argentine abstractions

Going on Pilgrimage

2011-05-24T23:46:00.003-04:00

Me at the church of St. James, Florence, Italy

In 1313, this church was dedicated to St. James and became a waystation for pilgrim priests.

Just two blocks away from my bed & breakfast here in Florence, the church has become important to me for two reasons. First: it is not common, from my apartment in somerville massachusetts, to walk down the street and stumble upon a medieval church. How is it possible to live in a place where humanity is so old?

Second, as I am on the verge of becoming a pilgrim, St. James has become my patron saint.

I am in Florence with my family: my little brother, my grandma, her friend, and my parents. But on Friday I depart Italy for St. Jean Pied de Port, a small town in the south of France known as the start of St. James' Way.

For the next month (give or take) I'll be walking. The Camino de Santiago is a medieval pilgrimage route that runs across northern spain, from St. Jean to Santiago de Compostela, just shy of the northwest coast. Today, after a big push from the Spanish tourism offices in honor of the holy year 2010, it is popular among the religious, the adventurous, and the crazy alike. What category do I belong in?

The pilgrimage ends at the supposed burial place of St. James, known as matamoros because his spirit returned from the dead to slaughter Moors. As I understand it, his actual grave was lost to history millennia ago. Then one day a man had a vision: guided by god, he was led up into the hills (?) and compelled to start digging. The human finger that they eventually found is all that was left of St. James. It is to pay respects to this finger that we walk 780 kilometers across the Iberian peninsula.

Walking the Camino de Santiago can also, I believe, reduce time in purgatory. This may be because walking the route is seen as a reasonable substitute. For that reason, I don't know if I'll have the time or inclination to post across my journey. But I am initiating the possibility today.

this is just interesting

2010-04-30T15:45:00.001-04:00

"Believing is seeing." Simple as it sounds, I really do think that's the case more often than not. By inverting the cliché, I'm trying to communicate that we can only see what we are prepared to see. There are many illustrations of this fact, but the one that really drove it home for me was the story of how child abuse first came to be recognized in this country. Child abuse was "discovered" and the treatment of it accelerated only in the 1960s when, in Boulder, Colorado, pediatricians and radiologists who were treating children added social workers to their teams. Until then, the pediatricians and radiologists wouldn't even allow the possibility that parents could be hurting their own kids because they didn't know what to do next. But when the social workers came on board, they said, "Sure, child abuse happens, and we know how to handle it by providing protective services" It was only at this point that the physician teams could afford to see child abuse, because then they knew how to deal with it. The moral, of course, is that the greater the repertoire of responses you have on your team, the more things you can do. And ultimately, the more ready you are to deal with reality, the more you can acknowledge its complexity. That's one of the reasons, I think, that we are seeing more concern about greed and CEO conduct in the United States right now-because we now feel we have a better idea what to do about it through governance."

- Karl Weick in hbr, 2003

earth day coming

2010-04-21T15:42:00.002-04:00

Earth Day is this Thursday. Hooray! Remember when it was about making posters? There is still a special place in my heart for the okapi, an endangered species I studied for the earth day fair in fourth grade.

A New York Times blog asked: "What is your earth day mission statement?" A lot of people wrote a lot of large scale statements about global climate change, consumption, waste, the state of humanity, etc., etc. Most of these statements were irritating, unbelievable, impracticable.

One person wrote something inspiring:

As an Environmental Chemist for NYS DEC I hope to help clean up some of the worst messes industry and man have inflicted on NYS and to help the fisheries in NY by controlling sea lamprey and invasive species in NY's waterways.

Thank you.

let them eat

2010-04-18T09:17:00.001-04:00

I have been writing so much that lately I lost my interest in posting online. This is shocking.

BUT, I have a long list of things to say. Until then, please enjoy this website.

http://www.gingersnapbakery.com/index.html

life is a carnival

2010-04-03T17:04:00.004-04:00

wow how beautiful today was. I went swimming!

You can see my poetry flying away on the wind. But what is poetry to a day like this?

. love

2010-04-02T19:23:00.002-04:00

I went to a house party last night to see this lovely band play. The house party was awkward and filled with smoke. The glasses were bigger, the pants tighter, and the flannel more carefully tailored than I've ever seen before. But the band was fun. And they got me thinking about scenes. Because I am privileged to live near a bar that has live music nightly with no cover (hooray!). But what would be better would be to have a community that was naturally musical. A community that held underground shows, parties or events that spotlighted musicians. A little more formal than the bluegrass jams we used to have in Maine; a little more respectful than a party. And I was thinking, my house would be a great place to host events like that.

If only I had a community to bring along with me. But the idea is a start.

please come to boston I say no

2010-03-31T07:00:00.003-04:00

equinox love poem

1"I don't want you to be a doctor," my grandfather said,
2bending down with his shoe horn. "Just don't waste your time
3trying to help people." I told him not to worry, the kind of promise
4you never intend to keep. I remember it was a new moon,
5I remember the apartment was full of mirrors, I remember
6it was the kind of promise you make to someone who's about to die.

6 Last week on the street it seemed like everyone was at risk of dying.
1 We were riding our bicycles, it was the first day of spring, and I shouldn't have said
5 anything about mortality but I was caught by the need to remember.
2 Maybe it wasn't appropriate, maybe it wasn't the time
4 or the place to talk about anything but new love, the new moon,
3 on a first date and all things full of promise.

3 Years ago, I was in a Wal Mart parking lot, fulfilling the promise
6 of a long flirtation when my grandfather began to die.
4 We had rented a cheap hotel, pulled the curtains against the moon,
1 stared at ourselves in the mirror. We look like strangers, I said,
2 and the room was too cold, and I said, it's about time.
5 The man I was with took a picture, so we would remember.

5 As it turned out there wasn't much to remember,
3 as it turned out I left without a promise
2 to return. I traveled back east, I traveled back in time,
6 my grandfather was still alive but the world had died
1 and it was snowing. On the long ride home I said,
4"let me drive," because it was dark, because there was no moon.

4 My grandfather's morphine drip took him over the moon
5 and I can hardly tell you the things that he remembered
1yitbarach v'yitkadash shmay raba, he said,
3b'almah dey'bara hirotay. He had been an atheist, he promised
6 before the morphine hit. And if before he died
2his faith came alive: it was just the drugs, not the time.

2 I think about that hotel room from time to time,
4 I think about that promise. I am not a doctor, the moon
6 still keeps me up at night. Not so long ago, my friend died,
5 riding her bike. That's what I remembered
3 on that first date, on the equinox. There isn't much I can promise,
1 But I'm willing to try, is what I might have said,

1but instead, "see you next time," is all that was said,
3under the moon. Because there is no promise
5that has not died, just the lies that we remember.

eschatology

2010-03-24T13:19:00.002-04:00

A recent nytimes article about israel was confusing to the point of being unreadable (and this from someone who's thought a bit about these things). But hooray for this excellent paragraph:

As more and more people are realizing, the only long-run alternatives to a two-state solution are: a) a one-state solution in which an Arab majority spells the end of Israel’s Jewish identity; b) Israel’s remaining a Jewish state by denying the vote to Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, a condition that would be increasingly reminiscent of apartheid; c) the apocalypse. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference on Monday: “A two-state solution is the only viable path for Israel to remain both a democracy and a Jewish state.”

a good idea

2010-03-21T22:42:00.003-04:00

as I watch the health care bill inch towards passing, I keep thinking of that greek play where the women refuse to have sex with their husbands because they don't like their behavior.

It's a silly story. But a good way to show support for abortion rights. A chance for the heterosexual women of America to remind the men in their lives where the risk really lies.

when health care is subsidized nationally, but affordable healthcare carries with it a no-abortion clause, who will pay? I plan to do my part to help minimize the impact of the great mistake about to be printed into law.

As Edward, a Canadian observer on the new york times website, put it, "In no country but America could a dispute ever be resolved by doing women injustice."

(that's why I'm glad I'm not a politician. But I am excited about health care. hooray.)

out of the night

2010-03-20T00:08:00.002-04:00

I have not been this tired in a long time.

The exhaustion is a good thing. It's because I made possibly my best life-changing decision in a long time. I now bike (sometimes) to or from work. It's 15 miles down bike paths and rural roads that follow (no kidding) the route that paul revere took on his way out of boston. The red coats are coming! It makes me feel so good. And spring, or the illusion of spring, has made everything feel better this week.

But here's what does not feel good. I have been trying to sleep for three hours and here I am, in bed, insomniatic.

I am not an insomniac. In high school people used to call me narcoleptic. I'm the person who can sleep anywhere. I sleep on buses and airplanes. I sleep on short car rides to random places and at random hours. In Maine I slept in a cabin over a raccoon's den; in tents over all sorts of surfaces and in all sorts of weather; in a bed that was more like a prison cot. In New Mexico I slept on an air mattress that would deflate every night, so I woke up every morning with my hips and shoulders touching the ground.

But I can't sleep here. Cities are godawful. Even with three-quarters of my windows covered by heavy curtains, my bedroom is bright enough to read by. There are cars driving by my house at every hour of the day and night. They rev their engines. They honk their horns. They blast music out of windows even when it's negative degrees out (which it's not, any more, this week). I used to think that light pollution was about seeing the stars, and that sound pollution was about jetskis and motorboats. Silly me.

One more reason why anxiety is so high in this world. Never mind the eschatological daily news. Never mind that the environment and the government are going to hell. Never mind how many people are suffering and how hard it is to alieviate even a single person's pain. How is it possible for anything to be right in the world when you can't get more than six uneasy hours of sleep?

But I'm looking forward to another great bike ride tomorrow. At least there's that.

let down

2010-03-14T21:16:00.003-04:00

Since I moved to Boston, Israeli politics have been on the periphery of my consciousness. Easy come, easy go, as they say. After all, while the reality on the ground was moving and powerful to me, I have little to say (and even less to do) about what Biden says to who and how Netanyahu replies, when.

But I do have something to say about the announcement from Netanyahu's government that they have agreed to build 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem.

Here's what I know. East Jerusalem is Arab-dominated and when I say Arab-dominated I mean that Jews don't live there. Between 1948 and 1967, East Jerusalem was part of Jordan. When Israel occupied the land after the war of '67, the Palestinians became "Israeli Residents" - not quite citizens, not quite foreigners, they have some but not all rights, some but not all privileges. Their trash collection and education is funded by the Israeli government. They can vote in local but not national elections. If they leave Israel for an extended period of time, they can lose their residency altogether.

The houses are going to be built in Ramat Shlomo, on the northeast edge of Jerusalem. Ramat Shlomo is not far from French Hill, an upscale neighborhood where I went running sometimes when I lived at Hebrew U. It is even closer to the Shuafat refugee camp. The refugee camp is home to families who were displaced, I think, during '48. Their refugee status is political (they want their homes back). But time has moved on and generations are growing up in this community. CCECH runs a program at the Shuafat girls' school. The lessons are about folk traditions, about culture, about community, about coexistence.

Here's what else I know. When Orthodox Jews identified Shimon HaTsadik's tomb in east jerusalem as a religious site and began to move there, they pushed Palestinians out. The people I met who lived in that neighborhood told me that the orthodox were using divide-and-conquer tactics to build a web of Jewish communities that would effectively break down East Jerusalem communities. These people were being evicted from their homes for complex reasons that I explain in an earlier post, so they had a reason to feel angry. But other palestinians I met told me that they believed they were constantly at risk of losing their homes, of being displaced, of losing their communities, of being pushed into the west bank, or jordan. My Israeli friend said that she doesn't believe this is a political possibility. But the fear is authentic.

When Orthodox Jews move into Ramat Shlomo, they will perpetuate the perception on the part of East Jerusalemites that they are being pushed out of their homes. They will perpetuate the perception that East Jerusalem is being broken apart. (in fact, this is not a perception. they will be part of the breaking apart of east jerusalem). This will not just impact "Arabs" and it will not just impact Biden and Mitchell's peace process, or Abbas and Fayyad's political status. This will impact the girls at Shuafat. Those girls are seven, eight, nine years old. They like Hannah Montana and jump rope and saying "I Love You" in foreign languages. And for that reason I am once again (yet again) disappointed by the ability of a powerful political entity to make life a little worse for people who deserve a better life. That's all.

cold hungry blues

2010-03-02T23:01:00.003-05:00

I went to see Po' Girl today and they were wonderful. The women just have phenomenal voices. They are beautiful and their songs are touching and I love that they are raising funds and awareness about childhood abuse. I have been listening to them for years and I was so pleased to see them live.

Tonight I was asked how I learned about them and I said that just after I graduated from college, my ethnomusicologist friend gave me a mix cd as a gift. I was on my way to California for SCA job training and so I threw the disc in my backpack and got on the plane. In the airport, I met up with several other trainees and we drove the several hours to Pt. Reyes together in a pick-up truck. As it turned out, of all the people in the truck, I was the only one with a CD on me, and so we listened to Rachel's Ethno cd on loop for two hours straight. Japanese anime soundtracks meet Irish folk fiddle meet bollywood, indeed. This was the first impression I made.

Anyway, in some way that I can't remember, when I left Pt. Reyes to go to Roswell I was carrying the wrong cd. Instead of my ethno mix, I had a data disc full of someone else's music. And on that data disc was a lot of really great music, and one of the great bands was Po' Girl. And so.

And so three months later I was in Flagstaff. Actually I was on my way out of Flagstaff, and Erica was driving me south to Sedona and eventually Phoenix to catch Hot Buttered Rum (another really great show) and my flight east. We were driving down this winding road ("scenic") on the edge of a mountain and it was raining like crazy and there were these boulders, literally boulders rolling off the edge of the mountain into the road and we were just sort of praying and clinging to the door (me) and the steering wheel (Erica, in the days before she drove a lot). It was an incredibly high stress intense emotional life threatening sort of ride. And then we got out of there and passed through sedona and drove across the desert towards phoenix, where no one wants to go, and we listened to Po' Girl and thought that everything was going to be alright.

Which is how I felt tonight.

hi melissa

2010-02-27T09:55:00.002-05:00

Lately I have been participating in several digital experiments which I am not currently at liberty to discuss. Let's just say that meeting people over the internet is not nearly as sketchy and awkward as I thought it was when I was a teenager. It actually runs closer to something lovely out of you and me and everyone we know.

which brings me to the topic of this post. So two and a half years ago, after graduating from college, having a bit of breakdown, traveling across the country and back, and then back again, I landed in New Mexico. More specifically, I landed in Roswell, home of aliens and other things, in a little one-story house behind the New Mexico Military Academy. I was working on an invasive species management crew with three other people much like myself. It was one of those intensive bonding experiences where you develop astonishingly close relationships with a group of strangers.

One of those strangers was Melissa. Melissa studied latin american studies in undergrad and she had incredibly strong opinions, gorgeous red hair, exciting musical tastes, and pretty phenomenal chainsaw skills. We shared a little bedroom where we slept on air mattresses. We had crazy adventures in the San Andres Mountains, White Sands National Monument, Tucson, and Albuquerque (and some truly unfortunate experiences at Bandolier NP). Then she moved to ohio, and I moved to Maine, and we fell out of touch.

But now Melissa has a blog. I don't usually do promotional posts on here, especially not about people who I haven't spoken to in years (awkward?). But Melissa's writing is beautiful, and insightful, and funny. There was a fun article in the nytimes today about cultural discussion and how there should be more of it (as opposed to repetitive 'debate' about meaningless news). Melissa is taking that torch. She should be a talk show host!

This would solve her problem, which she put so succinctly last week: "Hi. My name is Melissa and I have higher education ADD and career commitment phobia."

Don't we all.

http://lapajaritadice.blogspot.com/

Winter

2010-02-14T11:57:00.002-05:00

Today I officially reached that unfortunate stage in the year where I regard 36 degrees fahrenheit as balmy. Spring cannot come fast enough this year.

Precious

2010-02-13T09:09:00.002-05:00

When I saw Precious I thought it was interesting. And when I saw Precious I thought it was about gender and sexuality. So I thought: sexual abuse, god, that's terrible. I didn't feel vicarious. I thought there were weaknesses of plot and cinematography, I thought it was over the top, and I felt haunted.

Then I read Ishmael Reed's stunning review and I reconsidered. So I wondered, am I the kind of white person he's talking about? Am I the niche market for a film like this? The idea made me sick and it made me angry. Because yes, absolutely, the way the film has been framed as a movie about black culture is disturbing. And yes, the solutions offered are pitiful. And the hope it offers is really only for the middle-class white audience who paid $9 to watch some black girl in harlem expose the dirtiest secrets of society for general entertainment. So I felt guilty.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I did watch Precious, and I did respond to some of the themes that it portrays, and I did so without overtly being racist, sexist, or classist. Women know better than to think that sexual abuse only happens to illiterate black girls. And I know better than to think that support systems are better in middle class white communities than impoverished black ones (are they?). And I still believe that in this country, class stratification and education can be a barrier to hope.

Anyway, the other day on the train this overweight black girl sat down across from me. And I can't begin to tell you how ashamed I felt when I realized that the first thing I thought of when I saw that girl was Precious. It made me think of the way advertising works. You watch it with the belief that you are not moved, but subliminally, you can't control the way you associate coca cola with sex or budweiser with friendship. Ishmael Reed says that Precious was the commodification of abuse, class, and race. Now I think he's right.

San Andres

2010-01-27T22:41:00.005-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about the San Andres mountain range in New Mexico. For a brief time those mountains were the most beautiful place I had ever been, before they were overshadowed by Maine and by Jerusalem. Lately I've been recollecting how beautiful life felt there. I've been wondering where beauty like that gets its power. I think that physical beauty must be a catalyst for beautiful events. And it is those events that give it strength, at least in memory. I don't know if it is the memory of the past, the desire for change, or the desire for beauty which draws me to San Andres now. But Somerville is lacking in all of the above. And San Andres is lovely.

love story

2010-01-20T21:56:00.002-05:00

I was going to write a poem the other day and it was going to be about love letters. Because I have never written a love letter but I have been the recipient of several, and they have been diverse, and unique, and even the silly ones from high school were sort of lovely. But the more that I thought about it the more badly I felt writing about love letters, not in the abstract, but in the specifics. There are so many things that are open for analysis and conversation and posting online. I was thinking that some things ought to be kept private. Not because they are shameful or twisted or painful even but because intentions ought to count for something. And these letters were intended for no one but you and me.

so this is a declaration of not sharing. There is a word for that in literary theory but I have forgotten it.

autos mexicanos

2010-01-18T09:53:00.003-05:00

In mechanics the illustration of the pieces of a machine is called an
exploded view. It's intended to provide insight into the inner workings
and to allow for repairs.

Everyone looks at things differently but to me this piece (damián ortega
at the ica) is at the intersection between the physical and the digital
world. Machinery where the pieces don't touch; motion without friction;
the space between. Plus it's pretty fantastic to walk around in.

