Love
trees, like dogs; human beings need a lot of work.
Next: Running for Your Life:
Poem in Porto
Running for Your Life: ‘Gateway’ Drug
Every
once in a while a book comes along and you just gotta crow.
That’s
the case with this one: “Gateway to the Moon” by Mary Morris, an amazingly
gifted writer who happens to also be my wife. Disclosure noted, please read on.
First
the blog post, and then the book. (Please note the publication date: April
2018.)
If only
America could see its way to favoring books instead of deadly opioids as
mood-altering drugs.
Mary
has done it before, of course. Written books that readers love, the most recent
being “The Jazz Palace” (winner in 2016 of the august Anisfield-Wolf award for
diversity [aka, the black Pulitzer]).
“Gateway,”
may I be so bold, rides even higher on the mood-altering scale. “Gateway” never
flinches in its focus of a coming to America, our nation’s very foundation,
that imagines Columbus’ journey to the New World in a way that seriously will blow
your mind.
So, mark
the date in your calendar: April 2018. The “Gateway” drug arrives. And, please,
watch this space for more news in the weeks and months ahead on this astounding
literary event.
Next: Running for Your Life:
Poem in Porto
Running for Your Life: Copy Editing, Anyone?
So you
want to get into journalism? Howse about the reputed biggest name in news
magazines, TIME? (Full disclosure: I’ve proudly served on the rewrite desk and as a copy
editor at newspapers through five decades … kinda scary when I put it that way,
but …)
Not as
scary as this, though. The SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT column in the Oct. 30
issue of TIME magazine. (Just inside the THE GODDESS MYTH cover, in about 5-point
type … Barely legible and when you get a load of it, you’ll understand why the “editors”
wanted to try to keep this under wraps.)
Here
goes:
SETTING
THE RECORD STRAIGHT
“In the
View* (Oct. 16), we mischaracterized
the climate on Mars as being similar to the desert near Dubai. Mars is colder
than Earth. In an Oct. 23 interview with Dustin Hoffman, we misstated that his
character in The Graduate seduced an older woman. In fact, she seduced him. In
the same issue, in ‘Next Generation Leaders,’ Sebastian Kurz was described as a
favorite to be elected President of Austria. His party’s Oct. 15 victory is
set to make him Chancellor. In ‘Google Searches for Its Voice,’ we
mischaracterized James Giangola’s previous work experience. And in ‘Ivana Trump
Has Her Say,’ a photo caption misidentified her as Marla Maples.”
* Blog keeper's note: the standing TIME column is actually called The View.
* Blog keeper's note: the standing TIME column is actually called The View.
Next: Running for Your Life: “Gateway”
Drug
Running for Your Life: Read, Read, Read
It pays
to read. Especially these days.
Try one
of my favorite reporter-writers: Matt Taibbi, now in Rolling Stone:
that
America gets the karma it deserves.
Brutal
but essential.
Read,
read, read.
Then
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, Oct. 9:
the
lead Talk of the Town cuts to the chase on what it means to be an
unreconstituted liberal.
“[Free
speech] is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as
painful as the truth.”
Read,
read, read.
In the
same New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson boogies like no one else on the “border wall”
with Mexico.
“[NAFTA’s]
created 53 million very poor people for whom the only solution is to emigrate
to the United States and send remittances home.”
Read,
read, read.
The
White House treats Puerto Rico’s US citizens in an offhand way? It’s no
accident the American president (emperor?) lives in a capital “W” white house.
How “white” has the nation been since its founding?
Consider
the story after story after story in the epic tales of the Indian Wars with the
over-sentimental title, “The Earth Is Weeping,” by Peter Cozzens (see recent
blog post here). Many treaties were signed only to be broken, with the dog
whistle command of government (during these years of unrivaled growth in land
and economic wealth for white citizens) being:
“The
only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Read,
read, read.
Next:
Running for Your Life: “Gateway” Drug
Running for Your Life: After the Half
It took me 2:05:36 to finish, if you’re counting, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really, and if
there is any secret to a long life (40-plus years!) of running, I put it down
to that. For most of those years, I haven’t kept track.
Sure, in
2010, I shocked myself with running a marathon – twice as long as what I did on
Saturday (Oct. 7) – in 3:33:08, and started to think different. About my time,
that is.
I
started to train harder and improve, with hopes of doing better. Why not? Beat yesterday, as the kids say! It seemed
back then that a faster personal record wasn’t out of the question. That a 3:33 marathon time
was good enough to qualify for Boston, which I ran in 2012, despite a
near-running threatening hamstring pull in 2011.
Ah, but
three injuries later – return of The Neuroma, knee collapse and faceplant – and
finally I’m back to where I was when I started running in the mid-1970s.
Listening and looking and going inward.
In Bay
Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday, a waterside route out and under the head-spinning
Verrazano Bridge, I watched a stray cormorant skimming the rippling current,
followed the fairy dance of a wayward solo Monarch, tilted as if at windmills, running
toward the trees on the horizon, and after, the fishermen casting their lines
into the ocean waters, pausing to glance as we pass, puzzle-pusses, etched by
the collective insanity of four hundred lightly clad souls huffing and puffing,
beet-red in the punishing heat and humidity, so much like Hurricane Sandy
weather that I can’t help but think it is on these men’s minds such a horror it
would have been here almost five years ago to the day when that superstorm
struck.
This
then is the clean and well-lighted aftermath of the half. The ego eased with my
second wind. When the run is pure, “time” and the pressure of time, of “beating
yesterday,” simply vanishes like the morning mist above the Verrazano.
Next: Running for Your Life: Read, Read, Read
Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!
What is
it about Denis Shapovalov?
That,
at 18, (he won’t be 19 until April, by the way) he is excelling at arguably the
most amazing mass-market solo sport imaginable: Men’s Single Tennis.
That he
does it while wearing his goofy teenage identity; What me? A star? Nah, let’s
go get some grilled cheese and craft root beer, or maybe a cream soda, and talk
about anything but that.
On
anyone else that backward sweat cap, with the gappy extension band square in
the forehead middle, would look ridiculous and W-A-A-A-Y pretentious. On Shap,
it looks just right.
That he’s
a Canadian. Can’t you see him asking these bears to leave his property …. http://bit.ly/2yKWOhp ?
That he’s
now a regular court catch on the Tennis Channel. If he’s playing, I place the
set on mute and watch. And, yeah, all these thoughts that I’ve just put down
come into my head as I smile with the vanishing of my worries, if only for as
long as he is playing the sport that demands power, touch and intelligence in
equal measure … at 18 years old !!
Next: Running
for Your Life: After the Half !
Running for Your Life: Chairman Zuck
A lot
has been written and speculated about what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is
doing, re: his presidential-like tour, pledging to visit each and every one of
the fifty states, and in so doing hang out with regular Americans.
Wow, no
way in hell a Kardashian (excepting political hopeful Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps) would
do that!
Zuck will
in 2020 be old enough to be eligible to serve as American president. (Although,
trust me, the current president wouldn’t be above conducting a birther campaign
to accuse Z of using a fake ID. CARD HIM! Trump loyalists will be barking.)
No, don’t
believe the bunk that Z is priming the populist pump for a 2020 presidential
run. When you’re the planet’s Big Brother what in hell do you want with the world’s
most undoable job: being the US president?
Next:
Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!
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