New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #16
This is a collection of five things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.
They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.
I’ve been listening to Professor David Nutt‘s new book on alcohol that I’ve been listening to (sorry for the Amazon link but I can’t find another decent option).
I love brewing and drinking beer but it’s felt good to consider the strange niche alcohol occupies in our otherwise puritanical drugs culture. Nutt always approaches these issues with nuance and rejects the moralism that distorts most public conversations about drugs.
I like the look of this documentary about the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath:
There was a piece in the Guardian with three writers describing their love of the Ladies Pond. Also a subject of a photo series by Alice Zoo.
All that makes me think of Haunts of the Black Masseur, Charles Sprawson’s 1992 lyrical survey of “the swimmer as hero” in literature.
I can’t remember if I linked to it before but there was a brilliant Radio 4 programme about his later life with dementia and his half-memories of swimming pools.
Fascinating profile of Arthur Cravan, “the Dadaist poet-boxer”:
Described by one critic as “a world tramp … a traverser of borders and resister of orders,” Cravan traveled the globe in the early 1900s by forging documents and assuming false identities, preening, harassing, and haranguing, as he went. He was hailed by André Breton as a pivotal precursor of Dadaism, and belonged to that category of floating prewar avant-gardists whose legacy resides more in their mode of living than their artistic creations. Indeed, he declared himself anti-art and avowed boxing to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern, American-tinged age. He’s often referred to as a “poet-boxer,” though he wasn’t especially accomplished as either; his real talent appears to have been making a spectacle of himself, in every sense.
Arthur Smith presented a profile of him on Radio 4, and he was the subject of a 10-part series on Radio 3 too.
I am extremely, extremely excited and grateful to have booked onto a 16-week course called Slow Knowing, Deep Learning by the poet and radical dietitian Lucy Aphramor.
The course is designed to support people who support others who struggle to make sense of their eating andor have a complicated time with body respect as colliberators in activism that engages health-justice.
How’s this for a curriculum?!
What is Science?
Neoliberalism
Healthism
Hallmarks of White Supremacy
break
Framing Public Health Services
Undoing Coloniality
Possible Futures
Healing Relationships
Just Nutrition
break
Not everyone can be healthy
Real Life Diabetes (a case study)
Topic from group
Building Knowledge
Their work is a constant source of insight around nutrition and far, far beyond.