Running off a Jetlag Tuesday, Sep 30 2008 

americas and running and travel piupo 2:47 pm

Jetlagged these past couple of days – I always get it worse coming to this other side of the world, and almost never (touch wood) going back the other way.  The dry air didn’t help my general state of health, and tapering for the marathon seemed to worsen it – the body wasn’t used to lying still and resting and I’ve been lying awake at night thinking way too hard of relaxing my fingers and toes one by one as a means of dropping off to sleep, as they taught us in yoga.

I finally got a run in today.  It was a sunny day in interior northern British Columbia, which I have visited many times, but where I have never run – slightly under 20 degrees celsius, with a surprisingly hot dry sun and a cool breeze that made my nose run too (ha ha).  The area is very hilly but cresting the slopes, I was always rewarded by a view of the autumnal mountain range across the lake.  I probably need this form of hill training too; I’ve been too spoiled by the gentle inclines in Singapore, the worst only being the manmade overhead bridge that spans the Pan Island Expressway.
 
I’m glad I didn’t choose, after all, to run the marathon at the beginning of my trip to North America – I cannot imagine how the legs, heavy as lead after a long plane ride, and the mind, dazed and confused after radical time-zone changes, would have coped.

 

Meh Sunday, Sep 21 2008 

reading piupo 2:57 pm

Mostly bad reading lately, and I have mainly myself to blame.

I didn’t like P.D. James’s Original Sin, which is about a murder in a publishing house. I don’t know what it is about her solutions, but they usually seem incredible, and this one was more incredible than usual (given the remoteness of the motive and the less-than-spectacular technique). Also, while James portrays office politics pretty realistically, I find her descriptions of Daniel Aaron and Kate Miskin fairly out-of-place in this novel.

I was reading Gerard Donovan’s Schopenhauer’s Telescope concurrently, but it was so boring that I finished Original Sin long before I did Donovan’s novel. I had picked this up randomly in the library because the blurb looked interesting. The novel is about one man digging while another watches, and it somehow reminded me of that wonderful Iranian film I had watched with Yvonne, Men at Work, about a group of affluent male friends trying to budge a mysterious menhir-shaped rock from the edge of a cliff.

I found Schopenhauer’s Telescope too “experimental” to be enjoyable. I guess the dispassionate tone in which everything is narrated is part of the point, but I felt completely disengaged as a result.

Paul Theroux’s The Stranger at Palazzo D’Oro, a collection of short stories, started off being masturbatory again, but actually redeemed itself with a few creepy tales set in the woods and in Africa.

 

The Good and the Mediocre Sunday, Sep 7 2008 

reading piupo 1:06 pm

The recent reading has either been pretty mediocre or extremely riveting.

Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen started out promising – I love stories about small American towns – but the family tragedies come so thick and fast that the reader is eventually desensitised. (A few examples: a mother abandoning her children; a brother who runs away; a man who spends his entire life being in love with another and not being able to talk about it; a daughter who wears short skirts and tells lies).

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake started out beautifully in Calcutta and started going wrong when the rather unlikeable protagonist, Gogol, came onto the scene. Somehow, his struggles as a second-generation American seem a little trite, especially when he starts living with his uber-yuppie New Yorker girlfriend and her wine-drinking parents.

After Lahiri came Kathrine Switzer’s memoir, Marathon Woman, which was awesome, despite the numerous typographical errors in the book. In a time when you could count the number of women running in a marathon on the fingers of one hand, Kathrine Switzer fought to show the world – and her closest friends – that women could run 26.2miles without harming their uterus, crying or fainting. (NB: I found this book title on a bookblog of a comparative lit grad student!)

P.D. James’s Death in Holy Orders was evocative, but as seems usual with her, the actual unravelling of the mystery fell rather flat. I couldn’t quite believe in the murderer – his motive for the murder did not match the form of the murder at all!

More Peter Temple followed – the next two books in the Jack Irish series, Black Tide and Dead Point. Black Tide was fantastic, a revelation. I didn’t quite understand the plot (also as is usual for me and Temple) but there were several gems hidden quite snugly away in the prose. Witness this:-

Immensely reassured, I closed my eyes and fell to doing breathing exercises recommended to me by a priest I had defended on pornography charges.

It was sourdough rye, dense, intense, exactly what a rich Harvard MBA would produce in his kitchen for relaxation.

Dead Point was less flashy/action-flick, more “a piece of Jack Irish’s life”. During a bleak Australian winter, Enzio the balding chef is summarily ejected from one of Irish’s favourite Melbourne institutions, a prime racehorse shot, the new football team that Irish’s “Youth Club” (comprising mainly toothless geriatrics) had chosen to support in place of the defunct Fitzroys on a losing streak. Irish meanders through it all missing his cabinet-making and ex-girlfriends, mucking up his best friend’s attempt to hook up with his half(?)-sister, and trying to make good on a case he hadn’t deserved getting paid for. Seedy suburban solicitors, watch out!