His bricks installation is also great. A recommendation.

In winter

2010-01-07T08:46:00.002-05:00

One thing I love, in winter, is when girls' pants pull up a little and you can see the end of their wool socks, the narrow hem of their long underwear, and a strip of skin that may have never been shaved. Makes my day.

Three Metaphors

2010-01-03T21:40:00.002-05:00

Here are three metaphors I have been mulling over:

I. (on writing): in calculus a point is the representation for a line as a word is the represent for an idea. A line is a representation of a plane as a sentence is the representation of action. A plane is to a three-dimension object as a paragraph is to a world and it follows, of course, that if the integral of a plane is a sphere, the integral of a sphere is - a four dimensional object. Writing, then, is how we represent the fourth dimension, that is, the way in which we put the unthinkable into words.

II. continuing with calculus... In calculus you define space by its limits. As a student you rarely encounter finite sizes: a box is never 12 cubic inches; a cone is never 9 cubic centimeters. As a student of calculus you say: the limit of the surface area of the sphere as the radius approaches 3 is. Each shape is infinite within the line drawn by its limit. Writing is perhaps the act of defining limits. Writing sketches an outline. Inside, it contains infinity.

III. And what is the space it contains? So I was thinking about chemistry and I was thinking about, what is it, the quantum mechanics of pinpointing electrons. In highschool chemistry you draw symbols that represent an atom: a nucleus (so) and electrons are dots on little circles like rings around jupiter. but the truth is no one knows where those dots are at every given time. They move around. And, Saul tells me, the mechanical tool that they use to pinpoint the exact location of any given electron in any given atom causes that electron to move. So what you can do is you can draw these three-dimensional shapes which represent where the electron might be (the limit) and then you go in with your tool seeking the precise location of the (truth) and what you find is where the truth/electron used to be, before your words got in the way.

Inflection

2009-12-31T12:39:00.004-05:00

This is the New Year's Post.

At work we talk about inflection points like: that point on a cartesian plane where the linear trajectory of your life turns without warning in an altogether different direction. Like maybe its slope turns downward. Maybe it becomes suddenly exponential. Maybe it leaps three-to-five points straight up in the air and then settles into a curve.

I'll just draw out the metaphor a bit. What I like about inflection points is that unlike in physics, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction (thank you ms. monette), the graph only shows movement. It doesn't depict the force of change, the wall that I pressed up against and bounced slowly downward (or this, the sudden lift of gravity and subsequent flight). I like inflection points because they appear random against the laws of mathematics and predictable outcomes. Now I go up, and now, down.

This is, anyway, a new year post. Unlike many people I really like new years. That's why I celebrate two: Rosh Hashanah in September and again, January 1st. Twice as many opportunities for self reflection and for clean slates. Twice as many chances to draw the graph, label the points, and try to imagine what forces of nature were involved in making my life do that, then, and this, now. I have been so many places this year! how phenomenal. And I am so wonderfully curious about where I will go next. I wonder, unknown readers: what places (mental, academic, emotional, geographic) do you think I will go in 2010? I have some visions but I will keep them to myself.

Because really, new years are about continuity. There is no clean slate, and there is no predicting the future. That's why today, even though New Years is tomorrow, I am going to do something that I have never done before. Small steps in an unknown direction. Here is, in progress, a sonnet:

Why I have not written many poems lately

Oh joy! I have begun so many poems
this week . They charge ahead like blood-dimmed waves
that crash over the lines of St. Paul's graves
where ranks of soldiers quilled are overcome.

Hold firm the battlements! fighters stand strong
on this archival peat, feet-gripping bed
where Seamus kneels, finding Old Croghan dead
and in his hand a spade.

.......................................I’ve never dug
with spades. I write with pens that bleed their ink
in waves onto the peat. I obscure deep
below the bodies in the turf, the seep
of mud in holes and Seamus, still digging.

I’m floating in the wreckage of my poems
On stagnant water dammed by epic tomes.

So Sad

2009-12-20T21:00:00.001-05:00

Namesakes

2009-12-11T22:26:00.001-05:00

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.6/perloffpoem.php

Faith

2009-12-04T07:58:00.002-05:00

In Nebraska, a man who is performing legal late-term abortions (that is, in the case when a fetus is harmful or fatal to the mother) is being pursued by anti-abortion activists. In response, he has put a picture of himself and the physician George Tiller, who was shot by an anti-choice activist (and decidedly disturbed person) in Kansas last summer.

In Washington, the health-care bill, which already has failed to provide coverage for abortions, is still wavering on the edge. As someone who is going to have to pay her own way in health insurance next year, I feel comfortable saying that a failure to provide universal health coverage is bad for the country's finances, the country's health, and my personal financial stability.

In the supreme court, PTSD from combat-related trauma is being treated as a viable excuse (sometimes) to overturn a death row sentence. In the supreme court, the death penalty is still considered morally just, even as the supreme court this week overturned a sentence which apparently was caused by a negligent lawyer. I wonder how many more negligent lawyers are out there. I wonder how many more traumatized criminals are out there.

In the white house, Obama has made the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I continue to support him in general, but in this case I'm wary. I don't know what will happen in Afghanistan. But I do know that as the fighting escalates, we can look forward to more PTSD, more criminals, and more death.

This is why I never read the news. Many of the issues that I really care about - the damaging impacts of globalization, the unchecked progress of global climate change - aren't even on the front page this week. It's easy to see why depression runs so high in the USA. I need a seratonin stabilizer. If only I could afford it.

Israel

2009-11-29T20:41:00.004-05:00

For the appreciation of anyone here to read my writing about Israel: I was in Israel from February, 2009 to July 2009. You can access the pieces by selecting the 'Israel' label to the right.

Enjoy
Hannah

american way

2009-11-28T21:06:00.002-05:00

What do you make of this?

Winter's gettin' colder, summer's gettin' warmer.
Tidal wave comin' 'cross the Mexican border.
Why buy a gallon, it's cheaper by the barrel.
Just dont be busted singin' Christmas carols.

Thats us, that's right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Look ma, no hands.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.

Momma gets her rocks off watchin' Desperate Housewives.
Daddy works his can off payin' for the good life.
Kids on the YouTube learnin how to be cool.
Livin in a cruel world, pays to be a mean girl.

Thats us, Thats right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Look ma, no hands.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.

Poor little infamous America's town.
She gained five pounds and lost her crown.
Quick fix plastic surgical antidote.
Got herself a record, cant even sing a note.

Plasma gettin bigger, Jesus gettin smaller.
Spill a cup of coffee, make a million dollars.
Customs caught a thug with an aerosol can.
If th shoe don't fit, the fit's gonna hit the shan.

Thats us, Thats right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Hot dog, Hot damn.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.
Oh yeah,

abortion

2009-11-27T08:51:00.003-05:00

When I was studying abroad in college, an American friend came to me one day and told me that she thought she might be pregnant. We must have been 20 then, on the first of what was to be five months in South America. My friend was studying for a health profession - she was certainly more careful than just about every heterosexual woman I know (even the smart self-respecting feminist ones) when it came to sex. Nonetheless, she found herself in a troublesome situation. Abortion in Argentina is illegal. She didn't have the money to fly all the way back to the States. By the time of her flight home, it would be to late.

Fortunately, things worked out for my friend. She was suffering from that unfortunate disarray which occurs to many women's menstrual cycles when they are traveling, and which every young woman should be informed of by those same doctors who give yellow fever shots or prescribe malaria pills. (Personally, I get double periods every time I combine stress with a shift in diet, sleeping, and exercise). She was not pregnant. But if she had been, the combination of governmental inadequacy and financial limitations would have put her into an unwanted situation that might have totally changed her future. That is what I'm writing about today.

In college I wrote a paper on the history of abortion in Soviet Russia. Russia was the first Western nation to legalize abortion under Lenin in the 1920s, as part of the feminist movement which accompanied the rise of communism. As the Soviet Union changed, however, its policies changed with it. Under its own form of "Family Values" policies in the 1930s and 40s, which were dedicated to populating the country with workers who could maintain its rapidly expanding industrial structure, abortion was made illegal. This reversal so rapidly led to a tragic rise in backstreet abortions that legal abortions were reinstated in 1957. By the 1970s, abortion was in an unusual state. It was legal, and occurred in fully funded government centers. The centers, however, operated without anesthetic, and the environment was reported to be downright hostile. Women received minimal post-operative care and no comfort, physical or otherwise. Nonetheless, by 1987, Russian women had an average of three abortions in their lifetimes. Many women had upward of six abortions in their lives - some had even more.

In Russia, abortion was the only reliable means of birth control for many women. Condoms were of poor quality and unreliable; sex education was non-existent, and the birth control pill was demonized (my Our Bodies Ourselves also demonizes the pill, on feminist grounds). IUDs were more popular, but not available to most of the population. This means that young women who weren't prepared to have children, or married women who didn't want more children, often found themselves forced into a traumatic, painful, and dehumanizing situation. I don't think I need to spell out the sexist, and frankly abusive, undertones of this story. Abortion happens. It only happens to women. It is the responsibility of the government to make sure it happens in safely.

A distant cousin once said to me, "I googled your college. It looks kind of liberal. Does that mean you're... a feminist?" I was totally floored. For a second my mind raced through the definitions of various forms of feminism that I never bothered to get straight. But then I realized he wasn't being subtle. He didn't care about waves. He meant, literally, are you or aren't you? I'm not sure what I said but I hope it was, "Who isn't?" This was a married man with two children. In 2004, according to the US census, 212,000 women with two children had abortions. Assuming that they are happy with the size of their family, it would not be extraordinary if his wife ended up having an abortion before she reached menopause. I imagine he would want her to have an experience which was sanitary, painless, and without long-term consequences to her health. I don't know what his position was on abortion. But to me, that's what it takes to be a feminist. And that's why it's astonishing that anyone would go so far as to say they aren't a feminist, and they think abortion should be illegal.

The good news is, legality isn't the issue right now. Money is. In 2004, there were 1,222,000 abortions in the United States. There has been some discussion of whether abortion should be covered under the new government health plan. The tragic truth is that abortion already isn't covered by health care plans. My plan, which would cost me upward of $400 a month if I was paying for it myself, doesn't cover abortions. This means that over a million people a year are expected to fully fund their own operation. And it means that every single one of those people is a woman. A first-trimester abortion costs approximately $500-$1000. If a woman can't come up with the money within that time, the cost will rise. If a woman fails to find the new, increased amount in time, she may end up with an unwanted child. Unwanted children cannot be good for anyone.

It's shameful that private healthcare in this country does not provide funding for abortions. It undermines the progress made by every woman who is in a healthy heterosexual relationship, who works in a position of power, who makes a salary equivalent to that of her male equal. The governmental decision not to cover abortions in the public health care plan is a disturbing reminder of the glaring gender imbalance built into the health care system. It is also for me a reminder that we, the women & men who care, need to take a more public stance. It's not a solution. But vocalizing the issue, moving it away from marginal status, and making it something which is not open to compromise, is a start.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine recently told me about work she is doing for an abortion fund known as the EMA Fund. An abortion fund is a fund that provides financial support for women who cannot pay for their abortions. Because there is no governmental support or insurance for many of these women, an abortion fund is the only safety net for pregnant women in need. Abortion funds are tragically underfunded. My friend was telling me that her job as a volunteer is to speak with women who are requesting money and determine how to distribute grants. These women are forced to prostrate themselves before this financial power and beg for help; my friend is forced to humiliate them with questions about finances and family. Surely this is the emotional equivalent of an abortion center with no anesthetic. It is also the only system that we have.

The EMA Fund serves the women of Eastern Massachusetts. Its website is http://www.emafund.org/home. I would encourage whoever is reading to visit their website to learn more about abortion funds, and to find the local fund in your home town. When the institution fails, its good to know that there are people outside who are working towards change.

Word of the Day

2009-11-25T11:41:00.002-05:00

Trenchant, a (n) from Old French Trencher - to cut

1. Cutting, adapted for cutting, have a keen edge
2. fig. esp. of language: Incisive; vigorous and clear; effective, energetic.

1824 MISS MITFORD Village Ser. I. (1863) 208 Some trenchant repartee, that cuts off the poor answer's head like a razor.

3. transf. and fig. Sharply defined or outlined; clear-cut; distinct.

book review/victory lap/george saunders

2009-11-15T20:27:00.003-05:00

today i read this short story, victory lap, by george saunders. And you know what it was good. I mean it felt good to read it. I mean it was bittersweet and gently twisted but what I liked about it is that I came away with something better than myself. I mean this morning i was talking with my mother about self-help books, which inevitably lead to one situation out of which we have found no sophisticated exit: the circumstance in which a respected friend or acquaintance recommends a self-help book. "I recently read it and it really put things in perspective for me," he says. "I think it would really help you too. You can borrow my copy." And I am not a self help book reader. I am not! because self help books are full of bogus optimism and worthless recommendations and, as I said to my mother, they help people understand that they are not alone in their struggles in a positive way. I prefer to realize that connection in a negative context. that's why I read fiction.

I liked the george saunders piece because it wasn't negative. I liked it because it was about negative things. It was about the twisted and emotionally all-over-the-place mental state of an adolescent girl, which was something I connect to, although thank god I never kissed photographs or danced ballet. And it was about the repressive twists of family life, which is something we all connect to. And it was about rape, and about feeling helpless, and about indecisiveness and inaction. But it was a refreshing surprise to find that it didn't follow the traditional narrative formula for a short story. Usually, it's just: make things bad or almost normal. Make them worse. Make them worse. dangle hope in front of them, then make them worse. Leave them laughing.

This story didn't go like that at all. Well done, George Saunders. Thanks for taking an alternate route, just this once. It was like self-help for fiction readers. It gave me a new perspective. I think it could help you too. You can borrow my copy...

come on

2009-11-15T12:23:00.001-05:00

Dear America:

It is not Christmas yet.

Love
one more individual sick and fucking tired of hearing christmas carols on the radio in november.

House of Polar Hysteria

2009-11-13T10:25:00.003-05:00

[note: polar hysteria, aka arctic hysteria, aka perlerorneq, or pibloktoq, is an occurrence observed among Greenland inuhuit or eskimo peoples, and is arguably either dissociative mental psychosis bought on by the coming of the cold/dark season; mental distress brought on by hunger, anxiety, sexual abuse, and other stressors; shamanistic or cathartic episodes during periods of stress; eurocentric misinterpretations of differing cultural behaviors, or mental distress brought on by european-imposed lifestyles, etc.]

[note: but this is a poem]

House of Polar Hysteria
Is a mixed state, agitation and depression, green eyes gleaming fruitfully from the snow. I cast the circle, invoke the professional lover, where is the topaz man when you need him. She cannot be trusted with a weekend. We dwell with Tyw, Wodin, Thor, Freya, never riddle over who rules our workdays. I think he had a forest not a migraine. And I've seen God and done without, listened to the autobiographical sinew of helices for hexes; maybe blew it. Five hundred lifetimes as a fox — that's one. I let the leaves drop, stood all winter long empty-handed. It takes me, the supposed permuter, an hour to drive home, head hung out the window trying to see past striating snow, prow straight into its oncoming swirl, weirded. Go somewhat nuts, picture knot-headed proto-Europeans in rotted bearskins hurling heavy objects, e.g. boulders, at each other and grunting wrathfully. Is ego really so bad, after all someone has to steer the car, guzzle tea, take the last doughnut, facilitate meetings, or else chaos. Those old Zen masters who greedily reach for sweets. Whack the Calvinist within, it's an action not a piece of work. Who's above his own consequences? Both of us turned involuntary to check her out in tight jeans leaning over a low wall, blue eyes rimmed with black, thirteen and more than a little bit bad. No more sugar for you; I'm taking no-no for an answer; I am not a human being, after which he led the monks to the other side of the mountain, with his staff picked up the dessicated corpse of an old reynard, and performed the cremation service as if for a priest.

by JSA Lowe

the better life

2009-11-12T20:45:00.002-05:00

Today I read hours upon hours of words about polar night. Did you know that in greenland it is night for four months? Four months and I'm not saying that it's pitch-black blinding dark but I am saying that the moon - what? does the moon rise and set while the sun just rests below the surface? the morally ambiguous ethnographer I've been reading describes an eskimo man squatting in the dusting snow to diagram the movement of the planets and explain the polar night. This is something I don't entirely understand. In general there is a sense of otherness in the arctic that I just can't get behind. How does one eat vegetables in greenland which is not green? Where do you grow your soy beans and with what do you fuel your biodiesel truck? I'm not saying that there aren't points of intersection or communication but only that these books are somehow not helping me get there. My mother says without winter how would we understand mortality? And to any and all arctic dwellers I say: my winter is not your winter. In another story the ethnographer writes about what he refers to as polar hysteria, and which I am afraid of citing because I don't know its cultural or its scientific authenticity but as he tells it, it is the violent liberation from too much time spent thinking about your place in the world during that uncomfortable period when the days are short but winter hasn't quite come yet. Needless to say the priest prescribed tranquilizers which were taken unwillingly because as I understand what the woman said, the violent spells weren't the problem. It was all that thinking.

Well this may not be arctic but it is november. It's too cold for a kayak but we can't walk on the ice, not yet. And the more I think about it, the more I think that I am getting a little hysterical, and it's about time. Good to find some freedom from all this confinement. Anyway, when winter comes, I'm ready to do some walking. Just waiting for time to build the bridge.

[and, yeah, i'm done with the gres.]

Behind the elms

2009-10-25T17:02:00.003-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the eighth in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

Today's discussion is concerned with Britain's movement from devastation to empire between 1660 and 1800. We begin with devestation, and the restoration. In 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne (thus marking the failure of the 'commonwealth' of 1649). In 1665, the Black Plague swept through England, killing an estimated 100,000 people in London alone. And in 1666, a small fire in the bakery of Thomas Farrinor, Pudding Lane, erupted in the Fire of London, which destroyed approximately 7/8ths of the homes in London. In 1673 the Test Act required everyone in England to be a declared Protestant, resulting obviously in all sorts of religious persecution and revolution. Then, in 1689, came the glorious revolution and the arrival of William of Orange to the throne. Thus began an age of tolerance, where deism (religious vagueness) was in vogue, the Whigs and Tories emerged as political parties, and, in 1707, Scotland was incorporated into the country, England became Great Britain and the age of the British Empire began. Unfortunately, the Norton Anthology of English Literature's treatment of the British Empire is shamefully inadequate. Although the expansion of Britain during this time was one of the most important events in recent world history, it earns barely a mention in the Norton Anthology (and if you think that's a problem now, wait til we hit the victorians). All I can do is hope that this isn't relevant for my exam, accept that for the next 250 years British literature will be written in the context of a shockingly oppressive multinational empire, and move on.

