
“We are absolutely delighted with the stellar qualifications Lonnie brings to this role,” said Michael H. Zaransky, JUF/Federation’s Immediate Past Chairman of the Board, who chaired the search committee.
“In May, we will celebrate and thank Steve, chronicle his career, and mark our collective achievements under his leadership,” Zaransky said.
Register for the Ashland City Half Marathon today!
Additional race information can be found at http://www.nashvilletrackclub.org/ashlandcityhalf.
An actual in-person road race! The 1st annual Ashland City Half-Marathon will take place on Saturday March 6th in Ashland City (20 minutes west of Nashville). The pancake flat, USATF-certfied course will go from Riverbluff Park and then take you alongside the Cumberland River on Chapmansboro Road, return via the beautiful Bicentennial Greenway. This is a loop many of the faster runners in the Nashville area have been using for time trials and tempo runs and is about as flat as you can get without doing a boring out and back race.
The course will only be open for 2 hour and 30 minutes (11:26/mile).
Do not enter unless you are 100% confident you can cover the entire course in 2:30. The course will have a rolling re-open to traffic at 2:30 (11:26/mile) pace.
On second thought, it might have been revelatory to witness a tiger. While in Bangladesh, I had convinced myself otherwise. To avoid disappointment? To temper entitlement? I return from Dhaka the day before my birthday, in thrall to Red Roof Inn desynchronosis. Broad-eyed and crepuscular, I daydream of Panthera tigris tigris, a fetish I’ve cultivated over the past month. At midnight, a Chinese businessman waits behind me at the vending machine. I forget I only have Bangladeshi taka notes in my wallet, so I tell him go ahead. “Ah,” he says, grinning, “you are still disorienting.” I nod, assuming it is a grammatical slippage, that he meant to say disoriented. He offers to buy me a “treat,” but I tell him I’ve changed my mind, thanks and goodnight. Back in the hotel room, I realized he’s just wasted perfectly good double entendre on me. It was a joke. Of course: you are still dis-Orienting. I’ve spent enough hours with Edward Said that I’m not sure I would have laughed anyway. A mute CNN reporter with Turkish backdrop blabs about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. I type the homographs over and over again, a keystroke daydreaming as if into the CNN teleprompter: Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said etc.
I want to hurl the extra mattress from the balcony into the pool area. Its housekept sheets await disarrangement. The vertiginous canyon between the mattresses accentuates my loneliness. In a state of lucid drift, I imprint the sheets with shallow indentation, the curvaceous haunches of megafauna. In his essay “Dreamtigers,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “This is a dream… and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.” If by staring at my gift on Christmas Eve 1999, I became an infamous doglover (O, caged terrier, your insomnious eye shine), then on this birthday eve 2015, I will myself to become a catlover too. I keep distant company with the sustained pseudohallucination of Panthera tigris tigris in the dim airport hotel room.
Known as the "father of sociobiology," Pulitzer-prize winner Edward O. Wilson defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." It's why we sometimes tap our brakes to bear witness to motion on the roadside, to remind ourselves the margins' whir is still habitat: a rafter of turkeys in Orangevale, California; the scurry of an armadillo in Chickasha, Oklahoma; the chukwalla's pushup in Tucson; the rooting javelina in Sedona; a jilted bear cub in the New Jersey highlands. Unlike zoophilia (persistent sexual interest in animals), biophilia is natural, adaptive, instinctual. When I was in my teens, I thought the cover of Belle and Sebastian's 1996 debut album, Tigermilk, was the former; it seemed overtly sexual, the lactating mother sitting in the bathtub as her suckling infant wore a tiger costume.
It was the facelessness of the infant, I think—or maybe its cockeyed ears—that made it erotic, exhibitionist, transgressive. Eager to make sense of the album cover, to project my own ordeal onto another, I had decided it blended two paraphilias (zoophilia and lactophilia). As an adult, though, I recognize the photograph outsources the intimacy of breastfeeding— the implicit bonding and nourishment—to the tiger. It is decidedly biophilic.
One can read the urgency of biophilia, that imperative for affiliation, in the lines of Borges’ trials in “The Other Tiger”: “We shall seek a third tiger. This / Will be like those others a shape / Of my dreaming, a system of words / A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger / … I know well enough / That something lays on me this quest / Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on.” Unlike Borges who wrote of the tiger in all three genres, resigned to impossible destining after a single species, my biophilia is scattered among several species: dog, ferret, parrot, tortoise, badger, and then there was tiger (most recent of fetishes). In the tiger’s absence, Borges seems to discover his species’ profound loneliness. Sometimes, when I’m alone—in house or hotel—my subconscious fabricates a companion who's just on the other side of the wall, using the bathroom. “How does a tiger get in the bathroom?” Alan asks in The Hangover. “Of my dreaming… senseless and ancient,” Borges replies.
In the past couple decades, scientists have been debating geochronological nomenclature. The current epoch, the Holocene (Greek for “entirely recent”) is being slowly abandoned for a new parlance, the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity (as opposed to glaciation or other climatological phenomena) impacts the planet’s ecosystems. The term, which has been predictably politicized, doesn’t ring true to Edward O. Wilson, though. In the Economist, Wilson rejects anthropocene because it’s too self-aggrandizing, “a time for and all about our one species alone.” Instead, he offers the Eremocene, or the “Age of Loneliness.”
Back in the States, I’m able to receive text messages again. “Dad wanted me to send this,” my mother says in one, followed by a slew of photographs. One is an accidental video, my parents background bickering over aesthetics (“Hurry up, it’s beautiful now,” “I don’t know how,” “They’re beautiful now,” “I know…”); another is taken through the screen door, indecipherable through the distortion of mesh; for the last photo, though, my mother has opened the door to our Western Pennsylvania backyard. It’s snowy blue hour, and she captures (just barely) two deer mid-bolt after being caught eating the birdseed dislodged from the feeders by the squirrels. Dad, with his broken ribs and collapsed lung (another brutal winter, as if snow-shoveling would have cured his ennui, Nobody’s expecting you to be a hero here, Dad) has been spending a lot of time at the windows, counting the deer—“…five at one time!”—waiting to command his wife (“Get a picture, Mar!”) and share with his son (“Send them to Lar!”) whom he sees just twice a year.
I reciprocate with a photograph of spotted deer from the Sundarbans; standing ass-to-ass-to-ass-to-ass beneath sundari trees, their collective of eyes search in all directions for tiger as they wait for the macaques to drop leafy twigs onto the alluvium. As we approached, a few deer barked while the others burst away. Aboard the R. B. Emma, the green motorboat that grumbled us through the channels, I read Kenneth Anderson’s Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue. Each essay is littered with the pug marks of tiger, ecstatic imprints in the nullah. Anderson coaxes the reader through bush and sapling forest. “Trust me reader,” he seems to say, expertly. “I know how to find the tiger.” Written sixty years before my Sundarbans tour, Anderson’s confidence seems antiquated; by comparison, my Bangladeshi tour guide, Emamul (“Emu”), begins by all-but-guaranteeing we won’t see a tiger. By reading Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue in between treks and meals, amidst uninspired sightings of crocodile, kingfisher, egret, kite, soft-coated otter, wild boar, and the others, I am still able to engage with the megafauna fantasy. Unfortunately,