The hay is in the barn.

Two weeks until I run the marathon I've been training for since late July. I'm feeling pretty good about it; training has gone pretty well, and I'm confident I can meet the goals that I've set for myself. This is always a nice part of the training calendar. The big runs have all been completed, and I'm tapering for a couple of weeks. Sometimes the surfeit of energy produced by the taper can make me feel a little bit edgy, but it's better than being worn out and sore all the time the way I usually am at the height of marathon training.

In other news I'm reading Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book when I get a spare moment. It's not a book that people read much anymore--not even professional Victorianists such as myself. 600 pages of dense poetry has a way of taking people off their game. It's another sign--as if there weren't enough already--that poetry has long been taken off central stage in our society. It's sad really; it's beautiful, interesting, funny, intriguing, challenging verse novel that lies relatively dormant because no one--aside from a few specialists like myself--reads it anymore.

Persuasion and Pleasure

Over the weekend I reread Jane Austen's Persuasion. The direct reason, of course, was that a student is doing her senior project on the novel, and she asked me to be the first reader for the paper. But I thoroughly enjoyed rereading it.

Austen's novels have been relentlessly adapted these past couple of decades. Around the time I was in college the now famous Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice came out, and that seems to have either created, or have been a part of, a tremendous revival of interest in the works of the regency-era novelist. Upon teaching her novels in a couple of different classes, I have usually tried to ask my students why all this interest; why do they seek out these films, and even, in some cases, actually read the novels? The students--usually overwhelmingly female in these cases--have responded that in these novels the men simply treat women as women. The men are kind, considerate, and even romantic. My students are not (or at least not all) naive conservatives. They do not, apparently, want to lose the right to own property, vote, and appear in public without a chaperon. They also, apparently, appreciate the benefits of modern plumbing and medicine, but perhaps that goes without saying. Jane Austen almost seems to function for them the way that porn does for others; it's a fantasy that that the person having the fantasy can recognize as unrealistic, perhaps even undesirable, but that meets some deep-seated need.

I like Persuasion because--at twenty-eight--the heroine is today's equivalent of a woman in her mid-forties. There's something sweet about the idea of this rather shy, kind woman finally getting the man that she lost when she was younger, and more powerless. I also simply enjoy the prose; Austen writes with a clarity and precision that was unusual then, and is completely gone now.

On a side note: the TV show Reading Rainbow has been canceled. I'm not sure what I can add that some other people haven't already said. I particularly liked what the 19th floor guy had to say. I haven't watched the show in years; I'm not even sure that the PBS affiliates I have been living around even carried the show, and of course I have no children that would have caused me to look it up. But I have very fond memories of watching that show on idle summer mornings growing up. It remains one of the few shows--that I remember--dedicated to the sheer pleasure of reading. So much of our society is about the utilitarianism of capitalism; everything must be justified in terms of its productivity. Yes, kids who are strong readers do better in school, are more likely to go to Harvard, make a six-figure salary. For me, the show reminded me that--even as I was growing out of the level of books promoted on the show--that reading was as much fun as Bugs Bunny and chocolate milk. It was pleasure, not homework.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. . .

Last weekend I read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. A student was thinking about doing his senior project on it, so I said I'd take a look. The novel--half-forgotten today--was almost certainly one of the first in a long series of cold-war era apocalyptic nuclear scenarios. A late 1950s Florida small town survives the initial nuclear attack from the USSR, while Miami, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and eventually Orlando go up in a mushroom cloud around it, along with quite a bit of the rest of the planet. The survivors, of course, have to fashion new modes of survival, including transportation, medicine, and a new economy.

The novel was amusing in at least one way that it probably wasn't when it was first published. The novel is almost charmingly dated--it was a bit like watching an episode of _Mad Men_, except one where the Cuban Missile crisis doesn't end well. Imagine Don Draper and Pete Campbell climbing over the ruins of a destroyed Florida, saying things like "Well, this is a fine donnybrook, I must say," and you might get a rough feel for the novel.

