I’ve been sleeping less. I wonder if it’s jet lag. Or stress. I had been thinking that it had to do with Thurber, our new housemate. It’ll be two months next weekend that Thurb has been with us. And I can’t help but think having a 16-month-old redbone coonhound in the house, who for the first few months as a puppy had us near-tearing our hair out, might have something to do with it. But now he’s sleeping through the night, peacefully for hours on end so there’s little merit in that explanation.
No, it could be a change of life. Earlier this month, when my brother T came to visit, he said that he gets, on average, six hours sleep a night during non-vacation time. He’s a diligent one, my younger brother, who doesn’t get up to write the great Canadian novel before work; rather he’s working out, playing squash. He plays softball in summer, ice hockey in winter. He, too, has fallen to the DVT darkside and must monitor his blood circulation so he’s gotten even a bit more serious about staying fit. Curious bloodlines, ours.
I'm thinking this is a good thing, the sleeping less. Perhaps it is my body’s way of saying, Hey there, mind, if you are going to get your writing out, run a marathon, own and care for a seventy-pound dog with the spirit of a thoroughbred horse, as well as keep up with the rest of my life, attended to as I must in order to feel good about myself, then I’m going to be needing more hours in the day. (Not to mention that as of Oct. 6 it is hockey season!)
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Lose fifteen pounds of ugly flesh. Cut off your head.
I’ve come to think that all diets and glossy health mags that come to my office desk like duck weed to Doggie Beach (Park Slope inside joke) is best summed up by this line. Diets, of course, do have merit. But feelgood prescriptions don’t. A hundred years ago Jack LaLanne put the idea in media ad buyers’ minds that America would pay – and pay well – to remake their bodies. And yet, billions of dollars and a quadrillion of glossy mag pages later, America is fatter than ever.
Truth is the whole mind-body thing, which is at the heart of what it means to be human, is (here comes THAT word again) a complicated idiosyncratic narrative (previous word is, as noted, THAT word) that, although may be slightly influenced by such things as magazine articles and fashion and peer groups, is personal: a decision to lose weight, run a marathon, cut out the lunchtime Diet Coke is an individual decision taken by individuals one at a time.
A narrative (STOP!) that unfolds slowly. And, yes, I am a believer in stories, personal stories that can make a difference in the complicated idiosyncratic narratives of family, friends and perfect strangers, which, I suppose now that I’m writing this down, might best explain why I am keeping this blog. Alas, I’m not a big believer in national ad campaigns to promote some new and improved nutritional, dietetic foodstuff. Rather, I believe in the power of stories that in their telling can act as a worm, sinking into the intestines of the CIN that is yours alone but may just help to change the shape of it. (For the better – Think of a CIN as a virus-choked system and the worm, I’m thinking Lowly from the Richard Scarry “Please and Thank You Book,” in this case a voracious consumer of just those viruses. Burp!)
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As to stories. What to read. I’ve been trying “Player One” by Douglas Coupland. I’m thinking TV for middlebrow liberal arts grads, circa 1990 and up. Much better is “On Canaan’s Time” by one of my favorite novelists, Sebastian Barry. He of the heart-ripping-out endings, not with OCT, but his previous, “The Secret Scripture,” left me reeling. Next, Jose Saramago, there is such freedom in the prose. “Death Interrupted.” Ha!
What books do, like running, take you away. Movies too. Not as much. Or at least with most Hollywood movies. They leave too little to surprise. Stories are meant to startle, if not surprise. Stories are even more infinite than the people alive and dead to tell them. Consider the greats and the stories that were left unfinished. With a Kindle, buy for 99 cents a public domain Hawthorne, his “American Notebooks”: a sample: “The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street-lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam” and “A lament for life’s wasted sunshine.” One man, countless stories.
Saw “Gigi” with M at Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday night (Oct. 30). The love affair between Gaston and the irrepressible scamp turned high-hump lady of feminine discretion during La Belle Epoque, only a generation before the redoubtable Marilyn, the flick to see with Brooklyn’s Michelle Williams going on in Newsweek, “She’s offering — I hate to get graphic — sex from behind,” her as-yet-seen role a sure a thing as best actress at the Oscars in many years. Not like the National Book Awards, which for some of its own peculiar wisdom throws off canon fodder, Roth, Oates, Auster et. al., for small press no-names. But that is getting off the second topic.
Which is women. The portrayal of women. The mags for and about women. For every Michelle Williams and Helen Mirren there are Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. In our male-dominated culture, women play the fool first. Anna Nicole Smith vs. Anna Deavere Smith. Ms. Magazine, as New York magazine tells us this week is forty years old http://bit.ly/vCKJsa.
Is the women’s movement suffering from midlife crisis? Certainly not one that has changed the way women are portrayed on stage and screen. But increasingly, as this article (Oct. 20) in the London Review of Books recently notes http://bit.ly/vZ6VYe, women are a force to be reckoned with in politics. Without women, the Democrats don’t have a tinker’s chance of winning the 2012 presidential election. If we men had our way it would be Republicans, not just in the White House but in both houses of Congress. As the LRB’s R.W. Johnson writes, “This would put Tea Party extremists in a commanding position at a time of American and world financial crisis; for the rest of us this would be like tightrope walking in the dark with a gorilla on one’s back.”
So get with it, guys. Show the lady some respect. Without her, we’re finished.
Next: Running for Your Life: Changes
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