Breach of Close

Six or eight, does it matter? Miguel Iglesias, Cover boy for MH Spain 12/10

I admit it, I read Men’s Health. Religiously. In the same way my Italian Catholic family used go to church every Sunday: partly out of habit, partly out of a belief that it couldn’t really hurt and in the end might actually help. And with the same sense that I’ve heard (read) it all before, the same certainty that I won’t be surprised.

I still buy it every month. Sometimes, if I have a flight to make, more than once a month. (I never run out because there are two editions in English, one for the UK and another for the USA, and then there’re the German and Greek editions, all available at the airport.) I can’t help myself. I find myself at the newsstand gazing at the impossibly lean, impossibly well-defined muscular model on the cover and I suffer a temporary memory block. I never seem to recall how unsatisfied I was by the immediately previous issue.

I still don’t know why I buy it. It’s not just or indeed even because of the eye candy. I’m no longer the awkward 14-year-old boy sheepishly buying his first muscle mag in a deli store down the road from his parent’s house in a boring working-class suburb in New Jersey. (I was too scared to buy a second issue. There were only two reasons why someone would buy a magazine like that and I was obviously too scrawny to be lifting weights).

Maybe it’s the hope of finding the perfect workout. Not the one that will transform me into a clone of the cover model. I have no such delusions. I’m fairly happy with my body. I wouldn’t post a photo of it anywhere, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. I have two-thirds of a six-pack (if I stand really erect and lean back a bit and the light is right), but the other third is hidden under a layer of skin that was made for a midsection a size or two larger than the one I have now. Most of my life I swam. Now you think swimmer’s body, lean, right? But most swimmers I know over 30 have more body fat than, say, runners. It helps keep us buoyant. When I started training for the triathlon and running and biking a lot, I must have shaved off a few layers of abdominal fat, leaving me with a slight but still noticeable creasing of the skin, like a bedsheet that’s not been pulled taut. It’s a slightly weird body but it’s mine.

No, by perfect workout I mean the one that will actually get me to enjoy working out with weights. I could spend all my workout time cycling or swimming or running, but I know endurance is only a fourth of fitness.

I still haven’t found it. The perfect workout, I mean. And I’ve been reading MH for more than a decade. Always with a tinge of guilt. It’s like eating a granola bar for breakfast, the appearance of sustenance without real nutritional value, the illusion of oats for people who don’t like oatmeal. Or in the case of MH, the illusion of science without the context, methodical deliberateness, and caution of science. Whatever science is behind the hundreds of health and fitness tips MH dispenses each month, it’s been so stripped down, processed, adulterated and pumped up with promise that it bears as much resemblance to the real thing as the wheat in a Twinkie does to Triticum aestivum.

But mostly things are left out. Unavoidable, I suppose, as MH articles have shrunk over time to paragraph-length items and even one-sentence tips. Like this tidbit I found in a list of “Three Secrets to Keeping Your 20/20 Vision”: “Eating papaya will protect and improve your eyesight. The reason being that its levels of lutein leave eyes 80% less likely to suffer from age-related muscular degeneration”. Oh, and we get a reference, of sorts: Florida International University. But it’s an intriguing claim. Who doesn’t want to protect his eyesight? And even “improve it”? And that image of muscles around the eye degenerating, growing all flabby and decrepit, well, that’s downright scary.

If you actually dig up the study, it tells a somewhat different story. First being that it has to do with degeneration not of the muscle but of the macula, the pigmented spot near the center of the retina that plays a crucial role in central vision. The spot is yellow because of, yes, its high concentrations of lutein and zeaxanthin, carotenoids found in foods like kale, turnip greens, broccoli, swiss chard and you guessed it, papaya. But what the actual study says it that the “[donors] in the study in the highest quartile of lutein and zeaxanthin levels had an 82% lower risk for AMD compared with those in the lowest quartile.” It doesn’t say eating papaya lowers the risk of AMD. It says, “The results are consistent with a theoretical model that proposes an inverse association between risk of AMD and the amounts of L and Z in the retina.” But that’s not much of an attention-getter and even lousier as a tip.

Another item. Number 7 in a list of eight life-extending super-foods. “Coffee. Four cups a day reduce your risk of dying of heart disease by 53%. Brooklyn College.” Wow. 53%! Make mine a venti. Except that the protective effect was observed only in participants who were over 65 (and who were not severely hypertensive). It wasn’t observed for younger participants. The conclusions in the study form a model of careful scientific reasoning and well-written scientific prose, beginning with the following; “Our results do not allow us to conclude whether caffeine or the caffeinated beverages were responsible for the protective effect. Three of our findings suggest that caffeine is a possible causal agent…” after which the authors discuss the evidence for and against these hypotheses.

I sometimes think there must be a random generator of health and nutrition advice at MH. You start out with something like “new research has shown” or one of its dozen variations, add an exercise, vegetable, or mineral, couple it with a verb of change like “increases”, “lowers” or “improves”, add in a percent (even 3% will do, even if it’s nearly statistically insignificant) and, optionally a wisecrack at the end or in the title, and you’ve got it.

I know it sounds formulaic. But that’s the point. Like other genres—the obituary and wedding announcement, pornography or crime stories—MH has its, its own discourse and its own set of conventions. Here are a few I’ve noticed:

Advice is often bundled in numbered packages.

55 High-Energy Super-foods. 29 Foods for Rock-Hard Abs, 5 Quick Fixes for Stressed-out Guys. 13 Drugs That Turn Back Time, 7 Pains You Must Never Ignore. (right, as if I could ignore persistent painful urination). Curiously enough, these recommendations seem to come in odd numbered sets, and more often than not in primes. I suppose this gives an authoritative aura of completeness and precision to the set; “10” and “a dozen” are fuzzy, “29” never is.

