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My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read. I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right. I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy! (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage. Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart. The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse. The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses. Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract. Entirely abstract. Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all. A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich… Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not. Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting. I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep. But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding. Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot. I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess. Surrealism is fun. And material, too, not abstract. Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart. Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel. It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes. Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.
Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature. I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here. The quotation in my title is from p. 94. Naomi (1924) & Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here. Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery. Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about. But not quite doing that, unfortunately. That novel would have been more interesting. The actual novel was fine. This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue. A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series. Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories. A perfect Everett title. It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t. They always do. On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor. A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet. The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more. This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going. POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic. Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding. My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved. I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through. Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second. Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer. I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing. That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written. Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are. The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works. Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing. IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo. I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up. He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book. Les songes en equilibre (1942) & Le tombeau des rois (1953) & Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet. I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations. Her Catholic poems did not do much for me. If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them. Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later. I have visited his childhood home. Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena Flores ao Telefone (1968) & Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author. “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.” Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor. Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works. Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.
Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza. Always interesting to see what people are reading. Thanks as usual. 18th edition! The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related. Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki. Both were serialized in newspapers. How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked. Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines. Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on. Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different. Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.” … most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body. For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself. I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it. No one else had that right. (Ch. 18, 161) Pure poison. By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed. Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters. I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30). One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang. Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel. The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend. Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath. Eh, they’re all crazy. The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess. Maybe she is making it all up. Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it. She seems more unreliable in theory than practice. One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability. How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention. I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels. Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine. Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose? Is it worth the tedium of the typing? I mean that there is a lot of this: “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?” “Your phone call wakened me!” “I can leave anytime now. Won’t you come right away too?” “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?” “You’re sure you can?” “Of course I am!” (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98) And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki. Serialization filler? Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand. The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out. Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.
