The excellent Colleen Mondor (Chasing Ray) has organized a massive and wonderful-sounding young-adult summer blog book tour which will start next week and whose full details can be found here.
On the topic of summer treats, I have just found an open-water swim workshop to sign up for....
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Finding aids
The latest issue of Bookforum confirms my sense that this is the most interesting publication of its kind in the country. I love it! Intellectual, playful, eclectic, interesting--not a hint of that dreary worthiness that stops me from reading certain novelists and critics... Tons of high-quality and thought-provoking stuff.
I especially liked Jonathan Shainin on car bombs and suicide bombing--relevant for my novel, the soon-to-be retitled Dynamite No. 1--the last day and a half have vanished as if into a black hole as I desperately try to come up with a new name for the book, I've got some decent candidates and I suppose I can also say I've reread a large number of Shakespeare plays and poems by Donne, Marvell, Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Yeats, etc.--no definite winner yet, but a very reasonable short list which I will not divulge except to say that the literary allusion line of thinking did not pan out--I was laughing to myself as I read D. T. Max's interesting New Yorker article on the Texas archive and learned that even Don DeLillo had this problem:
The DeLillo finding aid shows which folder contains which draft of which novel, but not whether the draft is different in important ways from a previous one. It records that DeLillo’s 1972 novel “End Zone” originally bore the title “The Self-Erasing Word,” but you have to open the proper folder and look at the title page to see that it also had been called “Modes of Disaster Technology.” (The phrase appears in the book.) Similarly, the finding aid tells you that DeLillo’s original title for “White Noise” (1985) was “Panasonic,” but you have to burrow into his correspondence from 1984 to discover how upset DeLillo was when the Japanese electronics manufacturer that owns Panasonic declined his request to use the name. “‘Panasonic’ as a title is crucial for a number of reasons,” DeLillo wrote to his then editor, Elisabeth Sifton. He went on, “The novel is filled with the sounds of people’s voices, with sirens, loudspeakers, bullhorns, kitchen appliances, with radio and TV transmissions, with references to beams, rays, sound waves, etc. . . . Jack, listening to people talk on the telephone and musing on his own death, thinks ‘all sounds, all souls.’ (Page 369.) Again the notion of pan-sonus connected to a fear of death. There is still another instance in which Greek roots are important. Jack associates the god Pan with his fear of death.” The archive also contains two pages of other titles that DeLillo concocted—from “All Souls” and “Ultrasonic” to “White Noise”—written in jumpy capital letters.
Anyway, things in this issue that specially caught my attention: Eric Banks on Marianne Wiggins; Geoff Nicholson on Anna Kavan; Ed Park on Matthew Sharpe; Stefanie Sobelle on Gabriel Josipovici (I've got to read that guy!); Janine Armin on Wayne Koestenbaum; Carla Blumenkranz on Anne Fadiman (I bought that collection this weekend in Cambridge and read most of it last night, what a delightful artifact--post to come...).
Biggest puzzle: Tom LeClair's scathing takedown of Matt Ruff's new novel. He really, really hated this novel; go and take a look at the review if you want to see an example of just rabid dislike! The puzzle for me--I haven't read the new one, Bad Monkeys, it's not out till August [ARC, anyone?], but I think it sounds absolutely wonderful!--is that two of Matt Ruff's three previous novels are among my particular most-recommended favorites. If you haven't read Fool on the Hill and (especially) Set This House In Order, you are missing out on two magically good books!
And though LeClair's piece is rather passionately negative, it only makes me want to read the new one more, it sounds to my tastes altogether delightful! This is clearly the inverse of another phenomenon I have noticed, the glowing review that convinces me I would absolutely hate the book (Jennifer Egan on Cormac McCarthy's latest is a good example on this, I simply cannot read a book where people cook and eat a human baby and it's not savagely funny).
I especially liked Jonathan Shainin on car bombs and suicide bombing--relevant for my novel, the soon-to-be retitled Dynamite No. 1--the last day and a half have vanished as if into a black hole as I desperately try to come up with a new name for the book, I've got some decent candidates and I suppose I can also say I've reread a large number of Shakespeare plays and poems by Donne, Marvell, Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Yeats, etc.--no definite winner yet, but a very reasonable short list which I will not divulge except to say that the literary allusion line of thinking did not pan out--I was laughing to myself as I read D. T. Max's interesting New Yorker article on the Texas archive and learned that even Don DeLillo had this problem:
The DeLillo finding aid shows which folder contains which draft of which novel, but not whether the draft is different in important ways from a previous one. It records that DeLillo’s 1972 novel “End Zone” originally bore the title “The Self-Erasing Word,” but you have to open the proper folder and look at the title page to see that it also had been called “Modes of Disaster Technology.” (The phrase appears in the book.) Similarly, the finding aid tells you that DeLillo’s original title for “White Noise” (1985) was “Panasonic,” but you have to burrow into his correspondence from 1984 to discover how upset DeLillo was when the Japanese electronics manufacturer that owns Panasonic declined his request to use the name. “‘Panasonic’ as a title is crucial for a number of reasons,” DeLillo wrote to his then editor, Elisabeth Sifton. He went on, “The novel is filled with the sounds of people’s voices, with sirens, loudspeakers, bullhorns, kitchen appliances, with radio and TV transmissions, with references to beams, rays, sound waves, etc. . . . Jack, listening to people talk on the telephone and musing on his own death, thinks ‘all sounds, all souls.’ (Page 369.) Again the notion of pan-sonus connected to a fear of death. There is still another instance in which Greek roots are important. Jack associates the god Pan with his fear of death.” The archive also contains two pages of other titles that DeLillo concocted—from “All Souls” and “Ultrasonic” to “White Noise”—written in jumpy capital letters.
Anyway, things in this issue that specially caught my attention: Eric Banks on Marianne Wiggins; Geoff Nicholson on Anna Kavan; Ed Park on Matthew Sharpe; Stefanie Sobelle on Gabriel Josipovici (I've got to read that guy!); Janine Armin on Wayne Koestenbaum; Carla Blumenkranz on Anne Fadiman (I bought that collection this weekend in Cambridge and read most of it last night, what a delightful artifact--post to come...).
Biggest puzzle: Tom LeClair's scathing takedown of Matt Ruff's new novel. He really, really hated this novel; go and take a look at the review if you want to see an example of just rabid dislike! The puzzle for me--I haven't read the new one, Bad Monkeys, it's not out till August [ARC, anyone?], but I think it sounds absolutely wonderful!--is that two of Matt Ruff's three previous novels are among my particular most-recommended favorites. If you haven't read Fool on the Hill and (especially) Set This House In Order, you are missing out on two magically good books!
