Ron's View

Thanks to a post two days ago Geoff Shackelford’s golf blog , I learned two days ago about Golfer in Training Dan McLaughlin and The Dan Plan. Shackelford linked to an article by Michael Kruse three weeks ago in the St. Petersburg Times. As Kruse explains:

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”

The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5 job as a commercial photographer had become unfulfilling. He didn’t want just to pay his bills. He wanted to make a change.

Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.

The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.

Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. “If I could become a professional golfer,” he said one afternoon, “the world is literally open to any options for anybody.”

According to Dan, “talent has little to do with success.” He elaborates at his website:

According to research conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, “Elite performers engage in ‘deliberate practice’–an effortful activity designed to improve target performance.” Dr. Ericsson’s studies, made popular through Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, have found that in order to excel in a field, roughly 10,000 hours of “stretching yourself beyond what you can currently do” is required. “I think you’re the right astronaut for this mission,” Dr. Ericsson said about The Dan Plan.

I once enjoyed Gladwell’s articles in The New Yorker. He is, after all, such a talented writer. But I’ve tired more recently of his continuing quest to find explanations for assorted phenomena that are simultaneously novel and all-encompassing. I haven’t read Ericsson’s work, but I can’t imagine he intended for it to be applied, as Gladwell does, to explain Bill Gates’ success as resulting from the 10,000 hours he spent programming computers while in high school.

Nonetheless, I love the Dan Plan. Dan expects to “hit the 10,000 hour milestone by November of 2015. During this time, Dan plans to develop his skills through deliberate practice, eventually winning amateur events and obtaining his PGA Tour card through a successful appearance in the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School, or ‘Q-School’. I’ll be watching.

In the meantime, I have my own plan to attend to. This is blog post number 792. Just 9208 more before I hit my own 10,000 milestone and become a professional writer. Watch out, Malcolm. The New Yorker may not have room for both of us.

[Bernard Gotfryd, in the New Yorker]

Joyce Carol Oates has a beautiful remembrance of her husband’s last week of life (and her experience of it) in the December 13 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately, the online version is behind a paywall, so you will need to pay or get your hands on a print issue to see it. Make the effort.

Oates’ husband, Raymond Smith, died suddenly almost three years ago while hospitalized for pneumonia. (See the brief NYT obit here.) I could quote from her article, but really, you owe it to yourself to read it in full, without preview. I’ll just say that parts of it reminded me of our experience in August during the last week of Gail’s brother Gary’s life, when he too was connected to various measuring devices and you could study his oxygen intake with each breath. Oh, and of course, we have our own memories of arriving at the emergency entrance of Princeton Medical Center, near the end of the year we lived in Princeton, first when Joel fell off a speaker he had climbed on — around the time of his first birthday — and cut his face near his eye, and second just weeks later when Gail took an elbow in her face during a summer evening volleyball game and was lucky her cheekbone wasn’t broken.

Oops. There I go again. This isn’t about me, even if it is my blog. It’s about Joyce Carol Oates. Do read her article.

It’s September 21. You know what that means! I started this blog two years ago tonight. It was a Sunday. We had spent the afternoon watching the third and concluding day of the 37th Ryder Cup golf competition, between the US and Europe, held that year at Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky and won by the US.

My first post was called exactly that, and said, in its entirety, “Welcome to my new blog. I’m not sure what shape it will take yet. I will be experimenting for a while.” My second post was about the Ryder Cup. If I were writing it now, I surely would have said a lot more. Or been so intimidated by all that happened that I would have said nothing at all. What I did say was:

I can’t believe we have to wait two years for another Ryder Cup. There’s nothing like the final day, with 12 simultaneous matches, in match play format, and the possibility of wide swings in the team scoring from minute to minute. In medal play, you can usually have a pretty good idea of what’s happening all over the course on the final day, as the networks are good at switching around from hole to hole to cover all the contenders. But that’s just the point — everyone’s a contender in the team match play format, because everyone has a chance to earn a point, or a half point. It produces an entirely different kind of excitement than what one has on the final day of a major. I wouldn’t say better, though that’s what the commentators are always saying or implying, and what seem to want the players to say in the interviews. Just a very different experience, and one worth savoring.

See you in Wales in two years.

Now two years have come and gone. Which means, it’s time for another Ryder Cup! Number 38, held at Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales. Normally the competition is held in late September, which would make it this week, but for reasons that no one has explained to me, it will instead take place next week. No doubt I’ll have something to say about it then, but I wish it were now so I could celebrate the blog’s second anniversary with a Ryder Cup post.

