some turnover, and they were about 2 sec faster than usual.  The barrier is often coordination/lack of turnover, but since starting to work on the speed and starting to do some of Derek's drills that has changed somewhat.  The barrier yesterday was muscle fatigue.  That is good. 

Check out this video about biking in Manhattan:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

I wonder if biking in big cities is completely a lost cause.  I think it is, at least, I think patching dangerous bike lanes onto busy streets is a half-assed non-solution to the problem of cars in the city.  It's amazing how 100 years ago cities were built with cars in mind as if the energy supply were infinite, and it's amazing how difficult it is to restructure something as overbuilt as a city.  It's also amazing how hostile people are to trains in the US.  I think about O'Hare in Chicago and how the only way to get from the airport to downtown without a car is on the slow-ass blue line.  The airport was built under the presumption of automotive dominance, with easy access to the Kennedy highway that builders thought would be the quickest way into downtown.  Now everyone either suffers in Kennedy traffic, or shakes along on the slow plodding El train into downtown.  They need a high speed train from O'Hare directly into the loop that could get people from point to point in less than twenty minutes.  Or else they could make people bike!

is it cool to like "Hotel California"?

I kind of like the song, but I hear that hipsters make fun of it.  What about the Eagles in general? 

Reasons "Hotel California" is uncool:

• Covered by Gypsy Kings, hairy-chested Mediterranean singing group whose CDs supplied the soundtrack to the nervous third dates of 45-ish divorcees in mid-90s California. 
• Hipsters say so, but then again, the song's an easy target, so maybe it's cool after all.
• Last heard in dental office

Reasons "Hotel California" is cool:

• Don Henley's solo career
• In April 2001, when the Navy spyplane collided over China with a fighter jet, the captured American sailors sang it to their captors (the first foreign policy crisis of Bush administration)
• It makes you think of adult contemporary, mullets, hottubs, divorcees, and fake tans.

an easy week

I haven't been running too much this week, and it's been nice to have an easy week.  I have been focusing this week on a lot more speed stuff, including some sprint drills Derek taught me, and on a 70 minute run yesterday morning I stopped at the track and ran some sprints and 200s.  I'm pretty sore today from all of that.  The exciting thing is, though, that it's racing season, with local 5Ks almost every weekend, and I'm excited to see what I can do at a distance that's not really the one I train for.  Frequent racing is not only fun, but helps get you very fit, fast, and mentally tough.  So we'll see whether this summer will bring a 5K PR. I'd very much like it too.  I don't think I've run under 17:00 since high school.  I wonder if I can.  Last 5K I ran was something like 17:13 (I think) and that was in the middle of marathon training last fall. 

On a totally random note--here's my plug for the PBS series Downton Abbey, an enchanting Edwardian period piece about a fictional family of English aristocrats in the ominous years between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of WWI.  There's a whole lot to say about it, but seriously, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone.  It's absolutely great.

I'm also reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan -- here's a plug for that.  His Age of Reagan begins with Nixon and ends with Obama, and it's the story of the entree of the extreme right into the mainstream of American political life and the eclipse not only of New Deal Liberalism, but moderate conservatism.  Reagan is central to his story, but in the end, he's less important than the extremists--like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan--whom his own un-ideological pragmatism and politic willingness to compromise ultimately leaves disappointed and disaffected.  Wilentz redeems Reagan from right-wing haigiography and left-wing demonizing, and the 40th president who emerges from his portrait is one whose achievements in ending the cold war owe to luck and private idealism rather than to the hard-line stance he often faked in his rhetoric.

training in the heat.

Today was too hot to run.  While I relish the so-called character building aspects of cold weather running, with its Jack London, "To-Build-a-Fire" facing of the elements, I gladly let the heat have its day.  In sub-freezing weather I once ran a marathon PR, but when the temperature jumps over 80 I choose AC over training every time. 

We are in Tammi's hometown now and Tammi's brother is a top-notch, professional physical trainer.  Instead of going for a run today, we let Derek, Tammi's brother, run us through a half hour of sprint and agility drills.  It was a huge neuromuscular challenge, and it opened my body in some new ways. 

hot weather running, if you like sex and the city you hate homeless people

The last two days have been unbearably hot relative to the cool temperatures of May, and morning runs have left me drained.  It takes me a good two weeks or so to get used to warmer temperatures.  I have come to accept this as part of summer running.  It slows my runs, saps my motivation to run, makes me sleepy while reading.  (Of all the pleasures of academia, falling asleep while reading on the couch is the professional hazard I love best!)

This season's Bachelorette is shaping up to be even weirder than the others, mainly because they taken down the fourth wall of reality TV and this season's contestants are as savvy and conscious as ever about the show's cliches, rules, and history.  Contestants refer on-air to previous seasons, to the cliches of saying you're "there for the right reasons," and even, in the figure of Bentley, to the ways in which they're manipulating reality TV for personal gain.  Bentley, of course, is there for all the wrong reasons, but he represents the way the Bachelor/ette series has been able to integrate into its dramatic arcs what was once the story of the post-final episode tabloids: contestants' use of the show to advance their own fame.  If brazen confessions of self-interest once violated the rules and the spirit of the show, the fame calculus now merely introduces another ingredient into the pie, another peril that the bachelor or bachelorette must face.

While Ashley is one of the smarter bachelor/ettes, a savvy political infighter who clawed her way out of the pack to a runner-up spot that's now the de facto conduit to getting your own season, she's about to be outsmarted by Bentley--who creates drama by abandoning any pretense of being there for the right reasons, or even of thinking Ashley's hot.  And the fact is, Allie and Ashley (with their cute little names you might give to a Golden Retriever puppy) aren't half as attractive as the men on the show (though they are about twice as smart).  While they're less threatening than the hottest women on the Bachelor, viewers can identify with the spunky cuteness of someone like Ashley more easily than with the icy beauty of someone like Roslyn, who had the "inappropriate" relationship with the producer two seasons ago.

Now, academics love to tell people why the things they like pose HUGE political or ethical problems, and I'm no different.  I'm as smug as the rest.  So here's one of the many "problematic," as they say, aspects of Sex and the City.  SATC colluded with the Guiliani administration in sanitizing NYC and duplicated the city's efforts to sell a cleaned-up, poverty free, minority-free image of itself to tourists from the Jersey suburbs and the hinterlands beyond.  If you believe SATC, the post-industrial metropolis is a place where only rich while people live, where Big comes by lots of money through financial alchemy which is all too complex for Carrie try to understand anyway (and work is so boring after all!), and where the only minorities are the occasional tall, handsome professional black man who woos Miranda (or maybe a Fleet Week Hispanic sailor for Samantha).  At the same time as Rudy's efforts to make homelessness and poverty disappear from view in Manhattan were taking effect, the show promoted a similar vision, passing off as authentic New Yorkers (as if there were such a thing) what was really a quartet of suburban moms gawking their way to brunch after brunch, cosmo to cosmo.  SJP's high heels could echo safely on the walls of Manhattan's no longer abandoned and scary skyscaper canyons. It's not surprising, then, that we have SATC tourism now, because SATC was tourism all along.

