Thursday 30 July 2015

Technical issues

As I passed the three kilometre point I was not comfortable. I was struggling, a considerable part of my being was directed not at my feet pounding the treadmill below me but at two points of pain.

Two sensitive, delicate points of pain.

It is with no exaggeration that the level of pain had almost increased to that point where I am flung backward in time to the 1950s. There was no avoiding, I had to stop. Twenty minutes in and I was done for.

Those explorers in century-old pictures, who managed their way across relatively unknown landscapes, would not admit to suffering this, would probably not suffer this. In their woolly jumpers and fur coats, when will they get the chance to develop conditions like runners' nipples?[1]

Tuesday's early morning rain did me in. I have running clothes but some of my t-shirts are more scratchy than others[2]. In this sense I am doing better than Tengo Kawana creating a routine around writing, reading to his father, and walking along the sea front[3].

Fiction seems to search for answers in the worlds[4] they explore without coming to a conclusion. Yossarian implied escape in Catch-22 is reinforced by Closing Time[5]. Even when there is a definite end, such as Sombrero Fallout, there is not an end; the sombrero just sits there, waiting, the writer continues on his lonely search for discarded hair. Mysteries might present a solution though deliver it with further questions.

[Poirot, Curtain, spoiler alert, one paragraph]

In Poirot's last case Agatha Christie presents the reader with a murderer so devious the majority of their crimes cannot be linked to them. Poirot highlights a number of cases that bare the murderer's mark yet can only catch the murderer by feigning his own illness, by lying. What evidence do we have other than Poirot's word? And given this, what can the reader deduce about Poirot's suitability? In Curtain Poirot effectively becomes Joseph Dredd without the legal framework of Mega City-One.

[Spoiler end]

There is a clash between fiction and life, a dysfunction between fictional and reality. Fahrenheit 451 exposes this and exaggerates with the power of a nuclear explosion. I need to check the weather and my gym kits to avoid the unpleasurable burn.

Notes
1- This is a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions aren't meant to be answered, but if you'd like to try there's an administration fee.
2- They fight and fight and fight, fight, fight.
3- Still eighty pages in.
4- I avoided using the phrase universes in case I offended anyone by blurring the boundaries of how to talk about fiction and genre, even though fiction is genre and genre is fiction (to paraphrase a poem).
5- That Heller, always expanding the universe.

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