Djokovic

Reading this New Yorker profile of Djokovic, which reprints his daily schedule.  I’ve decided I’m going to copy it, just replacing tennis stuff with writing:

7:30 Wake-up.  Tepid glass of water.  Stretching.  A bowl of muesli with a handful of mixed nuts, some sunflower seeds, sliced fruit, and a small scoop of coconut oil.  Chew very slowly.

8:30.  Writing.  Drink two bottles of energy drink, adding a hydration drink with electrolytes if it’s humid

10:00 Stretching.  Check color of urine.

11:00 Sports massage.

12:00  Lunch.  Gluten-free pasta with vegetables.

1:30 Writing.  Drink organic protein shake made from water mixed with pea protein.

2:30 Stretching.

3:00 Sentence practice.

4:30 Stretching

5:00 Business meetings.

7:30 Dinner.  No Alcohol.  No Dessert.  Protein. Vegetables, but not beets, potatoes, parsnips, squash or pumpkin, which are too high in carbs.

(picture found here, credit Picture: Dita Alangkara Source: AP)

Peggy Noonan

is a truly fascinating writer.

let’s never forget that she claimed, on Nov. 5, 2012:

While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.

but she is the only political columnist I am excited to read every week.

I think the secret is that she is the best at writing.  she is hypnotic and confident and compelling.

Ways of describing horsemanship

He looked natural on a horse.

That might be one way.  Gets the point across.  But, just in case, let’s try another way:

The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway.  Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.

(theory: all great writers are comedy writers?  “Cracker Cowboys of Florida” by Frederick Remington, 1895)

Mark Helprin

from The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Why don’t you like to give interviews?

MARK HELPRIN

When I was young it was impossible to stop me from talking about myself, but I now find it difficult to start. As an adolescent (which stage in life took me to about the age of thirty) I had a facile tongue, a prodigious memory, and an all-consuming fear of sociality (a fear and distaste that is, if anything, stronger now than it ever was, but now I am disciplined enough just to suffer through it and, quite frankly, I’m tired of trying to keep back a sea of discomfort with the flood of my own words).

The source of my aversion is partly hereditary, in that my father and many of my relatives were much the same, and partly an acquisition that I owe to my early upbringing. When this was far more serious a matter than it is now, I was born two months prematurely, with malformations of the spine (spina bifida) and lungs, and what was later diagnosed as “hyperconvulsive neurological syndrome.” Whatever that is, it was sufficient to have kept me out of the United States Army, though not the Israeli infantry and air force or the British Merchant Navy.

To make a rather long story extremely short, I spent many weeks in an incubator, came home as damaged goods, and spent much of my early life in the throes of respiratory diseases that kept me out of school and apart from others. As a small child, I once ran a fever for, literally, a year. I had pneumonia half a dozen times, double pneumonia, whooping cough—all because of the circumstances of my birth.

Now, combine that, and all that you can imagine might flow from it, with the place in which I was raised—Ossining, New York. Culturally, the character of the area was formed during the Revolutionary War, when it was a no-man’s-land between the Americans and the British, and every criminal, deserter, and malcontent for hundreds of miles found his way there and left his genes. When I was a child, I would always look at people’s hands, to see if they had six fingers, and sometimes they did.

My draft board, I am told (although it may be myth), had, of all draft boards in the United States, the highest proportion of men killed in Vietnam—where, incidentally, my godfather, the photographer Robert Capa, was the first American to die, though he was a Hungarian and had nothing to do with the Hudson. The area was salted with military institutions—West Point, military academies, veterans’ hospitals—and old soldiers, including even, when I was young, some from the Civil War. The play of the boys was guerilla warfare in the extensive woods. Every stranger was a threat, an enemy. Indeed, there were a lot of bad apples around—escaped convicts from Sing Sing (twice as I remember), standard criminals, gangs in the fifties, child molesters (a beautiful little girl was taken from my third-grade schoolyard and raped and beaten over a period of many hours), and hoboes (not Shakespearian woodwinds) on the rail line that was the geographical locus of my childhood. I ran wild through all this, protected by my paranoia, by my sharply-honed guerilla skills, and by a rather extensive arsenal. Had you turned me upside down and shaken me, the floor would have looked like a military museum after an earthquake.

INTERVIEWER

I was asking about your dislike of being interviewed.

