Did I mention that I very strongly dislike running?
10:42 — yes, that sounds like a plateau. I felt all right most of the way, and pushed my don’t-break-stride mark to the 20 kph street sign on Hurst, but finished in the same general time as the last three or four miles.
Just leaving a marker here — another day with scintillating scotoma. Will look back and add previous dates.
Here we go: 5 June and 24 February, the last two. On a previous occasion, I told Ed Turnham ‘I experienced two of these as an undergraduate — the first while I was up late reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I ascribed to exhaustion and the intensity of the novel; and the second while I was driving at full speed on the motorway between Maine and Pennsylvania, at which time I narrowly avoided a catastrophic collision. Since there was no internet back then, I had no convenient explanation for the latter incident. I put it down to residual trauma from the assault I had experienced in secondary school, which included my face (and especially my left eye) having been clubbed. After those, I have no recollection of any specific recurrence until recently.’
What makes ‘Come On, Eileen’ great?
In the first place, plenty of people don’t think it is great, and even people who think it’s great can agree that it’s painfully overplayed. Whether you like it or not, it would probably sound better if you hadn’t heard it seventy krillion times.
It’s overplayed for a reason, though: there’s a lot to admire about it, mostly in the arrangement — The lyrics are all right. The repeated ‘thoughts verge on dirty’ (then ‘Well, they’re dirty’) motif provides an ingenious turn on outright explicit candour, or cloying romance, the first time you hear it; but it doesn’t wear well. Kevin Rowland’s singing as a grown-up, and we get what he’s referring to. It might do well as a device lightly deployed, but instead the Dexys hammer it home. The trope of ‘we’re different from those people’ does its usual work, though the song is unassuming enough* that it doesn’t seem too condescending, and ‘beat down eyes sunk in smoke dried faces’ is a fresh way of making this characterisation.
He’s sweet-talking Eileen, but he invites without threatening (in the song; the video shows Rowland and another member of the band grabbing and holding Eileen against her will, though it concludes with Eileen joining Rowland and walking into the distance arm in arm with him). Partial credit.
But the art lies in the arrangement, in several ways. First, the arrangement underscores the lyric’s hopefulness with brightness, but without drama (contrast ‘Born to Run’ — another ‘we’re not like them’ song). Predominantly up-tempo, with prominent hooks in the upper-register fiddle, banjo, and tinwhistle (and a high-end piano part), the arrangement is both full and at the same time airy and light. Langer and Winstanley did their job well.
More important, I’d argue, is the episodic structure of the song. If you count the outro, the song shifts among five distinct portions: verse – slightly slower chorus – verse – chorus — slow, but accelerating bridge – chorus, slightly faster – fade to outro. The very distinct sound of each portion flows utterly convincingly into the next. I’m a sucker for episodic structure in popular song, and ‘Come On, Eileen’ hits that squarely
I can hear out people who don’t like it, but even when I try to be too sophisticated to like it, many subtle touches in ‘Come On, Eileen’ win me over. At the second modulation from verse to chorus, Rowland sings ‘We’ll hum this tune forever’ — I probably will.
This morning I pushed my did-not-stop till a few steps beyond the corner of Magdalen and Hurst, and I felt about as good as ever, and my final time was around 10:48 (maybe a little less, maybe more — I had trouble hitting the correct button to stop the timer). Still better than regressing, and I still hate running.
We’ve had some downtime here at Hermeneutics and Wheezing Central — possibly connected with a nasty bout of comment spam (‘Comment spam’? What is this, 2006?) — but things seem to be stabilising. Thanks again to Christopher for the hosting.
So, the last I remember posting a time, I was running a 10:46. I thought that was still slower than I had worked up to toward the beginning of the year, but no! I was hovering around 11:00 when I stopped due to the Health Scare, and now I’ve pared almost 15 seconds off that mark. I have hit a real plateau there — a 10:47, 10:46, and yesterday 10:48. That’s fine; I obviously can’t expect to improve by five or more seconds every go. The good news is that last Wednesday I pushed my not-break-stride mark all the way to the intersection of Magdalen Road and Hurst, well more than halfway. Now, yesterday I didn’t do nearly so well, falling into a walk somewhere around Magdalen and Iffley, maybe as early as Stanley. My lungs were the culprits, I think; my legs felt relatively limber. But I still lost only a couple of seconds from my current normal pace.
Anyway, I’m at a plateau for pace, but it’s a reasonable plateau given my history of motionlessness; and I’m improving my steadiness by fits and starts. Someday I will go the whole route without walking, and that will be a Great Thing.
Sunday I was very, very reluctant to get out of bed, and a good deal more reluctant to run my morning mile. I decided to compromise with myself: I would do a mile, but not press. I came in at 11:46 — a humbling rate, but at least I didn’t bail out altogether.
This morning I woke up feeling all right, loosened up with some rope-skipping and stretches, and successfully pushed my not-break-stride point to the point where Stanley Street joins Magdalen Road, and I had Hurst in my sights. A significant part of the distance I had a physical understanding of how it would feel to run, limber and adequately aerated, the whole way. Nothing revolutionary as a result, but I did come in at 10:48, a full minute faster than Sunday’s semi-effort.
This morning I reluctantly slithered out of bed, tied on my trainers, and ran my mile. I pushed my non-break mark back up to the Missing Bean on Magdalen Road, which is good, and my time down to 11:035 (I give the extra decimal because it means that even though I round it up to 11:04, I actually ran faster than I have since I re-started after my lapse). The funny thing this morning was that for the first time ever, the physical sensation that stood out as I was plodding along was how leaden my bum felt — presumably some sort of unfamiliar stiffness in those muscles. Onward and… more onward.
Wednesday, 11:18. I stretched my not-break-stride to Magdalen Road.
Today, 11:04. My left knee and hamstring protested a bit before I started, but I didn’t feel any problems while I was going. I pushed not-break-stride back to partway ( a little way) up Magdalen Road, but on the whole it was a very average sort of run.
11:13 today, as my knees complain and I note with frustration how many seconds slip by while I’m trying to hit the ‘Stop’ button on my timer. But I pushed my ‘not-break-stride’ mark back to Stanley Street.
I forgot to blog this on Wednesday, but that morning I did my run in 11:04 — surprisingly fleet, after the long layoff and two results at about 11:30. I almost ran yesterday morning, but I had 8:00 Mass and didn’t want to impose on the latter any consequences of the former.
Just a note before I dash off to work on my translation project to observe that several months ago I had a Health Scare, which put me off ‘running’ for a while. As a result, I only just resumed my biweekly exercise last Wednesday, when I ran for 11:41 (much better than I feared, after a long layoff). Yesterday morning my time was 11:36, so we can regard that as a baseline pro tem.
I was cleared, by the way, from the concern mentioned above, at least until further testing. I remain now as I have been most all along, for better or worse.
In my on-going fascination with the rationale for practices of biblical interpretation (particularly in England, particularly among catholic-minded scholars), I was perusing John Henry Newman’s Tract 85, and it occurred to me that it, too, might be worth transcribing for study purposes.
This link leads to a single-page A5 layout PDF of the booklet. It may work best for tablets, for instance.
This link leads to a side-by-side A4 layout PDF, which should scroll nicely along a larger landscape-oriented computer screen.
And maybe someday I’ll run them through Calibre to make ebook format versions.
As is often the case with Newman, I am about two-thirds sympathetic. He could solve a lot of the problems with which he’s wrestling if he gave up on the conceptual metaphor that texts contain meaning, but then I would say that.