The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys. These books are all famous classical Chinese plays. Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles. I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too. The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor. The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world. She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies. This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden. After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking. There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector. I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5. The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another. Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them. Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels. “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth? One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator. Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion. How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.
How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions. I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford. Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship. Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what. Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me. In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows. Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does. A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate. Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises. One shocked even jaded ol’ me. There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption. The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin: The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying. They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72) In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests. Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals. Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return. The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs. Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist. But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm. More or less. “I know I’ve been somewhere like this before. I remember it now. It was in a dream. What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286) Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader. But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test. The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment… His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case. (119, 351) So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another. It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel. “What is truth, and what fiction? You must understand that truth id fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94) This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk. The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family. Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author. The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity. What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness? He finds an alternative immortality. “So it was really all utter nonsense! Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark! Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!” (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel)
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Introduction A few months ago, maybe in November, certainly by December, I began this ‘barefoot sprinting up grassy hills’ thing I’m going about to talk about in detail below. Shortly after I started, I began making use of the kettlebells I’d usually ignored at the gym(s) I have access to. I’ve been dual-tracking in time the two topics in this piece, kettlebell swings and sprints, but because of how text works, I must discuss one of them first, and one of them second. I’ve been hustling the kettlebell swings hard lately. If you’re one of the folks I’ve hung out with in-person, you know what I’m talking about. You are reading the blog post I said I’d send you. Someone said, believably, credibly: tell me more about these kettlebell swings, because I will do literally anything to be a stronger climber. Gladly. As usual, I’ve got a page a few pages of paper notes that I’ve put together across time, and am now bringing it to here and organizing it. I first crossed paths with kettlebells, and the ‘heavy two-handed kettlebell swing’ many, many years ago. I wrote my first piece about kettlebell swings in 2013. Did not write about them again until now. In 2013, I was using 55 lb kettlebells, and didn’t have access to other sizes. Now that I have access to real kettlebells, and at a variety of weights, I am find a lot more interestingness for myself. I still stand by that piece, and regularly since then have made kettlebell swings a part of how I use my body. Maybe two months ago I brought kettlebell