I’ve read a great deal on the topic but have never been satisfied, because deliberate practice is rarely treated substantively. You can find any number of 500 word articles about the principles of deliberate practice (and how it can increase your workforce’s productivity), but these are mostly abridgements of a Malcolm Gladwell book which was superficial to begin with. There are books on the topic. There’s the aforementioned Gladwell book, Outliers. Geoff Colvin wrote a book called Talent is Overrated. If you can stomach academic writing, there’s Karl Anders Ericsson’s research about the acquisition of expert skills. Then there are books that allude to its importance, like Born to Run and All Things Shining. Their primary subjects were running and eudaimonia, respectively, but both acknowledged practice’s importance to those pursuits. Or there’s always the world of sports, where our most glamorous ascetics live. You can watch thirty second Nike spots and feel like you spent hours sweating in the gym. Michael Jordan will tell you that you’re just making excuses. You can hear Ray Allen discusses his pre-game routine for ninety seconds.

Which is the problem: we acknowledge practice’s importance, but it bores us, so we don’t want to discuss it too long. That’s why Rocky’s training montages only last a few minutes, and why someone intrigued by deliberate practice can find only brief, generalist articles. (I do recommend the Ericsson, as it is neither.) Worse is the orientation of these books and articles. Gladwell talks about practice as a term in a secret formula. 10,000 hours of practice + environmental advantages = genius. These books and articles are about process, but only as it relates to the payoff – becoming an elite performer.

Leonard’s Mastery talks about how process can be its own payoff. Written in 1992*, Leonard writes about deliberate practice avant la lettre. He describes the expert’s learning curve and its many plateaus, and how to appreciate those. It’s the Karate Kid training montage expatiated into a 179 page book. If you’re like me, that should be exciting.

Leonard’s a fan of that movie. He teaches martial arts himself, though it is Aikido instead of karate. As such, he enjoys Zen parables. He sees the Karate Kid as the Americanization of the swordmaster myth: the story of the eager pupil come to learn at the feet of an at first indifferent master. When he finally agrees to teach him, the master makes him chop wood to learn swordsmanship. There’s other parables, about how you have to empty your cup before you can fill it, or how you have to let go of that cup of expertise to grab the quart on the table.

Someone aiming for excellence might roll their eyes at these Zen paradoxes. I am convinced by them. Maybe to get good at something, you have to not care if you ever do. The road is too long to be motivated by a destination you can only imagine and never see. The journey has to be its own satisfaction. I don’t fantasize about seeing my name on a bookstore’s shelves, anymore. I am more interested in learning how to pay attention to all the steps leading to it.

I like finishing projects. I liked it when I was up for critique in workshops; people would usually say something nice. Once a classmate compared a story I wrote to James Joyce. (The teacher told her not to get too crazy.) I’ve written a lot of sentences and even a few stories that seemed great at the time. That pride has never lasted more than a few months, though, so I have learned not to trust it. Now I take pride in effort alone. I feel best when I have pushed at a stone for two hours without appreciable effect.  I am most excited about writing whenever some other writer shows me just how much there is to learn.

* He despises insta-diets and quick fixes, and his condemnations of corporate raiders and high finance gambling are weirdly prescient about the 2008 catastrophe.

1. Are there at least two women in it?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

In movies that fail the Bechdel test (and most do), women are the objects of desire. That’s why they show up so infrequently, with existences contingent on men: they’ve been isolated from the herd, targeted for a soft-focus happy ending. Brief Interviews fails the conventional Bechdel test. Rashida Jones is seen laughing on a couch in a few scenes, and at one moment Sara is seen talking with her friends, but the conversation is unmiked and happens only so John Krasinski can catch her eye at a dreamily lit party.

It passes the inverted Bechdel with flying colors, though. The whole movie is men talking to, theorizing about, and addressing women, without ever waiting for a response. We know the monologue as the perfect format for confession, the revelation of sensitivity. When they are not meant to rally the troops or pleading the jurors to search their hearts for justice, most monologues are to be performed verklempt.  The movie maintains a deep suspicion of kind of damp-eyed sensitivity and its vehicle. Wallace imagines the dramatic monologue as a tool of patriarchy: fundamentally arrogant, founded on the belief that the speaker is the only one with something interesting to say. These monologues are interesting, featuring performances from a well-chosen cast.

