running to stay vertical (out of spite)

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A year and a half after blowing out my back (stupidly) carrying a standup freezer by myself down uneven-at-best basement stairs (I was pissed about something stupid and refused all help which was, say it with me, fucking stupid), I've managed to get myself back into a daily running routine. Aiming, by late Spring, to get back to my six-miles-a-day (I'm currently doing half that).

Why six miles, you ask? Simple, really: spite.

In Haruki Murakami's WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, he said that he ran six miles a day six days a week. Loved that book, but HATED his 1Q84 follow-up, COLORLESS SOMETHING SOMETHING AND THE SOMETHING SOMETHING (I only remember the first word of the title), so I decided I would do six miles a day, seven days a week, as a middle finger for writing that shitty book (IMO, 1Q84 is the last great – or even readable – thing Murakami wrote).

So long as I don't blow my back out again, I should be on track to get back to the six and continue my reign of spite-running two years after the herniation. Hopefully this will shut my doctors and father-in-law up about my weight gain over the last couple of years.

TITUS GROAN (Peake, 1946)

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Thanks to his sublime cadence, his intricate and labyrinthine use of limited locations, and deeply-drawn characters, Peake managed the heretofore impossible with the first of his Gormenghast novels: crafted a fantasy series that I'm itching to read every bit of.

As I've also been reading Alan Moore's (or, rather, "The Original Writer") run on MIRACLEMAN, the influence of Peake on Moore is even more apparent – indeed, I think it was this article that pushed me to check out Peake’s work as Moore’s description intrigued me):

The young Moore tore through Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, HP Lovecraft and, especially, Mervyn Peake. The Gormenghast novels, he says, “were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.

To be certain, Peake's wonderful, "fluorescent," characters will stay with me, friends for life; a delight. My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.

SitRep: MainFictionThing

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The good news: I still like everything I wrote nearly a year ago. The bad: I've been trying to figure out the next bit since then. If nothing else, I know that what's there isn't all there is – I've got plenty laid out around it, though I'm in the midst of another narrative case of South Park's Underpants Gnomes (phase one = collect underpants, phase two =..., phase three = profit / section one = works, section two = ..., section three = works). I sometimes wish that the sentences and rhythms and constructions and permutations that sounded good to me didn't sound good to me; it'd make things so much easier. Alas.

THE “POP-UP” DICK TRACY (1935)

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Excellent trip around and about to a new local(ish) comics shop, His and Hers Comics - will definitely be supporting (and not only because they had Beatty’s DICK TRACY film playing on the store TV) - and to The Toys That Time Forgot, for more treasure hunting. Came home with a big one: this gorgeous 1935 pop-up book:

A gorgeous addition to the collection – bee’s knees and all that.