While geared more towards the needs of Oly lifters and CrossFitters than most people might need, KStar’s new Mobility Workout of the Day is pretty cool. I now know that my hip bone is connected to my foot bone. Ouch. It’s all performance art.

Also, it looks like there’s going to be a one day NYC MovNat clinic on October 9. I wish I could go, but there’s no way the schedule will allow it.

Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths is my favorite work where this comes up, but it comes up in an artistic context. It’s work itself is very short and I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll skip discussing it in detail if anyone wants to read it, but consider this quote:

I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses– simultaneously–all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.

This is a good literary device if you don’t depend on there actually being infinite worlds, but I’ve heard this bandied about as the very way the universe works and I call BS on the whole thing. Don’t agree with me? Fine. In one of the multiple worlds, your mom and I are on Channel 7 discussing why you are wrong with a still alive William F. Buckley, Jr. That’s the most palatable example of why applying the hypothesis to everyday life on a human scale totally misses the mark. There are far less palatable examples left as an exercise to the reader.

Enter into the genre Iain Banks’ latest novel, Transition. It’s an Iain M. Banks novel in the US, thus branding it Sci Fi, but he’s surprisingly left the M. off in the UK, branding it as mainstream. If you know anything about Iain Banks, I picked it up because of the present middle initial M. in the author’s name, thinking it was his latest Culture novel since one is due. The Culture is Bank’s massive space utopia of really, really cool people who inhabit most of the rest of the galaxy. Transition is actually a novel about a group of assassins and operators who travel between the Multiple Worlds of the aforementioned interpretation altering history in them in various devious ways to spread the influence of “the Concern.”

That’s almost painful to type.

It’s also not very far from the plot of the Culture novels, which tend to run along the lines of “Fabulously oversexed super agent So and So travels through the entire universe at amazing speeds with her amazingly smart super robot weapon friend to save absolutely everything from something totally amazingly bad that would happen on a rather large scale but for the fabulousness of the Culture and their ability to get their oversexed super agent or maybe the robot friend on the scene. And there’s torture involved.”

It’s a credit to Banks’ skill as a writer that he can pull engrossing novels out of plots like that. This book opens with the murder of the narrator and is told in chapters divided into sections that relate a particular character’s experience at a particular moment. In the beginning, there’s nothing to suggest a relation between the stories, and the narrative seems disjointed. Characters “flit” between parallel realities and their stories are told in different time frames with different degrees of backstory. That’s where Banks skill comes into play: the narrative evokes the confusion of many worlds at many times and then he masterfully brings them together into a coherent reality as stories converge and the real tale of what’s going on emerges sharply from out of what seemed incoherent.The personal becomes the political and a story of the resistance to the Concern emerges.

Banks’ usual themes of corrupt power, resistance, utopia, torture and madness are present. It just wouldn’t be the same without them. After a divorce, he was accused a few years back of losing his edge when nothing really horrible happened to or was done by one of his protagonists. I guess things are going well for him again.

So, Banks tackles the multiple worlds genre and seemingly pulls it off, not because the hypothesis somehow works in his hands, but because much of what he writes is about how humanity is very broken on levels ranging from the personal to the universal scale and what he thinks could make it right. Ultimately, no matter how goofy the plot might sound, it allows him to focus his rage about injustice and power while remaining both so appalled and so hopeful. I don’t know if he actually needs the multiple worlds, but in his hands they become a device for political possibility, an ultimate way of saying “things are not right, but could be.”

As an adventure history per se, it’s not successful. Alberto Santos-Dumont is too absent for it really to be an adventure history of Paris. And some of the episodes, especially ones which try to cover large modern French topics, May 1968 or the suburbs of Paris today, are less successful than stories which focus on a smaller aspect of history that was previously unfamiliar. But there’s a lot of rewarding and fascinating material, much of it new to this reader. There’s the story of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the inspector of quarries who created the vast underground catacombs and tunnels systems which hold up the city, a city originally built on and at risk of falling into the shaky rubble of the stone yards which it was literally mined out of. In a fitting end, his final resting place is among the huge deposits of skeletal remains in the municipal ossuary he created. There’s Fulcanelli, the 20th century alchemist who was hunted by the Nazis and Allies after essentially predicting the Atom bomb.  There’s even Francois Mitterand, not as the older President, but as a younger, ambitious politician faking an assassination attempt on himself.