Or couched as commands.

Make Good Sex Great (and in case you were wondering)—Start Tonight. Lose Your Gut. Build Big Arms. The title is more a promise and encouragement than an order, more exhortative than imperative. “You really must try this terrific workout routine (and even bigger arms will be yours)”. Though I suspect if the writers gave full rein to their cynicism, the mood would be desiderative (if we had one in English): “You want to have a flat stomach”… but you and I both know there’s no way you’re ever going to shed that ring of lard around your abdomen, but hell, that’s how we sell magazines.

Advice is revelation.

With your copy of MH you gain access to a treasure of esoteric knowledge acquired over the years from the Navy Seals, football players and a slew of stars of action and adventure films. In November 2003 the magazine proclaims, “Six Pack Secrets Revealed—it’s easier than you think.” Six years later, the cover shouts, “Six Pack Secrets Revealed—sculpt abs on the beach.” In March 2011, MH trumpets, “Six Pack Secrets Revealed—unlock your abs (from the sofa)”. But maybe they weren’t the same secrets.

Advice is getting easier…

Did you notice the move from the beach to the sofa? I think it’s representative of a broader shift in MH over time towards less taxing and less time-consuming workouts, the shedding of discipline in favor of quick-fix solutions. In August 2002 MH told us, “Lose Your Gut” but by August 2010 it had become much more fun: “Lose Your Gut with Ice Cream”.

But it’s also part of MH’s hedonism. A case of having your cake—or ice cream—and eating it, too. In its April 2011 issue MH ran a short piece on foods that purportedly cut the risk of hypertension: celery, watermelon, bananas and olive oil. Like most of the “health” items in the magazine it’s marred by sloppy science reporting but as part of a broader initiative to raise its readers’ awareness of the risks off hypertension and to get them to eat more vegetables and fruit, it’s admirable. In the same issue, though, in a piece on “Seductive Suppers” there’s a recipe for Asian pork belly (!) that has almost an entire day’s sodium content in just one serving.

The mellowing process may have something to do with a change in readership. Judging by the growing preponderance of articles focusing on building abs and burning fat, I’d say its readers are fatter and arguably lazier than those in the early 00s. But paradoxically with perhaps greater, if more unrealistic, expectations. The December 2002 issue ran a piece called “Add an Inch to Your Arms”, a year later it was “Add 2 Inches to Your Biceps” and six years later, the stakes had risen even further: “Add 3 Inches to Your Biceps”. Oh, and by the way, in May of last year the six-pack acquired two new cans to become an eight-pack. Just in case you got your six and turned smug.

…And ever more confusing.

The magazine desperately needs a continuity editor. It’s rife with the journalistic equivalent of the scene in Ocean Eleven where Linus and Rusty are at the Bellagio waiting for Tess; Rusty has a goblet of shrimp cocktail in his hand, the cameras changes angle and then it’s a plate. And then it’s a schooner again. In April 2011 MH counsels us to switch from orange juice to apple juice to “[prevent] the formation of ‘senile’ proteins [sic] in the brain that can lead to Alzheihmer’s”. Just as I was about to toss the juicer to keep those nasty demented little proteins at bay (just for the record, its senile plaque), the May issue comes out and advises me to switch from apple juice to orange juice. Apparently it has a much higher antioxidant count. But I’m still implementing the January issue. I’m sticking with pomegranate juice.

Tina Barney, Yellow Wall

My protégé Menander left to work for the enemy. Before decamping, he put together a long list of reasons why he was leaving–most of which followed the theme of overworked and underpaid–and mailed it to senior management.

It was clear from the strident tone of the text that his theses were composed not “out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light,” nor as an overture to negotiations, but out of embittered disappointment. But they were also indirectly an accusation  of failure—mine. A failure to defend and promote his interests. A failure of mentorship.

He must have been working on his j’accuse for a long time, collecting and storing evidence of the slights he suffered and the achievements that went unrewarded.  He was always good at keeping records.

I had never seen this stridency before, or the arrogance (though I had noted his over-confidence on more than one occasion). Or the anger. It must have been there all along but I suppose he didn’t feel comfortable expressing it to me. Another problem in our relationship I had missed.

As now as I re-read his letter I have a hard time reconciling its author to the young man I had spent mentoring for the last two years. I still hear a different voice, a soft and shallow, almost adolescent tenor—though he was in his early 30s—made even more vulnerable by a minor but noticeable speech impediment of rasping, guttural r’s.

Menander looked a bit like the giant I remember from the illustrations in a book of Jack and the Beanstalk that my uncle used to read to me when I was a child—all torso and legs but with a small skull. He was well over 6 feet tall, with the trunk-like thighs and broad chest of the college sprinter he once was but with a head that seemed to belong to someone of much smaller stature. It was if his hormones had exhausted themselves in building so much bone and flesh that they could no longer percolate high enough to reach above his neck.

That was unkind. And it doesn’t feel right, even though his disloyalty hurts. I want to remember other things about him, like his winning smile and contagious enthusiasm, his devotion to his projects and yes, also his devotion to me. I genuinely liked him, and I thought he liked me, which is perhaps why his betrayal stings so much.

We had talked about his frustration about not getting the recognition he thought he deserved. My measured praise was not enough, he said. He knew that I had been his advocate in the organization but that, too, in the end, did not mean much without tangible benefits. I told him that with the economy in the deepest recession since the war and the organization obliged to start reducing its workforce, this was not a propitious time to be arguing for a raise. I thought I had convinced him. But apparently only for a while.

