As Dick Clark and I get ready for the New Year, there are so many different things on my mind and there seems little chance of tying them all together the way I prefer to do. I want to write long personal notes to so many friends, but if I start that I will never finish, and I will never get to write anything here. So I will start writing here and see if I end up anywhere worthy of sending this on to Ned and Nick and Steve and Mark and Stewart and Kip and Larry and Rena and Zach and Bill and Ariane and Hex and Nancy and Paulie and Pete and, well, good Lord, the list never ends.
I had a great workout at the gym this morning, and I feel fresh as a daisy. 65 minutes on the elliptical with an average heart rate of 147, for an even 900 calories burned over 5.13 "miles". My maximum heart rate was 167. This may mean I was briefly dead (as opposed to "beastly dead", Buck Mulligan's taunt to Stephen Daedalus about his mother over breakfast in the tower), since a 57-year-old man's heart is not supposed to beat more than 163 times a minute. I did not see a white light, but the movie Hairspray was playing on a big screen in front of me. But it had also been playing when I got on the machine.
My best discovery during my workout was a machine I had never noticed before, called the Multi-Hip. (This is not, at least for these purposes, some kind of metrosexual reference). I saw another guy using it while I was doing torso rotations with 90# of weight. I asked him a few questions, set the Multi-Hip at 50#, and did 25 repeats with each leg. This machine may help me a lot. The muscles around my hips, quads, and pelvic area are a tad screwed up from various injuries, too much running, whatever it had been. It often gets to the point where I have to lift my right leg with my arms to set my right foot on something 2 feet off the ground. This can be embarrassing, but more importantly it limits my mobility. I will begin using this machine faithfully to see if it turns me into a 20-year-old again. The sign on the machine said it would exercise my hip flexor and my hip excelsior. It is good to know, after so many years, that I still have a body part called "Excelsior."
Excelsior!
(Now I am disappointed. After not being able to find "hip excelsior" on Wikipedia I called my ex, a physical therapist. She said the sign probably said "hip extensor." Oh, well. I'm going to indulge myself by leaving the last couple of sentences in anyway.)
I spoke with Joe, the front desk guy at my gym, about this being a busy time of year at the gym.
I will finish this year healthier, and smaller, than I was when it began. That may be the best a 50-something guy can hope for. I will make some New Year's Resolutions, as I usually do. One will be that I finish next year healthier, and smaller, than I begin it.
Another resolution I will make will involve reading. I did not read nearly enough this year. Or, to be more precise, I did not read enough quality writing. I read a lot for information, which is all well and good. But for much of the past 50 years many of the times when my life had really soared have involved reading the soaring works of others, and I owe it to myself to build more time for this into the occasionally cramped routines of my daily life.
At various stages of our lives, reading great novels, stories, and narrative non-fiction teaches us what we need to know to proceed.
Reading McMurtry's The Last Picture Show taught me a lot in 1967 (when I had so much to learn!): how to leave a small town, why I needed to leave, how to handle the loss of people I looked up to, and how to get close to pretty girls like Jacy in spite of all. Reading A Moveable Feast taught me a lot about how writing and women and ego and economics could fit into a man's life before he shot himself. Reading Lady Chatterley's Lover in tandem with Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death taught me how carnality could kindle its own kind of romance and even double as as a philosophy of living. Reading Portrait taught me the place of baby talk in great fiction. Reading Michael Jaffe's Dance Real Slow taught me a lot about being a good father. Reading Richard Ford's Rock Springs taught me a lot about handling my sadness about the struggles and ultimate disappearance of my own good father. Reading Coover's The Universal Baseball Association suggested to me that the stuff of powerful fiction could exist anywhere. It goes on and on.
Now, I have been reading a book that Ned suggested. Brian Morton's Starting Out in the Evening. Jesus. (I am sorry if I say that too much). This book is teaching me so much. A lot of it is about getting older myself, and a lot of it is about handling relationships with people who are older, and people who are younger, and people who inhabit our imaginations as what we want to become, or retreat from, or embrace. It is gold-standard stuff. There is a movie out just now, adapted from it, and to tell you the truth I cannot imagine how the movie can do justice to the book, but I have no right to address this topic, since I have not seen the movie and I am only half way through the book.
Some, but not all, of the best books are books of exquisite sentences and paragraphs. This book by Brian Morton, of whom I had never read a word until a few days ago, is the kind of book that makes me want to keep a "commonplace book" to write down all the memorable sentences and paragraphs I come upon in my literary existence. I am promising myself, right now, as I type this, that I will only allow myself to provide one brief sample from the Morton book here, but believe me, I could easily start and not be able to stop until there were a hundred. So here is one, offered with the hope that I am not exceeding anyone's definition of fair-use sampling:
As the heavy bus shuddered back into the traffic, Schiller had a revelation. A theory of human nature blossomed between the bus stop on Lexington and the bus stop on Park.Thanks, Ned.
The primary human need, he decided--stronger than the need for food or sex or love--is the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world. One makes one's mark according to one's capacities. If you have talents, you exercise them: if you're Mozart you write The Magic Flute. And if you don't have any talents, you thrust yourself into the path of others in cruder ways: you wear stupid T-shirts or you become the impresario of the back of the bus. And if your life has been stunted from the first by violence and harsh surroundings, then you steal things or destroy things or hurt people: anything, anything, to leave an image of yourself in other people's minds.
And I need say no more about how important it is for me to read for a while each day. From a good book.
Friday Soundtrack
Whoa. I really like this group. My daughter Adrienne turned me on to them with a CD she gave me for Christmas. They played at her arts group's 5th anniversary party.This song is not on the CD, but it is very cool. I'm not crazy about people saying things like this is "Dylan meets Jonathan King meets Lisa Loeb meets Adam Duritz meets Cat Stevens," so I won't say that.
The CD rocks, too. I just finished importing it to my iPod shuffle. You can also buy it as an MP3 file directly from Amazon for cheap.
"9 Dreams and Some Whistling" by King Straggler
The lead singer is a fellow named John Hawkes, who is not the novelist John Hawkes whom my friend Ned interviewed for The Harvard Advocate in 1970, around the time he interviewed William H. Gass and long before he interviewed Richard Ford. Neither of the John Hawkeses is going to open many doors with his face. My daughter Adrienne? That's a different story.
Saturday Soundtrack
Off to the Newtowne Grille in a couple to split-screen the Pats and the Celts for a well-deserved Saturday night off, but, you know, it is important to start my engine with some great Saturday night music.....This is the Knack at Carnegie Hall in 1979. Open the windows and pump it up!
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