There’s Ben Shenkmen, doing Goldblum, doing a joke from Annie Hall: “I wouldn’t want to be a companion to any woman that would have me.” There’s Ben Gibbard, from Deathcab for Cutie, bearing a jowly resemblance to DFW himself and channeling that writer’s more literary sensibility. (He describes the character of light just before dusk, and floridly resents the female orgasm as some inner voyage into a void he cannot reach.) The always charismatic Bobby Canavale, here one-armed, brags about his disfigurement’s charming effect on women. There’s even two monologues by veterans of The Wire, Clarke Peters (Freamon) and Frankie Faison (Commissioner Burrell).

Most interesting are the Nice Guy monologues. There are many places online where you can find backlash against nice guys, essays which describe how they are not very nice at all, and more troublingly, that they’re unaware of their hypocrisy. Randall Munroe of XKCD frequently panders to his readership, but satire of the Nice Guy indicts a number of them (whether or not they realize it). In the movie, the Nice Guy wears three faces: there’s Will Forte (Subject #72), Tim Hutton (#30), and John Krasinski (#20).

Forte is the oblivious nice guy who professes a sincere love for women without seeming to know much about them. He says repeatedly, “I looove women,” like it’s an alibi, and Forte uses that malfunctioning smile he does whenever he’s playing a character that’s lying poorly. Subject #20 can only enumerate the most stereotypically charming aspects of women: how they giggle, look in high heels, or bat their eyes. Spend a little time in a sociology or gender studies course and you’ll come across the male gaze. It is patriarchy’s eye of Sauron, the ubiquitous objectifying glance which sees women as sex objects rather than subjects. At its most basic, male gaze is bad description emerging from inaccurate perception. As performed by Forte’s character, it downsamples the object, giving you a low-resolution version of the original. The women Forte describes sound like women only in the most general, theoretical sense, and you suspect he’s imagined them entirely.

Timothy Hutton, playing Sara’s faculty advisor, sees women more clearly. That is not much better, in some cases.  Subject #30 tells her about meeting his wife. He married her because of her durable beautiful. When he met her, she’d already had a kid, and he appreciated the fact that the worst had already happened to her and she’d retained her looks. Subject #30 interrupts himself to comment on how awful he sounds, how petty his motivations are – but in the end he shrugs and suggest maybe everyone’s motivations are petty when you get down to it. Forte’s character has no self-awareness. He is insists, he loves women; how could that be misogynistic? Hutton, in acknowledging some of his baser motives, is a Nice Guy one degree away self-recognition. It is Krasinski’s character, Ryan, who confronts his hypocrisy.

In doing so, he exposes and dismantles the Nice Guy. Which is ironic when you consider he got famous playing the quintessential Nice Guy, Jim Halpert. In that light, it reads like a willful repudiation of his meal ticket, self-iconoclasm. But I guess it’s doubly ironic, because Krasinski wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie. Apparently the actor they had lined up had to drop out just two weeks before production. Considering his familiarity with the source material and acting chops, Krasinski was the only possible pinch hitter. If that sounds kind of suspicious to you, you’re not the only one: in these same interviews, Krasinski swears it’s true and that he wasn’t casting himself out of vanity.

It would be more interesting if he had. Ryan obviously looks like Halpert – his hair and clothes are even a little better – and his sensitive, halting performance recalls  Jim at his most romantic. But the similarities stop there. Before his monologue, Ryan tells Sara that he must be completely candid with her. In normal circumstances that’s a good thing, and in stereotypical relationship drama, the woman is always pushing her man for more emotional openness. Not so in the world of Brief Interviews. Ryan unmasks the Nice Guy, revealing toxic insecurity. Krasinski, I think, is bound for a career playing the first or second male lead in romantic comedies, but his performance here indicates a potential for bigger things. The monologue is as shocking as watching Jim Halpert beat up Pam in the break room.

So many movies are about men. There’s almost always a love interest running around, but most of the story’s energy and attention is invested in male relationships.* Brief Interviews belongs to this category – ostensibly about men’s relationship to women, it’s actually about their relationship with themselves. But in having women for a topic, and with Sara’s constant, maddening silence, a male viewer’s own theories about women seem a little pathetic. It inspires a question and a desire for dialogue, not more monologues. I want this movie’s companion piece, Brief Interviews with Hideous Women. (Wait, is that The Vagina Monologues?)

