The Long Run: A Bob Seger Allusion by Way of the Eagles Album of the Same Name, and Also What I Did Today

Around noon I headed out for a two-hour run which ended up clocking in around 2:05.  I'll call it 18 miles.  I ran the second hour pretty hard.  The first long run of my Milan training, this two hours was also the first long run in a while done senza Garmin.  While keeping that touch-bevel hunk of GPS-enabled spedometer-odometer on my wrist would've given fairly accurate info on how fast and how far I ran, complete with mile splits that would help me gauge effort to pace, I've run with it so much that I've learned how easily you can focus all your long runs on mileage and pace at the expense of actually feeling your body, pressing the pace when you feel it, and keeping a sense of a flexibility in the run--a sense that maybe today you'll go longer or shorter than you plan based on how you feel.



Our bathroom comes with an extra sink.

 In the almost four weeks I've been here I've found some loops that take me off the canal and around some of the industrial area in the town just west of Padua called Bassilo, which appears to be a much less glamorous factory town, part of the European ugliness generally edited out of the travelogue, travel-guide, memoirist's idea of Italy.  And why shouldn't it be?  The point of travel is self-cultivation, recreation, and pleasure,not a crash course in the more unsavory aspects of globalization.  Nevertheless, in foreign countries we runners are often the rats that scamper out of the garden fenceposts, forced as we are to confront physical space in its nakedness, to look on it as a brute means to mileage.  There are times when we celebrate the touristic aspects of running as we trot through beautiful landscapes, but at other times, running forces us into the backways of industry and lets us see the centrifugal dynamics of capital that pleasure tourism, with its celebration of the durably local, tends to obscure.

Rehydrating after today's long run.  Never underestimate the importance of post-run hydration.  Even if you're not thirsty, sip six to eight ounces every half hour following a tough workout.

One thing that's been on my mind lately: Why do I have such an urge to listen to Bob Seger?  Every aspect of my being, every fiber of my hypersocialized academic superego tells me this is wrong and in utterly bad taste.  Now, there's no inherent reason it's worse than liking, say, The Decembrists, but although taste is arbitrary there's no escaping its policing force.  In an alternative universe, one where like Benjamin says about the time after the revolution when everything's still the same (that right there, my friends, is a Seger allusion) just slightly different, Seger would occupy the place of Springsteen in the academy.  But, the revolution has not arrived. 

Does Seger write great songs?  No.  Does he have a great voice?  No.  Do his songs have insights into American life that are tacitly felt by millions but never so well expressed as by him?  Maybe.  Seger's strength is tapping into wistfulness, nostalgia, and a sense of American decline.  He even admitted that his medium, rock and roll, was decadent, that he preferred an older, pre-disco, pre-lapsarian version of it. 

This doesn't account for why I love Seger, and it's probably easy to sympotomatize my regard as an over-identification with his wistfulness and the sense of victimhood it implies.  And there's a whole group of white-male movie-makers and rock musicians who read the 60s as not a profound change in gender and racial dynamics at home, not as a reorganization of American foreign policy abroad, but simply as an easily narratable loss of innocence.

So maybe to probe too deeply into my love for Seger is to court acquaintence with some unsavory parts of myself, but then again, maybe not.  I'd never admit a taste for Seger around other academics--after all, it's peer review on which everything in this profession hangs--but it's a taste worth thinking about.

academic work: cultivating genius one word at a time while death approaches inexorably

No long post here--just a complaint about how academic work is interminable, a process, etc.  I'm glad the deadline for a conference panel proposal is today.  That means, at 11:59 EST I can stop working on it.  A good argument for procrastination: tasks always take as long as you allow for them.

Endurance, Jean Paul Belmondo

Never drive anything you couldn't picture Jean Paul Belmondo driving

The Italians translate endurance as "resistenza" or "pazienza," a fun linguistic fact which, though Italy has a solid tradition of distance running, wouldn't be interesting unless it suggested something about the way we think about racing and training.  It gets at a very complicated set of questions: Is endurance active or passive?  What role does "endurance" play in racing?  What do we mean when we talk about "endurance" sports?  Is endurance a means or an end?

Endurance, patience, resistence:  All three have different shades of meaning, all three come from different Latin roots.  Endurance: shares a root with durable, means a quality of hardness.  Resistence: means holding back.  Patience comes from pati, which means to suffer.  It's the root of "passivity" and "passion," and it is a foundation conception of Christianity.  Hardening oneself, holding back from quitting, suffering: these all have to do, in a way, with making yourself into an object, with mastering yourself, keeping yourself within bounds.

Basically, all these things mean not yielding.  Yielding, then, to what?  To pain, to the desire to quit--we all know the feeling.  But a race is a different story--it's not about testing your limits to see how much you can take but about beating the other person.  Or, as my uncle once said, when you're head to head with someone it's really about who can take more pain.  That's a description that combines the active and passive aspects of racing: going forward, not yielding to yourself or to your competitors. 

So what do people think?  What does it mean to talk about "endurance sports"?   They are called endurance sports because endurance is the physiological characterstic most needed, as opposed to speed or strength.  But the connotations of endurance, and the reasons why people participate in endurance sports, far exceed mere physiology.

One thing I've learned about racing, though, is it never helps to think of yourself as merely trying not to quit, or merely trying to take the pain and get through the race.  You need to conceive of the race as a task and move actively through it, focusing on your place, on tactics, on moving up on the singlets ahead of you and not getting passed.



"Jean Paul Belmondo, how very becoming is your bicycle.  You wear no helmet and you smoke, but in Europe that is sophisticated, not reckless and white trash.  Your scarf is of the softest merino wool."



An example of artigliane food: locally grown ingredients, crafted according to ancient practices rooted in the land



The art of losing

Sometimes I wonder how I'll take getting older, when my body starts to protest against the miles and miles and miles and times slow and I've done all I can do as a runner.

I don't dread it. I've had great opportunities to grow as a runner and to push the limits of my ability. It will be a relief and a triumph to finally have known those limits because I know that even if I don't reach some of my running goals, like breaking 2:30 in the marathon, it won't be because I didn't try, but because nature, or other immovables in life, won't have allowed it. Running has allowed me a portion of glory--and yes, I mean it, glory--that I never expected. I'm happy with a lot of things I've achieved as an academic, thriving in a top-notch grad program, etc., and, professionally, I've more or less done what's expected of an Ivy League graduate. Lucky for me, that comfortably conventional career path has provided tremendous fulfillment and happiness.

But there's been no glory like running, nothing like the 25th mile of Boston, where somehow the agony is an ingredient in the utter triumphant joy of the race's last two miles. My uncle said it once, and it's true--nothing compares to the last two miles of a marathon when you're on your way to a PR.

What a joy it is to test and know the limits of your body. To tell yourself the truth about this is the essence of humility. The truth may not be what you expect.

The Inexcusable Stupidity of Running With Headphones

There's a great article in today's NYT about a proposed bill that would fine pedestrians, runners included, for wearing headphones when crossing the street. Say what you will about government interference in individuals' inalienable rights to harm themselves, this legislation is overdue.

Let me emphasize how colossally stupid it is to run with headphones. For what should be obvious reasons it's dumb in cities where you need all your senses to contend with the other bodies-in-motion, like cars and bikes, that all vie for limited street space. You have a better chance of not getting hit by a texting driver you cannot see if you can hear him. It is especially important to listen when crossing intersections. Traffic dangers are outside your peripheral vision. An example of these dangers would be a car making a right turn at a stop sign. The driver is probably looking left (at the oncoming traffic) rather than right, where you are. So careful.

Even on designated trails, like in Central Park or along the lakefront in Chicago, wearing headphones is dumb. Biker-runner collisions happen all the time because some runner and some ten-cent Lance Armstrong, equally absorbed in their music, aren't paying attention.

Runners also have to watch out for other runners. I can't say how many times I've come up on a runner who's listening to headphones screaming "ON YOUR LEFT...ON YOUR LEFT..." only to startle them as I pass.

Listen for cars, everyone! You need to be aware when you run, and music is a distraction. Stay away from the headphones. If you find running so boring that you need headphones to get through a half hour of it without your favorite adult contemporary mix, just give it up.

Fat

The empty Nutella jar in the trash says the binge has ended. Sometimes a drunk needs a Sunday-morning beer; sometimes a sweets binge calls for Nutella and peanut butter to manage the withdrawal. There's a lot of Liz Gilbert in me. Three pounds to be exact. I felt it on my run today and it was awful.

Last week I topped 90 miles in the first official week of training for the Milan marathon. I had managed to keep the post-Richmond weight gain to a reasonable and healthy seven pounds. You see, it's necessary to gain weight after a marathon to restore your body and get back to a healthy training weight. Training weight and marathon racing weight are not the same -- if you train at your racing weight, you'll burn out. For me, off season weight is seven pounds more than racing weight; training weight about four pounds more (ideally). The rationale behind these differences is that you need to eat enough to fuel and repair your body during training, but in the weeks leading up to the race you need to get light enough so that you're not carrying any extra fat or muscle mass. It's a tricky balance--lose too much weight and you'll be weak on race day; too little, you'll be sluggish.