He must have grown impatient at waiting. He had always been impatient. He was so eager to get the answer that the closer he came to the end of a project the more careless he became. He was already prone to over-estimating his abilities; as he rushed toward the finish, he would also become more over-confident of his data and methods. He didn’t have a real feel for numbers, though he could manipulate them well enough, so that when anomalies appeared in his data they wouldn’t set off the alarm they should have. He didn’t think, “if a number looks strange, there’s usually a good reason for it, and the reason is more often not a mistake.” When he was rushed he didn’t think at all.

But he was also just as impatient with people. He believed most of his colleagues and most of our clients were dumb and undisciplined. In Menander’s world the user was the enemy at the gate, poised to sow disorder and sully the sanctity of data. Users, he said, never read instructions and when they did, they misunderstood them. He was driven to reduce the possibility of user error to as close to zero as possible, even it meant introducing new problems. The price of control is always the loss of flexibility to deal with exceptions. And the world is filled with exceptions that cannot just be willed out of existence.

Admittedly, assuming that users are cretins isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it pays to imagine the stupidest things that a user might do in your new application and then design ways to prevent it from happening or, if that’s not possible, capturing it and dealing with it before it does damage. But showing users you think they are dumb is a bad thing. Menander was unloved by his colleagues. Very unloved. He claimed that didn’t bother him. But I wonder now if Menander left in part because he was lonely.

I wonder a lot about Menander, now that’s he gone. It bothers me terribly that he left the way he did. I feel used. I had invested energy and resources in teaching him, and political capital in advocating for him. I shared with him knowledge and confidential information.  I encouraged his autonomy by assigning him projects he could be responsible for. I trusted him. I did so believing he would treat the objects of my trust with the same care that I did.

I’m not a fool. I’ve been burned enough in the past by spiteful lovers and disloyal friends –luckily not often—that I carefully choose whom I trust. Menander was not some passive object of my confidence. He worked to convince me of his loyalty.

That’s what hurts the most—the suspicion he was just pretending to believe in our future together as a team, while all along like “honest Iago” he was planning how to leverage what he was entrusted with for his own personal advantage and at the expense of my institution and colleagues. But that can’t be right. Our relationship was marked by a growing friendship and mutuality and imbued with an unmistakable sense of pleasure in working together. It can’t have been all pretense.  Seeing Menander as a scheming, theatre-playing manipulator and myself as a victim of his treachery would be painful, yes, but I would feel more stupid than hurt.

At times I want to think that he knew that his frustration with his salary and working conditions could not be resolved and rather than let it poison our relationship, decided to leave. But this is just a borrowed fantasy. Menander was not playing Sarah to my Bendrix.  He was just looking out for himself.

Realizing that he simply stopped caring for our relationship for reasons of self-interest is vastly more painful than believing he had plotted his treason. But it is the truth. He grew tired of waiting. Even if he really wasn’t worth twice the pay he was asking for, he felt he was. Maybe he isn’t even working at our competitor. “There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go,” Tennessee Williams once said. Menander’s time had come and whatever we shared as mentor and protégé, or indeed as friends, must have meant very little to him now.

I hadn’t been betrayed. I’d been abandoned.

Luc Tuymans, Insomnia, 1988

Most people fall asleep soon after they lie down, and if they do awake in the middle of the night, fall back to sleep quite quickly. I don’t fall, I crawl into sleep, especially if I awake in the night, which I almost always do. I then need to inch my way back to unconsciousness. I am a snail encumbered with the heavy weight of a body that refuses to surrender. The whole idea of falling, the sense of relinquishment, the suddenness of it all, is foreign to me

I don’t sleep well, and haven’t for the last three or four years. I wake up after three or four hours of sleep. Everyone wakes up in the course of their sleep, but sound sleepers don’t remember it. But I really wake up. I feel as if I could put on my running shoes and do a brisk 10K run.

I don’t get back to sleep easily. Instead I lay adrift in a sea that is neither wakefulness nor sleep. I am on a raft that floats in a muted grayish fluid, an interstitial space that is vulnerable to the slightest disruption.

The painter Luc Tuymans arrestingly captured this no-man’s land in his appropriately entitled work, Insomnia. He said that the painting represented“the idea of a state in which the body has lost its feeling, in which all material loses its normal concreteness, and floats in space, as if weightless.”

I float. I lie on a raft hoping I will go under at any moment. But I bump into an outcropping of rock right before I slip into unconsciousness. Again and again.

I knew this wasn’t normal. I knew there’s something wrong.

It took me a long time to admit I had a problem. I suppose I thought it would just go away on its own, as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had come on. I was afraid that if I admitted it, if I named it, it would acquire an existence of its own. It would take shape. It would become a condition. Which, of course, it did.

People who sleep well—and even those who experience isolated bouts of insomnia—inevitably ascribe poor sleep to stress or depression or anxiety. It’s as if it’s your fault. I know, of course, that psychological factors come into play, are often at the forefront of insomnia. But if it were all psychological then why didn’t I sleep better when I was happy? I slept poorly whether I was under pressure at work or on a late summer retreat to an out-of-the-way island where the most taxing decision was which beach to go to. I slept poorly in the rush of early enthusiasm that marks a new boyfriend and in the still equanimity of solitude. I don’t even have all that much stress in my life.

I was convinced there was a physiological or neurochemical basis to my insomnia. Was it too much or too little exercise? A glass of wine too much? What about calcium and Vitamin D? Maybe it was the aspartame in the whey powder I used to turbo-charge my wake-up smoothie? Electrolyte loss? The hour I drank my last cup of coffee? Not enough magnesium? I had read a study, admittedly an isolated one, that claimed that magnesium supplements decreased the levels of post-exercise cortisol in athletes. And I had read that high night-time cortisol contributed to poor sleep. (aturally I took the magnesium supplements for a month. And naturally they didn’t help.

