For over a decade, the diarist Anaïs Nin led a double life, married to two different men on separate coasts of the United States. One husband was a wealthy filmmaker and banker in New York City, who provided Nin with a cosmopolitan lifestyle full of friends and luxuries. The other husband was a handsome forest ranger 20 years Nin’s junior, with whom she had passionate trysts in a mountainside cabin in Sierra Madre, California. Neither man knew about the other. Nin divided her time between them, flying back and forth for six-week stints. She called this balancing act her trapeze.
Everyone I’ve told this story to has either laughed or said something like “Good for her.” After all, who hasn’t wondered about the path not taken, the home in another city or the arms of a new partner? And here Anaïs (pronounced “anna-ees”) Nin seemed to have found a way to live two experiences at once: a sophisticated urban life on the East Coast and a romantic pastoral one on the West. It’s even more unusual because she was a woman. At a time when polyamory and open relationships were unheard of, and when women were funneled into narrow channels leading to marriage and motherhood, Nin seemed to be living on her own terms.
Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop. He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. “I’m takin’ five,” he told me. “I have to. I just don’t want my lead to dwindle.” He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.
It was midnight for civilians, but at Dawn to Dusk to Dawn—a grueling 24-hour ultramarathon in Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania—hour 17 meant more to the runners. Gagz, 47, wasn’t the only one who’d started to creak. Harvey, the race leader who had already run more than four back-to-back marathons that day (107.87 miles), needed to change his fluorescent-yellow shoes. As he sat for the first time in the race, his two crew members facilitated the camping-chair pit stop: Anti-chafe salve was handed off, new socks were stuffed in the cupholders, fresh shoes were lined up. Micah, 40, had been leading the women and was second overall. Her team in the tent next door had been tracking that while she had run 23 of her 414 laps in more than three minutes, eight of her 17 laps this hour took longer. Jeff, 75, had been the definition of consistency all day, alternating between running and walking in pursuit of multiple American records for his age group. Five minutes before Gagz laid down, Jeff had stumbled to the field inside the track and started vomiting.
“Good Night, Irene,” the latest novel from Luis Alberto Urrea, finally gives us strong women braving the heart of the battle and showing the importance of their strength and tenacity.
“Completely Mad” tells the story of these two men — one a flamboyant, attention-seeking playboy, the other a quiet and determined paratrooper — and their race to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic. The term “race” isn’t quite accurate, since only one man was actually racing. During his ordeal, Fairfax had no idea someone else was rowing across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, thousands of miles to the north. McClean, on the other hand, was acutely aware of his rival and brooded about him the whole way.
Their timing, however, was bad: Their triumphs were overshadowed by nonstop coverage of the moon landing. While celebrated in nautical circles, neither man became well known, nor have their stories been told together in a single book, until now.
There was a time when library shelves fairly sagged with strange reference works. Readers could peruse “The Best,” a 1974 hit that cataloged all things superlative, including bedsheets, sunscreens and life insurance policies. They could plunge into the RAND Corporation’s “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates,” something of a bible among data scientists. Or they could cozy up with “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places,” containing entries on El Dorado and Jurassic Park.
The rise of the search engine, reference text ad infinitum, spelled doom for many books such as these. So it’s a pleasure to encounter Dan Schreiber’s “The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird,” a willfully miscellaneous survey of the bizarre beliefs that people have held over the centuries: the kind of random, strange-for-the-sake-of-strange compendium that’s seldom published anymore.