And though LeClair's piece is rather passionately negative, it only makes me want to read the new one more, it sounds to my tastes altogether delightful! This is clearly the inverse of another phenomenon I have noticed, the glowing review that convinces me I would absolutely hate the book (Jennifer Egan on Cormac McCarthy's latest is a good example on this, I simply cannot read a book where people cook and eat a human baby and it's not savagely funny).
The sports section
is really something I should read more regularly, I might have missed this article if my friend Jane had not kindly sent it my way: Kate Torgovnick in the Times on the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim.
I can safely say that I'm never going to do that long a swim, but it's true that I've been checking out the Manhattan Island Foundation webpage and in fact (not coincidentally) I have a doctor's appointment later this afternoon whose main purpose is to get a tetanus booster shot so that when I'm up to speed for registering for one of their swims it doesn't hold things up...
(I also have to get certified for swimming a mile continuously without stopping in the pool, which seems to me certainly feasible but also something I have not yet done; must find a biddable lifeguard and get down to business on this one.)
They do some open-water swim clinics that I would like to get in on, only the information is not readily available on the website--hmmm, judging by last year's information, it looks like I only need to swim a certified half-mile to register for the entry-level one, that's convenient--we quite often do a timed 500-meter (500-yard?) swim at the clinic I've been taking, wouldn't take a lot of extra time to add on the additional lengths....
I can safely say that I'm never going to do that long a swim, but it's true that I've been checking out the Manhattan Island Foundation webpage and in fact (not coincidentally) I have a doctor's appointment later this afternoon whose main purpose is to get a tetanus booster shot so that when I'm up to speed for registering for one of their swims it doesn't hold things up...
(I also have to get certified for swimming a mile continuously without stopping in the pool, which seems to me certainly feasible but also something I have not yet done; must find a biddable lifeguard and get down to business on this one.)
They do some open-water swim clinics that I would like to get in on, only the information is not readily available on the website--hmmm, judging by last year's information, it looks like I only need to swim a certified half-mile to register for the entry-level one, that's convenient--we quite often do a timed 500-meter (500-yard?) swim at the clinic I've been taking, wouldn't take a lot of extra time to add on the additional lengths....
The blush
Here's what Jo Walton says in the dedication to the excellent Tooth and Claw:
I grew up reading Victorian novels. People since, from Joan Aiken to John Fowles and Margaret Forster, have done fascinating things with writing new Victorian novels from modern perspectives, putting in the things the Victorian novel leaves out. That gives you something very interesting, but it isn't a Victorian novel. It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren't like that. Women, especially, aren't like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.
And the particular novel to which this one pays homage is Trollope's Framley Parsonage! I've got a special relationship with Trollope, I always liked him a lot in any case & read quite a few of his novels as a child but during the long dissertation-writing years of graduate school I basically ritually spent the week-long Thanksgiving break each year rereading either the Palliser novels or the Chronicles of Barset. Most soothing--the Barsetshire novels in particular seem to me to capture most strikingly the chief qualities of academic life today, obviously the nineteenth-century Church of England is a very close parallel for twenty-first-century American academia, the character types and their negotiations around power and reputation and money strike many chords of familiarity...
In any case, the only thing that pained me about this novel is that it was the last one of Walton's that I hadn't read, and now I have none left! The opening sequence is in truth a bit slow, but everything about the rest of the book is absolutely perfect. I am especially impressed with Walton's gift for chapter titles. She has chosen the slyest and most modest little phrases and they do devastating comic work in conjunction with the incidents in the relevant chapters! My favorite cunning chapter title/incident contrast, for instance, surely comes in the chapter simply titled "Office Politics."
I hope Tor does reissue this in the near future, though the Sulien novels are so good that I'd bump them up a bit if I were choosing (and put them in a really fat handsome one-volume edition with a more historical and less fantasyish cover); it might even find some classroom use, it would teach well with the Trollope, and really should also be paired with the excellent introduction on the physiology of the blush in Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Fictions of Modesty.
I grew up reading Victorian novels. People since, from Joan Aiken to John Fowles and Margaret Forster, have done fascinating things with writing new Victorian novels from modern perspectives, putting in the things the Victorian novel leaves out. That gives you something very interesting, but it isn't a Victorian novel. It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren't like that. Women, especially, aren't like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.
And the particular novel to which this one pays homage is Trollope's Framley Parsonage! I've got a special relationship with Trollope, I always liked him a lot in any case & read quite a few of his novels as a child but during the long dissertation-writing years of graduate school I basically ritually spent the week-long Thanksgiving break each year rereading either the Palliser novels or the Chronicles of Barset. Most soothing--the Barsetshire novels in particular seem to me to capture most strikingly the chief qualities of academic life today, obviously the nineteenth-century Church of England is a very close parallel for twenty-first-century American academia, the character types and their negotiations around power and reputation and money strike many chords of familiarity...
In any case, the only thing that pained me about this novel is that it was the last one of Walton's that I hadn't read, and now I have none left! The opening sequence is in truth a bit slow, but everything about the rest of the book is absolutely perfect. I am especially impressed with Walton's gift for chapter titles. She has chosen the slyest and most modest little phrases and they do devastating comic work in conjunction with the incidents in the relevant chapters! My favorite cunning chapter title/incident contrast, for instance, surely comes in the chapter simply titled "Office Politics."
I hope Tor does reissue this in the near future, though the Sulien novels are so good that I'd bump them up a bit if I were choosing (and put them in a really fat handsome one-volume edition with a more historical and less fantasyish cover); it might even find some classroom use, it would teach well with the Trollope, and really should also be paired with the excellent introduction on the physiology of the blush in Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Fictions of Modesty.
The Natural History of Teeth
It's not available online, but I am fascinated to learn (from a piece in Time Out London) that a major character in David Mitchell's new novel is a Japanese student of surgery who journeys to London to learn about eighteenth-century surgical developments (I assume this is in the eighteenth century, not in the present day, though the phrasing's open to ambiguity!). Thanks to Becky for the serendipitous clipping, in which Mitchell praises surgeon John Hunter.
The Hunterian Museum (which makes an important appearance in my first novel) has a very spiffy website these days, by the way; go and take the virtual tour....
In other novel-related news, Heredity gets a ringing endorsement from the writer formerly known as the Washingtonienne! Very fun stuff.
The Hunterian Museum (which makes an important appearance in my first novel) has a very spiffy website these days, by the way; go and take the virtual tour....
In other novel-related news, Heredity gets a ringing endorsement from the writer formerly known as the Washingtonienne! Very fun stuff.
The inky and unpredictable Humboldt squid
This story is so appealing that I think I will just have to paste in the entire text (something about the diction makes me think it must have secretly been phoned in by Toni Schlesinger!):
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. -- The inky and unpredictable Humboldt Squid is back in big numbers in the coastal waters of California.
The sizable cephalopods, which can weigh 30 pounds or more, appear and disappear off the coast with no predictable pattern.