I’m a great believer in data and their potential to illuminate, too much so for my good I suppose. I thought if I could just record enough observations with enough variables a pattern would emerge that would lead to a diagnosis of my sleeplessness. Dieter says I’m a rationalist in the guise of an empiricist. By this I suppose he means my idealization of mathematics and the certainty I ascribe to the deductive potential of massive amounts of data. He may be right.

Maybe I wasn’t recording the right variables, or I didn’t have enough data points, but there was no pattern. Except Sundays. I almost always slept poorly on Sunday night (but the other nights of the other week were pretty shitty, too, so no big breakthrough there). Oh, and that I slept ok after a joint. But that was true as well with antihistamines, and no great revelation. I wasn’t eager to take up either as a remedy. I knew that drugs of any kind offered only temporary relief and eventually made it more difficult to fall or stay asleep.  I recognized I needed help and booked an appointment with a sleep doctor.

The clinic was housed off the corridor in a wing of one of the late 19th century buildings of the hospital, and had the high ceilings, massive doors and drafts of the original architecture. It comprised a suite of two rooms with hospital beds and a waiting area that doubled as the observation deck for the staff that monitored the patients’ sleep. Along one wall was a bank of PCs that were linked to the machines in other rooms, which at night were cabled to the patients’ skulls. I flashed on the plugged pods in the Matrix. It was eerie, but the idea of measurement appealed to me, and I imagined the graphs of alpha, beta and delta waves that my brain would trace along the  screen and then on a scroll of flimsy would like some hieratic papyrus finally reveal the meaning. A pattern that would explain my sleeplessness.

Behind the waiting area with these machines was a small room that could once have been a utility closet but now served as the doctor’s office, where I was now sitting being interviewed, having filled out a lengthy questionnaire about my sleep behavior. The results of which, it seemed, were piss-poor.

“I want to take a look at how you sleep. From what you’ve said and the results of the questionnaire, I believe an overnight sleep study is warranted,” the doctor said.

“But I won’t be able to sleep here,” I said.

“Oh, everyone says that but practically everyone does,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to fall asleep with electrodes and sensors attached to your head, nose, chest and a finger. Oh, and a leg, too.

It was wrong from the start. The skimpy pillow, the light that seeped into my room from the adjacent waiting room, the persistent tugging at my scalp from the electrode paste that was drying out. Something didn’t fit properly, I think it was the oximeter on my finger; it triggered an alarm to notify the technician, who would have to come in and readjust the sensor.

I gave up after five hours and asked to leave. I was apparently one of those few people who do not sleep during a sleep study, though the doctor said I did have a few episodes of stage 1 non-REM sleep. He booked me for another session, but told me not to sleep for more than two or three hours the night before. Which I did, and slept enough in the next session to generate data to rule out a slew of conditions including apnea and restless leg syndrome and to leave me as clueless as I was before I consulted the sleep specialist, with the exception of a sheet of tips he had given me on sleep hygiene, which I began gradually to implement.

I put a shade over the glass insert on my bedroom door. I didn’t turn on the lights if I had to get up to go to the bathroom.  Other rules, like not reading in bed or foregoing a glass or two of wine at night, proved harder to put into practice. And ever the incorrigible data collector, I still squint at the alarm clock to read the time when I wake up in the middle of the night.

I found an iPhone app for guided relaxation. It featured the voice of a Scotsman named Andrew Johnson. After guiding me into relaxing my muscles and breathing more deeply, he tells me that I am at the top of a flight of white marble stairs that looks out on a favorite place of mine. I think of the row of apple trees that stood at the edge of a bluff at my grandfather’s place in the country. The low-limbed trees were easy to climb, and I remember spending late afternoons nestled in one of those trees looking out over the rye fields below, pretending I was a soldier keeping vigil in a castle turret. The voice invites me to imagine this place as fully as I can. I do. I can almost detect the faintly sour, cider-like smell of the apples in the fall. The voice asks me to descend the stairs ever so slowly, and counts off the steps. One, two, three… There are ten of them. I know because I always make it to the bottom. Without falling asleep.

I will go back to collecting and plotting my data. I will observe more variables. I will measure my mood. If I could do blood tests at home, I would record the results of these as well. But how much do I need to collect? What if I missing a key variable? The only way to be sure is to record everything.

Then I think of the map in Borges’ story, On Exactitude in Science. The one-paragraph story tells of a map of an empire that its cartographers had drawn on a scale of 1:1. Its size was exactly that of the empire itself and represented it, point for point. But this vast map proved to be useless, as later generations soon discovered, and “not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.”

But I am still far from such exactitude.

James Franco... it's that textual feeling

The Yale Daily News reported yesterday morning that James Franco, whom Salon.com named “the sexiest man living” in 2009, has been accepted into Yale’s Ph.D. program in English. Franco, perhaps best known for his appearances as Harry Osborne in the Spiderman trilogy (what, you didn’t see the Spiderman movies?!) and Harvey Milk’s lover in Milk, also did a series of appearances at Columbia University, picking up an MFA in Writing.