*Wedding Crashers is a great example. The male leads spend all their time trying to sleep with women, and the movie’s back half is about Owen Wilson’s pursuit of one in particular, but the movie’s emotional core lies in the friendship between the two men. The final scene at the altar isn’t about getting the girl, it’s about Vince Vaughn’s character embracing his best friend.

FreeDarko’s status as a publishing collective is, I suppose, now in doubt. They followed up their Almanac with an Encyclopedia which covers some of the game’s esoterica. It is much like the first book. The writing is fine, if sometimes too familiar to me – I’ve already read Breaks of the Game – and the design is delicious. Jacob Weinstein has done tremendous illustrations for this volume.

This book completely obviates Bill Simmons’ recent book. They both cover the same territory in between their orange and blue covers — only FreeDarko does so more quickly and with better design and footnotes. The essays vary in prose quality, and some of it’s purple as a Kings’ jersey. Here’s a description of Jordan’s style:

To say that Jordan had a playground-style game was to suppose it could be contained or assigned its own argot. Jordan jetted up the court, around, over, and through defenders, with an organic, ecstatic ease that made of mockery of “moves.” The ball leapt out of Jordan’s hands as if imbued with his spirit, understanding for the first time what the rest of its life would be like. The burnished fadeaway that would later become MJ’s calling card, that ultimate beam of reckoning, was yet years away.

That last sentence is a three metaphor pileup. But the occasional overreach is a fair price to pay for basketball writing done by culture critics. The book offers unique takes on the old Celtics, Chamberlain, and the ’07 Suns.

I stuck it out to the end, and in doing learned that I’d been misreading Miéville. What seemed like missteps were intentional choices I happened to dislike. And the difference between a simple error and an unappealing decision is massive when it comes to books. There are simple errors: one previously bald character grows a head of hair in fifty pages, there’s some awful copyediting at one point, and the sentences still have all the fat on. But the larger, more bothersome mistakes are intended. Miéville:

Kraken is very aware of itself and its own ridiculousness, hopefully in an enjoyable way.

This late discovery didn’t change my feeling about the book, unfortunately: the damage had been done. But it did transform Kraken into just a miss, rather than my cue for avoiding China Miéville’s future work.

You might not guess it from the delicate first name and accented surname, but China Miéville is a tough looking dude. Shaved head, massive arms, scowling author photos. The problem is his prose takes after his name more than his looks. Lots of sing song word play, Britishisms (a lot of faffing about, you might say), and indefinite descriptors. Reading through Kraken, I kept wishing the writing would shave its head, get a few heavy earrings put in, and start scowling. Instead there were tragic puns about squids (“squiddity,” “squidnapping,” and squid pro quo) as well as the Londonmancers.

Oh, the Londonmancers. You may be surprised to learn that these are wizards who use London for their magic. OK, so it’s a little on the nose. Is that a crime? Well first, I ask you to please consider this paragraph:

The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges… the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.

Fantasy is a name game. You can figure out how much pulp is in your fantasy novel by calculating the value of a character’s name in a game of Scrabble, then multiplying by 1.5 for any apostrophes or diacritical marks. Besides betraying a character’s roots in someone’s D&D campaign, names are crucial to verisimilitude. Something as bald as Londonmancer reminds you every time it is used that you are reading something. Suspension of disbelief? You never even achieve liftoff. Nothing comes alive: every character and concept is a curio in an embalming jar.

It took me too long to figure out Miéville wasn’t trying for that. He is a worldbuiilder, and all his previous books depend on the reader beliving in these secondary worlds. But Kraken,  which he calls “a comedy all the way through,” is about Miéville goofing around with language – i.e. Londonmancers. Weirdly enough, this kind of comedy can’t afford to take things anything less than seriously.

For starters, the writing is too glib. Miéville claims

The language is more disciplined even if the story is more shaggy.

I disagree. The language compulsively grabs at every available joke. I recently listened to the commentary for Judd Apatow’s Funny People. Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan, and Apatow all sat in to talk about the movie. And as comedians, they were trying to be funny for every second they were talking. They went for bad jokes, small laughs, mild amusement. It becomes distracting. In the same way, Miéville writes in neon. His particular favorites are figures of sound: consonance, alliteration, echoing, etc. Here’s an example, with the text marked up to simulate its effect on my attention as a reader:

She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passerby passed by where they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about thesort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.

“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.

She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumors to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid.

