Swimming sometimes provides esthetic delights that echo or give form to the thoughts that lots of us experience but find difficult to express. This web page is about such things.
One of the inspirations for this page is a book called "Haunts of the Black Masseur", subtitled "The Swimmer as Hero", by Charles Sprawson, published in 1992 by Penguin Books. This is must reading for any dedicated swimmer with a Romantic nature. Here are comments by reviewers.......
A Fascinating scrapbook about swimming, loaded with lore. . . and suffused with the mystery of the water. (The New York Times Book Review)
It is Byron swimming the Hellespont and a drunken Jack London floating out to sea while roaring death chants at the stars. It is Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams. It is Japanese samurai diving into shallow waters from a height of sixty feet and English swimmers mastering the breaststroke by bringing tubs of frogs to poolside. Swimming - as sport, ritual, and consuming obsession - receives its most elegant and learned celebration in "Haunts of the Black Masseur". Taking in swimming's history and enthusiasts, its literature and fads, along with the author's own immersions in waters from Turkey to Key West, this book is a triumph of style, erudition, and that elusive quality called enchantment.
"This oddly charming book is about swimming in the same way that "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is about Harley-Davidsons. . . .Brings alive . . . the pleasures of the water and of measuring oneself against it. Reading "Haunts of the Black Masseur" is like standing beside a cool pool on a steamy summer day: the temptation to leap in is irresistible."
(The Washington Post Book World)
"For all the cascade of comic, eccentric, sometimes touching detail, it is the submarine presence of Sprawson's own personality which creates the book's strangely mesmeric quality . . . [and] he succeeds in immersing the reader in his own world of aqueous obsession. (The New Yorker)
"[A] bizarre and enticing story . . . For literary amphibiophiles, Sprawson has compiled every aquatic insight of recent history. With its charming stroll between the sublime and the mundane, "Haunts of the Black Masseur" is of a miraculous conceit; anyone who's ever closed [his or] her eyes will recognize . . . the passion in this book." (The Boston Globe)
"Endlessly fascinating . . . delightful . . . curious and eccentric . . A marvelous book with something for everyone - what Sprawson has shown is that swimming can also be seriously studied and the results are never boring." (The Houston Post)
"Sprawson has a genius for bizarre bits of water lore, a talent that makes "Haunts of the Black Masseau" compulsive, almost guilty reading." (The Miami Herald)
Pure Magic, by David Boudreau, Gold Coast
Randy's Swim Around Manhattan, by David Boudreau
The Decline of Rome - and the Origin of the Breastroke, by Charles Sprawson
"Feel" for Water - Shaving Down, by Charles Sprawson
Always Al - a tribute by Coach Chris Morgan of Stanford Masters Swim Team
9 Steps for Increasing Energy through Food
Finding Comfort with Healing Foods
Come on In, the Hudson's Fine
