With triathlon season well behind me, and having given up the notion that I'd put in even five hours a week to maintain any level of fitness in the off-season, I find myself with time. It's a glorious amount of time. There is no pressure to fit in one or two workouts a day, no packing of clothes, no heaps of extra laundry and only a minor lump of guilt to deal with and a daily gut pinching to measure the growth of the bulge. With all this extra time, I could be getting so much done, but it's the opposite. My productivity lessens exponentially to the amount of time I have. What I have been doing is reading, finishing the weekend New York Times crossword puzzles and walking the dog.
The last book I read was Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. I've been meaning to read this book since 1993. With apparently too much time on my hands even then, I used to scour the college bookstore for reading lists of English professors I liked, copy the lists and search for used copies of the books elsewhere. This is how I came to purchase Ratner's Star by Don Delillo, and why I abandoned the list of Bruce Robbins which also contained Lucky Jim. Twelve years later, I found the book on a friend's shelf and he gave it a hearty recommendation. Six months ago, I found a hardcover at The Strand. Last week, I began to read it before bed and it worked like a sleeping pill.
I didn't pick up on its humor right away. The observations were slow and drawn out. It took paragraphs to describe the kicking of a stone that seemed to have hit someone unintentionally and may have had consquences. It was very British. Or I was slow on the uptake. Because the book is hilarious. The story is of a young professor named Jim Dixon who is trying to make it in an academic world for which he feels a mixture of ambivalence and contempt. His peers, his boss, his girlfriend and his bumbling ambition make for situational comedy at its best--carefully drawn and set up, brilliantly timed and metaphors that are always unexpected but precise. I was hooked by the third chapter and I think I will read it again for anything I might have missed the first time around.
Yesterday I read the latest issue of One Story, which featured a story called "The 217 Pound Dog" by Arthur Bradford. The story reminded me of why I love plot so much, and why I need to get better at constructing them. The story is of a guy who makes copies in a law library, and the library copy guy is quickly befriended by a lawyer who asks favor after favor until they all wind up living in the copy guy's basement apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn--the lawyer, his 217-pound dog, a hired prostitute, and the prostitute's son. In that apartment, they are visited by a neighborhood drug dealer and the lawyer's son. And it's all connected, the first incident leading to the next, all of it somehow believable. Now that's plot.
Where am I going with all this? Nowhere in particular. But I do need a six letter word for fetch that may start with an 'h', and then I'll be done with the crossword. And now I'll walk the dog to buy another book. And nothing else gets done.
Merry Christmas!
