Domestic Left #60: One foot in front of the other
We’ll get there when we get there
For the last ten years, I have called myself “a runner.” Not that being “a runner” exclusively defined my identity — in many if not most social contexts I would never even bring it up — but if someone were to ask “are you a runner?” I would respond with an unequivocal “yes.” And I suppose if I had had occasion to have to offer a holistic definition of myself in five to ten words, “runner” would have been in there, along with “writer” and “trade unionist” and so forth.
On Memorial Day weekend of 2014, I ran a 6.3-mile leg of the Vermont City Marathon relay — the longest I had ever run — and in 2015 and 2016 I ran two marathons each year, one in the spring and one in the fall. I intended to run another full marathon in the fall of 2017, but ended up running a half instead because the pressures of moving to Pittsburgh and starting a new job made it difficult to maintain a training schedule. In those years I also ran a handful of other relays, 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, and, twice, the “Race to the Top of Vermont,” a 4.3 mile race with 2,564 feet of elevation gain up the toll road on Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in the state.
I didn’t run another race until the Philadelphia Half Marathon last November, but during those six years I always maintained the goal of staying in “half-marathon shape,” which I defined as running 20-25 miles per week and a “long run” of 10 or more miles most weekends. I didn’t always, or even often, meet that goal — especially during periods of high work stress — but the goal always remained part of my self-definition. And in many ways signing up for the Philadelphia Half was a way to encourage myself to meet it — which I did, enthusiastically, averaging over 25 miles per week in October and running two fifteen-mile long runs.
But I can’t say the same for the Pittsburgh Half Marathon I ran earlier this month. I mean, I still ran it in under two hours and felt good about the race when I was done — so I guess I was still in “half-marathon shape.” But I wasn’t running very regularly or very much in the weeks leading up to the race, and indeed was regularly considering the question of whether, perhaps, I was at the end of my decade of being “a runner.”
Alert readers may have noticed that I did not get a Domestic Left out last week. In fact, I didn’t do much of anything last weekend — I was recovering from a cold, from a UE NEWS deadline, and from working through that cold for eight days solid to meet that deadline. And then I tried to move right into another heavy writing project for work, to push myself through a thick fog of writer’s block — and my word engine, usually humming along at all hours of the day and night, would simply not turn over.
I did at least try to keep my brain stimulated by reading a few things, one of which was this article on “Public musicology and the logic of content creation,” by Phil Ford, a professor at Indiana University. Ford is also the co-host of the Weird Studies podcast, which I’ve been listening to a lot recently. (I looked up the article, not out of any particular academic familiarity with musicology, but because he had mentioned it on a recent podcast episode.)
The article contains a nice discussion of what it means to do scholarship for the public, and cites a clever description of academic writing (“whereas so-and-so says X, I say Y”), which struck me as an eloquent summary of the form. However, what I find most interesting about the article, and the reason I looked it up in the first place, is the distinction Ford draws between “works” and “content.” (This discussion is mostly in the section called “Content,” which the website helpfully allows you to skip to using the links on the left-hand side of the page.)
I’ve written about the way “content” dominates our modern lives before, in Domestic Left #25:
It is the atomos, the basic stuff, of our online existence, and its creation and propagation is the prime mover of whole sections of the economy. There is content about content, and content about content about content.
Journalism and journaling, food and fad and fashion, art and music and literature, all are now but mellifluous names for categories and subcategories of content, two hard-edged syllables acting as a container for every bit of information or inspiration we receive, whether they come through the narrow delivery chutes of email newsletters or the clean mechanical algorithms of social media.
Ford, whose own form of public scholarship is a podcast — a form of “content creation” — zeroes in on the temporal element of content:
The term “content” suggests some indifferent bulk matter stuffed into identical cans with CONTENT stenciled on the label, all stacked in uniform rows in a warehouse, each one as good as the next, one shipment after another going out the door and keeping the product cycle going. [ ... ]
Content is that which fills time, whether the temporal container is a podcast release schedule or a single podcast episode. There does not even need to be a schedule; the ambient pressure to maintain an internet presence is something exerted in the day-to-day and manifests in the thought “I should really post something, it’s been a few days”—or hours, or minutes, depending on how much internet attention you are after.