Franco’s recently published story in Esquire has been blasted in the blogs. Salon.com called it a “crush killer”. Judging from lines like “Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows made it shadow-color,” perhaps rightfully so (a handpicked list of other groaners at Open Salon)

But I hope the Yale news item gets a lot of publicity. The talented heartthrob’s entry into the rarified world of doctoral studies—at Yale and in English Language and Literature, which is about as lofty as academia can get without skirting entirely out of intellectual orbit—could be welcome news for smart kids in middling schools throughout the hinterland. If the emergence of geek chic in the ‘naughts and the reclamation of geekdom were steps in chipping away at the anti-intellectual ethos of the typical high school in the cultural backwaters of the nation—sh0wing us that smart could be cool—Franco’s move from the Hollywood film set to the New Haven seminar room is almost iconic in its powerful imagery of “smart is cool and sexy”.

While we’re at it, why not add Matt Damon (Harvard) and Edward Norton (Yale) and Wentworth Miller (Prison Break and Princeton and yes, one of People magazine’s “100 Most Beautiful People” ) to the campaign? Or Hill Harper, who plays coroner-turned-detective Dr. Sheldon Hawkes on the Emmy-award winning CSI: NY series. Harper, who was named by People magazine in 2004 as—you were expecting this, weren’t you?—“sexiest man alive”, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and got his law degree cum laude from Harvard Law School and a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.

There’s a curious irony to the fact that Franco got his first big break on the Emmy-nominated but short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks. He played one of the hip freaks, not a geek, of course (this was set in the 80s when it was unthinkable that geek could ever be cool); his character Daniel always seemed to be on the verge of failing a class. In fact, in one episode he tries to pull the fire alarm to get out of a test he’s afraid of failing. He’s caught and is forced to join, yes, you guessed it, the übergeeky audio-visual Club as punishment.

I wasn’t a member of the audio-visual club when I was in high school, but it didn’t matter—I could have been. Kids have a proclivity to sorting out their own, and like all taxonomists they have their behavioral cues and physiological features to classify who belongs where. And there were certain taxa you didn’t really want to be sorted into, at least not back then when I was in school, “faggot” being one, “geek” the other—obviously they were rungs apart on the pecking order— though I don’t think geek was the word that was used.

Maybe there wasn’t any word. There didn’t have to be, of course. Everyone knew who we were. There was Mike Shaughnessy, a tall goose of a kid with big hips and a fat butt who waddled more than he walked, and wispy mathlete Billy Walters with his mop of fine ash-blond hair and Marek Abramowicz, who could speak better French than his French teacher. Dave Nolan ,who ran cross-country, could have been a jock, I guess (even though distance runners weren’t considered hard-core jocks), but he wrote poetry and hung out with us.

I don’t remember how we started hanging out. We just seemed to gravitate to one another, not only because we had things in common but also because we just found one another more interesting than the other guys in school (and there were only guys in this particular school). I’m not entirely sure that given the chance we would trade places and minds with the more popular guys.

We kept in touch after school, not religiously so but enough to keep up on what has happening in one another’s lives. Mike left his medical practice to pursue a career as a cellist. Billy kept the ‘y’ in his name and made obscene amounts of money in some dot com venture. Dave is a district attorney in some Northeast rustbelt city. I don’t know if these guys are truly happy but they ‘re certainly privileged in being able to work at something they like doing. More often not, growing up at the edges steels you to take risks, persevere and not give a flying fuck about what people say. Which, come to think of it, is kinda sexy in itself.

Salvador Dali, Vertigo, 1939

I said I was sick, but that’s not really true. Well, not true in the sense of how we usually think of sick. Infection, fever, bleeding, swelling, pain, I had none of that. Instead I had rocks in my ears.

Otoliths are what they’re called technically, but that’s just Greek for ear rocks. Calcium crystals that get dislodged from the vestibule of the inner ear and drift into one of the semicircular canals, like refugees displaced from their home and wandering about in a new land.  Or rather, like the bits of white plastic ‘snow’ that whirl about and then ever so slowly float down in the glycerol-spiked water of a snowglobe. (As a kid I had a wonderful snowglobe with a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. I kept it on my desk long after the appeal of such a toy would normally have worn off. It wasn’t the scene I liked so much as the memories it encased of a rare family trip to Liberty Island, which was the occasion for my father’s buying me the snowglobe in the first place.)  In any event, the end result of this displacement is intense episodes of vertigo whenever the position of the head tilts up or back or shifts abruptly. 

The ENT doctor who diagnosed this as BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo) called them calcium crystals, but the truth is, they’re really just debris. In most cases the garbage just flows back out of the canal and back to where they do no damage, but in my case, and in that of what I later discovered from online forums and YouTube videos a significant number of other people, they get stuck in the canal, where they float around and mess with the signals that the hair cells send to the brain whenever you shift position. Essentially they prolong the signals, so there’s no longer any correspondence between what the brain interprets and what is actually happening. Like a shark asleep when it’s actually zigzagging its way through the water, only in reverse: the brain thinks you’re moving when you’re really not.

It came on without warning. One morning I woke up and turned my head to one side, and suddenly I felt the bed tilt and rotate, spinning faster and faster and with such frightening speed that I actually gripped the edge of the bed to hold on. Though lying perfectly still, I felt I was racing (if only in circles), the equivalent in motion of hearing voices or seeing things that aren’t there. My bed was a flying carpet of a mad whirling dervish. Mercifully it lasted less than a minute, and the room slowly stopped spinning. Although gone for the moment, the vertigo left me with nausea throughout the day and came back again later that afternoon and the next morning and the day after.

I quickly learned that looking up or down or quickly tilting my head could bring on an episode. If I dropped something on the floor I’d squat down but keep my gaze fixed on an imaginary point straight ahead of me and sweep the floor with my extended arm until I found what I had dropped. If it was a coin, I didn’t even bother. I more or less forgot about the top shelves in the kitchen cabinets. But there are a lot of interesting things going on above and below eye level that you can’t or shouldn’t avoid, like the gap between platform and subway car. Or sockets. Not to mention that the enormous concentration required for this state of constant watchfulness is very taxing.