Long story short: In Italy, it's possible to gain three pounds during a 94-mile running week. Let's run some numbers. An adult burns a little more than 100 calories per mile run. So, last week I burned over 9400 calories, 1343 calories per day, through running alone. This doesn't include all the time spent walking around Venice, which (as Peggy Guggenheim once complained) has lots of stairs to walk up and down over bridges. That's the minus column. In the plus column: pizza twice a day, no breakfast, between five and eight pastries (delicious chocolate eclaire, chocolate filled brioche, various kinds of cookies) per day, the occasional four-scoop tub of gelato. I gave up counting the calories. Not because I want to empower myself to affirm how comfortable I can get in existential Liz-Gilbert fat jeans. I'm just not good enough at math.

The reader probably detects (and possibly shares in) my complicity with the hate-on-Eat-Pray-Love-crowd, and maybe the animus is worth reflecting on. Why is Liz Gilbert so utterly offensive to so many people?

It's not just because I got fat that today is a perfect day to talk about LG. I also completed an application to teach college expository writing next year. Like many of these programs in elite institutions around the country, the program aims primarily to teach kids how to argue a thesis statement. It culminates in a long research paper. This is all fine, and probably won't harm the students, but it may not teach them how to write either. The curriculum shrouds the god of writing in a white spandex full-body leotard of sanctity that a course in old-school rhetoric would quickly sully with yellowish sweat stains. Students would improve as writers if they were directly taught the mechanics of parallelism, amplification, inversion, metalepsis, metonymy, litotes, etc. Winston Churchill and JFK were both students of classic rhetoric; neither was terribly smart but both were eloquent.

My point is, it's a pedagogical fallacy to treat writing as a form of expression rather than as a form of imitation. People learned to write by imitation basically up to the 1970s. Writing was rhetoric; now it's expression. Not necessarily personal expression, but expression in the sense that it's seen as the process of externalizing something that exists inside you.

Remember folks: expression is not the goal of writing, but is simply another metaphor for it. And this expressive metaphor contains a whole host of assumptions about knowledge and individualism that aren't necessarily true--not the least of which is the assumption that knowledge is the possession of, and originates from, individuals instead of being the shared cognitive process of a community. It also contains the assumption that thought is prior to language, when actually linguistic forms (from words to poetic forms) give shape and also content to our thought. Lastly, the expressive metaphor carries from its romantic origins the notion of individual genius, and with that, the notion that what one has to say is necessarily original and valuable.

So, back to hating on Liz Gilbert. We all thought she was bad because she cheated on her husband (that's clear in the book if not in the movie) and cried in the bathtub and then went to Italy to eat as much pasta as she wanted, as if her troubles gave her a free pass for indulging herself. Some probably read the "eat" part as a betrayal--who does she think she is to get so fat? Personally, I judge her most harshly for the "pray" part--something about the Whole-Foods-esque, pick-and-choose attitude to India when there were plenty of nice houses of worship in Rome. No one can blame her for the "love" part, given that it was Javier Bardem.

Sir Philip Sidney said the poet's job is to delight and instruct. The concept of "delight" is perfect here, as it's related etymologically to both sex and food (cf., "delicious"). Does Gilbert delight? No more than any other memoirist but to her credit, hardly less. She writes vividly and with a well-paced narrative flow. Does she instruct? I didn't think so, at least she doesn't offer positive instruction, only a negative example of a crazed white lady drunk on pizza and self-loathing. Well, that's not fair--she does give the lesson that when you're depressed, you have to care for your body (eat), then for your soul (pray), and then for other people (love). I would maybe change the order a little bit (body, others, soul) but she gets a lot right--there's an ethics of self-care when we're hurt, and self-care involves (among other things) treating yourself to pizza, but you can't lick your wounds forever, as Gilbert knew. Instead, the best parts of the book are when she develops new relationships with people she meets in her travels.

The reason we hate Liz Gilbert has nothing to do with her getting away with eating so much pasta, but rather with the reason people hate memoirs in general: their presumption on the reader that personal experience is, by definition, interesting and unique. Maybe. I don't completely believe this about memoirs as a rule, but it seems to fit in Gilbert's case.

Sixteen, Tom Clancy

I went with my wife on her 16 miler today. She's in great shape and had no trouble completing this part of training. Well done! Sixteen miles: that's real distance!