Works, on the other hand, in Ford’s binary, are defined by the way that they exist independently of the time spent on their creation:
If I publish my ideas in the Journal of Musicological Research, all that time spent writing and woolgathering has been bound up in a smooth, univocal object of prose. This is what I mean by a work: it is something in which the time of its making is wound up.
Works don’t stand apart from time, exactly, but they don’t bind the time of the creator and the time of the consumer together in quite the same way as content. They serve instead as more of a fulcrum — or maybe a wormhole — between the time spent in creation and the time spent in consumption, which need be neither commensurate nor contemporaneous.
According to my own, somewhat idiosyncratic approach to “training” for half marathons, I should have been maximizing my mileage about four weeks before the race. Last fall, for example, I ran 31.29 miles the week of October 22. But this spring, the equivalent week coincided with a vacation in New Mexico and Utah which I scheduled around a work trip to Albuquerque. And during that vacation, I was not running, I was hiking.
Hiking, especially in the mountains, was something I was fond of as a kid — my favorite family vacations were the ones in which we packed up the family station wagon and drove, not east to visit friends and family, but west to Rocky Mountain National Park. Somewhere I still have a blue backpack covered with the hexagonal patches they sold at the visitors center, each one embroidered with the name of a trail and a small icon, the borders color-coded based on the length of the hike. (I was so proud of my first, and I think only, hike that exceeded 10 miles, which finally earned me a badge with a sky-blue border.)
But I did little hiking in most of my adult life. I went to college first in Westchester County, just outside of New York City, then on the plains of Iowa — followed by three years of graduate school also in Iowa. I did several hikes after moving to Vermont in June of 1998, but my first child was born in October, and for whatever reason, we never really became a hiking family, and to be honest rarely left Burlington.
It took the pandemic lockdown — which brought me back to the Green Mountain State — to get me back out on the trails. This was not only because it was a Covid-safe activity, but because during lockdown I watched Ken Burns’ PBS series on the national parks, and it rekindled something in me. (My first post-pandemic trip, to Big Bend National Park in Texas, grew out of my surprise at learning from that series that, wow, there are mountains in Texas!)
I wouldn’t exactly say that I hike much in Pittsburgh — but I am fond of spending weekend days on long walks around the city, anywhere from five to ten miles. They are on sidewalks, not trails, but given Pittsburgh’s geography, usually include a not-insubstantial amount of elevation gain. And where I once scheduled travel mostly around food and drink and socializing, I am now much more likely to schedule it around hiking and nature and solitude.
When running, I wouldn’t say that all miles are the same, but what differentiates the miles are abstract, measurable qualities of the course or of the day: hilliness, surface, traffic, weather. One mile on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail at 75 degrees and 80 percent humidity is much the same as any other mile on a flat, paved surface uninterrupted by car traffic on any other warm, humid day.
In contrast, every mile of a hike is unique to that place, that season, that time of day, and that hiker. Every marathon is 26.2 miles, but every trail is the length that it takes to get from one particular place place to another — whether the under-five-mile trails memorialized with green-bordered patches on my backpack, or Vermont’s 273-mile Long Trail, or the even longer trails that the Long Trail was apparently the inspiration for, such as the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails.
Writing an email newsletter lies somewhere between content and works, with one’s place on the spectrum determined by one’s aims, habits, and temperament. I am somewhat envious of the people who seem to post email newsletters only when they feel like it, or have something to say. For the most part they seem to be people who have a proper writing career that predates, or is completely unrelated to, the email-newsletter industry.
Being on Substack, especially, one is constantly receiving emails from the company itself with tips on how to become a successful Substacker, and posting on a regular schedule is at the top of the list. Substack, of course, has a material interest in its content-producers expanding their paid following — hence the regular stream of content about how to, well, produce a regular stream of content.