And what was my third post? Maybe the less said about that the better. It was titled, and about, Sarah Palin, and was only the first of what turned out to be many posts about her that fall. I have pretty much given up writing about her. Not for lack of things to say, but largely because I have trouble controlling my emotions on the subject, and almost anything I would wish to say is said better elsewhere.

What has most surprised me about the shape the blog has taken is how often I am tempted to write, and do write, on political matters, despite having no particular expertise. But then, I seem to have chosen as my principal topics only those about which I have no particular expertise. The subjects are largely disjoint from my professional life. Then again, it’s not clear what expertise I have on matters in my professional life either. Maybe that’s the point. If I’m going to say something silly, it may as well be on a topic I’m not expected to know anything about.

Here I am writing when I should be celebrating. Champagne and dancing await. The night is young. So long. And thanks for reading.

Acadia National Park

I’ve admitted my affection for the New York Times’ weekly “Vows” feature in its Sunday Styles section. How can one not love each of the short tales of true romance? I prefer the ones about ordinary people to the ones about sons and daughters of the rich and famous. And I don’t enjoy reading happily about two commoners, only to discover halfway through that one is the grandson of a prominent Wall Street banker or granddaughter of a Hollywood power broker, with assorted famous colleagues in attendance at the wedding. Commoner or aristrocrat, though, the bride and groom’s tale is always told with such style, a style so memorably parodied in the mock Vows column of Claire Messud’s novel The Emperor’s Children.

Yesterday, I was going through the NYT Weddings/Celebrations section online to make sure I hadn’t missed any of the columns (or the equally wonderful weekly videos) while we were away, only to stumble inadvertently on today’s tale. I prefer not to read Vows online, waiting to open the Sunday paper. But when I saw the name “Rockefeller”, I couldn’t resist. I just had to know what Rockefeller it was. (No problem this time, of course, deciding if the bride was a commoner, or getting tricked when I thought she wasn’t. If Ariana Rockefeller is getting married on Mount Desert Island in Maine, you know she’s a real Rockefeller.)

Ariana, as it turns out, is David Rockefeller’s granddaughter, John’s great-great-granddaughter. She grew up spending summers on Mount Desert Island.* I don’t want to spoil your own enjoyment of today’s Vows installment, so I won’t say much more. Suffice to say, it’s not easy when a local boy falls in love with a Rockefeller.

Two more points. I couldn’t stop myself from breaking out in laughter when I read this line: “Days of swimming in the ocean followed nights of stargazing in each other’s arms.” I mean, really. And check out the accompanying slideshow. Are those Nantucket reds Ariana’s father is wearing as he escorts her at the wedding? I need them for sure. (See my recent comments on Nantucket red here and here. I bought the shorts, but not the trousers. Or the yarmulke.)

*In case you don’t know, the island was home to many of the wealthy a century plus ago. The website of Acadia National Park tells the story well.

[Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images]

I like sports. If you’ve read much of my blog, you’ll have figured that out. I’ve noted several times recently that my sports calendar peaks this time of year. The three weeks of the Tour de France would be reason enough for this to be the peak, what with daily races exciting in their own right, combined with the over-arching narrative of the battle for overall Tour lead. In addition, the Wimbledon tennis finals occur on the Tour’s opening weekend (two weeks ago) and the British Open golf championship runs from Thursday to Saturday of the Tour’s second week (this past weekend). If that weren’t enough, this year we had to make room for the World Cup, with its semi-finals and finals during the middle and end of the Tour’s opening week.

What is it that fascinates me about sports? Perhaps the key word is one I used just above: narrative. A major sporting event takes place within the context of the sport’s history and the biographies of the participants. With each development, we watch the narrative line take a different turn, imagine the new possibilities, re-write the story in our heads. Perhaps what I especially enjoy about golf’s four majors is that on the last day, so many players have their narratives change with each stroke. This contrasts, for instance, with tennis, whose major championships by the final day have reduced the competitors to two. At Wimbledon two years ago, during the extraordinary final between Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, we were kept in suspense about what the final story would be, but there were essentially two possibilities. As the players make the turn on Sunday for the final nine holes of a golf championship, there may be three or four or even as many as seven or eight still in reach. I could give many examples of this — though not from yesterday’s concluding act at St. Andrews of the British Open.