Last thing, I'm fully aware that my argument turns on an implicit opposition between the city and the white suburban mom, and I'll admit that it isn't exactly fair or original to make the white suburban mom the protected, sheltered, phobic antonym to all things supposedly urban.  It's worth dwelling, then, on why we (not just me, lots of people and implicitly, SATC) tend to think of the white suburban mom as the opposite of the city.  There are historical oppositions between the connotations of city as a bad place and of white moms as sheltering and overprotective; we think of suburbs as boring places where sex is for reproduction and cities as exciting places where sex is for fun.  We think of white women in the city as potential crime victims, not as people who exercise control over urban spaces.  (The point of SATC's gentrification of NYC is to undo this cultural canard and give white women power over urban space, and I give it credit for trying to do.)

This enduring opposition between the suburban mom and the city is one reason the white city mom living in a gentrified area proves so fascinating (not least to the legions of mommy bloggers themselves).  Who is this person, we ask.  How is she going to transform the city?  It's generally hipsters who give her the most grief, concerned as they are that strollers will interrupt their "authentic" experience as city people.  Hipsters are a topic for another post.  Why do hipsters bother me so much?

Desperate Housewives

Today was the first really hot weather run of the season.  I went out at 6:30pm for a very easy nine, and it was still around 88 degrees.  I wore a bunch of sunblock and didn't push it.  Here's a plug for spray sunblock.  It's extremely important to protect your skin.  Don't forget your legs and face, too.

Tammi and I spent the weekend in New England where I delivered a conference paper - the paper was well received, and the session productive; we were able to go for some fun runs along a really nice river, as well as spend some quality time watching TV from a cushy hotel bed.  Nervous about the paper, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and woke up wide-eyed an hour before my 6am wakeup time, when I planned to go for a run.  On a little less than 5hrs sleep, after some of the in-house coffee maker's weak filter-packet coffee, I left the room at 5:20 for a solid 80 minutes, during which I saw more people than I would've expected out for  early weekend morning runs.

The reason I ran late in the day today is because I stayed up til 1:30 last night watching Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly funny, fast-moving show that's part murder mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, part suburban gothic.  It puts into delightful comic soap-operatic form the four-character Sex and the City formula: neurotic redhead, do-gooder burnette, horsey blond with problems relating to men; Samantha's comic promiscuity is replaced by Eva Longoria's devil-may-care attitude toward mothering.  (DH corrects SATC's all-white-girl racial obliviousness to reflect contemporary American demographic realities, it nevertheless replaces Samantha's stock lusty-dame character with hoary stereotypes of Hispanic families: a domineering patriarch, a lax mother who lets her fat prepubescent daughters mess up the house, eat whatever they want, and watch whatever trash TV they want.)  Each episode moves quickly in and out of separate plots lines centering on each character.

Like its sister comedy Weeds, DH updates the durable American genre of the suburban gothic. The gothic has always, after all, been about houses, ever since the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; it's based around the idea that enclosed spaces enclose secrets, that appearances don't match reality.  In the twentieth-century U.S. this genre takes off in the 40s and 50s with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but also, more familiarly perhaps, Updike's Rabbit trilogy.  Rabbit, Run mixes in a lot of 50s-existential angst (Rabbit's last name is Angstrom), but you have to remember that despite Updike's well-wrought prose and sophistication and overwritten sex scenes, it's a novel that begins with the main character running through a graveyard and ends with his drunk wife, an example of the desperate housewife who in her physical confinement and mental isolation is a staple protagonist of the suburban gothic, drowning her baby.  In novels, houses always function as shiny symbols of the status quo that conceal turmoil within, but in TV shows from the 50s-90s, the inside of the house sets the stage for sitcom comic resolution, and serves as a repository of family values.  The placid outside is matched by a placid inside.  (Perhaps an exception to this division is the daytime soap--but the soap, of course, is a key genre ingredient of DH.)  The genius of DH is to take the novel's gothic approach to the interior of the house and put it in what's really soap-opera sitcom form.

DH takes the gothic very seriously.  In another nod to SATC, it begins and ends with pat voiceovers.  But instead of the voiceovers being the embarassingly bland musings of ambivalent exorbitantly dressed wanna-be writer Carrie Bradshaw, we have the ghostly voice of a Wisteria Lane suicide, a housewife whose despair took the extremest form.  By playing with the various forms despair can take on the spectrum between lethality and comic triviality, the show achives an engaging balance of melodrama, comedy, and utter weirdness. 

Last thing: I think of the show and its companion show Weeds as a response to the housing mania of the mid-00s.  Everyone's obsessed with real estate, there's a renewed interest in the exurbs and the suburbs--the suburban genre again has its moment.  But what DH captures perfectly is the extreme weirdness of the magical thinking characteristic of the moment, the idea that anything and everything can and will happen in the suburbs, the instead of being a place of placidity and stability the suburbs are turbulent, dynamic, dangerous.  Despair went both ways in the housing boom as first it was desire that was desperate, a yearning to have a bigger house with all the psychological and (so people thought) financial benefits it would entail.  Suburban houses truly were investment vehicles--places on which to wager the future of your money and your future hopes for achieving the suburban norm; when things turned, the despair took a far darker turn.

skipping

I don't feel like running this afternoon.  I'm in the middle of writing, and I have somewhere to be at 6pm. 

I always worry, though, that if I skip, I'll lose the habit and then bad consequences will ensue.  Then suddenly I'll no longer be a runner.

It feels wrong to leave this conference paper with the sticky ending un-stuck, then again, I know come 8pm I'll feel simultaneously lazy and jumpy if I don't go out.  But I know that I won't have time tonight to work and I need to crack corn now.

Another argument for morning running--which has been very hard to do lately, because of good habits broken.  Stay up too late, then it's hard to go to bed early, then it's hard to get up early enough to run, and so on.  Anyway, this is how I take my rest days--leave 'em unplanned, and let life tell you when to rest. 

And sometimes I skip to remind myself that I can, just to keep running in perspective so I don't become so obsessed that I can't skip a workout. 