swings back into my life, first time in many years, and I’m thrilled. My back feels AMAZING, and a bunch of other things. In case this information makes it incrementally more likely that any reader harvests any of the same nice things, here’s all of my beta. I try to write things when it’s first coalecing in my mind, and this current piece is no exception. Kettlebell Swings TODO: Add video of 2-handed swings. Here’s an album showing one-handed and two-handed kettlebell swings. The two-handed swings are me & a 75 lb kettlebell, doing reps 81-100 for that day’s work. The one-handed swing is from a different day showing reps 1-5 on each arm with a 55 lb kettlebell. I believe I did ten total on each side that day. The blog post about kettlebell swings I wrote now 12 years ago is maybe worth referencing. I no longer have the home-made kettlebell. The piece is a good-enough starting point. I remember getting a TON out of kettlebell swings long ago, especially part of training for a high-elevation marathon, and I’m thrilled that I used them then. It helped my back stay healthy, for sure. Then, after I stopped running, I stopped the kb swings, and then WRECKED!!!! my back doing something completely unrelated, and have not run since then… Until now (More on sprinting below) I also didn’t really do kb swings the last few years. Then, for reasons that do not have anything to do with climbing, I found a way to bring back into my life running, and stumbled backwards back into kettlebell swings, and have noticed so many interesting things as a result. In a way that is no longer surprising to me, my climbing has also been nicely effected as well, even though that was never the original intent of the kettlebell swings. Originally, I didn’t expect the exercise to do anything for my climbing, and in fact felt bummed when the kettlebell swings would sometimes leave me tired enough that I felt I was having a lower-effort, ‘maintenence’ climbing session, rather than a fresh, ‘try-hard’ session. Then, because of a slight reframe, I’m now thrilled by the soreness I feel from the kettlebells, and don’t mind that i’ve been carrying fatigue into most of my climbing sessions since I’ve started ‘spamming kettlebell swings’. Here’s misc notes I collected across a few days/weeks: I really don’t like to work hard, or even breath that hard. When doing my swings, I always breath through my nose, per Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I started with sets of 5-10 reps. Then rest until my breath returns all the way to normal, and my heart rate, then i do more. Keep going at a low rate of effort until ~100 reps, if feeling good. If I’m a little sick or whatever, I found myself dropping the weight a lot and still finding 60 reps difficult enough to stop there. (that was part of how I knew I was sick at the time. Came down with a slow-onset illness, and I noticed it first by a stunning loss of power. 60 reps of a 60 lb kb is vastly less work than 110 reps of a 75 lb kettlebell, but when I was sick the 60 reps at low weight were harder than the 110 reps of 75lb swings) It’s impossible to do kb swings well without chalk, I used to not use chalk, or I’d do swings even if I didn’t have chalk, and that is no longer the case. i found the weights I was using to be so heavy that simply holding on to the dang thing was often-enough a hard part of the exercise. I now recall, the last time I did kettlebell swings without chalk, legitimately, correctly fearing the bell breaking free of my hands during some part of the motion. I don’t climb without chalk, I do not swing kettlebells without chalk. As soon as any part of the form would ‘break’, if it ever did, I’d end the set. It almost never broke. both of the videos here have pretty good form. My form isn’t always the exact same, across sets, especially the one-arm swings. In both videos, my heels sometimes come off the ground. It’s reflective of me having to try very hard. Often-enough my heels do not rise off the ground, which feels more correct. Heels up or not, I’m pleased with it, because it shows that my form is and looks quite good, even though I know the exercises were quite effortful. Back and shoulders in particular look “packed”. It looks much more straight forward than it felt in my body. an unexpected crossover: Kettlebell Swings and Climbing I noticed lots of kb-swing-related soreness while climbing. Some climbing moves became for a time very sensory-rich because of how it was interacting with soreness recepters. The soreness in my hands after the KB swings is similar to the soreness in my hands I experienced after trying something from Tyler Nelson’s insta: Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (instagram) sometimes, usually, I’d begin the climbing session with kettlebell swings. Sometimes I’d do the swings at the end. Sometimes I’d do only kb swings, and would not climb, if I didn’t feel like climbing. the gym I use is close enough that I can walk to it, and will walk/scoot right by it often enough even if I don’t seek it out, so it’s trivial for me to pop in for a few minutes of using a single piece of equipment, and then continue on with my day. #scooterthings Often enough, when doing the kb swings before the climbing session, I’d notice how nice it felt to be really warmed up, and warmed up with speed, not just slow ‘warm up’ climbing. The kb is very demanding, and takes speed, the same way that jumping into the air takes certain speed. It’s really nice to soak the nervous system in this level of effort, and helps for the climbing. I’d do the kb swings, and feel really well warmed