Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

It has been a thrilling holiday period, so far.

This may sound contradictory, but this holiday has been heavy on moderation.

Little bit of this, some of that, dollop of wonder, childlike tastes of food, friends and family.

One gift in the household: a bear ornament for a log cabin tree of countable branches.

Heat from a wood stove and tiny Hanukkah flames.

Dim sum lunch on Christmas Day; creamy Bolognese from Thanksgiving turkey stock on Christmas Night.

On the shores of Great Latkes, savory bean dish.

The piece de resistance, an Eggplant Parmesan, courtesy of our loving Italian “mom”’s family recipe, the cumulative efforts of four loving souls.

Wine, Chinese takeout with vegetarian choices.

Because but for the turkey on Thanksgiving, that fed the Bolognese plan a month later, some slices of smoked turkey (again), we are moderating the meat.

Okay, say the words … animal consciousness. Three days after Christmas, we visited a family farm and saw a spunky pig in a barn. Seventeen lambs blatting for milk, for what seemed like attention but was more nine parts hunger, one part fear. All eighteen in line for holiday slaughter.

Call me a citizen in training in Moderation Nation.

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions?

Running for Your Life: “Irrationality” Heard From

Question of the day from the London Review of Books, from critic William Davies, reviewing a philosophy book, “Irrationality,” by Justin Smith,”

“How much, if any, of a pre-internet culture can survive in an age where every intellectual exchange can swiftly be derailed by a joke, a personal attack, a cry of victimhood or a strategic misunderstanding of the other’s argument?”

My pal, KN, responds:

“I think it’s because we collectively have lost the ability to sustain any thought too complex to be conveyed in 128 characters. Which leaves what? Jokes, personal attacks, cries of victimhood and strategic misunderstandings. They all fit the space! Public critique is dying because we can no longer sustain a train of thought, or attend with patience anyone trying to form one. Listening to another’s argument demands humility, and we are in a regular humility drought right now.”

And my response to KN:

“What Davies/Smith argue is that the platform giants – Facebook, Google, Amazon – rob us of humility, by rewarding everything but – Davies ends the piece by saying Smith is like the sober, patient person who attends a wild, drunken party who is loath to give up his effort of speaking truth to hype and boorishness.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

Running for Your Life: Fake News, the Early Days

It all started with the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command).

Fake news, that is.

Back in distant times, there were few news stories that adults enjoyed sharing with their Santa-believing kids than the news coming out of NORAD leading up to Christmas.

Check this out, an official NORAD press release last month:

Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. —
"As the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducts its primary mission
of defending the homeland, it stands ready to continue its tradition of tracking Santa’s
journey around the globe on Dec. 24."

Ah, in simpler times, adults would accept the Santa tracker information with a nod and a wink. After that news cycle, they'd return to their newspapers, radio and broadcast

Fake news being a nonpartisan non-reality in those days.

Fake news now? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Next: Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

Running for Your Life: Ducks, Newburyport!

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is not going to be for everybody -- and one can't help but think it doesn't hurt to be a member of a global literary royalty (her father Richard is author of the revered biographies of both James Joyce and Oscar Wilde), but whoa! I can't wait to read it.

Jon Day's review in the London Review of Books, Dec. 5, sold me with this line:

"Ellmann endows her narrator with a language entirely appropriate to her personality: polite and self-consciously self-doubting."

More than most anything else that's what I want from a book these days ... to remove myself for however long it takes into the mind of a narrator who is seen as "polite and self-consciously self-doubting." 

Next: Running for Your Life: Christmas Pineapple

Running for Your Life: Bear Truth

When it comes to a wonderful piece of bear nonfiction by David Trotter (London Review of Books, Nov. 7), which refers to North American grizzlies, aka “Moby-Dick with Claws,” it's understandable the blood gets stirred to write a letter in response.

And so, a letter appears in the Dec. 5 LRB, courtesy of Jane Campbell of Oxford.

Ms. Campbell adds to the conversation started by Trotter's essay. She writes of a passage in “The Biography of a Grizzly,” by Ernest Thompson Seton, that recounts the aftermath felt by a bear cub survivor, injured in his hind leg, from a hunter’s bullet after the man had shot and killed his mother and three siblings:

“As cold night came down, he (Wahb by name) missed (his mother) more and more again, and he whimpered as he limped along, a miserable, lonely, little motherless bear … not lost in the mountains, for he had no home to seek, but so sick and lonely, and with such pain in his foot, and in his stomach a craving for a drink that would never more be his. That night he found a hollow log, and crawling in, he tried to dream that his mother’s great furry arms were around him, and he snuffled himself to sleep.”

Ms. Campbell’s letter continues:

… Wahb survives to be the biggest, fiercest grizzly in the region but never has a mate or exacts revenge on hunters. He dies of old age.

Next: Running for Your Life: How’s About “Ducks, Newburyport”?