Back to the writing...

Lance

No, not Lance Bass, Lance Armstrong.  A doper?  Looks like it.  It's pretty hard to believe he didn't dope if everyone he beat was also doping, but one thing to think about in this whole sad episode is why we were all so inclined to trust him, so inclined to want to believe he was clean.  There's a good article in the New Yorker that's apposite.  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/05/say-it-aint-so-lance-armstrong.html

opinions: we all have them, just as we all have navels

I'm writing a lot about Charlotte Perkins Gilman these days.  She's the author most known for writing The Yellow Wallpaper, but I'm writing about her short fiction, much of which is concerned to challenge the conventional idea that motherhood is natural and a practice that cannot be improved upon through the genius of modern social science.  In her fiction and non-fiction alike, she's quick to point out how contradictory it is that people champion motherhood as completely natural on the one hand, but worry incredibly about doing it wrong on the other.  If it were  natural, she reasons, there wouldn't be room to screw it up.  Therefore, we either have to stop worrying about child rearing or else be more methodical and rational about it. 

I feel bad for new moms, because motherhood is one of those subjects everyone thinks they're entitled to have an opinion about.  This sense of entitlement to an opinion ends up extending to the mom herself, who becomes a depersonalized case about which everyone feels free to conjecture.  What's especially violative about this is how the pregnant woman's body becomes a subject for discussion, and all the various details of gestation, lactation, dilation that have to do with private parts become public where babies are concerned.  Everyone has an opinion, and everyone seems entitled to supervise. 

I'd like to know more about why this is.  Maybe it's because motherhood is a place where highly charged personal and highly charged social issues meet.  To raise a child is to stake out allegiance to a number of different social positions, some intersecting and converging, others conflicting:  class, race, religion, region, ethnicity, region, nationality, family, ancestry, history.  At stake in motherhood is how and whether each of these is going to be reproduced, and it's understandable, if not fair to mothers, that people have opinions.  But people who have opinions about motherhood ought to be self-conscious about their personal stakes in their own opinions, which require scrunity and introspection of their often sub-conscious origins.  Motherhood turns an individual mom into a vector for everyone to have opinions about, and this isn't at all fair.  So everyone should shut the f--- up about motherhood.

What all this goes to show is how right Gilman was to distinguish motherhood from reproduction, or bare nature; after all, reproduction is "natural," but motherhood is a vexed issue around which "culture" and the social most actively swirl.  Motherhood is above all a cultural expression par excellence.

Tammi and I are fans of the crime show "Bones," and if you watched recently, you'll know in the last episode Angela gave birth, and Bones is pregnant by Booth.  If you saw the birth scene, you'll remember that during labor Angela was skyping into the lab through a computer placed at the foot of the hospital bed.  It's not clear that the lab could see her lady parts, but the implication was that there's nothing private about delivery, that, in fact, it's a moment when the normally concealed lady parts come into view (literally and metaphorically) for anyone concerned.  Can't find a clip on YouTube, but maybe I'll post one later. 

diet

Tammi and I were going to run a local 5k today, but at a $25 sign-up fee we decided against it.  For a local race in a local office park, with no bells and whistles and no technical T-shirt, it wasn't worth the price of half a week's groceries.  So I did a 20 miler instead, and for the first time in a while, felt great.  I credit the extra sleep this last week, the improved diet, and last Monday's trip to the gym. 

My body beat and my mind frayed from a bunch of conference-related activities, the weather cloudy and rainy and dark, I shifted my running to the evening last week and slept in.  I also ran less.  I needed the break.   Avoiding baked goods, sweets, and refined grains over the past four weeks has also improved my running, keeping my energy levels even, and leading me to replace those empty calories with whole grain bread, lots of potatoes (but pasta, because it's refined and becauase we're still pasta'ed out, is out), more fruit, and more protein.  Nutrition matters, I guess.  Finally, I went to the gym Monday for lifting and stretching, and after I got over the initial soreness, it made me more limber and made me feel like I had more control of my body when running. 

The diet control and supplementary work is a big step for me and frankly, I'm proud that I've been able to do it.  For so long, I didn't want to think about diet or any supplementary fitness; I just wanted to run and get it out of the way, and continue to believe that running was self-care enough, or that running allowed me to get away with ignoring other aspects of health.  Yes, you can run well on a crappy diet, but if you have a good diet you can run better.

felt blah today

Only went for a little run today, a little over a half hour--felt kind of blah.  It's cloudy and rainy here and I couldn't really muster the energy to do any more.   I went to the gym for some cross training yesterday and am sore in a whole bunch of new places.  My legs felt like they were disconnected from my body and nothing was working right.  I still have faith that cross training's going to benefit me in the end, but today feels like the day after beginning a new exercise program.  In the end this will make me a better athlete and a better runner, but in the meantime, I feel beat up.

Tammi got supplies today to start her new hobby, gardening.  With a garden plot in our apartment complext, and some seeds and fencing, she's ready to go.

imbalance

My left knee hurt on my run today, so did my left IT band, and my left hip.  My left hip/butt area is the weak spot in my body, where all my running injuries tend to originate.  The knee pain is caused by a tight IT band, which itself is caused by a lack of strength and flexibility in my left hip flexor.  I can feel on my runs lately that my gait is becoming a little lopsided and right-leg dominant. 

My aversion to stretching originates in a feeling that when the run ends, I should turn my attention to more important matters.  My aversion to cross training is that I'd rather run, because after all, I think, you get better at running by running.  Tammi warns that this attitude leads to injury and diminishing returns on training.  I cut my run short by 20 mins today to focus on stretching and strengthening, which I'll turn to after I blog.  My left-side weakness figuratively bit me in the ass when I first started back into serious running a little less than four years ago, with a nasty case of piriformis syndrome, and while I've been lucky to have more or less avoided being sidelined with injury since, if I don't attend to this my neglect of stretching will once again figuratively bite me in the ass.  There's a lesson in all of this anatomy, somewhere, about our character flaws.

refined grains

One day, someone's going to write a memior with the corny title, Refined Grains.  Grains is a word that goes in many different directions.  We say against the grain, talk about the grain of wood, or the grain in the field, whole grains, or we refer to film, a carrier of memory, as grainy.  There are many different senses of the word.  I have given up sugar and, to the extent possible, refined grains in order to stay trim for running but also to keep my energy levels even at a time when I'm not getting too much sleep, as now. 

