Get wet.

March 30th, 2021

Another instructional video. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, # 33.

Skiing with Sal

March 11th, 2021

The second in my series of instructional videos, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength.” I’ve been backcountry skiing with my friend Sally for 13 years now–she is my inspiration.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

March 9th, 2021

I’m coming back to this neglected, vintage blog to post some stuff. I have been instructed to promote my upcoming book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, on social media. I am a bit loathe to wade into that septic morass, but it seems it must be done. Doing it here on WordPress as well as on the wider web makes me somehow feel a little better about the whole thing. Here I have some control and am not vying for algorithmic attention with QAnon.

I got this idea for a little instructional video series of “secrets to superhuman strength,” so here’s the first one. (I thought calling it #27 would motivate me to do more than one.) The book is about my lifelong pursuit of physical fitness, and how it has saved me by getting me out of my head and into my body. It’s about a lot of other things, too, but moving in an energetic fashion, especially outside, is key.

merging and purging

April 14th, 2017

In honor of National Library Week, which is almost over, here is a post about books. Hol and I have kept our books separate until now. But ten years in, it seemed time to organize, cull, and merge them. There were piles of books everywhere, and it was impossible to find anything. It was a big project. For the most part our libraries were very complementary—Hol has large swaths of botany, natural history, poetry, and Jung. I have more fiction, memoir, lit crit, and Freud. But there were a few points of overlap:

In these cases, one of us had to give up a book. I had signed copies of Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions, and Everything, and Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely from a High, Thin Sound. Hol had a signed Howl. So we’re giving away the unsigned ones.

For some reason we had three Moosewoods between us. We kept the one with the most notes and food spatters in it. Neither of us could part with our Hero With a Thousand Faces, or A Room of One’s Own. Or The Brothers Karamazov. I never read it, but it’s my dad’s Modern Library edition. Hol read it, and can’t let go of those well-thumbed Penguin Classics pages.

There was one other interesting point of complementarity. I have a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia that I got for Christmas when I was ten. Somewhere along the line I lost one book—The Last Battle. Bizarrely, Holly, owns one volume of the Chronicles of Narnia—The Last Battle. It’s a slightly later edition, but it fits neatly into the slipcase with the others. A complete set at last.