They last showed up in significant numbers two and a half years ago, when they swarmed up and down the California coast by the thousands, with hundreds washing up on beaches.
"We used to associate them with warm water," said Norris Tapp of Davey's Locker Sportfishing. "But now we're seeing them when the ocean is cold."
Many sport fishermen love struggling against the squirting, squirming beasts.
"It's out of control. They're squirting ink and water when they're brought aboard, and they're flashing their colors," said Chris Fowler, who works with Tapp.
Tapp said the fish are a handful when hooked, but it's not hard finding bait to make them bite.
"They'll eat about anything -- other squid, sardines, even sculpin," he said. "Open up one of these squid, and you'll find lots of fish eyes. It's weird."
(Thanks to Nico for the link.)
In other news, I have been uncharacteristically paralyzed by work-related stress this week, and will spend the rest of the morning indulging in what I hope will be therapeutic blogging with the goal of dispelling the feeling of constriction in the chest area that afflicts me at such times! Thinking about giant squid is certainly soothing, though...
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. -- The inky and unpredictable Humboldt Squid is back in big numbers in the coastal waters of California.
The sizable cephalopods, which can weigh 30 pounds or more, appear and disappear off the coast with no predictable pattern.
They last showed up in significant numbers two and a half years ago, when they swarmed up and down the California coast by the thousands, with hundreds washing up on beaches.
"We used to associate them with warm water," said Norris Tapp of Davey's Locker Sportfishing. "But now we're seeing them when the ocean is cold."
Many sport fishermen love struggling against the squirting, squirming beasts.
"It's out of control. They're squirting ink and water when they're brought aboard, and they're flashing their colors," said Chris Fowler, who works with Tapp.
Tapp said the fish are a handful when hooked, but it's not hard finding bait to make them bite.
"They'll eat about anything -- other squid, sardines, even sculpin," he said. "Open up one of these squid, and you'll find lots of fish eyes. It's weird."
(Thanks to Nico for the link.)
In other news, I have been uncharacteristically paralyzed by work-related stress this week, and will spend the rest of the morning indulging in what I hope will be therapeutic blogging with the goal of dispelling the feeling of constriction in the chest area that afflicts me at such times! Thinking about giant squid is certainly soothing, though...
Monday, June 11, 2007
Nice legs
A funny two-part article at the Guardian on which of their own body parts people love or hate most.
Here's Lionel Shriver:
Curiously, my legs are the part of my body with which I am most prone to identify, yet which I am also most prone to objectify. If they are me, the best of me, they are also my responsibility. They are innocent, a gift. I am their protector, as we are all our own protectors - both owner and possessor, custodian and ward.
It would be safer to write about some part of my body of which I feel ashamed, some lesser bit of meat to throw to the lions, a sacrifice for our mutual sport. I could mock my teeth, which stain so badly after a single cup of coffee that they might have been unearthed from an archaeological dig (self-deprecation is such a sure route to endearment in this country that when anyone plays that manipulatively humble card, you shouldn't trust it). But I will be brave. My legs are lovely.
And not because I'm athletic. The most fetching parts of our bodies came that way in the box. I am merely fortunate. The sculptural rhythm to these narrow ankles, full calves, and slender knees is not of my making. (Since the fundamental shapes of all our bodies are neither to our credit nor our fault, it's peculiar that we ever conflate our looks and our selves.) After all, when someone else is generous and tasteful enough to give you well-proportioned wine glasses for Christmas, the appropriate response is gratitude, not arrogance. So for me to submit that I was blessed with fine stemware is not a boast. All that falls within my power is to ruin them - to drop the glasses on the floor.
As their guardian and master, I put them through their paces. I take them running a nine-mile course every other day along the Thames. I hook them into the pedals of my bicycle and send them churning off to Hammersmith, when my publisher would have been more than happy to send a car. I set them bouncing comically through 3,000 jumping jacks in front of the Channel 4 News. They do as they're told. They rarely complain. They know that I have their best interests at heart.
I live in constant terror that something will happen to them - that Master's briefest inattention in the vicinity of a bendy bus will destroy at a stroke these faithful servants that have for decades spun me up the Alps, jogged me alongside the Mediterranean, and whisked me down airport hallways just in time to catch the plane. I sometimes have flash, nightmare visions of these thighs, pallid and melting in a wheelchair, or cut off just below the pelvis and reduced to stumps. Foolishness of course, but I've prayed after close-calls on my bike that if I have to have a serious cycling accident, please let it be fatal. Even typing 'cycling accident' makes me superstitious, and I'm tempted to delete.
My aim occasionally to do justice to these sturdy twins explains my seemingly uncharacteristic fondness for high heels. A girly predilection for me, but yes, the higher the better. Stilettos curl that delectable accenting comma under the calf, tense the front thigh, and realign the pelvis. You never get that effect flat-footed, as any woman knows.
Sure, my legs will fall apart - plump, crenulate, and dimple. But they will fall apart over my dead body - or attached to it. Indeed, that's the other vision. I did have that bike accident. I'm on a slab. A morgue orderly takes a sly peek as he pulls up the sheet. 'Pity!' he mumbles. 'Nice legs.' As an epitaph, mercifully short, and not half-bad.
Here's Lionel Shriver:
Curiously, my legs are the part of my body with which I am most prone to identify, yet which I am also most prone to objectify. If they are me, the best of me, they are also my responsibility. They are innocent, a gift. I am their protector, as we are all our own protectors - both owner and possessor, custodian and ward.
It would be safer to write about some part of my body of which I feel ashamed, some lesser bit of meat to throw to the lions, a sacrifice for our mutual sport. I could mock my teeth, which stain so badly after a single cup of coffee that they might have been unearthed from an archaeological dig (self-deprecation is such a sure route to endearment in this country that when anyone plays that manipulatively humble card, you shouldn't trust it). But I will be brave. My legs are lovely.
And not because I'm athletic. The most fetching parts of our bodies came that way in the box. I am merely fortunate. The sculptural rhythm to these narrow ankles, full calves, and slender knees is not of my making. (Since the fundamental shapes of all our bodies are neither to our credit nor our fault, it's peculiar that we ever conflate our looks and our selves.) After all, when someone else is generous and tasteful enough to give you well-proportioned wine glasses for Christmas, the appropriate response is gratitude, not arrogance. So for me to submit that I was blessed with fine stemware is not a boast. All that falls within my power is to ruin them - to drop the glasses on the floor.
As their guardian and master, I put them through their paces. I take them running a nine-mile course every other day along the Thames. I hook them into the pedals of my bicycle and send them churning off to Hammersmith, when my publisher would have been more than happy to send a car. I set them bouncing comically through 3,000 jumping jacks in front of the Channel 4 News. They do as they're told. They rarely complain. They know that I have their best interests at heart.
