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disobey_gravity2010-03-29 06:32 pm
rydra_wong) wrote in disobey_gravity2010-03-29 06:32 pm
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What you stand to lose: a handful of Pritchard reviews
"Deep play" is philosopher Jeremy Bentham's term for any gamble or wager in which "the stakes are so high that ... it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose."
It's also the title of Paul Pritchard's first book, in which he chronicled his growth from a semi-feral child throwing petrol bombs down at the climbers in the local quarry to becoming one of the brightest and boldest British climbers of the '80s and '90s generation: the "dole climbers" who scrounged gear and food while creating ever-more-daring new routes, most famously in the slate quarries near Llanberis and on the sea cliffs of Anglesey.
Pritchard's a sharp, pawky writer, and the book's fragmented and lyrical and jagged, dodging around moments of self-revelation, from his impulsive decision to throw himself down a four-storey stairwell at school to his near-fatal fall (from a route named "Games Climbers Play" -- this story has too many ironies to count) at Gogarth.
It won the 1997 Boardman-Tasker Prize. Pritchard took the prize money and set out on a climbing tour of the world with his then girlfriend; in Tasmania, climbing a slender sea stack known as the Totem Pole, he was hit in the head by a falling rock the size of a television set.
(Later, his girlfriend would tell him that she had put her helmet on him before hauling him to safety and running to get help, because she could feel his brain oozing out of the hole in his skull.)
Hospitalized for over a year (first in Tasmania and then back in Wales) while he recovered from a traumatic brain injury that left him with hemiplegia and epilepsy, Pritchard … began writing another book.
The Totem Pole: And a Whole New Adventure (which won the Boardman-Tasker Prize in 1999, making Pritchard the only author to have won it twice) and its sequel The Longest Climb chronicle his slow recovery. Pritchard re-learns to speak and walk, discovers a love of recumbent biking, experiments with whitewater rafting, and finally returns to climbing, albeit at far lower grades.
They start off in a style reminiscent of the morbid glee with which Pritchard relates horrific "epics" in the first book (high on painkillers, he hallucinates that a nurse is trying to kill him), the tone so many mountaineers use for describing nightmare adventures they've survived.
But then there's a shift into a more reflective mode, as Pritchard settles in for the long haul, into an "adventure" that won't ever be over, and faces adjusting to radically altered physical experience and capabilities, and to the unfamiliar social role of of a person with disabilities.
He draws conclusions, then revises them: he turns his focus away from climbing, then begins to climb again, finding what he calls a kind of "yoga" in learning to work with his body's new limits.
In The Totem Pole, he decides that in some way, he invited the accident, faced with a climbing career that had nowhere to go in the pursuit of ever higher risks. In The Longest Climb, he changes his mind again: no-one would have wished this on themselves. But in context, it feels like acceptance rather than rejection, a willingness to live with damage even when it can't be rationalized or made into a tidy story.
He also keeps on being funny; there's a memorable moment when he has a seizure during a book signing:
As ever, Gina [his publicist] was sympathetic. 'Mind you,' she said, 'that shifted a lot of books. Can you do that every time?'
'I'll think about it,' I said weakly.
Then there's "To the Rainbow". Originally included as an extra on the DVD "Welsh Connections", Bamboo Chicken have made it available to download individually.
The 15-minute film chronicles Pritchard's return to the Rainbow Slab in the Dinorwig slate quarries, site of some of his greatest exploits, accompanied by Johnny Dawes, a regular climbing partner during their glory days.
As someone with disabilities, I appreciate the film's stubborn refusal to be either tragic or "inspirational"; it's a climbing film, an unsentimental look at a noted climber and writer tackling a particular challenge.
Dawes picks an E2 to lead Pritchard up (it's about a 5.10, for you Americans), nothing daunted by Pritchard's mild protests that it's at least two or three grades harder than anything he's climbed since his accident.