I wish, however, to make a different point. Namely, much as I love narrative, I’m drowning! It’s just too much. The confluence of events this last month is pushing me to my limit.

I first thought about this two weeks ago, reading Wyatt Mason’s review in the July 15 issue of The New York Review of Books of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace . In the review, Mason quotes from an early essay of Wallace’s:

Human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing….

I think this is the appeal of sports: they feed our appetite for narrative. There may be more nutritious sources of narrative, but I cannot think of any with greater immediacy. The narrative is written as we watch. And the more we bring to it, in terms of our own understanding of the narrative to this point, the more we are drawn in. In the recent World Cup, for example, one need merely say the names of the great soccer powers — Brazil say, or Italy, or Germany, or Argentina — and hundreds of millions of people around the world could fill in the back story instantly. And then we could watch the narrative unfold: France’s shame, Italy’s lackluster play, the Germans’ brilliance, Uruguay’s unexpected return to soccer’s elite, England’s falling flat. And on and on, until there were just two stories left to be written, Holland’s and Spain’s.

Thrilling, yes. But perhaps too much. I may be ready for a break.

Not yet though. Give me until Sunday. Please. Have you been following the Tour these last two days in the Pyrenées? Mon Dieu! How will Schleck respond tomorrow after Contador took the lead away today when Schleck’s chain came off on the final climb just as he was attacking? And will one of them ride away from the other on Thursday, the final mountain day, in the closing ascent of the Col du Tourmalet. Then there’s Friday’s drama, as the sprinters come to the fore. Can Mark Cavendish win another stage? How will Petacchi do? What about the green jersey competition? Saturday brings the individual time trial. Ooh la la! One last battle for Schleck and Contador. They’ll coast in Sunday, but the sprinters will have one more chance to strut.

Five more great days. I’m not done with sporting narratives just yet.

In celebration of its 85th anniversary, The New Yorker has had a daily online feature in which it highlights some New Yorker author and a particular piece by that author that appeared in its pages. An especially noteworthy aspect of this enterprise is that the “issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.” Thus, a non-subscriber who has sufficient time can have a go at an entire issue from years or decades ago at no cost. But even without this bonus, the short blurbs written by current New Yorker writers about past works and their authors have been informative.

Yesterday’s featured work, discussed by Jon Michaud, was William Maxwell’s short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, which appeared in 1976 in two parts. Maxwell is perhaps better known as the long-time New Yorker fiction editor than as a fiction writer. He edited, among others, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Vladimir Nabokov. On seeing Michaud’s post, I was reminded yet again that I have long wanted to read Maxwell. I considered downloading So Long, See You Tomorrow from Amazon for my Kindle, then wondered if I should instead grab it for free from the New Yorker archive. Why pay $10? But I didn’t really want to read it online, because the look of articles in the archive is not welcoming. Indecision got the best of me.

Last night I asked Joel if he had read anything by Maxwell. No. This morning I was talking to Joel when I glanced at the books on the shelves above his desk. (I should take a moment here to explain that we did a remodel last year whose last step was the installation of the built-in desk and shelves. Since I didn’t want the shelves to look empty at the end of the installation and Joel wasn’t due back from Grenoble for another week or two, I put some of my books on the shelves, books that I had read and put out of the way in piles while awaiting more shelf space, or books I hadn’t read and put out of the way to make room for newer books.) As I talked, I noticed Joshua Ferris’s 2007 novel Then We Came To The End, which I so loved, and asked if he had read it yet. No, just the first few pages, but he said he’d give it another try.

And then I realized that the book next to Ferris’s had William Maxwell’s name on the spine. My gosh, we have a William Maxwell book! Was it Joel’s? No, he assured me that it’s mine. What a puzzle.

The book is Maxwell’s All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories. It was published in 1995. I have no idea when I got it, or how. A present, surely. Or did I buy it on remainder? That could be, given my continuing desire to read him. I felt foolish. I will start the book tonight.

In the Preface to All the Days and Nights, Maxwell has a passage that I remember reading before, perhaps in Morris Dickstein’s NYT review of Barbara Burkhardt’s 2005 biography William Maxwell: A Literary Life, which quotes it. This passage is what convinced me I must read Maxwell.

The year was 1933, and I was twenty-five. I had started to become an English professor and changed my mind, and I had written a novel, as yet unpublished. I meant to go to sea, so that I would have something to write about. . . . I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life-size characters — affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black — that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered.

