I am finishing up reading Willard Spiegelman's Seven Pleasures. I have known Spiegelman in the capacity of a bow-tied academic, the editor of Southwest Review based out of SMU. The times that I have encountered him in public, he has usually been rocking a seersucker or tweed suit with a distinctly E. Coast flavor in contrast to Dallas fashion. He is a snappy dresser and a professorial type who reminds me of my favorite lit professor at BU - Charles Rzepka - also a specialist in Romantic poetry - Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Byron. Seven Pleasures is a terrific book of essays, reminiscent of Montaigne's elevated art of nonfiction. Spiegelman is unapologetically academic and himself in these essays - shuttling from one scholarly conference to another, hanging out in London and Italy, taking a retreat at Bogliasco - but he pulls in pop culture/contemporary references from primetime dance shows to the relationship between Richard Long's art and walking to poor urban planning in Dallas, Texas. The limberness of his mind and his ability to trace a literary and aesthetic geneology go beyond exercise, to revealing and reflecting something of how the author perceives and experiences the world. Spiegelman even starts out his wonderful essay on swimming with an exploration of Byron's famous poem on crossing the Hellespont and contracting 'ague. While all of essays in this book are meditations upon activities that bring pleasure, I think the strongest pieces in the book are the ones that explore extremely physical activities such as dancing and swimming - they are not extreme sport experiences, but the experience of physicality for an individual who lives mostly in the world of the visual and auditory senses and the intellect. In this way, they balance and round out a strong and cohesive, slightly biographical, and certainly insightful collection on discovering and experiencing joyfulness.