The prose works in this register more or less all the time, which makes it difficult to thresh through the enormous amounts of plot Miéville delivers, mostly for form’s sake. The plot tries to go about six different directions at once and as a result stalls. Characters who I’m never convinced to care about go on searches for secrets I already know. They engage in tiresome sleuthing to solve mysteries I forgot about twenty pages ago. It all feels like rote observance of the plot beats customary in this genre potpourri.

Again, it’s intentional:

It obviously won’t work for everyone, but I always think about books like—and I don’t mean this hubristically—Gravity’s Rainbow. If Gravity’s Rainbow is anything, it’s kind of this dreamlike meander. The idea of saying to Pynchon, “You know, you need to tighten this up,” it would destroy it. Kraken was an effort to tap into that same kind of pleasurable ramble.

The difference between Gravity’s Rainbow and Kraken is that Pynchon knows that you have to commit 100% to the bit. A story from the perspective of a lightbulb, or about a man being flushed down a toilet in a jazz club, are on their face too ridiculous to bother with. But Pynchon deadpans these scenes. Sure, the writing is funny, but the impulse behind it is absolutely sincere. Stephen Tobolowsky gives this gloss of Freud’s definition of comedy:

Comedy is making the meaningless meaningful, or making the meaningful meaningless.

Miéville believes he’s doing the same thing, only he calls it fantasy. He talks about how one of the subplots – a general strike of magical familiars – was inspired by the rebellious paintbrush in Fantasia.

It is a form of workplace resistance, oddly moving in a silly way. Fantasy is about seeing what happens if you treat ridiculous ideas not as absurd but see where they take you.

Problem is, Miéville’s writing doesn’t treat ridiculous ideas seriously. It constantly undermines them, as with the Londonmancers. Or consider the Tattoo. This is the crimelord of magic London’s underground. He is as literally named as the Londonmancers: he’s an animate Tattoo that lives on some guy’s back. Now, nevermind that his henchmen are called knuckleheads because their heads are actually fists. Let’s just focus on his threatening of the ocean.

In Kraken, the ocean keeps an embassy somewhere in the city. It’s a standard house, only it’s filled with water and sealife. When you want to talk to the embassy, you say something at the door and wait for a message in a bottle to crash out of the mail slot. So at some point, the Tattoo actually threatens war against the ocean. The scene is played for laughs – look at how arrogant and powerless the Tattoo is – and it never transcends absurdity.

The trick to enjoying the book is embracing the surreal, literary chaos. I never managed to, because it’s exhausting chaos rather than exciting chaos. Miéville crams the book with two notebooks worth of dream journalling and ideas from his slush pile. Aside from all the references to geek culture (the main character acquires a working phaser from Star Trek at one point), the book is about twenty different things. It’s a comment on the power of language, or metaphysics, or faith, or whatever. This kitchen sink is the worst kind of geekery. It’s taking a box of shit you like, thrusting it at somebody, and asking, “Do you like any of this? Me too! Awesome!”

Their message is polytheistic and spiritual but irreligious in the traditional sense. Instead of a pantheon of gods, the authors believe moderns need to attune themselves to moods, to learn wonder and gratitude, and embrace meanings and significances outside those generated in our own heads. Nihilism – God is dead, “nothing is true, everything is permitted” – is presented as the logical but deleterious successor to monotheism, which was the understandable but unfortunate successor to polytheism, which was… well, pretty great. The authors’ high opinion of the Greeks should come as no surprise, since they are both philosophers. And they make the golden mean their methodology. At every available opportunity, they choose the middle path in a false dilemma. It is classical, restrained, effective argumentation.

The dust jacket is less circumspect in its claims:

This book will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves. It offers a new – and very old – way to celebrate and be grateful for our existence in the modern world.

Grandiosity aside, it’s that second sentence which interests me. This appeal to the forgotten wisdom of the ancients was beautifully executed by Christopher MacDougall in his Born to Run. As a strategy, it combines the credibility and safety of old thought with the allure of secret technology. It makes me wonder if, like fashion, society cycles, and in another hundred years we’ll start reenact the course of Western civilization. More likely we will continue amassing technologies which conquer our material problems and keep struggling with the spiritual.