I decided that this was not going to go away on its own and went to see my GP, who put through me a series of tests, including an MRI scan, all of which were negative. He eventually referred me to an ENT doctor for more tests.

This guy I liked from the moment I saw him. He was one of those short guys with a fire-hydrant build look—broad shoulders, a long, lean torso and shortish legs—who look much taller than they are. He had the eagerness of the young doctor that stems from the need to prove himself in the eyes of his more senior colleagues or simply from the enthusiasm of finally practicing medicine. After a few questions about the when, where and how of my symptoms, he took the list of ear tests my GP had prescribed for me and scanned the items. “Well, this one isn’t going to tell us anything interesting,” he said and scratched it off. “And why would we want to do this?” he continued, scratching off another. “This one, well, since you’re here, we might as well do it. But first let’s take a look at you.”

He sat me on the examining table with my face towards the head of the bed. Standing at my side, he cradled the small of my back in his left arm and nestled the back of my skull in his right hand. He then tilted my head to the right and lowered me down quickly to the point where I was lying on my back with my head drooping backwards like a heavy ripe fruit ready to drop from the limb. The vertigo came back in all its fury, the muscles of my eyes twitching wildly as if being strummed by a demon, but the yawing and pitching and rolling quickly spent itself as it had before. He then maneuvered my head to the left, paused, tilted my head down, paused and then lifted me up.

And a minute after sitting up I felt better. And a few days later, having followed his instructions to sleep sitting up, I felt fine. And it didn’t come back for months.

I tend to think of the laying on of hands as something only Pentecostals, Roman Catholic priests, shamans and New Age spiritualists practiced; at best it evoked the ritual of ordination or blessing but more often it brought to mind images of faith healers and exorcists, of a country woman in a polka-dot dress writhing on the wooden floor of a clapboard church waiting for the preacher to cast out the demon within her.

But I now recall how deeply I felt ministered to as I lay splayed out on the table with his arm around me and my head resting in his hand. His were a shaman-father’s hands, different from those of a friend or lover, mother or nurse; they incarnated the power of his knowledge, and it was a power which I gladly surrendered to. Maybe this feeling of surrender was healing in itself, this yielding to being taken care of.

Of course I know it was just gravity. He shook my head and the rocks in my ear drifted back to where they could do no harm, like bits of plastic snow in a half-globe of water floating to settle on the crown of a small leaden statue.

Magritte, Man from the Sea, 1927

 I stopped writing in this blog seven months ago when I got sick. 

I got better in a few weeks, but somehow I just couldn’t get back into the discipline of writing, at least in a form that others might read. I did keep writing, but in my journal, for myself. (Of course, this distinction in readerships existed only in my mind. Most of the people who get to this site have come for the image of Bacon’s Crucifixion that I included in my post The Circus Comes to Exarchia) 

I was talking to Dieter about this and he told me that blogs are like sharks. I had heard this once myself but about software and relationships and possibly even stirring polenta, actually anything, I suppose, whose success or very existence relies on continual movement, development or growth.  Stop moving, and you asphyxiate or drown or whatever it is that happens to you when you’re a shark and you stop swimming and oxygenated water is no longer swooshing over your gills. Likewise, so the saying goes, you stop writing, and the blog dies. Which more or less happened. And the longer I stayed away, the more monumental the task of posting an entry seemed. The blog wasn’t completely dead, of course—folks still came by for the Bacon painting, which apparently keeps appearing in the Google search results, like a listing in an out-of-date guidebook for a restaurant in a now desolate neighborhood whose prior residents have long moved out. But I had lost the habit of writing for the blog, the daily askesis of shaping a text out of the images and scraps of conversation and experience I recorded in my notebook.  

Out of shape and out of my element, just as when I started swimming again (literally, I mean). The first few times in the pool the water felt almost viscous. I just couldn’t get comfortable in the water and had to content myself with  paddling along like a duck on phenobarbitol. “Use it or lose it”, I discovered, isn’t true just for cardiovascular fitness. I realized it was true for the blog. Maybe it’s also true for sex. Though Greeks would say, trogontas erxetai i orexi, hunger will come when you start eating again. Or as Dieter put it, “Just hook onto something and start writing, even if you think it won’t lead anywhere.” 

One thing that puzzled me about these sharks swimming for their lives was how they slept. I asked Dieter about this. I guess I could just as easily have looked it up, but I figured he’d know, since it was the kind of question one of his fifth-grade students might have asked, and anyway we were talking about my disappearance from the blogosphere so it seemed apropos. “So how do sharks sleep if they’re always swimming?” 

“Maybe the same way dolphins swim and sleep,” he replied.
 
I waited a few seconds for him to finish his explanation, but none was forthcoming.  “Ok, that’s not terribly enlightening,” I said. 

“Oh, you know, one cerebral hemisphere at a time.” He said it in a way that implied that this was something that even his students would know. 

I thought this one hemisphere sleeping thing was a marvelous idea and I was peeved with nature for having gypped us on this. It would certainly work wonders for my insomnia, because while I was tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep and getting all anxious about not sleeping and worrying about how I was going to get through the next day with only four, oh three and a half, no three, hours of sleep, I would actually be sleeping, or half of my brain would. And as every fifth grader knows, one-half of something is more than zero. Unless the something is chlamydia or a kidney stone. 

 “Or, wait,” Dieter said, “Then there’s this shark, what’s it called, you know, the one that swims with its spinal cord?”  

