Since 1999 Rockin' it old-skool. Medley's 10th anniversary has come and gone!
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I have been Twittering about my recent attempt to start the Couch to 5K (C25K) program. I’ve known about the C25K program for some time. I think I first came across it before I was pregnant and bookmarked it for ‘further consideration.’ Well, many, many moons later, inspired by a couple of friends I know who’ve liked it, I’ve decided to give it that old college try. Except, I haven’t been to college in a loooong time, and my bones are a bit creaky, but still..
C25K is structured to give a very gentle build-up so that by the end of the 9 week program you are running a 5K. I decided, upon a bit of reflection, that three things were absolutely necessary for me to actually do this program.
- 1) I had to sign up and pay registration fees for an honest-to-god 5K to be preparing for,
- 2) I had to be public about it, and
- 3) I needed some cool technology to distract me (see below).
The second has already proven its worth, because if I weren’t public about it I would have stopped after C25KW1D2 — (that’s Couch to 5K; Week 1, Day 2 for the uninitiated.) But now there’s public humiliation at stake on my Twitter feed (and on Facebook, since I pipe everything from Twitter over to Facebook, and now here), so I have to keep doing it. I also signed up for a local 5K at the end of April – it gives me 3 or 4 more weeks to get ready in addition to the 9 weeks of the program. Since I’ve got some travel coming up and also expect to have repeat some of the days, hopefully that will work out. One thing I like about this program is that it’s really only 30-40 minutes per outing for several weeks. And 10 of that is warm-up/cool-down. So really, just 20 minutes or so — and what kind of wimp would I be if I couldn’t suffer through a bit of jogging for 20 minutes three times a week? At least that’s what I’m saying right now. (Yes, the self-loathing self-talk in my brain is really fun to live with, I tell-you-whut.)
Before I went public, I had mentioned it to a few friends, one of whom put the 5K I signed up for on her calendar to come and cheer. There’s another good motivation, because me and all my high-productivity knowledge-worker friends are fanatical about the GTD-hard-landscape of our calendars–so knowing I’m on someone’s calendar is also a good impetus. You don’t mess with people’s calendars!
So, for my own sake, I thought I’d jot down a few notes while I’m still very early in the process.
Technology: Last fall I installed the NikePod software on my iPhone and bought a NikePod sensor, which integrates with the iPhone/iPodTouch and tracks how far and fast you’ve gone. You can then transmit the data to the NikePlus website that will then keep track of all your runs, show you the shape of them (intervals, sprints, whatever), and let you jot down a few notes.
 NikePlus Graph
The NikePlus website feels like something that a lot of development was put into, but for which not much maintenance or enhancement has been done. Still, it works for my purposes. Since my running shoes are not Nike shoes (which come with a built-in sensor slot), I also bought a little pouch to shove the sensor into and then attached it to my shoes. Seems to work great, although I haven’t actually calibrated it yet to make sure it’s getting the distance right — sometime when I’m on a proper track with distances measured out I’ll do that. It’s also integrated with the iPod such that you can choose which playlist you want and has a cute feature called “Power Song” for when you need an extra boost of inspiration. I’m not using that yet, since there’s a set of podcasts (see below) I’m listening to right now, but I can see it being very useful later on. I’m thinking something by Queen will probably be my Power Song when it comes time to create my own playlists.
Music: I’m using one of Steve Boyett’s Podrunner podcast series. The “First Day to 5K” podcast was designed specifically for use with the C25K interval program and provides audio cues for when to switch from walking to running and back again. Moreover, it’s mixed to change the bpm as appropriate. And, it’s free! It also exposes me to some music I would never listen to otherwise, so that’s cool too. I’m expanding my cultural horizons while plodding along. So far only one of the pieces has really stuck with me as something I want to go find and listen to apart from the podrunner stuff, but it’s early still. Not having to watch a clock is a huge value-add. There are other podcasts that do similar things – I’ve also bookmarked Robert Ullrey’s C25K podcasts and may try one of those at one point, too.
