Blog Archives
IS SOCIALITY PROMOTED BY THE SPECTACLE?
I am releasing my new fiction novel: Turkeys Not Bees. It explores a near future of capitalism and totalitarianism controlling human evolution.
The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control.
Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.
The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist.
At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Reviewed by
David P Jones – Philosophy Student
August 12th 2022
My blog: martinknox.com
GOING WITH THE FLOW
It means taking what life gives you. A movie and a novel about endurance both have heroes who take as much as they can get.
In the movie Cast Away (2000) Chuck (Tom Hanks) frenetically controls workers’ goals for punctual delivery of parcels for his employer’s worldwide business. When a plane he is on goes down in the Pacific Ocean, he is cast away alone and starving on a small island without control of anything, except his striving to stay alive.
His only hope is to build an escape raft. Without materials or tools, he slogs for 4 years. His raft is seen and he is rescued, by which time his wife has remarried and has a child. She still loves him, but the situation is not finally resolved at the end, as he waits for things to turn up, as he did on the island, contrasting with his former work-to-schedule life.
It is a very good movie.
Time is Gold by Martin Knox, has an elite marathon runner, Maxi, who learns to live in her own time, like Chuck did. She runs ‘in flow’ and contests the world record. The story has psychology, philosophy , neuroscience and physics and will keep you on the edge of your seat.
The movie and novel both have lessons on everyday endurance that wins.
On Amazon. Reviews: martinknox.com
COULD YOU WIN AT YOUR OLYMPICS?
Many people endure competition in athletics, sport, music, dance, debating and other performance. The key to success is training.
Time is Gold, a novel by Martin Knox, tells a story how a schoolgirl Maxi Fleet trains to break the World marathon record coached by a team of technical specialists and her boyfriend physicist Jack Cram. It takes them years of effort, but with a new technique she is confident of winning.
Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers’ Favourite.
‘. . .This is a wonderful story with elaborately developed themes, including love, ambition, hard work and pain, drive for success, performance and friendship. Set in the future, it has strong psychological and scientific underpinnings. . .’
Available from Amazon.
martinknox.com
RUN FURTHER IN LESS TIME, WITHOUT SPEEDING UP.
YOU CAN FIT MORE INTO EVERY SECOND
Einstein’s theory of special relativity in space travel was that movement in a faster time frame would dilate time. By analogy, stimulus response signals in a human nervous system would be in dilated or stretched time, enabling a runner to go further in less time without speeding up. By running in their own internal time, independently of the external time of timepieces, a runner ‘in flow’ can run timelessly, improve and win.
My speculative fiction novel Time Is Gold will be published later this year.
http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