The restoration! We will divide the period under discussion into three sections, for easy mastication. The first section is from 1660-1700. It is marked by the restoration of Charles II on one side, and by the death of Dryden on the other. Death of whom? you ask. John Dryden (1630-1700) was the representative writer for the restoration era british lit. In literary terms, this was the Augustan or Neoclassical era, because the literature of the time was modeled on classic writings from the time of Augustus Caeser. The literature was marked by complex closed heroic couplets embellished with parallelism and double balance - more later. It emphasized simplicity, rationalism, and peace, as well as relations with Nature.

My notes say that John Dryden was the "first readable writer." I'm not sure quite what that's supposed to mean, except that he was known for his simplicity of style. Dryden wrote all sorts of things. He was known mostly for writing occasional poems, like Annus Mirabilis, which celebrates a British naval victory and surviving the fire of London. He wrote plays, particularly All for Love, a blank verse drama which adapted Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to Aristotle's Unities (unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action). He wrote important satires, like Absalom and Achitophel, which parallels both the story of David and Absolom and relations between Charles II and his illegitimate son Monmouth. Mac Flecknoe, another important satire, mocked the contemporary playwright Thomas Shadwell. And his Essay of Dramatic Poetry established for the first time the field of literary criticism. woo.

At the same time that John Dryden was writing plays, John Bunyan, a baptist priest, was in jail. Remember that the Test Act outlawed everyone who wasn't an Anglican. Well Bunyan refused to convert, and was sent to jail twice, in 1660 and 1675. It was perhaps during this time that he developed his masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress, which Norton calls "the greatest allegorical tale in English." In the tale, a pilgrim named Christian travels along the King's Highway on his way to salvation. My Norton bemoans the fact that today is a secular age, saying that in any other scenario, Pilgrim's Progress would be known to every English speaking household. I don't know about that, but it is a great read. In the first chapter, the narrator presents a dream he has. In the dream, Christian finds himself suddenly stricken by the call of God. An evangelist shows him that he needs to go on pilgrimage, and he tries to convince his family to join him, but they're stubborn, so he leaves them to burn in the ashes of hell. They think he's gone mad. On the way out of town, he encounters two neighbors who try to stop him, named Obstinate and Pliable. Let's take a look:

Then said the man [Christian], Neighbors, wherefore are ye come? They said, To persuade you to go back with us. But he said, That can by no means be; you dwell, said he, in the City of Destruction (the place also where I was born) I see it to be so; and, dying there, sooner or later, you will sink lower than the grave, into a place that burns with fire and brimstone; be content, good neighbors, and go along with me.
OBST. What! said Obstinate, and leave our friends and our comforts behind us?
CHR. Yes, said Christian (for that was his name), because that ALL which you shall foresake is not worthy to be compared with a little of that which I am seeking to enjoy (II Corinthians v.17); and, if you will go along with me, and hold it, you shall fare as I myself; for there, where I go, is enough and to spare (Luke xv.17). Come away, and prove my words.
OBST. What are the things you seek, since you leave all the world to find them?
CHR. I seek an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away (I Peter i.4), and it is laid up in heaven, and safe there (Hebrew xi. 16), so to be bestowed, at the time appointed, on them that diligently seek it. Read it so, if you will, in my book.
OBST. Tush! said Obstinate. ...

Remember, Pilgrim's Progress is one giant allegory, and the voyage isn't so much literal as spiritual. Don't you wonder what will happen next? So do I, but alas, we move on...

Pilgrim's Progress might make the less uptight of my readers cringe, but never fear: the age of Dryden was also the age of the Restoration Comedies, aka the "Comedy of Manners." These witty, cynical theatrical works provide a valuable balance to Bunyan. One important author of such comedies was William Congreve (1670-1729). Congreve, an Irishman, was a sinecure, which means he got paid to do nothing much. Good for him. During his short career, he wrote a number of popular plays, some of which are still performed today. Consider for example The Old Bachelor, his first success, Love for Love, and The Mourning Bride (this one was actually a tragedy). One of his most important comedy of manners was The Way of the World. In this story, Mirabell is a player who has given up his wild ways for the love of his life, the coquette Millamont (interesting aside: coquette comes from the french for cock, as in a male chicken, which was originally applied to male flirts. A coquette is not a hen, but it is a feminization of cock - ie, a flirt. ha, ha). Unfortunately, if Mirabell can't get the consent of Millamont's guardian (lady Wishfort), her large inheritance will be lost. Hilarity, needless to say, ensues.

Another comic writer of these early days was Samuel Butler (1612-1680). Butler, an Augustan poet, is known best for his work Hudibras, which spawned a whole literary form ("hudibrastic verse"). Hudibras is known as a mock-heroic poem. Like the poetry of Donne and Milton, it is written in tetrameter, but its content and its intentionally bad rhymes burlesque or mock puritans and great poets. Here's a taste:

When civil fury first grew high,
And men fell out, they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears
Set folks together by the ears
And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For Dam Religion as for punk,
Whose honesty they all durst swear for,
Though not a man of them knew wherefore;
When gospel trumpeter, surrounded
With long-eared rout, to battle sounded
And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
Was beat with fist instead of a stick;
Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,
And out he rode a-coloneling.

Here a punk is a prostitute, and civil fury is the civil war between the Royalists and Parliamentarians (1642-49), for which the Presbytarian clergy were sometimes blamed.

There were numerous other Augustan poets. John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, was an excitingly debauched man who eventually saw the error of his ways. His "The Disabled Debauchee," written in heroic stanzas like Dryden's poetry, totally subverts heroic conventions. Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, was an influence on Wordsworth. Of her many interesting poems, my favorite is called "The Spleen." Another poem I particularly like as "A True Maid"by Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who was known for his highly readable lyric poetry:

'No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that,' says Rose, 'I'll die.'
'Behind the elms, last night,' cried Dick,
'Rose, were you not extremely sick?'

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, besides having a fantastic name, is known for her letters from around the globe, and for her poetry. And finally, John Gay (1685-1732) was a friend of Pope and Swift, and obviously carries us into the post-Dryden period. He was a satirist who composed this epitaph on his gravestone:

Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.

I thought to leave off there for today, but before I go, I wanted to make a quick comment on the state of the novel. The, quote, "First Modern Novel," Cervantes' Don Quixote, was published in Spain between 1605 and 1615. During the restoration, the English novel was developed by the remarkable Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a middle class Presbyterian known for his political and financial double dealings. At the surprising age of about 60, Defoe produced perhaps the first modern English novel (my Norton says we should exclude him, but not why. So I say: here he is), Robinson Crusoe. This was followed by a series of popular (but not "literary") adventure novels - Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders (remember, the only example of a picaresque novel about a woman), Colonel Jack, and Roxana.

And so, for now, adieu.

where the wild thyme blows

2009-10-23T09:31:00.003-04:00

"I had forgotten," said Saul, "that comedies were supposed be funny." We were watching nick bottom's dreadful performance as pyramus to francis flute's thisbe. and it was funny - in that vulgar comic way that only shakespeare can produce while maintaining iambic pentameter. It's easy to forget, when you're reading the complex and convoluted lines of Elizabethan drama, that then as now audiences had a wicked sense of humor. But when you see it on-stage (or on-screen), with a stunning Judi Dench and devastatingly dirty helen mirren, sometimes the comedy comes alive.

We watched Peter Hall's a Midsummer Night's Dream last night. The film was produced in 1968 and that should be no surprise. The young ladies looked like hippies galavanting across the fields (and blond-haired lysander was like some moonstruck member of the monkees). The story is sweet - hermia loves lysander, and lysander loves her right back. Helena loves Demetrius - but Demetrius loves hermia and he has her father's blessing. She is so fortunate in love. So Hermia and Lysander elope into the forest, with Demetrius and Helena chasing them down... Big mistake! Because the forest is Judi Dench's domain. Or technically, it's Titania and Oberon's, fairy king and queen embroiled in a bitter battle over an adopted boy and prepared to produce all kinds of absurd chaos in retribution. Add a flower that makes people fall in love, a group of horribly unskilled actors, and the trouble-making Puck, and you have an.... elizabethan comedy.

The truth is, this part didn't touch me much. Maybe it was the performances (unlikely. Judi Dench speaks with astonishing nuance, and the rest of the company kept up admirably). More likely it was the cinematography. Attempting, I guess, to create a dream-like experience, the camera tottered between ill-cut shots, badly focused, and poorly spliced. It was like a dream in that it was broken - pieces falling all over the place, space and time diving and backtracking at will. But Shakespeare creates a dream without ever resorting to bad rhymes and ill-set shots. These filmmakers ought to have done the same.

That's why, of course, the end was better. Happily married to their rightful loves (it's just ridiculous that Demetrius ends up with Helena. I'm sorry, but it's totally unconvincing), the couples repair to Theseus and Hippolyta's palace for some evening entertainment. Theseus and Hippolyta! Aren't those characters from Chaucer's Knight's tale? Why yes indeed. In fact, according to wikipedia, in the greek myth theseus abducts hippolyta and causes a war. In the Knight's tale the whole thing is sort of glossed over:

875: And certes, if it nere to long to heere,
876: I wolde have toold yow fully the manere
877: How wonnen was the regne of femenye
878: By theseus and by his chivalrye;
879: And of the grete bataille for the nones
880: Bitwixen atthenes and amazones;
881: And how asseged was ypolita,
882: The faire, hardy queene of scithia;

And truly, were it not too long to hear,
I would have told you fully how, that year,
Was gained the realm of Femininity
By Theseus and by his chivalry;
And all of the great battle that was wrought
Where Amazons and the Athenians fought;
And how was wooed and won Hippolyta,
That fair and hardy queen of Scythia;

In the Knight's Tale its all chivalry conquering female desire. And in a midsummer night's dream, of course, it's a tale of love. So the lovers go back to the palace and they watch the epically bad performance of the story of pyramus and thisbe, and laughed, and then to bed, where weirdly the fairies all show up to plan a queer sort of bedroom blessing / invasion. As they say: The course of true love never did run smooth.

Th' Aonian mount

2009-10-22T11:13:00.003-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the seventh in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

In the postscript to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges writes:

Entonces desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español. El mundo será Tlön. Yo no hago caso, yo sigo revisando en los quietos días del hotel de Adrogué una indecisa traducción quevediana (que no pienso dar a la imprenta) del Urn Burial de Browne.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

In the labyrinthine days of my undergraduate studies, I sought out and read, in part, the original Urn Burial to which Borges abandons himself. Published under its Latin name of Hydriotaphia, the work examines at length the seventeenth-century discovery of a bronze-age burial site at Norfolk, and goes on to describe numerous burial and funerary traditions. The book itself, published by Sir Thomas Browne in 1658, is today anachronistic both in style and subject, relevant only to the most obscure of seventeenth century scholars. Since today's review begins with an examination of the seventeenth century essay form, Sir Thomas Browne is an excellent place to start. Seventeenth century prose form is modeled on the writing of Seneca, who used "exploded periods," an enthusiastic name for an argument stated and then examined at length. The seventeenth century style is marked by an increasing emphasis on stylistic simplicity. In addition to Sir Thomas Browne, important essayists of the time include Francis Bacon, one of the first English essayists. His work is remarkable in that it is not personal, but rather focused on exposing superstition and on the privileging of empirical evidence. He is an early voice for the rise of the scientific method. Another writer, who any political theorist is surely familiar with, is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes' Leviathan, published in 1657, caused a big scandal in court because it was philosophy, but secular! Hobbes is known for his theory of Human Nature, which is not good at all. The human state of nature = chaos and disaster. Social contracts are a necessity. Communities must have a sovereign authority. Hobbes is still read today. Do we still agree with him, deep down? I don't know.

One interesting and more unfamiliar seventeenth century essayist is Robert Burton. A reticent scholar, he spent so much time poring over books that he was uniquely susceptible to that malady known as Melancholy. Apparently the type of person to indulge, rather than seeking to avoid, an unhealthy obsession, he made the study of the illness his life's work, resulting in his epic "The Anatomy of Melancholy." We are fortunate that the full text is available both at Project Gutenberg and on google books. Burton composed his own epigraph, which reads as follows:

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia.

If you can translate it, more power to you.

I can't think of a clever way to transition to our next subject. It's just too huge for silly comments. It begins, of course, with a marvelous subject. ha, ha. Andrew Marvell was, according to my Norton Anthology, the most major of minor poets. His importance, however, is due mostly to the fact that 1657 he was appointed secretary to the blind Latin Secretary for the Commonwealth, John Milton. As such, he was the first poet to be associated with him. After Marvell, Milton is everywhere.

John Milton was born in 1608 in London. In his youth, as I understand it, he read everything. After graduating from Cambridge, he went home to read more, then went to the continent where, I guess, he read. In 1637, a former classmate of his died tragically, and he sent a poem to be published in a memorial collection. The poem is called Lycidas, and it is his first great work. It is important to me because it is a pastoral elegy which is, no kidding, an elegy (song for the dead) written in the voice of a shepherd. The lord is my shepherd, the simple life, I know. But tell me that concept isn't kind of hilarious.

After that Milton's life got exciting. He became a political radical in support of the Commonwealth and, interestingly, divorce, after his wife of three weeks left him. He married twice (both women died), he had children, and he went blind. In 1660, when the commonwealth ended, Milton was jailed; with the help of Marvell and friends he escaped execution, but he was left destitute. Isolated, blind, impoverished, and a failure, Milton did what any man in his situation would do. He wrote an apocalyptic poem, titled it Paradise Lost, and became one of the most important English writers in history.

Paradise Lost is an epic detailing the exciting adventures of Satan and, ultimately, the more appealing contrasts of Christ. The first half is a rise from Hell through Chaos to Heaven; the second half is the descent of Adam and Eve from Paradise to earth. Its epic climax is when Eve eats an apple. Rumor has it the poem is very very good. I haven't read it - I was trained, remember, in the excellent school of "anti-canonical education" - but I can say that it sounds appealing. The poem is written in blank verse, which means unrhymed iambic pentameter. At a loss for what else to do, I offer the first sentence. Milton invokes his muse (in classic epic tradition), equating Urania, the muse of astronomy, with the Holy Spirit of the Bible which inspired Moses to write Genesis:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

and we are but decaying

2009-10-19T13:13:00.003-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the sixth in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

It is now the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is on his way out, distracted by such drivel as The Tempest (hah, just kidding. I performed that once for second graders. they didn't really seem to get it). The protestant reformation is testing the limits of its extremism. The economy is moving from court to the middle class. And political power is oscillating between the monarch and the parliament.

Literature is caught in the crosscurrents. The Puritans, who thankfully took off for the US of A in 1620, where the managed to repress and stultify American literature for hundreds of years, were opposed to all aesthetic indulgences, included any literature except for Milton and Marvell. This led to the fall from grace of the sonnet, the madrigal, and the masque, as well as (for some reason) allegorical literature. Poetry became increasingly simple, with an emphasis on rhymed couplets, and a reactionary introduction of satire and burlesque. Prose, similarly, moved towards simplicity.

Theorists generally use two categories for the poets of the early seventeenth century (from 1600-1660). These categories are now considered useful only insofar as they help students remember things. Thus: in the seventeenth century, we have the metaphysical poets, and the cavalier poets. The metaphysical poets, characterized by john donne, wrote about god. The cavalier poets, under Ben Jonson, are actually brought together more by their political positions, and are known sometimes as the "sons of ben."

The truth is that, not only do I know very little about this period, but I maintain only minimal interest in it. This is not because it is not full of great art, but rather because it's not to my taste. And that's okay. In fact, we won't return to my taste until well, the modernists. But for sure we'll have fun in the nineteenth century, too.

Okay, but, before I dismiss the seventeenth century altogether, there's a few gems hidden away in here. The first, my dears, is John Donne (1572-1631). Donne's history is interesting because originally, he became famous for his witty and pleasurable poems which traced his gradual rise in court until, upon eloping with Ann More, he fell into disgrace. But never fear! The king, recognizing something important in Donne, forced him to abandon Catholicism for the Anglican church in 1615. Thus began his god-fearing years. and they are prolific years indeed...

Compare for example, the early poem the flea from a later selection of his Holy Sonnets. The Flea describes how when a man and his lover are bitten by a flea, their love is consummated, even though, unmarried, they can't consume each other. Here, in contrast, is Holy Sonnet number 10:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from the much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

I do like John Donne a lot. Incidentally, he is also known for his powerful religious tracts and speeches.

John Donne, at least the late John Donne, is for obvious reasons known as a metaphysical poet. Some other metaphysical poets include George Herbert, an important religious welsh man, who wrote The Temple, a collection religious verses with very simple names like Man, Jordan, Time, or The Bunch of Grapes. Some of his poems were "shaped" meaning they were in a particular shape. Here is one which is notable because it has no verb:

Prayer (1)

Prayer, the church's banquet; angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth;
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage;
The Chrstian plummet, sounding heaven and earth;

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
the six-days' world transposing in an hour;
A kind of tune which all things hear and fear:

Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss;
Exalted manna, gladness of the best;
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood
The land of spices; something understood.

One other important metaphysical poet is Richard Crashaw, a Catholic convert who wrote in the European Baroque style. He's known for problematic decorum, ie, for poems where the style does not match the subject. Another is Henry Vaughan, a Welsh man who was deeply influenced by Herbert, and who is known as the last of the "mystic poets." His poems tend to have hermetic elements, which is a whole other vacuum-sealed can of leeches.

In contrast to the metaphysical poets we have the Sons of Ben. Who, you may ask, was ben, to have so many symbolic sons? The answer is that Ben was Ben Jonson, poet laureate of England and pompous literary whatnot. Well maybe not. Anyway, Ben Jonson is famous for his plays and his poems. He is also famous as having been the first commercially known author, due to the coincidence of his writing and the development of commercial printing. As a playwright, Jonson is known in particular for his play Volpone, from 1606. Set in Venice, it tells the story of Volpone (the sly Fox) and Mosca (the wily Fly). Other characters include Voltore (the shyster lawyer), Corbaccio (the avaricious dotard), the voluble Lady Would-be and the lovely (I presume) celia. Volpone and Mosca are cheating a financial system which is sickeningly corrupt. Their trickery is comic and morally ambiguous; the world of money is explicitly ill.

Following in the school of Ben is John Webster, one of the great playwrights of his time. He is particularly known for his The Duchess of Malfi, which is particularly unusual because its heroine, the duchess, is "one of the freest and most positive women in all English drama." After Webster comes a whole list of poets. There is Thomas Carew, who was known as a sexually explicit poet and libertine, and who wrote a famous "Elegy Upon the death of John Donne." ("Here lies a king, that ruled as he thought fit/ The universal monarchy of wit;/ Here two flamens [Roman priests], and both those the best:/ Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.") There is Sir John Suckling, whose name says it all, and Richard Lovelace, known for his collection Lucasta. Together Suckling and Lovelace were the self-titled leaders of the Cavaliers.

