Feeling rather pale and sickly lately, perhaps due to the rain and long hours of reading (but also doing the bar rounds at Lorimer and other Brooklyn drinking favourites that have lost my interest), I’ve rethought the notion of the writer/intellectual lifestyle. A number of examples come to mind, we’re not the Beats anymore – we’re not cool enough to jump on a freight car to ‘Frisco (unless your Jerimee’s friend Juan) with the breezy northern California sun on our faces. We’re not war heroes like Orwell or Hemingway; Spain and Italy don’t need our immediate help. No one can really afford an F.Scott Fitzgerald romp on the French Riviera, what do we have? Proust’s beloved Parisian apartment and Kafka’s middle class recluse?
When we look around at who’s deemed creative, the ironic mustaches and pale faces of Brooklyn’s finest. The thrift store magnates, secret Top Shop binges, cafe-with-cool-bookstore-on-Bedford soy milk latte drinking, bleary eyed smokers. It’s actually not aesthetically displeasing, I like that image: think Michael Pitt in The Dreamers, except this is not 1968, or Paris, and most of your friends are from New Jersey or Pennsylvania. The point is (or really my point got a little lost) it’s unhealthy, man.
Being outshined by my older brother’s interest in extreme sports and his shared love of surfing and healthy eating (inherited from my mother), I had some not-so-feeble attempts of fitness positive thinking that manifested in cross-country running. Of course this faded, like all parent-sponsored high school skills, when I started university. Then I read Haruki Murakami’s What I talk About When I Talk About Running (again, left by my brother visiting from Tokyo last week, who mentioned running the NYC marathon sometime in the future, outshined again!). Murakami talks about how running marathons/triathalons/6 miles a day for the last 25 years helps his writing lifestyle, is essential to his creative process. He’s says (in words I will interpret as relevant to my life) you don’t have to be a pale, thin hipster to be a creative genius, and since he’s most likely a creative genius, I’m going to take his word, quite literally, for it. Everyone hit the streets! Take your vintage Schwinn seriously! Hydrate, protein, positive thinking! This is gonna be productive.
-Nikki-Lee
Tags: Haruki Murakami, hipsters, lifestyle, running, writers