Art Is Not About Pleasing Your Coach

Swimming Studies:

 And yet, all this control and self-denial are what (in Swimming Studies at least) define swimming, as opposed to bathing. “Swimming” is what people who want to be the fastest, the best, do. It involves never letting your feet touch the bottom, never resting, both literally and metaphorically. “Bathing”, on the other hand, “implies having some contact with the ground while in the water – propulsion and speed are secondary”. Bathing is what the rest of us do. Shapton’s husband James, a poor swimmer who seems from Shapton’s account to be a grounded person in both senses of the word, is a bather. “Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn’t see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.” To be an Olympic contender you clearly have to be a swimmer, as defined above. But to be an artist? James, Shapton remarks, “is the opposite of a coach”: “He encourages me to sleep in, isn’t bothered when I cancel, shrugs at my whims, my mistakes, my detours into self-indulgence”.

There is a poignant moment towards the end of Swimming Studies when it begins to dawn on Shapton that art is not about pleasing your coach. Finding herself irresistibly drawn to the life stories of swimmers who, like her, didn’t quite make it, she wonders if this is just a case of sour grapes. But her interest seems to go deeper. After her own years of self-flagellation she is fascinated by “the athlete who hates practice”, the “self-loathing questioner of authority”. The others, “the ones who say and feel all the right things, are predictable”.  

Baggage = Caravan

In advance of our caravaning to each other:

I used to wish that I was an unremarkable girl, especially when it came to relationships. I was told more than once, by men who sought something less complex, that it might have helped. I don’t see my experience, or my intelligence, as baggage anymore. It’s a caravan.

Or as Nabokov, of course, put it much more aptly, and beautifully, in his Speak, Memory, “As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.”

Making It Politically

Sex On Inauguration Night:

I saw a picture of Barack and Michele Obama dancing face to face at the inaugural ball, and I immediately started wondering if they were going to have sex that night. I wonder what it must be like to be so close to a lifemate after having gone through such a major transformation, from gangly law student to American figurehead. Does sex have a place in that world anymore? ...

It’s hard not to see the sex between them, watching the Obama’s dancing against a blue sea of heads gazing up in the darkness. Barack’s forward-leaning posture, his chin jutting hungrily into Michelle’s face, I can almost see the thoughts in his head. The wetness, the warm touching of skin, the rhythmic thrust inward, straining to ascend, the hips rising in anticipation of his momentum. The arch up, the coming together, the falling back, the dilated pupils, the clenched hands, fingers interlocked.

Frugal Childhood

Memory: Wrapping pennies in brown paper bag rolls for fun so we could take them to the bank. Does this explain my obsession with saving money? Were my parents just using me for cheap labor? Does no one do this anymore?

 Here's advice for how to have a baby on the cheap.

Instructions For Being Alone

Exhibit A:

I’ve been through a million — OK, three — breakups before. I’ve spent plenty of time single in between. I thought I’d be good at this alone thing by now. I’m an only child, for crying out loud. Instead, on the heels of another split, I’m amazed at how difficult just being by myself can be. I have friends – they are wonderful — but I feel a suffocating solitude at the end of the night, in the morning or at any moment of the day that isn’t scheduled with distraction. It wasn’t this way when I was coupled. Just the knowledge that I had “a person” to call my own (even though I know in my bones that you can never truly call another person “your own”) was a comfort; that knowledge itself was a constant companion.

How does one become good at being alone? This question might be uniquely poignant for those of us fresh out of a breakup, or still in our 20s, but it’s a question people confront at all stages of life and for all sorts of reasons, whether it’s a big move to a new city, an unexpected death, a divorce or any countless number of things that life can throw your way. And regardless of your romantic status or friend count, it’s nice to be capable of enjoying a movie or dinner alone. A friend told me a story about an acquaintance who is married with kids: She has a meltdown whenever her family goes out of town; she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

[Judy Ford's] practical tips for conquering solitude are to get creative (“creativity is the cure of loneliness”), push yourself to “do something you have never done before” (like taking yourself out to dinner), admit your loneliness to others (“you might be surprised that they feel lonely too”), “get cozy with the gaps,” those empty spaces in between plans, and remind yourself, “Loneliness is not going to kill me.” These aren’t easy fixes — and may induce eye-rolls from self-help haters — but they’re crucial to happiness, she argues: “To experience wholeness, first we experience the void.”