Frank apparently wrote the novel, in part, because he didn't think his contemporaries realized how bad a nuclear war could be. He wanted to show that the world would NOT get back to normal after a nuclear exchange, and today it's an interesting reminder that anyone ever thought that that would be the case; it goes a long way to explaining the early years of the cold war when you realize that people on both sides thought that a nuclear exchange would be like a conventional war, only more so. Frank wanted to point out that the U.S. would essentially turn back the clock of civilization by at least a couple of thousand years. From my perspective, Frank was still almost charmingly optimistic about nuclear annihilation. Within a year after The Day, his heroes and heroines have new food sources, new sexual partners, and a new economy. There's almost something bracingly Thoreauean (if I can use that word) about the whole thing: these people have had to simplify their lives with a vengeance, but after having done so, they seem to be enjoying themselves. Yeah, okay, there's the little matter of radiation poisoning, but, Frank seems to say, life ain't ever going to be perfect.

As I was reading, I also couldn't help think about the way in which recent fiction has turned its back on the nuclear scenario. My favorite 'end of the world as we know it' novel of the past few years is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, wherein an engineered super-virus, introduced into the world through vitamins, takes out all but a handful of engineered mutants. Despite the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, we're more worried about catching a super-cold these days.

Managing Expectations

Right now I'm procrastinating on more important projects by working on a less important project. I might teach a science-fiction course spring semester 2010, so I've taken this as an excuse to read some science-fiction. I asked for some suggestions on facebook; I received a few. Some suggested graphic novels. Watchmen came up. So I checked it out, and finished reading it yesterday.

It was disappointing. I'd heard a lot about this particular work the past couple of years. I like comics; I grew up on a steady diet of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man, and Thor (speaking of which, where is Thor's feature film?). And I admit that Watchmen engaged comic book superhero tropes in some interesting and engaging ways. I think perhaps the book suffered from what I'll call the Casablanca or Citizen Kane syndrome. Watchmen obviously influenced an entire generation of comic books, films, even TV shows. By the time I read it (much in the same way as I saw those two films) it simply felt cliched. I'd seen this stuff before. Over and over again. Enough with the brooding, flawed super-heroes.

But of course, it's horribly unfair, because Watchmen, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane are the reasons those cliches exist; or at the very least, they helped those tropes become set through their own brilliance.

At any rate, I don't think Watchmen is going to make the cut; it mostly engages comic book tropes; the science-fiction genre, while occasionally making an appearance, takes a backseat to the series' attempts to reexamine classic comic book beats.

The Zen Koan that is Lance

As baseball fan, an occasional marathon and other track and field events enthusiast, and as an even more casual cycling fan, I've been reminded a lot of steroids issues lately. Lance Armstrong is riding again, and every one and their kid sister seems to have an opinion about Lance the person, Lance the cyclist, and Lance the alleged doper. Manny Ramirez has returned to play for the Dodgers after being suspended for 50 games; apparently he was taking a female fertility drug that 'roiders use when they come off a cycle.

There's probably not much I can add to these discussions. I have a hard time getting self-righteously indignant about doping anymore; it simply happens too often, and it's too exhausting to get upset that often. On the other hand I have a hard time blowing it off as 'that's what athletes do these days to compete' the way that some fans seem to have coped with it.

But on the new Slate sports gabfest, one of the commentators pointed out that we--as the sports watching populace--tend to treat these people differently based on whether we liked them before they got caught on steroids. Alex Rodridguez gets caught--no one liked him to begin with, so we come down on him like a ton of bricks. Manny does it, and we make jokes about the fact that even the drug he gets caught with is typical of his flaky weirdness. And we're thrilled when he starts hitting home runs in Dodger stadium again.

Which brings me to the strange phenomenon of Lance Armstrong. I can't think of any athlete who inspires--at least in me, anyway--the strange mixture of admiration and repulsion. There's enough circumstantial evidence that it's difficult for me to believe that he hasn't played around with EPO on occasion. And he's arrogant enough; he reminds you of high school jocks who thought that mastering their particular sport made them superior human beings in every respect. But at the same time, he has this odd redeeming quality. The cancer scare really seems to have got to him, and I believe him when he says that he is riding for cancer patients. There's something really off putting about the messiah complex so obvious in a commercial like "Driven;" there's something appealing about an athlete doing something in addition to trying to notch another victory. Make no mistake about it: Lance intends to win his eighth Tour de France. But make no mistake about it; he also really believes he's doing it for the 12 year old recovering from cancer.

I'm back. Again. Maybe.

A couple of thoughts as I try to return to this format:

1. I’m doing this to get myself writing again, in any format, in any way. Most of the past year was completely swamped by teaching, and I simply need to write more: professionally, and for my own satisfaction.

2. I need to be more concise. My favorite blogs, I’ve noticed, keep it relatively short. My favorite blog right now, the 19^th floor, usually comes in around two or three paragraphs.

3. I also need to write more often. I check blogs more often that I know are going to be updated more often.

4. Perhaps I need to not limit myself to my workouts or my current reading. Most running blogs I breeze through get pretty boring if they focus on running alone. This probably should have been obvious to me much sooner, but I can be dense.

That being said, I will mention that I’m reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I’m trying to make up my mind if I like it. I saw the mini-series that Jeremy Irons starred in a couple of decades ago. Waugh’s prose is—well any adjective I use is going to sound trite—but it’s sort of delicious in an overly rich pastry sort of way; it’s heavy on the nostalgia to an almost cloying degree. On the professional side I’m reading Darwin’s Sacred Cause, which is a history of Darwin’s relationship to the abolitionist cause. I’d say it was interesting, and it is, to me, but this up my particular professional alley, and I can have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to that sort of thing.

Since I last wrote, I also bought a Trek 1.5 road bike. There’s little ambivalence there. Despite being occasionally left in the dust by the local cycling club, I have to say that I love cycling. I’d be doing a lot more of it right now if I weren’t trying to focus on training for another marathon in Grand Rapids. Despite these humid South Georgia summers, rides in the morning take on this wonderful meditative quality.

Enough for now. More soon, hopefully.

I'm back. I think.

It's hard to believe that it's been August since I last posted. I suppose that was roughly when the term started. It's been a four months of teaching at full speed: class prep, grading, and the odd committee meeting (and when I say odd. . . .).

Still, over Thanksgiving I read a book that had me thinking I should start again. The book was What I Talk about When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami. It's a short book; I read it quickly over a couple of days. It's a memoir about Murakami's running life. He took up running when he began to write novels in his late twenties. He gave up his jazz club so that he could focus on running, and when he did so, he began to gain weight. Running became the solution. At the time of running he had posted well over twenty marathons, at about the rate of one a year, and a number of triatholons of various distances.

The interesting thing about it is how hard Murakami is on himself. His times still frustrate him. His aging body frustrates him. And his times are impressive, at any age. They aren't Olympic impressive, but he's obviously a solid athlete, as well as an award winning novelist. The book is simply written, but compelling somehow; perhaps it is because--even though he doesn't talk about traditionally 'personal' subjects--the book feels so personal because Murakami feels that running is so personally important to him.

I am neither the athlete nor the writer that Murakami is, but I did relate to him on that level. Even the title seems to get at something. Running--and other distance athletic activities--are odd, and hard to understand for those who have no interest in doing them. And yet it has--in the past few years--become incredibly important to me personally as well, for reasons that I can't quite describe to myself. Like Murakami I became serious about it in my late twenties. In my case it was when I was beginning the process of writing my Ph.D dissertation, which was a marathon in of itself. My goal was to finish a marathon before I defended my dissertation, and I met that goal with about nine months to go.

I haven't raced since May. I've been too busy with school and other act ivies. I've still been running; I could run a reasonably competent half on short notice I think. Still, I've been thinking that it's time to start planning for another half and a full in the spring, in no small part because of Murakami's book.