Wrestling with angels

I see the last few posts here are mistakes, entries that should have gone to the other blog! Which I keep up very faithfully, only it is boring to read (insanely repetitive, as training must be!). Still overdue a light reading update and a year-end best post, I would like to keep the blog going to that extent but I've been too busy with other things: especially, finishing the Austen book (and juggling the other work commitments that you can only put on hold for so long). Leaving for the airport for Rome in a couple of hours, got some last bits of packing still to do and library books to return, but thought I'd blog a few sentences from J.D. Daniels' very good little book of essays The Correspondence. I think it may have been a mistake to include the two pieces originally written as short stories - they feel different and they don't work as well as the essays. But even so it's a great little volume. Here are a couple paragraphs I especially liked, for obvious reasons:

I took eight weeks off to squat and dead-lift heavy and eat everything that wans't nailed down, and I gained thirty-five pounds and had to buy new pants. Then I went back to sparring and I broke a guy's ribs. That was nice.

And then I did it all again, the way you find yourself eating dinner again the next night; the way you have sex, if you do, again; the way too much to drink was barely enough. It didn't end, it doesn't end, and if I knew what to say next, this wouldn't be the end.

"Plate it!"

What I love about powerlifting: my installment for Josh Glenn's Hilobrow "Grok Your Enthusiasm" series!

Sacks and his fives

Oliver Sacks is my hero; I have read every one of his books eagerly (and wrote about his last book for Bookforum); I devoured On the Move and urge you to do the same. He has written about sex and his own sexuality here, remedying a striking omission from the rest of his work, but there are all sorts of other delights (one library bit I already linked to some time ago).

As a SWIMMING and powerlifting obsessive, I am of course especially enchanted by those bits (and pained by the lost suitcase of Muscle Beach photographs and other material! - so many lost books here...); but I am also just very struck by the vision of a working life. I found myself thinking several times as I read that I am too much of an insider, that I need really to rediscover my independence: the way to write amazing books is not to be an easy creature of the institution....

Anyway, THIS! (NB squat still weakest of the three lifts for me, but I am getting my technique down and there are some BIG NUMBERS in my near future I hope....)

Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym--"Sacks and his fives." I didn't realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.

And an account that has the overly shapely ring of storytelling but that surely has a good deal of truth in it (bonus link: squid giant axon!):

I committed a veritable genocide of earthworms in the college garden: thousands of earthworms would be needed to extract a respectable sample of myelin; I felt like Marie Curie processing her tons of pitchblende to obtain a decigram of pure radium. I became adept at dissecting out the nerve cord and cerebral ganglia in a single, swift excision, and I would mash these up to make a thick, myelin-rich soup ready for fractionation and centrifugation.

I kept careful notes in my lab notebook, a large green volume which I sometimes took home with me to ponder over at night. This was to prove my undoing, for, rushing to get to work one morning after oversleeping, I failed to secure the elastic bands on the bike rack and my precious notebook, containing nine months of detailed experimental data, escaped from the loose strands and flew off the bike while I was on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Pulling over to the side, I saw the notebook dismembered page by page by the thunderous traffic. I tried darting into the road two or three times to retrieve it, but this was madness, for the traffic was too dense and too fast. I could only watch helplessly until the whole book was torn apart.

I consoled myself, when I got to the lab, by saying at least I have the myelin itself; I can analyze it, look at it under the electron microscope, and regenerate some of the lost data. Over the ensuing weeks, I managed to do some good work and had started to feel some optimism again, despite some other mishaps, as when, in the neuropathology lab, I screwed the oil-immersion objective of my microscope through several irreplaceable slides.

Even worse, from my bosses' point of view, I managed to get crumbs of hamburger not only on my bench but in one of the centrifuges, an instrument I was using to refine the myelin samples.

Then a final and irreversible blow hit me: I lost the myelin. It disappeared somehow--perhaps I swept it into the garbage by mistake--but this tiny sample which had taken ten months to extract was irretrievably gone.

A meeting was convened: no one denied my talents, but no one could gainsay my defects. In a kindly but firm way, my bosses said to me, "Sacks, you are a menace in the lab. Why don't you go and see patents--you'll do less harm." Such was the ignoble beginning of a clinical career."

And the note: "Perhaps I had never really expected to succeed in research. In a 1960 letter to my parents, wondering about doing research in physiology at UCLA, I wrote, 'I am probably too temperamental, too indolent, too clumsy ad even too dishonest to make a good research worker. The only things I really enjoy are talking . . . reading and writing.' And I quoted a letter I had just received from Jonathan Miller, who, writing about himself, Eric, and me, said, 'I am, like Wells, enchanted by the prospect and paralyzed by the reality of scientific research. The only place where any of us move nimbly or with grace is with ideas and words. Our love of science is utterly literary.'"

Greaves and pauldrons

Mark Kingwell on Paul Fussell. It was at age thirteen or fourteen I think that I first read Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (I also had a treasured copy of Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, loaned to me I suspect by my singularly inspiring teacher Deborah Dempsey!) I had the electrifying sense of reading a book that was something like what I wanted to write myself someday - I had already had that feeling very strongly based on novels by Robert Graves, Anthony Burgess and a few others (Gore Vidal?), but this was a new vision of what might be possible....

