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”?











Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams

Jill Jonnes’ “Urban Forests” throws some uncommon love on the ginkgo biloba.

We’ve been blessed with more than a few ginkgos in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.

It has a wonderful history, with a punk yellow color of Sex Pistols splendor.

Here’s the “nut” graf:

“An abundance of fossils record that the ginkgo tree was among the fauna and flora of North America that were glaciated out and effectively driven into extinction on the continent by the Ice Age. (Talk about a native tree!) … Scientists now know that the ginkgo biloba tree or its ancestors have existed on earth for 250 million years, longer than any other tree now living.”

They aren’t everywhere, the ginkgos … But next time you see one, bow down. Not only have they outlived everything else on earth, individual trees have been know to live for centuries … (Two famous 18th century ginkgos – one in Utrech, the other in Kew Gardens, are still alive today.)

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

Running for Your Life: Dawn Times

Two years ago I had an idea.

I had spent months that year -- the centennial of the passing of the Canadian artist Tom Thomson -- researching and writing a book of letters. Thomson grew up in my hometown, Owen Sound, Ontario, and his life and times -- especially his final days because his demise remains shrouded in mystery to this day -- have always fascinated me.

On American Thanksgiving, 2017, I finished a woodland painting of my own -- in part inspired by my Owen Sounder forebear. A image of the painting can be found attached to my Twitter page.

The 2017 Dawn Times panel lies in the back of this image; in the foreground, is Dawn Times II.

A third panel is due, yes, in 2021... Perhaps just in time for the Tom Thomson book? Let's just see!

Next: Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams   

Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

OK, not exactly loving it.

Or is it?

What did Kierkegaard say about love?

“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

That’s what he said.

So, it is about love, isn’t it?

No matter how cold it is, I’ve stepped out the door for a run every other of my adult life.

The truth is, severe cold gets to me in ways it never did, say, 30 or 40 years ago. But I head out the door (the realm of love?) and start to run, regardless of the temperature, the rain, snow.

Running for your love … Corny but, effective.

Next: Running for Your Life: Dawn Times







Running for Your Life: Art?

Critic Colin Burrow in a recent London Review of Books (No. 21, “The Magic Bloomschtick”) writes this and I couldn't agree more:

First, let’s start with poetry from Emily Dickinson:

The Poets light out Lamps –
Themselves – go out –
The Wicks them stimulate
If vital Light
Inhere as do the suns –
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference –

“(Dickinson) is doing what the best poets do, trying to think behind the words they’ve been given, whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street, from a story told in church, or on their grandmother’s knee, from a whisper in the ear from the muse, or from another poem.”

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

Running for Your Life: Anonymous Heard From

If you read one book this election year, let it be “A  Warning” by Anonymous.

Okay, you say. I can’t read another word about politics, most especially about the circus surrounding the current president. It just depresses me.

Suppress those thoughts, and read this book.

But if Anonymous were truly courageous, he or she (he and she?) would not hide in anonymity and own the charges leveled in this stunning account of the perilous state of our nation.

Hachette, the publisher of “A Warning,” obviously thought differently. Its trust in the integrity of the message, the truth of what’s in these pages, won out.

There are things about this book that the left doesn’t like. (It is the work of a conservative true believer, not a unreconstituted liberal.) And obviously there are things that the right doesn’t like about it.

But how about us individual, open-minded readers? I submit that “A Warning” is the single-most important book to read for those who seriously want to know what it’s like today in the inner sanctum of the Oval Office.

And “A Warning” must be considered, given the stakes: As Anonymous writes, we are currently finishing Season Three of the US presidency. Read this book and just try to imagine what it will be like during the Final Season of late 2023. That, I find, unimaginable.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold