survival

I gave up the anti-authoritarian agitational life several years ago. Most of my friends (old comrades) have more-or-less done the same. Maybe a little less so than me. I, and my old friends, generally hold the same values as in the old days of confrontation. Having moved to a new city (though with lots of friends and acquantances from the trouble-making days) I find myself repeatedly characterizing myself in conversations as a "survivalist." One person told me that I ought to move out to the woods but they misconstrued me I think.

What do I mean by survivalist? Well, I don't really know but...

a) I have had a many year (lifelong pretty much) obsession with martial arts
b) I am firmly committed to outstanding fitness, physical and mental
c) I find the world to be an increasingly hostile place
d) I am firmly old school whether we are talking martial arts, philosophy, literature, medicine and much else
e) and yes I am still definitively anti-rightwing and socially very modern and liberation oriented despite the seeming conservatism representing in points a-d. A conservative radical? That might be it you know. But not a radical conservative.

East Van full of parasitic a-holes?

I am so pissed off tonight. As I arrived home my girlfriend pointed out that someone (@#@^#) had smashed her car window and made off with what.... $15 worth of change? Just this past week in my small housing coop one set of friends had some skinny little runt squeeze through the bars of their windows and get away with many 1000s 0f $$ worth of stuff. Within a night or two of that happening my immediate neighbour (also attached to my building) woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a drill. Someone was trying to remove the bars from his window. So that makes at least 3/5 units targeted over the last week alone.

I feel like I'm living under bloody siege!

Kelly Holmes

I can't remember where I found tbhis passage about Kelly Holmes, kick-*ss runner, so no one sue me as I'd love to credit you if I could:



---------------------

By the time she was 18, Holmes was seeking new
challenges, and became what she calls “Army barmy”.
She did that by taking a career in the forces,
developing a reputation as a pocket physical training
instructor, who would bully men twice her size on the
judo mat, or galvanise the Army volleyball team.
Holmes would always be first in line when it came to
abseiling down sheer cliffs, or rafting fierce rapids,
despite her own fears of heights or water.

---------------------
Cool, hey? I hope that she reads Proust too.

more on Murakami, veteran of 16 marathins by 1999

more from Rubin's book (I admit to a little guilt in harshly criticizing him and yet quoting fairly heavily):

Murakami: I've heard it said a million times that fiction comes out of something unhealthy, but I believe the exact opposite. The healthier you make yourself, the easier it is to bring out the unhealthy stuff inside you (95).

Murakami: You've got to have physical strength and endurance... to be able to spend a year writing a novel and then another year rewriting it ten or fifteen times (95-6).

Rubin: He decided that he would live as if each day were 23 hours long, so that no mater how busy he might be, nothing would prevent him from devoting an hour to exercise (96).

Murakami: Stamina and concentration are two sides of the same coin... I sit at my desk and write every day, no matter what, whether I get into it or not, whether it's painful or enjoyable. I wake up at 4a.m. and usually keep writing until after noon. I do this day after day, and eventually - it's the same as runnng- I get to that spot.... You need physical strength for something like that. . . it's like passing through a wall" (96).

Okay, so the book does have it's redeeming features, little gems such as I have quoted above. I can't quote any more. If you dig this (as I do) then read the book. Just be prepared to sift through a lot of unrewarding sections.

Fiction writing as boxing

Haruki Murakami, as quoted by Jay Rubin in his crappy but interesting book on the Japanese novelist, essayist, short story writer:

The most important thing is confidence. You have to believe you have the ability to tell the story, to strike the vein of water, to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Without the confidence, you can't go anywhere. It's like boxing. Once you climb into the ring, you can't back out. You have to fight until the match is over.
This is the way I write my novels, and I love to read novels that have been written this way. To me, spontaneity is everything.

(Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words p.82)

I call the book interesting because Murakami is interesting. And I seem to remember having no trouble with Rubin's translations of Murakami. The book itself though is tedious, full of endless plot summary and occasionally a wonderful little chunk from or about Murakami himself.