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.