I live in constant terror that something will happen to them - that Master's briefest inattention in the vicinity of a bendy bus will destroy at a stroke these faithful servants that have for decades spun me up the Alps, jogged me alongside the Mediterranean, and whisked me down airport hallways just in time to catch the plane. I sometimes have flash, nightmare visions of these thighs, pallid and melting in a wheelchair, or cut off just below the pelvis and reduced to stumps. Foolishness of course, but I've prayed after close-calls on my bike that if I have to have a serious cycling accident, please let it be fatal. Even typing 'cycling accident' makes me superstitious, and I'm tempted to delete.
My aim occasionally to do justice to these sturdy twins explains my seemingly uncharacteristic fondness for high heels. A girly predilection for me, but yes, the higher the better. Stilettos curl that delectable accenting comma under the calf, tense the front thigh, and realign the pelvis. You never get that effect flat-footed, as any woman knows.
Sure, my legs will fall apart - plump, crenulate, and dimple. But they will fall apart over my dead body - or attached to it. Indeed, that's the other vision. I did have that bike accident. I'm on a slab. A morgue orderly takes a sly peek as he pulls up the sheet. 'Pity!' he mumbles. 'Nice legs.' As an epitaph, mercifully short, and not half-bad.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
A room the color of blood
I like the "Writers' Rooms" feature at the Guardian, but I'm often struck by how similar all these writers' rooms are--it's partly, I suppose, a function of London's particular housing stock, but the sameness becomes a bit much. That's why it's such a pleasure to check out (though I do not think I could work well in a room like this!) A. L. Kennedy's office. It's nothing like the others!
Here are a few paragraphs from Kennedy's novel Paradise, by the way, that will give you a small taste of her great genius:
You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools--which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women's magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it--there is no point to you.
At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because--after all--what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.
At the moment, though, there's nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I'm forced to admit I've been driven to make the drinker's most conventional mistake. I've started working in a bar.
Here are a few paragraphs from Kennedy's novel Paradise, by the way, that will give you a small taste of her great genius:
You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools--which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women's magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it--there is no point to you.
At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because--after all--what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.
At the moment, though, there's nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I'm forced to admit I've been driven to make the drinker's most conventional mistake. I've started working in a bar.
Words for Anton Segal
Also Harvard-class-of-1992-purposed, my apologies, but it seems to me that there's something in the nature of this occasional writing that's weakened when you take out the references specific to the audience. Here's Anton's memorial website.
----------
I was fifteen when I met Anton, and almost at once I was just devastatingly in love with him. Strange to say, he seemed to feel the same about me, which I found extraordinary but of course also completely delightful! We were going out long-distance our whole senior year of high school, and in fact I doubt I’d have come to Harvard in the first place if not for Anton—my high school teachers firmly told me that I should go to Yale because Harvard was anti-intellectual…
We broke up shortly after making our college decisions, and in the ensuing years we only ran into each other now and again. What’s strange and moving to me now is how strongly present the seventeen-year-old Anton is to me all the time. When Kurt Vonnegut died this spring, I really felt as though Anton was just there out of the corner of my eye making some more or less disrespectful wisecrack about the genius who wrote Cat’s Cradle, one of Anton’s particularly favorite books at the time I knew him. I read a quite wonderful book recently, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China (in short, skinny American kid drops out of Princeton in the early 1990s and goes starry-eyed off to China in search of the kung fu training at the Shaolin Temple—mishaps ensue…) and it was so much the kind of book I imagined Anton writing that I sort of felt like we’d just slipped over for a moment into an alternate universe where Anton got exactly the writing career he’d been working towards.
After Anton died, I went through the copious hoard of letters he’d sent me that senior year of high school in which we were conducting our desperate passionate stressed-out young-person’s correspondence. There were all sorts of gems, but I thought what I’d read you today is Anton’s list of possible yearbook quotes, from January 1988. It gives you a strong sense of Anton, and also a terribly strong flavor of 1988, a formative year I’m sure for many of us!
January 1988. Anton's list of possible yearbook quotes:
"Life is a pool table, after the breakshot" (Nietzche)
or how about "So much depends on a little red wheelbarrow glistening with rain water among the white chickens" (Massive Misquoters of America)
or "Enter life at your own risk" (Duncan (?))
or "Life is not a spectator sport" (Reebok Advertisement) or "Root Beer" (Alan)
or "Is it live--or is it Memorex?"
or "Holy Shit, Batman!" or "If life is just a waste of time, & time is just a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives" (Katie (?))
or how about quoting the Warning on a box of Valium? That could be neat.
or "I saw Mikhail Gorbachev having sex w/ Mr. Zulman the other day in London, when Bruce Jenner ran by and the Crunchberry beast swallowed them all whole" (Warren Xevon (spelling?))
or "Aw, Fuck You" (Big Bird, Oscar, & Snophalopagus, all in unison)
or "A Woman is a hole. A man is a stick" (Max) or "Don't tell me what kind of day to have" and "Happy Trails" (my nefarious English teacher)
or "It's a rubber, a condom, a building, a condominium" (someone doing pictionary) or "I did it my way" (The Sex Pistols)
or "Don't drink and drive" (Everyone) or "I'm on Hayes' Street" (Taxi commercial) or a Bartles & James quotation or...
The original list goes on a bit longer, but I like the string of dots this one ends with, the sense of possibility and energy and excitement. Like our other lost classmates, Anton made great use of the time he had, and those of us lucky to have known him will not forget him.
----------
I was fifteen when I met Anton, and almost at once I was just devastatingly in love with him. Strange to say, he seemed to feel the same about me, which I found extraordinary but of course also completely delightful! We were going out long-distance our whole senior year of high school, and in fact I doubt I’d have come to Harvard in the first place if not for Anton—my high school teachers firmly told me that I should go to Yale because Harvard was anti-intellectual…
We broke up shortly after making our college decisions, and in the ensuing years we only ran into each other now and again. What’s strange and moving to me now is how strongly present the seventeen-year-old Anton is to me all the time. When Kurt Vonnegut died this spring, I really felt as though Anton was just there out of the corner of my eye making some more or less disrespectful wisecrack about the genius who wrote Cat’s Cradle, one of Anton’s particularly favorite books at the time I knew him. I read a quite wonderful book recently, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China (in short, skinny American kid drops out of Princeton in the early 1990s and goes starry-eyed off to China in search of the kung fu training at the Shaolin Temple—mishaps ensue…) and it was so much the kind of book I imagined Anton writing that I sort of felt like we’d just slipped over for a moment into an alternate universe where Anton got exactly the writing career he’d been working towards.
After Anton died, I went through the copious hoard of letters he’d sent me that senior year of high school in which we were conducting our desperate passionate stressed-out young-person’s correspondence. There were all sorts of gems, but I thought what I’d read you today is Anton’s list of possible yearbook quotes, from January 1988. It gives you a strong sense of Anton, and also a terribly strong flavor of 1988, a formative year I’m sure for many of us!