We've been getting to bed early enough to get a solid seven hours, but I keep waking up around two, maybe as a result of lingering jetlag, but it was also a very busy week, one in which the conference I've been helping to plan was finally and successfully staged.  So, glad that's over with.  It went really well.  I gave a paper that was well received (and maybe the dread of giving a talk was part of what bolting me upright at 2am all last week, our subconsious works in strange ways) and the invited speaker seemed to enjoy herself.  

It's funny how European aristorcrats used to refine grain as a sign of their distance from the whole-grain eating plebes; how different things are now.  I ran twenty this morning and then with Tammi went to Whole Foods for a few items, including a recovery breakfast burrito.  One thing I'll say about Whole Foods:  They signify authenticity or wholeness to their customers by postering the place with images of third-world women sitting or standing next to bags of coffee beans or rice, but you never see images of third-world men.  Why is this?  Despite all the self-congratulatory progressivism of many of their customers, the third-world man still poses a sort of existential threat that interrupts the equaniminy of the shopping experience, insofar as he is associated more with terrorism (or with the sordid poverty of the new immigrant) than with feeling good about food.  Certainly, there is a hidden continuity between the war on terror and eating organic or buying expensive produce.  Both are, in a sense, protective measures that aim to keep contaminants out, or to keep the interior free from invasion from the exterior.

perfect run

This morning's satisfying, memorable workout reminded me of why I love pre-dawn long runs.  Out the door by 5:45, I followed a course that more or less draws a square with four ~five-mile sides, north to east to south to west.  The college town where I live sits at the base of the pre-foothills of the Appalachian Range--to the South and East is a coastal plane; run just a mile North and the roads begin to undulate; five miles north, you gain about 300 ft. of elevation.

Forty minutes into my run I was northbound on a rolling rural road that wound through woodsy tree cover before, at the top of a high hill, splilling out into the middle of a broad meadow.  The sun was shining bright over distant hills and coloring everything verdant.  The long shadow of my stride fell on late April grass, marking the contrast with the intense green, and the spreading sky was as big as I've ever seen it here.

I generally hate to wax sentimental about running and unity with nature but today I can't resist; the dawn, the view, the perfect damp cool--almost transcendental.  The workout itself was a hard 21 with lots of hills.  My legs are fried, but afterwards I went to Whole Foods and treated myself to three of their breakfast burritos: uno bacon, and dos huevos rancheros.  Indeed, I do love the Whole Foods weigh-and-pay-buffet--the latent white-trashiness ot it (pardon the classist phrase) kind of warms my heart, as it is essentially a bourgie McDonalds: fast food for the Prius set.

But back to running and nature.  I've been getting out the door by 5:40 lately, not because I'm especially ambitious but because I've been jetlagged and numbingly tired by 8:30.  Dawn in springtime energizes you, and it allows you to see the full spectrum of light that a day can bring, and even to observe how different light can be, and how different the most familiar of places, the most familiar running routes, appear depending on time and the seasons.  Two days ago I felt like I was in a Disney cartoon about the first Thanksgiving.  Every mile or so I seemed to startle a different group of deer; the sparrows were out in force; and a pair of wild turkeys, puffed out with their multicolored tails spread, fiercely warned me off as they fed on someone's lawn.  Wild turkeys are big, fast, and agressive, and I can see why Ben Franklin wanted them to be the national symbol.

Theodore Roosevelt and inspirational quotes

Sports comes equipped with handy, inspiration sayings and motivational cliches, usually dismissed by the students aware enough to pay attention to them and altogether ignored by the rest.  Because they're cliches that all more or less reinforce variations on a lesson about the value of effort over the ultimate result, and because they're directed at an age group prone to scoffing at nostrums, an injunction like "leave it all on the course" raises a perenniel issue: what do we do with received wisdom?  Ignoring it usually brings some combination of liberating joy and unforeseen loss (which can easily be viewed as a punishment).  The consequences of ignoring wisdom to follow one's bliss: this is Philip Roth's great theme.  To hew close to wisdom keeps you out of trouble and enables you to reproduce your traditions with all their good and all their bad.  You know intellectually why you do what you do, but the lessons land in the heart only when you're old enough to be the coach.

It's not strange how much our culture invests in the figure of the coach--especially the high school coach, on whom the expectations of character building that implicitly weigh on all high school teachers fall hardest.  The best coaches assume that responsibility (which is all about teaching the value of responsibility) and understand their role in the formation of students.  Friday Night Lights captures perfectly the dynamics of coaches, community, and character formation, responsibility for which places the Taylor family at the nexus of Dillon's many conflicts, which all converge on the high-gravity space of the football field.

TR said that, versus the mollycoddle critic, the doer of deeds is someone "who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."  The reasons why it's better to try and fail (and then, knowing you tried, own that failure as possibly personal lack--though you are advived always to try, try again) than not to try at all aren't that clear upon examination.  What does defeat bring you except genuine diminishment and the cold comfort of self-knowledge?  TR's consolatory "at least you suited up" mentality doesn't go far enough to countenance the genuine pain of losing. 

More later...and more pictures later--there are some good ones coming very soon!     

delivery

My training has been going pretty well this week, and I'm anxious to do some races this spring, especially some of the cross country series in our town.  I finished a 22-mile run on Sunday strong and I ran ten yesterday morning and this morning and those runs went well.

Last night Tammi and I had a nice sunset walk around central Padua and then came home and ordered pizza.  The pizza delivery, on scooter, is lightning quick and usually arrives within 15 minutes of ordering.

Here's a running blog that I like:  http://www.runblogger.com/

He does shoe reviews, and maybe someday I'll try to do that too, if I can get them from the shoe companies for free.

Random thought: I very much dislike when people think their mere suggestions qualify as directions or orders.  (A colleague of mine has suddenly taken on a lot of work based on the fact that "Prof. Frappenflaffen suggested so-and-so," therefore she's doing so-and-so with all haste and dispatch, as if the Prince had insuinated his desire for the arrest and imprisonment of a rival.)  I also dislike indirection; a good counterstrategy to it is refusing to interpret, or simply taking things at face value.  Though excessive literalism can be a form of passive-aggressive indirection too, as it's a dodge of the situation too; nevertheless, it can work in situations where frankness would call attention to itself and nothing infuriates insinuators like literalness and hermeneutic refusal.

Trope of Venice as Museum

In 1882, long before The Wings of the Dove, Henry James praises Venice as basically a wonderfully enchanting outdoor museum.  "All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the clouds."  It's true, and this is the enduring appeal of the place.  And a place is really what you have to call it.  Venice isn't a city, not in the sense of Paris or New York or London or Rome, where a dynamic present menaces the traces of the past.  It isn't really an island in the traditional sense, though it's surrounded by water.  It is merely an artificial land mass.  You can't even run there, and I am sure the native Venetians, whoever they are, have high BMIs and are slack and underexercised even if they are cultured.  Venice invented allegorical painting of civic history, not gym class, lacrosse, or football.  But Henry James was pretty out shape too.  I don't fault him for that--it's critically passe to evaluate authors based on their physical fitness.  My advisors frown upon it.

