Manly Health
April 29, 2016 11:51 AM   Subscribe

 
I am large, because I contain multitudes of calories.

/Sorry, I couldn't resist. Just consider it my barbaric yawp.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:27 PM on April 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


Don't forget, these might not have been Whitman's personal views and the topic itself might have been suggested by an editor. I know for a fact that freelance writers given a similar assignment today usually go online and range over what's already been written on the topic, and then write a synthesis mildly slanted to their own biases. This "Manly Health" article is probably just a potboiler and not to be taken seriously as a reflection of the poet's studied beliefs.
posted by Modest House at 12:43 PM on April 29, 2016


What reasons are there to suspect that this should be taken less seriously than anything else Whitman wrote? Should Edgar Allan Poe "potboilers" like "The Tell-Tale Heart" -- he habitually wrote notes to publishers saying, "I am desperately pushed for money" -- be taken less seriously than the "quiet articles" that his editors preferred him to submit?
posted by blucevalo at 12:50 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


That's a good critical reminder, but I'm swayed by how the qualities of health he recommends here are the same ones you see him celebrating in his poetry.
posted by Miko at 1:29 PM on April 29, 2016


“To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice,” he declared. “Get a Fitbit!"
posted by roger ackroyd at 1:40 PM on April 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


What reasons are there to suspect that this should be taken less seriously than anything else Whitman wrote?

word
posted by thelonius at 1:49 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


In the words of the graduate student who made the discovery: "It’s sort of an insane document."
posted by bokinney at 3:12 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


What reasons are there to suspect that this should be taken less seriously than anything else Whitman wrote?

I guess "taken seriously" is vague enough to admit multitudes of readings, but Whitman's lifelong record of publishing all kinds of amusing bullshit anonymously to make a buck, much less of adopting all kinds of voices and personae in poetry, might at least suggest caution before assuming he "seriously" believed what he was saying in any given instance. And if "taken seriously" means read with the same kind of close attention as his poetry, well, it's probably just not worth it (yes, unless you're going to do the equivalent of Derrida on Nietzsche's umbrella, in which case, go for it). The reason the "paleo" analogy works at all in the first place is that this kind of newspaper writing is the exact 19C equivalent of clickbait.

confidential to NYT: FFS, do these really look like sneakers to you
posted by RogerB at 3:13 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


No, no it's a diet of leaves AND grass!
posted by Rashomon at 3:22 PM on April 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


When I heard the learn’d nutritionist,
When the fats, the sugars, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the FDA pyramid,
When I sitting heard the fitness guru who did Pilates to much applause in the Pilates-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Crunched on a bag of Doritos.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:15 PM on April 29, 2016 [10 favorites]


The impression I have always got of Whitman's diet is he had a strong preference for what was available and best of all paid for by somebody else. Picky eater and Whitman are hard for me to connect.
posted by bukvich at 5:25 PM on April 29, 2016


Cool find, particularly alongside Ted Genoways' discovery regarding the engraved frontispiece portrait of Whitman in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass... namely that 'there are two versions of this frontispiece, one in which the figure's crotch is flat, and the other in which a noticeable bulge has been added by the engraver to enhance the image of what Whitman would refer to as a "goodshaped and wellhung man."'

Genoways makes his case – with photographic evidence, of course – in this essay collection [pdf], pp.87-123.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 3:20 AM on April 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


That was an enjoyable read, GeorgeBickham, but by far the best part is the detailed comparitive crotch diagram with the circles and arrows.
posted by Miko at 11:11 AM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


So you found that too? It made me wonder what the author's friends thought when the would visit him, ask what he's been up to lately and he started waving around highly zoomed and annotated copies of 19th Century crotch shots and saying "The third crease! It all depends on the third crease!"
posted by benito.strauss at 9:55 AM on May 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


"back, and to the left"
posted by Miko at 10:21 AM on May 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


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