All Things Shining’s poster boy for spiritual struggle is David Foster Wallace, whose book Infinite Jest pointed out the dangers and emptiness of modern entertainment. Wallace hung himself in 2008; with the man gone and only his texts remaining, Dreyfus and Kelly build a convincing piece of criticism from his life. Wallace himself would disagree with this reading, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Their claim is this: Wallace takes complete responsibility for his inner life, and in doing so places an untenable burden on himself. They draw on his memorable commencement address, in which he describes his strategy for coping with banal consumer hells. It is the writer’s gambit:

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.

I read that as a helpful reminder to be mindful. Dreyfus and Kelly see an approach crippled by relativism. In any relativistic system, no one thing has agreed-upon supremacy over the other members of its set. Their hierarchy is determined by the attitude of each subject which considers them. In an anthropological sense, this is useful in repressing racist and colonial tendencies. In our everyday, relativism is more dangerous. On the individual scale, relativism becomes subjectivism, the belief that “transcendent knowledge is impossible.” This is a lonely way to be. Worse, it’s on you to micromanage your own existence. For a depressive, that’s a tall order. It would take a superhuman act of will to create your own happiness, to in fact be unhappy and convince yourself, somehow, that you aren’t.

Dreyfus and Kelly believe in truths that live outside of ourselves. They reject the notion of some overriding monotheistic truth, however, in a strong chapter on Moby Dick (which I’m reading right now.) They advocate a series of truths and feelings which cannot be unified in some grand theory, only taken one at a time. Picking up Melville’s ruminations on the color white’s evil aspects, they use a little wordplay: white light looks like nothing. Every beam of it contains a whole dazzling rainbow of color — but in its normal state it is a medium as invisible as air or culture. Then, there’s white noise. Say you hold the perfect book. In it there are a million beautiful sentences, each clever and euphonious. What happens when all of those sentences are simultaneously spoken aloud? You get none of their sense, only babble. These two moves sold me on the book – even if it did spoil Moby Dick for me.

Who is Chuck Klosterman? Klosterman is either a brainier Bill Simmons or a less intelligent David Foster Wallace. Klosterman maintains a slight inferiority complex about his fellow Midwesterner; while covering a cruise which features Journey and Styx for musical acts, he describes the challenges in writing the story.

The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace, who published the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the forty-eight hours prior to this trip.

Klosterman probably hates being compared to DFW, but he’d be smart to emulate him. The essays in this book read like the work of a culture critic fooled about his true subject. Wallace never forgot that culture criticism must be about the culture consumer, and not the producer. Celebrity is a quickly revolving door, and the people who come through it are ultimately interchangeable; the long-term, universal interest in any celebrity (aside from whatever artistic contribution they’ve left) is how we relate to them, and how they are validated by the faceless masses who create them.

Chuck Klosterman IV does ask these questions – just not frequently enough. There’s a nice essay about cultural betrayal, and quite a few pieces about the sociology of fan groups: why young Latinos almost exclusively comprise Morrissey’s LA  fan base, for instance. But the first section is rife with disposable artist portraits done for Spin Magazine. Fine for a monthly publication, but it’s still ephemera and nobody goes looking for a compilation of the Tribune’s greatest hits just to marvel at the craftsmanship. Of course there’s the debased and musty pop culture analogies to The Matrix or Friends; more problematic are simply outdated stories. A piece on the radical ambiguity of Britney Spears, for instance, seems irrelevant in 2011.

If Britney Spears has nothing to say (she doesn’t), we can only pay attention to Klosterman’s approach. As a commentator, he methodically demolishes the glamor of fame. His journalism reads like the behind-the-scenes commentary to some more outward facing piece we never read. He details the circumstances between the Q & A, like what Thom Yorke has for a meal, or what Jeff Tweedy’s naked 4yo screams as he races about the house. In these everyday circumstances the super-famous are humanized; which is nice, but Klosterman is nobody’s publicist: most of the profiled come off like assholes.

Val Kilmer is an effusive man unable to realize his epileptic brother’s death was likely caused by his family’s belief in Christian Science. Also, he owns a bunch of bison. Thom Yorke “was twenty minutes late for our interview, explaining that he had to run home and do some yoga because he was ‘feeling a bit weird.’” Jeff Tweedy “can’t remember if his wife’s name is spelled Suzy or Susie, so he begs me to refer to her simply as Sue if I mention her in the article (apparently, he’s gotten in trouble for this before).” The self-righteous scorning of people more successful than you is a satisfying transfiguration of jealousy — but I’m not that interested in Charlie Sheen.

Better than the passive-aggressive ridicule of celebrities is Klosterman’s undisguised vitriol towards hipsters. Before participating in criticism, each critic has to decide for themselves just how subjective taste really is. There are three possibilities:

1.) Objective taste. These are critics who believe in Platonic aesthetics. They get worked up about IMDB’s Top 250, box office returns, and are generally pretty annoying.

2.) Subjective taste. Live and let live aesthetics. Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla – it’s all a matter of personal preference. These people shrug when arguments start over Oscar nominees. (No writer fits this category, by the way.)

3.) Compatibilism. A mixture of 1 & 2. Here, taste is subjective – to a point. Preferring The Wire to The Sopranos is your right as a clear-thinking HBO subscriber. Claiming Twilight is the best book of all time only proves you know nothing about books and should not be trusted on any other matter of taste.

Fitting Klosterman into one of these three categories is difficult. We know he’s not an objectivist:

The only people who believe in some kind of ‘universal taste’ – in other words, a consensual demarcation between what’s artistically good and what’s artistically bad – are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.

But he’s not totally subjective, either, because there’s an article about correctly rated bands, which are neither overrated nor underrated – all meaningless concepts unless we believe in some objective hierarchy.

So he’s #3, then. Nope. He has an essay about the concept of a “guilty pleasure” in which he criticizes people for having so little self-respect and confidence in their taste that they let other people dictate what’s acceptable to enjoy. At the end of this he proudly declares himself a faithful viewer of The Ashlee Simpson Show, the kind of horseshit even #3s won’t defend.

Which I guess just means he’s a culture critic, someone less interested in singular cultural artifacts than the overarching system which draws them into relation with one another. And David “The Broom” Foster Wallace always discussed that system with more insight and engagement.

Americans love when false arrogance comes back to kick someone in the teeth. Heck, that’s what created our country in the first place: In 1774, the British easily could have been LeBron, Wade and Bosh dancing on a stage and pretending to be immortal. We love underdogs, upsets and comeuppances.

(Brief sidebar about this bizarre metaphor: Do we really love “underdogs, upsets and comeuppances”? We haven’t been an underdog since the end of WW2, we hated Vietnam, and no one seems to have been enjoying our recent economic and political comeuppance.)

And that’s what this Miami season has been — a four-month-long comeuppance, a vindication that you can’t stack your team without thinking it through, that role players matter, that coaching matters, that even the most talented basketball teams need a pecking order. Miami tried to cheat the system. It didn’t work. Teams came roaring at them for four straight months — night after night, a bull’s-eye draped on their backs that never went away — and eventually, Miami started to wear down. It’s possible to play playoff games for nine straight months, but only with a deep team. You can’t do it with three guys.

As of right now, Miami enjoys the league’s sixth best record. So his talk about “comeuppance” seems premature. Twenty-four other teams would love to have failed like the Heat have. This whole paragraph reads like a post-mortem following Miami’s spectacular first-round flameout. Yet there’s twenty games to go, and as LeBron mentioned, the Heat have already clinched a playoff berth.

Against the Lakers, they won because Bosh played really well, Wade outplayed Kobe, and Miller and Bibby nailed six of nine 3s. Pretty good game for the Heat, actually. And they barely won. Not a good sign.

Simmons talks about the win like a perfect storm. The only flukey circumstance he lists is Bibby/Miller’s 6-9 mark from deep. That Chris Bosh, perennial All-Star, and Dwayne Wade, top five talent, would perform exceptionally does not qualify as abnormal, or even lucky. The media has an angel/whore complex when it comes to this Heat team. They are perfect (remember Van Gundy’s prediction) until they do not meet the unreasonable expectations set for them. Then they are fallen. If they rip off twenty-one wins in twenty-two games, the Heat are a man-eating Cerberus, the most ferocious open-court blitzkrieg the league has seen. If they lose a few games, they are an abject failure; pundits start measuring the Big Three for a king-sized coffin. The fact that Simmons can call a six point victory over the streaking, two-time defending champion Lakers a bad sign speaks to the preposterous expectations imposed on the Heat. These columnists reference the pre-season pep rally as their license to rant: “They brought it on themselves! They bragged about all the championships they haven’t yet won!” These are athletes. They bluster. The media shouldn’t follow suit.

I shut my eyes. I could not see the man’s face eidetically. That is, I could not reproduce it interiorly, study it, and discover new things, as some few people can look at a page, print it, as it were, in their memories, and read it off later. I could produce stable images only rarely.

