Thinking about what Mr Murakami thought about when he was running
Mr Murakami was right in his descriptions of running. Initially I was perfectly satisfied to let him do the running, but then after he passed all those dead dogs in Greece and the unjust cruelty of that marathon where you’ve to hit mile 38 out of a total 65 mile course by a certain time or they hoof you from the race… I needed to raise out of the armchair and test drive what he reports.
Firstly he omits to mention, probably because he’s been at it 26 years and no longer notices, the perpetual build up of NASA style pressure and pain round the shins and ankles after running about five paces. Pressure only relieved by stopping and yowling. This never ceases even after 21 whole days of running.
Another omission is the ankle bending motion required to dodge the ample supply of dog shite (are there no dogs in Japan?) Eyes must remain down or shoes and nasals will suffer.
Eventually when you can alight your gaze for a few seconds, you do discover hark indeed, he’s right the same faces pass each day and nod or avoid eye contact…there’s the man in the green jacket who cycles up that hill every day (at a much swifter pace than I manage going down it) and then a few days more of ‘hark, there’s that man in the green coat before a closer squint …and er bloody hell I actually know that man in the green coat and better duck so he does not bear witness to me in this much reduced condition.
He also did not mention the runner’s fury at objects blocking their way. Usually these objects happen to be baseball players, who seem to adopt urban sprawl as their policy for temporarily inhabiting outdoor spaces in pursuit of raising their bats. Pace, pace, pace, pant, chest pain, pant, cue blurring of vision, what the bleep is that slung across the path…tents, bicycles, extended family, cooler, and finally, but surely with single intent of wiping out approaching, arthritic runner they come complete with waist high dangling cigarettes designed to singe you and your polyester shorts as you pass them and their sprawling (and unnecessary) accoutrements. And this was on a rainy day. I think they bring the entire block of flats when the sun comes out.
Treasure
Crikey, think I just alighted upon my true calling….though Environment Canada are so conservative in their assessments. We’ll be deluged with epic rain and their assessment will read “light drizzle”.
CANWARN is the Canadian Weather Amateur Radio Network. These are amateurs supporting Environment Canada with eyeball reports of severe weather as it passes through their area. Environment Canada can watch storms coming through on radar and satellite imagery, but they cannot see what is happening UNDER the clouds.
A note of caution before readers get to ecstatic and race off to sign up:
CANWARN members are not storm chasers. Rather than chasing the weather, we wait for the weather to come to us!
I am co-operating fully with the later instruction, merely keep my close encounters to ruminating on the radars of places I’ve never been. I wish this font would be similarly co-operative.
Retreat
An interview with Philip Roth on The Observer, not linked to here for the simple reason I cannot understand why we (or the medja in our apparent interest and from whom I should state I do earn the odd muffin, incredibly minimal quantity of muffins but muffineen none the less) keep hunting these people who don’t want to be interviewed down. Leave him and those like him alone. We don’t need these pilgrimages to the foot of his remote country lane to learn life busting facts such as the fact his legs have grown incredibly skinny. God help us. Nor one hopes by age 75 should he give a toss that Hitchens (whose miraculous qualification in this instance is he’s lived as a reader through every phase of Roth’s writing …so likely has the average man doling out the shoes at the local bowling alley) declares him fouling his nest (it’s like an uninvited member of the Health Board popping in to comment on the dusting). And the obligatory hasty summing up of a writer’s work, inbetween descriptions of how his brow is furrowed and he doesn’t want to answer questions this afternoon puzzle me as to their purpose. Why are we going to writers, as though they have any more answers than anyone else? Especially when they’re hiding away among the apple trees, lusting after a bit of peace. Surely we should keep our dealings to what is on the page, rather than the mantlepiece.
Anne Enright had a great piece recently (in Guardian land) describing the perils and viciousness of public questioning. I’m beginning to think we feel writers may have some extra organ we don’t know about that endless questioning may reveal.
There are people more suited to this boiling to the bones for the last dregs of their information for example and it is a prized topic of mine… weather forecasters. I’d like to see the folks grilled who did a impressive job of predicting the strength of those recent hurricanes who sign the National Hurricane Centre bulletins with only their surnames … or the neurologists could explain why those bright lights and coloured packets in shops make us dizzy? Or experts in the ear canal? Audiologists have minutae on ears to spare. Plus there’s a great deal to know about bees based on a brief exchange with a bee expert.
The Puffin when asked this week for a school assignment who he’d most like to meet declared the person who invented air conditioning. So there’s another niche that needs attending to.
I know why’d I read it? (Mainly because it stated he was writing his last book..and I had to figure out how a person could know such a thing. It did not shed any light) Why do I have links here to writers gabbing? Well it’s a recent insurrection and this piece provoked particular perhaps once off grumpydom. Why do I write about writers? Cue stubbing of inconsistent, hypocritical toe.
Here’s another curious beam: Neon sign flashing yes above this monitor.
The weather in tennis
For some this essay may be about tennis, for others childhood, for me it was all about the weather. RIP. Mr W.
For those who knew him, the thought of his suffering (or others similiar suffering) must be hard to bear.
Rumbles
B.C. coast shaken by powerful earthquake so the headline last Thursday read… A 5.8 earthquake that shook the ocean floor.