What I love about doughy Uncle Henry's description is that Venice's museal qualities endear him.  The idea of the museum, I think, has all sorts of bad connotations: artifice, artificiality, false disctinctions between art and life, snobbery, boredom, canonization, death, Woody Allen, interpretation, bathrooms, coatrooms, tearooms, fatigue, curation, incoherent placards, stealthy and anonymous farts, conspicuous and concussive farts that add a soundtrack to the viewing, or an olfactory supplement to a Dutch master or a Pollock.  Tammi guessed that the word has to do with the muses, and the OED confirmed her etymological sense.  "In the ancient Hellenic world: a building connected with or dedicated to the Muses or the arts inspired by them; a university building, esp. that established at Alexandria by Ptolemy."  Then it is no wonder that Venice produces so much wonderful writing, that people return to this museum for sustenence.

Training and mental focus

Libidinous dirtbag watercolorist Charles Walter Stetson,
first husband of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lately I've had plenty of time to run--it's not like there are a ton of daily interruptions and emergencies in, say, Henry James studies--but my mind has just not been in it.  I've been doing all the workouts, feeling pretty good, and at least my speed fitness is improving some.  But, at least until I watched the inspirational performances at London and Boston--both Mutais in London and Boston, Lel's come-from-behind second place sprint at London, Davila's gutsy second at Boston--running had lost its glory for me, its late nadir a pathetic half-marathon slog trudging through a painful cobblestone-riddled 21st kilometer here in Padua.  In all, it wasn't such a bad race--I went out to win it, but I lost.  After covering the first 5k in 17:18, and the second 5k in 18:00 flat, things blew up, I lost the pack and sank further and further behind.  It does lead me to question my fitness, though, and I can't blame the race entirely on reckless tactics. 

Before every breakthrough race I've had I have found myself equipped with an amazingly keen mental focus, a highly functional obsession where all the slack in my life--in every aspect of life from writing to diet--pulls taught; for a period of a month or so the race rearranges my mental furniture, dusts it off, puts it in order; it brings everything into my life in an efficient whole, which for a short happy time until race day, exceeds the sum of its parts.  Not this time.  I bagged Milan because I wasn't ready, and I'm not even sure which Spring marathon I'm going to run.  So much for compartmentalizing everything in my life, or trying to. 



The debaucher of nude models some years later,
youth and looks eclipsed by years.  He and Gilman
divorced in 1894, and critics justly attribute
the biographical origin
of "The Yellow Wallpaper"
to his failures as a husband. 



hot hot hot

Damn!  Got up to 86 today.  Weather.com didn't predict that -- and my long run was a aestival slog.  Did 2:23, call it 20.  Read an article in the New Yorker (purportedly a book review, but it didn't do much reviewing) about Italy's ungovernability and ingrown resistance to national, rather than local or international, purpose.  But hell, given the narrowly averted catastrophic U.S. budget impasse, we could've stayed in America for that.

corri per padova

Bodies in motion

To our delight, Padua has an electrically alive running scene.  It hosts a thriving professional track club with world class runners, devotes a weekend in April to a marathon, and even has a weekly series of Thursday night fun runs.  Called the Corri per Padova series, these fun runs of four or five miles begin at a different part of the city each week and bring out hundreds of runners and walkers of all levels.  Tammi and I missed the sign-up deadline for last night's run by five minutes, but what we saw presented quite a spectacle: runners gathered under the inflatable start gate and clad in the reflective vest that comes with cheap five-euro sign-up fee, an MC who introduced two major Italian running figures, Ruggerio Pertile (2008 olympian and Padovan local who trains in Kenya most of the year) and Orlando Pizzolato, the last Italian winner of the NYC marathon ('84 and '85).  Tammi and I joined the tail end of the walkers and strolled for about half a mile before the group got away from us.

there they go

Lately I have been training more by feel and time than by mileage and rigid workout schedules, and I think it's getting me fitter.  If I feel like going farther and longer I will, and I've been trying to go to the track more and just get used to running faster.  I think it's improving my biomechanics and opening up my stride and my body.  On my ten-miler this morning I felt a lot looser, my range of motion greater, for having done the 800s yesterday.  Instead of the usual route, I took a detour to the track this morning and added a mile of 200m sprints followed by 200m jog (4x200 fast total).  I've made friends with the track this spring and I hope it results in some faster race times. As legendary coach Billy Squires said to Bill Rodgers once, they don't give the medal to the runner who can run all day but the runner who gets there first.  (See an excellent profile of Squires here.)

Still, I am four to five pounds overweight right now and I lack the discipline to do anything about it.  I'm very good at the running part of training, doing the miles and intervals and all that--but there's a non running component where I completely fall short.  This component involves stretching, core strength, and diet, all supplementary but hardly inessential.  If you don't stretch your stride lacks its fullest range of motion; with a weak core you waste energy stablizing yourself; if you don't watch what you eat you carry around a few extra pounds of mass that at a cost of about a second per mile per pound (where this figure comes from I'm not sure--it's so convenient and round that I'm skeptical of it but it's obviously true that it's better to weigh less), an extra pound of fat could over the course of a marathon make a difference of a minute or two.  As one whose marathon PR is tantalizingly close to 2:30, this matters to me.  So every time I eat a pastry I feel like I'm betraying myself and my training and I wonder what it is in me that can't sacrifice suguary, flaky, chocolately-delicious immediate gratification for what I know would be a lifetime of satisfaction from a new PR. 

People sign up for marathons thinking they'll feel invincible when they're done, but they inevitably come away humbled and painfully aware of their physical, even psychological, limits.  My inability to master my desire for sweets has given me empathy for the obese and their struggles and has administered another one of life's lessons about the limits of will power and reason.

food essays

spring evening at the Prato

I have had a solid training week so far.  Yesterday morning I went for 1:40, running for an hour on the canal before stopping off at the track for four miles at 5:51, 5:45, 5:43, and 5:43 and then running the two miles home.  Today, I ran eight 800s at the track with two minutes rest in between.  The workout didn't go as planned, but I finished it and felt great.  I wanted to do all eight in under 2:40.  The first three clocked in at 2:40 flat but the remaining 800s started to drag ass like a poor man's Lars von Trier film.  Fine.  Yesterday tired me out.  And so much of running is pushing through races or workouts that aren't going as planned.  Or muddling through when your eating habits go to hell, as mine have lately.  I've tried to cut down on the gelato and pastries, but last night I was starving and ordered a pizza for delivery and tonight, after a stroll in the Prato, I had a small cup of gelato.  To eat here on a regular basis is to encounter more high-quality junk food than one could enslave one's palate with in the U.S.  But high quality though it is, it is junk food nonetheless, abstaining from which will exact nothing from one's store of future memories of Italy.