Another Cavalier is Robert Herrick. He is interesting because although he was a clergyman and although he writes about nature and God, his writing is in fact loaded with pagan undertones. He is known for two volumes of poetry: the religious Noble Numbers and the secular Hesperides. He is known for his poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," which begins "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a-flying/ And this same flower that smiles today,/ Tomorrow will be dying." He is also known for his lyric masterpiece, Corinna's Going a Maying," which although not really in my style of verse, is important enough to represent here (the final stanza):

Come, let us go while we are in our prime,
And take the harmless folly of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short, and our days run
As fast away as does the sun;
And as a vapor or a drop of rain,
Once lost, can ne'er be found again,
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.

That concludes today's foray into seventeenth century British lit. Tomorrow, we delve deep into science and religion. Enjoy Corinna while you may. Things are about to get serious.

signifying nothing

2009-10-19T11:50:00.003-04:00

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

There are some artistic moments that strike with extraordinary resonance. Like a string which, when gently tapped at some precise location, plays out in stunning harmony, or a protein which after long and tortuous flotation is matched perfectly with the hollows of its conforming enzyme, these moments sing. Say it's the recognition of something out of spiritus mundi, that is, out of our shared poetic consciousness. Or say it's a sacred or transcendent moment, some kind of sublime communion with nature, or spirit, or god. When I was sixteen I heard bob dylan's like a rolling stone for the first time and I thought it was perfect. While taking an exam, I stumbled on the lines "turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer" and it was like a sudden relief. Last night I watched the superb Macbeth [full text] with Ian McKellan and Judi Dench and when towards the end Macbeth heard the death of his lady and spoke thus (above), well, those lines resonated too. Whether we like it or not, shakespeare has permeated our souls.

Macbeth, you know, it's great. Whether you like it or not, it's great. That's the power of canonization and I mean that in the sacred catholic sense of the term. Macbeth is so full of repeated lines that it even the first watching feels familiar. Do you think of Faulkner when you hear "full of sound and fury"? Have you ever heard of "the milk of human kindness"? When's the last time a witch did not say something like "Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble"? We're saturated with it.

And it's a pretty good story. Three witches give Macbeth a prophecy and the prophecy comes true in all of its dreadfulness. They say: all hail Macbeth, thane of glamis and cawdor. Hail Macbeth, who will become king. To his companion Banquo they say, not you, but your progeny will be king. And so, of course, Macbeth and his lady scheme to make the prophecy come true, and in so doing, they destroy themselves. Strangely, although King Duncan dies early and Macbeth rapidly achieves the monarchy, the succession does not go to Fleance (Banquo's son) but to Malcolm, the heir to the throne. Strange, until you do some research and discover that Fleance was in fact the ancestor of King James I, current king of England and Scotland at the time that Macbeth was written. Pretty good stuff.

Although for good old-fashioned shakespeare the Royal Shakespeare version is excellent, I feel the need to mention an alternative cinematic interpretation. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth and set in Japan, is one of the greatest films I've ever seen. Time magazine calls it "the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare in pictures." The New Yorker calls it "The tensest and most charged of Shakespeare films." The Guardian calls it "a ravishingly visual exploration of the warrior traditions of Japanese myth" and says it was T. S. Eliot's favorite film. Obviously none of these stunning reviews are necessary to prove the artistic excellence of the film. This is just a recommendation. Watch it.

Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
...
The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?--
What, will these hands ne'er be clean?--No more o'
that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with
this starting.
...
Here's the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!
...
Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so
pale.--I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he
cannot come out on's grave.
...

To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:
come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's
done cannot be undone.--To bed, to bed, to bed!

Exit

the twilight of such a day

2009-10-18T11:30:00.002-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the fifth in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

To the left is a picture of the extraordinary Queen Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603). Note, in the portrait, the fascinating clothing that Elizabeth is wearing. A quick google search shows that Elizabethan costume is a supremely popular web subject, although most websites are remarkably incomplete in their information. According to the internet, women's costumes from the Elizabethan era start with undergarments, usually a linen chemise. On top of the chemise was a bodice, "boned" with caning or rushes (or perhaps, bones?) and styled to give a narrow-wasted, flat-chested body type. Then came petticoats, which gave volume the costume, and finally a gown went over the entire dress. Many women wore a "drum farthingale" around their waist, which would spread the skirt out beyond the hips. The dress was often highly embroidered, as in this case. Women also often wore a stiff collar attached to the bodice, and elaborate sleeve cuffs.

Elizabethan costume was, obviously, heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive. Why, then, the pronounced internet interest in Elizabethan clothing? It's because the Elizabethan era was a time of great British theater, and every school girl and country boy wants to dress up and play shakespeare. And modern interpretation notwithstanding, if you're going to put on the play, you had better look the part. That's called decorum.

We're going to start with a brief discussion of the history of theater in London, then get down to the plays. Theater began in the sixteenth centuries with performances known as interludes, which were short entertainments, as well as morality plays and classics. These plays were performed at the homes of wealthy patrons. Originally, they were performed by clergy, and meant to educate on biblical issues. Later, children or vagabonds would be collected by rich people to perform for them. At some point, aristocrats began hiring groups of servants who served only for theatrical entertainment. These servant groups were given time off to perform in other places: hence "the King's men" or "The Lord Admiral's men."

In 1576, James Burbage built "The Theater," the first dramatic performance space, just outside London. There's a whole field of study surrounding theater architecture etc. but it has never much interested me. Still, I'll mention that Shakespeare's theatrical company (not, I think, associated with any particular patron) performed at two theaters, the Blackfriars and The Globe. There's a diagram at left: click on it, and you will hopefully get a bigger picture. Actually, the Globe Theater was rebuilt recently and you can go visit it in London if you want. I guess they probably perform Shakespeare there to this day.

The picture to the left shows Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love. Shakespeare in Love is important because a) it's a great movie and b) it's the first R rated move I ever saw in a theater. It's also important because, despite its obvious fictionality (Shakespeare, after all, is known as one of the least historically understood writers in the English language), it does have some elements of truth. I would like first to draw your attention to the scene where the young writer is stabbed to death in a bar fight. The young writer, you will remember, is Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Born the same year as Shakespeare, he is thought of be of more-or-less equal caliber as a writer. Unfortunately, before the competition could really begin, Marlowe was stabbed, and so we only have a few writing samples to go by. One real interesting fact about his life, however, is that he almost didn't graduate from Cambridge because he intended to go abroad to Reims, which was a center of intrigue etc. The Privy Council intervened, saying that "it is not Her Majesty's pleasure that anyone employed as he had been in matters toughing the benefit of his country could be defamed by those that are ignorant in the affairs he went about." To this day, no one knows what those affairs were. Marlowe's mysterious, too.

Marlowe Is known for having written two important poems. The first is Hero and Leander, a mythological erotic poem based on Ovid. The poem is written in three parts. First, the lovers meet at the feast of Adonis. Then, the tale of Mercury and the Fates is told. Finally, there is a narrative of consummation. The second poem is called The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, which is one of the most famous lyric poems.

Marlowe wrote about five important plays: Tamburlaine, Dido Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, Dr. Faustus, and Edward II. Tamburlaine, his first play, is a tragedy about a fourteenth century Scythian shepherd who conquered much of the known world. It introduced blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English theater. Dr. Faustus, also a tragedy, describes how Faustus seeks power through the knowledge of dark magic by making a deal with the devil. The story apparently comes from German mythology, and is also told, as you surely know, by both Goethe and Thomas Mann, and inspired a dramatic array of musical pieces. Did you know that Tom Waite's Lucinda is inspired by the story of Faust? Here is the most famous speech in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, in which Faust addresses Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burn the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul - see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heave is in these lips
And all is dross that is not Helena.

[Enter Old Man and stands watching Faustus]

I will be Paris, and for love of thee
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked,
and I will combat with weak Menelaus
And where thy colors on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel
And then return to Helen for a kiss.

O thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms,
And none but thou shall be my paramour.

Yep, pretty famous. And, okay, stunningly beautiful. oh, tragic love.

Now Shakespeare. The truth is I don't really know what to do with Shakespeare. The problem, of course, is that Shakespeare ought to be known in full by anyone attempting to do the "english canon." In full. My Norton Anthology lists 24 important plays by shakespeare. Unfortunately, I haven't really ever studied Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in seventh grade, and memorized the epic "what's in a name" scene. I read The Tempest twice, in ninth grade and again my junior year of highschool. I read hamlet one summer in college just for the hell of it. I think I've seen a Midsummer Night's Dream and I used to watch the movie version of Much Ado About Nothing (the one with Emma Thompson) all the time. It's pretty damn good. I once memorized sonnet 73, lord knows why, but I've forgotten it now. It goes like this:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Anyway, it's pretty exemplary: in Shakespearean sonnet form (abab/cdcd/efef/gg), iambic pentameter, each quatrain moves forward through time, the couplet concludes. sweet.

A little about Shakespeare. He was born in 1564 in Stratford upon Avon and died there in 1616. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582. His collected sonnets were published in 1609, and they suggest a narrative although they never make it explicit. His plays can be divided into three periods. The first period, which ends in 1598, is mostly chronicle history plays and comedies. Like Richards I and II, Henry IV, King John, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labors Lost. The second period, which extends to the turn of the century, is entirely romantic comedies. As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V. The period until 1610 is all the great tragedies like Hamlet and Macbeth and Othello and King Lear. In 1610 Shakespeare retired. Then he wrote a few final romances and tragi-comedies: The Tempest, Henry VIII, Cymbeline and A Winter's Tale.

So I've decided that the best way to learn Shakespeare quickly is to watch the movies. Before you judge me, just think about it. Shakespeare is meant to be performed. A good Shakespeare movie has a one-to-one literary correspondence with the written play. Obviously there are differences in interpretation. But that's theater.

The first play I watched was Othello. I saw the Laurence Olivier version, which was a bit of shock. Who knew that Othello was actually "Othello the Moor" and that Olivier played him in black face? Not me. Of course, black face isn't quite the right term. Olivier's makeup in no way signifies the horrifically offensive tradition of American blackface. Although his embarrassingly exaggerated performance looks racist, in retrospect I think it's mostly just the way he acts. Obviously they could have (and should have) hired a black man to play the role, but, well, those were racist times. And so it should be possible to look past the insane acting and the offensive racism and talk about Othello.

What to say about Othello [in full text, here]? I don't know. Othello falls in love with Desdemona and she falls in love with him. Iago, his ensign, wants to become lieutenant, so he plots to ruin Cassio (the current lieutenant) and Othello, out of pure spite. Terrible tragic things occur. It takes about 5 seconds for Othello to go mad. They plot to kill Cassio. Everyone dies. One important element of the play is Desdemona's handkerchief, a gift from Othello, which Iago uses to plot against them. Another element are these two great speeches. The first is from the very beginning (act I, scene I) when Iago, the most evil man ever, explains to Roderigo (who is in love with Desdemona) why he works for Othello even though he hates him, saying "I am not what I am." Oh, duplicitity. The second is from the very end. Othello's suicide.

IAGO
O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd:
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by them and when they have lined their coats
Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul;
And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

OTHELLO
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.

Stabs himself

I think, for the sake of whatever, I'm just going to move on here. As I watch more shakespeare, I'll keep you updated. Anyway there's one more Elizabethan dramatist I want to mention before finally moving on to the seventeenth century. I actually thought that the only playwrights in 16th century England were Shakespeare and Marlowe. But I was wrong. A third is Thomas Nashe, apparently a friend of Marlowe's, who was known for his vituperative attacks and social commentary. He wrote plays, poems, and apparently a novel (although theoretically, this is before the introduction of the novel into english lit. What?). He wrote a picaresque narrative called "The Unfortunate Traveler." A picaresque is a story that follows the adventures of a rogue. He also wrote something called "The Anatomy of Absurdity" which is an attack on women. It opens with this verse:

Containing a brief confutation
of the slender imputed phrases to feminine perfection,
with the short description of the several practicies of our youth
and sundry follies of our licentious times.

No less pleasant to be read than profitable to be remembered
especially of those who live more licentiously
or addicted to a more nice stoical austerity.

leaves, lines, and rymes

2009-10-17T16:48:00.003-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the fourth in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

Before I get carried away with, oh lord, Marlowe and Shakespeare, let's consider a few remaining non-dramatic Elizabethan writers. We'll start with the estimable Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Spenser is known in particular for his fascinating experimentation with literary forms. Antiquated or anachronistic writing? You've got it. Multiple meters, verse forms, and rhyme schemes? Absolutely. Think Spenser's a bit old fashioned? Authorities say he influenced, among others, Shelley, Byron, Keats and Tennyson. And they influenced, well, just about everyone else.

Spenser's first important work is The Shepheardes Calendar. The work is made up of twelve eclogues (a classical form [virgil] that presents the rural life through a dialogue between shepherds, and compares it to the faults of modern society) corresponding to the twelve months of the year. The eclogues are divided into three groups: plaintive, restorative, and moral. The calendar seems to start in November and end with October. Which, hey! is right now. Here's a selection from October:

Piers
O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?
If nor in Princes pallace thou doe sitt:
(And yet is Princes pallace the most fitt)
Ne brest of baser birth doth thee embrace.
Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit,
And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven apace.

Cuddie
Ah Percy it is all to weake and wanne,
So high to sore [soar], and make so large a flight:
Her peeced pyneons bene not so in plight,
For Colin fittes such famous flight to scan:
He, were he not with love so ill bedight [furnished]
Would mount as high, and sing as soote [sweet] as Swanne.

The dialogue is apparently between Piers/Percy and Cuddie, with relation to Colin's poetry. Find it incomprehensible? That's because Spenser believed that writing in an archaic style added meaning to his poetry. Okay. Apparently Piers is asking where poetry belongs (heaven), and Cuddie answers that although his imperfect wings ("peeced pyneons") are not good enough for poetry, it is appropriate for Colin to attempt to achieve poetic flight.

Spenser's second important piece is The Faerie Queen, an ultra-complex romantic epic with religious and historical allegorical elements. Each chapter (Spenser completed 6/12) also aligns with a virtue (ie holiness, temperence, chastity, etc.). The subject of the poem is Faeryland, a land of Faeries and Elves (but actually, human beings). There are also british knights like Redcrosse and Arthur, as well as monsters with symbolic significance. The poem looks like this:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds [garb],
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle [noble] deeds;
Whose prayses having slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds [appoints]
To blazon [proclaim] broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song.

First, about the meaning of the poem: the first two lines are modeled on the opening to Virgil's Aeneid. My Norton Anthology summarizes them as "behold me, the poet who appropriately appeared before as a writer of humble pastoral [ie the Shepheardes calendar]." The fourth line refers to the exchange of Oaten reeds (ie shepherds pipes) from trumpets (heroic instruments). Lines five and six are modeled after the opening of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

Next, about the style of the poem. The poem is made up of what are called, for obvious reasons, Spenserian stanzas. The Spenserian Stanza is a nine-line stanza. Eight of the lines are in iambic hexameter and rhyme abab bcbc. The ninth line is known as an "alexandrine" - it's in iambic hexameter, and it rhymes with the c rhyme. The Spenserian Stanza, as in the Faerie Queene, is similar to the Spenserian Sonnet form which is represented in Spenser's paired poems Amoretti (little love) and Epithalamion (wedding poem). The spenserian sonnet is similar to the English sonnet in that it contains three quatrains and a couplet. It carries its rhymes through, however, into the following stanza: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Here's an example, from Amoretti:

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead dong might,
Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands
Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and read the sorrowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bathed in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
When ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
My soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
Whom if ye please, I care for other none.

Well it is a shame that the policy of courtship and seduction via complex rhyming poetry is no longer in order. Rumor has it that these poems were written for Spenser's second wife, elizabeth boyle. I'll take a spenserian sonnet cycle over a singer-songwriter, any day.

Along with the Spenserian verse forms, Elizabethan poetry was characterized by a plethora of other forms. Let's take a look.

Lyric Poetry: Poems intended to be set to music. Tottel's Miscellany (p. 1557 - a collection of poems, esp. those of Sir Thomas Wyatt) contains mostly lyric poetry. Lyric poetry was also often inserted into elizabethan plays, because many of the actors were also trained as singers.
Popular Ballad: Anonymous poems with four-line stanzas, originating in the 15th century. Broadside Ballads were crude and commercial printed poems that originated w. the printing press.
Madrigal: A song for two or more voices singing in couterpart. Madrigals were usually petrarchan love stories (remember: the lovelorn man sings for the woman who doesn't love him, and the end is ambiguous). They tend to be short because of their musical complexity.
Air: A song with a recurrent vocal melody to be sung with a three-note harmonic accompaniment on the lute. Airs are often longer than madrigals, and often written as lyric poetry. Thomas Campion was known for his airs.

A couple of other important poets of the time are Thomas Campion (known for writing in "quantitative verse" which is timed for enunciation, not accent or stress), Arthur Golding (known for his humanistic translation of Ovid's metamorphosis) and Lady Mary Wroth. This is our first female so she gets a special moment of consideration. Mary Wroth was the most prolific and accomplished female poet of Rennaisance England (the rennaisance period in england starts with shakespeare). She wrote a highly controversial prose romance called Urania, and a petrarchan sonnet sequence called Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (the speaker, pamphilia, is a woman, and her name means "all loving"; amphilanthus is her unfaithful lover, whose name means "lover of two"). Pamphilia to Amphilanthus contains several "coronas" which are pretty neat. A corona is a sonnet cycle where the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the next sonnet, and the last line and the first line of the series are the same.

There is one final work of consideration that I want to look at before Shakespeare. In the Elizabethan era, English prose was mostly not considered art. One of its most important usages was in bible translation, which you will remember was a new post-Martin Luther activity and led to increased literacy. There were also lots of polemics and even scientific writings, of various levels of shocking inaccuracy. The most important literary prose figure, hoiwever, was John Lyly (1554-1606) who actually had a prose form named after him. Lyly wrote a book, called Euphues: Anatomy of Wit. Euphues means well endowed, and spawned a popular prose form called euphuism. The style is characterized by its especially elaborate sentence structure (based on classic rhetorical styles) and its wealth of literary ornamentation (history, poetry, proverbs, and similes). If you think that description doesn't bode well, you may be right. On the other hand, it's pretty funny. Here's a small selection, from the middle of the beginning, which introduces us to our young hero. Is his name Euphues? I'm not sure.

