"The Green Hills of Earth"

Sunday, 5 December 1999

My sister (a physical therapist) has recommended that I shift from focusing on my upper body when working out and pay more attention to my arms, especially since I pulled a muscle in my left collar area a week or two ago. So I'm still doing the front lat pulldowns, but instead of the bench press and military press I'm doing, um, a different kind of lat pulldown and some work with regular handheld weights. This is actually yesterday's news, since that's when I did my weightlifting and I don't do that two days in a row so today I just used the treadmill (40 minutes at 3.5 mph and a 1° incline), but my arms are aching like my body did when I first started working out, which I suppose is a good sign.

I've lost 19 pounds so far. Actually, I've probably lost something like 40 or 50, but gained most of them back right away. I can hold my weight more or less stable without watching what I eat, but I do need to take care to lose weight.

More of yesterday's news: I finally got around to renting and watching Mallrats, so I've now seen all of Kevin Smith's feature films. I can see why a lot of people don't like Mallrats -- it's very lightweight and zany, like a 90-minute sitcom with dirty language. But it's not without its charms. I especially liked all the comics references, though Chasing Amy is even better for those. I was befuddled by all the people who keep reappearing in Smith's films as different characters. Ben Affleck's three characters (Shannon, Holden, and Bartleby) are all different enough that they're easy to distinguish, but Jason Lee's characters (Brophie and Banky) are similar enough that I thought that they might be the same until I looked up the cast of Chasing Amy on the Internet Movie Database, while different enough that I thought the difference might just be bad inter-film continuity. Same with Joey Lauren Adams, though her two characters (Gwen and Alyssa) seemed even more similar. And of course Jay and Silent Bob are the same characters in each film, and there are references in Chasing Amy (and in the Jay & Silent Bob comic) that make it clear that the characters in that movie are part of the same broad social circle as those in Clerks and Mallrats.

While working out I usually listen to WNYC, an NPR station. This means that on Sundays I listen to A Prarie Home Companion (11 AM to 1 PM), and sometimes whatever comes before or after it depending on just when I wake up and work out. This week it was after -- the beginning of Selected Shorts, a show where actors read short stories, came on as I was leaving the gym. Selected Shorts opens with a clip of one o that week's readings, and as this week's clip was playing, I thought I recognized it:

The subtle change in his orientation which enabled him to see beauty at Marsopolis where beauty was not now began to affect his whole life. All women became beautiful to him. He knew them by their voices and fitted their appearances to the sounds. It is a mean spirit indeed who will speak to a blind man other than in gentle friendliness; scolds who had given their husbands no peace sweetened their voices to Rhysling.

I think "Marsopolis" is what caught my ear, but the name at the end gives it away: "The Green Hills of Earth," by Robert Heinlein, read by Kathleen Chalfant (who I saw in Wit a few months ago). As she read the scattered verses of the title song, I felt a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye, the way on old patriot might on hearing his nation's anthem, though I've never felt that way about "The Star Spangled Banner" or the "Hatikva" or any of the other songs my parents and teachers taught me as anthems. Those words, describing a future that will never exist (Venusian jungles? Martian canals?) stir me more than the real anthems of my nation of birth, because they're written in my mother tongue, the language of science fiction:

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet--

And not just the songs, but the prose of Heinlein's story is peppered with those magical stefnal phrases: "...the Jovian loop trip..." "He slapped the emergency discover and fished at the hot stuff with the tongs." "Jetmen were scarce; the shielding was cut to a minimum to save weight and few married men cared to risk possible exposure to radioactivity." "Or it might have been Esperanto, while Terra's rainbow banner rippled over your head." Those casual phrases which bloom into worlds of possibility in the fertile brain of an SF reader.

Chris called as I was writing this; she wants to organize a group trip to see Toy Story 2. The difficulties involved in organizing a bunch of people in our circle gave me an idea which I need to pass on to Josh....