Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

It hasn’t been a super season for feminism. There was the Madeleine Albright tone deaf comment about a special place in hell for women who don’t vote for a woman, and Gloria Steinem didn’t win any sympathy from young women when she characterized them as plain vanilla bobby soxers chasing guys at college who favor Bernie Sanders, not because they are attracted to his ideas but because, well, that is where the boys are.

Nevertheless, there is a remarkable policy wonk running for the Democrats in Hillary Clinton. If she can stay on message, maybe, just maybe, she will perhaps, one day, win the hearts and minds of those in places like Iraq and other trouble spots in the Middle East.

That is where Gertrude Bell, the Desert Queen (1868-1926) http://lat.ms/21ux5CT, made her mark. Hillary could do a lot worse than evoking this great woman who, as a representative of the British Empire, devoted her life to smart public policy that has yet to be improved upon. Gertrude Bell lived her principles – and won support and appreciation from Christians, Arabs and Jews alike.

Here is what she said about Iraq in 1918:

“There is nothing easier to manage than tribes if you’ll take advantage of tribal organization and make it a basis of administrative organization … and establish familiar relations with sheikh and headman and charge them with their right share of work and responsibility.”

If only this great were with us. And she could be, if Hillary Clinton were to set the right course with a campaign that embraces values and ideals best exemplified in the life and death of Gertrude Bell.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Trouble With Slow

Running for Your Life: What Else Are You Reading?

Caught up in space-time after the discovery of “the chirp,” the first bit of hard evidence that gravitational waves can be heard? http://nyp.st/1o2z3Mg. Then read about those “Ripples on a Cosmic Sea,” a book by David Blair and Geoff McNamara http://bit.ly/21oG48D.

I cracked open this book a few years ago, but now … with the most definitive news yet that Einstein was right! … I’ve a whole new impetus to a greater understanding of black holes, general theory of relativity, dark matter, gravitational lenses, the curvature of space-time …

Read it with the stars overhead – on a beach during a winter vacation, or as I have done, under the spell of full moon insomnia. It won’t put you back to sleep, but, man, oh, man, what a cool way to keep in touch with the wonders of the universe and the genius of theory.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: What Are You Reading?

Has the howl from the political wilderness of vulgar and unrighteous thought, lies and sons and daughters of lies, the parade to come of soul-degrading attack ads marching down roads built by oligarchs obsessed by absolute power got you down?

Then turn to Dave Eggers. I’m here to tell you that his sleeper novel, the object of attacks, “The Circle” http://bit.ly/1oYaeSu, pings just the right tone. This is a dissent for the ages. The screen-obsessed ages. If Munch defined “The Scream” of the human soul in the industrial age, Eggers in “The Circle” defines “The Screen” in the digital age. A cautionary tale in this the most cautionary of times.

Great stuff. Scary. Not the fully developed characters we’ve come to expect from the author (I’m looking at you, “What Is the What” http://bit.ly/1SNPrx8 ) but as I’m writing this note it’s come to me that that is the point. Be too immersed in social media as culture and sacrifice character. Consider the continuum: less screen time, more character, more screen time, less inner life. Writing powerful inner lives for his characters has been an Eggers hallmark in his previous works. In “The Circle,” he drained his characters of that dimension to make a chilling point in his novel of digital dissent.

(Oh, and the twist at the end … took my breath away.)

But don’t take my word for it. Take Eggers’s. You won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: What Else Are You Reading?

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Today (Feb. 18) Donald Trump attacked Pope Francis. Pope Francis?!!

What’s next, Charlie Brown? Of course, Trump would lay into Charlie Brown for being a LOSER. I mean what kind of a young man would – time and again – expect a wily young woman to NOT deceive him when she presents for his kicking enjoyment a football teed up just so. LOSER! LOSER! LOSER!

If only Charles Schulz were alive. He would come to Charlie Brown’s defense, wouldn’t he? Maybe, what it takes is a blast from the past, a choice Peanuts comic strip to be the thing that would knock down this clown from his high horse …

Next: Running for Your Life: What Are You Reading?

Running for Your Life: If the Great Were With Us Thursday

These days of Facebook selfies and gasping self-promotion in all facets of the creative life pause a moment to reflect on a pre-iPhone great, David Foster Wallace.

On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of his ambitious tour de force, “Infinite Jest,” consider this piece of journalism  by The New Yorker’s D.T Max about the inherent character of this literary original. (Wallace committed suicide in 2008. He was 46 years old.)

“[Wallace] told most people that he did not use e-mail, but he gave his students an address. Sections of “Infinite Jest” began to appear in magazines, but he downplayed his growing fame as a writer. Doug Hesse, a colleague, made the mistake of praising an essay of Wallace’s. “He did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing to his mouth with the other,” Hesse remembers. “I learned really really quickly not to go beyond the equivalent of ‘How’s the weather?’ ”

“Downplaying his growing fame as a writer”? There may be those who say a man who enjoyed the kind of fame that Wallace did in the last decade of his life could afford to be dismissive of the trappings that come with being a household name. Still, imagine if this great were with us, how instructive of a role model he would be for exposing the emptiness of fame in our modern world.

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s to Read?