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.