up for bouldering. I also sometimes would feel really sore from the kb swings in ways that would be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS when I was climbing. I was thrilled bc that meant I was getting a ton of useful crossover. right now, as you read these words, consider ‘shrugging’ your shoulders, up towards your ears, and then pushing them back ‘down’, with firmness, and rigidity - these were very often the muscles that I’d feel EXTREME fatigue in, across days and weeks, and plenty of other muscles, but that these muscles in my body were so sore was continuously surprising to me. I pretty quickly dialed down good-enough technique, and then started adding weight. I got to 75 lb two-arm swings, spent a few sessions there, that was the heaviest kettlebell at that gym, then I found an 88 lb kettlebell at a different gym and have now used that one a few times. The first time I did it, I’d still not tried any one-handed kettlebell swings. I’ve now done a bunch, and the second time I used that 88 lb kettlebell, it felt shockingly easy to hold on to and swing, compared to how it felt the first time. It’s still wildly hard. That 2nd set was yesterday, as I type these words, I can feel soreness in my thumb, if I stretch it, each of my fingers, and much more. update from a few weeks later than that paragraph was typed^^: that 88lb kettlebell, while not feeling light, now feels much, much, much easier to move around. I giggled to myself the last time I used it, because of how easy it was to hold on to, and to swing!!! this kettlebell swing thing is a high-value 5-10 minutes in every session. i almost always do 100 swings. even when moving slow, it’s only like 7 minutes. If you read half this blog post, you’ve spent far longer reading than I spend on most kettlebell swinging sessions, which, for the record, even the ‘active 7 minute workout’ is still mostly me standing next to a kettlebell, not swinging it. I weigh 140lbs and started with a 55lb kb, then 65, then 75, then 88. Spent a few sessions at each weight before going up one. I switched to one-arm work with a 45 lb suitcase/farmers carry a few times, then 55lb one-arm swings, then 60 lbs, and get use from 45lb one-arm swings too. I do between 60 and 130 reps of two-arm swings, and started with like ten reps of one-arm swings, then 20, 30, and have not done more than 40 in a session so far. an unexpected variation: One-handed kettlebell swings I’ve got a video of me doing one-handed kb swings here. I started one-handed swings the very first time on accident, because when I went to the gym, the 70 and 75 lb kettlebells were in use. So I grabbed a 55, and thought “i bet I can still get a version of the exercise I want”. Oh, wow, I was correct. It feels so stability-encouraging of my toros, back, spine, ‘the box’ of the upper body, because of it’s asymetric nature. I could feel my spine and the mucles along it, and the entire “box” of my upper body (sides, front, back, bottom of my core), straining to maintain their body position. Straining to resist movement, rather than straining to move. Wildly applicable to climbing movements. My forearms and hands were quite nicely stressed by the effort - I could feel the familiar sense of fatigue in the muscles/connective tissue inside of my hands, the fleshy part of my thumb, I could feel fatigue and stress in the middle bone of my fingers, too. not the bone in the tip, not the bone connecting to the palms. The one in between. How nice. I could feel sensation from the muscles along my spine all that night and the next day - nothing felt painful or damaged, simple soreness and the feeling of use. I could tell the entire system had been thoroughly stressed. It felt so good. I could feel my rib intercostals and so many stabilizing muscles that night, feeling so sore and happy as I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I’ve had that feeling in my body now every time I’ve done KB swings, and usually carry perceivable fatigue into the next day, but it’s partially because I’m often-enough increasing the ‘work’ that I do every session. Once I started one-arm swings, I’d do five reps at a time, per side. I started at 55lbs, then went to 60 a few times, tried 45 lb swings once, liked it, and will probably keep upping the reps and weight as it feels good. I’ll slowly ease the rep count up, and sets. I started with 5 reps per side, then did 8, then reduced the weight and went to ten reps per side, and maybe 40 swings total, across a few sessions. other variations to the two-handed kb swing Hold a kb that’s like 1/3rd your body weight while standing around, or stretching, or shifting weight and doing bodyweight squats and stretches and stuff. Bounce on the toes. Switch it back and forth between your hands often. I started with like a small number of minutes of holding it, while moving around. The one-arm weight/motion is very interesting, both while moving around or perhaps while remaining very still. after a 45 lb/33% bodyweight suitcase carry, a 55lb one-arm kb swing isn’t such a leap, even though at first I surprised myself with how much I could move with the single-armed swing. try to move slowly under/around the kb. Think doing light yoga while holding a kettlebell. mega challenging, interesting. One-leg balancing, golfball pickup type motions, if you want. Felt to me promotive of stability in ways that justified the effort. So much for kettlebells. These have been something I’ve been doing regularly now for a few months. The same length of time that I’ve been doing this sprinting thing… Barefoot Grassy Hill Sprints In The Park I started these sprints I am about to describe before I restarted the KB swings The sprints had been going great for maybe two weeks, and then one of the times I walked past the kettlebells at the gym, I was like ‘my back and legs are already feeling great/tired, maybe i’ll be able to do kettlebell swings without my back feeling terrible the next day.’ I was right. Anyway, here’s free-associating through sprints, as recorded in a paper notebook across a few days: The idea originally had nothing to do with “running”. it started with ‘grounding’. A few friends have spoken in some length about grounding, over the years, the idea always seemed plausible, and I never did any particular action in response to it. years later, another friend that I’d meet at Cheesman Park, throwing frisbee, talked about it as he was taking his shoes off on a warm day in the fall, a few months ago. I thought ‘what a reasonable idea’, as I took my own shoes/socks off and went barefoot for the rest of the frisbee throwing session. Eventually, I started going barefoot often-enough when the weather was nice and we were throwing a frisbee, but usually never took more than a few lazy steps at a time to catch a disk, while barefoot. relevant: years ago (2020) I took a gnarly back injury and basically have not run since then, and for a long time could barely walk. Then even short walks would wreck me. Shortly before the injury, I’d run the Leadville Trail Marathon, and was climbing, so I was pretty abled, and the difference was profound. Deserves it’s own blog post or two, some time. As I think on it, it really changed me, the time of that injury, the things I experienced immediately afterwards. also relevant, years before that injury, after reading the Born to Run book that made the rounds, maybe in 2009 or 2012 or whenever. That was the one and only other time in my 35 years I’d done a specific ‘barefoot run’, for like 12 minutes, on a patch of grass at a park. My calves were DESTROYED, even though it was a short run, and I was used to long runs in normal shoes. I never ran barefoot again, but the memory stuck with me. So, back to 2024… I don’t have running shoes, and didn’t want to have to obtain another pair. I also know that walking up a hill is lower-impact on the body than a level surface or down a hill. I also know that walking on grass is lower-impact than walking on asphalt, concrete, or dirt. It’s gentle on the skin. So, I figured if I ran, and even sprinted, with a strong body position, up a hill, on grass, while barefoot and on the balls of my feet, and went only short distances, while doing lots of walking or standing around, I might not injure my back, and might find it interesting enough. I was right. It was all sorts of interesting, enjoyable, peaceful. I’m calling this ‘sprinting’, but it also involved plenty of ‘meandering back from whence I sprinted at a very, very leisurely pace’. I started with a short distance and a gentle but fast run. More than ten paces, probably less than 20, usually only the distance I could run while holding a single breath, or maybe two, because breathholding and nasal breathing. It’s a hold-over, always-running script in my brain. Ensuring I’m breathing through my nose, and sometimes holding my breath, or breathing in a very controlled way. Sprint sprint sprint, then walk, lazily, back to where I began, then walk around a little more, then sprint sprint sprint, repeat. It is vanishingly rare that I begin a sprint while still breathing hard, at all, from the prior sprint, and I usually let plenty of time elapse after my breath has all the way slowed down again. That was the routine, and it’s been extremely rewarding. TODO: create photo album, link to convey the gist of the vibe of the sprint/walk things 👉 Here’s a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints These “sprints” vs. distance running I’m appreciating how uneasy I am naming things sometimes, and ‘sprints’ is making me uneasy. It’s emphasizing the wrong thing. Alas. So much about the experience compares/contrasts with running. I like easy things, and tend to do more of something if it’s easy than if it’s difficult. Here’s ways this sprinting thing is easy: It’s barefoot, and I’m always close to where I start, so I can show up wearing ‘regular’ shoes, normal clothing, with a backpack, coffee, and more. Drop the bag, take off the outer layer of cloathing (i’ll have shorts or leggings under my pants, pretty much all the time, in the winter), take off shoes and socks, fold it all neatly in the grass/under a tree and I’m ready to run. I started this in the winter in colorado. there’s plenty of sunny days, and as long as there’s not snow on the ground, I’ll run. I’ve run barefoot in as cold as like 21 degrees farenheight. Only because the sun was out, and there was no snow. Again, much of the niceness to me of the sprints isn’t even the sprinting, it’s the walking around on the ground barefoot. Sometimes it’s cold, or the ground is wet in different ways. wet ground still counts as ‘nice’. It’s like a tiny little ice bath, when it’s snow melt or recently frozen. Like I said, I prefer comfort, and I usually run in dry, warm grass, but there’s a blob of trees where I run, and I sometimes interact with the shadow, which keeps ice/swow longer than the spot in the sun. Or I run/walk/stand mostly in the shadows of the trees, in the warmth. The hill I run up is south-facing, and because it’s sloped, water flows off it, so it dries out really quickly after snow, and becomes very usable very quickly, even when lots of the rest of the ground is covered with