Emma, one year ago

Earlier this week I mentioned the article in the current New York Review on Grigory Perelman, but failed to point out the issue’s two items of feline fun, having not yet stumbled (pounced?) on them. Let me fill in the gap. I’ll take the opportunity as well to add a few words about our resident feline.

Tim Flannery reviews four books on animal behavior. All four sound superb, but of particular interest for us here is Flannery’s discussion of Temple Grandin’s latest book (with Catherine Johnson), Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. Commenting on the cat chapter, Flannery writes:

Cats are a big part of my life, so I read Grandin’s chapter on felines with unusual concentration. I was a little dismayed, therefore, to discover that “animal behaviorists and ethologists don’t know as much about cats and their emotions as we do about other domestic animals.” I thought I knew my cats pretty well, but Grandin surprised me by having much of great interest to say about these superbly sensual, mysterious creatures. One bare fact that had hitherto escaped me is that there are two basic cat personalities—bold and shy—which are associated with coat color. Black cats, it turns out, are usually laid-back, while tortoiseshells are the typical “scaredy cats.” I live with a black and a tortoiseshell cat (known respectively as the Captain and Bernadette), who could be models for this: the Captain is as solid as a rock, his aura of calm spreading far and wide, while Bernadette has been known to take fright at her own tail. Both, incidentally, had identical upbringings from kittenhood.

This hit home. Our own tortoiseshell, Emma, turns 14 next week. Her sister and fellow tortie, Goldie, who disappeared a few years ago, was the classic scaredy cat. However much she accepted us, however willing she might be to sit on our laps or flop for petting, if she were walking down the hall and saw or heard us coming, she’d run the other way. If company were around, she made herself invisible. But in her final years, her desire for chicken, beef, and fish overcame her fear. She would be drawn to the dining table, however many strangers were there, stopping at each chair to see if food were forthcoming.

Emma, though never as skittish, wouldn’t dream of coming to the dining table if strangers were about. She trusted no one, at least until a year ago, when she found an unexpectedly new level of calm. In response to our months-long remodel, she came to accept the constant comings and goings of assorted craftsmen, even allowing Bert, our carpenter/project-manager/friend, to pet her. However, since Joel’s return home in December, simultaneous with the end of the remodel, she has regressed. Initially, she didn’t quite trust that he was back for real. But by the end of January, after Gail and I came home from our third trip of the month, she had re-attached herself to him, like a barnacle to a ship. No longer does she come downstairs to the main floor in the morning to go outside when I get up. She’ll stay on Joel’s bed until he wakes up, and if he wakes up late enough, she might just stay on the bed for the day. The disturbing aspect of all this is that in treating Joel as a quasi-sibling, she has become a scaredy tortie cat.

The latest twist is that Joel took off two nights ago on a road trip — riding shotgun for his friend Michael on his drive back to Boston — and suddenly I’m back in Emma’s life. She woke me up this morning as the birds started tweeting. I ignored her, but an hour later I got up to let her out, and an hour after that she insisted on licking me for five minutes. I haven’t merited such treatment in months. Not that I missed it.

Enough about Emma. The current New York Review has another piece entirely about cats, Pounce, an essay by the late English writer Rebecca West that will appear next month in The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose. Unfortunately, the full article is not available to non-subscribers, but if you love cats, be sure to find it. Pounce came to live with West as a kitten during World War II. Here’s an excerpt:

Then suddenly a disquieting fact was brought to my notice. We lived on the top floor of the apartment house, and outside our windows a cornice ran round the four sides of the building. This Pounce used as a playground, to take the air and exercise his sense of power by ordering the pigeons he found there to take off into the empyrean, and we used to watch him complacently. But it now appeared that he had been using the cornice for other and odious purposes. He had been visiting a neighbor of ours. Not all our neighbors, only one. He had walked past the window of hosts who would have been glad to entertain him, who cried “Pussy, pussy,” as he went by, imagining him to be innocent and playful like themselves, and he went round two sides of the building to the apartment furthest from ours, to call on Mr. Gubbins: the one person among our neighbors who belonged to the same unhappy race as my mother, who feared cats.

