Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Herein lies the message of the strange villain Dimitri in Coetzee’s “Schooldays”: He is the person paralyzed by guilt, something that is at the core, and he knows it; that it can’t be fobbed off on his sad, lonely childhood, that it (the feeling of being unloved by your own flesh and blood) is not the driver of Dimitri’s tragedy, when in a fit of madness (unhinged passion, because, what, pray tell, do we REALLY know about what the human heart is capable of doing, both in grace and evil) he strangles his one true love who has miraculously come to him.

Technique to study: Simon, the narrator, the everyman, without him we don’t live as fully the extremes of the other characters, who like electrons swirl around, bombarded by stimuli, and we, the readers, are the neutron, the neutral being. Simon is simple, ordinary. We are moved to feeling for him, of course. Someone we can relate to; and perhaps more important, feel superior to. (The mass appeal message of the performance show that with The Simpsons made Fox TV what it is today: American Idol.)

Next: Running for Your Life: Street Book Pathway

Running for Your Life: Rough Road to Reddit

Journalism – the wonder of the news – captured my fascination when Globe and Mail reporter John Fraser began sending his dispatches from China in the late 1970s. It was an exciting time of global promise. China during the Democracy Wall movement. Jimmy Carter was president, the Cold War still on but somehow less vicious than the preceding decade.

Fraser wrote in a fashion that was described to me as like a charismatic man who stops you on the street, grabs you by the lapels, and proceeds to tell you what the hell is going on. If there was bullshit in it, I couldn’t detect it. I was 23 and intoxicated with the idea of working in the same business as John Fraser. Literally, chasing a passion, following my bliss, as myth maven Joseph Campbell advised.

Now in 2018, forty years on, what have we got? Newspapers? Magazines? Is that how 23-year-olds get their news?

Nope. We’ve got Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Here’s an education, the big read in the current New Yorker by Andrew Marantz http://bit.ly/2GoKuZs. Call Marantz a John Fraser throwback, somebody who has not lost the thread of what it means to chase the story. Damn thing is how and where do 23-year-olds in North America get their news? Go ahead, read the story.

There is a direct line from the collapse of the Democracy Wall movement to the rise of autocracy, of hate spheres of influence enabled by “news” sites like Reddit.

Still, I’m a diehard believer in the power (and the glory) of the honestly conveyed story. I mean, what other choice do I have?

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetze’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

The other day I broke a logjam. I don’t often suffer from writer’s block – as eye-rolling readers of this blog can attest – but there it was.

To dangle metaphors, I’ve been spinning wheels at my home writing desk. Uncertain (more than usual) and making excuses to myself for why it was I wasn’t getting a lot done – as in new writing, beyond keeping up my old-school correspondence with friends and family.

Park Slope is a mecca for street-abandoned arts and crafts: tables, thrown clay pots, books of all conceivable types, paintings, you name it.

I’m walking T, our special needs coonhound mix, when I saw a small wood panel oil painting. It struck me as being pretty cool – but I was in a hurry and at first went past at a fast pace, T leading.

Then I stopped and guided T back the half-block to where I picked up the painting, oils of T brown and scarlet. A still life object in the foreground. The painting fit snugly in my T string bag I carry that is full of plastic bags and assorted canine playthings – and off I went to finish my errand.

Now the painting is tacked to a place of honor above my writing desk. Before putting it up, I resurrected a photo of me as a young man, serene-looking smile on my lips, my left hand resting against the cover of “A WRITER’S DIARY,” by Dostoevsky, a book that brings back a flood of warm memories.

The image is of a brass lock that has been opened. There is no key, so it would be foolish to think of it ever being locked …

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Running for Your Life: A “Hump Day” Poem

A Profession *

By Jamie Baxter

The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.

-        Shigeo Shingo

Thank you for giving me this opportunity          in the world of work

I will endeavor    I will strive   I’ve put hands on parts of my body

and committed   It is a noble pastime to work   few would disagree

though some might shun   not I   Recognizing my own potential

I have become a corporate citizen   The office square fills with workers

at lunch   wandering from their desks into the highest point of the sun

though often in the form of rain   Some days I staple my work to my desk

so I can slowly unpick it   There’s so much to look forward to

like watching Thomas fail    What a thrill it is      not being Thomas

His eyes back    from the bathroom blare     I save files and am constantly

printing or making notes at easily remembered meetings      Sometimes I strip

in the toilet cubicle   only to redress     but there is a moment

I care very deeply about this company    whose name     I will research

My lunch is almost ready to be removed from the photocopier    What a thrill

to receive so many different looks during the course of a day   from the same set

of people     I am very focused on being here    My emails are always leaving

and move through the one language I know     and few others

I’m vaguely aware of    I’m always being asked for advice   how did you

get a job here      how do you define failure or success     When the red

of the clouds fades to pink during the 4 o’clock winter sunsets and everyone gathers

by the windows to take in the view I tut and shout    make sure they get back to work

I’m always making coffee       and throwing it away   I don’t drink coffee

* London Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2018

Next: Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

Running for Your Life: On Going Long

I thank my lucky “starts” every other day.

That’s what I do. Run every other day since 1977 – or thereabouts.

There are times when I’m just dead tired. Or a little sick.

But I lace up the shoes and go for a run. Without fail.

Thirty minutes, the absolute shortest period of time. Or up to an hour and a half, given my current fitness level.

I’ll be pushing that in the weeks ahead, when the weather gets a little warmer, the sun stronger.

Knees, check. Hammies, check. Back, check. Wind strength during steep uphill, check.

Out the door in compression socks, patella bands, orthotics. Much slower than I was in 1977.

But steady. And ready. Every other day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Lock And Free