It hath been an old said saw [proverb], and not of less truth than antiquity, that wit is the better if it be dearer bought: as in the sequel of this history shall most manifestly appear. It happened this young imp [novice] to arrive at Naples (a place of more pleasure than profit, and yet of more profit than piety) the very walls and windows whereof shewed it rather to be the Tabernacle of Venus, than the Temple of Vesta [chastity].

There was all things necessary and in readiness that might either allure the mind to lust, or entice the heart to folly, a court more meet for an atheist, than for one of Athens, for Ovid than Aristotle, for a graceless lover than for a godly liver: more fitter for Paris than Hector, and meeter for Flora than Diana.

Here my youth (whether for weariness he could not, or for wantonness would not go any further) determined to make his abode: whereby it is evidently seen that the fleetest fish swalloweth the delicatest bait, that the highest soaring hawk traineth to the lure, and that the wittiest sconce [head] is inveigled with the sudden view of alluring vanities.

In the second paragraph: Ovid wrote love poems and Aristotle wrote philosophy; Paris was Helen's lover, his brother Hector was a great Trojan warrior; and Flora was the goddess of fertility (whose celebrations were noted for lasciviousness) while Diana was the goddess of chastity.

Well that's Euphues for you, and the end of all this beating around the bush. Tomorrow: Elizabethan drama.

the long love

2009-10-15T09:55:00.003-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the third in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

The great thing about old and middle english lit. is that there is not very much of it. Although there are loads of great tracts written in Latin, and more religious diatribes than a nice Jewish girl like myself can handle, the selection of canonical English literature is relatively small. Beowulf. Chaucer. Malory. Unfortunately, with the spread of literacy and of literary publication, all that changes. We are about to arrive in the 16th century, and English literature is about to explode.

What happened to make the body of literature grow so dramatically? In c. 1440, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented what would become the world's first printing press. The printing press spread throughout Europe, increasing the availability of literature. Remember the Luttrell Psalter? That book, written in c. 1330, was hand written and illuminated and made especially for the Luttrell family. It would have cost a small fortune to obtain. After the printing press, the cost of published works diminished dramatically. This helped speed the rennaisance in Italy. It paved the way for the reformation. And it would dramatically effect England as well.

A word on the rennaisance. Renaissance means "rebirth" and it refers to the cultural movement that spread from Florence to all of Europe. Surprisingly (to me), the beginning of the rennaisance in Italy coincides with the publication of The Canterbury Tales in England. Dante Alighieiri published his Italian masterpiece the Divina Comedia in the early 1300s, before Chaucer was even born. The Divine Comedy is sometimes said to be the greatest Italian poem of all time (sorry, everyone who came later). It is the dramatic account of Dante's voyages through hell, purgatory, and heaven under the leadership of Virgil (Roman author of the Aeneid, stuck in limbo, literally, because he had the misfortune of being born before Jesus) and Beatrice (one of the great unrequited loves of all poetic history. Check out Borges' reference to her in The Aleph). The poem is written in terza rima, a hendacasyllabic rhyme scheme with tercets of aba bcb cdc etc. I would love to discuss in detail the action of the story - the punishments that Dante invents for his enemies are excruciatingly good - but you'll just have to go ahead and read it for yourself, because it's Italian, and this is English lit. English.

Another important early rennaisance figure is Petrarch. Petrarch (1304-1374) was apparently the "father of humanism." The philosophical movement of humanism (promoted by such greats as Erasmus and Machiavelli) emphasized the study of the liberal arts and classical Latin texts, as well as the publication of texts in vernacular languages instead of Latin, and the protestant faith (more on this later). In England, humanism was carried forward by the great writer and thinker Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). Thomas More is known for his Utopia, which I did an incomprehensible book report on in eighth grade, and which discusses in detail the imaginary country of Utopia (utopia means literally "no place"). Its first book is a dialogue between the narrator and Raphael Hythloday, a traveler recently returned from Utopia. It discusses the question of a scholar's role in the world, and whether he should remain in the ivory tower or not. Apparently the answer is no, because the second book of Utopia details the laws and customs of the land of Utopia, including for example community of property. Political, indeed. Sir Thomas More himself was also political. He was executed for refusing to support Henry VIII in his conversion to protestantism (wait for it). He was canonized in the 1900s. Now he's a saint.

Patrarch is also important because he fathered the petrarchan sonnet form. The petrarchan sonnet is a fourteen line poem divided into two stanzas, an 8-line abbaabba and a six line cdecde. It generally tells the story of a lover's feelings as he idolizes an unattainable lady, and led to English lyric poetry. Here's an example from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, a courtier, traveler, and translator who introduced the sonnet into English literature. It is a translation of Petrarch's Sonnetto in Vita 91.

The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor

The long love that in my thought doth harbor
And in mine heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretence
And therein campeth, spreading his banner.
She that me learneth to love and suffer
And will that my trust and lust's negligence
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,
With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
Wherewithal unto the heart's forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life ending faithfully.

Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder was soon followed by Henry Howard, early of Surrey, who established the English sonnet form. The English sonnet form also has 14 lines, but the rhyme scheme is different. It has three quatrains (abab cdcd efef) and a couplet (gg). The English sonnet is also known as the Shakespearean Sonnet, for obvious reasons. Henry Howard, meanwhile, is additionally known as the first English poet to use "blank verse" - iambic pentameter, but unrhymed! It was first used in Howard's translation of the Aeneid, by Virgil, who was Dante's guide in the Inferno.

The period that we are looking at today is known as the "Tudor period" because during this time England was under the rule of the Tudors Kings - from Henry VII (the first strong central authority, in 1485) to Elizabeth I (died 1603). Think of Tudor architecture - white houses with exposed brown boards - like the house where shakespeare lived (see left). But before we get deep into shakespeare, marlowe, and the Elizabethans, we need to consider one more important historical event and its literary implications.

On October 31, 1517 (exactly 492 years from the day I take the GREs!), the Catholic priest Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The theses, written in Latin, were an invective against many Roman Catholic practices (especially the sale of indulgences, which was mocked by Chaucer in his pardoner's tale). They served as the catalyst for the protestant reformation, which led to a schism in the church and the development of protestantism. The reformation had a dramatic impact on religious life throughout the Western world. It also had literary implications. One of the revolutionary moves that Luther made was to translate the bible from Latin into German, making it more accessable to common people. This paved the way for translations of the bible across Europe. Biblical translations moved the power of interpretation into the hand of the individual. They increased the value of literacy among the general public. And they changed the meaning of sacred language itself. (Benedict Anderson has some interesting comments on this in Imagined Communities).

In England, the reformation struck hard and fast when Henry VIII converted the entire country to protestantism. Everyone knows that Henry VIII did this because he wanted to get divorced. One thing I didn't know is that first, Henry was a stuanch supporter of the Roman Catholic church, and a powerful oppressor of protestant converts in England. The other thing that I didn't know is that Henry's first divorce was politically strategic. He needed to divorce his wife because she was infertile, and without an heir, the nation's future was highly uncertain. Finally, I'd like to mention that it was Henry's conversion which led to the martyrdom of the talented Sir Thomas More.

One of the people who benefitted from the reformation was Sir Philip Sidney, a staunch protestant and a courtier. For a not particularly interesting man, he is known for having written one of the earliest important works of prose fiction in English literature, one of the earliest important examples of english literary criticism, and oneof the most important sonnet cycles of the sixteenth century. So maybe he is interesting. His work of prose fiction is called Arcadia. It is a pastoral romance from the 1580s, written for the Countess of Pembroke. It incorporates numerous poetic experiments, including songs, eclogues (ie bucolics ie classical style about farms), and even a pretty incredible double sestina, called appropriately "Ye Goatherd Gods." The work of literary criticism is called "The Defence of Poesy," and it defends high art from the attacks of the puritans who were, quite frankly, puritanical. hah. Sidney writes,

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.

This piece is also notable because almost every other paragraph begins, unfortunately, with "and" or "but."

Sidney's third important work is Astrophil and Stella, a sonnet sequence which follows the stages of a romance and ends with a complete lack of resolution. It is modeled after Petrarch. Here's an example. It's written in the English Sonnet form, but it's notable because it's in hexameter:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' fet still seemed strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

One thing I can say about this poem is that it is guilty of promoting one of the worst concepts ever to come out of European romance, the pathetic male lover whose love is little more than obsession combined with objectification and deification. Come on. Christ.

Well that's all for today. Tomorrow, Elizabethan poetry and, maybe, Elizabethan drama.

Triumph, my Britain; thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!

of which vertu engendred is the flour

2009-10-12T19:12:00.006-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the second in a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

Above are pages 9-10 of the Luttrell Psalter. The Luttrell Psalter is a psalm book made for Geoffrey Luttrell during the fourteenth century. The book is hand-written and illuminated in the style of the East Anglian School (associated, remember, with the Angles, one of the three important anglo-saxon tribes). Page 10 depicts Psalm 41:

“All that hate me whisper together against me: against me do they devise my hurt. … But thou, O Lord, be merciful unto me, and raise me up, that I may requite them.”

Observe, in the image above, the confrontation between (probably) the blue-faced Saladin and the golden Richard the Lionheart during the crusades. Observe the chimeras with their hooved feet and their snake's tails and their smiling faces. Welcome to the grotesque world of the high and late Middle Ages. Let the games begin.

Wikipedia says the Middle Ages extends from the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the Rennaisance (16th century). Last time we discussed what I guess was technically the early middle ages, the era of the Anglo Saxons. Today, we will focus on the high and late middle ages, characterized by such terrifying and fascinating events as the Norman conquest (1066), the Crusades (attempts to free the holy land from Muslim control - sound familiar?), the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket (archbishop of canterbury, killed by knights in 1170), the black death, and the wars of the roses (civil wars). The middle ages in england ends with the rise-to-power of King Henry VIII and his many wives.

We will begin with the Norman conquest. Did you know that Normandy, that lovely french countryside where American troops landed at the end of World War Two, was controlled 1000 years ago by the Normans, a scandinavian but francophone political group? In 1066, the Norman Duke William invaded England in an occupation (get excited, post-colonialists) that would last until the end of the hundred years war and the severing of allegiences with France. Why is this important for a student of English literature? It is important because it was the Normans who brought the french language to England. For the first 200 years of the Norman conquest, English writing disappeared altogether. When it returned, it looked like this:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Let's compare that to the old english from last week:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,
þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Wow. What a difference. In just 400 years, the English language changed from something incomprehensible to something very similar to what we speak today. (If you're having trouble with the Middle English, though, don't worry - the Great Vowel Shift is yet to come!) If it looks like the change between old and middle english was dramatic, you're right. It's worth noticing, however, that although there is a gap in written works between old and middle english, the development of oral poetry during this time is thought to have been extremely fluid. Like it usually is.

The other vitally important historical event during this time period is the black death, which struck England between 1348-1350. The Bubonic Plague, as we know, is a bacterial infection caused by Yersinia pestis and spread by rats and fleas. It is thought to have first arrived in England in the summer of 1348. By 1350, it had killed 30-40% of the entire population. (I would use the word decimated, but etymologically decimate implies killing 1 in every 10 individuals. The black plague was much worse.) The plague struck laborers, aristocracy, and clergy alike. It crossed social and religious boundaries (although in Europe it was thought by some to be a Jewish conspiracy). It brought mortality into people's homes. Its influence cannot be underestimated. Just think of every child's favorite rhyme, which popular mythology says is a mnemonic device for the symptoms of the bubonic plague:

ring around a rosie
pocket full of posie
ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Now, literature. The first thing to remember is that in the Middle Ages, composition in Latin was still substantially more common than composition in English. English literature in this time, however, shifted as substantially as its spelling. For the first time, English poets began using multiple voices, and speaking on the themes of romance, emotion, love, comedy, and women. The first known poem written in Middle English was "Brut," by someone named Layamon. "Brut" was written in c. 1215. Composed to be a history of England, "Brut" is in fact the first English Romance, and includes the first reference to King Arthur (Arthur was a descendent of Brutus, ie Brut, who was himself apparently a descendent of Aeneas and the man who liberated Britain from Rome. Although, like most colonial situations, liberation is a complex term. Keep an eye on the privileging of Latin literature and compare to the privileging of European lit. in post-colonial south america, for example).

At the end of the fourteenth century, England experienced a sudden burgeoning of good literature. This may have been due to the introduction of a system of patronage into English society, whereby rich English people payed artists to produce art for them. There are three particularly important works that were composed at exactly the same time, c.1372-1400. The first is called "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." It was written by someone who my Norton Anthology calls "Gawain" because the author is unknown. The poem itself is written in a style known as alliterative revival. Like Beowulf, each line is two half-lines bound by alliteration, but in "Gawain" the lines are more variable in length and the alliterations are looser. Lines are grouped in stanzas of varying lengths; between each stanza is a "bob" - a word or phrase of two syllables - or a rhyming quatrain (abab) which also rhymes with the bob. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is of course a King Arthur story. It tells two intertwined stories: a beheading story and a temptation. To know more, you (or I) will have to read the poem.

The second poem written at this time was the "Vision of Piers Plowman" by probably William Langland. The poem is known as the "greatest English allegory." It is about a dream which is actually a theologic allegory. It tackles church corruption and the failure of the wealthy laity to support the people (note that this is in the wake of the Black Plague. Many replacement clergy were rushed in without adequate training, etc.) This poem was so popular that it was used during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Too bad the revolt was a failure (although, according to Wikipedia, it marks the end of feudalism in England. Go poetry!)

The third important work from the end of the 14th century is, of course, the Canterbury Tales. I took a whole class on the Canterbury Tales! Good thing, too, because apparently they are of some importance. The Canterburgy Tales was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, a middle-class beaurocrat and patroned artist. The "frame" of the Canterbury Tales is that a handful of people are travelling to Canterbury to pay pilgrimage to Thomas a Becket (see above). As they travel, they tell stories. In between the stories, they talk to each other. The narrator is a guy named Chaucer. Is he the real Chaucer? Is the "author" dead? Who knew medieval lit. could be so postmodern? And just wait until I start talking about gender and sexuality...

But really. Let's look at that selection from chaucer again. This time, keep an eye out for sexual innuendo:

1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
6 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
In every wood and field has breathed life into
7 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
8 Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
Has run half its course in Aries,
9 And smale foweles maken melodye,
And small fowls make melody,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open ye
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
11 (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),
12 Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
13 And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
14 To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
15 And specially from every shires ende
And specially from every shire's end
16 Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
Of England to Canterbury they travel,
17 The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
18 That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Who helped them when they were sick.

This one includes a translation, thanks to the folks at harvard. It is the beginning of the General Prologue, which many people before me have memorized in undergraduate. Here's one cool fact about Chaucer: until relatively recently, people thought that Chaucer wasn't a very good poet, because nothing rhymed. Then, around the beginning of the 20th century, someone discovered the Great Vowel Shift. In the time between Chaucer and Shakespeare, English pronunciation shifted markedly. All of the vowels changed pronunciation. And everything rhymed.

The Canterbury Tales is really long and can't really be summarized. Here's a teaser: each of the pilgrims serves as a commentary on the role in society that he (or she) is supposed to occupy. The first is the Knight, who tells a long story about chivalry (which is dead) and the Greek gods. He comes with his Squire, who is a hopeless romantic. Then comes the Prioress, who is irritatingly obsessed with her dogs (note the general mockery that Chaucer makes of the church), and the Wife of Bath (everyone's favorite bawdy female). One character is the Pardoner. I once wrote an essay about the Pardoner as a eunich and/or homosexual. Another character is the student of literary theory, who is full of.. just kidding, ha, ha.

There's one more important and relevant figure from the Middle Ages. That's Thomas Malory. He was imprisoned during the War of the Roses, probably because he led a violent and exciting life. He wrote Le Morte D'arthur. It's the first good English collection of all the Arthur stories. It's also exciting because it was printed in 1485 by William Caxton, who ran the first printing press in England. The story was published 15 years after Malory died in prison. Malory was the last great medievalist. His death and the publication of Morte Darthur harks a new era in English literature. Bring in the rennaissance! But first, let me just say that I recently reviewed the end of Le Morte D'arthur. And it was every bit as good as they say it is. You should read it. Thank goodness for google books.

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

2009-10-10T15:25:00.002-04:00

[disclaimer: what follows is the first of a series of pieces designed to help me study for the GRE in english lit. If this interests you, scan on. Otherwise, come back next month when I return to normalcy]

Technically, my story should start with the epic adventures, tragedies, comedies, and arguments of the Greek and Latin masters whose words form the epicenter of so much early English literature. Unfortunately, with the exception of a seventh grade foray into the Odyssey and couple of other isolated incidents (Plato's cave, Lysistrata), I haven't read any Classical literature at all. But good news! I am currently listening to the Iliad on cd and I will be sure to keep you updated as things progress.

I plan to begin instead several thousand years after the collapse of the Greek Empire, in the dark and dingy dungeons of Old English literature. Before I begin, however, a few notes are in order. First, a brief comment on eurocentrism. Like so many people out there, I was raised and educated in the great traditions of pluralism, heteroglossia, and post-colonial theory. So I feel the need to remind myself that the history of English literature is eurocentric. In fact, it's anglocentric, that is, centered on the language which descended from the Anglo-Saxons (more on them in a moment). The formation of this language, and the artistic culture which surrounds it, is most closely dependent on the education and influences of anglophones. And historically, that means the bible, classical greek literature, classical roman literature, and the literature of the romance languages. The influence of other literatures is, for the most part, going to have to wait for another day. (but it will come! It will.)

Now, on to Old English literature. But wait - first, a timeline. For context:

PREHISTORY is traditionally the age before history begins, ie, the time before literature. Isn't the close link between history and literature exciting? Prehistory is divided into three subsections. The STONE AGE begins approximately 2.7Ma that's 2.7 million years ago, and ends at different times in different places, approximately 3000-2000 BCE. The BRONZE AGE is when communities started using bronze: in England, that dates from 2100 BCE to 759 BCE. And the IRON AGE is from c. 800-400 BCE. Normally, we think of those times as dark and unsophisticated days, when people wandered the hills with loincloths and spears. But did you know that Abraham, the great Patriarch of the Jewish people, is thought to have been born in 1812 BCE? And that some scholars place the Jewish exodus from Egypt at around 1400 BCE? (Needless to say, prehistory is a loaded term. Doesn't the exodus post-date cuneiform and heiroglyphic writing?) I don't really know much about these things.

The end of the Iron Age conveniently coincides with the rise of the Classical Greek Empire, which dates from 776 BCE (the first Olympiad) to 323 BCE (the death of Alexander the Great and the fragmentation of the Roman Empire). Homer, the great blind poet to whom the written texts of the Odyssey and the Iliad are attributed, is thought to have lived in approximately 823 BCE (thus predating the Classical Greek Empire? Confusing, I know.) The Greek Empire coincides with the Persian Empire (550-330 BCE) and also the births of both Buddha and Confucius, who are both thought to have lived in around 500 BCE.