The best thing about Mark's Hilobrow shout-out to P. Fussell was that it reminded me of the existence of a book I heard about on its first publication but never read, and which was perhaps more perfectly suited to my current state of mind than anything else imaginable: Sam Fussell's Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. Happily for me, this book has just been reissued, and I devoured this week (again, curiously, thinking - this is inspirational in terms of a book I might write myself one of these days!).

Here are a few snippets. First, on coming across a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder in the autobiography section of the Strand in September 1984:

As for his body, why, here was protection, and loads of it. What were these great chunks of tanned, taut muscle but modern-day armor? Here were breastplates, greaves, and pauldrons aplenty, and all made from human flesh. He had taken stock of his own situation and used he weight room as his smithy. A human fortress--a perfect defense to keep the enemy host at bay. What fool would dare storm those foundations?
--
Pre-iron, I'd spent my days convicting myself of avarice and envy and sloth. To become something else seemed the only alternative. As long as I covered myself with the equivalent of scaffolding and labeled myself a "work in progress" I could escape the doubt and uncertainty that plagued my past and spend every second of my present concentrating on a pristine future. I hated the flawed, weak, vulnerable nature of being human as much as I hated the Adam's apple which bobbed beneath my chin. The attempt at physical perfection grew from seeds of self-disgust.
--
It had begun to dawn on me that the whole building thing might be merely a parody of labor, and I myself a well-muscled dilettante. What would Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, think of bodybuilding? He had to be turning over in his grave. After all, the iron we lifted didn't help build a bridge or a battleship or a skyscraper. It enlarged our biceps and spread the sweep of our thighs. The labor of farmers and factory workers and longshoremen had a kind of dignity and purpose that ours didn't.

Here's an excellent interview with Fussell about the bodybuilding, the book and the paths his life has taken since.

Bonus link: Lionel Shriver on the body as a trench coat.

Closing tabs

I often find January challenging, and this year is no exception! A close family member is facing a difficult medical situation and we are all, I think, bracing ourselves for what's to come. Taking things day to day and trying not to worry too much about the failure to accomplish pretty much any of the work I'd hoped for (there were more other bits and bobs of work than I had admitted to myself, including Skyping in for a day and a half of MLA interviews for our eighteenth-century search). School starts next week, and will be crazy from the get-go....

However there have been many good things this month too.

Two Days, One Night is utterly mesmerizing in a terribly depressive way (glimpse of hope at the end); also, who knows whether everyone in Belgium eats their ice-cream cones like that or whether it just happens that the two actors in that scene were asked to lick in distinctive and identical fashion?

My friend Tanya's show Sorry Robot is absolutely delightful: like Hedwig, only with robots, and the exact right balance of existential and hilarious! It is really about the human condition, and I am only sorry that the song "Tears on the Treadmill" is not yet available as a Youtube link.... (A nice review at the Times.)

This is the sporting activity I have just taken up. It is making me extremely happy.

Lots of tabs to close:

Peter Hirsch on how a trip to the spa could end your marriage.

Greene Street soundscape c. 1972!

Memorable reference questions at the NYPL.

Identifiable images of bystanders extracted from corneal reflections.

R. Crumb on the Charlie Hebdo deaths.

Checking in with Thomas Lauderdale at the Pink Martini world headquarters in Portland, OR.

And quite a bit of light reading, all things considered (very soon I'm going to have little time for it, between teaching Clarissa and the TRAC committee shifting into heavy mode, although really the quantity speaks to the fact that I've been slightly struggling to get from day to day!):

Two very enjoyable albeit largely fantastical crime novels (I can tolerate preposterousness in the grand scheme of things so long as the sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph developments are plausible, which is so in this case) by Pierre Lemaitre, Irene and Alex. Which I read the wrong way round: ignore Amazon's use of the term "prequel" to describe the first one I list, it was written and published first in France, takes place chronologically prior to the subsequent volume and only happens to have been published belatedly in the US! More on Lemaitre here.

Comfort reread that reminded me of my deep conviction that I should write a long essay or a short book about Diana Wynne Jones, The Islands of Chaldea, posthumously completed by her sister Ursula Jones.

The first three books of Adrian McKinty's excellent Sean Duffy series, set in Belfast during the Troubles: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone. Another installment coming soon, but I felt bereft when I'd finished these three: the comfort of finding a really transporting fictional world and knowing that there is more of it where that came from is inversely proportional to the pain of being cut off at the end. I am always convinced, when I finish a series of books I enjoy, that I am never going to find anything I like to read ever again....

Ben Aaronovitch's Foxglove Summer: these novels are pretty much perfect in my book, though it took me some chapters to become fully immersed in this one - that may have been circumstantial, though, as I have had a lot of minor subway travel and waiting around for things.

Meghan Daum's new essay collection, The Unspeakable, which I enjoyed very much. (Here's an interview with Daum in Bookforum.)

Finally, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends. Several friends have recommended Macintyre's books to me, and I certainly enjoyed this one (I wanted to follow up the factual story of Kim Philby, so far as it is known, after reading Tim Powers and other alternate-history versions).

I am really beginning to be grumpy about not having written anything recently. I need to think about this semester and whether I can build in a couple sessions a week of writing time. I think it is conceivable, but it will only happen if I make a concrete and realistic plan....