For some people food is incredibly mnemonic, for others, not so much, and whether or not food works on your memory has nothing to do with your sensitivity or your intelligence.  Proust, obviously, invented this connection between food and memory and probably determined thereby a whole Western way of traveling through the palate.  Food is absent from the travelogues of Henry James, however.  For some travelers opening up taste and smell adds to the sensorial arsenal with which they metaphorically conquer a place.  (Forgive the imperial metaphor, but I'd love to meet someone who didn't travel with mastery in mind; or maybe my own desire for mastery means I never have, and never will, travel.)  For other travelers, taste and smell shut down the other senses, and a place reduces like some savory sauce to the mere quality of its food.  A saving grace of Venice, you should know, is uniformly bad food, which forces you pay attention to the visual scene.

Grad students love to talk about food, and they have a strange fondness for cooking, and for talking about cooking as a respite from work. They also strangely enjoy emphasizing how they enjoy fatty meat dishes such as pork and bacon.  (This is truly weird, and I don't know where this love for trumpeting one's taste for lipids comes from.  But you decide which sounds better:  "I just love pancetta, and I save all the grease so I can make gravy" v. "I only eat fat free Snackwells -- Devil's Foodcake is the best!!)  There's a strange relationship to domesticity in all this that I can't figure out, but I think it has to do with academics' inherent personal conservatism.  See this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which pretty much encapsulates this tendency to talk about loving to cook and using cooking to relax.  Notice how it's written in the breezy, somewhat cheery, stilted, precious, personal-and-yet-not-too-personal style of the university public communique, or of the grant application essay or teaching statement, one of the intellectual autobiographies that we academics write from time to time when we want an institution to give us money.

The other thing that interests me about this essay is how she refers to keeping her sanity, as if she were under the polar icecap on a submarine or D-Day plus 15 on Iwo Jima.  There's nothing to go insane about in graduate school, but when PhD students talk about insanity (a cliche in grad school) they're really talking about the phenomenon ofaltogether losing that salutary perspective in which these intellectual pursuits (for which myopia is actually a thrill) appear merely as a job.  Not useless or silly, but simply a part of a multifaceted life.

Hell with it, though--if this person can write that essay about cooking, maybe I'll do it with running, and go on and on about how after the library on rambles on country roads, past the horsefarms in the crepuscular light of late afternoon in the first days of November, I let brilliance effervesce and ideas stew, like the beef stroganouf I would cook later that evening after a rejuvenating shower.

Trader Joe's

Zany, unrelated, and 90 degrees off

Sometimes I wonder whether my advisors think of me as the Trader Joe's of academia -- you never know what you get, sometime's it'll be good, sometime's crap; you may be pleasantly surprised, but maybe you won't be able to find what you need.

East African masters runners

At Tammi's marathon last week there were a number of very fit Italian runners who looked to be well into their late 40s/early50s and beyond.  At the 20 mile mark where I watched impressed with their fitness and hopeful about the future of my own running, many were on pace to run in the 2:40s/2:50s.

With all the prominence of the region's distance champions, we rarely hear about East African masters runners, the Kenyan and Ethiopian equivalents of the men and women in their late-40s and up who grace weekend morning road races with lissome bodies and, often, intimidatingly fast times.  So I was surprised to come accross this article (linked at letsrun.com) from a Kenyan newspaper.  At 54, Francis Kimeli Kimei is aiming to run a 1:15 half marathon.

It seems pretty clear why masters running might be a first-world phenomenon.  The current life expectancy for a Kenyan male is about 59 years, and most people in the country work in agriculture.  By most accounts, running provides a way out of poverty for young people and there is an "up-or-out" mentality in the sport.  Either you make it to a level where you can win significant prize money for yourself, or quit. 

It's this mentality, I believe, that is part of the reason behind Kenyan dominance.  The poverty of the place means that it's foolish to think of your running career as lasting longer than ten years tops (Kenyan running is like the NFL in that regard, and the way the Kenyans train, just as punishing physically).  Mere hobby running is a laughable idea when you have to do hard agricultural labor just to survive.  For whatever reasons (more likely historical and cultural than genetic), the Kenyans have a long tradition of excelling in distance running, and because they're not so strong in other sports like soccer, this tradition means that running attracts the best athletic talent, unlike in the U.S. where people like this blogger who were too slow or too uncoordinated or not sports-minded enough to play real sports like football, basketball, and baseball bring our gangly knees and elbows to a spot on the cross-country team. 

Imagine what U.S. distance running would be if track were the prestige sport, if you had all the talented athletes going out for cross-country rather than football and basketball--or, nowadays, soccer.  In about ten years or so, we'll see that the mainstreaming of soccer will have been a boon for American distance running.  Among mainstream sports that lots of kids play, including the talented ones, soccer is the closest to running.  It builds endurance and gets kids used to running a lot, but on top of that, it  demands and builds those supplementary athletic skills that distance runners lack: agility, speed, and strength.  Middle distance star Andrew Wheating, who played soccer until his junior year of high school when he switched to cross country, represents the vanguard of what I predict will be a trend in the makeup of runners' athletic resumes.

Of course, the problem is that even as soccer expands the pool of potential distance runners to include actual talented athlets, it does not expand the pool enough.  Soccer in the U.S., one suspects, is a suburban sport that draws mainly (though not exclusively) on affluent whites.  The same city kids who fall prey to the obesity epidemic will for some of the same reasons never be runners.  There's not enough space in the inner city, at least not enough space that one can move safely through.  For a huge part of the American population, there are structural barriers to participation in running, and this is to the detriment of the sport.  Running simply does not attract the best talent. 

lame-o abortive track workout

I felt like crap today -- gave up on a track workout after one 400.  I have been running a lot.  And sometimes you just break down.  It's all part of the game.  Things will work better tomorrow.  Hitting the breaking point is an important part of training, and so is knowing when to back off.

