It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
Running for Your Life: Staying Cool
A pause to kvell. Kate, my daughter, she of the Rosa Luxemburg-like sensibility – “Enthusiasm combined with political thought. What more could we want of ourselves!” http://bit.ly/mIqiTV – burst onto the national opinion-making scene on June 17 http://nyp.st/ielb6l. That’s my daughter! Rosa’s letters, new ones recently published by Verso in English translation, cut to the heart of what I am talking about. Another quote: Attacking the decision by her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, which voted in favor of the munitions budget in August 1914: “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat.” Thank God Rosa wrote these letters – and that her friends saved them. Kate, I’m proud to say, is cut from this kind of cloth.
Running for Your Life: Finding the grove
Back at it. In the groove. Running, that is. (And twice-a-week blogging!) Feeling a touch of “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami, his groove being a daily hourlong run without fail, a baseline to ramp up in training, but I go Haruki half-better, an hourlong run on alternate days, alternate day at the gym, hamstring strengthening and ellipitcal machine, not just marking time in these forty-five minute workouts, and so far, so good. On track for Boston, folks. Here I go again.
Running for Your Life: Summer Road
The day before The Rapture (May 21) M dreams about being taken. She is invited into a church and she wakes before making up her mind about whether to go or stick around in hell with me.
It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!
It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!
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