January 1988. Anton's list of possible yearbook quotes:
"Life is a pool table, after the breakshot" (Nietzche)
or how about "So much depends on a little red wheelbarrow glistening with rain water among the white chickens" (Massive Misquoters of America)
or "Enter life at your own risk" (Duncan (?))
or "Life is not a spectator sport" (Reebok Advertisement) or "Root Beer" (Alan)
or "Is it live--or is it Memorex?"
or "Holy Shit, Batman!" or "If life is just a waste of time, & time is just a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives" (Katie (?))
or how about quoting the Warning on a box of Valium? That could be neat.
or "I saw Mikhail Gorbachev having sex w/ Mr. Zulman the other day in London, when Bruce Jenner ran by and the Crunchberry beast swallowed them all whole" (Warren Xevon (spelling?))
or "Aw, Fuck You" (Big Bird, Oscar, & Snophalopagus, all in unison)
or "A Woman is a hole. A man is a stick" (Max) or "Don't tell me what kind of day to have" and "Happy Trails" (my nefarious English teacher)
or "It's a rubber, a condom, a building, a condominium" (someone doing pictionary) or "I did it my way" (The Sex Pistols)
or "Don't drink and drive" (Everyone) or "I'm on Hayes' Street" (Taxi commercial) or a Bartles & James quotation or...
The original list goes on a bit longer, but I like the string of dots this one ends with, the sense of possibility and energy and excitement. Like our other lost classmates, Anton made great use of the time he had, and those of us lucky to have known him will not forget him.
Words for Helen Hill
On Saturday afternoon, there was a screening of Helen's films in Adams House as part of our fifteenth reunion (the whole idea of reunions makes me crazy with irritation, they are so much not what I like about the whole business of these universities, not to mention the events are so expensive that a normal person quite simply cannot afford to attend, but I will attempt to contain my spleen and get down to the main point). Those films are quite the loveliest thing and I will link when they're being shown elsewhere--there should be a screening in New York sometime next year, at any rate. This is what I said about Helen afterwards.
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A disproportionate number of my memories of Helen contain some kind of sweet, usually cake. I remember going to an academic conference in New Orleans in the spring of 2001, for instance, and receiving a most lovely welcome visit from Paul and Helen at my hotel the evening I got in—I was supposed to see them a couple days later, but Helen just didn’t think it was right not to welcome me personally. She had with her a slab of extremely sticky and dense-looking vegan cake, which she was fully bent on leaving with me in case I needed a snack, and only my most earnest entreaties and truthful warnings that I wasn’t going to eat it led her to take it away with her again!
But we had beignets at Café du Monde, of course, and the next time I saw Paul and Helen in New Orleans, in May of 2003, we went on an expedition to see the Bindlestiff Family Circus again bearing left-over cake—that technology that lets you go to the grocery store and get a photograph sort of laminated onto the top of the cake icing was peculiarly well suited to Helen’s aesthetic, this cake bore (am I remembering correctly?) an enchanting blue-haired portrait of Helen & was left over from her birthday (the cake had been carefully cut around the rim of the portrait so as to keep the important part of the picture intact).
There’s a sort of platonic ideal of cake that I see in my head when I think of Helen—personally I’m a fan of the luridly iced cupcake—and the cake I’m thinking of now is like what you’d see, oh, in one of those original Babar the Elephant illustrations, or an English children’s book from the 1950s. It’s a modest little cake, just big enough for one person, with beautiful pink icing and a little cherry on top, with a sort of classic outline and symmetry that makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
I’ve been kicking myself all spring for a terrible missed opportunity. I never got to talk to Helen about teaching! Helen was an immensely talented person whose modesty led her to downplay many of her achievements. Her sense of playfulness may have sometimes been misleading, though in my opinion all the best artists in any field (from tennis-players to ophthalmologists) retain that sense of high-level play in their work. Good teaching more than most other things requires a sense of play as well as imagination, generosity of spirit and a high-level quality of attention, and of course these were exactly Helen’s qualities.
As I read the memories from film-school classmates and film students of Helen’s in the memorial zine, I was overwhelmed with the glimpses they gave me of an inspired teacher at work. Madam Winger Makes a Film shows us that side of Helen also. What a teacher Helen must have been—both by nature and nurture, I strongly suspect this was partly a gift from her mother—and the thing about teaching is that it leaves so much good stuff behind even when it’s gone. The results may not show up in concrete form, like a film or a poem or a song, but those students of Helen’s are out there in the world now not just remembering her and celebrating her when they make their own films, but also remembering and celebrating and carrying on her work in their teaching as well.
We can’t all make films (though Helen would say we can!), but we can make other things—we can even make cupcakes!—and we can teach other people how to stretch and expand their own minds and hearts, and when we do those things we will be doing them very much in Helen’s memory, and Helen’s spirit.
----------
[Postscript. The eye doctor with a sense of playfulness and passion for his work--I am not sure if ophthalmologist really is the right term, but I thought it sounded better that way--is someone I actually met last week, I can't remember the last time I met someone so enthusiastic about his job! It was hilarious--the thing that got me in to deal with the eye thing is (a) needing prescription sunglasses for safe cycling and (b) really I have gotten awfully short-sighted, I must start wearing glasses much more of the time rather than just for plays and movies (I destroyed my eyesight by reading three times through the Riverside Shakespeare over one summer as part of a maniacal orals-studying initiative), just because I like wandering around in a short-sighted daydreamish haze does not mean it's a good idea and (c) I thought glasses-wearing would be more likely to happen if I got some new ones with more exciting frames and the non-reflective lenses I was too cheap to spring for the last time. So this guy just loves his job, I can't even tell you how much! "So, what color do you think the inside of your eye is?" he asked me as he bounced like a slender Tigger around the examining room. I disclaimed any knowledge of the color of the inside of my eye. "It's a pinky-orange, like raw salmon!" he said. The other highlight was him quite gleefully telling me that I had a harmless but interesting birthmark on the inside of my eye with the quite wonderful name Mittendorf dot. "So if anyone's ever looking into your eye in the future and wonders about it, you can tell them you have a Mittendorf dot!"]
----------
A disproportionate number of my memories of Helen contain some kind of sweet, usually cake. I remember going to an academic conference in New Orleans in the spring of 2001, for instance, and receiving a most lovely welcome visit from Paul and Helen at my hotel the evening I got in—I was supposed to see them a couple days later, but Helen just didn’t think it was right not to welcome me personally. She had with her a slab of extremely sticky and dense-looking vegan cake, which she was fully bent on leaving with me in case I needed a snack, and only my most earnest entreaties and truthful warnings that I wasn’t going to eat it led her to take it away with her again!
