On Running and Writing

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you're running and you start to think Man this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running." (Foreword)

"In the novelist's profession...there is no winning or losing...What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you have set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away...In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outwardly visible." (Chapter 1)

"I'm struck by how...you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance." (Chapter 2)

"Most of what I know about writing I have learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate - and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself?" (Chapter 4)

"Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life - and for me, for writing as well." (Chapter 4)

-What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

A Far Cry From Africa by Derek Walcott (1962)

Introducing...El Otro

I hope to get working on a blog on ID and postcolonialisms and "the other", with emphasis on literary/"cultural" topics...Nothing posted on it yet but hopefully in a few months' time it'll be buzzing with good stuff.

www.elotroproject.blogspot.com

Look out 2009!

Changes will take place on this blog...Changes for the better methinks. Watch this space.

And some more Doris...

'What use are men?' asks Lessing
Doris Lessing
Men are a 'haphazard species' says Doris Lessing

Veteran author Doris Lessing asked her Hay festival audience what use they thought men were - in an ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek way.

Lessing's latest work The Cleft is a sci-fi fiction which imagines what happens to a mythical world of only women, when men are introduced.

In her eyes men had been introduced to "pep up" a slothful, lazy world of women," said the 87-year-old.

"This is what I think men were for. The Y chromosome.. to pep up everything".

She said men were a "haphazard species" who always have to be looked after and died "much too easy".

But she admitted she would not want to live in an all-female world.

The novelist and essayist, on the final weekend of the book town's 20th festival, spoke of how her latest work had attracted criticism because of its inclusion of the mutilation of baby boys.

But she said it contained much nastier scenes - including a gang rape of a girl who escaped from her all-female world.


We like to think we are motherly and kind and that we are not going to go to war, but it's not true, is it?
Doris Lessing

And she asked why that should be?

"Obviously because its a female's lot to be raped," she said, and then referred meaningfully to some of the current strife in Zimbabwe - she was brought up in Rhodesia.

"Believe me, if you're a woman wandering carelessly in Darfur... rape is the least of it."

But asked by a member of the audience if it was men who waged war, she replied: "I have not noticed that women, when they get to be prime ministers are particularly peaceful."

On the contrary she said some of the worst crimes had been committed by women.

She said: "We like to think we are motherly and kind and that we are not going to go to war, but it's not true, is it?"

'Something abrasive'

Lessing described how her latest writing had been partly "inspired" by her own experience of giving birth at 19 and the woman in the next bed, already a mother of two girls, harshly rejecting the son she had just had.

She said the woman's reaction to her new-born was "primitive " and "shocking" and added that often these supressed ideas resurfaced to colour her writing when "without you even knowing you're doing it".

Lessing lamented the lack of modern science fiction writing and spoke of her own love of writing for the sheer surprise of what happens next.

She said she was often surprised by criticical reaction to her writing - the early reviews to her 1962 masterpiece The Golden Notebook were "horrible", she said.

Lessing said "There's something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross".

But she said as a writer it was important not to care what other people think and that the profession must honour that.

"We are free... here I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?"

(BBC News 2 June 2007)

Doris Lessing

Speaking about her writing, she said: "It has stopped, I don't have any energy any more.

"This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever.

"Use it while you've got it because it'll go, it's sliding away like water down a plughole."

(BBC News 11.05.2008)