But this is what An American Childhood is: a series of stable images. As a good writer, Dillard has a great  capacity for emotional and intellectual ambiguity, but none for ambiguity of experience. These things happened in this way, and she confidently produces scenes from a period of life that is, for most of us, pre-history. She admits the impossibility of the task:

As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss… Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.

Still, here is An American Childhood, and Dillard reports on dreams she had thirty years prior, lines of dialogue reproduced whole, fine-grained details possible from only a camera or a great writer, yet captured by the eyes of a second-grader. But this is creative nonfiction, not an affidavit: shouldn’t some license be granted?

Non-fiction storytellers have it pretty easy and pretty tough, depending on how you look at it. They never lack for material, but they have an absolute obligation to truth – or at least plausible verisimilitude. “This happened” is every memoir’s promise, and readers will enjoy stories not fit for fiction because this is real life and truth is not stranger than fiction – but when fiction’s tools are used, they bring with them their own obligations: dramatic coherence, excitement, “a point.” An American Childhood has plenty of those, and makes them beautifully, but in doing so sometimes feel facile.

Using parables from her youth, Dillard lays out her personal philosophy. These chapters can be quite didactic, as we are to generalize from Dillard’s experience some truth about living: football, for instance, teaches us the importance of total commitment:

It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees – if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly – then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball.

This comes from the frequently anthologized essay “The Chase.” In it, Annie and friends pelt passing cars with snowballs. After they hit one, the car screeches to a halt and the driver leaps out to pursue them.

… the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man got out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door.

(I love the “, running” move.)

Annie and Mikey flee this maniac for blocks, panting through the snowy backyards of the neighborhood. It is a glorious all-or-nothing pursuit, inspiring total conviction from both the quarry and their hunter. The allegory works nicely, but one detail destroys suspension of disbelief:

He chased us through the backyard labyrinths of ten blocks…

Ten blocks? Really? For one thing, that’s like a mile. For another, Annie’s pursuer is in his twenties. She is seven. Have you ever met a first grader that can outrun a grown man for a mile before being caught?

As a precocious kid, young Annie is convinced she knows everything, and much of the humor comes from her baseless certitude, even when her parents know better. This is the kind of “kids sure are funny” material that bothered me in Jeanette Winterson’s book.

Episodes from later in Dillard’s life read less like fables, and her psychology becomes more convincing. Adolescent fury, infatuation, and boredom do not seem trite in Dillard’s handling. Having written this when she was forty-two, there’s a certain amount of embarrassed grimacing at her younger self. Ultimately she treats herself and every other character with the empathy of a very good writer* and each scene with the intensity of the same.

*the troubling exception being the invisible black people who serve as hired help to the Dillard clan. The long-time maid, Margaret, leaves the house

Then Margaret left. I had taken by then to following her from room to room, trying to get her to spill the beans about being black; she kept moving. Nothing changed.

Books like this live and die by their hook. Born to Run has a pretty good one: How is it that a reclusive tribe of Indians with shoe tire sandals can beat the First World’s greatest runners in a race? The Tarahumara Indians reside in the Copper Canyons of northern Mexico and can run like hell. McDougall reports feats of superhuman endurance, 345 mile runs undertaken just because, ultra-marathons treated as everyday activity. With a marathoner trapped inside his big, rickety body, McDougall makes a pilgrimage to the Copper Canyons to unlock the secret of running, and in doing so, the secret of our very humanity. You can see the blueprint of a bestseller. We read to learn, and with books like this, we like to learn about ourselves. Common knowledge won’t do it, either: secrets are preferred. Even better, this is the wisdom of the ancients. McDougall smartly universalizes his thesis by plugging into our hunger for self-improvement, which, as the Bible proves, can move more books than even teen vampires. Running, according to McDougall, is a fundamental human activity, exercise encoded in our genes. He points out that the Tarahumara do not suffer the ills of the sedentary modern world:

In Tarahumara Land, there was no crime, war, or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn’t get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: fifty-year-olds could outrun teenagers, and eighty-year-old great-granddads could hike marathon distances up mountainsides. Their cancer rates were barely detectable.

Let’s play self-help bingo! You won’t get sick. You won’t get old. You won’t get sad. All you have to do is run. McDougall so fervently believes in running-as-panacea that he even tosses in low carbon emissions, though that may have more to do with the Tarahumara’s third-world poverty rather than a zest for jogging.

