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.