The Other Side of Oliver Sacks

July 15, 2020 9:37 AM

Oliver Sacks remembers his bodybuilding days on Venice, California’s Muscle Beach. (Via)
posted by growabrain (25 comments total)

The other other other side - that man was faceted like a brilliant. Thanks, growabrain.
posted by clew at 10:03 AM on July 15, 2020 [9 favorites]

Dr. Sacks spent a few days at my college in the mid-eighties and I was both a student in the host program and an A/V tech at his main talk, so I got to spend some time with the man. I'm ashamed to admit that I assumed he was a doughy British intellectual under that suit.

Not because he would be a lesser man were he such, but just because assuming makes an ass of me.

He was just lovely, in any case.
posted by allthinky at 10:08 AM on July 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

Even Sacks could admit he was a fool about something!
posted by Chickenring at 10:15 AM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

What a great essay, I didn't know about his bodybuilding days at all. A terrific story ultimately about a painful but important personal insight, stated so plainly at the end:

I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.

posted by LooseFilter at 10:57 AM on July 15, 2020 [21 favorites]

My father's boss was also a weightlifting member of the Mar-Vel Athletic Club of San Rafael and knew Oliver Sacks back in the day. Dr. Sacks was such an incredible man.
posted by wicked_sassy at 11:38 AM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

That first picture is the sole reason I bought the book it's excerpted from. And the entire thing is a fascinating read.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:47 AM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is another lovely book of his, the last one: Everything in its place, First Loves and Last Tales (a link to Oliver Sacks . com!, not amaz--u-know-ugh) . It's got a bit of these stories of Muscle Beach, and other bits before, and much after; and it's a lot about how he hid his sexuality in nearly everything during his lifetime, until he didn't.
posted by winesong at 12:19 PM on July 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

A charismatic researcher with an esoteric specialty who is also a strongman with the nickname "Dr. Squat." That's 75% of the way to being a Batman villain.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:21 PM on July 15, 2020 [26 favorites]

Only Oliver Sacks:

Once my own strength came in handy on the neurological wards. We were testing visual fields in a patient unlucky enough to have developed a coccidiomyces meningitis and some hydrocephalus. While we were testing him, his eyes suddenly rolled up in his head and he started to collapse. He was “coning”; this is the rather mild term used for a terrifying event in which, with excessive pressure in the head, the cerebellar tonsils and brain stem get pushed through the foramen magnum at the base of the skull. Coning can be fatal within seconds, and with the speed of reflex I grabbed our patient and held him upside down; his cerebellar tonsils and brain stem went back into the skull, and I felt I had snatched him from the very jaws of death.

Another patient on the ward, blind and paralyzed, was dying from a rare condition called neuromyelitis optica, or Devic’s disease. When she heard that I had a motorbike and lived in Topanga Canyon, she expressed a special last wish: she wanted to come for a ride with me on my motorbike, up and down the loops of Topanga Canyon Road. I came to the hospital one Sunday with three weight-lifting buddies, and we managed to abduct the patient and lash her securely to me on the back of the bike. I set out slowly and gave her the ride in Topanga she desired. There was outrage when I got back, and I thought I would be fired on the spot. But my colleagues—and the patient—spoke up for me, and I was strongly cautioned but not dismissed. In general, I was something of an embarrassment to the neurology department but also something of an ornament—the only resident who had published papers—and I think this might have saved my neck on several occasions.

And if you look closely at that first photograph, you can see that was quite a neck to save!
posted by jamjam at 1:04 PM on July 15, 2020 [21 favorites]

His writing is always a delight.
This reads like an old piece recently published and I wonder how he would have written this after he came out of the closet. He goes out of his way to make the Venice Beach body building scene sound very straight and non-sexual, which I assume it was not.
posted by w0mbat at 1:13 PM on July 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

i want more ppl like him in the world plz.
posted by lalochezia at 1:13 PM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

To my surprise—I had hardly ever done front squats before—I matched him. Dave said that was his limit, but I, with a vain-glorious impulse, asked for 575. I did this—just—though I had a feeling my eyes were bulging and wondered fearfully about the blood pressure in my head.

Holy shit. A 575 front squat is BEYOND LEGIT.
posted by The Tensor at 1:14 PM on July 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

Does anyone else think he's leaning dangerously too far forward on that back squat? It makes me cringe to look at.
posted by overhauser at 1:41 PM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is a wonderful Oliver Sacks moment:

could I show him where the pituitary gland was located? I was surrounded by pickled brains, and I pulled one out of its jar to show Chuck the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain.

