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?

Running for Your Life: After New Hampshire

As the kids communicate these days, here’s a text exchange with a bosom buddy that best conveys the After New Hampshire in my private world …

KN: Daily News editorial today takes to its fainting couch because Trump “dishonors the office he seeks with … gross vulgarisms.” I happen to agree with the sentiment, but I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to a sermon from the leading supplier of gross vulgarisms in the tristate area. Thank you for letting me vent.

LO: As to the Daily News, ’Tis the unhinged caterwauling of a dying beast.

KN: Unhinged Caterwauling of the Dying Beast: now there’s a death metal instrumental title for you!

LO: Let’s write it! Could be the unofficial anthem of the Clinton campaign.

KN: I know I said instrumental, but just as a warmup … Steinem, Albright, welcome to the eternal night, Albright, Steinem, screams of the damned delight ’em . . .

Icons of the feminist dawn, now yelling, “Damn kids, get off my lawn!

Ba da da da BAAAAA dum …

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

Running for Your Life: Trump as President? US as Haiti?

It may be too much of a stretch … how far is the question but … I couldn’t help but substitute the name DONALD J. TRUMP for MICHEL MARTELLY, who stepped down this month as president of the island nation, and the US for HAITI in this illuminating look at the current state of affairs of Haiti by the writer Jon Lee Anderson in the most recent New Yorker magazine http://bit.ly/1SK2DD0.

Interesting reading as the votes are piling up this afternoon (Feb. 9) in the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire.

Next: Running for Your Life: After New Hampshire

Running for Your Life: Alan Bennett !

Alan Bennett, playwright and sublime diarist, submits enough entries per year to the London Review of Books to merit the annual subscription to the print edition (am a firm believer in reading work like Bennett’s on newsprint; one pays for one’s luxuries these days).

This recent diary entry . . .

11 Sept. 2015:

“Smart to [British Prime Minister David Cameron] seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart answer, which I’ve sure David Cameron has to hand. Dead smart.”

. . . spurred this nugget of a poem (M and I were in Miami for a bit of rest and relaxation that was buffeted by windy 50 degree weather and drenched by monsoon-like rain.)

Dead smart

Tornados in west and central Florida

Alan Bennett Diary wisdom

how he writes of “dead smart;”

nostalgia  piled high in a

serving dish to spread

like French butter

over all, literally all

pray to inoculate against

the “dead smart” scrolls.

Next: Running for Your Life: After New Hampshire