Snickers

Last year I ran my first marathon. As anybody will tell you, I’m one of the least likely candidates for any sort of sporting endeavour, but maybe going out with a former sports fiend (now, after my own influence, downgraded to ‘sports enthusiast’) had its impact on me and the two of us decided to go for it. We had both been in Rome in 2006 the same weekend as the Maratona di Roma was taking place and had both agreed at the time that it would be a stunning city to view through the medium of running. If you have to put yourself through 42 kilometres of masochism, the surroundings might at least make up for some of it. Then last year we thought we’d aim for the 2008 Rome marathon, and warm ourselves up nicely with an October bank holiday jog around Dublin.

As such, since last summer, I have had more than a passing interest in running. I would hardly describe myself as the world’s most diligent athlete when it comes to training, but I enjoy it, and hope to run in a marathon again within the next year. Maybe I’ll actually make it to Rome this time around.

Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (hereafter, for reduced word count’s sake, referred to as Running) came to my attention through a newspaper interview I read about the author. I had read his most celebrated novel, Norwegian Wood, earlier in the year and had been impressed, so the interview immediately caught my eye. By all accounts Murakami seems a reserved figure, uncomfortable with the limelight that came with the popularity of his books, first in Japan, and then globally. Running, the interview surmised, was probably the closest thing that we would get to a memoir of the taciturn author. Even at that, the book is far from a sentimental memoir, but rather a collection of essays talking about his experience as a runner and as an author, and how the two are allied.

Murakami began running around the same time that he began writing. He describes the moment in which he decided to become an author in vivid detail, able to pinpoint the exact moment in which inspiration struck him. Ever the champion of western culture, it was at a baseball game in Tokyo. The batter hit a remarkably good ball (if that’s how you describe these things – I told you I’m not a sportsman) and Murakami figured that if the batter could do that, why couldn’t he write a book? No, I’m not sure I see the connection there either, but I am fairly certain that Murakami doesn’t particularly care that I do.

At the outset Murakami declares that “a gentleman shouldn’t go on an on about what he does to stay fit”. I’d have to agree. I normally wouldn’t be an advocate of stiff-upper-lipping it, but a gentleman, or anybody for that matter, that is disposed to keeping themselves fit should just do whatever it is they do to achieve this and get on with it. There are few things more tedious than listening to somebody rant endlessly about how far they ran, how heavy a weight they lifted, how many goals they scored, or how many tiddlies they winked. Nobody likes a show-off, and that’s basically what tooting your athletic horn amounts to – one-upmanship of the highest order. For the most part Murakami, who seems to be aware of the danger of slipping into this line of boasting, steers clear of it.

Instead he offers what amounts to a record of a pretty intense training programme as he ups the distance and difficulty of his runs in preparation for the NewYork race. As he does so he allows us to slip into his thought process, and the novel is essentially a glimpse of the running Murakami’s meandering mind.

When you’re running your mind understandably wanders to take away from the – let’s be honest – relative trudgery of repeatedly putting one foot in front of another at increased speed; however, his thoughts, unlike mine when I run, are very interesting and insightful reflections on the life and methods of a writer. I suppose the idea at the centre of the book is that running a marathon is analogous to writing a novel– an overly long and painful process as emotionally draining as it is physically so. Why would you put yourself through this torture? The short answer is because it’s there. The long answer is because it behoves a certain type of personality to repeatedly set the head to the grindstone, whatever that might entail.

Running is a wonderful little collection of themed essays, and very easy to dip into at leisure. It lived in the bag I compulsively carry with me for about a week during which I whipped it out at any free moment. Erudite and accessible, it’s a quick and rewarding read and should make required reading for Norwegian Wood fans obsessed with the apparent autobiography of that novel. And if you’re in the business of judging a book by its cover, it’s got a terribly well-designed one of those too.

Filming Mona

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so by way of penance I’m offering not a review but a brief rant to keep you entertained. Enjoy.

It was my birthday last Thursday and I was brought to Paris for the weekend. Neither of us had ever been properly before so we had an understandably enjoyable time walking for miles around the city. What we didn’t do, however, was take photographs of anything - the simple reason for this being that we both forgot to bring a camera.

It’s a surprisingly liberating thing not bringing a camera on holidays. It was nice to walk around the Jardin du Luxembourg without taking a photo of the funky boat sculptures currently dotted around the park. When we crossed the Champs Elysées there was no mad scramble to whip the camera out of my backpack and recreate an image of the Arc du Triomphe at the end of the tree-lined avenue. And there was no desire whatsoever to film, as I saw one gentleman doing, the Mona Lisa.

We went to the Louvre on Friday night and made straight for the Denon wing where the Mona Lisa hangs, primarily so that we could say we’d seen it and then go off and enjoy the rest of the museum. As to be expected there was a large crowd gathered behind the railing that uniquely protects this painting, itself shielded from would-be knife wielders by reinforced glass. Whether or not the Mona Lisa is worthy of all this idolisation is another matter entirely (it’s not, by the way), but what caught my attention was the volume of people taking photographs of her.

Bear in mind that this is now one of the most mass-produced images in the world. On top of this, any photo taken by a civilian visitor to the Louvre will be done so at an unflattering distance and almost certainly skewed by the museum lights reflecting off the glass. It will not be a good picture, but still people will try. I admit that had I remembered to bring a camera I probably would have joined all the others, but in not having one I realised how ridiculous and expendable an awful lot of holiday snaps are.

Now, I can see the merit in taking a photograph of somebody standing next to the painting, if you want to argue that photographs count as a testament to having been there, seen that. But how many photographs, really, do you have at home that you’ll never look at again? I know I have at least twenty pictures of the Pantheon that I could probably do without. And those were taken before I had a digital camera. I have about fifty digital photographs of a single pride of lions in Kenya – and at the time I was actually trying to restrain myself from living through my camera.

Of course this isn’t limited to Leonardo’s painting. There was a woman in the Musée D’Orsay who systematically documented every single artwork she came across. Surely actually looking at the sculptures, drawings, paintings, and architecture would have been more rewarding. But then, I don’t know, maybe she was going home to recreate a miniature Musée in her garage.

Leaving the camera behind was the best thing we did over the weekend. We’ll just have to just actively remember all the events of our four days in Paris, and if that means that our memories will be rose-tinted and unrealistically pleasant and idyllic, so be it. But at least I won’t be making anybody watch my rolling footage of a still life.