srf0638
2d ago
Recently read Robert Shankland's 1954 biography of Stephen T. Mather, written apparently quite straight in what I can only describe as a jaunty Wodehousian style. This has inspired several reflections:
-1954 was of course 30-odd years into Wodehouse's career as a bestselling author (modulo the whole German radio broadcasts episode), meaning that Shankland, in writing a piece of serious if perhaps hagiographic biography, presumably knew he sounded a bit like Wodehouse and chose to write like that anyway.
-One naturally considers Wodehouse's style as a parody of the dominant straight middle-highbrow style of the time. Indeed, Wodehouse occasionally steps outside this to parody the genuinely avant-garde (the occasional modern poet character) or popular crime fiction (various episodes of jewel theft and so on.).
-At the same time, virtually everything Wodehouse ever wrote and said was in more or less the same distinctive voice--is it really a parody if you're just like that naturally, so to speak?
-This also inspires the speculation that Wodehouse's style read as relatively colorless New Yorker prose to the audiences of its day. Imagine sitting down to Psmith in the City or Right Ho, Jeeves and having it read like Atul Gawande's longform medical pieces or something. It's enough to give a guy vertigo.
-At the same time, one can see cheeky flashes of Wodehouse from time to time in A. J. Liebling, who was after all a New Yorker fixture, and perhaps even John McPhee. Was Raymond Chandler a pioneering modernist with his works of hard-boiled fiction? Maybe--but he also went to Dulwich within two years, I think, of Wodehouse.
There's probably a coherent essay lurking in all this but I can't put my finger on it.
srf0638
9d ago
biceps, triceps, pectoral muscles, and lats.
You really just gonna skip delts like that, damn.
Thinking about it, I don't know if I've ever looked in a mirror and thought I wanted bigger pecs. But I've definitely wanted bigger shoulders. A guy could go quite a ways with just supine-grip chins (on a fat bar, for forearms) and ohp variants.
srf0638
29d ago
I think I would take post-depopulation Detroit over ~late 70s/early 80s ditto, and the rural parts of Japan and Spain, for instance, seem quite nice.
srf0638
1mo ago
On one hand, yeah, fair. On the other hand, I guessed before I clicked that it was a gravel event doing this.
srf0638
1mo ago
Eh, maybe, maybe not. "Kenyans would dominate Western States if they showed up" is a perennial LetsRun flame post. Every 15-20 years someone tries to build a pro cycling team in East Africa with lots of sponsorship money and it never amounts to much. Rowing, swimming, flatter cycling events, and by extension of the latter two triathlon, and possibly xc skiing as well all favor somewhat burlier body types than the typical East African runner.
srf0638
1mo ago
living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it
I was going to mention this as another example of sloppy equivocation but it seemed like it was straying a little far afield. I'm reasonably familiar with the relevant literature, and it seems like we're awfully ready in conversations of this sort to ignore other androgens, androgen receptor status, the differences between acute and chronic effects, what actually counts as a clinically significant effect size, etc. etc. This might be a reasonable analytical approach if you zoom out far enough (pretty obviously in the case of men vs women, for example) but that's surely too coarse a level of resolution to distinguish between "lift 2x, run 5x" and "lift 4x, run 2x" within the same individual.
The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds.
There's definitely a performance engineering mindset out there in Line Go Up activities, and I appreciate it. But I also see a kind of religion mindset, where as a trainee you do the thing because it's virtuous, a form of worship, and as a coach or advisor you tell people what they should want and what the virtuous thing to do is and baldly assert that one thing or another is true without empirical evidence or sometimes even without a priori logical argumentation--pretty far removed from methodically figuring out how to get from a well-defined A to a well-defined B and rebuilding Neurath's boat. Rippetoe is an obvious case in point, and I say that as someone who pretty much got into lifting thanks to Starting Strength (in fairness, he got a lot worse after 2017 or so). Older heads make it sound like the HIT types of the early 2000s were like this as well. Alan Couzens is an example from the endurance world (and I actually agree with quite a bit of his advice.).
are places where you can find something of a männerbund.
True, though probably 99% of my training has been solitary so it doesn't seem terribly salient to me.
srf0638
1mo ago
Yeah. Also cycling, rowing, XC skiing, triathlon, and I'm pretty sure swimming.
I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility.
It's interesting that we seem to equivocate between "lifting", "not being fat", "aesthetics", "the gym"/"gym bros", fighting sports and fighting ability, strength, and "being in shape" in this thread and discussions of this nature generally, as if they were all more or less equivalent, while endurance gets ignored, briefly passed over as "oh yeah, you gotta do some cardio too", or downright dismissed as a PMC affectation. At least some online endurance spaces are pretty normie left bluepilled (TrainerRoad forums spring to mind), though LetsRun is regularly accused of being problematic. Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised), there was at least a brief period in the 70s-80s when marathons and triathlons filled pretty much the same subcultural niche that Crossfit (and its knockoffs) and BJJ do now, and long-duration endurance is notoriously a limiting factor in most of the higher-speed parts of the US military. I don't really have a point or even a question here, it's just an observation.
See also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/right-versus-left-movie-stars/
(Edit, that came to me while out running: also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).
srf0638
1mo ago
This description of heating with wood is giving me flashbacks to a winter I spent in a yurt near the California/Oregon border.
srf0638
1mo ago
power sports
cycling
worse life outcomes
Eh? (Unless you're talking specifically about match sprinters, which is an awfully small sample size. The bad outcomes for endurance guys have historically involved low bone density and maybe skin cancer.).
Call Grayback Forestry or Franco Reforestation or Pacific Oasis and tell them you're interested, they'll walk you through it. A lot of the entry-level workforce consists of dumbass 18yo kids so they're used to answering questions. With your availability window you may not get out on actual fires much but Grayback will for sure have fuels work and I'm pretty sure the others will as well.
srf0638
1mo ago
When I was in a fairly similar situation, I picked up some contract wildland fire work. I didn't have any experience, but I was willing to travel and work, and they needed bodies. I enjoyed it overall, pretty slow at times but the money was decent. Seven years later, I'm a permanent employee on a hotshot crew, with a consolation master's. Unintended consequences (or were they?)
srf0638
1mo ago
I'll broadly echo this. My impression is that, at least post-COVID, blue-collar labor has as much bargaining power as it's ever had in the US, or very nearly so.
srf0638
1mo ago
Very reminiscent of the courtroom procedural bits in Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity, which I liked a lot.
Thanks for the backstory. That's pretty wacky, but it sure beats sitting inside doompoasting all day.
Edit: read through some archives and man, that was kind of a bs ban. I hope he makes it and tells us all about it.
srf0638
4mo ago
Well, it certainly sounds like you'd know if it helped. I barely drink, haven't really a/b tested for myself, but it does seem like I enjoy being around people more when I drink, and when I saw that excerpt it occurred to me that maybe the author was on to something.
srf0638
5mo ago
I know several of these feels.
Do you drink? I can't find a full-text source online, but see https://twitter.com/snowset/status/1625119258265911296
Separately, I just started Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue and while I don't have any definite textual evidence yet I am extremely confident that George Macdonald Fraser must have read it and lifted a good deal of the style and possibly some more or less intact episodes for the Flashman books. Flash does run into the Glanton gang at one point, Fraser was never one to shy away from primary sources, and the voice will be strikingly familiar to Flashman readers.
More options
Context Copy link