On Saturday, while Kathleen had her hair done, went to see Lincoln with friends, and then had dinner with them at Shun Lee West, I read the two latest issues of the London Review of Books. I would finish one piece and then start in on the next, whatever it was about. In this way, I plowed through David Runciman’s pellucidly outraged response to the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. I couldn’t care less about cycling or Armstrong or doping — I’m never quite sure what’s wrong about “enhancing” the performance of inherently idiotic and dangerous sports — but Runciman’s excoriation was a blast to read.  

The testers did have one thing in their favour. A cyclist only had to make one mistake, or be unlucky once, and he would become damaged goods. The code of omertà, which guaranteed that the riders on the Tour never discussed what they all knew was happening, also meant that if one of their number got caught, he had to be ostracised. The only way to keep up the pretence was to pretend to be outraged by any evidence of cheating. And over the course of a long career, it was almost impossible for the top riders to keep out of trouble. This became Hamilton’s private motto: ‘Sooner or later, everybody gets popped.’ Not because, as he puts it, ‘the testers suddenly became Einsteins, though they did get better. I think it has more to do with the odds over the long run. The longer you play hide-and-seek, the more likely it is that you’ll slip up, or they’ll get lucky.’ Hamilton got his own comeuppance in 2004, when a test showed that he had another person’s blood in his system. By this point most of the top riders were using ‘blood bags’, storing samples of their own blood taken at a time when their hematocrit level was high, and then re-injecting it into their bloodstream during a race to give themselves a boost. Somehow, Hamilton had been supplied with the wrong bag.

He was outraged, and protested his innocence, because this was clearly a mistake: no rider would deliberately boost with another athlete’s blood. He had the sense of injustice of the perennial cheat who finds himself accused of the one thing he never tried. A doctor must have screwed up, making Hamilton the victim. But Hamilton couldn’t win, either under the official rules or under the unofficial ones. He took his case to court and lost, because the scientific evidence against him was overwhelming: the blood really wasn’t his, a fact for which there could be no innocent explanation. He had also fallen foul of Armstrong’s unspoken rule for the sport, which was that you have to be better at breaking the rules than anyone else. If your doctors screwed up, you were at fault for having hired the wrong doctors. Armstrong knew that the medics who ended up servicing cyclists were there for two reasons: first, to make money (some were charging hundreds of thousands for their services); second, because a career in conventional medicine had somehow passed them by. These people were not to be trusted: had they been, they would have become regular doctors. Armstrong never stopped monitoring the men who were monitoring his body, because he knew his fate was in their hands. Hamilton took his eye off the ball, and paid the price.

And after all those years of earnest-puppy poster pictures of the bent cyclist, my Schadenfreude meter registered dangerously red when I learned that “Hamilton’s memoir establishes beyond doubt that Armstrong is not a nice person to be around.”

Kathleen reported that Lincoln is a very good movie, with great performances by a very large cast, and she couldn’t see how it would rub me the wrong way, as Steven Spielberg’s movies never fail to do unless they’re comedies. I shall wait for the DVD just the same.

Yesterday, after what I called a “review” of the kitchen and the larder — straightening up shelves and bins and reminding myself of what lay in the freezer — I turned to history bookshelf in the blue room. I hoped to cull some more books, but the main objective was to group books by time and space, to the extent that this made sense. At the back of the bottom shelf went the Hitler and Stalin books, of which I accumulated a few when Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of the Nazi leader came out. At the back of the next shelf up went big books of American history, such as Sean Wilentz’s Rise of American Democracy, which I’m not going to read anytime soon, and several Civil War books that I’m equally disinclined to read. The only sympathetic book of American history that I’ve read (possibly ever) is Jonathan Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation, which sounds the depths of the failure of the American experiment in “freedom” in the decades after the Civil War. (That book was not consigned to the back of the shelf.) Other categories included “Ancient,” “Asia,” and “Economic.” Histories of Great Britain filled both rows of a single shelf — no surprise — while histories of modern (national) Europe fronted two shelves. There was also a stretch of “Medieval” histories, into which I tipped a number of books about sixteenth-century matters, such as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation.  

But before I could do any arranging, I had to adjust the height of the bottom shelf. Part of the task of shaping up my library is making it more accessible, which means keeping books off the base shelves unless they’re very tall and can be reached without kneeling. History books don’t fall into this category, so I lowered the bottom adjustable shelf so that it would not longer be a “short” shelf, incapable of accommodating all books within the (admittedly wide) range of normal height. (For the base shelf, I hope to find or to have made a bin or basket or drawer, easily pulled out and lifted up without kneeling, to hold opera CDs.) I had the devil of a time moving the little pins on which the shelves rest; between the odd angle and my immovable back (which made it impossible to see what I was trying to do with my outstretched arm), I began to despair of making progress. In the end, I had to get out the drill and widen the bottom hold a bit. All this involved a lot of kneeling, which I try to avoid, and I worried about inflaming the right knee, which is still a bit swollen from an escapade in the early summer in which I walked down a dozen flights of stairs in order to be on time for a movie. And when it was done, I had one less shelf. The displaced books are lined up on the easy chair; as I reorganized the books, I began to distinguish intellectual and scientific histories from the more conventional national and institutional ones. Who knows where these brainier books will wind up.

Before getting round to all this housework, I read the paper with Kathleen. At one point, Kathleen said, “You know, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen Cool Hand Luke.” “Neither have I,” I said. Then I picked up my phone and had the Video Room send it over. We watched it after dinner. Now we’ll never have to see it again. Ostensibly the agony, in the formal sense, of an antiauthoritarian young man who forces his Dixie jailers to crush him, Cool Hand Luke blends nouvelle vague existential despair with intimations of its real-life counterpart in the senseless misadventure of the War in Vietnam. There is also a certain curious homoeroticism. It is not intended to appeal to any kind of viewer, but rather to suggest, what is widely acknowledged today, that men in confinement learn to make do. (I was arrested by the sight of two men closely jumping rope together in the background of a shot of Paul Newman’s Luke going to say goodbye to his mother.) In the end, however, the film is more unpleasant than engaging. Like most Hollywood films made during the height of the Cold War, it is harshly over-lighted. George Kennedy’s character is cartoonish and confused, as if intended to take the place of a black prisoner (there are no black prisoners). The sadism of the guards is so disgusting that at one point I expostulated, “I wonder why the women of the world don’t just rise up in the night and slaughter all the men.” Paul Newman looks great, though, when he smirks, which is most of the time. And great for 42, too.

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Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2012 at 10:23 am.