Technical Difficulties

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.4 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 81.4 mi.
DISTRACTION: mirrorthaw playing de Blob
NOTES: Two 15 minute intervals of 1.7 mi. each, because I had to stop in the middle and roll my back. Now that I've got the shin splints sorted out, that's my worst problem: my spine does NOT want to be responsible for the weight of both my ribcage and my head.
SHIRE-RECKONING: Trudging through the Old Forest.

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I'm having the same problem I always have with exercise; aside from the fact that I'm inherently disinclined to exertion, I can't find any form of exercise that isn't either (a.) boring or (b.) social. So it's hard--and gets progressively harder--for me to talk myself into it. Woe is me and my first world problems.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE 3.4 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 74.4 mi.
OTHER EXERCISE: 10 pushups, yesterday morning and this morning; walked to pharmacy yesterday
NOTES: Okay, I can get over 7 mph without shin-splints, if I remember to let my arms and shoulders do most of the work. Am thinking about a metronome, since I don't have a coxswain.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We are riding from Crickhollow to the Old Forest.

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I realized that one (of the many) reasons I had been so bad about exercising the past few weeks is that I was avoiding Rabkin's lecture on Heinlein. So today, instead of Rabkin, I listened to the first thirty minutes of Poul Ruders' opera, Tjenerindens Fortælling (The Handmaid's Tale). Which is interesting.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE 3.2 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 68.8 mi.
NOTES: Apparently, if I keep my speed at 6.5 mph or lower, I will not have shin splints. o.O
SHIRE-RECKONING: Not yet to Buckleberry Ferry.

TIME: 21 min.
DISTANCE: 2.5 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 63.1 mi.
NOTES: I get out of the habit of exercising with depressing ease.
SHIRE-RECKONING: Farmer Maggot!

TIME: 24 min.
DISTANCE: 3 mi.
TOTAL: 58.6
SHIRE-RECKONING: We're in the Marish.

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Lecture 20: Science Fiction and Religion. No.

TIME: 15 min.
DISTANCE 2 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 52 mi.
NOTES: Still with the effing shin splints. Also, first day back on machine since the seventh. (For me, vigorous exercise is contraindicated while menstruating.) Am big wuss.
SHIRE-RECKONING: Pippin points out we're going the wrong way. Shut up, Pippin.

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Rowing while mirrorthaw plays Resident Evil 4 is fairly satisfying. It would be more satisfying if I could kill zombies with the rower.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.6 mi.
TOTAL: 47 mi.
NOTES: Still with the shin splints. OW.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We see a Black Rider on the crest of the hill.

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Professor Rabkin knows a good deal more about utopian literature than I do, so I found this lecture both interesting and enjoyable. He even brought me around on the subject of nomenclature. He uses eutopia for imagined societies which are unequivocally good, dystopia for imagined societies which are unequivocally bad, and utopia as the set containing both those subsets AND the imagined societies which are ambiguous. (He talked some about author intent, but that ended up getting kind of lost in the shuffle.)

Bonus points for discussing Herland--and he reminded me that it should, of course, be taught in juxtaposition with The Handmaid's Tale.

TIME: 15 min.
DISTANCE:1.8 mi.
[break due to phone-call]
TIME: 18 min.
DISTANCE: 2.2 mi.
TOTAL: 4 mi.
CUMULATIVE TOTAL: 40.4 mi.
NOTES: Obstinacy. I has it.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We burst into song. Again.

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There is a direct correlation between how much I know about the works Prof. Rabkin is discussing and how much I yell. Today was Jules Verne and I only muttered a couple of times. And at least one of those was him doing his conflation thing again, where he's talking about Verne as being in the tradition of Robinsonades, goes back to talk about Robinson Crusoe, and then announces that Robinson Crusoe demonstrates thus-and-such about science fiction.

Which, hello, it does not.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.6 mi.
TOTAL: 33.3 mi.
NOTES: Next time, cut your nails before rowing.
SHIRE-RECKONING: OMG BLACK RIDER!!! AIEEEEE!!!

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In fairness to Professor Rabkin, I need to tell you all that today's lecture on Frankenstein was not only entirely unobjectionable (that's higher praise than it looks like), but also offered a very clever observation about the relationship between Frankenstein and the Gothic, particularly the Gothic expliqué à la Anne Radcliffe.

The Gothic expliqué works by what we would call (as Rabkin points out) the Scooby Doo ending. There are all kinds of strange and apparently supernatural events, but at the end, they are all revealed to be natural. What Mary Shelley does, Rabkin says, is move the ENDING of the Gothic expliqué to the BEGINNING (although he fails to note both the meta--the explanation has become part of the apparatus of the text rather than a feature of the text itself--and the fact that this preface was written by P. B. rather than M. W. Shelley): "The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." And thus we have the claim of plausibility against a background of science that Rabkin lists as one of the defining characteristics of science fiction.

And a claim of scientific plausibility is a characteristic of science fiction--not all science fiction, and to a greater or lesser extent, but it is there, and I like this observation about Radcliffe and Shelley partly because it makes that issue so very clear.

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I should also note--I've been thinking about this--that probably the chief reason I am actively hostile to Professor Rabkin's ideas about fantasy (N.b., this is not the same as being hostile to Professor Rabkin himself.) is that he seems to want to elide from consideration the extensive canon of twentieth century fantastic literature in English that is neither (a.) science fiction nor (b.) for children. When he wants to talk about twentieth century fantasy, he either goes for children's literature (The Phantom Tollbooth) or South American magical realism and French post-modernism. And while I have no problem with discussing any of these genres, any more than I have a problem with an extensive discussion of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone science fiction, it really chafes my hide that he's ignoring H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, M. R. James, Russell Kirk, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, Hope Mirlees, Oliver Onions, Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. R. Eddison, Austin Tappan Wright, John Collier, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake . . . Bram Stoker is cited only to be dismissed, and even Tolkien is reduced to mere tokenism. (And none of the people I listed is part of the post-Tolkien commerical fantasy boom, which Rabkin does at least mention.)

Obviously, this is a choice on his part. Obviously, I disagree with it. Vehemently. And that being said, I'm going to let go of it, because there is no point in judging any intellectual endeavor on what it has chosen not to do.

TIME: 15 min.
DISTANCE 1.6 mi.
TOTAL: 26.2 mi.
NOTES: Dear knees, wtf? On Sunday, with no provocation, my right knee spent the day going, I shall now hyperextend! ... Ow! Today, my left knee rejected this whole rowing concept. When the issue did not work itself out after 15 minutes, I did the sensible thing and stopped. Spent the rest of the half-hour stretching.
SHIRE-RECKONING: On the Road again ...

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Dear Professor Rabkin: Post-modernism? Do we have to?