(photo found here, by Jim Harrison for Harvard Magazine)

Train Dreams

One of Grainier’s last jobs was to get up the Yaak River Road to the saloon at the logging village of Sylvanite, in the hills above which a lone prospector had blown himself up in his shack while trying to thaw out frozen dynamite on his stove.  The man lay out on the bartop, alive and talking, sipping free whiskey and praising his dog…

Much that was astonishing was told of the dogs in the Panhandle and along the Kootenai River, tales of rescues, tricks, feats of supercanine intelligence and humanlike understanding.

Proto-Human

Remembered a story I heard once that Columbus on one of his later expeditions brought along speakers of Hebrew and Arabic, in the hopes that they might be able to communicate with North Americans in some version of the “original language.”  Found myself on the wikipedia page for “Proto-Human language.”

A fairly large number of words have been tentatively traced back to the ancestor language, based on the occurrence of similar sound-and-meaning forms in languages across the globe. The best-known such vocabulary list is that of John Bengtson and Merritt Ruhlen (1994), who identify 27 “global etymologies”.

Source: Ruhlen 1994b:103. The symbol V stands for “a vowel whose precise character is unknown” (ib. 105).

Based on these correspondences, Merritt Ruhlen (1994b:105) lists these roots for the ancestor language:

• ku = ‘who’

• ma = ‘what’

• pal = ‘two’

• ak^wa = ‘water’

• tik = ‘finger’

• kanV = ‘arm’

• boko = ‘arm’

• buŋku = ‘knee’

• sum = ‘hair’

• putV = ‘vulva’

• čuna = ‘nose, smell’

To summarize some further reading: these findings are controversial.

Karen Russells

Have not read Swamplandia! or St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Who Were Raised By Wolves – on title alone both sound excellent – but I did enjoy Karen Russell’s article about Spanish bullfighter Juan Jose Padilla, seen here before a bull gored out his left eye:

Pepe doesn’t think he will ever recover from his son’s accident.

“I thought that I had killed him,” he says in a raw voice. “I thought that I had murdered my son. I was the one who encouraged him in this profession….”

Pepe Padilla has raised three toreros. (Oscar, the middle son, retired as a banderillero the day after Juan Jose’s goring and now runs a chain of pet-supply stores.) Pepe coached his sons after school, caping cows with them in the green hills around Jerez. He once dreamed of being a matador himself. As a teenager, he was a novillero, a matador in training. “But I was a coward,” he says, smiling. “Not like my Juan.”

Today, Pepe is a charmer in his sixties with uncorrected teeth, gold jewelry wreathed by silver chest hair, and one droopy eyelid. For decades he worked as a baker in Jerez, sleeping three or four hours, heading back out before dawn to support his seven children. (Seven children! Franco years, he grins, shaking his head. Everything scarce and hard-won, including condoms.)

So I went on twitter to see if Karen Russell was on there.  She is not, but there are 50+ other Karen Russells.  Here are some of the twitter biographies of these other Karen Russells:

Country girl at heart who loves her kids (fifth grader & my Navy girl), husband (the judge) and my animals (horses and dog). Life is Good!!!!

I’m a public relations professor, but in my spare time I read mysteries (and sometimes watch on film).

Lives in Fife. Ex Army, Qualified Veterinary Nurse. Doesn’t suffer fools.

Mom of 4 boys, blogger, addicted to Young Adult books, Facebook, and twitter.

23 & a sweet down-to-earth TX girl ! I work as a Paralegal in Downtown Houston!

Married 40 something mum working in OT, diagnosed in may 2011 with severe inflammatory arthritis,learning to accept life changes 🙂

Born, live and work in the best place in the world…. Yorkshire!!!

Christian, mom of three, wife, I make videos of various Christian topics

A curious lover of life who never tires of trivial facts or useful knowledge.

Mother of one, forgiven sinner, lover of classic rock, reader of mysteries, rider of motorcycles, and sometime knitter.

Accountancy student at Glasgow Uni, flute player, Scout Leader, and master of procrastination.

i am a mom to 3 special need boys

registered nurse, church pianist

engaged to a woman who has taught me to be a better woman and mother. so that makes me the luckiest woman in this world.

A feisty free spirit that has low tolerance for stupidity and loves to bake. I also love my grands

im 47 yrs old seperated from my husband i have four sons two are in the army and now my 16 yr old is thinking of joining.i was born in north london.

love spendin time with family n friends,love my job not many can say that haha, have two georgous children who are my world

NICKELBACK!!!

Nutty 40 something that loves horse riding, badminton, hockey and watching pretty much all sport, am an Arsenal supporter, have 2 daughters & grumpy husband.

I teach mathematics