I had to wonder how it could be described as powerful if no one except the marine life felt it. Followed by affront… no mention of it on google alerts earthquakes. The stories that landed that day included nothing about our powerful one. I had to find out about it from the CBC. What’s the point in Google alerts if they don’t alert you. Tho’ I think an earthquake tends to assert itself …
It got me thinking about earthquake kits and necessary inclusions: good chocolate, strong scotch. No point in having teabags if there’s no kettle. I pondered it further what exactly is edible with no heat nor water? Crackers, canned fish, cold beans. All most unappetising in the event of catastrophe.
Have to recommend the MEC Wound Repair Kit which I treated myself to for a xmas present, mostly because it had detailed instructions on how to repair a wound. Then not long afterwards I found a sling on sale. The Puffin unpacked it and now it will need to be retrieved from one of his teddy bears in the event of a rumble.
Always beneficial to be in calamity mode at least every three weeks.
Here are some charts to get you hyperventilating:
Our powerful one did make the US list of most powerful earthquakes in the world in the past week.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php
They have an earthquake notification service you can subscribe to.
Check out the epic number of quakes that have happened on the West Coast since Aug 29th. They’re more frequent than the bus service.
http://earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/recent_eq/maps/index_e.php
And finally preparez vous .. though I think the salt and pepper suggestion is a bit excessive. Why would you fuss about not having salt for your crackers, if your entire ceiling has caved in and you are sitting in a hole.
Hearts, Lungs and Minds: experimental radio documentary
In the category of groovy ideas that have nothing to do with the weather ..came across this interesting piece…hurry though you’ve only 7 days to hear it.
An experimental documentary by sound artist John Wynne, who spent a year as artist-in-residence with photographer Tim Wainwright at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants.
Using recordings of patients, the devices some of them were attached to, and the hospital itself, the piece weaves together intensely personal narratives with the sounds of the hospital environment, exploring the experiences of transplant patients and the important issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure.
Flourish
Prepare for flurry of weather centric posts …
In a round up of weather related worrying and reading I came across this article headlined Expert: Scientific reasons behind year’s weather. The second paragraph read
At least one Iowa City resident said she thinks the weather in Iowa this year, along with the seemingly apocalyptic flurry of earthquakes, deadly tornados and other natural disasters around the globe might be a sign from above.
“I think the end is near,” Linda Lewis said Friday.
I should point out the Mrs Lewis is not the expert in the article, but I was comforted to see another weather wonderer who relies on absolutely no science for her wondering. I’ve questioned whether it’s resolvable being entirely illiterate in science and concurrently obsessed with the weather.
I’ve muttered my way through some hardware shop discussions with perplexed employees as I complain about the selection of barometers they stock, whilst not being entirely clear what barometers actually do. I’ll ask do they measure air pressure without really having a clue what the purpose of measuring air pressure is, but since it matters to weather people, so it too matters abstractly to me.
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century
From Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent:
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.
Read the rest here.
Meanwhile on this side of the water they’re decking it out over whether or not to implement a carbon tax federally and some are hiccuping over the already introduced Provincial tax on petrol. Now lads, a bit closer to home, this might help you make up your minds…
The researchers say sea levels could be expected to rise by four to six meters by 2100 as part of a long-term trend towards five to ten meters. A six meter rise in sea level would put 91 per cent of Richmond, and 76 per cent of Delta underwater; the entire airport and ferry terminal at Tsawwassen would be lost to the sea; and the current erosion counter-measures around Point Grey and North Vancouver would be overwhelmed, threatening to plunge much of UBC into the ocean.
Read more here
Curiously there’s been recent, slightly rabid muttery protests about the introduction of a new bus route in our area! A bus, God help us.
Round Table discussions
I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving. Given that this discussion took place after extracts from her journal had been published which surely gave some context on the complexities of her personality…
Perhaps I am too squeamish, but I kept thinking yes, she was a public intellectual, perhaps she could be vicious and critical, but she was also someone’s mother and it cannot be easy to have your mother turned over and pulled apart like a piece of toast. You can see why it was so necessary for her son to write his recent book, which though remarkably restrained, created a profound portrait of grief and its inherent complexities. It’s effect for the reader was what John McGahern would have described as the particular being the way to the general, which is perhaps when and how the particular can serve a purpose.
This roundtable discussion relied too much on the particular only as a means to the particular and sometimes felt like crows pecking the same patch of land to turn up the same version of the repeatedly pecked and bloodied worm.
Why are these dichotomies in her personality so surprising? Why the gasp and gush over her insecurity? I’m confused as to why this is so foreign. Are not most humans similarly flawed?
Nabakov’s position of “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal.” made certain sense as an aspiration in the aftermath of listening to it.
The roundtable discussions are here: http://philoctetes.org/past_programs/ They are varied and some are about the brain, and the weather, areas of particular interest to me. I also like that these discussions are hours long. We live in times of conversational brevity.
Middling
“He was greatly distressed in his head. All night the parrot had swung roosting from his palate…”
From Dream of Fair to Middling Women. A Novel. Samuel Beckett. (Arcade Publishing, New York, first Arcade paperback edition 2006)