Europeans seem to (hmm...how to put this gently), um, lack some of the sensitivities to different cultures that we value in the U.S.  This requires a far longer and more thoughtful post than I have time for here but just as an example, take this newspaper article about the marathon Tammi ran in (Tammi's translation):  "When do you recall having seen two Leghisti that applaud the arrival...of two sweaty North Africans in underpants?"  He's talking about the two North Africans who won the marathon...but I saw them pass, and they were wearing split racing shorts and a singlet: standard, modest running attire much less offensive than the spandex salume outlining tights that the native Italians seem to wear in all weather.

Even when it's sunny and in the 60s, the Italians love their spandex--long tights, long sleeve shirts.  I agree with Tammi that this is a cultural phenomenon, but its roots remain obscure.  Perhaps it's considered stylish, and style is important to the Italians, even the runners.  Often, I'm the only one out running in a plain cotton T-shirt.

Tammy Falconer: Huge PR!

Join me in congratulating Tammy on a huge marathon PR (the time left off here because of our anonymity)!

long run yesterday, Cronon

Our feline neighbor: eyes closed, but not to injustice

I ran for two hours and twenty minutes yesterday, and I'll call that about 20.  It was a great spring day.  Today I ran ten, easy.

There's a disturbing attack on academic freedom in today's news.  Officials from Wisconsin's Republican party have filed a public records request for history professor William Cronon's emails.  Cronon recently wrote an op-ed for the NYT about the attacks on labor in the state.  They are more angry that on his blog he posted information about the American Legislative Exchange Council, information he tracked down simply by examining what's available to the public.  Here is the email request available at Cronon's website  http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/:

From: Stephan Thompson [mailto:SThompson@wisgop.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:37 PM
To: Dowling, John
Subject: Open Records Request
Dear Mr. Dowling,
Under Wisconsin open records law, we are requesting copies of the following items:
Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.
We are making this request under Chapter 19.32 of the Wisconsin state statutes, through the Open Records law. Specifically, we would like to cite the following section of Wis. Stat. 19.32 (2) that defines a public record as “anything recorded or preserved that has been created or is being kept by the agency. This includes tapes, films, charts, photographs, computer printouts, etc.”
Thank you for your prompt attention, and please make us aware of any costs in advance of preparation of this request.
Sincerely,
Stephan Thompson
Republican Party of Wisconsin

Cronon is an incredible scholar and no political radical.  He is an environmental historian who writes histories of particular places that stretch far back into ecological time.  His masterwork is a history of Chicago that explains why of all the cities of the West that vied for prominence in the mid-19c--St. Louis, Cincinati, Milwaukee--Chicago won out.  He says it is because Chicago was located at a place where water and rail transportation could move goods east, and also because geographically, it was located at a regional juncture convenient to the places where different types of natural resources were extracted: lumber from Wisconsin and Minnesota, wheat and corn from Iowa and Illinois, beef and pork from various places on the plains.

But as in the McCarthy days we see Wisconsin Republicans going nuts and paranoid once again.  When asked about the request by newspapers, one of them gave this outrageous reply:

“Like anyone else who makes an open records request in Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Wisconsin does not have to give a reason for doing so.

“I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government.

“Further, it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner. The Left is far more aggressive in this state than the Right in its use of open records requests, yet these rights do extend beyond the liberal left and members of the media.

"Finally, I find it appalling that Professor Cronin seems to have plenty of time to round up reporters from around the nation to push the Republican Party of Wisconsin into explaining its motives behind a lawful open records request, but has apparently not found time to provide any of the requested information.

“We look forward to the University’s prompt response to our request and hope those who seek to intimidate us from making such requests will reconsider their actions.”

As if this poor professor is trying to intimidate the Republican party,  and as if they're the injured party.  The other thing that merits note is the way this Republican, Mark Jefferson, characterizes a history professor as a "public official" whose personal records are subject to the same scrutiny as, say, the state comptroller.  There's a difference between the kind of scrutiny a professor can receive and that which an elected official should get.  

But hey, at least someone thinks we're powerful.  At least someone thinks we pose political threats of some kind.  Anyway, I'm glad I'm done with college and a few score of pages away from finishing my education.  But I fear for my kids, the way Republicans are going after the state schools.  We're seeing the end of America's happily functioning multi-tiered educational system where state schools afforded top-notch educations and entry into top grad schools and into the professions.  Within twenty years, we'll see state schools decrease in quality to University of Pheonix levels, while the private schools will do better and better.  Wealthy kids will continue to do well, but no longer will higher ed be a means of rewarding hard work.  Even more than it does now, it'll continue to replicate the inequities rending the American social fabric.

medium long run, intervals

Yesterday I went out for a 90 minute run with the intention of circling by the local track and dropping four marathon-pace (or thereabouts) miles before running the two miles home.  Did this successfully, and the run turned out to be around 95 minutes, about 14-14.5 miles.  The marathon-pace miles (miles 8-12 of the workout) felt pretty easy.  That's a good sign.  It took a few days to get un-stiff from a full day of travel Friday.

Today I did 8 x 400 at the same track and I think I'm seeing some progress, as my splits were 3-4 seconds faster than when I started doing 400s six weeks or so ago.  I felt like I had some turnover and speed, so maybe the rust is coming off, the gears are shifting: you pick the mechanical metaphor.  Today I finally got to the point where I could run in the anaerobic range.  Seriously: I'm so slow that it's hard for me to transition from aerobic to anaerobic modes.  I tend to be a single-pace marathoner, a one-trick running pony with my best half-marathon time ever the split from a marathon.  Hopefully, this speedwork will give me some range.  Maybe it's the weather.  The dogwoods and other floriferous trees and shrubs have scented the air of a city more filled with bikers and amblers and smiling gawkers than the one I left a few weeks ago.

more on opportunity cost

I got to thinking on this morning's run that in yesterday's post I left out the obvious, meaningful thing you give up when you go running: time with loved ones, maybe a phone call home, time spent building relationships with people.  Well, this is always the major worry about running.  For me and Tammi, running makes up a big part of our relationship.  It's a way we have fun with each other and support each other and learn from each other.  It was a common interest we immediately shared on first dates and probably was a signal that we shared similar habits and values.  This easy symmetry will of course change if we're lucky enough to have kids--then we'll manage something.

Anyway, appropos of that article in the WSJ sometime back, there was a thread on letsrun.com, a very informative running website, where runners discussed running and marriage.  It's an anecdotal goldmine:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3898568

missed workout

I had a 15 miler planned today that I simply missed/skipped/didn't get around to.  I slept in today because I've been very tired and haven't been getting much sleep and it was raining, etc.  Last night before I decided to do the run after a 2:30 meeting I had this afternoon, but then the meeting went longer than planned, and I hadn't eaten since 10.30 (an odd time to eat, I know -- but I wanted to grab something before heading into the library and by the way I recommend the Subway breakfast menu)...I had to send some emails to follow up on some things from the meeting, then it was 7:30 and dark.  Even grad students have their hectic days, whether for some of us that simply means having to put on pants and see the sun.  Lesson learned: better to run in the morning because the best laid plans go awry. 