“You seriously don’t expect me to know that, do you?” I said. 

“It’s… ach, you know this shark… They use it in fish and chips sometimes,” he said, somewhat impatient with my thick-headedness with matters zoological. 

“I’m not English and I never eat fish and chips,” I reminded him. 

“Ach, es liegt mir auf der Zunge!”  Dieter would lapse back into German when he was frustrated or excited or (thinking back to the days when this was still possible between the two of us) horny. But he never used German when he was angry. Once when I asked him why, he said he didn’t want to turn his language and anger into a weapon, and besides, getting angry in English meant he wouldn’t say things he’d later regret. 

“Dornhai!” he exclaimed. I looked up the English equivalent for this later to discover it’s spiny dogfish. Which was also an unknown word for me. “Their spinal cords coordinate the swimming, not the brain. So the brain can go to sleep.” 

“Doesn’t it need to look where it’s swimming to?” I asked. 

“It’s the ocean, Stefan! What is it going to run into?” he said, again with that das-weiß-doch-jedes-Kind fifth-grade teacher tone of voice. I could have said a reef or another shark or an offshore drilling platform but instead asked him about his recent vacation with his nephew on the North Sea coast. (He and I are trekking along parallel paths of discovering our inner father, me with my godson and he with his nephew.) What I really should have done, though, was to thank him for getting me unstuck.

Emil Doerstling, Kant and Friends at Table

The thought of how best to cook for a dinner party came to me as I was reading Auden’s poem “Tonight at Seven-Thirty”.  It is part of the cycle of twelve poems called Thanksgiving for a Habitat that celebrates the house he had bought in Austria and its rooms (the poem in question is of course for the dining room). In the poem Auden talks about what makes for a good dinner party. The list includes the “authentic comity” of a smallish gathering (“six lenient semble sieges/none of them perilous,/is now a Perfect/Social Number”), the kids off to bed, and a mix of well-mannered guests who are not bores. Men and women who relish good talk and “who enjoy the cloop of corks” but who also “can see in swallowing/a sign act of reverence”. But the only food actually mentioned in the poem is mammoth-marrow, long pig and pickled Leviathan.

Granted, the food isn’t the most important part of the evening. The dinner is a pretext to pamper your guests and celebrate your friendship, but it’s also an occasion to share good food with people who are important to you. Sharing food is laden with social and psychological meaning; cooking for others, which adds the element of gift-giving, is even more complicated, and that’s not even considering questions of skill and technique. The following are more notes to myself than advice, put together from experience (I’ve broken them all at one time or another, almost always to my regret) but also from observing friends who have a talent for making others feel truly at home.

1. Don’t experiment.

So you’ve found what sounds like a great recipe for butterflied sea bass with salmon mousse in puff pastry. What, you’ve never really made a mousse (much less butterflied a fish)? Now is not the time to try. Something will go wrong. Cook something you’ve cooked before and can cook well. A perfectly cooked yoghurt-marinated chicken kebab and an expertly dressed salad is infinitely more rewarding to the palate than a runny salty crab soufflé.

2. Do respect the dietary restrictions of your guests.

None of your friends who are gluten-intolerant, lactose-resistant, vegetarian, Muslim or allergic to shellfish would expect that a meal served at a dinner party would be wholly designed to suit their own dietary needs. But it’s just good manners to ask (if you don’t know) about possible food restrictions and ensure that there’s at least one dish that is free of whatever it is that would send your food-challenged friend into anaphylactic, gastrointestinal or ethical shock.

3. Don’t cook okra, snails or tripe…

or in general foods that are slimy, unidentifiable, too much work to eat, or in any way an acquired taste. It’s a good bet that most of your guests have not acquired it. Save your passion for kidneys or habanero chilies for a tête-à-tête dinner with a fellow aficionado.

4. Don’t try to impress.

Relax. Dinner with friends is not an audition or talent show. The country may be looking for the next culinary superstar but the odds are they’re not looking for him in your kitchen. Even slimmer that they’d find him there. The food is important (it’s dinner after all) and you’ll want to do something special (it’s not everyday you invite your friends for dinner) so you won’t want to serve meatloaf (unless, of course, you make a remarkable meatloaf or meatloaf is the only thing you do well), but the food is not the only reason, or perhaps not even one of the more important reasons your friends have gathered at your home. Besides, there are plenty of other ways, more subtle perhaps, like the notes of a flute in an orchestra, to mark the evening as a celebration. A stack of freshly laundered hand-towels in the bathroom, a fine postprandial grappa, candles of course.

5. Don’t be stingy either

The dinner party, of course, is an instance of those social exchanges which shape others’ perceptions of our hospitality and generosity, so the choice between meatloaf and porterhouse isn’t inconsequential. As David Sutton writes in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (some of which deals with customs on the Greek island of Kalymnos), food exchanges generate a social (and hence, remembered) narrative that make or break a person’s standing in the community: people remember meals. I recall the first meal I had Giorgos’s new apartment and the exquisite roast potatoes he cooked, I remember nibbling Sofia’s baked ham on the veranda of her home below the Acropolis in the Plaka, M’s kreatopita, Nikolas’s apple dessert, Adrianne’s lentil salad, Eric’s homemade bread. But I also remember the way friends cook and not just specific meals, like Sotiris’s by now trademark medleys of intriguing mezedes. I’ve tended to cook in a rather minimalist, cardio-friendly way, a practice that in my early years in Greece I carried over without much thought to the meals I cooked for my Greek friends. Until I heard a friend joke, as we were unpacking the dishes of a potluck beach picnic “and Stefanos has made a wild rice salad and, let’s see, stuffed artichokes and, ah, some more finetsata anosta (bland but elegant).” Food as memory. I’ve since adapted (somewhat) my cooking to the taste-scapes of my Greek friends.