I just finished Red Rabbit, my second Tom Clancy novel ever. I feel like reading them all. Literary fiction never has ass-kicking heroes like Jack Ryan. In Clancy's world, irony has no place, only Soviet agents are ambiguous, and complexity gets people killed. What pleasure it is to read without having to interpret.

But I can't resist interpreting nonetheless. In TC's fantasy world, the men all have military backgrounds and heroic qualities, Republicans are patriots, the New York Times traitorous, and the Soviets are sympathetic to the extent that they see freedom as tantamount to American capitalism. You can see why Republicans have so much more fun that we do, with all our left-melancholy apologizing and introspection.

A question, then: What's fun about being progressive? Let's think about that, and maybe we'll gain some ground in the war over political psychology.

14.2/1500, Peggy Guggenheim

Today worked well. I made some serious progress on my dissertation, writing 1500 words, 500 more than usual. Not to obsessively quantify, but yes--that heartens me. Ultimately, it's easier to write when you set these word-count mile markers. The task becomes far less intimidatingly infinite, you get started and build momentum, you can stop.

Writing all day about mystical experience and the "vague vistas" of consciousness it reveals, it was fitting that the fog lifted today and the sun shined on Padua in one of those wintry foretastes of spring that make you anticipate how sweet springtime will actually be. I can't wait.

My first writing break was pastries and cappuccino, my second a fourteen mile run that brought with it, thanks to the clear skies, a view of the snowy Dolomites off in the far distance, washed in the pink light of late afternoon. What a sight they'll be in the spring.

I completely love Venice. As I said in an email to a college friend the other day, Venice has places that seem completely sufficient unto themselves, places where I feel there's no place else I need to be on the planet than here. San Marco, in all its glory, has that effect on me, and I think it's because in Venice words like glory, beauty, luxury, retain something of their original and uncorrupted meaning. Only in Venice do ornament and luxury meet such extremes without flinching.

To establish a museum of modern art in Venice, then, was a huge risk--what art work could stand up to the classical perfection of the city, what exhibit space wouldn't seem blank and barren with all of Venice's magnificent density surrounding it? The astonishing thing is, the Guggenheim is one of its jewels, set off by the centuries-old splendor. Why is this?

For one thing, there's something about setting a modern art gallery inside what, for all intents and purposes, was once a house, that brings the works to life in a way that more conventionally sterile galleries, purpose built for showcasing art as art cannot. I'm thinking in particular of MOMA, where Wright's corkscrew design alienates rather than invites, there being literally no angle of repose on those sloping floors. Exhibited in Guggenheim's old house, the Picassos and Pollacks become somehow warmer, earthier, have a more organic relationship with the viewer. Put back into a space where life was lived, Rothko's abstract expressionism becomes even more expressive and its abstraction more precise, if that makes sense--as they intended, the emotion, not the art, becomes the abstracted thing in Peggy's high modernist living room.

I got so excited about the place that I bought her autobiography, Confessions of an Art Addict. I'm only about 1/5 of the way through it but so far it shambles unreflectively through her early life in the various expat Bohemias of 1920s Europe, detailing the pathetic blow-by-blow of her dysfunctional, adultery-and-violence riddled marriage to artist-manque Laurence Vail. Not a total failure as an artist, Vail exhibited some forgettable found-object type pieces with Duchamp and Joseph Cornell in 1942, but his more vivid legacy comes not from his art but from the tortured-genius histrionics he visited on Guggenheim (who gives as good as she gets). Taken uncharitably, Autobiography reads as a tale of two no-talent bohemians fumbling

alcoholically across an amused Europe. At least Peggy (thank goodness) will go on to make something of herself, by dint of will alone.

Mileage, Or Yet Another Writing/Running Analogy

There are days when I don't feel like running at all. There are days when I don't feel at all like writing, when each sentence is a slog, when the Internet seems drastically more interesting than my dissertation. Some days I'd rather drink beer and watch TV than run. But when I don't feel like running I do it anyway. I know it will feel fine after three miles, and if it doesn't, I can quit and I'll have at least put in a minimum maintenance run. When I don't feel like writing I do it anyway--if I can just get 250 words in the day won't be completely wasted. In writing and in running, something is better than nothing. Getting started is the hardest part. Do the miles, they don't have to be good; write, it doesn't have to be good either.

