Ca' D'Oro

Training, like rhythm, consists of ordered patterns of stress and unstress.  The stressed parts of a running week are: a Tuesday track workout, Wednesday medium-long run, a weekend long run or race.  For whatever reason, most runners do it just this way -- the track workout always falls on Tuesday.  Why?  It's just done that way.  If anyone knows why, please weigh in.  Runners are nothing without our habits and rituals, but I broke rhythm today to follow Tammi into Venice, running 12 this morning and postponing intervals until tomorrow afternoon.  By the way, if anyone has some good tips for strength training for running, please weigh in on that.

While Tammi researched I strolled around Venice and took in the Ca' D'Oro, another erstwhile palazzo converted into a museum.  The Ca' D'Oro is a quintissential Venetian Gothic double-decker: stacked squares divided into eight rooms each, with two balconies that afford magnifient views up and down grand canal.  I'm not competent to say anything about the collection, which consisted mainly of religious subjects and pictures of nobles and clergymen (executed by a lot of Italian Renaissance painters I haven't heard of), but I was again struck by how well palazzos carry the art they exhibit -- and by contrast, how sterile purpose-built museums can sometimes (but not always) seem in comparsion.  There's something about the feeling that you're seeing art in someone's home, that the home furnishes art with an enlivening context.  This may be why many art museums in the US are modelled on palazzos, such as the Fogg and the Gardener Museum.  And although it's not a palazzo, the Barnes collection carries out the palazzo principle even better than these 19c replicas of old Venice, given that it's Barnes's very own house that has all the art.  It's truly sad that they're moving the collection to a new museum plaza in Philly in 2012--you'll have the art, but you won't have the experience of art. 

Next thing:  on the train this morning I read the intro to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma.  Pollan makes me irrationally spiteful for whatever reason, so it's hard for me to be evenhanded when discussing him.  Don't expect what follows to be an exception.  I agree with him 100% on what he says, at least in what I've read of him, but as I read him, even as I agree rationally, I come more and more unhinged.  (Something about his tone, a tone that wants to judge without exhorting, or wants to persuade the reader through the threat of bearing the shame of coming down on the gauche side of a line he draws.)  But I was struck in particular by his conclusion to the intro: "In the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing." 

This rhetorically and intellectually meretricious conclusion panders to the reader (if they're not persuaded already) by aiming the book's argument at their personal pleasure, and then very quickly circumscribes the kinds of pleasures he's talking about to the intellectual.  Now, my uncharitable way of reading him says he's basically excluded a whole bunch of things from the realm of legitimate pleasure, including--anathema to Pollan--eating a whole box of Twinkies.  Really--what does knowing have to do with enjoying eating?  Some people find pleasure in filling the dinner conversation with observations about every spice of the soup and each chocolately floral note of the wine, or about the provenance of the salad, but, alas, I do not.  Though I know people who do, and I can understand why they do.  De gustibus.

What I really think he means, though, is that we enjoy our food better when we know enough about it, when we've learned enough about it we feel good for eating it.  My objection (rational or not): he converts an ethical matter into one of personal (I'll omit "self-congratulatory," "narcissistic," "hedonistic") pleasure.   And it seems to me that part of the whole ecological-epidemiological-ethical cluster of problems surrounding food is this too automatic assocation of food with pleasure.  Obviously, food is a high pleasure, but it doesn't have to be so at every meal, and pleasure shouldn't be the goal everytime we scoop up a spoonful of shredded wheat. 

My sense is that Pollan doesn't consider the value or the nature of pleasure itself--what we mean when we talk about pleasurable eating, when it's a good thing and when it's a bad thing to associate food and pleasure.  Instead, he takes the pleasure of food for granted and makes value judgments about people based on what they eat.  Good people like artisinal ice cream, bad people like Mountain Dew.  What bothers me the most, I think, is that these tastes might in fact be simple socioeconomic facts, not values on which you can make judgments about individuals and their choices.