Monday, September 6, 2010

"Loved it. It made me want to run and write." 99 Problems gets Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home'd. And likes it. A lot.

There is a quite terrific and much appreciated free-associating riff about running, writing and 99 Problems on Rose Hunter's blog Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but we were particularly excited to see here musing on place, a thread we were very conscious of trying to capture in these pieces, but not one that has received much attention prior to this. Many thanks to Rose, who should we add has a new poetry joint coming out with the Artistically Declined titled To The River, which means that unless things going awry, and sometimes they do, we will soon be sharing a publisher with Rose, something we find terribly exciting.

"
Apart from all the running and writing and publishing stuff in Ben's book, I also liked the focus on place. I liked the street names, and run routes. When I was a teenager I was a runner. One dislocated kneecap, three arthroscopes and this lateral release thingy - later, and I wasn't, anymore. Boo-hoo, I know. The point is these days I'm securely in the degraded "jogging" category, but I still remember at least what it used to be like to go at a decent clip - definitely running as opposed to jogging, and the mental distinction as well. And I still call it "going for a run," even though both of us (two of my split personalities at least) know that this isn't what actually happens. This isn't what I was going to try and say. I'm not capable today it seems, of saying what I was going to try and say. The other day - or was it yesterday? - I went for a jog around the neighbourhood, which made me think of the part in the book which refers to the view over Lake Michigan I think it is, as like the dropoff-world in The Truman Show, because that's what this entire neighborhood [here in Brisbane, Australia, where I am] looks like to me (The Truman Show) - but of course I can't find the quote, because I never can find quotes when I want to. I'm not even sure it's in there now. Maybe I dreamt it. I had a dream once that I was in Atlanta (one of the "settings" in 99 Problems). It was very vivid (the dream I mean here) and I wrote the whole thing down somewhere. I was ice skating, outside, but I knew it was Atlanta because someone told me it was. Which is one way to know you're in a place."

2 comments:

Rose Hunter said...

Aw! WBMHWHTTMH is very appreciative, of your (collective) appreciation. But I know Ryan already went all meta on his blog, so! Smiley time. :)

TBWCYL, Inc. said...

Meta, good, smiley time, awesome, and appreciation is most definitely in the air. Is that everything?