Where the book is enormously successful is in it’s ability to relate very personal lives and ambitions to the much larger hero behind each scene, the city itself. It cannot be a comprehensive book because it tells its story through individual lives, but it really left me wishing for more to fill in the gaps.

Casey always thought I was Jewish. At first I didn’t notice it, probably because it’s pretty easy to live in New York and not notice Jewish cultural references as being anything other than New Yorky. In his last months, he suddenly ran with it. We’d never discuss actual religion, and it snuck up on me, so it’s not like I explained his mistake at first. So, he’d work in, say, little Yiddish expressions or some reference to overcoming Antisemitism, or something about temple. While he had completely missed the mark, he was actually very supportive, I would say even celebratory of what he imagined my faith to be, and he really believed in this entire world I lived in involving bagels, smoked fish, Yeshivas, the Sunday New York Times, perhaps the scholarly study of the Torah and the historical injustices that my people had overcome.

Since he was so supportive, it became really hard to let him down. But finally one day, and I think it might have been the last time I saw him, we were standing around while the smokers smoked during refreshment and Casey was making some reference to, I don’t know, the times I put on my schmata and went out to fight Antisemitism with Woody Allen, and after confused looks began to spread, I finally had to say, “Someone needs to tell Casey that I’m not Jewish because at this point, I don’t have the heart.”

I felt bad. Here was this Irish knucklehead who was into Aleister Crowley going the extra mile to relate to what he imagined was my very mainstream faith because he really cared enough about a friend to try to relate on that level. It does say a lot about Casey. If he was right or wrong, or you were right or wrong, once you were his friend, he had your back.

Or this:

In fact, it’s pretty shocking that there’s not a market for a car that looks to be six feet long and four feet high. In New York, just about everyone could use a streamlined version of one of those.

Now that was a twist in the conversation that I didn’t expect.

Cats: 1, Medieval Metaphysics: 0

I’ve spent Lent experimenting with Paleo and Primal diets, mostly by trying to stay as grain free as possible. I haven’t been entirely strict and some got by, but I’ve stuck with it as best I can. It’s worked really well in a couple of ways. I don’t get tired at work in the afternoon and my energy level has been very high. So far the main downside has been that it gets a bit gnarly and tense when you keep it very low carb and I have nasty Paleo breath. Primative man probably used bad breath to hunt. I think that’s the low carb. After Lent, I’ll probably reintroduce the occasional rice and corn and allow more dairy than I have been. Reintroducing yogurt has made this a lot easier.

kettlebells

I’m experimenting with a new program that tries to combine what some of the Primal Fitness guys do with the Max-Effort Black Box style templates. I’m jokingly calling it Primal Effort Black Box, even though it’s really not either, mostly because the whole thing is just my personal pile of rip-offs from various other plans I like

It looks something like this:

Monday – Off

Tuesday – Kettlebells. Something classic like 5X(1,2,3,4,5) clean and press ladders followed by swings or snatches and swings. If you want to mix it up, short metcons, like 4 X 400 with max swings or pullups after each round.

Wednesday – Lift heavy. Warm up and then something like 5X5 deadlifts, leg press (would be squat if not for bum knee), bench press, standing overhead press, pull-ups. I’ve subbed in hang power cleans for the leg press and farmer’s walks for the pull-ups.

Thursday – Cardio time. Anything from intervals like 4 X 400 to a 5K run, or comparable time on the bike or rower.

Friday – off

Saturday – Repeat lift heavy day. It’s also chance to break up the heavy days if the full body thing gets too long.

Sunday – How do you feel? Sore? Tired? Burnt out? If you feel bad, it’s a day for a long, slow walk over mixed terrrain. If not, take a random chance and roll the die:

1,2 – Kettlebells or short metcon

3,4 – Short Cardio Intervals – hill sprints, Tabata on the bike

5,6 – LSD: 5k to 10k run if totally fresh. long slow walk if you’re not.

Stretch and do mobility work like Z Health as often as possible.

This seems almost over-ambitious – like a stealth overkill program, but it’s just the ideal week. If you miss a day, you miss a day, your body gets rest. If you don’t feel like working out, miss a day. If you can’t get to the equipment, take a day off. If you’re traveling and can’t just hike around, take the day off. If you feel worse, take the week off. Or two.

Every fourth week, back off. Take weight off the the bar, reps off the kettlebells, walk around a bit. Recover.