Just keep swimming

Dive into summer with the recently republished "Swimming Studies."

Happy Friday!

I’m at a place in a project where I need to write, write, write. What I want to do is stop, edit, polish, pitch, and publish it. Stop the bleeding and tie this thing off! But I saw two dear friends and trusted editors last weekend, both of whom read the piece-in-progress. They gave me really good notes, but the main one from both of them was to just keep going.

That’s some tough love right there, and very much related to a beloved text that recently resurfaced: Leanne Shapton’s 2012 Swimming Studies, a memoir rendered in essays, watercolors, and more.

I didn’t realize Swimming Studies was out-of-print until an event celebrating that it’s “back in print” crossed my radar. Rachel Comey, the designer who made the pants I’m wearing right now, hosted author Leanne Shapton (who is also the art editor of the New York Review of Books) in conversation with Aminatou Sow at her Brooklyn store last week.

They recorded and posted the interview on Rachel Comey’s Instagram, which I came across after putting the girls to bed. This might be the only good that’s ever come from opening Instagram in this quiet post-kid-bedtime moment. I otherwise don’t recommend doing that, but this conversation I could have gobbled up with a spoon.

I wrote a recommendation of Swimming Studies back in 2016 for Quartz (RIP), which was actually edited by one of those friends I saw last weekend. It still stands today, and I don’t think anyone at the new Quartz will notice or care if I share it here. (Because I think they’re mostly robots?) I hope it will be helpful whether you’re looking for a summer read or a kick in the ass. Or both!

A few of the pools Shapton has practiced in and painted. Courtesy, Leanne Shapton

Every time I get in the pool to swim laps, I make a little underwater noise when I first submerge. I sit on the edge, plop in feet-first, and bend my knees to submerge my butt, shoulders, head, all at once. Then, I push off the wall with my feet and exude a high-pitched hum of bubbles, before my head emerges and I start my exercise. It’s one-part response to the cool shock of being underwater (brrrrrr), one-part glee that I’ve actually made it into the pool (wheeeee).

I never thought this about until I read Swimming Studies, a 2012 memoir by the New York City-based writer and artist Leanne Shapton, which was released in paperback May 24—just in time to be my first beach read of the summer.

Shapton, who swam competitively as a kid and made it to the Olympic trials as a teenager, deftly documents how her athletic training shaped her as an artist and a person. It’s no secret, of course, that practice, practice, practice results in good work. But what makes Swimming Studies such a revelatory read is how Shapton shines a light on the strange, intimate observations a person can make when they’re alone in that space.

“Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins,” she writes. “They require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred.”

It was only after I’d finished the book, which I steadily devoured over three days lying in the sand, that I realized I had just spent my vacation reading a book about discipline. I wasn’t seeking self-improvement; I just kept turning the pages because her observations—casually delivered in words and watercolors, but razor sharp—make for such evocative pictures.

She transports the reader to 4:25 am in the Canadian winter of 1987, to wake for swim practice and watch a teenage Shapton set the microwave timer for 1:11—the time she aspired to swim the 100-meter breast-stroke in—and complete the race in her mind, eyes squeezed shut, while her muffin-in-mug cooks into a warm, battery mass.

One doesn’t need to be an athlete to understand a longing to be greater than one is—a better writer, a better parent, a better cook. Swimming Studies shows how that longing, and the practice and study it inspires, can shape a person. Practice is magic, she shows. But you’ve got to get yourself to the pool.

“After twenty years, I still search for the dumb focus I had as a competitive swimmer,” she writes. “My fingers used to be pruney, from being in water. Now they’re ink-stained. I replace my laps with stacks of sketches, and my teenage dread of workout with my adult dread of bad work. I fill sketchbooks with repetitive studies, happy only when the last page is finished and I can look back, pick out the handful of good pieces.”

Whether Shapton is quoting David Mamet on directing, Jaws author Peter Benchley on writing, or pianist Glenn Gould on recording, she comes back again and again to the intimate, mindless, time-collapsing role of practice, practice, practice: that weird, wonderful place where a person makes a sound somewhere between brrrrr and wheeee that no one else can hear.

Have a good day—and a great weekend!

Love,

Jenni

P.S.

read, eat, repeat

That Swimming Studies interview was the inaugural event in a “backlist” series, based on the very good premise that many books worth discussing are not new. If that appeals to you, you might like my friend Emily Fiffer’s newsletter read, eat, repeat. Emily, who co-owns the Silverlake restaurant Botanica and was a founding editor at Daily Candy (sigh), sends out semi-monthly missives recommending a not-new book and a recipe. This is exactly the stuff I text her about: What are you reading? What are you eating? Her late March edition recommends, of all things, a book self-published by an expert on whooping cranes. But in Emily’s voice, it’s a beautiful and urgent consideration of what makes a meaningful life. It also contains this aside: “I haven’t communicated news via an open car window in roughly 20 years. This alone feels like a goal I need to set my sights on.” You might discover lots of life-improving things from Emily Fiffer. And the recipes and books are great too.

read, eat, repeat/Emily Fiffer