snow. Having my backpack with water in it, coffee, my coat, extra layers, makes it convenient even in the winter. Since I ride my scooter even in the cold, I’m accustomed to having a pair of leggings (that I can run in) under whatever pants I’m wearing that day anyway. I warm up by sometimes moving at a walking speed, but doing ‘high knees’ or doing a slow, ‘in place’ jump on each leg. It can look sorta like skipping. It can ‘build’ towards you doing something that looks like running through thigh-deep water. My goal was always to simply stress enough that I’d feel it the next day, on the bottoms of my feet. It wasn’t an aerobic workout, it wasn’t a leg workout. I’ll never forget how much a 2-mile barefoot run did me in, when I let myself run barefoot with my normal distance running form, in high school. The first session I did a low number of trips up the hill and back, I stopped while I felt fine and fresh, and I reflected ‘this small amount of movement is still more than I’ve had for a while’. It felt great, and as importantly, felt great the next day. Since I was at the park again anyway, throwing frisbee with a friend, I did some more ‘sprints’ up the hill. I’m a curiosity-driven person, I don’t know if that comes across as why these sprint things are so interesting to me. Eventually, I started jogging slowly back to the start, sometimes, and immediately would sprint again. Or I’d walk back, walk some more, walk even more, stand stationary for a bit, and then sprint again. After my sprints, to continue with the theme of applying impulse to the balls of my feet, I would/will hop on the balls of my feet, bouncing with two feet a few times and then landing firmly on one foot, to try to catch as much force as I could on each side. I could feel the gentle soreness the next day, always. I’d always evaluate how I felt the next day, and never pushed anything ‘hard’ or ‘got worked’ or anything, still have not, in any particular session. It feels so good in the balls of my feet, the arches, calves, supporting structures. I have found tons of interestingness in the simple observation and sensation of the soreness. I don’t count things, either. I don’t count reps, steps, distance, time. I start when my breath is still and slow, and I usually stop before it’s much more than ‘slightly elevated’. I got the entire sprint workout from a recent warm day, here. The first video, it was a bit too sunny, so I moved into the shade of some trees, and finished the sprints, in the second timelapse video. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. It feels so nice getting sunshine on my skin (colorado, afterall) and grass, dirt, moisture on my feet. My body feels so good, months later, still doing these sprint things. SO GOOD! I’ve been doing kettlebell swings throughout, too. Sometimes on days I’d run I’d skip the swings. When there’s snow out and I don’t sprint, I’m vastly likely to do some kettlebell swings. Often I’ll do both, because both the park and the gym is ‘right on the way’ for me, to many places. The park is close enough I can walk there, or I’ll take my scooter and convert a 12 minute walk to a 4 minute scoot. My brain and mood enjoy the experience. I’ll often take a frisbee and text my normal frisbee throwing friend(s), and he’ll sometimes join me for some frisbee tossing. I might frisbee before, during, or after the sprints. I’ve done these sprints with Eden. We were walking through cheesman already, she was asleep in the jogger, so I parked her jogger where I usually sprint, in the shade of a tree, and did the running right next to it. Then tom met me for some frisbee, we tossed for a while, then Eden woke up and was ready to depart, so we did. the whole thing is quite peaceful, full of ease, effortlessness. It’s nice to not spend a single dollar on traditional running gear. I don’t like the impact of doing anything on asphalt, and I won’t run on a road that is cambered, because it feels devestating to one’s body, to run across a slope like that. I don’t have to deal with cars, in this sprinting thing, either, and I don’t hear any engines nearby, unlike running on a road. When traveling, out of town, without access to Cheesman Park, and still wanting to do these sprints, I modified it to run in the playing field of a school near where I’ve visited. It was all fine, by the way. I prefer to run up a hill, yet this format seems to work on a level surface, well enough. The whole workout can be done in 5 minutes, or, if I’m feeling a longer session, it will stretch across many more minutes. Grand conclusions I’m so aware of how some of my skeleton and muscles function together often-enough to maintain the shape of a box, other times these systems function to form something of a column. The column of my spine is very perceivable along side the ‘box’ of my torso. I’m aware of holding tension/stiffness/maintaining a position through my whole body, in various situations. my climbing feels better. way better. My shoulders feel strong, my fingers feel strong, my core feels strong. It’s been interesting to experience the transfer of power from holding the round kb handle, for instance, and the ‘c’ shape one’s hand makes when crimping on steep holds. This is the ‘active hand position’ tyler nelson talks about. Being able to hold that ‘c’ is easier to me now, dramatically so, having ‘trained’ it, unintentionally, with kettlebells. I feel light on my feet when walking around. I still do not like to train, io don’t think it’ll change. I am thrilled that with almost zero time I get so much. The sprinting is also ‘walk barefoot in the grass in a park in the sun’ which obviously we should all be so lucky as to get a little bit of that every day. It’s nice for my 🧠. usually I have earplugs in and can only hear my own breath, when I do the sprints. And kettlebells. I wear ear plugs most of the time I’m not at home, and even some of the time I am. 