The motorbike ride for the old patient, though, is sweeeeet.
posted by zompist at 2:08 PM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Lawrence Weschler's recently-published memoir of Oliver Sacks has a funny extract from an interview with Sacks's friend, the poet Thom Gunn:

At one point during his craziest stage, maybe 1963 or so, he announced he was going to train himself to get the California State weight-lifting championship. At which point he put on a huge amount of weight. At one point, I was quite shocked, he waddled across the room, just like Jell-O, he was veritably wobbling. I said, 'God, Oliver, what would your mother say if she saw you?' To which he replied, 'She'd probably say, 'So you're really taking after your father now.''

Not Sacks-related, but California-bodybuilding-related: Christopher Isherwood and Me at the Gym.
posted by verstegan at 2:18 PM on July 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

Does anyone else think he's leaning dangerously too far forward on that back squat? It makes me cringe to look at.

No, that looks like a fine squat. It's difficult to tell from the angle of the photo (and it looks like he has a towel over his shoulders maybe?) but the bar position is not a high-bar squat but not quite a common low-bar; if you draw a line from the barbell down to the floor it looks like it cuts exactly through the middle of his foot which is perfect.

Last year I was on the road to a 600lb backsquat, but changes in life intervened unfortunately. The idea of a 575lb front squat is staggering to me; I cannot front squat more than 350lbs without the pain/pressure on my shoulders and chest becoming unbearable.

I feel like bodybuilding and powerlifting had more in common back then. My body has changed due to powerlifting but my goals were never aesthetic. It seems like bodybuilders get strong as a side effect, and powerlifters can get bigger muscles as a side effect, but it's a different goal.

This was a wonderful article, thank you.
posted by Skrubly at 2:45 PM on July 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

I can't even remember how I first ran into Oliver Sacks the weightlifting biker, but it catapulted him into Feynman stature in my mind; what a legendary weirdo.

(And unlike Feynman I don't think he was a sex pest, although who really knows).
posted by aspersioncast at 3:07 PM on July 15, 2020

That's 75% of the way to being a Batman villain.
posted by clew at 4:22 PM on July 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

And unlike Feynman I don't think he was a sex pest, although who really knows

I can't easily get to the link to back this up on my phone, but the answer is very likely not. In his memoir, he wrote about being celibate for a few decades, subsequent to familial pressure to stay in the closet and other stuff.
posted by blerghamot at 4:23 PM on July 15, 2020 [6 favorites]

Not Sachs related, but Muscle Beach related:

There's a book from 1959 called Muscle Beach by Ira Wallach. It's one of the first grown-up books I ever read, in its paperback form, which was re-titled Don't Make Waves, inspiration for the zany Tony Curtis-Sharon Tate movie from 1967 (trailer). I know this book so well, it's much better than the film and last time I read it I took notes which I'd like to share in a wikipedia page, but none exists (for the novel) and I'm clueless on how to create a new wiki page. This story of a sarcastic young man's migration from the East Coast to California was one of the inspirations for my own such journey.
posted by Rash at 5:11 PM on July 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oliver Sacks was such an incredible man. Thanks for the reminder that I have Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales lingering around somewhere. His writing feels like coming home.
posted by invokeuse at 12:51 AM on July 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

Not sure where you can see it right now, but if you're a Sacks fan, look for Ric Burns' Oliver Sacks: His Own Life which ran on American Masters at one point. It's based on a really great interview in the last months of his life. Disclosure: I helped edit the film.
posted by fungible at 7:48 AM on July 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

This reads like an old piece recently published and I wonder how he would have written this after he came out of the closet.

This is an excerpt from On The Move, in which Oliver Sacks wrote about being gay and is quite open about sexual experiences, as well as his thirty years of celibacy and family pressures to stay closeted. I highly recommend the book; he had an interesting life and wrote well about it.
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:54 AM on July 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thanks for this. I was a history of science major (actually philosophy of medicine under a History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science and Medicine umbrella) in college and read a good deal of/about his work but never knew this. Also thanks for some of the recs in the comments.
posted by Pax at 5:45 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

Provoked by this AskMe, I've created my first Wikipedia page (but it won't be available for a while, the submission must be approved). My research uncovered this 2018 article in UC's Southern California Quarterly which may be of interest: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Muscle Beach: Reassessing the Muscular Physique in Postwar America, 1940s–1980s (but again, no Oliver Sacks).
posted by Rash at 8:09 AM on July 24, 2020 [1 favorite]