What follows is one of the most fascinating bits of climbing I've seen. Pritchard's paralysed right arm and leg make some easy moves impossible, depending on the position of the holds. It should be excruciating to watch, if he wasn't so visibly applying his formidable experience and skill to negotiating the challenges involved. At one point, unable to use his right hand, he solves a move by slapping left-handed along a ledge (with no footholds) until he can get a decent hold.
This isn't about the "tragedy" of a former athlete living in a terribly damaged body, or about "triumphing" over those limitations; it's about movement, and skill, and persistence.
"This is just me now, and that's it," Pritchard says.
The Dawes, meanwhile, is cheerily blunt (reminiscing about being able to feel Pritchard's pulse through the hole in his skull) and unexpectedly sweet, kissing Pritchard's hand as he finishes the route.
Then there's the following exchange, which sums up both climbers pretty well:
Dawes (struck by a thought after they've roped up): How do you belay? I was just thinking about that.
Pritchard: Well, with a gri-gri I can belay quite effectively.
Dawes: … but we haven't got one here.
Pritchard: That's only on a single rope, and there's no gear in it anyway, so I'm just gonna let you … (shrugs)
Dawes: So you're just going to watch me climb, basically.
(They both crack up and start giggling.)
It's also the title of Paul Pritchard's first book, in which he chronicled his growth from a semi-feral child throwing petrol bombs down at the climbers in the local quarry to becoming one of the brightest and boldest British climbers of the '80s and '90s generation: the "dole climbers" who scrounged gear and food while creating ever-more-daring new routes, most famously in the slate quarries near Llanberis and on the sea cliffs of Anglesey.
Pritchard's a sharp, pawky writer, and the book's fragmented and lyrical and jagged, dodging around moments of self-revelation, from his impulsive decision to throw himself down a four-storey stairwell at school to his near-fatal fall (from a route named "Games Climbers Play" -- this story has too many ironies to count) at Gogarth.
It won the 1997 Boardman-Tasker Prize. Pritchard took the prize money and set out on a climbing tour of the world with his then girlfriend; in Tasmania, climbing a slender sea stack known as the Totem Pole, he was hit in the head by a falling rock the size of a television set.
(Later, his girlfriend would tell him that she had put her helmet on him before hauling him to safety and running to get help, because she could feel his brain oozing out of the hole in his skull.)
Hospitalized for over a year (first in Tasmania and then back in Wales) while he recovered from a traumatic brain injury that left him with hemiplegia and epilepsy, Pritchard … began writing another book.
The Totem Pole: And a Whole New Adventure (which won the Boardman-Tasker Prize in 1999, making Pritchard the only author to have won it twice) and its sequel The Longest Climb chronicle his slow recovery. Pritchard re-learns to speak and walk, discovers a love of recumbent biking, experiments with whitewater rafting, and finally returns to climbing, albeit at far lower grades.
They start off in a style reminiscent of the morbid glee with which Pritchard relates horrific "epics" in the first book (high on painkillers, he hallucinates that a nurse is trying to kill him), the tone so many mountaineers use for describing nightmare adventures they've survived.
But then there's a shift into a more reflective mode, as Pritchard settles in for the long haul, into an "adventure" that won't ever be over, and faces adjusting to radically altered physical experience and capabilities, and to the unfamiliar social role of of a person with disabilities.
He draws conclusions, then revises them: he turns his focus away from climbing, then begins to climb again, finding what he calls a kind of "yoga" in learning to work with his body's new limits.
In The Totem Pole, he decides that in some way, he invited the accident, faced with a climbing career that had nowhere to go in the pursuit of ever higher risks. In The Longest Climb, he changes his mind again: no-one would have wished this on themselves. But in context, it feels like acceptance rather than rejection, a willingness to live with damage even when it can't be rationalized or made into a tidy story.