A Vocation

Why do we tend to think we have only one, singular, authentic vocation? In this article from the Notre Dame alumni magazine, a philosophy grad student waxes refreshingly sanguine about the prospects of the academic humanities in the face of all the crisis talk to which we've grown accustomed since 2008 (and, of course, before -- the humanities are always in some kind of crisis or another). It's entitled "A Defense of My Life's Vocation."

http://magazine.nd.edu/news/12207-a-defense-of-my-life-s-vocation/

I'm skeptical of the idea that we have a single calling (and that even if we did, that calling somehow takes the form of a societally approved profession). We tend to talk about vocations when it comes to professions that require lots of training and singular dedication: academia, the clergy, medicine. But no one says about their career in, say, telecom ad sales or consulting that they've answered a calling. No one gets a road-to-Damascus flash about accounting.

So what is a vocation? Do we have more than one of them in our lifetimes?

Academic Writing: A Waste of Humanity's Time Since...Well, We Have to Historicize Each of These Concepts and Define "Waste" More Precisely

Writing never gets any easier, and it's debatable whether I've gotten any better at it. I make daily progress on my dissertation, though, which is feeling more and more like a credentialing hurdle than like the critical monument I envisioned for myself at the beginning. Will it delight? Will it instruct? Maybe. In Italy the question is whether writing is worth the opportunity cost. Sometimes the only way I can keep writing, in those increasingly frequent times when life offers so much that's way more interesting than my dissertation, is to realize this dissertation isn't the odyssey of the mind of the precocious man-child genius but is simply a job, and to know that like it or not, the job of the so-called intellectual or academic is still a job, with all the banality and travail of any other pursuit despite the fact that we all like to pretend that one of the perks of academe is that labor and leisure and love are three strands of the same precious braid. Well, today that braid is a hard hempy rope whipping me across the ass. The twist, the surprise is, though, that this is completely freeing and positive. Why pretend you're supposed to love to work?

I stepped out for a pair of espressos after completing a draft of an abstract for a spring conference.

Back to the dissertation.

Postscript: I wrote 111 words of my dissertation today and a 397 word abstract. So, 500 total. Rather weak. I gave up about an hour ago and went for a 6 mile run, which I've just returned from. Now begins the fun part of the day: It's into Venice for me for a concert at La Fenice. But first, a meal of Padova train station pizza, some of the best around. Seriously.

statue

Hm. There are a lot of ways to read this statue, and not many of them good. So let's get right to it. Yes, it may be a female version of "The Thinker;" yes, if that's true then there's a linkage of women's intellectual labor to earth and matter and the labor of birth; yes, that linkage is, as they say, deeply problematic.

What really strikes me, though, is the gaze. Not my male gaze, but her backward gaze. At me. A gaze that asks, "Why are you watching me poop? This is a private moment. You are a pervert with a strange fetish for pooping statues. I'm a sculpture happily pooping near a historic Paduan cafe, the site of a student revolt in 1848. You're just another coprophiliac tourist with a blog and childish fascination with butts that says way more about you than about me. Who knows what you'll be tomorrow. At least I know I'll still be a pooping statue."

Foggy Ten

There's a thick fog on the Veneto today. The first half of my run followed a path into the city gates along the river but I turned around when the path stopped and I saw I'd be forced to wind my way through cobblestone alleys and around blind corners. (So often in European cities the streets aren't made with getting you anywhere in mind.) I conceded this portion to the city's history and scampered back to the canal where I finished the run. The first half was slowish, about 7:30 pace, the second half averaged around 6:20 pace, with miles eight and nine at 6:01 and 6:11. I finished the workout in 68 minutes.

the first mile, metaphor for life

This morning I felt like hell. My body hasn't fully adjusted to the time change, and even after eight-and-a-half (a number with good Italian connotations!) hours of sleep I felt sluggish and beat up. Partly this is explained by marathon training, which I began in earnest this week. With increased mileage, there's always an adjustment period. We've also been doing a lot of walking here. Finally, last night J. and I broke our no-sweets rule.

After we enjoyed a meal of squid prepared with lemon, oil, and salt, we declined dessert, self-control intact. But like a crack pusher the waiter (who was as incomprehensible to us as we were to him) gave us a free slice of berry tart that we couldn't resist. It would've been rude, right? Well, once the dam had cracked, floodwaters of cookies and gelato followed.

The point is, sugar makes me tired, especially when I'm training. It's best for me to lay off the stuff entirely when I'm getting in shape. Not for weight control, though it helps with that, but simply to alleviate the inevitable fatigue of training.

My first mile was an eight-minute slog to the canal, but after that I found my legs. Whenever I feel like not running, I run the first mile or two as slowly as I want. It gets easier after that, no matter how tired I am. I leave it to you, reader, to make this into a sports metaphor to fit the challenges you face in your own life.

