Jogging

Jogging and I have a long history of hating each other. We are not friends. We are not civil. We stay far away from each other. But I know that I also have a history of cardiovascular disease in my family and I know that time is not, in fact, moving backwards. If I don’t start getting serious about my heart health now, I never will. So my lovely spouse and I have taken to jogging a couple of times a week.

It’s sweaty and difficult, but I keep reminding myself that it’s not about how I feel in the moment when my heart wants to burst out of my chest at the end of the block. It’s about how I’ll feel when I can run longer and hike farther. When my body starts changing to reflect the work I’m putting in. Though those rewards feel so far away early in the morning when I’d rather still be in bed.

Sometimes You Just Need to Laugh

So, when I saw SJ Perelman’s Cloudland Revisited sitting on the shelf of my local independent bookstore, I wasn’t sure what to expect. (I think after so many years I can go ahead and admit that bookstore is Fanfare Books, full of wonderful staff and wonderful books that I visit at least once a week if not twice a week.) The title seemed to reverberate somewhere in my memory but I knew not from where, and I really didn’t need another book to add to my stack.

But it had been a bad week, and I really wanted something to make me laugh. I also really wanted something about the movies. For that is what Cloudland Revisited is — a hilarious ode to the movies, including all of those bad and cheesy ones that we watch and then wonder why hundreds of people came together to produce such a clunker. It’s also an ode to all of those pulp novels that we read sometimes — in the words of Joe Gillis of Sunset Boulevard — ‘just to see how bad bad writing can be.’ Perelman writes hilariously about his adventures in re-watching old films, and re-reading old books from his youth in the 1920s, savagely ripping apart their flimsy plots and even flimsier attempts at serious literature or movie-making.

His humour is dry in the best ways, and, unlike a lot of other humour produced at the same time, Perelman primarily makes jokes at his own expense. This is what has really withstood the test of time. Not that Perelman was ever at risk of disappearing into the vortex of history with his many contributions to The New Yorker, his Academy Award, and his writing of scripts for Marx Brother films.

Old Film

I love classic film, and anyone who shares in this love has also seen a lot of bad movies. Not just in the sense of them being hopelessly out-of-touch, but in the sense of bad acting, bad plotting, bad technique, bad cinematography, or all of these things at once. Plan 9 From Outer Space may be the winner of two Golden Turkeys, but there are plenty of other contenders I can name (such as The Swarm, Orson Welles’ Othello, and The Tingler).

Perelman got the chance to re-watch the films of his youth via private screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, and he recounts all of the feels — from boredom to awe to the sheer dazzlement that comes with the realization that you might have liked these things, once upon a time. Where was your taste back then? I also find it delightful that he introduces each film with a little blurb that usually details the last time he’d seen it and what he vaguely remembers as his first impressions of it. It’s almost hard to recall that there was a time when we couldn’t re-watch things whenever we wanted through VCRs and DVDs and the internet. But that time did exist and it did allow for a long gap in time between the first exposure to a work and the next exposure to it, which could lead to some major collisions between memory and reality — much to Perelman’s horror and our delight.

Old Books

When I went used-book hunting (which I have cut down on in recent years because my to-read stack is out of control and, wow, I do not need to come home with a huge stack of more books to add to it), one of my primary joys was to go to the bargain shelves in the deepest of the bargain basements and to find the most outlandish of the forgotten fancy tomes. You know the ones I’m talking about: gilded pages, imitation illuminated manuscripts, and leather binding combined with a weird title and an author you’ve never heard of.

These are the books that Perelman reviews to outrageously funny effect. Rancid romances, insipid adventures novels. Every trope. Every cliché. And it really doesn’t matter that you’ve never heard of these books and will never find a copy because Perelman summarizes them at the same time as making fun of them — letting you in on the joke without you feeling the need to read the piece yourself.

Not Jogging

I definitely like not-jogging far better than I ever will like jogging, and adding new exercises to my routine can be very difficult for me. I always get a wave of feeling like all of my time is going to tiring myself out instead of doing the things I really want to do but unfortunately do not offer any kind of fitness component — reading and writing. It’s a balance that takes a few weeks to master. But by then I’ll probably feel like I need to add something else. *sigh*