“He Never Walked”

Murakami defies the over-generalized popular view of the "outsider" artist. He is connected to his running community, he is tenacious, ambitious, grounded in reality (for all of the surreal scenes in his novels), and treats his body as well as he can. He feels the connection of mind/body is important, and even says that he feels like it is the body that fuels the mind; it is the body, in fact, that makes writing possible.


Early in his memoir, he states that most people would find his personality and disposition repugnant, and at first I mistrusted this humble statement. At the end of the novel, though at a base level I think I really love him, I would agree that most people (and even myself) would probably avoid having him over for a long dinner. But it’s absolutely clear that this personality is exactly what allows him to author his novels.


What does this mean for other artists? He steadfastly refuses to extrapolate his own life to make more general recommendations, so I’ve had to come to my own:




Take-aways (the corporate lingo just sometimes works, ok?):

- Whatever your talents, when you’ve figured yourself out, be uncompromising. This right here could be a game changer for most of us.

- Within this theme: make the time and make the space for your craft. There can be no output otherwise.

- Take the long view. What if a distance runner constantly thought about every detail of the mile he was on? What if, as a yogi, I encountered a difficult pose early in my practice and didn’t remind myself that shoulderstand and savasana lay ahead? I would undoubtedly run from the classroom, throwing my mat in the nearest dumpster. As much as this point borders on the trite, I think it’s important to make it real, to live it. Then it’s not so trite. “That's how I started running. Thirty-three - that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and my starting point as a novelist (p. 47)”. Without a long view, 33 is too late. Every point is a starting point, though I know this quote with undoubtedly have me comparing myself to him when I reach 33, which is the exact opposite of his thrust but inevitable. Which leads me to my last take-away:

- Much of our lives are based on habit. Another way of saying this is that our thinking and actions are in large part based on how we’ve trained ourselves. Training can be passive. Training can be purposeful. But it happens either way. On this afternoon's “Talk of the Nation” on NPR, Neal Conan had a psychologist on who has recently worked with middle school children and the military (what that says about the lives of 6-8th graders I can only guess) on “mental resiliency”. He passionately discussed coping themes based on taking yourself out of the moment, imagining the worst-case scenario (as habitually we do first), imagining the best-case scenario (which takes training), and then settling on the most probable explanation for what’s happening (this also takes much training). With consistent practice, he says, it has been found that soldiers and kids are less catastrophic in their thinking and less prone to depression and bad decision-making. What he was trying to say in essence is the same as Murakami’s theme: just as we train our muscles, we can have success in training our minds. It’s just that it’s such damn hard work, and many of us end up walking our marathons or never even lining up on the starting line.



Go here for an excerpt of the memoir, but I recommend going out and buying the damned thing. Preferably at your local bookstore. My thanks to the guy at Pendragon in Oakland who, when I balked at the paperback price, sternly put his hand on mine and said, "It's worth it."

Consider this my equally stern equivalent.

Can I laugh at Mich Jagger?

An excerpt from the amazing book I stumbled across:

"I'm in my late fifties now. When I was young, I never imagined the twenty-first century would actually come and that, all joking aside, I'd turn fifty. In theory, of course, it was self-evident that someday, if nothing else happened, the twenty-first century would roll around and I'd turn fifty. When I was young, being asked to imagine myself at fifty was as difficult as being asked to imagine, concretely, the world after death. Mick Jagger once boasted that, "I'd rather be dead than still singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five." But now he's over sixty and still singing "Satisfaction". Some people might find this funny, but not me. When he was young, Mich Jagger couldn't imagine himself at forty-five. When I was young, I was the same. Can I laugh at Mick Jagger? No way. I just happen not to be a young rock singer. Nobody remembers what stupid things I might have said back then, so they're not about to quote them back to me. That's the only difference."

This is from Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" and all hyperbole aside, I feel a little like this book is saving not my life, but my potential life.

I am savoring this thin little book and will definitely write more about it when I have absorbed every last word.

The Summer Reading Guide - Guidespot.com

Summer Reading Guide

Psuedo-Feminist Rape Fiction, “Scissors” Slashing, and the Bookstore Owner Who Doesn’t Know Who Dave Eggers Is

My annual week spent in the Trinity National Forest precipitates reading: no cell phones, no internet access, and “town” is a half an hour drive through windy and deer-laden roads. There’s nothing to do but grab a raft and try to keep your book dry as you bob through slow parts of the river.