But we had beignets at Café du Monde, of course, and the next time I saw Paul and Helen in New Orleans, in May of 2003, we went on an expedition to see the Bindlestiff Family Circus again bearing left-over cake—that technology that lets you go to the grocery store and get a photograph sort of laminated onto the top of the cake icing was peculiarly well suited to Helen’s aesthetic, this cake bore (am I remembering correctly?) an enchanting blue-haired portrait of Helen & was left over from her birthday (the cake had been carefully cut around the rim of the portrait so as to keep the important part of the picture intact).
There’s a sort of platonic ideal of cake that I see in my head when I think of Helen—personally I’m a fan of the luridly iced cupcake—and the cake I’m thinking of now is like what you’d see, oh, in one of those original Babar the Elephant illustrations, or an English children’s book from the 1950s. It’s a modest little cake, just big enough for one person, with beautiful pink icing and a little cherry on top, with a sort of classic outline and symmetry that makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
I’ve been kicking myself all spring for a terrible missed opportunity. I never got to talk to Helen about teaching! Helen was an immensely talented person whose modesty led her to downplay many of her achievements. Her sense of playfulness may have sometimes been misleading, though in my opinion all the best artists in any field (from tennis-players to ophthalmologists) retain that sense of high-level play in their work. Good teaching more than most other things requires a sense of play as well as imagination, generosity of spirit and a high-level quality of attention, and of course these were exactly Helen’s qualities.
As I read the memories from film-school classmates and film students of Helen’s in the memorial zine, I was overwhelmed with the glimpses they gave me of an inspired teacher at work. Madam Winger Makes a Film shows us that side of Helen also. What a teacher Helen must have been—both by nature and nurture, I strongly suspect this was partly a gift from her mother—and the thing about teaching is that it leaves so much good stuff behind even when it’s gone. The results may not show up in concrete form, like a film or a poem or a song, but those students of Helen’s are out there in the world now not just remembering her and celebrating her when they make their own films, but also remembering and celebrating and carrying on her work in their teaching as well.
We can’t all make films (though Helen would say we can!), but we can make other things—we can even make cupcakes!—and we can teach other people how to stretch and expand their own minds and hearts, and when we do those things we will be doing them very much in Helen’s memory, and Helen’s spirit.
----------
[Postscript. The eye doctor with a sense of playfulness and passion for his work--I am not sure if ophthalmologist really is the right term, but I thought it sounded better that way--is someone I actually met last week, I can't remember the last time I met someone so enthusiastic about his job! It was hilarious--the thing that got me in to deal with the eye thing is (a) needing prescription sunglasses for safe cycling and (b) really I have gotten awfully short-sighted, I must start wearing glasses much more of the time rather than just for plays and movies (I destroyed my eyesight by reading three times through the Riverside Shakespeare over one summer as part of a maniacal orals-studying initiative), just because I like wandering around in a short-sighted daydreamish haze does not mean it's a good idea and (c) I thought glasses-wearing would be more likely to happen if I got some new ones with more exciting frames and the non-reflective lenses I was too cheap to spring for the last time. So this guy just loves his job, I can't even tell you how much! "So, what color do you think the inside of your eye is?" he asked me as he bounced like a slender Tigger around the examining room. I disclaimed any knowledge of the color of the inside of my eye. "It's a pinky-orange, like raw salmon!" he said. The other highlight was him quite gleefully telling me that I had a harmless but interesting birthmark on the inside of my eye with the quite wonderful name Mittendorf dot. "So if anyone's ever looking into your eye in the future and wonders about it, you can tell them you have a Mittendorf dot!"]
His weapons and his stuff, or "I don't know from radar or sonar"
Lou Reed on tai chi and related matters, a rather charming link via Neil Gaiman's blog.
It was funny, I was sitting in Cafe Pamplona on Saturday morning and reading the latest issue of Bookforum (about which more anon, but that is a truly great wad of pages, I cannot recommend it highly enough, it totally countered my reunion malaise!) and there was a very nice and enthusiastic waitress (in my day it was all surly but rather beautiful men of more or less saturnine description) and if I closed my eyes and listened to her talking to her co-worker I could have been listening to myself equally rhapsodically enthusing circa 1988, the names were so exactly the same: Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Joyce Carol Oates...
(My dear friend A. and I used to sit in that cafe for hours at a time, eking out whatever meager sum we had to spend! These occasions featured the ritual sharing of either a mint parfait or a fruit tart which we invariably had to select with great thought from the pastry tray even though we always got the same kind...)
Another highlight of the weekend: three loops round the Fresh Pond reservoir first thing Saturday morning. Got quite a bit of light reading done here and there along the way (not, I mean, while running), but will wait till tomorrow to chronicle it. Sad times thinking about lost friends. Sleep deficit also now running pretty intolerably high, unfortunately; will see what can be done about this over the next few days, but I am not hopeful!
It was funny, I was sitting in Cafe Pamplona on Saturday morning and reading the latest issue of Bookforum (about which more anon, but that is a truly great wad of pages, I cannot recommend it highly enough, it totally countered my reunion malaise!) and there was a very nice and enthusiastic waitress (in my day it was all surly but rather beautiful men of more or less saturnine description) and if I closed my eyes and listened to her talking to her co-worker I could have been listening to myself equally rhapsodically enthusing circa 1988, the names were so exactly the same: Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Joyce Carol Oates...
(My dear friend A. and I used to sit in that cafe for hours at a time, eking out whatever meager sum we had to spend! These occasions featured the ritual sharing of either a mint parfait or a fruit tart which we invariably had to select with great thought from the pastry tray even though we always got the same kind...)
Another highlight of the weekend: three loops round the Fresh Pond reservoir first thing Saturday morning. Got quite a bit of light reading done here and there along the way (not, I mean, while running), but will wait till tomorrow to chronicle it. Sad times thinking about lost friends. Sleep deficit also now running pretty intolerably high, unfortunately; will see what can be done about this over the next few days, but I am not hopeful!
Friday, June 08, 2007
On the appeal of three things
Of course I am far from alone in having fallen victim to the fatal thrall of the idea of triathlon. (In fact--horrifyingly--the next season of "Wife Swap" is going to feature families that participate in triathlons!) But there's something peculiarly compelling about the notion of balancing three different things at once.
I love running, it really is my passion, and of course triathlon training is also a sensible way of limiting running-related injuries; it's a safer way of having a high level of fitness. I rather love swimming too, only swimming in these crowded pools is horrible--but if I could swim in a lake every morning, I would probably feel much the same way about it as I do about running. And I am a total novice cyclist--starting next week I am going to be a cycling devotee in training--but pretty much everyone I talk to who does this stuff loves biking, it's got its own challenges but it's not as technically difficult as swimming or as pantingly and stomach-churningly intense as running and there's something magical (we all know this from when we were kids) about how fast and smoothly you cover the ground on a bike.