Location & Timing: Mornings. There is no way, with my crazy-angsty job and a toddler, that I could ever hope to do any such program regularly in the evenings. So it’s mornings every other day or sometimes with 2 days in-between. There is a constructed pond just down the road from us that has a walking/running trail that goes around it. I drive down, park across the street, and then use that. It’s great because it’s mostly asphalt (not concrete) and it’s not right next to the road (with all the crazy traffic around here). I’ve been there 4 times and I’m already starting to recognize some of the regulars at that time of day–including the small woman probably 20 years older than me who lapped me 3 times, but let us not speak of that again–and grumpy-middle-aged-man-with-dog.
 View from C25KW1D3
Yesterday and three days ago, however, I had to use the treadmill at the rec center. I made a mistake this past weekend. While planning for the weekend, I heard the weather people say it was going to be super cold on Saturday and that we’d get a dusting to an inch of snow later in the day on Saturday, but somewhat warmer on Sunday. So my decision was: run in the cold-cold-cold on Saturday morning or wait and go Sunday after the snow? I decided to wait until after the snow. But of course, we got several inches, instead of just an inch. And the path was not cleared, so I had to go use a treadmill inside. Lesson: If it’s not precipitating and you’re due to go, just go. Siiigh. And, frankly, after a few minutes I tend not to notice the cold – and it’s not like it gets that bitter cold around here. (The forecast for Saturday morning was 20 degrees.) I had to use the treadmill again yesterday morning because the path is still not clear. And more snow is in the forecast for the next few days, so I have a feeling I’ll be at the rec center for the next few sessions.
So, now I’ve done a few outside runs and two on the treadmill and I definitely prefer being outside. Here are the pros and cons as I see them:
- Outside positives: fresh air; slightly varied terrain; free; some sense of community/solidarity with the other crazy people out there
- Outside negatives: weather; safety concerns (see below)
- Treadmill positives: no weather, easier on the knees
- Treadmill negatives: boring; feels harder and I go slower; costs money
This could change if I’m still at this as we move into the summer months, as I’m much less tolerant of heat than I am of cold, and the heat and humidity around here can be oppressive, even at 6am.
Safety: I was really fascinated by the experiment conducted by TwitchHiker last year. Basically this guy decided to see how far and where he could travel based only on the good graces of people on Twitter. I thought it was a very clever idea. And I also thought that sort of thing is so much easier for a guy to decide to do. Similarly, I think women walking or jogging solo outside have to think harder about where and when they go. Most of the path around the pond that I mentioned is visible from the road, although not all of it. But I still try to be very mindful and (sadly) not turn up the music so loud that I can’t hear if someone is coming up behind me.
Health: My biggest concern – apart from simply continuing to find the motivation – is making sure I don’t inadvertently mess up knees or end up with shin splints or something. It’s not actually a huge distance each week so hopefully I can avoid any such issues for now. My doctor recommended being diligent about fish oil supplements, which I have in my spplement regimen anyway, as that’s supposed to help with joints. My knees were bothering the first few days but seem to be less troubled now, albeit still with a bit of creaky-poppyness.
Community – The 5K I found to aim for is put together by Run Pacers, a boutique race manager and local chain of running stores in this area. I’ll almost certainly buy my next pair of running shoes from them. They seem to really have their act together. I’ve also come across (on one of my local parenting email lists) a very local-to-me running group (they sometimes use the same path around the pond that I do) and if I manage to keep this up may join them at some point, too. I was corresponding with someone from that local group (and from the list) who has signed up for the same 5K that I did, so my Google-fu and list-scanning skills still seem to be pretty good. As with any new ‘hobby’, once you start to poke around into a subculture, you find all sorts of interesting things.
Ok, that’s my brain dump for now. I’m sure I’ll have more observations as the experiment continues, but that’s a start.