He also keeps on being funny; there's a memorable moment when he has a seizure during a book signing:
As ever, Gina [his publicist] was sympathetic. 'Mind you,' she said, 'that shifted a lot of books. Can you do that every time?'
'I'll think about it,' I said weakly.
Then there's "To the Rainbow". Originally included as an extra on the DVD "Welsh Connections", Bamboo Chicken have made it available to download individually.
The 15-minute film chronicles Pritchard's return to the Rainbow Slab in the Dinorwig slate quarries, site of some of his greatest exploits, accompanied by Johnny Dawes, a regular climbing partner during their glory days.
As someone with disabilities, I appreciate the film's stubborn refusal to be either tragic or "inspirational"; it's a climbing film, an unsentimental look at a noted climber and writer tackling a particular challenge.
Dawes picks an E2 to lead Pritchard up (it's about a 5.10, for you Americans), nothing daunted by Pritchard's mild protests that it's at least two or three grades harder than anything he's climbed since his accident.
What follows is one of the most fascinating bits of climbing I've seen. Pritchard's paralysed right arm and leg make some easy moves impossible, depending on the position of the holds. It should be excruciating to watch, if he wasn't so visibly applying his formidable experience and skill to negotiating the challenges involved. At one point, unable to use his right hand, he solves a move by slapping left-handed along a ledge (with no footholds) until he can get a decent hold.
This isn't about the "tragedy" of a former athlete living in a terribly damaged body, or about "triumphing" over those limitations; it's about movement, and skill, and persistence.
"This is just me now, and that's it," Pritchard says.
The Dawes, meanwhile, is cheerily blunt (reminiscing about being able to feel Pritchard's pulse through the hole in his skull) and unexpectedly sweet, kissing Pritchard's hand as he finishes the route.
Then there's the following exchange, which sums up both climbers pretty well:
Dawes (struck by a thought after they've roped up): How do you belay? I was just thinking about that.
Pritchard: Well, with a gri-gri I can belay quite effectively.
Dawes: … but we haven't got one here.
Pritchard: That's only on a single rope, and there's no gear in it anyway, so I'm just gonna let you … (shrugs)
Dawes: So you're just going to watch me climb, basically.
(They both crack up and start giggling.)
no subject
no subject
I thought To The Rainbow was such a lovely bit of film-making. It says so much about the climbing (and the personalities of those two climbers) in a very short space.
no subject
no subject
no subject
"In a situation like this, lonely and homesick and faced with a terrifying lead, Johnny could be counted on to dispense with caution and just be downright irresponsible."
Kind of offtopic
Re: Kind of offtopic
And -- well, mountaineering is not my thing, but they are making an informed choice about the massive risk they're taking with their lives, and because the mountain's not going to be crowded, they're unlikely to take anyone else with them.
Both Dawes and Pritchard did a number of "death routes," and I have huge respect for them. It'd be hypocritical for me to disapprove of the Russians just because I don't have any personal desire to climb mountains.
(Ask me about Everest any time, though, and I will be as judge-y as anyone whose highest summit is 5 metres can be.)
no subject
"We had plenty of experience of each other's moods and habits. I knew 'slack on brown' could mean either more red or green rope was needed for my colour blind friend. He knew 'This will be my last go ...' was a barefaced lie. He had a long reach, was sometimes dangerously brave. Take climbs like his Scimitar Ridge E7 Surgical Lust if you must. Look up, squint and spot the first gear, a peg sticking way out, 60ft up, archetypal of the scary, foot dangling, cross-roped style of the wild Lancashire black dog Paul Pritchard."
Deep Play
Good luck with every thing...
Paul Pritchard
Re: Deep Play
And it might amuse you to know that my other reason for being late replying is that I just got back from my first ever visit to Llanberis (five days trying to pick up some basic trad skills). Sadly I didn't get to play on any slate routes, but I did go sneaking into the Vivian quarry yesterday evening, just for a look around in the fading light ...
(Then, this morning, back on the train to central London.)