😬 Ear plug wearing while exercising seems to make it effortless for me to perceive my own breath. I feel light on the wall. the one-arm swings + sprints helped me feel the intense usage of arms/shoulder girdle/the sides/front/back/bottom of the ‘box’ of my core. (Do not neglect the bottom of the box of the core! Kegles & pelvic floor strength is for everyone with a pelvis!) Updates on sprints after two more weeks I’m still quite pleased. I did some unexpectedly long walks on concrete, amidst some of the prior exercise, and I felt much stronger, most of the time, than usual. I think it would have been too many miles if I hadn’t been getting stronger. I did like three seven-mile days in a row, all back to back. I got a slight over-use tendon sensitivity on one of my feet. There was, and to a much lesser degree still is, pain around the movement of lifting my right toe, entirely coherent with a regular walking motion. I modified my gait a little, when it was really bad, and didn’t use it until it felt mostly better, and I’ve been easing back into using it. It was hurting quite appreciably for a few days, and now five days later it’s still delicate and I retain some of my accommodations. Sooo I wish I hadn’t done that to myself. There was a day after the big huge days of walking where I thought “hmm, this feels like it is damaged” and I went on a bit more of a barefoot walk in Cheesman than I wish I had. That night is when I realized it was pretty sensitive. The toe looks/feels like a bruise along the top of it, close to what it would feel like if the nail had been beaten into the nail bed (like after a long run, something I experienced often enough marathon training). Truly, this is the only pain of substance I’ve experienced. All the rest of the pain has been pain of interest, where I note slight sensitivities and sorenesses as I move around, in certain ways, body positions, motions, and it’s all, still, interesting. I appreciate how I’ve felt pleasent stress inside of my knee, the tops of the shin bones. I like how my knees and ankles feel. The sprints still feel worthwhile, and the time walking/bounding barefoot continues to be time very well spent. Updates on kettlebells after two more weeks some gyms have kettlebells that have rough, textured handles. The high-to-me weights are therefore rough on the skin of my hands. some kettlebell handles are too rough for me to feel comfortable with the swings. I could feel myself trying to accommodate it somehow and it was hurting, so I did a lot less reps. The skin at the base the fourth finger always gets pulled by the kettlebell, picks up callouses that have never torn but have sometimes felt close. Ideal kettelbell handles look like brushed metal, polished smooth. Don’t forget the chalk. I’m still getting lots of climbing-specific benefits from the one-armed swings. I’ve now done both lower-weight higher rep one-arm swings, and higher-weight lower-rep schemes. It’s all been interesting to me, which is good enough. It continues to feel deeply supportive of strong climbing. I’m sorta annoyingly still telling lots of people about this strange magic that helps my back feel great, and everything else too. If you’ve done more than skim a few paragraphs of this article, you’ve probably spent more time reading than your first two kettlebell workouts would take. I was having issues where the heaviest swings were pulling at the callouses at the base of each hand’s 4th finger. Eventually I noticed that if I sqeeze the handle a bit more at the bottom of the swing, it seems to pull less hard on the skin. So, if the skin in the hands starts hurting, squeeze harder? My fingers and hands feel nice. I’m not surprised, as often-enough I’ve felt profoundly sore in the small muscles inside my hands themselves, and all over the upper body. Much of the fatigue and soreness moves in waves through the shoulders and ‘shrugging’ motions. I am really curious for someone else to replicate this, doing lots of heavy two handed kettle bell swings, and eventually trying one-handed (heavy) kettlebell swings. I did one arm swings recently with 65 lbs, which is like 48% of my bodyweight. Heaviest I’ve done yet, and felt ‘lighter’ than the first time I tried 55 lb one-armed swings. My form and posture keeps getting better, and have I mentioned I feel stronger? More notes from a few weeks later I’ve regularly been dealing with the skin on my hands suffering under the weight of the kettlebell. HUGE NEWS! When I squeeze the kettlebell handles more tightly, much of the discomfort related to the skin pulling goes away. It took years of swinging a kettlebell for me to make this connection, I’ve never heard it articulated before. 🧐 I was obviously squeezing enough to hold onto it, but the skin was ‘sloshing’ around under the kettlebell. this is now minimized when I squeeze the bell harder. Huzzah. Related Reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (tyler nelson instagram) Driven by Compression Progress a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints a photo album containing two videos - two-handed swings, reps 80-100, with a 75 lb kettlebell, and one-handed at 55 lbs Footnotes