For the most part, I am extremely dubious about claims that parenting imbues anyone with special insights or perspective that non-parents somehow cannot also attain. We might like to think so, but really we’re all just muddling along the best we can. I was talking to another parent at TheLittleGuy’s weekend gym class the other day and we agreed that “who knows?” and “it’s a mystery!” and just muddling along were the best characterizations of the mental life of the parent of a toddler. I’m told it doesn’t get any less confusing, just differently so, as they grow.
But I think there’s one big exception to this, and I think that is the feeling engendered by the thought of harm coming to your child. My worst-feeling, most-blubbery moments as a parent have come from two things: 1) sleep deprivation (and since that’s also a Cheney-style torture technique, I think that’s just a fact of human nature and not unique to parenting) and 2) when TheLittleGuy has been hurt–even in a comparatively minor way. We’re dealing with another bout of ear infection right now and while he’s pretty stoic about it, it makes so very sad for him. When he’s actually in pain, I can usually manage to hold it together to help him cope, but once he’s fine again I often have to take a moment to cry myself.
The thought of anything serious happening to him is what causes me the most anxiety and pre-emptive stress as a parent. And the thought of losing him to some freak accident or illness (and oh, while I’ve never been a fiction writer, I’ve now discovered I have a great imagination) makes me crazy. I have to work sometimes to push those worries and fears far, far away lest I become incapacitated or start investing in reams and reams of bubble wrap.
Beth (Xeney) is one of my “Internet friends” (someday we’ll have a better phrase for that–something that doesn’t over-qualify, but doesn’t presume, either) who I’ve been reading something like 15 years and corresponding with occasionally although we haven’t yet met in person. Her daughter Penny admired one of TLG’s pictures when he was small, and anyone who exclaims over my kid goes on my good list, so I count Penny as a buddy too. (Yes, we moms remember such things – we don’t try to, we just do.) Penny’s enjoyment of her toy piano was also the inspiration for TLG’s big Christmas gift this past Christmas.
Just this past week, Beth lost her baby boy, Hector Alexander, at 22 weeks gestation. And I cannot stop feeling so terribly sad for her and Penny and Jeremy. It is a special and terrible kind of grief–even imagining the prospect of it, as I do during fleeting and not-so-fleeting moments of anxiety regarding my own little boy can make me stop breathing. Often very young babies who pass away, babies who are born too soon, and babies who are miscarried can be forgotten by others somehow more easily, and so I thought I should say something here in this space to acknowledge and remember the little boy of my friend who came too soon and could not stay.
 - Image by me via Flickr
TheGuy and I, for the first time since TLG was born, attended some live theatre this past weekend. Yes, we arranged and paid for a babysitter – the whole nine yards. (Well, we went to the Sunday afternoon show, so not *quite* the whole 9 yards.) My old college chum Mike Daisey was performing his new show, The Last Cargo Cult, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in downtown D.C. (And, when I say chum, I mean, it was a small college and we were both native Mainers and knew each other on the electronic notes boards, but you know.. still..enough time passes, you remember each other’s names.. it counts! A chum!)
The show was amazing. Really excellent. Totally worth seeing. In fact, I have made an offer on Twitter, and I will repeat it here: The first person to buy a ticket, see the show, and show me proof, I will reimburse. So basically: FREE LIVE THEATRE! The show is selling out and they have to conclude the run by February 7th, so don’t delay! Here’s the Washington Post review – a snippet:
Finally, the banking system has met its match. In “The Last Cargo Cult,” the inimitable Mike Daisey harnesses pervasive contempt for the way many banks have handled the financial crisis and uses it to fuel a divine rant about how we have allowed money to ruin everything.
The monologue at Woolly Mammoth Theatre may constitute the finest hour — actually, make that two hours — ever devised by Daisey, a tale-spinner of amusingly footnoted outrage. His brand of bombast is perfectly calibrated for examinations of the colossal follies of our time. In this instance, he gets the meaty topic between his teeth and, like some carnivorous poet, gnaws it down to eloquent bone.