For most of the first five years of this newsletter, I was an irregular poster, but I always experienced this irregularity not as freedom or autonomy but as failure to live up to my initial intent of a monthly newsletter — even when I posted more than once in a month. Last November, after a certain amount of introspection about my life, and the importance of writing in it (and especially of creative writing), I began posting on a weekly schedule, and have more or less kept to it — with a few exceptions, like last week.
Nonetheless, I like to think that my attempts to keep to a schedule stem less from the logic of content — I am embarrassed to think that I am seeking “internet attention,” though of course I would love for more people to read my writing — than from the number of potential “works” I have in my notes, and from embracing a work ethic that helps me actually complete them.
Still, I feel the “ambient pressure” that Ford describes, and certainly don’t claim that everything I put out qualifies as a “work.” Especially this post…
The person I was when I was most a “runner” was, in many ways, my favorite version of myself. I don’t know how much causation there was between the discipline of almost always being in training for a race and the record self-confidence that I felt in those years (or in which direction the causation might have flowed), but there was certainly a strong correlation.
During those years I was in a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to fitness, one of which was made up of other “movement” people and bore the title “In It for the Long Haul Runners.” Indeed, in movement spaces we would often use running metaphors, talking about how the struggle is “a marathon, not a sprint,” or about how the movement (metaphorically) needs “long-distance runners.”
When I would be gearing up to do something difficult, like having a hard conversation with someone, I would often think about it during the most challenging part of a run. “If you want to [do X],” I would tell myself, “you are going to need the same kind of fortitude you need to get up this hill. So get it done!”
And yet, while I miss the person I was then, in my early middle age, I am not sure I can or even want to be that person again.
Last week I was talking with an old friend and comrade, a movement organizer who is also a proper writer (like, with a published book), and they asked me if I thought I would ever write a book myself.
I demurred, but I have to admit that I thought about it on my long walk this weekend, along with all of the other things I tend to think about on hikes and long walks: things I have done and things I haven’t done, and all the things I will likely never do, or never do again. The person I was and the person I am and how one became the other. I thought about aging and loss, acceptance and letting go, and the miles ahead. It was warm and humid and sunny, and I took a breath and continued up the hill.
Some things I have been reading, listening to, and watching recently:
Public Source, Pittsburgh’s online non-profit news site, recently published a story about “Pittsburgh’s decaying ‘Death Stairs’” which I found quite charming. The author, a native Pittsburgher, discusses how, while living abroad, he began to follow a Facebook group called “Death Stairs,” which is “dedicated to pictures of dangerous, decrepit or otherwise intimidating staircases around the world” — and quickly “noticed that a disproportionate number of the group’s posts depicted the same Pittsburgh steps that I remembered so fondly from my days growing up there.”
Two types of discussions tended to follow each post. First, the group members who had never been to Pittsburgh (and who, in some cases, had never even heard of Pittsburgh) expressed bafflement and curiosity at this strange American city and its numerous deadly stairs. Second, the large contingent of native Pittsburghers began to express remarkable civic pride at how their city stands out among all the hundreds and thousands of cities across the world, if only in terms of dangerous-looking stairs.
Erik Davis (one of those irregular Substack posters) has a nice post up at Burning Shore called “Sad Ear Worm,” which contains an insight I think is worth sharing (along with three pieces of sad music which I think are worth listening to):
There seem to be three principal monsters of the heart these days: hatred, fear, and a terrible sadness. There are reasons for all three, but only two — hatred and fear — are actively perpetuated by our sick capitalist communication webs. This should be a sign.
My insight was simple: whenever there is the choice, move from hatred or fear to the terrible sadness. Carry the heaviness rather than project it outward or tamp it down. ... Being alive today means being immersed in a sea of good-byes — to birds and beasts, to analog lifeways, to values and assumptions, to hopes and dreams. Fight for your cause if you will, and take on fears if it helps you prepare, but please do not forget to make space to mourn in real time.
Finally, this roughly 30-minute video essay from Quality Culture about Chris McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild (and the movie based on the book), was a nice meditation on nature, civilization, and human connection: