Katha Pollitt wrote:
> But i wouldn't say my way is working
> out so well from the health and energy point of view. Keep meaning to
> join a gym and go swimming, but it's so boring.
I discovered by accident in my '20s how good aerobics made you feel -- but didn't learn from it. I had a factory job for one summer which had an aerobic effect, and for half the next semester I felt better than I ever had or ever have again. As for boredom. I ride an exercycle with a reading stand. And during my intermediate periods of depression when I lose my ability to focus, all the complex reading I do is during exercise. Some years ago I read *The Wealth of Nations* and reread *Theories of Surplus Value* all while peddling an exercycle. It was the best time of the day. Far from boring.
I dropped exercise while enduring some very strange atypical migraines last spring that kept putting me in the emergency room and haven't gotten back to it regularly yet. But I have started going regularly to a personal trainer for weight lifting.
Carrol
P.S. On another post of Katha's. It doesn't matter whether Butler thinks her stuff is paraphraseable or not -- it is. And the usefulness or uselessness of her stuff should be judged on the basis of competent paraphrases of it. If Plato and Marx can stand translation, Butler can stand paraphrase.
And on Nussbaum. She's all wrong about the Sophists. They were the first philosophers of real democracy, as opposed to that beautiful rich reactionary, Plato. He quite deliberately slandered them, and reactionary idealists have been repeating the slanders ever since. What Plato could not forgive the Sophists was their willingness to teach rhetoric (politics) to non-blue bloods, and their insistence that every man (they were sexists) could be virtuous -- i.e., worthy of participating in public life. The only honest words Plato ever wrote was the speech he gave to Protagoras. After that he never gave democratic thought a fair expression. But the *Republic* still is one of the most wonderful works ever written, dishonest as it is.