絕色

你寫在手記上的段落來自第十五頁。
現在我給你另一段...
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那天那個女孩子坐在靠窗的座位，
一張臉彷彿新鑄出來的肉色硬幣，
肌膚是冒過一陣細雨的花瓣，
頭髮跟烏鴉翅膀一樣黑一樣亮，
斜斜一剪順着臉頰剪出一彎新月。
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沒錢買新書了
不如交換來看

the wonder of blink, no-wonder.

How does he do it? He has figured out that he doesn’t need to pay attention to everything that happens. I was overwhelmed by the task of counting negativity, because everywhere I looked, I saw negative emotions. Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

“You would think that criticism would be the worst,” Gottman says, “because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism I might say to my wife, ‘You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.’ Well, she’s going to respond defensively to that. That’s not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if I speak from a superior plane, that’s far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it’s an insult: ‘You’re a bitch, you’re a scum.’ It’s trying to put that person on a lower level plane than you. It’s hierarchical.”

…”Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community…”

Highly interesting. It is not even a book on relationship. It is about thin-slicing. Blink. The power to think without thinking. Malcolm Gladwell. Some other topics are, military strategy and rivalry between Coke and Pepsi. Saved me from the boredom of 3 consecutive no-power-nights.

What I talk about when I talk about running

When Huraki Murakami has his new novel IQ84 released about a month ago, I started reading his 'memoir', What I talk about when I talk about running. Anyone who read about him briefly would know he is a jazz addict, a cat lover and a very keen runner. The book is like a training diary, how he started running after closing down his jazz bar Peter Cat. And later in the book, more details on how prepared himself to run the New York City Marathon back in 2005. Interestingly enough that at one point of his practice, he ran the original route from Athens to Marathon, seeing flattened dogs and cats by the side of the highway.

Very uplifting as it involves nothing about the skills but the dynamics of running, how the body and the mind change in the time of 26 miles. More, how this momentum has an effect on his literary productivity. Its true that we readers have fantasized enough, being creative or having that thing called 'talent' doesnt make you finish a novel, they could dry out. It takes energy to plan the narrative, pick the right word, and physically, keep up with that pattern for a year or two. So maybe it is necessary for him to so brutally induce discipline and strength into his life. 

Like many of his other work, the humour is there, so people who doesnt do long distance running (i.e. me) would find it captivating enough to continue reading. The tone is light, chatty style, and most sentences are short like there is a rhythm to it. 

There are insights to life, quite concrete ones that you just cant not agree. i.e. the idea of faded youth, a familiar topic in most of his work, and he very nicely put it as 'just as a fastball pitcher's speed starts to slip away with time'. Time is ticking, and something has to be done, or tested. It also feels good to be reminded about the self-satisfaction we get from having the endurance to stick to one thing. There are either too many choices or too many excuses, not to elaborate here but sometimes I wish I didnt have them. If they werent there, I would have probably finished my degree already, gotten a job, getting paid way above what I am getting now. Anyways, the months ahead are clear so theres not much to moan about. 

It is actually the first time I read an english translation of Murakami's work. I have no idea how japanese is like compared to english but a gut feeling tells me that chinese is closer to japanese than english. So I would probably go back to chinese for his next one. Still, its a simple, charming and honest book, recommended!

As a side note, this is where Murakami adapted this very catchy english book title, a tribute to one of his favourite writer.

the fruit of my pencil's grief

Sometimes as we write, there's something we intended to express, the best word in the best order, we believed. But it turned out to be words that misled or being misinterpreted. Literature explains to me the pun meaning, metaphors and how the freedom of mind works. But shouldn't there be a kind of language that could make you get the meaning just right, nothing more, nothing less. It might be a very shallow way to say, but it might just as well be the problem of a keyboard that created this feeling of incongruity. When a word is only a collection of alphabet, we could no longer see the eraser mark beneath a certain word, the fruit of the pencil's grief, the hidden meaning behind all the anticipation.