And here’s the New York Times:
The way Mr. Daisey makes his arguments, more than the arguments themselves, is what makes him one of the elite performers in the American theater. Sometimes he lays them out straightforwardly, but more often he expresses ideas indirectly through story and, increasingly, through a self-conscious use of language. He repeats words (pay attention to “island” and “detached”), making them signposts to guide audiences toward his conclusion. He illustrates the relationship between money and trust this way: “I don’t buy that. That’s what we say in our culture when we don’t believe something.”
Here’s the thing: in my job, one of the things I do is canvas for experts (for a variety of purposes). And I’ve been doing this job for almost, *cough* 10 years *cough*. And over time I have learned that expertise does not happen on a smooth linear scale. That is, people in the first tier, at the top of their game, are not merely somewhat better than those in the second, they are usually at least an order of magnitude better. They are bigger and broader thinkers–more insightful, sharper, and all-around deeper. It is–usually–a stark and notable distinction. Mike Daisey is at the top of his game. Some have called him one of the finest solo performers of his generation. This is the first of his shows that I’ve seen. And I was convinced within just a few moments that he’s a top-tier performer.
So go and see the show if you possibly can. TheGuy and I have been talking about it off and on for the last week – I would see it again if I could. And we’ve incorporated a few catch-phrases from the show into our conversations–it has definitely got its hooks into us. It’s both deeply thought-provoking (although if you’re at all aware and self-reflective, not exactly surprising), very funny, and occasionally moving. Mike makes connections and observations that immediately resonate, but that you probably never would have come up with on your own.
Just go. He’s now on our ‘go every time he comes to town’ list – and for us, deciding that something is babysitter-worthy is a big deal. We watched even the new Star Trek separately rather than pay a sitter. So, declaring something babysitter-worthy is really our highest recommendation!
So I’m a big big talker about GTD and Inbox Zero and all the clever modern knowledge productivity hoo-hah. But, I have to confess, my gmail inbox, which is where my personal mail goes, has had hundreds of messages in it for years. At one point I did manage to set up some really aggressive filtering (that needs to be constantly curated and maintained) to help slow the growth, but still. What a disgrace. The oldest message in it right is from 2007. I’d asked a friend for a pointer to some slow cooker recipes. And there it sits.
Now, part of the problem is that I’ve given myself a classic yak-shaving problem. I can’t deal with that slow cooker recipes email until I figure out how I’m going to store and manage all of my recipes. And I can’t do that until I figure out what to do with all of my cookbooks. And all of the loose piles of paper recipes sitting in the bottom cupboard of the sideboard. I might scan them into Evernote. But we don’t have a scanner hooked up right now. And I can’t get the scanner hooked up until we transition the old fax machine into the new 3-in-1 copier/scanner/fax that’s been sitting in its box for .. umm… many many moons! You get the picture.
But I do have a moderately-functioning Omnifocus (with its own dozens and dozens of projects) that I could translate some of these emails into. So, at the beginning of the year I decided I was going to find a way to deal with this massive junky inbox. I set before myself a low-key task: remove, archive, delete, or otherwise deal with just 10 messages per day. A net 10 messages that is. I could leave something that had arrived that day, but that would mean removing 11 of the old ones. So far, it’s been working. I suspect it will get harder as I get closer to zero, so I may have to change my rule to 5 per day. But everytime I declared that a certain day would be the day I cleaned out the gmail box, I’d get distracted or pulled away for something, and the next thing I knew it would have 100 more messages in it. So, slow and steady is the mantra now. There are about 250 messages left, so in theory, a month from now, I should have my personal email inbox under control.
We shall see.
I’ve often said that there is really nothing at all new that can be said in or about the so-called “abortion debate” in this country. I read basically the entirety of the talk.abortion archives on Usenet when I was in college (at least it felt like the entirety) and am pretty sure I saw every conceivable argument for and against state control over women’s reproductive health and lives. But sometimes people articulate things so well that they bear repeating. I’m sure (if my archives were up; le sigh) that I linked to this back when it was first posted, but Bitch Ph.D. has re-posted her thoughts on trusting women, and they really should be heeded.