The Roman Empire is dated from 44 BCE (the appointment of Caeser) to 476 AD. One important event that occurred during this time was the birth of Jesus Christ (0 ad) and subsequent development of the Christian faith. Also around this time, the Bhaghavad Gita was composed in Southeast Asia, and a little later, the Mayan Empire evolved in the Americas. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD; the Eastern Roman empire became the Byzantine Empire, and continued until 1453 AD.

Although people have lived in Great Britain since the stone age (Stonehenge was built in 2500 BCE and the Celtic languages are thought to have arrived in Great Britain in the 13th century), our story begins in c.450 AD, with the arrival of the people who we like to call the Anglo-Saxons. At the time of Jesus, Great Britain was occupied by a number of small tribal kingdoms. In 43 AD (that's 13 years after Christ was crucified), the Romans invaded Britain. For the next 400 years, the island enjoyed a period of relative peace and stability until, near the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Constantine removed the entire Roman occupying force to another location, thereby ending the occupation. A mere 50 years later, in c.450 AD, the Anglo Saxons arrived in England. The Anglo Saxons, I was pleased to learn, are actually a group of three loosely affiliated Germanic tribes known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. They are important for many reasons: today, their arrival marks the development of what is known as Old English. Old English is a mix of Celtish, Germanic, and Latin, with a heavy Norse influence. Although it was spoken in Anglo Saxon G.B. for many years, it was first written after the mass conversion of the Angles, and the Saxons and the Jutes, to Christianity. In 597, St. Augustine and a number of other Irish missionaries brought Christianity to the island, along with Latin literacy, which was of course a requirement for all members of the clergy. The first written Old English was a list of laws by King Ethelbert of Kent. Other important works include the "Ecclesiastical history of the English People" by a churchman named Bede, and a translation of classical Latin works by King Alfred of the West Saxons (871 - 899 AD).

Politically, Anglo Saxon great britain was characterized by conflicting and fluid tribes and family groups. Even after the arrival of Christianity, the culture remained deeply influenced by so-called pagan traditions, of which I know almost nothing. I do know, however, that Anglo Saxon religion did not have an afterlife. The result of this, according to my Norton Anthology, is that being recorded in poetry was the closest an individual could come to immortality. This poetry was similar to classical greek poetry in its epic form and its emphasis on the "heroic ideal" of a hero-king who achieved excellence in all areas of life, and who had a spiritual relationship with his "thanes" or warriors. It is also similar to ancient Greece in that its heroes were mostly remembered through oral poetry. In the now classic "The Singer of Tales," Albert Lord considers the possibility that the Iliad and the Odyssey are merely the first written documentation of a long song-tradition carried forth by multiple singer/storytellers. Anglo Saxon literature is thought to have been similarly oral: the texts we have are merely those songs which had the good fortune to have been written down.

Old English is a really interesting language. It looks something like this:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,
þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Yes, that's english. Here's the literal translation:

What! We Gar-Danes in yore-day
people-kings, trim afrained
how those aethlings arm-strong feats framed

And the beautiful Seamus Heaney translation:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

Bet you didn't see that coming. Let's go back to the original, which is of course from the opening lines of the great Old English epic Beowulf. [For your information, Beowulf was written by an unknown Christian author from West Mercia, sometime in the 8th-10th century. Although he sites the Old Testament, the text remains deeply "pagan" in its traditions. It tells the story of a conflict between the Danes (from Zealand) and the Geats (from South Sweden) in approximately 520 AD. It depicts a world world where life is an endless web of inescapable violence between warring groups. If it interests you, you can always see the 2007 film with Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovitch. Creepy.] Back to the Old English:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,
þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Old English epic poetry has some exciting characteristics. Unlike later English verse, which is mostly defined by rhyme scheme and syllables, Old English poetry is defined by alliteration. Each line has four principle stresses. The lines are divided into two half-lines separated by a pause known as a caesura (the Latin word for a metrical pause). The first half-line is alliterative; the second half-line begins with the alliterative letter (g, þ, e). Old English poetry also has highly complex syllabic patterns, probably because it is written to be sung.

Old English is also characterized by its use of kennings. I like kennings because they were one of Borges' personal obsessions. A kenning is a highly stylized compound metaphor traditionally found in Old Norse (which exercised a profound influence on Anglo Saxon). Poetically, in a kenning, an ordinary word is replaced by a metaphorically synonymous phrase. For example, a "ship" might become a "wave's steed" (ie the horse which you ride over waves instead of roads), while a "sword" might become a "wound-hoe" and a warrior might become a "destroyer of eagles' hunger" (because eagles feed on dead warriors) or even better "fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed” (you figure it out). Old English kennings were mostly of the most simple kind (ie "swan's way" for "sea") but I am of the opinion that we should probably bring the complex kenning back into modern English literature.

Well that's all for today. Tune in tomorrow for Middle English, the Middle Ages, and lots of dirty jokes. Plus some seriously heroic tales.

words and the words behind them

2009-10-09T00:23:00.004-04:00

One of the (many) reasons that this blog has not been as commercially successful as many other internet sites is its lack of consistency. The public enjoys writing that maintains consistency in theme, or in style, or in identity. I recently learned the word tortuous and have taken great pleasure in using it to describe my life path. I like to envision it as a rattlesnake that has recently been pinned by a knife: the snake is writhing in pain, my hopes and dreams flinging off its long tail and soaring into the desert to land in the dust under a sagging saguaro or something else prickly and dry. That's called a homeric simile and that brings me back to the subject, which is the way that my internet writing has arced and bent with the changes in my life. Geographic shifts have carried with them theoretical weight and my words have come with me, from performance theory to desert literature to wilderness and religion and back again. Lately, I have been writing primarily about words. This is because I am in New England, the origin of the signified.. or more likely, because I am waist-deep in the torturous (not tortuous!) process of studying for the Graduate Record Examinations. But I refuse to succumb to this invitation to suffering. What is a vocabulary list if not a chance to learn more about the history and structure of the English language? I ask. And what is the GRE English Literature exam if not the opportunity for a crash course in English literary history? For the past week, I have been working my way through the glory of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. And I have discovered that while breaking down the canon and tearing into the extraordinary depths of world literature and postmodern theory is a blast, going back to the roots is interesting, too.

With that in mind, I have decided to focus my writing energy for the next month on a review of English literature, as I come to learn it. Prepare yourself for such nuggets of entertainment as the story of Achilles and Dante, Beowulf and the Green Knight. Get ready to be blown away by the structural complexity of the Elizabethan madrigal, the Petrarchan sonnet, the Spenserian stanza. Writing is traditionally one of the ways that I fix information in my mind in preparation for some sort of instant-recall examination (think: freshman year bio midterm). It's also how I share the more obscure things that I enjoy. So without further ado, I bring you the first of what will be a stunning series of literary information:

The Homeric Simile: a simile that goes on so long you've lost track of what the story is about, anyway.

But swift Aias the son of Oïleus would not at all now take his stand apart from Telamonian Aias,
not even a little; but as two wine-coloured oxen straining
with even force drag the compacted plough through the fallow land,
and for both of them at the base of the horns the dense sweat gushes;
only the width of the polished yoke keeps a space between them
as they toil down the furrow till the share cuts the edge of the ploughland;
so these took their stand in battle, close to each other.

The Homeric Epithet: a description that is repeated throughout a work. Comes from Homer, where epithets are attributed to certain characters or places and repeated each time that character or place appears on the scene. Wine dark sea is an example: how often does Homer describe a sea which is not wine-dark? Other examples: rosy-fingered dawn; swift-footed achilles.

Word of the Day

2009-10-01T11:23:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I wonder how my definitions of words can be so far off from their real meanings. Here are some examples of words that I totally misunderstand:

INSIPID (me: "evil, villainous, sneaky") (dictionary: "bland, tasteless" f. Latin in+sapid=savory)
TRUCULENCE (me: "tasty, delicious") (dictionary: "aggressiveness, ferocity" f. Latin truc-em=fierce, savage)
LASSITUDE (me: "freedom of thought") (dictionary: "languor, weariness" f. Latin lassus=weary)
OFFICIOUS (me: "official") (dictionary: "meddlesome, excessively pushy" f. Latin officius=office)
DESULTORY (me: "sultry") (dictionary: "aimless, haphazard" f. Latin desultor=vaulter, circus horse rider)
ENERVATE (me: "to excite, energize") (dictionary: "to weaken" f. Latin: "to extract the sinews of")
CRAVEN (me: "old & sneaky") (dictionary: "cowardly" - et. obscure)
CUPIDITY (me: "amorous") (dictionary: "greedy" f. Latin cupidus=desirous)
DECADENCE (me: "indulgence, excess of pleasurable things") (dictionary: "decay" f. Latin de + cadere=to fall)
COMPUNCTION (me: "need to act") (dictionary: "remorse" f. Latin (Christianity) "sting of remorse")
CONFLAGRATION (me: "exaggeration") (dictionary: "great fire" f. Latin con+flagrare=to blaze)

and finally,
DENOTATION (me: "footnote, citation") (dictionary: "meaning or signification of a term" f. Latin: de+notare=to mark)

Word of the Day

2009-09-29T10:44:00.002-04:00

Jingoist - an extremely aggressive and militant patriot; a violent chauvinist

FROM: HEY JINGO (c1670 England): a nonsense phrase used by magicians to make something appear, like "abracadabra." Later, Jingo became a euphemism for god in "take-god's-name-in-vain" phrases like "oh god." (See motteux's 1698 translation of Rabelais, where "by jingo" in used in place of "par Dieu"). In 1878, G. W. HUNT wrote a popular song with the chorus: We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo! if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too. This song became the anthem for supporters of Lord Beaconsfield's 1878 decision to send a British fleet into Turkish waters to oppose Russian advances. This group of "militant patriots" earned the name "Jingoes" after the song, thus the modern definition of a Jingoist.

1679 OLDHAM Sat. Jesuits IV. (1685) 89 Where spiritual Jugglers their chief Mast'ry shew: Hey Jingo, Sirs! What's this? 'tis Bread you see; Presto be gone! 'tis now a Deity

1760 MURPHY Way to Keep Him I. ii, Their husbands care no more for them, no, by jingo, no more than they care for their husbands!

1881 Gentl. Mag. Jan. 46 The Jingo is the aggregation of the bully. An individual may be a bully; but, in order to create Jingoism, there must be a crowd.

Word of the Day

2009-09-22T09:47:00.003-04:00

Today's word of the day is a fascinating phrase: "Self-Hating Jew." A google search of the term produces 849,000 results, including articles in the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Forward (an American Jewish journal), The Nation, and Peace FAQ.com, as well as (thankfully) a Wikipedia page.

From wikipedia: a little history of the term. Apparently, the concept originates in the conflict between orthodox and reform Jews in nineteenth century Germany. The orthodox community argued that reform Jews were losing their identity in the face of German nationalism; that they had absorbed German antisemitism to such a degree that they were attempting to purge their interior Jewishness. The orthodox community was, of course, correct: the nineteenth century represents the phase of Jewish "assimilation" into German culture, a process that was so highly successful that by the early twentieth century Jews in Germany were said to be fully integrated both financially and socially in German culture. We all know what happened next.

So self-hating Jews are Jews who let their national interests trump their socio-religious identity. Their assimilation makes them complicit in international cases of antisemitism, most obviously the case of Hitler's success in the 1930s. Today, self-hating Jews are individuals with a Jewish background who actively undermine Israel's legitimacy. Some examples of self-hating Jews in the US include Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod who are responsible for supporting Obama in his attempts to control Israeli settlements, and Richard Goldstone, the UN investigator of war crimes in Gaza. Other examples include any Jewish journalist or celebrity who has spoken out against Israeli policies, from Jeffrey Goldberg at the The Atlantic and Thomas Friedman at the New York Times to Eve Gensler and Naomi Klein. For that matter, the term self-hating Jew just might apply to Jews like me.

I'm not the first person to write about this subject, as some of my own links show. Here's what interests me today. The 'great Israel problem' in the Jewish psyche is that Israel is both a nation and a religious center. Hence the confusion over passover's traditonal prayer "Next year in Jerusalem" - does this mean "Next year I hope to be in the State of Israel" or does it mean "Next year I hope to be at the Temple," the Jewish site of prayer (traditionally held to be the location where Adam was created and where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac) which was destroyed by Romans in approximately 70 ce? My grandmother would remind me that these things are not mutually exclusive: it was only after Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 that Jews had access to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. That's the same annexation which led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Which led, in turn, to this generation's plethora of self-hating Jews.

Which leads me to the troubling part of this subject. The term self-hating Jew is derogatory, and today it tends to be used as a general phrase for anyone who says anything bad about Israel. That's just silly. Israel is a nation, and as such, it should be subject to the same international judgment as any other nation. Just as I am uncomfortable with nationalist rhetoric in America (it reeks of imperialism, of South American dictatorships, and yes, of Nazis), I am unwilling to abandon my critically detached politics for the sake of my religious heritage. I am comfortable with my Jewish heritage, but my political identity comes first. That's the privilege of being an assimilated American. Which is, perhaps, what those assimilated reform Jews in Germany were saying at the turn of the last century. Then the political climate shifted, and assimilation was exposed as the illusion that it is. It's too bad that Israel was not a nation in 1939. And, as uncomfortable as I am in saying this, it's a good thing that it exists today. Any other opinion plays into the hands of the anti-semitic undercurrent which I know runs through this country, and many other parts of the world. I have no choice but to be an Israeli nationalist. And that means, I am obligated to work with great subtlety and care as I examine the terrible things that Israel is doing today. This is not self-hatred, it's the delicate combination of self-preservation and humanism. Which is a fine and, I think, a valuable line to walk.

Word of the Day

2009-09-20T19:37:00.002-04:00

Bale (n)

[Common Teut.: OE. balu, bealu, (gen. bealw-es) = OS. and OFris. balu, OHG. balo, ON. böl:-OTeut. *balw-o(m), the neuter of the prec. adjective; cf. evil, ill, good, as ns. Almost confined to poetry from OE. downwards; in Middle English it seems to have derived fresh vitality from the Old Norse. böl, pronounced (bl), whence also its alliterative use with bote ‘remedy, relief,’ and bete ‘to relieve.’ More of English origin, perhaps, is its alliterative opposition to bliss. Marked obsolete in dictionaries soon after 1600, and rare thence to the present century, when its undefined vague sense of evil has made it a favourite word with the poets.]

I. Senses.

1. Evil, especially considered in its active operation, as destroying, blasting, injuring, hurting, paining, tormenting; fatal, dire, or malign quality or influence; woe, mischief, harm, injury; in earlier use often = death, infliction of death.
1579 SPENSER Sheph. Cal. Nov. 84 The flouret..buryed long in Winters bale.
2. Evil in its passive aspect; physical suffering, torment, pain, woe.
c1460 Frere & Boy in Ritson Anc. Pop. Poetry 35 God that..dranke both eysell and gall, Brynge vs out of bale.
3. Mental suffering; misery, sorrow, grief.

II. Phrases and locutions:

4. to work, bake, brew bale: to make mischief, prepare woe or misery.
5. Opposed alliteratively to bliss, blithe.
1876 LOWELL Poet Wks. (1879) 468/2 Was it a comet or star; Omen of blessing or bale?
6. Opposed to boot (ME. bote) ‘relief, remedy,’ and bete vb. ‘to relieve, mend.’ So in Icel., böl og bót ‘bale and boot,’ bölva bætr ‘boots of bales.’

1867 G. MACDONALD Poems 144 Where he had found Boot for every bale

7. Proverbs. Cf. Icel. egar böl er hæst er bót næst ‘when bale is highest boot is nighest,’ etc.
8. Comb. bale-sithe [OE. bealu-sí, f. si expedition, adventure, fortune, lot], death, destruction; evil-doing, mischief; evil fortune, calamity. bale-stour [stour tumult, battle], fatal struggle, death-throe. The OE. poetical compounds were very numerous, e.g. bealu-cræft magic art, bealu dd sin, bealu-ráp deadly rope, bealu-spell fatal news, bealu-anc malicious thought.

Good Reading

2009-09-04T20:00:00.003-04:00

This story has stuck with me for years. It's just... kind of fun. And now that I know sergeis, and galyas, it feels a little closer to home.

My only problem was that after a while I started doubting Aunt Galya’s expertise. At night I tossed under my thin woollen blanket and wondered, What if Aunt Galya is wrong? What if lemon juice isn’t a good contraceptive? What if eating cabbage doesn’t make your breasts bigger? What if having a lot of hair on your legs isn’t a sign of infertility? What if drinking alcohol before and after sex doesn’t prevent you from getting an S.T.D.? What if Aunt Galya’s whole attitude toward men is wrong? The last question bothered me the most. Aunt Galya seemed to see men as soldiers in an enemy army. Or, worse, as soldiers defeated and captured. “Don’t let them slip away!” “Make them work for it!” “Don’t let them get lazy!” “Don’t reward them until they deserve it.” I had repeated everything she’d told me without questioning it. I looked at the portraits of her late husbands, glistening softly in the moonlight above my head. They didn’t look very happy. And they were both dead. (love lessons monday, 9 am)

powerhouse

2009-08-17T20:53:00.002-04:00

wow look how cool these guys are.

And I knew them once! Impressive.

like the shoreline and the sea

2009-08-02T16:20:00.004-04:00

"Did you hear the news?" said Juli. "Two people were killed at a queer community center in Tel Aviv." In what was surely a hate crime, a gunman shot two visitors at the center and injured several more before escaping. He has not been identified.

"Did you hear the news?" Sergei asked, a few hours later. "Yes," I said "I did," but I was mistaken. Last night at a rally that I attended in support of the rights of foreign workers and refugees, police violently broke up the gathering and arrested many of the rally participants. The rally was in opposition to a new law, which has been passed but not enacted, and which permits the eviction of individuals and families who lack citizenship. Although theoretically intended to prevent terrorism, it can be used to target Sudanese and Eritrean refugee families who have long since begun to build lives here, and who have nowhere else to go. It can also be used to target Philippine and East Asian workers who are brought here for cheap labor, and whose situation parallels those of illegal immigrants in the USA. When I left early in the evening, it was a peaceful gathering. The most diverse group of people I have ever met in Israel, drumming and singing and little kids running around in the grass. That's all.

So I went online to read about the shootings and the arrests and I learned that after years of legal protest the families in Sheikh Jarrah (East Jerusalem) have finally been evicted from their homes. It's a complicated story, partially explained here. The Palestinians being evicted are refugees from the war of '48, who were given their homes by the UN when East Jerusalem was part of Jordan. Some technical problems, and a complex history of land ownership, has led to their eviction this week. The actual eviction comes after many years of legal battles, and is a surprise to no one: when I visited the protest tent a few weeks ago (only a ten minute walk from my home on Mount Scopus), they already knew it was coming. They just wanted their story to be known.

