Tag: CUE Books

week seven

Books Read:
13. Airborne Photo — Clint Burnham
14. Open Text: Vol. 1 — Ed. Roger Farr
15. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner — Alan Sillitoe

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 24.91
to date — 184.81

I was in MacLeod’s Books the other day and came across a signed copy of Clint Burnham’s Airborne Photo that I picked up for $8 or something. I can’t quite remember what I paid. This particular copy is signed with a personal note to Renee, whom Burnham also thanks in the acknowledgements. They’re on a first name basis, obviously. Also obviously because in the Thank Yous he’s circled Renee but he doesn’t acknowledge her last name, neither in the acknowledgements nor the note. He also took the time to correct a typo on page 135, changing “her” to “him”. At least I think it’s a typo. I liked this collection of short stories. More like vignettes. Almost Twitter length. I miss @Prof_Clinty on Twitter. I don’t know what happened there, but I’m sure there’s a [short] story involved. The first of the three volumes from the Open Text series is another from the CUE Books archives that I’ve finally gotten around to reading. It has some really great stuff in it, especially the poems from Maxine Gadd and George Bowering. I think my favourite contribution is from Donato Mancini. The book is out of print now, so if you find a copy I’m sure it’s worth at least its cover price. I suppose that it was only a matter of time before I started reading about running, and what better place to start than with Sillitoe’s novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. I’m not sure what exactly constitutes a novella by definition, but the one that I’ve adopted for myself is “a short story with chapters”. So there it is. I suppose that a book that came out in 1959 doesn’t really deserve a spoiler alert. I don’t generally consider myself to be competitive but every once in a while it seems to come out. Hence, without giving too much away, Smith kind of irked me at the end. Alas. I did thoroughly relate to the notion of using running as an emotional escape, though I don’t know that I really think of running as escapism. Not anymore at least.
week seven
I didn’t run much this past week and for no really good reason either. I can blame the weather and the fact that I went away to Victoria for the weekend, but neither is an excuse worth anything. Not running while in Victoria seems especially excuseless, especially since I was staying mere steps from Dallas/Crescent/Beach/Road/Drive. And as I’ve mentioned previously, I like to run in poor weather, not least for the lack of other people to get in the way. On Sunday evening I ran my left-turn route — down to Beach Avenue then over the Burrard Bridge and around Science World then back home. It was dusk-getting-dark and a bit drizzly and I saw zero other runners the entire route. I was drafted for a kilometre or so by a swervy cyclist smoking a joint, though, which was a bit spooky through the secluded stretch between Granville Island and Spruce Harbour Marina. Is it swervy or swervey? I often wonder about my safety when I’m out running after dark. Cars are the least of my concerns for the most part; people are far more unpredictable. I know that if it came down to fight or flight I’m pretty much screwed either way. I mean I’m already flighting. How much more flighting can I do? And fight? Nah. Let’s be honest, I’m not much of a fighter and I’m already mostly exhausted from all the flighting. I’d probably just turtle, though tortoise seems more fitting.

week five

Books Read:
9. A Sport and a Pastime — James Salter
10. Poetryworld — Louis Cabri

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 28.61
to date — 120.64

A sport? I must have missed something. I kind of get the pastime part. Maybe there’s some baseball metaphor at work that I completely missed. Sounds like a job for George Bowering…. Anyway, I thought this book was alright although I found the narrator rather curious. He’s a character in the story, obviously, but he’s rather shady it seems. Not trustworthy to say the least. But strangest is that he seems to be around directly observing an awful lot of the arc of Dean and Anne-Marie’s relationship. Impossibly so. It reminds me of when people claim the Bible stories of Jesus are definitely all totally true because they’re from eye-witness accounts, including events that happen without anyone around to eye-witness them. He sweat blood? Really? You watched him and Satan hang out in the desert? Sure you did. Seriously, the amount of time that narratorwhatshisname spends watching Dean and Anne-Marie have sex…there’s a lot of sex. With an audience. Wait, am I also the audience? So, anyway, Poetryworld, another from the CUE Books archives that I’ve failed until now to read. And I should have gotten to it sooner because I loved Posh Lust and Louis Cabri is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Poetryworld hurts my head, like a long series of tongue-twisters for my brain. I enjoyed this collection a lot. Worth picking up a copy, and I know where you can get one.

week five
My physiotherapist suggested that I try the Strava app to go with my Fitbit so I did a few runs and I’m confused. The thing on my wrist tracks what I’m doing and then it syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and Strava syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and the two take the same data and come up with remarkably different results. The distances are often close, but you’d think they’d be exactly the same, no? The times and splits, close. The calories burned, well, not close at all. And that’s fine because I assume that they’re both just guessing, really. But the information going into both apps is the same information from the same source. The only thing that I can think of is that the Fitbit dashboard is lying to Strava, but that doesn’t make much sense because Strava tends to be a bit more generous on the time tracking. And waaay more generous on the calories burned. I used to pay more attention to that caloric burn, because I would think that if nothing else I’d earned enough metabolical reserve for that post-gin-and-tonic bottle of wine. Doesn’t matter much, what with currently doing–and killing at, I might add–sober February. But if I start doing hot yoga, someone just put me out of my misery.

week four

Books Read:
7. Burqa of Skin — Nelly Arcan
8. species branding — Danielle LaFrance

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 20.27
to date — 92.03

I’m slowly reading my way through Nelly Arcan. It’s not an easy journey. I love her writing style, though I feel like she makes me work hard. And the content isn’t exactly uplifting. Burqa of Skin is a collection of writing predominately reminiscing on an abhorrent (she had a few in her too short life) experience appearing on an episode of Tout le monde en parle (I think that’s the name of the program) on french CBC. I watched bits of it on YouTube, but I don’t understand french, much less Quebecois french, so I was left with trying to read body language. It would be interesting, though interesting is perhaps not the appropriate word, to watch it with English subtitles. I’m also slowly making my way through the CUE Books catalogue–an embarrassing admission, given that I was its managing editor for a little over two years. I didn’t plan on following Arcan with LaFrance’s species branding though the works seem to complement each other in their exploration of the treatment of women, sex workers, and marginalization. I thought species branding was great and deserves a wider readership and critical analysis. I know where you can get a copy, ahem…
week four
Three bouts of physiotherapy and my knee is feeling much better and I’m starting to reramp-up my running to make up for lost time. My physiotherapist seems to agree, and suggests that I don’t need to see her again for a few weeks unless knee takes [another] turn for the worse. I feel like I’m behind. I know that I’m behind. I’m nearly to the end of January and I haven’t broken 100 kilometres yet, and I need to be somewhere near 150, although I expect to be running farther frequently come autumn. Still, I feel like I should be further along, though I really don’t want to hurt myself any more and make things worse. The weather has been cooperative for the most part, although I don’t mind running in poor weather; at the least it ensures fewer meandering idiots on the sea wall for me to run into. Which is nice.