Running for Your Life: Essay Writing, Advanced

So you want to be an essayist. An essayist on serious matters. Or, uh, walk that back a bit … You actually love to read essays that are immaculately structured, humble (not clever!) in tone and tell you something about what you care about in a way that is surprising, intelligent and entertaining.

If this sounds like you. Or half of you. Take a few moments and read this essay (from the London Review of Books, March 3, alternate title, The Faceless Unnamed) by Frances Stonor Saunders. Thankfully, this thinker is not one of those in the If the Greats Were With Us Thursday department …

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders

The one border we all cross, so often and with such well-rehearsed reflexes that we barely notice it, is the threshold of our own home. We open the front door, we close the front door: it’s the most basic geographical habit, and yet one lifetime is not enough to recount all our comings and goings across this boundary. What threshold rites do you perform before you leave home? Do you appease household deities, or leave a lamp burning in your tabernacle? Do you quickly pat down pockets or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’?

Read more »

Running for Your Life: Let It Come to You

Some time ago my daughter K was in a car in Los Angeles when she came upon a dog. It was hard to tell at the time just actually what kind of dog she found, the creature was in such a desperate, starved state. The car stopped, K got out to investigate, and the dog mustered the strength to get up, circle round her and get into the vacated car, where she promptly curled up and went fast asleep.

At about the same time, C, her current partner, was riding his bicycle on LA streets, when he saw a car swerve, slow down and then, at a crawling speed, deposit a tiny pet onto the asphalt. C came upon the dog, a Chihuahua, and before taking him to an animal clinic, took a shoelace off one of his boots and looped it around the little dog’s neck, in order to better keep a hold on him, as he peddled off to the vets.

So started the stories of Stella, the most gentle of blue pitbulls, and Shoelace, or Shoey. For years now these grateful, winning animals have been bringing joy into our family life.

A lot is said about the importance of ambition and hardheadedness when it comes to getting what you want. This, of course, is true. But as these stories suggest, don’t lose sight of how the possibilities in life, in enriched soulful experiences, can come from narrowing your focus on what you truly want. Perhaps, when we acknowledge we have done the work – both on ourselves and on what we consider the product of our endeavors – maybe we can stop chasing and allow things – from pets to lovers to finished manuscripts – to come to us.

  

Next: Running for Your Life: 21 Days Under the Sky 

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

It’s St. Paddy’s day … 

MUSIC          

By Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)

        If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian

pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,

that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s

and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.

Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.

I have in my hands only 35¢, it’s so meaningless to eat!

and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves

like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you

to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,

      I must tighten my belt.

It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season

      of distress and clarity

and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s

lightly falling snow over the newspapers.

Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet

of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.

As they’re putting, up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue

I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,

put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!

      But no more fountains and no more rain,

      and the stores stay open terribly late.

[1954]

Next: Running for Your Life: Let It Come to You 

Running for Your Life: After Super Tuesday 2.0

So Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan (that prize) “will not accept” the GOP nomination, according to the latest breaking news (March 16).

Meanwhile, Donald Trump reboots call for unity. For its part, the GOP has fingers securely plugged in ears. Wilfully disregarding reality. (There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the president is not really nominating a judge for the Supreme Court.) Trump’s insurmountable delegate count lead isn’t a fact unless Republican Party elders say it’s so.

I can understand the tendency to say that we are living in interesting, if not dangerous, times. Unless, of course, we adopt this new American way of wilfully disregarding reality. What, me, worry?

What’s next? We haven’t come close to testing the limits of that …

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

Running for Your Life: What Are You Reading?

When it comes to Divides in books, here’s my takeaway:

Pick up “The Divide” by gonzo journo Matt Taibbi and pick up (and then put down) “The Great Divide” by esteemed economist Joseph E. Stiglitz.

So much can be gleaned from a book’s first taste. (I found that to be true of the runaway bestseller “H is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald. She ends her opening sentence with the word “indeed.” No greatness can come of that.)

So, let’s play. The Divide’s opener:

Tuesday, July 9, 2013, a blisteringly hot day in New York City. I’m in a cramped, twelfth-story closet of a courtroom, squeezed onto a wooden bench full of heavily perspiring lawyers and onlookers, watching something truly rare in the annals of modern American criminal justice  – the prosecution of a bank.  

The Great Divide:

The book begins with the onset of the Great Recession, several years before the start of the Times’s Great Divide series. The first selection was published in Vanity Fair in December 2007, the very month the U.S. economy slipped into a downturn that would prove to be the worst since the Great Depression.

Urgent political times demand powerful writing (and reading) responses. The Divide answers the call. The Great Divide, not so much.

Next: Running for Your Life: After Super Tuesday 2.0