During my first visit to the protest tent in Sheikh Jarrah, the immam of al-Aqsa mosque and an important christian religious leader were sitting in the heat and talking about the unity of the Palestinian people, while a young woman passed around Easter Eggs and french and American tourists sat cross-legged on the ground. On my second visit, an eloquent woman told us that she sees the evictions there as part of a greater plot to push the Arabs out of Jerusalem. The series of evictions and demolitions in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, according to her, are geographically planned to surround the city. Each time an Arab family is forced out, Jewish nationalists (who walk through the neighborhoods defiantly dressed in orthodox clothes) move in. Ruti told me that some Arab friends of hers are honestly afraid that at any moment, they might be forced out of their homes and their communities. There is already historical precedent. They don't understand why it won't happen again.

Meanwhile, Israeli police have recommended that Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing foreign minister, be tried for various legal offenses. Hooray! Lieberman's policies are thought of as racist and approaching fascism. On the other hand, Lieberman's party appeals primarily to Russian voters, and most articles I've read about him are full of the anti-Russian sentiments that pervade Israeli culture. This week, racism and hatred comes from all sides. In a country that is so small, it's scary the way things suddenly seem to fall apart, and the abyss beneath this nation is exposed.

In other news, the leonard cohen show in Tel Aviv sold out in less than one day. that's really fast.

ahoj

2009-07-29T08:19:00.003-04:00

"It's amazing," said Agnes. "You really have your roots here."

We were standing in the long grass along the bank of a small lake full of jumping fish and rusty rowboats sunk along the shore. The lake was a short walk down winding roads from the top of the hill in hluboka, czech republic. Agnes was referring, of course, to Eastern Europe.

Agnes is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter of daughters of daughters of Lithuanians. She was born in Lithuania and although she lives in Amsterdam now, she knows it's only temporary. She has roots like I can only dream of in occasional fits of false nostalgia. But Eastern Europe does feel anyway like a return. A return to the land of my own mythology (because the narrative of every ashkenazi jew is filtered through the holocaust) and also to the land of my childhood, because in 1996 I drew cartoons in the old city square under the magical clock tower which turns tricks on the hour, and today I am sitting in a beautiful cafe on a sidestreet outside of the Jewish quarter and writing about nostalgia. It's something mystical.

In czech republic everything is a sign. We sat in a private compartment on a rickety train heading to hluboka and Vafa murmured, surely this train isn't from the second world war. And we were all silent, and although of course those trains didn't have compartments, we could all sense the presence of a thousand ghosts. They whisper in the misty forests where surely all those stories come from, the ones about secret massacres and abandoned children and rebel bands waiting for the Russian front. Only the heavy weight of the soviet architecture, all imposing cement blocks and sullen colors, can silence them. It's that real.

This morning I went to the Spanish Synagogue in Prague. I don't have a camera but you can google it. It as astonishingly beautiful. The upstairs of the synagogue contains a series of exhibitions about the Jewish presence here, which is more than 1000 years old. There are silver religious symbols from the 1600s, old books written in German and Hebrew, faded photographs of religious jews who look much the way they do now. (Look in my facebook album "where we come from" for a good example). Only one small corner is devoted to the holocaust. It says simply "All of the czech Jewish communities were destroyed in the holocaust. Most of them cannot be revived." Among other artifacts is a photograph of a beautiful woman and child, smiling. Their identities are unknown. No one is left to identify them.

Now there is a Jewish revival in Czech Republic. The Soviet occupation only redefined the way in which antisemitism was expressed. Everyone believes, however, that the liberation of the Czech Republic in 1991 signifies the end of antisemitism here. The Jewish ghetto has been transformed into an expensive museum and rows of ultra-upscale european shops. It's certainly triumphant. but it feels a little hollow. Maybe because there's so few people left to celebrate.

surprise!

2009-07-05T07:38:00.002-04:00

From "Amnesty International Accuses Israel and Hamas of War Crimes in Gaza," nytimes.com:

Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its 117-page report on Thursday. It explicitly rejected Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases, Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.”

we care about beauty

2009-06-25T15:30:00.002-04:00

this is not that

die flute #58

shape of the red moon

mots.org

The aleph revisited

2009-06-23T14:55:00.003-04:00

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

haven't had a dream in a long time

2009-06-22T03:12:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I was taken by the Israel Experience co., in partnership with the State of Israel and the Jewish Agency, to the town of Sderot, and to a nearby refugee camp.

Sderot is a Jewish Israeli town located ten minutes away from the Gazan border. From a lookout point in Sderot, you can see the electric plant in Ashkelon (Jewish city) which provides power to much of the Gaza strip. You can see the ruined land of what was once a series of Jewish settlements in Gaza. You can see land which is officially under Hamas rule. But you can't see the 1.5 million residents of Gaza.

Sderot is famous today for its proximity to the kassam rockets that Gazans have been firing for the past (eight?) years, and which escalated dramatically at the time of Operation Cast Lead. In Sderot, an alarm says calmly "color red, color red" when a rocket is detonated on the Gazan border. There are fifteen seconds to reach a shelter before the rocket hits. Today, you can buy hip t-shirts that say "15'" in recognition of the suffering of Sderot.

Sderot is not an illegal Israeli settlement. Whether the people who live there are idealists, who came to Israel high on zionist fantasies and set out into the great untamed wilds of Palestine with spades and pitchforks and communist manifestos, I don't know. I do know that they are located inside the Israeli border as it was established in 1948. They are not pushing into occupied territories. And they are not breaking international law.

In Sderot they talk about the post-traumatic stress that comes from living under daily rocket fire. They talk about children, hardly able to talk, who understand the meaning of "color red." They talk about the fact that the Israeli government hasn't fully funded the development of rocket protection in the city, meaning that one elementary school has only half a rocket-proof roof. If your kids are in grades 4,5, or 6, you're out of luck. And they talk about how the people in Sderot are trapped. Because how can you move away if your house has dropped in value by fifty percent since Operation Cast Lead?

In Sderot we met several American new olim (immigrants) whose hatred, racism, and zionist zeal was palpable. They run the Sderot media center, which in its propagandaistic approach is a waste of everyone's time. We also met several Israelis who work for an organization that attempts to open dialogue with residents in Gaza. They told us that although they have been working on this project for many years, they have yet to meet an actual Gazan resident, because the border is so tightly closed. One person asked how they contact each other. "Well that's easy," the program director replied. "We're in the same area code." No kidding. He also told a story about traveling in Italy with a group that included a man from Gaza. Although they were in Italy, and although they were living and traveling together, it took that man four days to feel comfortable enough to talk to a (liberal, activist) Israeli. That's how deep things are here.

After visiting Sderot we went to the refugee camp. A clarification: the Palestinian girls that I work with in Jerusalem are from a refugee community. Their families were driven out of their homes in '48 when the country of Israel was established. I am unclear as to why they haven't been better integrated into the community - Israel's choice, or their own? The refugee camp near Sderot is a different story. It is a hot, dry, upscale trailer park just this side of Gaza. Its residents are Israeli Jews who were evacuated from Gush Katif, a bloc of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip, during the disengagement in 2005. Unlike the residents of Sderot, these settlers made the choice to live illegally on the far side of the 1967 lines. Their residence in the Gaza Strip was part of their idealistic claim to the land (watch out for the word "idealistic" in Israel. Its meaning is highly problematic.) Their evacuation was a great source of drama within the Israeli community, creating a real schism between 'idealistic' settlers and moderate Israelis.

I wanted the woman who spoke to us, in a pleasantly shaded courtyard beside the synagogue, to be evil, red-eyed and yellow-skinned and clawed hands. Instead, a sweet looking dati woman from Wisconsin stood in front of us in a nice black skirt and colorful headscarf and, for the first time on that unbearably hot day, asked us if we needed water or a restroom. She was funny, pleasant, easy to talk to. She spoke about her life in wisconsin as a secular jew, her return to religion and her move to Israel. She spoke with obvious pride about her seven (!) children, one of whom suffers from ptsd. She spoke about her farm community, which exported flowers, and about the Palestinians who worked in the community as low-level wage earners, flower pickers, cleaners, trash collectors. She spoke about the difficult of living in a temporary community for four years after the disengagement, waiting for the Israeli government to provide the compensation that it originally guaranteed.

And then she spoke about how in the (biblical) desert God gave his people the Torah, and he gave his people the land of Israel. And that land is the birthright of the Jewish people. She told stories about a pregnant woman in her community who was shot at gunpoint by a Palestinian. A man who was knived to death by his own farm workers. A woman who was shot while driving her Palestinian employees home after work. She asked how it was possible for a government to permit its people to live in those conditions. The racist undertones (who cleans up whose trash?) were implicit when she said: If Mexico invaded the United States and attacked it with kassam rockets, would the US sit by and let it happen? (But isn't Israel Mexico in that metaphor? asked Yair. It was too late too argue. She was on a role). She said, how can we allow a community to exist in Israel that teaches its children to hate us, that doesn't believe in our right to exist? How can we allow a community to exist in Israel that refuses to participate in Israeli society (by being in the army. Never mind the fact that orthodox Jews are also exempt from service)? The Palestinians are not an ethnic group, they are a product of political fighting in other parts of the Middle East. They should go back to where they came from. There's room for them in Iraq.

The issue of Israeli settlements is really relevant right now. As you probably know, Obama is insisting on putting a complete stop to Israeli settlements, while Netanyahu (the Israeli pm) is arguing for what is referred to as 'natural growth' (see: israel vs. the u.s.). Although Netanyahu recently, belatedly, stated his interest in a two-state solution, he undermined his own statement with a list of demands that are not only impossible, but offensive (see: egypt and see: palestine). There is an interesting op-ed about settlements in today's nytimes, which suggests that placing the settlement issue in the forefront of the pursuit of peace is misguided. The other day an Israeli friend asked me: what if we pursued a one-state solution. One where Palestinians and Israelis lived side by side, under the control of two co-operative governments. Jews could live near the holy sites in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian refugees could return (when possible) to their historic homes in the land of Israel. There would be no artificial borders that make dialogue (between, for example, Jews in Sderot and Palestinians in Gaza) impossible. The mixed geography, and subsequent economy, would make governmental co-operation necessary.

Obviously it's impossible. But once rationality has been abandoned, it's nice to indulge a little too.

ונתנו

2009-06-17T17:51:00.003-04:00

September, 1944

'Where are you going?' [Edek] asked finally.
'We're going a long way,' Gedaleh answered. 'We want to fight the Germans until the end of the war, and - who knows? - maybe even afterwards. Then we'll try to go away. We want to go to Palestine; in Europe there's no place for us anymore. Hitler's won the war against the Jews, and even his pupils have done a good job. Everybody has learned his gospel: Russians, Lithuanians, Croats, Slovaks.' Gedaleh hesitated, then added, 'Your people [Polish] have also learned it; or perhaps you already knew it before. Tell me, Lieutenant: are we your guests or your prisoners?'
'Give me time,' Edek answered, 'soon I'll be able to give you your reply.'
[...]
He opened two packs of Lucky Strikes and offered the cigarettes to everybody, to the admiring wonder of the Gedalists; then he went on: 'You mustn't be unjust, even if some Poles have been unjust to you. Not all of us have been your enemies.'
'Not all, but many,' Gedaleh said.
Edek sighed. 'Poland's a sad country. It's a country that has always been unhappy, crushed by neighbors that were too powerful. It's hard to be unhappy and not hate, and we've hated everybody for all the centuries of our servitude and our partition. We've hated the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs, the Lithuanians, and the Ukrainians; we've hated your people, because you had scattered over our country but didn't want to become like us, dissolve in us, and we didn't understand you. We began to understand you when you rose up in Warsaw. You showed us the way; you taught us that even in desperation, people can fight.'
'But it was late by then,' Gedaleh said. 'We were all dead.'
'It was late. But now you are richer than we are: you know where to go. You have a destination and a hope.'
'Why shouldn't you Poles hope, too?' Dov asked. 'The war will end, and we'll build a new world, without slavery and without injustice.'
Edek said: 'The war will never end. From this war, another war will be born, and there will always be war. The Americans and the Russians will never be friends, and Poland has no friends, even if the Allies now are helping us. The Russians would prefer for us not to exist, never to have been created. The Germans, when they invaded us in nineteent thirty-nine, immediately deported and killed our professors, writers, and priests; but the Russians, advancing from their border, did the same, and what's more, they handed over to the Gestapo any Polish Communists who hadn't taken refuge in Russia. They didn't want Poland to have a soul, neither side did; they didn't want it when they were allies; and they don't want it now, either, when they are enemies. The Russians were glad that the Warsaw uprising failed, and that the germans exterminated the rebels: while we were dying, they were waiting on the other bank of the river.'
Dov spoke up: 'Lieutenant, I'm a Russian. A Jew, but Russian, and many of us were born in Russia, and that tall boy you see over there is a Russian Christian who is following our way. This one' - and he pointed to Mendel - 'and many others who are dead were soldiers in the Red Army; I was, too. Before beginning our journey, we fought as Russians first and as Jews second: as Russians for the Russians. It's the Russians who are liberating Europe. They are paying with their blood, they died by the millions, and the things you are saying seem unfair to me. I myself, who was tired and wounded, was treated in Kiev, and then the Russians brought me back to my companions.
'The Russians will drive the Nazis out of our country,' Edek said, 'but then they won't go away. You mustn't confuse wishes with reality; Stalin's Russia is the czar's Russia: it wants a Russian Poland, not a Polish Poland. That's why our war is desperate: we have to defend ourselves and the people from the Nazis, but we also have to look over our shoulder, because the advancing Russians don't want to hear of any Armia Krajowa. When they find us, they stick us into their units, here and there; if we refuse, they disarm us and deport us to Siberia.'
'And why do you refuse?' Dov asked.
'Because we're Poles. Because we want to show the world we still exist. If necessary, we'll show it by dying.'
Mendel looked at Dov, and Dov returned the look. Both had remembered the sentence Dov had shouted at Mendel at Novoselki, in the midst of the fighting: we're fighting for three lines in the history books. Mendel told the story to Edek, and Edek answered: 'It's stupid to be enemies.'

-primo levi

If not now, when

2009-06-17T01:40:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to tag along on a field trip with a group of eleven students in a co-existence seminar at a teaching college in Beersheva. The group consisted of eight Jewish students - one man and seven women - from Beersheva, and three Bedouin women who commute from a small village half an hour away. The Bedouin students were all religious and wore decorated abayas (I believe this is the correct term for the long black dress worn over clothing while outside) and colorful hijabs. At one point during the day a Jewish woman used the word Israeli to refer to Jews and she was promptly corrected: we all, a Bedouin woman said, are Israelis.

Two women immediately stepped up to provide translations for me: Julia, a 30-year-old Russian-Israeli who moved to Beersheva from far-east Russia after graduating highschool, and Manal, a twenty-one year-old Bedouin woman. The city of Beersheva is located in the dead center of Israel, in the Negev desert south of Jerusalem, directly between the West Bank and Gaza. Its name, literally, means seven wells, and Beersheva, as a source of water in the desert, has been a city since biblical times (in fact, Beersheva is referenced throughout the old testament). Today, Beersheva is the third largest city in Israel, and is known for Ben Gurion University, one of Israel's top universities. It was also in the news last winter when rockets from Gaza surpassed the city limits.

The field trip we went on was based, as usual, on questions of folklore and co-existence. The trip made three stops: at two Bedouin women's collectives located in a recognized Bedouin village outside the city, and at a Kibbutz where one of the students lived with her family. A recognized Bedouin village is a town built by the state of Israel in an attempt to help Bedouins assimilate into industrialized Israeli society. Unfortunately, these towns generally fail to recognize the issues of land use, family relations, economic needs, and lifestyle choices relevant to a historically nomadic community. They are largely considered a failure, and most Bedouin today live in unrecognized villages where they don't pay taxes and don't receive state support in terms of water, electricity, and education, among other things. A kibbutz is a collective farm from the early days of the state of Israel, built on a strict communist ideology. Many kibbutzim today have abandoned their communist and socialist roots: the one we visited, located on the edge of Gaza, is one of the few that maintains most of its communist integrity today.

At the women's collectives, we learned about traditional Bedouin embroidery and also weaving. The materials and the colors are beautiful, and symbolic. The woman doing embroidery showed us an old dress embroidered with flowers. These flowers represent the sheik, the man, she said. The leaves surrounding them represent the women who support him. Then she held up a square piece of cloth, freshly embroidered. On this piece, the flowers were on the edge, and the pattern centered on an intricate arrangement of leaves. Now the man is no longer central to our thoughts, she said.

The weavers' work seemed harder. Weaving and embroidery are important opportunities before Bedouin women because they can gain independence without stepping outside of their traditional roles. Bedouin society is traditional, by Western standards. Manal, a surprising liberal girl who believes in love before marriage and maybe no marriage at all, told me that marriage is often arranged, and still requires paternal consent, dowry, and payment for the bride. At the weaving collective, women spun, hand-dyed, and wove incredible carpets. Traditional Bedouin tents are made from carpets like these, and can take a year to create. As I sat in a tent watching the demonstration, I was reminded of my own experience as a child learning to card and spin wool. The Lowell mills, located not far from where I grew up, were centers of industrial fabric production during the industrial revolution. They also represent important stages in the women's movement and the environmental movement in America. Today, the mills are no longer running, except as re-enactment sites for children (most fabric production, I suppose, has moved overseas). And traditional fabric production is taking on a new role for the women of this community in the Negev.

At the kibbutz, we piled out of the bus and entered the cow shed, where rows of cows in pens were hooked up to milking machines. I have never seen anything like a machine that sucks the milk from the cows' teats, and I was struck by the contrast between the slow, careful artisenal work of the Bedouin women and the industrialized production on the kibbutz, which is sustainable in its own way. Just different narratives for different people.

We met the mother of one of the Jewish girls for coffee and biscuits. She is an Uruguayan immigrant with an unusual story, pieces of which I picked up via translation from her perfect Hebrew. She moved to the kibbutz because her sister was in an accident and became paralyzed, and it seemed like a good place for her to live. She was told that the kibbutz was a farming community on the beach. In fact, it is a communist community in the desert. The beach is within easy driving distance, but to reach it you have to pass through Palestinian villages or Gaza. That is no longer an option.