The bottom line about abortion is this. Do you trust women to make their own moral judgments? If you are anti-abortion, then no. You do not. You have an absolute moral position that you don’t trust anyone to question, and therefore you think that abortion should be illegal. But the second you start making exceptions for rape or incest, you are indicating that your moral position is not absolute. That moral judgment is involved. And that right there is where I start to get angry and frustrated, because unless you have an absolute position that all human life (arguably, all life period, but that isn’t the argument I’m engaging with right now) are equally valuable [...], then there is no ground whatsoever for saying that there should be laws or limitations on abortion other than that you do not trust women. I am completely serious about this.
Let me unpack a bit, because I know this sounds polemical, since I am clearly stating a bottom line. When pro-choice feminists like Wolf, or liberal men, or a lot of women, even, say things like, “I’m pro-choice, but I am uncomfortable with… [third-trimester abortion / sex-selection / women who have multiple abortions / women who have abortions for "convenience" / etc.]” then what you are saying is that your discomfort matters more than an individual woman’s ability to assess her own circumstances. That you don’t think that women who have abortions think through the very questions that you, sitting there in your easy chair, can come up with. That a woman who is contemplating an invasive, expensive, and uncomfortable medical procedure doesn’t think it through first. In short, that your judgment is better than hers.
Think about the hubris of that. Your judgment of some hypothetical scenario is more reliable than some woman’s judgment about her own, very real, life situation?
And you think that’s not sexist? That that doesn’t demonstrate, at bottom, a distrust of women? A blindness to their equality? A reluctance to give up control over someone else’s decision?
Because if you cannot see that, then I don’t care who you are. Male, female, feminist, reactionary asshole. You are acting as a conduit for a social distrust of women so strong that it’s almost invisible, that it gets read as “normal.” The fact that abortion is even a debate in this country demonstrates that we do not trust women.
Jill at Feministe has a slightly different take.
To put reproductive rights in the hands of anyone but the individual whose body is doing the reproducing is to radically infringe on the most basic of human rights. It is in essence to say, “Your very being is not as important as my opinion.” And if we don’t trust individuals to make their own choices about reproduction, given their own unique set of circumstances, why in the world would we trust outsiders — who know significantly less about the whole of any one individual’s circumstances than the individual involved — to make such important decisions for them?
The fundamental point is (my words here): women are human and should be allowed full expression of their humanity. Infantilizing them through state-based restrictions and limitations on something as fundamental as reproduction is a deep and immoral injustice.
NTodd has come around to view all of the yimmer-yammer about keeping abortions “rare” as the condescending nonsense it is. As if women wander in to get abortions like they do to have their teeth cleaned. As if. I mean, of course we want abortions to be rare. We want heart surgeries and appendectomies and liver transplants to be rare, too, but we don’t create slogans for them. Anyway, NTodd:
Obviously Stupak has been a big component in my evolution of thought. Not just the immediate threat to reproductive health, but even more the ancillary dangers I see from so-called moderates, liberals, progressives, etc, who were still fine with a “reform” that threw women under the proverbial bus so long as the bill contained their favored element(s) changed my mind.
Lots more to read by following the twitter hashtag #trustwomen today.
Old-skool weblogger and warm-hearted, and funny, let us not forget the funny, friend to all, Brad Graham (of the Bradlands.com) passed away a few days ago. It is extraordinarily hard to express the broad-reaching impact he had on the early webloggers and the community as it grew. This thread over at Metafilter offers some insight as numerous people dug up their Metafilter passwords from 8 or 9 years ago (myself included) to pay a bit of tribute.
I wrote a longer piece about Brad for my Thursday post over at CurrentMom. It is inadequate to the task, but it’s there. A memorial fundraiser has been set up by his friends at the theater where he worked.
