Running for Your Life: Like a Fading Shadow

There is something about Lisbon that makes for a character.

In the case of LAFS, a place where James Earl Ray managed to jet off to in the snaggle-toothed aftermath of Ray’s murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Also a place where almost twenty years later Antonio Munoz Molina, author of the novel “Like a Fading Shadow,”soaks in the sea air, the unchanging street feel of the Portuguese capital.

What’s reduced here is a labyrinthine dream, a plumbing of the human soul that sets judgment aside for an animal watchfulness. We are dumbstruck in the modern age to fathom, let alone give shape to the drumbeat thump in the mind of a cold-blooded killer, this one perhaps the most famous to ever land on the FBI’s most wanted list.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Falafel Guy

Running for Your Life: Cold Comfort

On Kennel Road, Cuddebackville, New York,

There’s a place down the

Hollow where two streams cross.

Air temperatures are 10 degrees colder than ours in Brooklyn, New York,

Where we’ve lived since before Bill Clinton was president.

Temperatures in these mountain-fed rushing streams are

umpteen degrees colder than New York City tap water.

Close your eyes under a night sky

Where the streams meet

And it’s trapline time, bear,

Deer, raccoon, porcupine lap

Life-restoring waters.

Long before the first cabin is

Built. Let it be before this nation is born.

When man was but one and not

The One.

When listening meant something entirely different

Than it does now.

Sink your body into the

Teeth-chattering cold of the churning waters

Will seal the deal. Make you want for nothing more

At least for a moment.

Next: Running for Your Life: Like a Fading Shadow

Running for Your Life: Subway Jottings

It is a fraught time

When the hinges

Come off

And looking away

Is not frowned upon.

(Written on Day Two after reading Marilynne Robinson on poverty and the classical economists …)

Watching grown men

Thinking on television

Sends me to the pages

Of a good book.

Bar codes

Make me crazy mad.

Algorithms are live feeds from the devil’s workshop.

Must we always go forward

And accept that nostalgia is death?

Next: Running for Your Life: Cold Comfort

Running for Your Life: Cars and Manners

Love that New York City street lighted kiosk privacy pilferer that quotes some dude saying that in Gotham you’ll find the only place in America where a car serves no discernible purpose – like good manners.

Next: Running for Your Life: Gordon Lightfoot?

Running for Your Life: Killing Commendatore by Marathoner-Novelist Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami’s “Killing Commendatore” breathes life into the notion that a novel in the right hands is an enduring inspirational art form.

Just try to make a movie out of “Killing Commendatore.” It cannot help but be a lesser product than the original: the novel, any more than you can do justice to what Marlon James does in his novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” of what George Saunders manages in “Lincoln in the Bardo,” or Richard Powers in “The Overstory.”

Murakami, the marathoner, is in for the long haul. What informs a work of art, the painting?

If the world is unknowable what risk is the reach of the fantastic in literature? Especially as it relates to that which we have not words: horrors of war; depths of romanic love; the power of empathy; the inevitability of evil intent.

Sit down with this book and savor it all. You won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cars and Manners