Dawn broke earier this morning

The sun popped through briefly today. Dawn broke earlier. I ran 11 and felt good in the last three. It's hard to run in a place so flat. That sounds strange. But my hometown is hilly. I noticed this when I lived in Chicago: flat ground taxes your hamstrings differently than hilly ground, which on uphills switches some of the burden to your quads.

This is still a running blog, but running is intimately connected with food, so on an unrelated note: why is Italy so associated with food and pleasure in (at least) the Anglo-American mind? When did we start thinking Italy was a place where we ate with reckless abandon, where the food was better, where it had a more organic connection to the land (itself a fantasy), to the people (another fantasy), to the labor and leisure of everyday life (three fantasies)?

I ask this question not in the spirit of a demystifying critique--as if telling everyone that pasta is a social construction would somehow make it less delicious (and isn't this, at bottom, every academic's stick-it-to-'em, sadistic fantasy?)--but in the spirit of a real historical inquiry. Where does this idea come from?

A few preliminary thoughts: let's look in the nineteenth century, where everything about national difference starts. During the 19c, tons of English and American intellectuals and aesthetes ventured to Italy: Hawthorne, Henry James, Pater, Ruskin, to name a scant few. These are all more or less post 1850-(Hawthorne excepted), and there are more I'm sure from the early 19c. When you read 19c accounts of Italy such as James's or Ruskin's, food is not the focus. Architecture and manners are. Food comes in later. When exactly? Let's do more research.

Off the top of my head, A Moveable Feast is the earliest travelogue I can think of that has food in it. Actually, not food but (best I can remember, and this is what I love) beer: Hemmingway talks about beer that's "cold and good." Only Hemmingway can get away with not only using adjectives to talk about food, which is a Freshman writing no-no, but that the adjectives are so completely common. Seriously though, when it comes to beer, other adjectives would somehow miss the mark, and what he's describing isn't a quality of the beer; he's describing (or performing) the way beer gives you permission to stop searching for the perfect adjectives, permission to surrender intellect to sensation. That's why it works as prose.

So, maybe my question is, when does food enter begin to enter into Anglo-American Italian travelogues? If we can answer this, we can figure out when Italy and food came to entail one another in the Ango cultural imaginary. I tried the new google word assocation tool but "food" so completely exceeds "Italy" in frequency that I can't get anything out of it. Anyone know a way to measure change in frequency of correlation?

Valpolicella Ripasso

This was the first wine we bought in Padova and it was a disappointment. Vapolicella ripasso is a style of wine made by adding grape husks to an already fermenting batch of wine to give it sweetness and body. I didn't know this when we bought it. I asked the salesperson at the wine store "Dov'e gli vini di veneto?" and got in return a bunch of gibberish. (I think these people who don't speak English should either learn it or go home.) Anyway, all I heard was uva, rossi, Verona--good enough for me to plunk down 12 Euros in hopes of a relaxing glass or two and expanded tastes.

The 14% alcohol content should have cued me into the fact that this would be head-splittingly sweet, to the extent that it overpowered what ought to have been a complex profile of flavors. It hits the nose like sherry or port and gives me the same nauseated feeling. I got through about three sips: the first eagerly, the second with fortitude, and the third in that vain hope we have about endeavors we know are failing. To be fair, the second sip was the best. I allowed the wine to stay in my mouth long enough for some of its flavors to open up but I can't name them. This would be a fine wine to pair with chocolate, ice cream, or sweet soft cheeses, but the thought of finishing the glass I'd poured with my arugala salad was simply too much. I recoiled at the thought of the headache I'd be lining up for from even a glass of the stuff. So soberly, and sobered about ripasso, I resolve not to buy this style of wine again.

Morning Run on the Veneto

I left for my morning run along a canal in Padova at about 6:40 this morning, after passing a short night. My body, it seems, is still adjusting to the time change. The sun doesn't rise until between quarter to eight and eight and it was cloudy and misty this morning and the run was covered in a darkness that was broken, thankfully, by the lights along one of Padova's well-maintained bike paths. I met few people on the first half of this out-and-back, encountered a few more (on bikes, on foot, with dogs) on the way back. Padova's on a coastal plain and is extremely flat.

The rest of the day was spent writing a dissertation chapter, the evening watching youtube clips of the Bachelor, season 15, featuring second-time contestant Brad Womack. The Bachelor resonated in a few strange ways with my dissertation reading. A little background: Womack is infamous for being the only bachelor ever to turn down each of the bachelorettes. He walked away from his season mateless. Now three years later he's back on the show, after undergoing intense therapy. His first season on the show, we're told, was symptomatic of an inability to commit, which was symptomatic of trust issues, etc. He's worked it all out in therapy.