As Genehack noted by pulling a couple of the quotes from the Mefi thread, Brad’s early passing should give all of us pause about what we want done with our digital stuff in the event of our untimely passing. I told Genehack I plan to just make sure he has the keys to all of my stuff if something were to happen to me & TheGuy before TLG is old enough to manage it. (Wasn’t joking either – and will make sure it’s in the next revision of the will.) Related to this is the issue of so many people leaving so much of their data in the hands of third parties (like Facebook and Twitter) instead of keeping it on their own sites. Working out how to archive or otherwise not lose track of personal data posthumously is even more complicated in such cases. (I think I saw that Brad’s account at FB has been designated a memorial profile, now.)
Anyway, farewell Brad. I miss you.
At every one of the 3x month-milestones I have in my head that I’ll do a blog post update about what TLG is accomplishing these days. But I never get around to it. Or rather, I start drafting one, and by the time I get back to it he’s another month older and it’s all out of date and things just keep moving on. I’ll try to keep this one short in hopes that I’ll actually finish it before he turns 2. There’s just so much that could be said! (By the way, I fully recognize that it’s only his parents and maybe his grandparents who are so fascinated by all of TLG’s activities and that he is a fairly typical (if low-key) toddler and so on… I’m not so far gone in parenting obsession that I don’t keep in mind the non-uniqueness of it all. Except that he’s a super-genius. That aside, though.. we know… he’s just a kid.. but he’s ours and this is my blog… so disclaimers over.)
TLG is now 18.5 months old. At his 18-month checkup he was just about 30 lbs on the dot and 33 inches tall. He wears 3T shirts – they’re sort of big on him, but many 2Ts are small through the shoulders. And he wears 2T pants, which are good through the thighs, but still need to be rolled up a lot (he’s still got short legs, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, who apparently used to claim that his legs were just as long as everyone else’s: “They reach the ground!”) He has a lot of hair that grows quickly and always looks like he needs a haircut. If fine baby fuzz on the body is any indication, he’s going to be a hairy guy post-puberty. He has big hands, big feet, and his head circumference is still off the charts. His eyes have stayed blue (or gray-blue) and about 75% of the time it seems like he’s left-handed, although he sometimes eats and writes with his right hand. (Since I am also confusingly ambidextrous, this doesn’t concern me.)
He does not eat nearly as much as his size would suggest and we are still dealing with dairy, egg, and (possibly) nut allergies so all of those foods are eliminated from his diet. Which makes meals quite a bit of a challenge. And it makes me sad for all the things he’s not getting a chance to try yet. I’m still hopeful that he’ll outgrow these issues. While he had but one ear infection last winter, this fall and winter he’s already had 3, or two–during the last one where a second-line antibio failed and so we resorted to zithromax, which may *crosses fingers* have done the trick. I am really hoping that this knocks it down once and for all. We’re pretty sure he’s had fluid (if not an infection) in his middle ear for quite some time, which is probably muffling his hearing a bit.
Possibly related to the muffled hearing, or possibly because of nothing in particular, TLG is not a very talkative sort yet. He’s said a great many words that we recognize, but has repeated or used consistently only a few of them. Nevertheless, he is able to communicate his preferences very effectively, including dictating to people on Christmas where they should sit. He is completely fascinated with letters and knows all of his (capital) letters and numbers and has “read” some of them by saying them on sight. He would rather play with his various letter toys and books than trucks or cars, although he has great fun with his riding firetruck that he just got for Christmas. He has become scarily proficient with the iPhone–browsing photo albums, playing a few of the toddler apps we’ve downloaded for him, and using the Apple Remote app to get a new song playing through the house speakers. He loves to look at pictures of himself and people he knows. He’s recently started to become interested in stickers. He also colors with crayons, works on puzzles, and enjoys scattering his blocks far and wide.