The abominable genius of Pounce not only led him to this victim but indicated to him the moments when he was alone and most vulnerable. The poor man suffered from the fear of cats in an even more intense form than my mother. When he saw a cat he became paralyzed. Pounce used to visit him when he was having a bath. Mr. Gubbins was not favored by nature. He was an industrialist who looked like a Communist cartoonist’s victim of a wicked capitalist: a tall and flabby man, with pouches under his pale eyes and drooping cheeks and chins and paunch, and the unpleasant peculiarity that his wispy mustache and strands of hair combed across his bald scalp were bright gold like the yolk of an egg. When Pounce dropped into his bathroom and sat down on his haunches and looked at Mr. Gubbins the poor man’s deplorable and pendulous nakedness was then congealed. He could not get to his bath towel, to his bell, to his door, he could only utter loud wordless groans for help. If his door was locked, he had to stay where he was until his manservant crawled out on the cornice and released him. And Pounce had always left before the manservant arrived.

Tagliolini with truffles, butter, and truffle oil

[From the slide show that accompanies the review, with photographs by Daniel Krieger.]

It’s always fun to read a negative review by a good writer. Sam Sifton’s NYT review two days ago of Nello (on Madison between 62nd and 63rd) is a superb example of the genre. One sample:

Nello, which opened in 1992, is an ecosystem that is almost incomprehensible to those not a part of it. The food is not very good. Yet the restaurant’s customer base is built of the richest and most coddled people in the city, who love it for its elegance and, perhaps, simplicity.

It is a private club of sorts, where the dues are paid nightly. The meetings are unadvertised. Nello’s dining room can be crowded at 3 p.m. or midnight. It can also be empty at 1 p.m. or 9 p.m. Regular patrons respond to whistles mere customers cannot hear.

The table of four that night was made up of that latter group: New Yorkers relatively new to the restaurant, unknown to the management.

They ate crisp artichokes offered as carciofi alla giudia. These tasted of shirt cardboard. They ate sawdusty chicken livers lashed with balsamic. They sipped at lentil soup familiar to anyone who owns a can opener and shared too-salty saffron risotto, correctly yellow, of no particular flavor.

The patrons come in for as much ridicule as the restaurant itself.

One night at dinner, there was a very tall woman in elegant clothes, with skin stretched tight over her face in unnatural ways and glasses the size of salad plates to magnify that. She was eating with a small red-faced fellow with dark hair in a center part, who was wearing an ascot and green Tyrolean coat. A cartoonist might render them as an awkward French giraffe and a mischievous Austrian chimp.

The overall rating is “Fair”, which is a level below one star. The summary judgment on atmosphere is “oligarchic chic”; the sound level is “a low buzz of self-satisfaction [that] rises into occasional peals of self-delighted laughter.” I don’t know how fair the review of the restaurant is, but it’s surely overly harsh on the clientele. Anyway, have a look. And if you dine there, let me know how it is.

I won’t try to explain why I read the lead story in the NYT Sunday Styles section two Sundays ago. What possible explanation is there for reading about The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs?

After an introductory section, the article introduces each of the eight rising stars whose group photo graces its top. I skipped around, reading a little bit about each of them and their current outlet, eventually reaching Lilit Marcus, editor of The Gloss. At the website’s homepage, you can see its self description as “A gloss on beauty, fashion, style, love and more.” No matter. Rather, what prompts me to write about the article and the site is the following passage: “The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said.”

I was dumbstruck. It had never occurred to me to describe Cynthia Ozick as a feminist writer. Maybe she is a feminist. Maybe not. But mostly she’s a writer, a great one, with enormous range — novels, short stories, essays. It’s not unusual to brand a writer with some simplistic label. One might complain whenever this is done. Sometimes I don’t even notice. Maybe I should. But this time I noticed, and it struck me as an especially dumb reduction of a great writer (who, by the way, if she must be simplistically reduced, might more naturally be called a Jewish writer).

By coincidence, just as I was going to start this post, The New Yorker put up a post by Erin Overbey on Ozick. The post is part of their 85th anniversary series, in which every day some piece from the The New Yorker archive is made freely available online, along with the entire contents of the issue the piece appeared in. An accompanying post provides context on the author and an excerpt from the piece. Today’s piece is Ozick’s short story The Shawl.

Not that I was gone, but I haven’t posted anything in over two weeks. I don’t know how that happened.

Well, actually, I was gone, but that was over a week ago, when I was back on the east coast for four days. Since returning, I’ve collected various items to blog about. I just haven’t followed up. And as the days pass, items that seemed worthy at the time strike me as less so now.

Worthy or not, new posts will be on their way soon.