What's so interesting is how the storyline of the show now relies on a redemption narrative made possible by turning Brad's failure to find in any single one of those usually vacuous bachelorettes a soulmate, or even a suitable partner. My question is whether Brad really wants to be treated for an inability commit--that's a psychological problem?--or whether he just didn't connect with any of the people on the show, and is (like we all are) a stranger to his own desires. The really sad part of the show is not that he broke those women's hearts three years ago, but that this season we watching a man's life be normalized to the standards of a TV show hosted by Chris Harrison.

Padova running group

We are living near a running store owned by a world class marathoner. Naturally, I'm excited about the possibility of training with him. We'll see if I can make it happen. We happened upon the store on a walk yesterday--it's a little store next to a laudromat a few blocks from the Prato. We saw posters of the guy on the wall and the clerk told us he was the boss. She also mentioned there was a running group that left from the storeTuesdays and Saturdays. My wife and I were hoping we would discover such a group in Padova. I ran with the group this morning and it was a disappointment. The olympian wasn't there.

first run in Italy

I'm an enthusiastic tourist, but I find traveling to be comparatively difficult. Tourism means going someplace without really leaving yourself and your habits behind--your comforts, your pleasures, your dislikes, even your curiosities. The other day my sister in law ask what I needed to pack to feel ready for Italy. My response, di corsa, was running shoes. I like to run in a new place and get to know its topography in the efficient way only running allows, and being ready to go somewhere means being ready to run. I'm never really ready, though, for travel per se but as I define it or simply idealize it, it's something you can never really be ready for -- travel visits you, leaves its mark on you in the form of surprises and shocks, good and bad. It's worth remembering that so many romance language words having to do with travel (hostel, hotel, host) come from the Latin hostis which means stranger but also enemy.

As I was running through Padua this morning I saw road signs point to Venice and Bologna; I wondered,for a moment, how easily I could run to either city and thought too how hard and difficult and dangerous getting to place to place must have been in the Middle Ages. Travel left people exposed and vulnerable. Papal agents arrested heretical intellectuals on the road to Padua.

Friendly tourism, and tourist friendly destinations, remove the hostility from the experience of being away from home, while tourists like myself find ourselves, upon reflection, taking measures to protect oursleves from inimical experience. Which is not always to be celebrated, and which is not the same thing as having a closed mind. The small ways in which Italy can baffle count among the ways in which it can prove hostile; its innumerable glories are often the friendliest and most well paved places on the planet.

If there's one arena of experience where travel and tourism converge it's in the most touristy place of all, the museum. I always find Giotto a shock, an artist who unsettles me almost completely in the religions expressions of his figures.

Today's Run, Emily Dickinson, Tammy Wynette

Today's run was an easy 11 in the late afternoon, with the Emily Dickinson slant light you get this time of year. It's pleasant and calming to run in this dull afternoon light, not opressive like like the heft of cathedral tunes. What the hell are cathedral tunes anyway? Probably not the protestant hymns whose meter all her poems employ.

Speaking of church music. Tammy Wynette's songs, and many country songs for that matter, leap up and down in intervals that sound to me a lot like hymns. My wife would know better than I. Anyway, there's something about a Tammy catharsis that suggests a singalong, so maybe this is where the church music hunch comes from. She's probably less well-regarded than Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn for the very reason she's such an excellent performer, her unabashed, self-negating displays of vulnerability and sadness. Dolly's glitz and crystalline vocal tone, Lynn's sass and self-assertion overshadow the retiring Tammy, who lands the corny punchlines that make up the wit and soul of country music with absolutely withering pathos. Listen to her second best-known hit, D-I-V-O-R-C-E for a taste of what I mean.

Impact through Insight

We grad students receive periodic recruiting solicitations from the big consulting companies: Bain, BCG, McKinsey. As an undergrad at the turn of the millenium I received solicitations from this same lineup of firms, and what sticks out most in my mind from that time is the fatuousness of dot-com era business-speak ("out of the box," "envisioneering") and the vacuousness of consulting firms' slogans: the one I remember is "Impact through Insight," which basically tries to reassure clients that they're hiring smart people (that is, after all, part of the peace of mind they're paying for) and to reassure us insecure, anxious smart people that our intelligence can make a difference.