6. Do think of dinner, not dishes.

Nor is dinner a pentathlon (or triathlon or biathlon) of wholly separate events but a sequence of foods in which intensity and drama is gradually built up and then released. When planning the menu, think of making love or plot development or sonata form or working out. Only the unwise athlete begins a workout with interval training and fails to stretch at the end, only a bad lover jumpstarts the evening with penetration and turns on his side once done without a cuddle or a kiss, and only an inept cook begins with a meal so rich and heavy that the palate is dulled and exhausted for anything else that follows. Or forgets dessert, or worse, assumes his guests will bring it.

7. Don’t buy your way out of getting fresh, seasonal ingredients.

Asparagus in January can have a certain novelty value but it smacks of arrivisme and culinary insecurity. It says in effect that you think the appearance of luxury is more important than sensory pleasure. In this case, a dish of honey-drizzled slow-roasted winter root vegetables, however humble in origin, is a far classier act than the asparagus. Cook honest.

8. Don’t serve risotto, polenta, tempura…

or anything else that tethers you to the stove while your guests are nursing their drinks in the living room wondering when you’ll appear. Unless you have a kitchen staff to do that for you. One of the reasons they’ve accepted your invitation is to see you. The one exception: you’re comfortable with having your guests hang out in your kitchen as you cook. Of course this presupposes that they’re comfortable with it as well. In the end, though, this guests-in-the-kitchen-while-you-cook thing is very hard to pull off. They’ll want or feel obliged to help, but you shouldn’t really let them. You’re supposed to be taking care of them. And if you can’t make food and conversation at the same time, or make whatever you’re doing look as effortless as folding a napkin, or failing that, at least fun, keep your guests out of the kitchen. Otherwise your sweating over the stove or grunting as you bone the fish will send a very clear message to your guests: look at how hard I’m working for you, which is why we don’t leave price tags on the gifts we give. This is not to say that occasions for social cooking don’t exist — an extended family get-together, two friends cooking an evening meal together — but these are very different from the dinner party.

9. Don’t exhaust yourself.

Don’t overestimate the skills, time and equipment you have at your disposal. You always have less than you think you will.

10. Do have a good time.

Isn’t that why you invited your friends to dinner in the first place?

Daniel Vojtech, Old Bicycle

This Saturday I went looking for a new bike and set out for Frederik’s, one of the oldest and most knowledgeable bike shops in Athens. Located at the back of a gloomy stoa at the corner of Patision and Stournara and grimly lit in icy fluorescent light, the high-ceilinged, narrow L-shaped shop is unprepossessing and anything but inviting. It could have been a betting parlor or hardware store. But there are bikes everywhere: a row outside the shop, others set out on the shop floors, still others in a cramped stuffed-to-the-gills loft built above the shop. Not just bikes but bikes to be, since the shop also custom-builds cycles. There’s probably an order to the display of goods, perhaps similar to the logic with which we organize our kitchens, but it’s not evident to the uninitiated.

The shop is named after its owner, a wiry short sprite of a man of indeterminable age with a full shock of graying hair and the extremely lean body of a long-distance cyclist. He moves at twice the velocity of an average man. And he does always seem to be moving, as if his body had an attention span measured in seconds not minutes. He ricochets through the shop, checking a repair made by one of his acolytes (“shop assistant” doesn’t really convey the deference they show him), meting out a piece of advice to a prospective buyer, barking out prices and bike reviews and warranties. He is the shop.

I went up to him and told him why I had come. After a quick battery of questions about why I wanted a new bike, delivered presto with an undertone of impatience (it felt somewhat like an appointment with a renowned neurologist, the kind that doesn’t give receipts) he showed me a bike in the loft and then another one downstairs in a nook off the repair bench—a beautiful, carbon-forked and wonderfully light Specialized Allez.  And then he left me there and moved on to finishing a tire replacement that one of his minions had started.

“Left me there” has a ring of abandonment but that’s exactly how it felt. I didn’t know what I was expected to do. Take notes? Finger the derailleur? I felt as if I had arrived at a party where I knew no one and the host, after greeting me and showing me where the bar was, flitted off to check the amuse gueule and give instructions to the waiters.

However daunting my initiation to Frederik’s was, I’ll probably buy my bike there. His prices are good, and I know that that if I ever need him to deal with a wheel that’s become laterally out of true, he’ll take care of it, probably leaving another potential buyer in the lurch to do so. I’d been to Frederik’s before to get the clamps on my biking shoes adjusted; he did it for free.

His shop will become yet another landmark on my map of the city, another rare find where expertise and the delight in craftsmanship assure me that there isn’t an item in the shop that’s of shoddy quality. The bike shop will join the ranks of places like the Pnyka Bakery on Petraki Street, which makes the best stone-ground whole-wheat sourdough bread in the city (their flour is ground at their own mill!) and the Greek Record Club (the hauteur of whose staff make Fred’s seem like a teenage sleepover with your cousins), a wine shop run by a pair of brothers on Metsovou, the tiny Italian tavern Maltagliati with its marvelous homemade pasta, and a dozen or so more places whose staff exude an almost tangible and highly contagious pleasure in the goods they make or sell, and places where the craftsman’s pride, his “love of [his] own excellence” (Augustine) is not only evident but wholly justified.

Connoisseurship has a bad reputation these days as elitist, but informed and discriminating taste, instilled with passion, is worth seeking out. Especially when you’re about to shell out €1400 for a bike.