But the appeal of three things is something much longer-standing for me. Of course it's partly why I like being a professor, where the three things to keep in balance are teaching, service and research/writing. I also like balancing fiction-writing and academic writing, and have recently realized that of course the third leg of that particular tripod is the kind of reading and writing I talk about here on the blog--I've been doing it all along, it turns out, just not quite realizing the extent to which it was part of a threesome.
When I was a Young Person, I was passionately devoted to musical activities, and there too I always had to have three things: oboe, clarinet and recorder. (Singing also, but singing doesn't count, not so much my cup of tea in the end!) The oboe was my one true love, but there were various reasons to keep the others also, and of course I also loved the way each one kind of proliferated out into a whole family of instruments, all of which I played at one time or another. I came to the oboe by way of the bassoon (now that's the instrument I'll take up again in later life, it's the least technically demanding double-reed instrument), there was a spare one lying around school and a Scottish exchange student who gave me a few free lessons (in the nurse's office, I seem to remember!), and it led to the English horn also. Clarinet flowers out into bass clarinet and various sizes of saxophone (tenor is my favorite, the larger instruments are all easier on the embouchure); and of course the recorder (though alto's the main one) comes in various different sizes right from the start.
My great pleasure in those years was sightreading chamber music in some farfetched variant--you know, like reading the viola part in a string quartet on the clarinet--or else having a maniacal week of rehearsals in the small orchestra for a school musical, when my genius music teacher Al Clayton realized that he could rent me an instrument at the beginning of the week & I would be able to play it by the end of the week & it was both cheaper and more educationally valuable than paying a pro! So I had those funny little stands where you can rest your clarinet and your English horn or whatever funny combination of instruments you need depending on the orchestration of the particular show. And in general the work you do on each instrument is specific to that instrument and yet also has some cumulative benefit for your playing in general. And triathlon is just like this, it's a threesome of activities each of which has different sub-challenges (climbing versus sprinting on the bike, different sorts of running at different distance, working on the transitions between) and all of which go wonderfully well together, and it is what I am most excited about doing in future!
Further thoughts on swimming:
(1) I must check out the pool at
Riverbank State Park, it is potentially the answer to all my problems...
(2) Spare a thought for my inspiring swimming teacher, Doug Stern, who's having a major health crisis. I am so worried, it is awful! Here's a post by a longtime friend of Doug's that will give you the flavor of why he's such an important teacher. One thing I have especially appreciated about Doug's teaching is that though he's an immensely accomplished and high-powered athlete, he believes (as I do) that the most inexperienced beginners deserve the best teaching just as much as (maybe even more than) the super-intense talented ones. One of his particular interests is teaching adults who are afraid of the water how to swim, a topic of great interest and importance; another focus is helping triathletes improve their swimming, which is why these swim clinics he does focus on front crawl (you don't use breaststroke, for instance, in a triathlon because it's much more tiring on leg muscles that you need to save for the bike and run).
(3) The best thing in my life recently is Doug's Level II swim clinic, pretty much triathlete-oriented and really, really excitingly challenging. Doug's been too sick to teach, but everyone who works with him is a wonderful teacher also, and this class pushes me to the limit of my abilities in exactly the way I most enjoy. We did an amazing set as part of class last week, it was 8x160s (it's a 20-yard pool--Wendy Buckner's lovely not-exclusively-swimming-related blog is a good place to check out some of the swimming lingo--my other favorite swimming link is here) at lactate threshold pace--the first sets we did with fins, the second with paddles, so it was not absolutely brutal naked swimming, but still totally intense--I am slower than everyone else (least experienced, only female--but by this time next year I am promising myself I'm going to be able to beat some of these guys!), but I am so determined to keep up that I can just about have mind over matter and make it happen. The teacher's on my side, she's an amazing athlete & I whether it's reality or not feel that she's specially fighting for me to keep up because of me being a girl! So she urged me to draft off the other guy in my lane (poor guy!), and just kept on cheering me on, and amazingly I really only finished half a length after the last of the others. As I breathlessly and sweatily staggered up out of the water, she said, "I bet you never swam so far or so fast in your life!" And it was true, I never swam so far or fast in my life--it was amazing. (Promise to self: I must get a good flip turn this summer, it's driving me crazy not being able to do them properly! I was practicing yesterday morning, made a bit of progress, long way still to go...)
Further thoughts on cycling:
I am in love with the bike I've just bought, though I won't have it in my possession till next week. (NB for my mother--don't click on the bike link, you will be horrified at how much money I spent! And NB for my mother and J., I will die of mortification if anyone calls up that store & tries to buy presents for me in absentia, DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT! I mean it...) So it's
a Specialized Roubaix, and I got it at an absolutely lovely store called Sid's Bikes. It is going to be slightly nerve-racking riding it home on Monday or Tuesday, haven't really ridden a bike since I was a kid, but I am going to abandon all shame and just walk it over (the store's in Chelsea) to the bike path along the Hudson and ride only once I'm not on actual streets, so I feel I will probably survive unscathed. I hit the local Barnes & Noble on Saturday, they do not have much of a sport-related section but I bought & then compulsively read the two books they had on cycling: a useful though mildly goofy book called Bicycling Magazine's New Cyclist Handbook (as a precaution will read through it one more time before actually getting on the bike, though I can see you only really get things like gearing once you're actually doing it), and Lance Armstrong's rather grippingly interesting autobiography. What an unbearable guy the young Armstrong must have been, and what an amazing story--only I wanted a bit less inspirational life message (the parts about cancer treatment are really excellent, though, especially his descriptions of the horrors of chemotherapy) and more about peloton strategy! Any recommendations on good cycling-related reading would be welcome, or swimming- or running-related for that matter.
In proof of how bicycle-obsessed I already am, I will say that almost the only thing I liked about the recent production of Ellen Stewart's Romeo and Juliet adaptation at LaMama was the person in the gorilla suit riding the tiny bicycle! That bicycle really was adorable--otherwise it was definitely one of those evenings when the dinner was better than the play. (Grilled squid salad, grilled mahi-mahi in tomato broth, rhubarb crisp--mmmm....)
I've just spent a rather harrowing morning writing reminiscences to read at the memorial services for Anton Segal and Helen Hill and other lost classmates at my fifteenth college reunion, which is taking place this weekend in Cambridge. This is a task I am hoping not to be called upon for again any time soon! I am not the reunion type, I wouldn't be going otherwise, but I must go and talk with the relevant family members and such--there will be incidental pleasures along the way, I'm sure, but it's all going to be very sad. No posts here till Monday.
I love running, it really is my passion, and of course triathlon training is also a sensible way of limiting running-related injuries; it's a safer way of having a high level of fitness. I rather love swimming too, only swimming in these crowded pools is horrible--but if I could swim in a lake every morning, I would probably feel much the same way about it as I do about running. And I am a total novice cyclist--starting next week I am going to be a cycling devotee in training--but pretty much everyone I talk to who does this stuff loves biking, it's got its own challenges but it's not as technically difficult as swimming or as pantingly and stomach-churningly intense as running and there's something magical (we all know this from when we were kids) about how fast and smoothly you cover the ground on a bike.