The PhDs on the McKinsey site are all in the sciences. They must think that we "right brained" humanities folks are too dumb to have real insight, too feckless to have impactful impact. This is probably true, and thank goodness. I would not want to fail in the labyrinthine analysis--probably full of mathy formulas I don't get--required to deliver to the Arkansas plastics manufacturer, in whose noble town I'd be living in for weeks on end, the insightful insight that they can save 2% on the sourcing costs by purchasing industrial emoluments from a plant in India rather than Brazil.

Chrissie Wellington, best at exercising

Check out this profile of Chrissie Wellington, the current record holder in the Ironman. Most interesting to me is that in her youth she wasn't really athletic. She ran a marathon in her 20s, but got hit by a car and began to ride and swim for cross training. Now she's world champ. She trains in Boulder with her husband, and her training has caused her to put a career in development economics on hold.

Jim Fixx

Dare make the fixation pun? Yes.

A few years ago, I can't remember where, I found a copy of Jim Fixx's The Complete Book of Running, a 1977 guide to the sport aimed at novices caught up in the running boom. It states its aim as nothing less than to change the readers life, promising to set the reader on a path to complete mental and physical transformation, to weight loss, increased energy, even renewed sexual potency. As much as he is known for this best selling book, Fixx is remembered for the cruel irony of the fatal heart attack he suffered while on an easy jog in Vermont at age 52. To read the book today is, as one would expect, to see how little the basics of training have changed in 34 years. But it is also to notice the durability of a narrative genre--the running transformation story. Like a conversion narrative, it begins with an old, failing self that becomes a new, improved, and more authentic self, a self more in line with who we believe we really ought to be. Through neglect and bad habits--in Fixx, these are cigarettes and alcohol (to me more fun than the villain of today's narrative, junk food, though I love junk food too, not being much of a drinker any more)--one loses touch with one's best self; one recovers that self, in more confident form, when one becomes a runner.

In the first chapters, Fixx trumpets the physical and mental benefits of running, while later chapters cover logistics: what to wear (nylon shorts with a split up the side), how to slim down by calculating calories in and out, training advice on interval work, advice on fitting runs into a busy day, and suggestions for marathon training. The chapters back these tips testimony from runners who have transformed their lives.

Fixx's story is the common one, and I'll blog more about it in future posts. I am intensely interested in fitness transformation stories, of which Fixx's is an early example, for their happy endings (you rarely hear then stories of fitness failure, and I'd be happy to hear about conversions to detraining and unfitness, how people lost the running habit - this seems common only among erstwhile college athletes) and for the intriguing note of pathos or anxiety that always touches even the happiest. This is the convert's fear of regression.

A lesson from Fixx: A habit we attribute as the source of our transformation easily becomes a fetish or token in which we lodge everything we doubt to have taken root internally. It's a magical fixation, running, this object that so much is credited with.

excess

Last post I started thinking about how a hobby is always excessive to the outside observer. Being a leisure activity, it's pointless. It thus seems an extravagant expenditure of time. The question about distance running is not whether it's a form of excess, but what kind of excess it is, and what its excesses mean. To endure means to continue in spite of adversity and discomfort. The virtue of endurance lies its exceeding ease, being in excess of what we normal do, in excess of quitting, capitulating, giving up. Distance races exist because they fascinate us in their excessive character: in the excessiveness of the strength and stamina they call on, in the expenditure of pain they exact.

Distance races display and demand excess, but whether distance running, the daily running habit we have, is a form of excess of the more banal kind: a compulsion or addiction, an obsessional neurosis, that's a symptom of or a compensation for a frustrated desire. Runners, we know, rarely stop running. Marti Liquori no long runs because of an illness, but plenty of other retired greats who have achieved all they could in the sport still try. Joan Benoit Samuelson, for example, was recently trying to make the cut for the U.S. women's Olympic trials. Obviously, running presents itself as textbook compulsion, something infinitely, excessively, psycho-analyzable. (N.B. The runner-analysand probably won't be found on a couch.) So it's one of the least interesting, though often true and apt, ways to talk about runners and running. Anyone can be analyzed. Its interpretive interminability leaves all the power with the analyst; even this here resistance to analysis can itself be analyzed, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Resistance to analysis aside, or my reluctance to confront the latent content of my so obvious symptoms, I've been reading a great book by psychoanalyst and literary intellectual Adam Philips called On Balance. Why do we think balance is such a good thing?, he asks. What can we learn from our attitude toward excess, and toward the excesses of others? I just started it but so far it's an excellent read; his essays wind between lucid interpretations of Freud and Lacan and suggestive meditations on the problem stated in its title. I'll probably blog more about it as I try to untangle the problem of running and excess.