Here's today's quote in the popular feature that is sweeping the digital nation .... With special thanks to my creative friend and wordsmith, Kirk Nicewonger.
"What doesn't kill you will come back to finish the job."
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Running for Your Life: Deserters 2015
Great piece in New York magazine this week by Wil S. Hylton http://nym.ag/1BO4Rth that goes to surprising
lengths to put a human face on deserter culture, coming on the forty-first
anniversary of “The Burglary” (see prior post, four back), in which a
group of brave citizens stole FBI documents and changed the course of American
democracy -- if not forever, at least until the Internet infected our brains and
impeded our moral imperatives -- believing in the just fight against a fraudulently
promoted war in Vietnam that sent a generation of ordinary American young men
and women to slaughter.
In this case, US deserters who have sought refuge in Canada
are now subject to deportation and prison for their crime. Not so much the
desertion itself, but the fact that in Canada they have become public figures,
of sorts. They speak out, not as I understand it, in any way that exposes
classified information about their wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. But rather just
because they have acted, as the Media, Pa., group in 1971 did, like citizens. In so doing, they have been a profound embarrassment to Imperial America. (Thank God, the Media burglars were never found.)
When it comes to objections of conscience, who are the worst offenders?
The deserters or the pursuers? Read the article and decide for yourself.
Next: Running for Your Life: Discovery of Slowness
Running for Your Life: Who, What, Where and WiFi
If I were to teach a course today in journalism this is what
I would call it. There was a time when a version of this phrase – in its
pre-Internet form – said it all when it came to news. It amounted to rank order
topics of interest: The Who, What, Where, and Whys of my day – the 1970s –
actually constituted a primer for how to be an informed and responsible
citizen.
The “Why” kicker always coming back to the core. Why do we
care about the topic? Hopefully that answer reflected on what you intend to
expose to make the world around you a better place. To comfort the afflicted
and afflict the comfortable. Who, What, Where were the preamble; Why, the
essence of the citizen constitution.
Now, though, in our ironically “connected” world, that
pre-Internet “Why” has been replaced by WiFi. A story isn’t a story unless it
has an extra life in social media. Reporters don’t have a platform to say anything
unless they have a gazillion “followers.”
Take the New York Times Magazine makeover. Why do the editors
choose to allow a comic-writer clown of a Russian American, Gary Shteyngart, to
write his impressions after bingeing on Putin-era TV? Because he is getting to “Why?”
No. Because he has a gazillion followers. And those followers will bring the
new nyt magazine to the conversation: Hastag nyt. Relevance? Not in the noble
tradition of Who, What, Where and Why but the ignoble one of Who, What, Where
and WiFi.
When it comes to Who, What, Where and WiFi, journalists
aggregate followers first and then the news. Actually report the news, bring a
critical vision to public affairs? That’s not a journalism class; it’s a
history class.
Next: Running for Your Life: Draft dodging in Canada, circa
2015
Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday
Consider this a regular feature, right here at Running for Your Life!
Today's If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday quote:
“When it comes to smartphones, I prefer to be ignorant.”
– Sam Beckett
Today's If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday quote:
“When it comes to smartphones, I prefer to be ignorant.”
– Sam Beckett
Running for Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs
The idea, of course, is to stay ahead of the game. Flu shot,
fleece layers, wool cap, parka with Porsche price tag, long johns, lined wool
socks, fur-lined waterproof snowboots. Oh, and this winter, something call
Yaktrax, slip-on wire-mesh affairs that attach easily to the soles of your
snowboots so that walking on ice is significantly less of a calamity than the
alternative, that I swear to God are selling like hotcakes in Park Slope
hardware stores.
Still, winter – this winter – can dim even the lightest bulb.
This is the time to stoke your passion, to set aside time to do that. It helps,
too, to see what winter looks like through other animals eyes http://bit.ly/1E6QiAs What passions? Obviously
winter sports: cross-country skiing, ice skating, tobogganing. Kids get the
snow. Get bundled up in all that clothing, grab a sled, and go to the toboggan
hill in your neighborhood.
Or indoor stuff: Write poetry, short stories, essays – get
back to that journal (see second-last post) or start a new one. Draw. Paint the
drawing. I’m sitting here writing this note after having spent a day in bed
with a cold and fever. As a marathoner, I can’t not be a big believer in mind
over matter.
In no time I’m back to my passions: running (3.3 miles today
[Feb. 17], albeit @ slow pace of 9:30) and
writing. Off to work at The Post. Back on the trap lines, and as a good friend
says, looking to snare a mink.
Next: Running for Your Life: Who, What, Where and WiFi
Running for Your Life: "The Burglary" by Betty Medsger
There was a time and place, it seems so distant, like that
house made of crystal in misty skies, what is now a setting in a video game or
a visual logo of the next new capture-of-all-senses movie producer, when
American citizens cared so much about what their country was doing in places
like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Pakistan and Latin America that a small group of
them took the grave risk of stealing government files to see if their worst
fears were just that, or real. That the dissent they were engaged in had been
hollowed out through the actions of a cynical web of paid informers who sold
their integrity for some false nothing of what was in the national interest and
what was not.
