Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen Shells and Skulls. Typical of her species, the clam deactivated all of her social-media accounts on her thirtieth birthday and headed to the sea, not wanting anyone to wish her well. She was unable to explain this urge to hide on what most considered a momentous transition—thirty!—a day that’s usually reserved for last-hurrah debauchery. Instead, she Googled cabin rentals in Sag Harbor, where she and her husband would be unlikely to run into anyone they knew. On the drive out, a misty rain cloaked the empty highway. It rained all night, so they stayed in, drank bourbon, and watched The Shining in bed. The next morning, when she went out for a jog along the shore, the liminal space between sea and sky looked fuzzy, indistinct. She searched for something to latch on to. In the city, she tended to look up, searching for scalloped edges and glimpses of figures in lit windows, but by the sea, she looked at the sand. Whatever she picked up she put back down, knowing from experience that these objects would never be as beautiful as they were at first glance, half submerged and luminous in the frayed light. She couldn’t explain it then, the urge to hide on one’s birthday, but recently she read a passage in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost about the molting behavior of hermit crabs that explained it perfectly. Hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable bodies, so they scavenge for shells left behind by mollusks. Aside from shedding their exoskeletons, this shell-search is the riskiest part of a crab’s life. Between scurrying out of a too- small shell to a better-fitted one, any number of things can happen: she could get eaten, lose her old shell to an opportunist crab, or get dragged off by a male crab for mating. At the cusp of the molt, the last thing she wants to do is call attention to herself, so she buries herself in the sand or waits underneath a rock. Later, wandering through the Parrish Art Museum on that same trip, the clam came across a painting that she found so amusing she took a picture of it and sent it to her friends. Titled Portrait of Shellfish , it featured an array of clams, mussels, oysters, and a conch, plus two crustaceans—a crab and a lobster—perched on a lighthouse window ledge. The arrangement recalled an awkwardly posed family photo. An opened oyster quivered, fleshy and beige, like a well-fed aristocrat. The closed-lipped shells looked like pouty, uncooperative children. The placard informed the viewer that the painter, Hubbard Latham Fordham, had worked as the head keeper of the nearby Cedar Island Lighthouse in the 1860s. When he made this portrait, he had been “looking for a new direction” in his art. The clam didn’t know why she found this painting so funny. Perhaps it was the unsettling expressiveness of the shellfish, or perhaps it was simply that phrase, “looking for a new direction”—it seemed a flippant way to describe an existential crisis, no less gut-wrenching in its universality. She imagined that Fordham had been extremely limited in his range of possible subjects, ensconced as he was in the solitude of his lighthouse, but now, writing this, she recalled that even artists with a wide range of possible subjects tended to gravitate towards shelled creatures in times of crisis. Take the example of Rembrandt, who made his well-known etching of The Shell (Conus Marmoreus) the same year he committed his second wife to the “Gouda House of Correction”(1650). One could only speculate about his psychological state, but tellingly, six years later, he would file for bankruptcy and liquidate all of his assets. Among his personal affects were enormous quantities of shells and coral branches, including a single conch shell for which he paid eleven guilders, more expensive than any other item he possessed except for a print by Raphael. The conch was extremely rare, imported from the Far East—so his determination to acquire it against all good sense can only suggest temporary insanity. It was, perhaps, the seventeenth-century midlife equivalent of buying a sports car. Rembrandt, The Shell (Conus Marmoreus) , 1650. In retrospect, Rembrandt’s collector’s mania made sense: shells are beautiful, morbid objects, much like skulls. Both are the calcified remains of some long-dead animal. They straddle a boundary between nature and art, necessity and excess, form and function—the coveted ideal for any artist. Perhaps they also represent the possibility of immortality, of living beyond the flesh. Shells and skulls, unsurprisingly, were both used as motifs in Dutch vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popular still-life compositions of hourglasses, flowers, skulls, and overripe fruit, all meant to remind the viewer of the transience of life. The word vanity comes from latin vanus or “empty,” which may very well apply to the bereft shell. This year, around her thirty-second birthday, the clam decided to drive to Abiquiú to visit the retreat of yet another artist who had briefly succumbed to shellfish: Georgia O’Keeffe. Admittedly, the clam had never been especially interested in this iconic painter, a dentist’s waiting-room favorite, but now that the clam had spent some time in New Mexico, she found the painter impossible to avoid. Everywhere she went, she was confronted with Georgia anecdotes and Georgia rooms, even Georgia ghosts that lurked in otherwise unremarkable buildings. The entire local economy seemed to be powered by the Georgia nostalgia machine: flower and skull images on gift-store knickknacks, horseback riding tours to stirring Georgia plein air locales with sack lunch included. At first, the clam tried to be cynical about it, but she was starting to admit that there was something singular about Georgia’s vision. After awhile, certain moments began to transform themselves into animate Georgia paintings: the stark late-afternoon shadows; the cow skulls hanging over low casita doorways; the herds of clouds stampeding across New Mexico’s preternaturally blue sky. O’Keeffe began her first clam series in 1926, during a difficult transitional period in her career. Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, O’Keeffe’s relationship to art, marriage, and womanhood would evolve in radical ways. Her career was taking off just as the health of her husband and mentor, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, was in decline. By this time, they had grown disillusioned with one another and possibly with the whole endeavor of marriage: after more than a decade together, she was no longer the naive “woman-child” (or the “little plant” he had “watered and weeded and dug around”) and he was no longer her sole authority. O’Keeffe became increasingly indignant as muse and wife, requiring more and more time alone. That summer, at their country estate in Lake George, she stopped socializing with others, stopped eating, and lost fifteen pounds in two weeks. Then she fled to York Beach, Maine, where she began, once more, to paint. O’Keeffe’s first clam series is solemn, quiet, and bleached of the ecstatic hues that characterize her earlier flower paintings. While the flowers represent an explosion of fertility and abundance, this clam series is cold, austere, and barren, painted in white, tan, blue-black, and gray. In Slightly Open Clam Shell (1926), the opening of a clean white shell faces the viewer, revealing a tiny ominous black bud. The composition of Closed Clam Shell (1926) is even more forbidding: the hunched dorsal edge of the clam cuts vertically down the center of the painting, reminiscent of a shrouded figure in prayer. O’Keeffe’s biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp comments: “If, as suggested, O’Keeffe’s paintings are self- portraits, these offer evidence of a woman who had shut down.” Georgia O’Keeffe, Slightly Open Clam Shell , 1926. O’Keeffe knew that these paintings were a departure for her, but she couldn’t quite articulate why. She only knew she was attracted to these forms—shells, shingles—which were calling out from her subconscious. She confessed distractedly: I do not seem to be crystallizing anything this winter … Much is happening—but it doesn’t take shape … I am not clear—am not steady on my feet … I have come to the end of something—and until I am clear there is no reason why I should talk to anyone. Despite her own reservations, the clam paintings were well received. The paintings sold—one woman offered the price of a Rolls-Royce for the entire Shell and Shingle series—and garnered a new kind of cultural caché for O’Keeffe: this was “high” art now, and “French.” Critics praised her mature palette and restrained subject matter—one male critic noted that it operated on an “intellectual” rather than “emotional” register, since “emotion would not permit such plodding precision.” Glad for once that the reviewers weren’t belaboring the sexual nature of her paintings, O’Keeffe responded that she was “pleased to have the emotional faucet turned off.” The exhibition also turned out to be a watershed moment, ushering in a new period of financial security. From this exhibition on, she would be able to support herself through painting alone. However, as O’Keeffe’s career took off, her marriage worsened. Dorothy Norman, a young woman forty years Stieglitz’s junior, appeared at one of O’Keeffe’s exhibitions, asserting herself as Stieglitz’s new lover and muse. O’Keeffe had no control over this affair (she was instructed not to “intrude” on the nude photo sessions Stieglitz conducted with Norman on the bed he shared with O’Keeffe) so she continued on with her shells, returning to York Beach to paint Shell No. 1 (1928) , her first nautilus-shaped shell, and another clam, Shell No. 2 (1928), draped with sinister- looking seaweed. For Drohojowska-Philp, this painting symbolizes what O’Keeffe called her “black-hearted” disposition. Strikingly, O’Keeffe constantly chastised herself for not attending to Stieglitz’s needs more thoroughly, describing herself as a “heartless wretch.” She remained a dutiful wife, caring for him even after they stopped speaking to one another. That summer at Lake George, she painted Yellow Leaves with Daisy (1928), a painting easily symbolic of a fading May–December relationship. In the spring of 1929, O’Keeffe agreed to take a trip to New Mexico with the painter Rebecca Strand, a trip that would change the course of her life. The two women went out West at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an art critic and socialite who was trying to set up an artist community in Taos. For the first time in their lives, the two women were free from their controlling husbands, and while they had always regarded one another with suspicion, without the men, their friendship blossomed. They sunbathed nude, went out dancing, drank liquor, learned to drive, and “even smoked a cigarette once in awhile.” The open landscape reminded O’Keeffe of the way she used to be, before she met Stieglitz, when she was still living in West Texas and supporting herself through teaching. When she returned from the New Mexico trip, O’Keeffe began painting Inside Clam Shell (1930). It had a different kind of composition from the previous clam paintings: rather than showing the half-opened seam, this painting depicted a zoomed-in view of the clam’s interior, a landscape so vast it couldn’t be contained—it spilled off the edges of the canvas, stretched beyond the frame. It was a declaration of her own immense subjectivity. Confident that she contained an entire world, she was eager to show its contours. She might be a clam, but she was a complex one. Many more difficult events would transpire in that decade, and by the end of it, O’Keeffe had added not only shells but also animal skulls to her visual vocabulary—those iconic images of Southwest Americana. In 1938, she painted Red Hills with White Shell , a monolithic, white nautilus shell securely nestled in the center of a red hill landscape. It seemed she was beginning to feel at home. Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Hill and White Shell , 1938. The clam paused here in the biography. This progression from clam to nautilus: the salvation was in the architecture. Why not become a mollusk with propulsion, who could ascend and descend down into the water column as it wished? One didn’t have to be crab either, scavenging for shells. This is how Solnit concludes that passage about the molting hermit crabs: Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea. Perhaps she was ready to become some other kind of mollusk. Everyone had instructed the clam, with the hushed reverence reserved for saints, Oh, but you must visit Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, as though it were a pilgrimage site. This afternoon, as she edged the car up the hill and coasted down into the valley, she finally understood. Her friend M., sitting in the passenger seat, audibly gasped. The landscape was like nothing they had ever seen, striated in pastel pinks and yellows and grays. To their left, Abiquiú Lake shone brightly in the sun. After their hike up Chimney Rock and an obligatory stroll through the archaeology museum (“Oh my god, they even named a dinosaur after Georgia!” M. said), the mollusk and M. were sunburned, ravenous, but happy. They headed to Abiquiú Lake to see if they could swim. They were told it would be too cold this time of year, but they just wanted to see. The sun was already low in the sky, no longer radiating much warmth. At the swimming beach, they encountered a group of women grilling burgers on a mini cooker, shaded beneath colorful umbrellas. “Is this the best way to get in?” the mollusk asked, and the women nodded. “Good luck,” they said sympathetically—they had braved the frigid water earlier. By the time the mollusk looked over, M. was already standing shin-deep in the lake, shrieking about the pain. “You just have to go for it!” the women called out from the rocks, laughing. There was no way they could not swim after they had come all this way, and now they had an audience, so the two of them launched pathetically into the water, dog paddling for several minutes before the merciful onset of numb skin. The barbecuing women shouted, “How is it?” and M. shouted back, “Like torture, but so good!” They got out and got in and got out and got in and got out, dripping and goose-pimpled, scrambling for towels. “I’m glad we did that,” M. said, out of breath. “I felt like a powerful woman.” Then they lay out on the rocks for awhile, their limbs outstretched to absorb as much of the waning sun as possible before it finally set. Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions , out in June from Kaya Press. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University. So Many Olympic Exertions. The National Book Foundation named its 5 Under 35 honorees for 2019. The program recognizes five debut fiction writers under the age of 35 whose work “promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape.” Each 5 Under 35 author is selected by a previous National Book Award-winner or 5 Under 35 author. Here’s a list of the honorees, with bonus links where available: The Parisian by Isabella Hammad. Such Good Work by Johannes Lichtman (A writer for the site back in the day) Happy Like This by Ashley Wurzbacher. The Mind Is an Impediment: The Millions Interviews Anelise Chen. Anelise Chen and I first met at a bar in New Haven, Connecticut, where we’d each worked. “You were getting marrow ‘to go,’” she wrote, “which I thought was the craziest thing.” Chen’s careful observation of the absurd ripples throughout her debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press, 2017). The narrator, Athena Chen, is a Ph.D. candidate ostensibly at work on a dissertation concerning Olympic athletes, but she spends much of the novel sliding into unfunded, perpetual-ABD status. Athena is a feverishly avoidant narrator: She’ll almost acknowledge her own emotions, only to redirect with an obsessive digression into Andre Agassi’s childhood or Diana Nyad’s long-distance swims. Athena begins to describe herself as though she’s one of her research subjects: “She can’t fake it anymore. She’ll have to do something or do nothing and keep going forward blindly.” Currently a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Anelise Chen has written for The New York Times, Gawker, Vice, Bomb, The New Republic, and The Paris Review Daily. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University. We spoke over the phone. The Millions: So Many Olympic Exertions is a novel of distraction and dissociation. Athena is preoccupied with her own body, but she’s also studying other people’s bodies. How do you craft a voice that navigates these tensions? Anelise Chen: That was really hard. I didn’t realize the disconnect between being so in my head and having such a sort of locked-in narrator who was attempting to write about the body: She completely doesn’t have any access to her body. At the same time, she’s trying to think about it. That problem didn’t occur to me until many years into the writing. I was going through a difficult time and I was going to therapy, and of course they tell you to exercise. It’s actually very cheesy, but then I just started moving my body a little bit more and paying attention to it. I do remember in the first drafts of it someone in my workshop just refused to read it. He said it made him feel claustrophobic and crazy; it was suffocating and uncomfortable because we never got to leave the narrator’s head. That was a complete revelation for me. Prior to that I hadn’t considered that this was what I was doing: trapping the reader in an anxious person’s head. But I think that is what is happening to the narrator. She’s sort of just locked into her head and she can’t escape and she can’t access her body. I did go through a phase where I felt that writers had not properly addressed the body as a subject; that we weren’t very good at it. So I was like, who has written about the body before? In Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Barthes writes about these two brothers. One of them is an intellectual, and so he’s not as good as his brother, who’s just this, like, maniacal bicycle demon. So [Barthes] sort of puzzles over why the intellectual one can’t be as good, what it is that’s preventing it. And it’s the mind: The mind is an impediment. He thinks too much. There’s this very old René Descartes, or Cartesian, dualism, the separation of mind and body. TM: On what draft did you realize that you were writing about the body? AC: I wanted to write about the body from the beginning because I wanted to write about sports, but I didn’t realize right away that I was disconnected from my body and didn’t know how to access my body. I was just curious about it, and I was just wondering, just as I was watching the Winter Olympics, “How do they have so much conviction?” They have so much conviction in their bodies, so much belief and confidence they can just do these things! All of their intentions channel through their bodies, and how does that happen? So I really wanted to investigate that, initially. TM: The book is apprehending the physical through a form that’s inherently intellectual, which creates some tension, too, between form and content. AC: Form and content, right. I mean, that is the problem with every book, and with this book, the content is very much just thought and the movement of thought, and that is different from the movement of the body. Movement of body is just like, how we move around in space, and that’s where plot comes from, that’s where drama comes from, because we bump into each other, we interact, that’s drama—and movement of thought doesn’t really have that. When people say things are claustrophobic and boring, that’s what they’re talking about. So it’s like, how do you sort of fuse those two things together? So I puzzled over this and I thought, well, I have to capture somehow the movement of her day to day, how she’s moving her body around in life —the book might feel very static, but she’s actually going about her day. She has these real routines. So I started reading a lot of journals, journals of writers and artists, or just any kind of journal, and sort of recording, like, how organic structure arises from just a life. I mean, arguably, a journal has no form—just organic documentation—but actually, you do see these ebbs and flows, and you do see these sort of climaxes in action, and especially with Virginia Woolf’s diaries, you can really tell there are these lapses, and she has attacks and is ill. Her entries are like, very far apart, and the prose isn’t as vibrant. There are these natural waves in every life. So this isn’t a journal, but I tried to mimic that in form, and I think it fits it to use that to create movement. TM: Yeah, there’s something very balletic in the structure. You have these very short, staccato interludes of very tight paragraphs, and then you’ll have a long, sweeping passage. And often it’s either Athena discussing something that’s quite painful for her or avoiding it entirely with a very long discussion of a particular athlete that she’s become obsessed with. AC: Yeah, so that’s a question of patterning, too, and so I tried to really be physical in a way and tried to put myself in Athena, in her life, experiencing how she would experience, and of course I have to invent things that happen to her, so it’s like, well, if a person were in such a situation, what would be captivating to them? What would they be thinking about? What would they be feeling in their body? Sometimes you go to work out, and you show up and just have nothing. You can’t run or whatever, but sometimes you can just go for miles. Mental attention is the same thing. Sometimes