Personality-wise, he is still a super-sweet person to have around (I caveat that, as I know the 2s are coming…). He’s very affectionate and attuned to both of his parents. He gives hugs and blows kisses to his teachers at school. And, once Uncle Genehack showed him the technique, he’ll fist-bump just about anybody he’s decided is friendly (although he usually waits for it to be initiated). His general mode is watchful and observant. This switches to wary if there’s a new adult in his space. But if we’re out at a restaurant or something like that, he just likes to watch people and see if he can get them to smile at him. One of the sweet things he does is to come and give us hugs if he sees a picture of himself with one of us (either as a screensaver or in a photo album or something.) It is adorable. He still exhibits no particular preferences about his clothes–he’s really easygoing in that sense. And, while he likes to cuddle a stuffed animal at night sometimes, he doesn’t seem to have a particular favorite.
Some of his favorite things right now:
* The letter “G” — still a huge favorite
* The moon
* Books of all sorts – right now he’s really enjoying his Big Book of Dinosaurs and Bear’s New Friend, but he rotates among books quite frequently
* Seeing flocks of birds in the sky
* Dancing to certain songs, especially “Old MacDonald” and “Go for G” and “Never Go to Work” and even the “ABCs”
* Saying “moooooo” when he sees a cow, or wants us to sing “Old MacDonald”
As the length of this post suggests, I could go on and on and we’re inching ever closer to 19 months and I still haven’t posted this yet, so I’ll pause for now, but that’s a small update for TLG’s fans.
 TLG at 18.5 Months
I love National Geographic photography and I love that they make so much of it available as desktop wallpapers. I’ve downloaded a few dozen of their wallpaper images over the years, along with other cool photos from elsewhere (with permission!) to use on my computers. Unfortunately, given the way I work, I almost never see the wallpaper on any of my computers. At work I used to run a piece of wallpaper manager software that would flip the wallpaper to a new image every few minutes and also show it as the screensaver, so once in awhile I’d get a glimpse of the cool photos I’d collected. It’s been mostly a useless exercise, but I still like to browse NG images now and then. They’ve put together a set of what they’re calling their Best Wallpapers of 2009 (I saw the link in their Twitter feed). My favorite pretty pictures from this set are: this (I’m a sucker for high saturation) and this (dolphins!).
During the last few weeks I read the complete Sherlock Holmes – all of the Holmes stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There were two reasons: 1) I was looking for cheap (preferably free) stuff to read on my Kindle for iPhone app and 2) I knew the movie was coming (and had been intrigued by the trailer) and the complete Holmes was only $0.99 so I downloaded it and read it. I enjoyed it and tweeted a few things about it. It really is a precursor to a lot of the procedural crime shows we have today. And a friend of mine pointed out that the tv show House is basically a Sherlock Holmes homage, down to the main character’s apartment number being 221B. (I have not seen any episodes of House.) Prior to these last few weeks my exposure to Holmes had been minimal. As a child I read a kid’s version of Hound of the Baskervilles and really liked it. And of course, there were the ST:TNG episodes that had Data playing Holmes in the holodeck. Apart from those, most of what I had gathered about Holmes had just been through cultural osmosis. Thus, my inclination to go back to the source before seeing the movie.
Now, I am not someone who insists that remakes, spinoffs, and homages based on classic works hew strictly to the particular details of the original, although I do prefer that they keep to and appreciate the spirit of the original, as much as possible. (I’m a purist about some things, but not this.) I think that Star Trek this summer did a good job of honoring the spirit of the earlier franchise, for example. And, having just recently read for the first time the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, I think the new movie does that for Holmes as well. I won’t recap the major plot points and such – there are plenty of reviews that do that. Apart from the scale of the criminal enterprise (much larger than in most of the stories) that Holmes was battling here, a few things that struck me as interesting or surprising: the relationship between Holmes and Watson was played as a bit more of a bromance (new word I learned from reading the reviews) than the original stories might have warranted, but only just a little. They were quite tight in the books/stories, as well. Some of the reviews have complained that Downey’s Holmes is too much of an action figure, but in fact he did have physical altercations in the stories and his character was apparently very well-trained and effective at that part of things. In other words, he wasn’t wholly a cerebral character in the stories, although that may have been lost in subsequent interpretations.