On March 8, 1971, a group of citizens in Philadelphia changed
what had heretofore been known about how the secret police operated in America.
Not Cuba, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Russia under Putin. But the US of A.
One brave reporter stood up and did the right thing. Betty
Medsger of the Washington Post published the first newspaper account on these
files, which were stolen from a small FBI office in Media, Pa., during the
broadcast of the Fight of the Century, between Muhammad Ali and Philly fave Joe Frazier. She then wrote the book.
These burglars were the Edward Snowdens of their day, urged
on by a breathtaking display of social responsibility, revealing what US government surveillance forces are doing to
corrupt democracy and steal into our private lives by taking liberties that
today include hacking into the technological carapaces, where we conduct the
private affairs of our life, but in the days of the Media crime (you really
must read Medsger’s “The Burglary” http://bit.ly/19tadhq)
nothing was known of just how nefarious the FBI had become under its dictator
boss J. Edgar Hoover. How wonderful it is to consider the grace and true civic
power these burglar-heroes showed at a time of crisis, a moment that has
near-vanished from history – and would have had it not been for the amazing
work in this extraordinary document by this courageous reporter.
Next: Running for
Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs
Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?
Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to
God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.
I can remember why it was that I starting running on a
regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I
started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been
schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single
English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were
going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs.
Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been
newspapering, editing and writing.
In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone
from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip
that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New
Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater
Cessna back north.
In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal
that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It
was my first journal. Christmas 1983.
I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past
thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing
regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you
read in this blog was first put down in longhand.
We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written
in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times
the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to
a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my
newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger
Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness
What to say? There is something rattling around up there.
I know if I go more than a few days without running, i.e.
hard running, aerobic exercise, my brain feels sluggish. How do you mind your
life when your brain is dulled?
Some of that comes down to what we call spirit. But really
nothing would happen if not for the release of those delicious biochemical that
are stirred when the body is pushed. It’s a different result from the passion
that you feel in the arms of a lover, the cut and thrust of an idea shared with
your best friend, the feeling of the curtain going up on your favorite play, TV
series or movie.
Which is to say that mental fitness as it relates to running
is a physical thing. Feeling mildly depressed before a run and, more often than
not, five miles of running – not jogging but running – and you’re feeling
better. Cold and flu season? That too can knock you off your pins. Feeling a
little punk before a run? Four miles on the treadmill and you can actually
sense the malaise lifting, the healthy athlete’s body doing its job, ridding
you of the virus that so easily enters the mind as depression in the strong
cold of deep winter.
Knock on wood, but I literally can’t remember when it was I
was last felled by the flu or a bad cold. Is it all because of running, this
purchase I have on physical and mental fitness? Seriously, I couldn’t tell you.
But I’m not about to take the chance and find out. Suffice to say that four
decades ago I unwittingly gave myself a gift that I will cherish as long as it
stays with me: the gift of running for my life.
Next: Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?
Running for Your Life: The Jazz Palace Post
It’s deep winter in the city, the five-day weather forecast
as welcome as an elevator fart, and by my reckoning there’s been a rise in
those, as social decorum frays under dreary skies with yet another Monday storm
coming at you, right between the eyes.
That’s why it’s so important to think of . . . spring! And
not Groundhog Day, six more weeks of winter, spring. But The Jazz Palace spring
of 2015.
Do yourself a favor and clink on this link http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD. It will take you to
another world. Have you ever seen such a beautiful object? And that’s just the
beginning. The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris (full disclosure; Mary is my wife) is
not only the novel of the spring, but the event of the spring.
The Jazz Palace tells the story of Benny Lehrman, Napoloeon
Hill, the Gem Sisters. I’ve lived with these characters for years and to quote a
friend, the one-of-a-kind drummer Jamey Haddad, they are hip cats, man. They
lived the life in Prohibition America. This is a story of tragedy, race,
friendship and love. Benny and Napoleon, they howl at the moon. Pearl and her
mother, Anna, keep it real. Oh, and music. In deep winter, we need hot music.
So, are you tired of winter? Make The Jazz Palace Web site http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD you’re pre-spring
destination. Make it a favorite, share and retweet these few words of mine.
Come to the events when they come to your ZIP, or a ZIP near you. Oh, yeah, in April. When the book is available for sale, get the book. You won't be sorry.
Because it’s The Jazz Palace. You don’t want to miss it.