with these journals, the writers will just go on for pages about something, even their day; something just sets them off. And other days it’s like a bomb could have dropped on this day. Virginia Woolf would just record it in a single line. So it’s really about placing yourself in that person’s body, in the character’s body, in their situation, allowing yourself to feel what they might feel, what they might be looking at. And I think the form sort of arises very naturally out of that. Like, if someone is manic, for instance, it makes sense that they would have a lot of long, sort of unhinged passages. But if someone is depressed, or they can’t even get to a notebook, then they wouldn’t — huge stretches of time are just passing unrecorded. But of course, with the novel, you have to make it stretch right. The arc has to feel, but it is all artificial. You have to pattern it directly. TM: That sounds like when you’re running. The pacing is different for a 5K than it is for a half-marathon. AC: Toward the end, I was so exhausted from writing it I did start thinking of it as a marathon. I blocked it out and thought, you know, if this were mile 18, then I should be feeling this. I was trying to account for my thoughts in that way. TM: There’s a point in the narration that approaches that acutely: “Women experience time like an animal that wants to thrust us off its back.” It seems as though gender expectations are negotiated as another bodily expectation alongside that of athletic exceptionalism. AC: Yeah! She has these separate expectations, and she carries the brunt of being a woman and being an athlete, being a daughter, all of these things. I mean, why do we have this stress, like “time’s running out, time’s running out”? Why is time running out? There actually is a very concrete reason, because it’s like, oh, there’s a physical marker—once you cross it—I mean, if you just don’t have a kid after you’re 40. Or you don’t have a career—nothing’s going to work out for you. You’re not going to have a family; you’re not going to have kids; your life is over. And that just came from conversations that I had with friends, academics, and my friends who are academics, and from everyone’s anxieties about that. And then it’s just—I feel like now that we’re older, it’s a little more relaxed; now we know older mothers, and the timeline has gotten pushed back a little bit, so I don’t feel as stressed about it. And also, just having a kid is such a leap of optimism, and even that is an expectation. And it’s like, well, are you optimistic about the future? Can you imagine yourself having a kid? And it’s like, no. But Athena is someone who wants to push herself to get to that point, and it’s like, why aren’t you optimistic—why can’t you envision the future? And it’s very much about self-blame. Which is how athletes operate, too. So they’re similar in that way. There’s a lot of self- blame involved. TM: Yeah, there’s also a recurrent discussion of addiction, which I think is tied to athleticism. AC: I mean it really comes from this semi-set gold rule of sports, which is just never quit, and if you take that to its logical extreme, then you shouldn’t quit anything, not even addiction. But you wonder what came first, the addiction-prone personality or the training? It’s probably both. You probably have to have an addiction-prone personality to move yourself forward, because sports reward that. So never quit. Athletes just don’t know how to quit, and everyone always says the retired athlete always dies twice, because after they quit, they don’t know what to do with their lives, and then that leads to addiction, and they also have physical injuries and concussions. There are a lot of reasons why those things go hand in hand. But I think the biggest one is the never-quit idea, which is a pretty dangerous one. TM: There’s a passage where Athena talks about how her vocation most closely resembles other people’s vacations. What relationship does she have to conviction? AC: Yeah, I mean, her shame comes from not really having a conviction, or not truly believing in what she should feel conviction about. She doesn’t totally buy into her life’s endeavor, this academic career. She doesn’t really buy it, and she’s really questioning what anybody does anything for. And some people have a lot of conviction. These athletes totally devote themselves, and it seems valid, and it’s very beautiful to watch. And they’re very good at it. But it’s not really doing anything; it’s not really productive in any way. It’s not useful. So she has self-blame because she can’t figure out, “Why can’t I feel as convicted, or have as much conviction about what I’m doing as these athletes, and how do I get that conviction?” It’s something she wants but knows she doesn’t have. Is that shame? I guess it’s shame. Or is it more like envy? TM: I mean, I think that shame and envy get along really well with one another. Another comorbid set of emotions in So Many Olympic Exertions is grief and humor. Athena is also processing a lot of grief, and guilt, and her dissociation seems sort of willful. AC: That’s exactly right, and I totally forgot about that until just now. You’re right. There’s so much blocking. There’s willful blindness and dissociation. This seems to be a pattern: Every time someone tells me something about my own book I am surprised. Just the other day my mom said, “You have to stop feeling so guilty all the time. Why do you have so much guilt? Your book is all about guilt too.” I thought, oh, right. Athena has survivor’s guilt, but she also has so many other strains of guilt: second-generation guilt, high-achiever guilt, etc. TM: And humor seems like a way of letting some air in to the narrative. AC: I don’t like reading anything that doesn’t have any humor in it. Humor’s very important to me, and I don’t even have a way to explain it; it’s just a personal taste kind of thing. I like funny writers. It just seems like the way to get by, because life can be pretty grim and depressing, and then you just laugh about it and it’s better. My family has coped that way, and it’s what I seek in writers and in friends, too. All my friends are very funny. But I mean, as I was writing, when I got that claustrophobia comment, I remember thinking, “No! I wanted it to be funny!” So I’m glad you said “let some air in,” so it doesn’t feel so claustrophobic. TM: A lot of writing about sports tends to pivot on the Big Game/Match/Race. But for a narrator who’s obsessed with athletes, there’s so little action or high drama. What is Athena thinking about when she thinks about sports? AC: She’s mostly thinking about failure. I really love Kon Ichikawa’s documentary Tokyo Olympiad because he shares a similar sensibility. He focuses on all these moments between each event, these seemingly throwaway moments when athletes are stretching or chatting or working out their competition jitters. He really lets the camera linger on their faces, especially after they lose. From a literary standpoint, these moments carry more potential because winning and losing—that’s a simple narrative that doesn’t leave much room for nuance. So Many Olympic Exertions. Blending elements of self-help, memoir, and sports writing, So Many Olympic Exertions is an experimental novel that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hypomnemata, or “notes to the self” in the form of observations, reminders, and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on “how to live” or perhaps more urgently “why to live,” a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through a fascinating collection of anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing (ie., bloody) world of sports, the novel questions the validity and usefulness of our current narratives of success by focusing attention on seemingly mundane, unexpected, or “failed” moments. A deep examination of life’s epic and daily moments, So Many Olympic Exertions puts a spin on the auto-fiction trend in the vein of Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner to examine what counts as meaningful in the field of our lives. Is it “winning” goals, dominating others, acting upon unbridled ambition, or the relentless stockpiling of fame and validation? Or can meaning be generated in others ways, through moments of mutuality and shared practice? In her debut novel, Anelise Chen brings you a completely original take on the sports novel. media. Anelise Chen reading from So Many Olympic Exertions - 2019 5 Under 35 Celebration. So Many Olympic Exertions. Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen�s debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or �notes to the self,� in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on �how to live���or perhaps more urgently �why to live,� a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success. Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times , Gawker , NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University. UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS. SHARON GALLAGHER | DATE 8/22/2017. So Many Olympic Exertions Book Launch at Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth. Join us on the afternoon of Saturday, August 26th, 2017, from 4 - 6pm, for the Book Launch for So Many Olympic Exertions published by Kaya Press. The event will feature a reading by Anelise Chen as well as a reading by Jarett Kobek from his new novel The Future Won't Be Long (Viking). Signing follows the reading. ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth 917 East 3rd Street Los Angeles, CA 90013. So Many Olympic Exertions Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen�s debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or �notes to the self,� in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on �how to live���or perhaps more urgently �why to live,� a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success. Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Gawker, NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University. Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called �highly interesting,� by the Times Literary Supplement, has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing, and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His latest is I Hate the Internet (We Heard You Like Books). continue to blog. So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen (2017, Trade Paperback) С самой низкой ценой, совершенно новый, неиспользованный, неоткрытый, неповрежденный товар в оригинальной упаковке (если товар поставляется в упаковке). Упаковка должна быть такой же, как упаковка этого товара в розничных магазинах, за исключением тех случаев, когда товар является изделием ручной работы или был упакован производителем в упаковку не для розничной продажи, например в коробку без маркировки или в пластиковый пакет. См. подробные сведения с дополнительным описанием товара.