Mostly accidental, my reading list this year fell prey to bad planning that lead to packing at 2am the night before our 7am departure and having only a few books that I was working through on hand. This fact, however, turned out to be highly serendipitous and I got to practice my “Zen and the Art of Random Reading”:


First

“Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry. Status: finished at long last. It was amazing how dense the novel felt after not experiencing layered writing in a while; the words at time swam and melded until they became word-magma and rushed off the page. I will spare you my reading of the text and characters, as many more literary than I have been up to the task. But let’s just say it was interesting to read after a recent relationship that devolved, in part, due to “glass bottles upon bottles”.







Second

A novel that was stuffed into my bag by my mom, “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Steig Larsson. This, I subsequently heard, has been topping the bestseller list.

I found it entertaining enough at first, until it took a turn into barbaric sexual crimes against women, exhaustively described.

Now the unsettling thing about this turn was the fact that this novel was sort of set up by Larsson to be a quasi-feminist novel: the eponymous “girl” is a damaged yet intelligent hacker and shares the protagonist role with a male reporter, and by her wits and strength she of course manages to save him from the hands of the murderer they’ve been seeking. Larsson also marks major shifts in the story with a quote much like the one that opens Part 2, “Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.”

But when brutal rapes and murders are again and again described (there are no less than 7 rapes against women described in this novel and 6 murders; one woman dies while having a parakeet shoved up her anus while another has her head held in a stack of blazing embers until she is finally dead), my brain starts getting all confused.

This seems a disturbing twist on old hat. There’s certainly a history of Violence & Sex & Women being all mashed up together and then served up as entertainment, but is it getting both more perverse and more ubiquitous? Ever watch the TV series “Law & Order”? That was violent enough, then they added the SVU spin-off to more specifically act out and focus on violent sex crimes. I was surprised to find that my conservative parents watch this show, and shows like it, regularly and without batting an eyelash.

Again, the subversive thing about this is when it is set up as a feminist story, with hard-ass, physically powerful, smart women cast as the detectives and heroes while simultaneously we watch, in great detail, women in the story held captive, raped, tortured, and abused.

I think this genre should have its own name, and “Psuedo-Feminist Rape Fiction” has an accurate ring. ‘Cause it looks like this kind of stuff isn’t going away, but maybe calling it what it is will wake us up to what we are spending our time watching/reading, and remind us not to cultivate the destructive, lurid, or horrendous things that excite us.




Next

My reading of novels was here broken up by several issues of Vogue and People magazine as I waited for a ride into “town” to visit the local bookstore. How’s that for feminist? But I did learn that Jessica Simpson works out at her trainer’s house 4xs a week. I just know this information will be useful at some point . . .




Next

“Running with Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs. A book I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I found the author trying to trump Sedaris in grittiness and flatly describing the downright deviant - the tone and irreverence was too similar to David Sedaris with nothing else added to let the Sedaris fan experience anything new. Which is unfortunate for Burroughs, who I wonder if he has another story in him besides the bizarre childhood he was thrown into. The book jacket says he has published a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll take the time to check it out for signs of authorial growth.





Next

The June issue of “The Believer”. A fun piece was Garrett McDonough’s essay “Close Encounters of the Metafictional Kind”, on how he came to insult one of his literary heroes in person. I am constantly thrilled and restored by the quality of The Believer – they just nail it EVERY TIME. The Believer and Mother Jones have my vote for world and mind-changing publications. Up next month from the McSweeney’s publication? The MUSIC ISSUE!! Pure bliss.









Last

A truly great little book that I impulsively grabbed down off the overcrowded bookshelf was “San Francisco’s Lost Landmarks” by James R. Smith.

This thing is packed full of fun facts like the nugget that there are no less than 44 ships buried under what was to become the Financial District, and the gem that there was a giant public waterslide/boat ride in the Haight that opened in 1895. I can’t wait to regale unsuspecting acquaintances with my new historical knowledge of our fair SF.







Future

Of course what I really wanted to get my hands on this week was Dave Eggers’ new book.

But because of my aforementioned poor planning and because I had to spell Eggers’ last name to the confused bookstore owner (shouldn’t all literaphiles be familiar with Eggers, whether their shop is in the sticks or not?? A question that’s rankled ever since . . .), it’ll have to wait for next week.