Everyday Implied But Never Declared

My Magellanica

"Fernweh is what the Germans call that longing for faraway places, the poetic certainty that things are better elsewhere. But there is a superlative degree of geographic desire, a Fernweh even more sublime: the ache for fictional faraway places. Of such nonexistent locations, the mythical continent of Magellanica surely is the crowning glory."

Life Blood

On artistic collaboration.

"Many serious writers and visual artists benefit most from a virtual dialogue that doesn't require a computer—an ongoing mental conversation with a loved one, dead or alive, who 'fosters the psychological courage that can feed creativity,' as Barron puts it. It's important, she notes, 'to have a supportive, trusted, loving other in your life, whether it is someone you hold onto in your heart and head or someone in the flesh—even if they are not directly involved in making the work—in order to create.'...Which is to say: While most serious writers and artists don't make their best creations working with other people standing over them—or next to them, paint-brush in hand—they are almost always telling a story to, or making beauty for, someone specific."

Where You Belong

It wasn’t a bad place, and many peo­ple we knew loved it. But the fact was that we sim­ply didn’t belong there....And to live in a place where you don’t belong can begin to feel like a kind of nonex­is­tence.

More on hipster odyssey.

Life In Swim Suits

As I walk, naked, along the wooden deck, among the tan, blonde Swedes reclining on their beach towels, I’m less selfconscious than I expected. Women glance, I glance back, but it feels like an internal shrug, a relief to be naked, outdoors, and feel so safe. In contrast to the chatter and shrieks of the family beach, the Dambadet is quiet. Most of the women are reading. I step down the wooden steps that lead into the water. It is cool, perfect hot-day temperature, tasting only mildly saline.

The water is a beautiful olive-green color, turning my skin ochre beneath the waves. I like seeing the body I usually see in a tub or shower out here, in the sun, in the sea; gliding naked around other women’s thin bodies, fat bodies, saggy and taut parts. I feel good about my own— a relief after the habitual scrutiny of clothing myself— and at the same time feel invisible and unself-conscious. Out of the water my movements are still modest: I hold an arm between my breasts, I step around towels and legs with economy. But the feeling is very matter-of-fact, no need to yank Lycra over butt cheeks, no worrying about my bikini line, no anxiety over lane direction, speed, time.

An indifferent animality trumps anything erotic. As though in our polite blankness we are brushing up against one another, our furs, our similarities. I still see myself as a young swimmer, as a tube in a tank, as a neutral, androgynous athlete. But without my Speedo I am a bather, a body. As I approach forty, my swimmer self erodes with the onset of the gravity-bound realms of marriage and family. Swimming is my disembodied youth, yet I am rapidly becoming the embodied present.

- Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies.

The Illusion Of Loving Yourself

Eva Illouz on Why Love Hurts:

 One of the things which surprised me when doing this research is how much "self-blame" seems to be an art of the female psyche. Women connect their self-worth much more closely to the realm of love and relationships and when that realm poses problems and difficulties, they view it as a direct reflection of and threat to their self-worth.

This is what the hackneyed "you've got to love yourself first before someone else can love you" comes to express, without really knowing it—it comes to express the idea that you must make your self-worth independent of others' love of you, because their love cannot be counted on, whereas yours for yourself can.

The problem however, at least for a sociologist, is that you can never be the source of your own self-worth. This is an idea concocted by psychologists, which does not have any sound sociological basis. We can only build self-worth through and with others. This is why building good and nurturing environments, as families, schools, workplaces, is so crucial.

Making Life Submit

Do the ugly paintings really exist?

I was afraid of this question. Sure. But to me, their importance was as a thought. A question. A metaphor for other things.

What do you suppose the metaphor is?

It’s there in the book—Sholem’s approach to making an ugly painting is like Sheila’s attempt to construct a beautiful life—thinking she ought to marry and whatnot; follow the rules of how she thinks she should be, just as Sholem has rules about what’s beautiful and what’s ugly and tries to follow them in his painting.

I see. All those “oughts” equal something very different from beauty.

Yeah. Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head ... it’s really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it’s cheating.

How do you mean?

Cheating life. Cheating yourself out of a real engagement with life, which involves surprise, not just you moving through your environment with this pre-determined idea of what you intend to do with it and how it should react to you. It’s like thinking you’ve been put on this earth to master life and make it submit.

- Sheila Heti