There was a bit too much ‘damsel in distress’ stuff in the movie, although the Irene Adler character could have been drawn much worse. She had her own agenda, which was good to see. (One thing I noted upon finishing the stories was that it was nice to read a set of procedurals in which a woman was not raped, tortured, or murdered in 3 out of 4 episodes. There are several otherwise decent television shows that I just can’t watch anymore for this reason.) In the Holmes movie, I was totally bored by the ‘escape the meatgrinder just in time’ scenes. In one case it was a literal meatgrinder. But that seems to be a trope/crutch that Hollywood just cannot let go of. I always find those sequences in movies incredibly boring while at the same tense-making. They’re some of what make me feel most manipulated while watching Hollywood movies — you know the good guys are going to get away, and yet you become tense, anyway. Yuck. Often I close my eyes and tell TheGuy to just let me know when it’s over.
I’ve seen at least one reviewer claim (read a bunch – don’t remember where I saw this; sorry) that it was Sherlock Holmes morphed into Jason Bourne. An amusing quick description, but one that I think is unfair. And don’t get me wrong, I liked the Bourne movies and always enjoy a fun spy thriller or caper movie. But I think that such facile comparisons miss an important point about cultural and literary heritage. They forget that all of culture is essentially a remix. One might, for example, be able to trace a lineage from the original Holmes stories to many of the mystery, detective, and spy thrillers of the late 20th-century, and on to the Bourne movies of the past decade or so, and then circling back around to Holmes again. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when I read that I thought it was a bit unfair. Conan Doyle came well before Robert Ludlum, after all.
Given our schedules and other factors, we rarely get to see movies anymore, which is probably why now that we had a chance to see a decent one I’ve been reading a bit more than I usually do about it. And, as so often happens when I happen to be read up on a topic, I discover that our esteemed fourth estate gets things wrong. A lot. Even about comparatively simple stuff like entertainment. Most disappointing to me was Roger Ebert’s review of this movie. (I’m not a movie buff and I don’t read a lot of reviews, but TheGuy has long been a fan of Ebert and I’ve been exposed to his stuff a bit – can’t stand the guy, Roeper, that he worked with for awhile, but that’s another post). Anyway, Ebert made several factual errors in his review.
First, he claims that in the canonical universe of Conan Doyle that Watson was typically “fretful and frightened” — that was not at all the impression I got from reading the books. In some cases Watson was the muscle of the duo and as a former Army medic who’d seen action (if I’m recalling the details correctly), he was not an easily frightened sort. Second, he says, “Watson has decided for once and all to abandon the intimacy of 221B for the hazards of married life” – but, Watson did that in the books and stories, only to return after his wife died. Ebert claims, of the new movie, “Holmes’ canonical devotion to cocaine is here augmented by other drugs and a great deal of booze.” But I don’t recall seeing any explicit drug use by Holmes in the movie – in fact some reviews made a point of that departure from canon. Ebert claims that, “My Sherlock is above all fastidious” in contrast to Downey’s version. But, and on this point I’m less certain, I think I recall several instances in the book where Holmes would hole up in his room for days letting things get pretty messy and I also vaguely recall descriptions of piles of books and reference material all over the place. Ebert gets another Watson fact wrong (if there can be facts about fictional characters) when he claims that “Watson has always maintained quarters elsewhere.” Again, not true. Holmes and Watson met because Watson needed an apartment.
Anyway, the particulars of Ebert’s review don’t have much bearing on the movie, which was the nominal topic of this post, but it was just disheartening to me to find yet another example (among countless) of poor journalism about topics I happen to know something about. Pretty maddening, the state of journalism these days. And I did expect better from Ebert.
Back to the movie – about 10 minutes before the end I leaned over and asked TheGuy, “Do you think they’ll be making a sequel?” And then just a few minutes later I got my answer. I do look forward to the sequel, and like the Bond flicks, this is a universe and character with endless opportunity for new stories. If they can keep the quality level above Hollywood-mediocre, a sequel or two might be worth Netflixing!
December 26, 2009:
And, a year ago, December 26, 2008:
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