The book works best when it sticks with the more tangible secrets of proper running technique and equipment. They comprise just a few chapters, but offer a convincing argument against the high-tech Nike shoes and heel-toe running most of us are familiar with. McDougall sees Nike as responsible for most runner’s injuries; thick soles which shield us from impact also muffle biofeedback, allowing our bodies to operate in structurally unsound fashion. Barefoot running, as practiced by the Tarahumara over rocky terrain, means you won’t discover aching knees the moment the run’s over – you’ll just wrench something right then and there. Expensive running shoes can mitigate brutal impact, but proper running circumvents it. If you’ve ever thought about it, you’ll notice that sprinters’ heels do not touch the ground. Which is why something like a high heel race is possible. Run barefoot down the street and I promise you won’t land on your heel, which is not designed to absorb that kind of shock. Born to Run suggests landing higher up on the foot. Which seems a little goofy, taking advice on how to run: we see running as so basic an activity as to make any training in technique a waste of time. McDougall’s coach, Eric Orton, responds to that:

“…Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.

Any skepticism about Born to Run’s claims are of course easy to test; my first run sans heels shaved half a minute off my best mile time. My Achilles were sore for about a week after, but I’m willing to credit that to amateur mistakes and atrophy. In the runs since, my Achilles have been improving along with my times. It’s all suspiciously easy, but I’ll take it: anything to get off the plateau. A month ago I was absolutely killing myself for a nine minute mile. On pure effort I was outrunning Bannister, but my body wasn’t keeping up. Now nine minutes feels, appropriately, like a mild pace.

Born to Run works as a manual, then. And McDougall’s passion for the subject and the characters make the book a convincing and energizing read. But zealots don’t write well. McDougall’s running coach counsels him to run “Easy, Light, Smooth.” His editor must have been shouting, “Forced, Slangy, Punchy!” It’s X-Games writing, a conflation of strong writing with sizzle, attitude, writing that pops. For instance:

Ann Trason. The thirty-three-year-old community-college science teacher from California. If you said you could spot her in a crowd, you were either her husband or a liar. Ann was sort of short, sort of slender, sort of schlumpy, sort of invisible behind her mousy-brown bangs—sort of what you’d expect, basically, in a community-college science teacher. Until someone fired a gun.

If you’ve seen Ken, with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living, you figure out pretty quick you don’t put a hand near his face unless you’re dead drunk or dead serious.

McDougall courts the reader’s attention like a bar buddy on his fourth Rolling Rock. There’s lots of aggressive yous and crackling binaries: “either her husband or a liar,” “dead drunk or dead serious.” The diction is cacophonous, each word clamoring with the others for attention.

with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living

Punchy writers like McDougall only throw haymakers, never jabs. This is the legacy of Dan Brown and the airport thrillers. You can see one in that quote about Ann Trason:

sort of what you’d expect, basically, in a community-college science teacher. Until someone fired a gun.

My favorite leads off Chapter 20. McDougall writes:

Nine months later, I found myself back on the Mexican border with a ticking clock and zero margin for error.

That sentiment might be appropriate for John McClane, maybe. But McDougall isn’t talking about saving a school of children from the vengeful machinations of Hans Gruber’s younger brother: he’s talking about organizing a race. Writing like this insults the reader’s intelligence. It’s constantly trying to goose you, assuming you can’t breathe through your nose and focus on the text without copy befitting the trailer to a Steven Seagal movie. In contrast to his running philosophy, McDougall constantly lands heavy, and frequently goes overboard. If you’re not sure if a book has over the top prose, check the similes. Here are two of my favorites.

Imagining a man’s voice:

probably like Yogi Bear ordering burritos at Taco Bell.

Or:

Your feet are like a minnow bucket full of sensory neurons…

Then look for absurd and unnecessary locutions made in the name of Mountain Dew writing. He talks about blasting up hills, jamming ‘er [sic] into gear. Eating a mid-race snack becomes “get[ting] a few more calories down her neck.”

Since you can read the book in the time it takes to run a marathon, these missteps are more charming than irritating. Recommending a book usually comes down to winnowing out that particular thing within the text – be it a sensibility, emotion, idea – that will connect with a certain kind of person. With Born to Run, I recommend it based on physiology. If you have bad knees and wish you could run more, look it up.

So for the sake of thoroughness: pretty good, not worth the sticker price.