We are shokunin. Last week I was in Ojai, California, for True’s Founder Camp.[1] James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee was in conversation with Jeff Veen, and one of the attendees asked him: “How do you maintain such high quality?” Freeman answers, “‘Maintaining’ is a trigger word for me. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There is no maintaining.” That struck me as he said it. It immediately reminded me of shokunin. Master woodworker and shokunin himself, Tashio Odate describes: Shokunin means not only having technical skill, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness... a social obligation to work his best for the general welfare of the people, [an] obligation both material and spiritual. The Art of Fine Tools If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” Jiro Ono himself is a shokunin, and I think of his lifelong pursuit of making sushi better every day. Compare that to the rise of supermarket sushi, which can be passable and satiate an immediate need, but never reaches the levels and highs of what master sushi chefs can achieve during their tenure. Sachiko Matsuyama in a piece titled, “Shokunin and Devotion,” writes: When I take guests to visit shokunin at their studios, they often ask how long it takes to make one item. The shokunin, sometimes annoyed by the question, answers: ‘A lifetime’. Among shokunin that I often work with, there are some who are carrying on their family business, and others who have courageously jumped into the field of craftsmanship to become one simply through their own strong will. The independent web, where people are making homes on the internet, on their own domains — creating, building, and sharing with the world — stands in contrast to the walled-off prisons of social media networks. The curation and craftsmanship that individuals develop over time — iterating, tending, evolving, and continuously improving — results in a collection of work that embodies their creators’ intentions and aspirations for care. I’m okay with worse too. We learn from regression or dilution, and that can provide perspective to return to better. You need to know the lows to appreciate the highs. In this current moment with AI reaching a fever pitch in the industry, there’s a palpable tension between those of us who have been working on the Internet for decades, and the young upstarts embracing vibe coding and building with almost completely generative codebases. Many of us possess deep knowledge and experience, having journeyed through different outcomes and encountered those moments when things worsen or improve. We design and code for better, and we design and code because we’re practicing a craft for our lifetimes: Internet shokunin. Full disclosure: I work for True Ventures as a fractional creative director and product designer. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.” It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are… read article
Quite a marvelous season after a protracted Northern winter, spring is the hoariest of subjects for a poem. How many ways are there to be jubilant or render the sensation of “cavorting with the milkmaids,” as an old friend once put it? The effort usually comes off as hackneyed or embarrassingly neo-pagan, like the carrying-on of a dim, histrionic teenager. As close as Philip Larkin ever approaches this state is in his spring poem “Coming” (The Less Deceived, 1955): “On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon -- And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy.” James Booth in his biography of Larkin calls it “one of his most serenely beautiful poems.” It’s a poem for adults who understand that the world is a complicated place, where happiness is fragile and precious. Typically for Larkin, the phrasing and word choice is unexpected and precise (a rare combination): “Its fresh-peeled voice / Astonishing the brickwork.” So too, “forgotten boredom,” seemingly an oxymoron. Thanks to Larkin we can learn to value flickering spots of happiness. Someone said there are no happy lifetimes, only happy moments. I opened The Complete Poems (ed. Archie Burnett, 2012) again after reading Peter Hitchens’ review of it in the June 11, 2012, issue of National Review. The title is a good one, “Stark Beauties.” I think it’s always a good idea for a reviewer, at least in passing, to address the new or first-time reader, and not make too many assumptions about what he knows. This is especially true in the case of Larkin, who since his death in 1985 has been libeled by self-righteous moralists. His Complete Poems is among the rare essential books published in recent decades, one to shelve alongside Hardy, Robinson, Yeats and Auden. Hitchens writes: “What might the new reader, unprejudiced by reputation, see in this odd, ugly man’s poetry? There is first of all a great deal of gentle kindness, not very well hidden behind a grumpy and unsympathetic public persona.” Hitchens devote additional attention to Larkin’s other spring poem, “The Trees” (High Windows, 1974): “I have never been able to read the lines ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’ without hot tears forming behind my eyes. I have no real idea why this happens (it just happened again) but I know that it does and that these two immensely simple lines contain a mystery of language which I shall never solve in this life.” Larkin is a poet of deep feeling but never in a manner that is self-serving, like that teenager mentioned earlier. He reminds me of something Yvor Winters wrote about Gerard Manley Hopkins in The Function of Criticism (1967): “[T]he poem is a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, a judgment both rational and emotional.”