But the appeal of three things is something much longer-standing for me. Of course it's partly why I like being a professor, where the three things to keep in balance are teaching, service and research/writing. I also like balancing fiction-writing and academic writing, and have recently realized that of course the third leg of that particular tripod is the kind of reading and writing I talk about here on the blog--I've been doing it all along, it turns out, just not quite realizing the extent to which it was part of a threesome.
When I was a Young Person, I was passionately devoted to musical activities, and there too I always had to have three things: oboe, clarinet and recorder. (Singing also, but singing doesn't count, not so much my cup of tea in the end!) The oboe was my one true love, but there were various reasons to keep the others also, and of course I also loved the way each one kind of proliferated out into a whole family of instruments, all of which I played at one time or another. I came to the oboe by way of the bassoon (now that's the instrument I'll take up again in later life, it's the least technically demanding double-reed instrument), there was a spare one lying around school and a Scottish exchange student who gave me a few free lessons (in the nurse's office, I seem to remember!), and it led to the English horn also. Clarinet flowers out into bass clarinet and various sizes of saxophone (tenor is my favorite, the larger instruments are all easier on the embouchure); and of course the recorder (though alto's the main one) comes in various different sizes right from the start.
My great pleasure in those years was sightreading chamber music in some farfetched variant--you know, like reading the viola part in a string quartet on the clarinet--or else having a maniacal week of rehearsals in the small orchestra for a school musical, when my genius music teacher Al Clayton realized that he could rent me an instrument at the beginning of the week & I would be able to play it by the end of the week & it was both cheaper and more educationally valuable than paying a pro! So I had those funny little stands where you can rest your clarinet and your English horn or whatever funny combination of instruments you need depending on the orchestration of the particular show. And in general the work you do on each instrument is specific to that instrument and yet also has some cumulative benefit for your playing in general. And triathlon is just like this, it's a threesome of activities each of which has different sub-challenges (climbing versus sprinting on the bike, different sorts of running at different distance, working on the transitions between) and all of which go wonderfully well together, and it is what I am most excited about doing in future!
Further thoughts on swimming:
(1) I must check out the pool at
Riverbank State Park, it is potentially the answer to all my problems...
(2) Spare a thought for my inspiring swimming teacher, Doug Stern, who's having a major health crisis. I am so worried, it is awful! Here's a post by a longtime friend of Doug's that will give you the flavor of why he's such an important teacher. One thing I have especially appreciated about Doug's teaching is that though he's an immensely accomplished and high-powered athlete, he believes (as I do) that the most inexperienced beginners deserve the best teaching just as much as (maybe even more than) the super-intense talented ones. One of his particular interests is teaching adults who are afraid of the water how to swim, a topic of great interest and importance; another focus is helping triathletes improve their swimming, which is why these swim clinics he does focus on front crawl (you don't use breaststroke, for instance, in a triathlon because it's much more tiring on leg muscles that you need to save for the bike and run).
(3) The best thing in my life recently is Doug's Level II swim clinic, pretty much triathlete-oriented and really, really excitingly challenging. Doug's been too sick to teach, but everyone who works with him is a wonderful teacher also, and this class pushes me to the limit of my abilities in exactly the way I most enjoy. We did an amazing set as part of class last week, it was 8x160s (it's a 20-yard pool--Wendy Buckner's lovely not-exclusively-swimming-related blog is a good place to check out some of the swimming lingo--my other favorite swimming link is here) at lactate threshold pace--the first sets we did with fins, the second with paddles, so it was not absolutely brutal naked swimming, but still totally intense--I am slower than everyone else (least experienced, only female--but by this time next year I am promising myself I'm going to be able to beat some of these guys!), but I am so determined to keep up that I can just about have mind over matter and make it happen. The teacher's on my side, she's an amazing athlete & I whether it's reality or not feel that she's specially fighting for me to keep up because of me being a girl! So she urged me to draft off the other guy in my lane (poor guy!), and just kept on cheering me on, and amazingly I really only finished half a length after the last of the others. As I breathlessly and sweatily staggered up out of the water, she said, "I bet you never swam so far or so fast in your life!" And it was true, I never swam so far or fast in my life--it was amazing. (Promise to self: I must get a good flip turn this summer, it's driving me crazy not being able to do them properly! I was practicing yesterday morning, made a bit of progress, long way still to go...)
Further thoughts on cycling:
I am in love with the bike I've just bought, though I won't have it in my possession till next week. (NB for my mother--don't click on the bike link, you will be horrified at how much money I spent! And NB for my mother and J., I will die of mortification if anyone calls up that store & tries to buy presents for me in absentia, DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT! I mean it...) So it's
a Specialized Roubaix, and I got it at an absolutely lovely store called Sid's Bikes. It is going to be slightly nerve-racking riding it home on Monday or Tuesday, haven't really ridden a bike since I was a kid, but I am going to abandon all shame and just walk it over (the store's in Chelsea) to the bike path along the Hudson and ride only once I'm not on actual streets, so I feel I will probably survive unscathed. I hit the local Barnes & Noble on Saturday, they do not have much of a sport-related section but I bought & then compulsively read the two books they had on cycling: a useful though mildly goofy book called Bicycling Magazine's New Cyclist Handbook (as a precaution will read through it one more time before actually getting on the bike, though I can see you only really get things like gearing once you're actually doing it), and Lance Armstrong's rather grippingly interesting autobiography. What an unbearable guy the young Armstrong must have been, and what an amazing story--only I wanted a bit less inspirational life message (the parts about cancer treatment are really excellent, though, especially his descriptions of the horrors of chemotherapy) and more about peloton strategy! Any recommendations on good cycling-related reading would be welcome, or swimming- or running-related for that matter.
In proof of how bicycle-obsessed I already am, I will say that almost the only thing I liked about the recent production of Ellen Stewart's Romeo and Juliet adaptation at LaMama was the person in the gorilla suit riding the tiny bicycle! That bicycle really was adorable--otherwise it was definitely one of those evenings when the dinner was better than the play. (Grilled squid salad, grilled mahi-mahi in tomato broth, rhubarb crisp--mmmm....)
I've just spent a rather harrowing morning writing reminiscences to read at the memorial services for Anton Segal and Helen Hill and other lost classmates at my fifteenth college reunion, which is taking place this weekend in Cambridge. This is a task I am hoping not to be called upon for again any time soon! I am not the reunion type, I wouldn't be going otherwise, but I must go and talk with the relevant family members and such--there will be incidental pleasures along the way, I'm sure, but it's all going to be very sad. No posts here till Monday.
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