Category: Read Run Write

week twenty five

Books Read:
37.1 Jackals and Arabs — Franz Kafka
37.2 Kafka and Arabs — Jens Hanssen in Critical Inquiry 39 (Autumn 2012)
37.3 Jens Hanssen, Kafka and Arabs — in Jadaliyya (Nov. 7, 2012)
38. The Men — Lisa Robertson
39. Cinema of the Present — Lisa Robertson

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 57.75
to date — 883.71

Politics is something that I’ve consciously tried to avoid in these post and so far I’ve done an okay job of it I think, but it’s been a tough slog over these past few days to avoid all the crap that’s going on what with the Pulse shooting and the Brexit vote and the fiasco around Steven Galloway at UBC none of which are actually related except that they’ve caused an overall feeling of being emotionally deflated. None of that has anything to do with any of the reading above, either. I met my friend Jeff for drinks and we talked a bit about the Middle East, he just getting back from a conference that coincided with the opening of a contemporary art gallery in Palestine. I’ve a growing interest in speculative fiction and works in translation from the Middle East, though it’s not showing up in my reading, yet. I have a few titles in my to-read-pile (Aziz’s The Queue sits at the top) that I hope to get to soon. He suggested revisiting Kafka and forwarded me the two companion pieces from Hanssen. I hadn’t read “Jackals and Arabs” before. It’s pretty clear, though, that Kafka would have been appalled by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And if there was any doubt, I think that Hanssen sufficiently crushes said doubt. I’m nearly through my pile of Robertson; I think that I have one or two titles left. I liked The Men better than Cinema, though when it comes to book-length poems I tend to prefer more narrative(?) style in the vein of William’s Patterson or Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Purely personal preference. I’ve no regrets spending a couple transit trips with Cinema.
week twenty five
I noticed very early on in my running that I tend to perform better when I’ve shit on my mind. I tweeted once that given my experience I didn’t understand why professional athletes would want to be happy at all. And so I figured that going into the Scotiabank half marathon this morning I would have a decent run. I did, I guess, but I’d really hoped to crush my BMO half time of 1:46:00 and in that I fell short. I ended up with 1:46:31, which I do think is pretty good for me, for my second half marathon, but I wanted to do better. World events didn’t propel me through the race this time around, so I think I need to rethink my hypothesis. I did everything nearly identical to my BMO prep, but for whatever reason nerves were higher, giving me an upset stomach and sufficiently dehydrating me before I even left the house this morning. I’ll spare you the [shitty] details. Or not, apparently. Anyway, I started well, and the race starts fast and I hit 10 kilometres with nearly a personal best, but I ran out of gas by the 12 kilometre mark and it was a struggle between my body and my pride to not walk a couple times. I haven’t done many races, but I have never walked. That being said I went from first-half splits of 4:30 down to 5:30 in the last 5 kilometres. Pacing is clearly still a problem, along with nutrition and hydration. Maybe there’s some psychology in there too.

week twenty two + twenty three + twenty four

Books Read:
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery

Kilometres Ran:
these weeks — 133.27
to date — 825.96

It feels a bit like cheating at solitaire but I’m justifying it because I’ve fallen behind farther than I had ever wanted and this seems like the easiest way to get sort of caught up and move on and hope that this is just another blip along the way. Suffice it to say, I’ve done little reading and even littler writing. I should have just quit or postponed The Elegance of the Hedgehog because I simply did not feel like reading it. And not because the book was bad–on the contrary, it’s quite good–but simply because I was not in the mood to read it. But I stubbornly trudged on, if by stubbornly trudging I mean to say that I took nearly a month to get through it. And by get through it I must admit the latter third involved a lot of skimming towards the finish line. I should have put it aside and moved on to something else. But I didn’t and I do sort of regret it because it’s a good book. It was simply not a book I felt like reading in May and June, for whatever reason. And for that I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will take a miracle to get to 95 books this year. All is not lost. But 95 seems an unattainably long way off.
week twenty four
Running, on the other hand, I’ve not much faltered in the inspiration there. I’ve nearly erased the injury losses I suffered at the beginning of this adventure, and it’s looking like I’m going to be close to 1,000 km by mid-year. I do have two weeks in October whilst prancing through Scandinavia that is going to throw a hiccup into the plan–not a lot of running in prancing. But I’m hoping to front-load some credit into all of that. The other day I set out for a run and noticed that my Surge battery ws nearly dead so I took along my iPhone with WalkTracker Pro installed as a back up. My Surge survived, but the numbers at the end of the run were rather frustrating. Not only were the many of the splits between the two devices way off, by the end of a almost 12 km or over 13 km run (depending on whom your believe) the two were off by nearly 500 metres. And then of course Strava chimes in with its nonsense that barely correlates with either of the other two. So I have no idea what my actual distance is and I don’t know what the solution is. To make it more confusing, I’m to understand that my Fitbit uses my iPhone’s GPS when I connect them. So now I have three different numbers from essentially the same device. At least the overall times are the same across the three. Well, within a few seconds but I chock that up to a lack of button pressing synchronicity. The Scotiabank half marathon is next weekend. I’ve very curious to see what kind of time I can complete.

week twenty one

Books Read:
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery (in progress)

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 39.56
to date — 692.69

I’ve slipped into this routine of snoozing away my morning Skytrain commute, which has seriously hampered my reading. I’m enjoying this book, but I’m not really into this book. Yet. Maybe it’ll come. I’m not very interested in Renée Michel; I find her to be a bit too, I dunno, French? There’s something about her that I don’t really care for. Perhaps that will change. But for now I’m far more interested in angsty preteen, self described genius Paloma Josse though I have a feeling that she is going to get rather annoying quickly. I especially dislike the condescending decision to have Renée in serif and Paloma in sans serif, as if the reader is so daft as to not be able to figure out which one of the two first-person narrators is narrating. Rude.

No photo and quote this week; maybe next week if/when I finish this book.

It looks like I’m going to break 200 kilometres in May. That makes me happy but I’m a bit behind in my goal. Not insurmountably so, though. I wonder, though just how accurate my tracking is. I’ve lamented Fitbit and Strava in previous posts for their inability to maintain my confidence in their accuracy. Then the other evening I went to Ballet BC for Program 3 and while applauding the performance of Bill my Surge vibrated congratulating me on reaching my daily step goal. I guess clapping is exercise.