Because it can’t miss.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Floss
Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff
From Charles Reznikoff’s “Rivers and Seas, Harbors and Ports,” published in “Testimony,” Objectivist Press (1934):
a cargo of sandalwood at the Fiji Islands and
at Guam a quantity of beech de mer, betel nuts, and deer horns; ivory rings for
martingales; a cargo of copper ore, shipped in Chile; sperm and whale oil,
sperm candles and whalebone; pigs of copper; six seroons of indigo; pigs of
lead, moys of salt, and frails of raisins; seal skins, prime fur and pup skins,
from seals taken at the Falkland Islands; a cargo of tea, fresh, prime, and of
the finest chop, quarter chests of tea, hyson skin and congo, with the present
of a shawl from the hong merchant in Canton; cases, trunks, bales, casks, kegs
and bundles
Here’s a big shout-out to Eliot Weinberger, whose “Poet at
the Automat” piece in the London Review of Books, Jan. 22, 2015, introduced me
to a writer I’ve known about for years – but have never read. This Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) seems, in
Weinberger’s smart and considered interpretation, a kindred spirit. Some
reasons why:
“There was the legend of Reznikoff, the
invisible poet, walking twenty miles a day in New York City, writing down his
observations in a little notebook, meeting cronies who never knew he was a
writer at the Automat, publishing his own books of perfect poems for more than
fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George
and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the
audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard
to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’”
It is an aspiration of mine to be seen as a kind and self-effacing man like Charles Reznikoff, a writer who until
his mid-sixties published nearly all his books himself, setting type for many
of them on a printing press in his parents’ basement.
Charles Reznikoff is an American original, a writer’s writer.
Please note: This is not an Amazon published writer. Rather, Reznikoof is a man who self-published
and continues to be read and discussed in the most learned journals of today.
After Weinberger's timely introduction (I am not yet in my mid-sixties!), I can’t wait
to sit and read his work.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness
Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors
Okay, so these shoes (see second last post) have changed
everything!
Heretofore I’d been writing that winter running poses too
many risks for a runner in his sixtieth year, i.e. icy pavements, black ice on
asphalt, wet slushy corners, especially those of the calf-deep variety that
come about in the too-soon thaws that follow a blizzard, leaving streets with
gallons of mud-colored soup at the lip of every sidewalk cut made to advantage
the disabled, who you have to wonder where the disabled have gone and how they’re
faring in the days (weeks!) it takes for Brooklyn sidewalks to be clear.
Which means the big outdoors, cross-country skiing in
Prospect Park, and running ! in my new shoes, the ones that promise sure footing
and relaxed spring, that somehow, miraculously, have helped to calm the fat
leg from my DVT I’ve been feeling in recent weeks, worrying me some but, then,
in these new shoes ! the feeling is just as it should be, and I’m back, right
where I want to be, floating along these hard and too smooth surfaces.
Back to looking around as I run in the cold and on the snow
and ice, falling into meditation. Second winds coming when they should,
actually back to the sublime idea that I will go on a run; in winter, or
summer, the season doesn’t matter, all with that indescribable feeling that I could
run forever.
Next: Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff
Running for Your Life: "Red Army" by Gabe Polsky
You don’t have to be a fan of hockey to like the movie “Red
Army,” a captivating fill-in-the-blanks feature-length interview between filmmaker
Gabe Polsky of Chicago and Slava Fetisov of Moscow, Soviet Union.
Watch Slava sit and watch the critical play-by-play segments
of the astonishing Miracle on Ice triumph by the US men’s hockey team. The
outcome wasn’t so miraculous for the Soviets. Players were purged and those who
remained – Fetisov among them – were relegated to punishing training methods
(where did they get the footage!) that would bring low the sternest Spartan
warrior.
Watch how Slava snaps at Gabe, who chooses the word “power”
to describe the sudden ascension of Victor Tikhonov to the helm of the Red
Army, the Soviet men’s national ice hockey team, over beloved, fiercely
dedicated to the players, Anatoly Tarasov. It is “system,” Fetisov scolds.
Tikhonov was KGB. He is only an empty suit. A stooge. What power is in that?
Watch and marvel at the best top five that will ever – argue here if you will, but with
the advent of salary caps and front-loaded contracts, you will lose – play the
game. Kasatonov, Fetisov, Larionov, Makharov and Krutov.
Ah, Krutov. You will love him. If there is a man to limn the
soul of ice hockey, the glory of the team above all else, it is Krutov.
Sense the no small bit of Putin in our Slava. This man who
brandishes his cell phone like a gun, his easy arrogance, his withering glare
at the inferiors around him. No Esposito showman, Beliveau nobleman, Howe great
uncle. There is more than a little of the Russian dictator in this man who
after hours of being interviewed by Gabe doesn’t show him the courtesy of even
remembering where the filmmaker came from. As if a California boy, as Fetisov
calls him, could have come up with what northern boy Gabe of Chicago has managed
to do.
The Soviet Union may be dead, but it is very much alive here
in the story of the Red Army and Slava Fetisov, in fact it smolders in the
death-stare gaze of this amazing man who doesn’t stint in telling a story of
great drama, a story that seems so long ago and far away but that crackles in
the telling.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors
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