It was just one of those days.  Poked at my chapter from mid morning to mid afternoon and increased mankind's store of knowledge by an unimpressive 611 words.  Readers of this blog will note that over the last 48 hours I've written more about Magnum PI and clandestine pooping than about the subject in which a major institution of higher learning is certifying me as an expert. 

Anyway--it takes about two days to start losing fitness so no harm done but then again no fitness gained.  The midweek medium long run is a major part of my marathon training goals, and this season, I haven't been doing them. 

It's a constant worry of mine that running will ultimately diminish the quality of my life, that the opportunity cost of an hour or two on the road will not be worth it when in my senescence I look back on my years as a runner.  I wonder, shouldn't I be spending running time reading Latin poetry or learning programming or figuring out bond valuation? 

A lost running day tells me no.  There's a limit to how much I can do cognitively in a single day.  I can't pay attention all day long to productive work.  After I finished all my work around 7.30 I felt totally restless.  It was too late to go for a run but I didn't have the energy to do some of the other things in my life I've been  meaning to get around to: finish The Bostonians, write the cover letter to send out that Henry James paper, give the paper one more quick revision, read The American, read more Saul Bellow, read an academic journal, read more poetry, watch more French films, figure out how to build websites, etc.  I'm too tired, and too distractable.  So it's OK to run, because I probably overestimate its opportunity cost.

In Praise of Tom Selleck

Barely recognizable as TS

On Tuesday afternoons I generally start to dread whatever interval workout I have planned for the day.  I half hope that the track team will be using the track so that I will have an excuse to run something else.  But when I'm doing intervals, I never hate them as much as I fear I will and in fact I tend to enjoy them.  Today I did 3x1600 and 1x3200, with 200 jog in between each (5:39, 5:39, 5:35, 11:17). 

On the advice of interval maven Tammi I kept the recovery short.  She says, for short intervals have a long recovery.  Have a short recovery for long intervals.  The reason for this is because when you're working on aerobic/threshold capacity you want to keep the pressure on.  When you're working on speed and strength with the shorter stuff you want enough recovery so that you're body is charged and fully explosive. 

It's true about running that you never feel worse for having done it, and it was true today despite my inclination to bail on the workout.

You know who would never bail on a workout?  Tom Selleck.  In every role he plays Selleck represents rectitude, authority, and probity.  He is a stable, unwavering 6'4" oak of justice who can be counted on to do the right thing, whether as detective Thomas Magnum; as one of a trio of surprised, hapless, but ultimately caring dads in Three Men and a Baby; as Eisenhower in a fictionalized representation of D-Day; or as Commissioner Frank Regan in his latest vehicle, cop drama Blue Bloods. 

Selleck can be counted on to deliver one convincing performance after another in the episodic (as opposed to serial) TV dramas that have become his specialty as an actor: crime dramas and other shows where each week's plot turns on a central masculine authority figure.   Genres such as the cop drama and the western (recall Quigley Down Under) convert Selleck's limited seemingly expressive range (I emphasize the "seemingly") into the impassivity that characteristically befits the unimpeachable authority of lawmen and cowboys. 

Thomas Magnum

Selleck does not emote.  He rarely even gets convincingly angry.  But this would-be limitation as an actor turns him into a force of stability around which a plot can take shape.  Throughout the course of his long career, directors, producers, and casting agents have year by year whittled Selleck down to a type, but he works expertly in the mold.  Selleck will serve more as a structural support in the plot of a show than as a character whose turmoil captivates the viewer.  To put it another way, he doesn't play characters--he plays plots.  Once Selleck gets involved the plot can get going, the case begin to be solved, because he radiates rectitude and the knowledge of when and how and why to do the right thing.  These are the qualities that set a good cop show in motion.  They don't belong to the actors; they belong to the architecture of the genre.

To be fair, we cannot know from the body of his work that Selleck does not in fact possess a mine of emotional range left lying untapped deep beneath the bristles of his famous moustache  However, a look at his early work in Magnum PI gives us some indication of his strengths and weaknesses as an actor.  This is because as originally written, the character of Thomas Magnum is not actually that well matched to Tom Selleck the actor.  As the series progresses Selleck makes the character his own, but in the early episodes, Selleck seems almost uncomfortable in Magnum's Hawaiian shirt and too-cool-for-school manner, uneasy being the easygoing, worry-free surfer-detective that is the Thomas Magnum character.  Viewing the early episodes, it becomes clear that Thomas Magnum was a character probably written more for an actor like the guy who played Murdoch in the A-Team.  But Selleck launched his career by making Thomas Magnum his own, taking the role and tailoring it to his own strengths.

A still from Blue Bloods

The current show Blue Bloods exploits Selleck's talents in their full flower.  The show is about a family of Irish Catholic cops in New York. Selleck is the reigning patriarch, but he's watched over by his own retired cop-father, the patriarch emeritus.  They sit at the heads of the table at the Sunday family dinners that comprise a regular part of each episode.  (The show is family on steroids with four generations involved.)  Donnie Wahlberg--who shares his brother's expressive brow and is a subtle craftsman in his own right--plays the older of Selleck's two cop sons, one of who has traded a career as a Harvard-trained lawyer to stand in the filial line of blue uniforms. Selleck's daughter plays a rising DA's assistant.

Whatever happens in Blue Bloods, Selleck knows how to handle it.  In the last episode some affluent young developers beat to death a homeless Iraq vet.  Donnie Wahlberg was on the case, incensed because like him (and like all the men in the family except the Harvard lawyer) he's a Marine combat vet.  When it appears that Wahlberg might be on the verge of crossing the line with the suspect, Selleck steps in and counsels his hotheaded son against compromising the case and imperiling justice.

Selleck puts his talents to use in steady TV work, but one wonders what would've happened if he had become a leading move actor.  Had Selleck turned to movies, his resume would probably boast higher highs but would also be saddled with lower lows than one finds upon review of the steady stream of TV shows that comprise his career.  With years left in his career Selleck may yet find additional range as an actor, but one has to admire him for finding a niche and doing something right time after time.  As a figure who can telegraph stalwart authority to an audience in one reliable performance after another, he is irreplaceable.  No one does it better.