Tag: 95 Books

week nineteen

Books Read:
31. Ticknor — Sheila Heti
32. Pound @ Guantanamo — Clint Burnham

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 48.72
to date — 607.16

I read Ticknor in one round-trip transit ride to-and-from work. It’s pretty short. But short is good sometimes too. You’ve noticed the amount of poetry in these posts, yes? Ticknor was not what I was expecting. It’s nothing like How Should a Person Be?. There were times when I was reading Ticknor and it felt like I was reading Kafka. My edition has an introduction by Ben Lerner and I didn’t bother reading it and then I finished Ticknor and I was around Nanaimo Station and still had another four stops on the Skytrain to go so I decided to take a look at what Benny had to say about the book and he writes that Ticknor reminds him of Kafka’s “The Next Village”. I don’t recall reading “The Next Village” and there’s a good chance that I have not. Yet, anyway. Maybe I should. I mentioned a couple weeks/posts ago the Talonbooks launch. Clint Burnham reading “No Poems on Stolen Land” from his collection Pount @ Guantanamo was far and away the best part of the evening. And most of the evening was pretty good. I like this collection. There’s a rather odd little shout-out to Poetry is Dead in the acknowledgements that I’m a bit confused by. There’s maybe a story there. Or maybe not. I really like Clint; I miss @prof_clinty in my Twitter feed.
week nineteen
Until lately I’ve been grossly ignorant about all the races, and I was lamenting the other day that it would be nice if there was a list somewhere. Well, there are a few, and I was just grossly ignorant when it came to my Googling. Be that as it may, I learned from a Skytrain Station ad that apparently if I sign up for and complete the Granville Island Turkey Trot 8 km race over Thanksgiving and the Fall Classic at UBC in mid November (probably the half marathon) then, along with the BMO ten days ago, I’ll have the RUNVAN Hat Trick. I think I might give it a shot. Registration closes on May 31 so I’ve a bit of time to decide, but I think I should just sign up before I convince myself to back out. The word “trot” though. I really dislike that word. I broke 600 kilometres somewhere around the lighthouse under the Lions Gate Bridge today, so that’s exciting. I’m 30 per cent away from my goal of 2,000 kilometres this year and 36.5 per cent through the year. I’m pretty happy with those numbers.

week eighteen

Books Read:
29. The Trouble with Brunch — Shawn Micallef
30. M Train — Patti Smith

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 42.81
to date — 558.44

Hey here’s an idea let’s go spend the majority of Sunday’s midday standing in line outside of some kitsch-decored otherwise hole-in-the-wall restaurant so we can pay $15 for $1.50 worth of poached eggs and fried potatoes. I guess the other $12 goes toward the shitty service? Nope, you have to tip for that. Anyway, I never ever liked going out for brunch. I don’t worship at the cult of bacon. And I pretty much agree with everything else that Micallef writes in this book. But especially his hatred of brunch. That’s okay because I know a lot of people that hate even the idea of running. I really liked Just Kids and so I thought that I would really like M Train but I did not. I found it dreadfully boring, and for some reason the Patti Smith voice in my head the whole time I was reading this was this whiny, dramatic, annoying voice that seemed perpetually on the verge of catastrophe, even if that catastrophe was something as mundane as someone sitting at “her” table at the coffee shop she frequents. I feel her pain; I used to love to spend my Saturday mornings in Kamloops having a coffee and reading on a street bench in the middle of the 200-block of Victoria Street in Kamloops and I’d be pretty disappointed to get there and see that it was already occupied. But not quite Patti-Smith-disappointed. I read that people disliked the overly romanticized (revisionist?) historicity of Just Kids but I didn’t mind. Plus, at the risk of alienating any photographer friends that might be reading this, I kind of like Robert Mapplethorpe. He’s a tragic story to say the least, and yet somehow I didn’t get that from the invariably tragic Patti Smith. But who am I kidding? Nobody is reading this, much less any artist acquaintance. Anyway, since no one’s reading this anyway, all aboard the M Train to Yawnville.
week eighteen
So it happened that on Sunday, May 1, I dragged my ass out of bed at 5 a.m. not to stand in line for brunch but rather to go to Queen Elizabeth Park and stand in a corral with a couple thousand other geniuses waiting for a 7 a.m. gun to tell us it was time to spend the next couple hours running 21.1 kilometres. But to each their own, I suppose. The BMO Half Marathon was my first official half marathon and it was really great. I’d been looking forward to this race ever since I registered back in November, immediately after purchasing the XBoxOne/Fallout4 bundle. I figured I needed to strike a balance. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d won a Platinum race package from Air France and all that I will say about it is if I had actually paid the extra $100 it cost (as 199 other people did) I probably would have asked for my money back. Not worth it. At all. Otherwise, the race was really great. I learned that I might need to add a few more hills to my running repertoire, and reconfirmed that I need a sippy-cup if I want to stay hydrated and not attempt some unerotic-asphyxiation. I bought one of those dorky looking fuel belts. I’ve yet to use it. When I signed up for this race back in November, I estimated my time to be 1:59. At that time, I’d never run more than 15 kilometres, so I was really guessing. I read that the average time for my age is 2:02 so I thought I’d set a goal of under two hours. A couple months ago I reassessed and set a goal of 1:49. My official time ended up being 1:46:00 and I am very happy with that. My knees cooperated the whole race, which was really great. Everything was great, right up until the last two or three kilometres when I felt like a pylon as runner after runner passed me. I need to work on my end game. Hills-hydration-finish. I have a few weeks until the Scotiabank Half Marathon at the end of June.