In the beginning, the communist ideology of the kibbutz was extreme. Children were taken from their parents as babies, three or four months old, and moved to a dormitory where they were cared for by other kibbutzniks. In theory, this liberated women in particular from the chains of motherhood, and allowed them to work as full members of the kibbutz. It would also redefine the children's sense of family, so that the whole kibbutz had a part in the raising of a child. In fact, it was an unalloyed disaster. The children suffered psychologically from being away from their parents, and in some cases (on other kibbutzim), there were cases of molestation and abuse. Today, children are no longer raised collectively. Other aspects of the kibbutz remain collective, however. Money is still pooled and distributed equally between kibbutzniks. Housing is provided and maintained by the kibbutz, although interior decorating belongs to the individual. Children raised on the kibbutz receive their own tiny apartments and free education from the community, as long as they continue to live and work there. For young people, it is a wonderful way to avoid the struggles of financial independence in a capitalist society. That's because this kibbutz had the good fortune to be financially succesful. Communally.

Meanwhile, Julia told me about her experience as a new olah in ulpan (Hebrew lessons) on the kibbutz, when she first moved to Israel. The ulpan is an important financial opportunity for kibbutzim, and it is often treated with a striking capitalist coldness. Ulpan students are often isolated, kept separate from the community. For big groups of young twenty-something Americans on vacation, this is fine. For Julia, a new immigrant from Russia, the experience was miserable. The flip side of community is often exclusion, and although Russian immigrants make up a sizeable Israeli subgroup (see: avigdor lieberman), assimilation into society remains a challenge.

At the end of the day, we went to the synagogue on the kibbutz, where an elderly rabbi spoke with a heavy accent and everyone nearly fell asleep. He explained about teffilin, which I still don't understand, and other religious rituals. He passed around a book of bar mitzvah photos going back to the 1950s. Bat Mitzvahs, of course, were markedly absent. (Women can't be bat mitzvahed in orthodox communities). After he finished speaking, someone asked a question about the difference between Judaism and Islam. From what I understood, which wasn't much, the ignorance was appalling all around. I don't know about the Muslim girls, but the Jews didn't seem to know what Ramadan was, and none of them were aware that Islam has holy leaders, too. Some of the students told me that they had already been through co-existence coursework, and that they only did it because it was required. Fine. But it was apparent that there was so much to learn.

Today, during a slideshow presentation at a Jewish elementary school, a boy noticed that one of the Muslim women didn't have her head covered, and he asked why. Mahadia told him that the woman isn't dati, the Hebrew word for religious, which is usually associated with Orthodox Jews. The class was astonished. They didn't know there were religious variations in the Islamic community too. Later, one girl commented that before the program started, she had hated all Arabs. She didn't say that she loved them now. She said, now, I know they are people. Just like me.

Word of the day

2009-06-15T04:12:00.002-04:00

Incommensurable, a:

[ad. med.L.incommensurbilis]

1. Math. Not commensurable; having no common measure (integral or fractional).

2. gen. Having no common standard of measurement; not comparable in respect of magnitude or value.

b. spec. Not worthy to be measured with; not coming up to the standard of measurement of (something); utterly disproportioned to.

much to speak of

2009-06-11T18:40:00.002-04:00

I was recently perusing the old testament (check it out!) when I came across a reference in the story of Saul (incidentally, my brother's name) to Rachel's tomb (incidentally, my middle name). In the story, Samuel (the first son of Hannah, my namesake) selects Saul as the new king of Israelites and makes a prophecy regarding his voyage home, a prophecy which includes a visit to Rachel's tomb.

2 When thou art departed from me to-day, then thou shalt find two men by the tomb of Rachel, in the border of Benjamin at Zelzah; and they will say unto thee: The asses which thou wentest to seek are found; and, lo, thy father hath left off caring for the asses, and is anxious concerning you, saying: What shall I do for my son?- 1 Samuel 10

Not so long ago, while engaging in a little sightseeing with my friend Naomi, I found myself at the spot currently thought to be Rachel's tomb. Which is where Rachel (my middle name) was buried. And where Saul (my brother's name) met two men as prophesied by Samuel (Hannah's son).

To get to Rachel's tomb, you take the Arab bus 124 (did you know: Arab Israeli communities have their own bus system, separate but equal to the Jewish system?) to the checkpoint at Bethlehem (that's where Jesus was born!). The bus drops you off on a small highway that winds its way through the Jerusalem foothills, beautiful old hills full of old and overgrown ledges from the days when Palestinian communities freely farmed this land. Rival cities of cement and stone crown each hill. At the checkpoint, a long line of cars and a parallel line of men waits to enter. It is apparent that most of the pedestrians are Palestinian; I don't know what they were doing there (I couldn't help think of migrant laborers), but the sun was burning and the checkpoint was all cement and metal and boys with guns and it was hard not to feel uncomfortable. Entrance to Rachel's tomb does not require passing through that checkpoint; it is, however, only open for Jews.

The site of Rachel's tomb is situated, unfortunately, well inside West Bank territory. To resolve this problem, Israel performed a tricky little maneuver where it bent the security fence (a long cement wall topped with barbed wire) in towards Bethlehem and out again, pushing Rachel's tomb onto the Israeli side. The bend in the fence is marked by a soldier with an M16, a teenager who informs us that walking to the tomb is not permitted. Before we can decide what to do, the boy speaks to two dati (religious) women waiting patiently to enter and asks if we can 'tramp,' which is the Israeli term for hitchhiking. We pile into the back seat with our jeans and our uncovered heads and drive down the narrow road, surrounded by walls. We know we are safe because, after all, they are religious.

Rachel's tomb itself is a characteristic Jewish religious site. We are the only people there who are not orthodox. The site is marked by a building with a long hall and a sink for ritual purification. After rinsing your hands with a special two-handled plastic cup (and reciting, if you know your stuff, the appropriate prayer) you walk down a long hall where children with sidelocks and kippahs entertain themselves. Prayer rooms for men and women are, of course, separate. The women's room is at the end of the hall. It contains two sections, an outer and inner sanctuary. Both spaces are full of prayer books and lined with benches. Women pray in both, but my impression is that the interior is reserved for the singing of relevant psalms. The women get offended when I do not pray. Instead, I ask Naomi to tell me the story of Rachel.

Actually, I already know the story of Rachel, because I recently read The Red Tent, which is a fascinating alternative to the biblical narrative. As my online bible has it, Rachel was the second, and preferred, wife of Jacob, son of Isaac, who wrestled with an angel, and who became Israel. She was beautiful, and she was Jacob's first love: he was tricked into marrying Leah, her sister, by their father Laban. Leah, because she had weak eyes and was despised, had many sons; Rachel, although apparently barren, was blessed with one son, who was Joseph of the amazing technicolored dreamcoat. In a tragic turn of events, the family of Jacob fell apart, and Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin, whose story I do not know, on the way to Bethlehem, which is the hebrew word for "house of bread" and which is where Jesus was born.

We did not want to walk out of Rachel's tomb, so we hitched a ride with a group of tourists from the states. They were not religious, and I don't know what they were doing there. They dropped us off at the bus stop where we caught the 124 back to Damascus gate. The woman in the backseat was astonished to see us hitchhiking. She kept saying, "do your mothers know you're here?" Now I suppose the answer is yes.

Obama fever

2009-06-05T02:16:00.002-04:00

Today I read the (technologically exciting) transcript of Obama's speech in Cairo. He is a brilliant, eloquent, and inspiring leader. We are fortunate.

On the nytimes middle east page, there are seven articles about Israel and Palestine, two about Iraq, one about Iran, and one about Egypt. This is absurd. According to the review of Obama's speech by Jeff Zeleny and Alan Cowell, it was primarily about Israel and Palestine. By telling Israel that America will not tolerate settlements, and by referring to Palestine as an authentic community, Obama has marked an explicit shift in America policy that has important political ramifications. Good for him. Continued settlements should not be tolerated. The Palestinian territories are culturally, politically, and religiously distinct from Israel and I now know from experience that life as a Palestinian in Israel includes humiliation and suffering on all levels. In my opinion a two-state solution is currently the best solution.

But Obama's speech was not about Israel. Obama's speech confronted seven important issues: violent extremism, Israel and Palestine, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious freedom, women's rights, and economic development. The nytimes suggests that Israel and Palestine is the most important of these seven issues, and they may be right - I am no political analyst, and anyway, they have the power to make it so - but I thought some of the other things were exciting too. Like the statement that America will promote educational and cultural exchange with middle eastern countries, and that women's literacy is a priority.

So I'm just saying, it's worth reading or watching the speech in its original form. And remembering that although Israel is the topic of approximately 70% of the nytimes reporting on the Middle East, its population is a mere seven million of the 500 million inhabitants of the Middle East. That's a big difference. And it's a complicated story.

Word of the day

2009-05-29T02:36:00.001-04:00

Oneiric (adj)

[< src="http://dictionary.oed.com/graphics/parser/gifs/mb/olenisacu.gif" alt="{olenisacu}" width="7" align="absbottom" border="0" height="15"> dream. Compare French onirique (1895), Italian onirico (1899).]

Of, characteristic of, or relating to dreams; dreamlike.

1859 The oneiric medium of revelation.
1994 Discworld has always seemed like a dream, but Pratchett has never admitted into this pleasance anything too intimately oneiric.

maybe maybe they'll stay true

2009-05-29T02:00:00.004-04:00

Today in the New York Times is a really powerful article about the complexities of the situation in Gaza,

"Misery Hangs Over Gaza Despite Pledges of Help"

The article, by Ethan Bronner, is about the impacts and implications of the siege on Gaza held in place by Israel and Egypt. According to Bronner, the siege is intended to put pressure on Hamas, but its value is doubtful and its humanitarian consequences are tragic. A few weeks ago I met a young Israeli man named Shimon who does co-existence work in Jerusalem. He spoke to me about his military service with the IDF, where he was stationed along the Gaza border. He said that while he was stationed there, they tried to open the border to let in more material goods, and they were immediately shot at by Hamas militants. He said that the siege is kept in place as much by Hamas as by Israel. "How can we open the borders when Hamas shoots at us every time we try?" he asked. "They are keeping the siege in place because it helps them secure control over the population. It helps Hamas more than it helps Israel." And his dispair and the fear of his experience on the border was palpable. It's a different perspective.

Word of the day

2009-05-25T07:02:00.000-04:00

Thallasic (adj)

Of or pertaining to the sea; growing or living in, or formed in or by the sea; marine.

Pertaining to the (smaller or inland) seas as distinct from the pelagic waters or oceans.

this is the first day of my life

2009-05-22T20:26:00.003-04:00

Sometimes life calls for a return to the classics. I live at the edge of the apocalypse (literally, the kidron valley is around the corner) and yesterday I drove down the road to bethlehem, where I collected bags of vegetables from a small farm in an Arabic village located in the valley between two settlements, on the far side of the green line. (sometimes, something goes wrong and the druse workers who deal with settlement waste on saturdays dump the sewage onto the village below. I said: that can't be environmentally sound.) Also today I have been reading about the environmental crisis and at a party in the kfar where I live, someone is playing dancing queen. So here we are:

THE SECOND COMING
william butler yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Summer in the city

2009-05-20T02:25:00.003-04:00

This is a short story that I have posted here before in Spanish. The translation is in progress: as always, I appreciate and desire comments on language, typos, style, meaning, and especially the use of spanish. Or you can just read it for the approximate pleasure. I hope you enjoy.

Wedding Vows
Antonio Skarmeta

It was extremely hot in the subway, and the young man, leaning under the only functioning air conditioner, had crossed his arms across his chest and was pretending to read an advertisement. The woman, astonished, paused for a long moment before she began to speak.

“Give me back my shoe,” she said softly.

The young man favored the woman with a quick glance, frowned, shifted his legs for balance, and calmly returned to his reading

“Please,” said the woman, a little louder. “Have the goodness to give me back my shoe.”

“She really is a beauty,” thought the young man. “If she lets just one more word slip between those lips, I will wrap my fingers in her hair, I will cradle her head in my hands, I will kiss her and I will sleep with her – a siesta resting between her breasts. “What shoe?”

“What do you mean, what shoe? My shoe! Which one did you have in mind?”

“God help me,” he thought. “Either the loneliness has driven me mad and I am hallucinating, or am really in love with this woman.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, señora,” he replied.

“It should be obvious what I'm talking about!” she insisted, stamping her bare foot against the floor of the train. “I am talking about an object known as a shoe, an object made of leather which you put on your foot and use when walking. That is what I'm talking about!”

“God help me,” said the young man to himself. “How is it possible that I am in love with such a nervous woman?”

“Please!” she demanded. “My shoe! Give me back my shoe, boy.”

Subtly, so she wouldn't notice, the young man slipped the shoe into his back pocket. He approached the woman, and once at her side he began rubbing his hands together, contemplating them as if there was nothing else going on . Then he lifted his hands as if finally resigned, he scratched his head, and, as she watched open-mouthed, he kneeled and taking her foot between his hands, he began to study it straight-faced and with absolute sincerity.

“Let's see what the problem is,” he said, turning her feet this way and that, an examination that slowly evolved into a caress. He brought his fingers to her lips and was on the point of kissing her, but he controlled himself, and breathed deep her scent.

“ Watch over me, my ángel,” he thought. “If my words fail me or if I act imprudently, she will leave me forever. Please, make me friendly, seductive, intelligent. Don't abandon me now, little angel of shit. Let the English blossom in me, let its grace flow between my teeth, let my words take on the poetry of one of Shakespeare's sonnets until even Albert Finney would envy me, and keep me from being kicked in the face by this little ray of sunshine that I hold in my hands.

And then, hiding his fear, he lifted his gaze. For a moment their eyes met and he smiled a little, hopelessly, trying to explain to her... She didn't smile back. However, with a movement that came like a breath of cool and celestial air, she passed her fingers involuntarily over his head, barely grazing its surface. He felt the touch like a caress, which left him at the point of tears. But he didn't cry, not even one single tear, although he felt his eyes grow damp, although he had to breathe deeply through his nose to control himself.

“God help me,” he murmured under his breath. “I have to know her name. Before I take her face and press my thumbs into her cheeks, I have to know her name.”

He wiped his eyes on the edge of her plaid skirt and continued his consideration of her bare foot, controlling the force of his emotions.

“The problem is simple,” he said, after a pause. “It is apparent that what you need is a shoe. If you had two shoes, you wouldn't need anything, because generally it is the fashion to go out wearing two shoes. This is my case. Look at my feet. How many shoes am I wearing? Count them. One, two. Such is the style. It is very unusual when someone like you goes out with only one shoe.”

“Something's not right,” he thought immediately. “I'm unsympathetic. In a moment, she will take the only shoe that she has left, and she will hit me across the head with it. And now the train is arriving at the station. Shit luck. I'm crossing my fingers. Here we are. Please God, please, if anyone gets on the train, I swear I will throw myself into the Hudson.

The doors closed, nobody got on, and they continued alone in the carriage.

“Listen, listen to me!” she demanded.

“Yes, my love!” he cried silently.

“I want you to give me back my shoe,” she declared, stamping her bare foot on the floor. “Are you not aware that it is not right to steal people's shoes?”

“What do you want me to say?” he protested. “I am entirely in agreement with you. There is nothing good about stealing people's shoes. Do you want to know what I think about those who steal people's shoes? They're thieves! You want to know what else I think? (We are going to be happy, that's what I think. We are going to get off the train at the station, and from then on, I am going to explore your body and your soul. You know what we will do with my pension? We will walk into a little shop and we will buy a stereo, and I will stand behind you kissing your hair while you choose a record, whichever record, any kind of music is good, and you will feel my hot breath in your ears while you consider the rhythms, and I will casually brush your breasts and I won't need to apologize because you will already have taken off my shirt at least once. You want to know what I think? I will press my nose against your bellybutton, I will twist myself like a tourniquet around your body, I will throw into the abyss a century of my life and I will baptize you with the best of names when we shower together, in the pink shower of the hotel morning after morning and we wake up with our throats parched and our mouths dry and we step half-naked onto the balcony to watch the sunrise. What do you want me to do with your shoe now? Do you know what I will do? I will eat it in front of your eyes as a symbol of my love.)

“No,” said the woman. “I don't care to know what else you think. Since you've got two shoes and you're not about to get cold, why don't you go ahead and use them to kick yourself.”

The young man, deeply ashamed because she had turned his love into a virus and into a bacterial infection, stood up and let his hands fall to his side in surrender. Then, after a moment of thought, he drew his face close to her left ear, and one might be able to say that he kissed her.

“I understand,” he murmured.

He nodded. He untied the laces of one of his shoes, and he took it off, and he offered it gravely to her.

She took the shoe and she passed her hand over its surface, so slowly that he was certain that she was caressing it.

Voy a abrirme el pecho algún día y te haré que me aprietes el corazón con tus manos ,” he said in Spanish.

The woman considered the sound of his words and she smiled cautiously, not understanding. Still serious, she passed her hand over the tongue of the shoe, she smiled, she brought it to her face and with her index finger she fingered an immense hole. Removing her hand, she looked at the young man through the broken sole.

“That's it,” he thought. “I gave her my broken shoe, just my luck . Now she thinks that I'm a vagrant, or a wandering salesman. Shit luck.“

He drew even closer to the girl, and taking her shoulders, he began to shake her, speaking in his native tongue, begging all the gods to make her understand.

“No me mires así pensando que estoy loco ,” he told her. “Before you assume anything about me, just let me say my piece. Let los ángeles give me just one year with you, and then you can think whatever you want of me, you can destroy me, you can attack me and you can fuck another man in my bed if I fail you, but give me the chance to astound you. Let me show you everything that I am capable of being, that I am more than a starving animal with no ambitions; I will be able to say this to you in your language, when you are ready to hear it. Don't assume anything of me yet. I am pure, I am intelligent, calm down without words, try not to dissect me and archive me so soon, wait while this silence grows in me and takes form, because then I will be indestructible, or at least I won't care if you destroy me.h

And then, as if a mountain of benevolent angels had been listening to his prayer, and they had made themselves manifest on the train, the woman rested her head against the wooden back of the bench, and the young man fell against her, and he kissed her and he bit her lips, and he caressed her breasts over her dress, and she put her arms around his neck, and her warm arms protected him, and if he could have spoken, he would have given her a home, he would have given her his love, he would have given her a good breakfast at seven in the morning, he would have made her laugh from time to time, and the smell of her skin and her body, the smell of her body where the root of all his ambitions were born, where the dreams of a young Chilean man resided, after having been spent and dissipated cleaning the crumbs off the tables and the stained floors of the taverns of New York, working for a few dollars in order to buy the right to kill cockroaches in the corners of the hotels, and to own a bed in which to collapse, to stare at the wall and clutch at the mattress, to vomit our loneliness every day in an oval basin on top of the dresser, to rent a piece of wood to perch on, cross our arms, and contemplate our swollen feet, red and worn from so many hours walking the asphalt of the greatest city in the world, amen, as it was said in that show that he saw in Central Park; ; without even having anyone to buy him a Lucho Gatica disk from one of the stores lit up with neon signs on forty-second street for his birthday, and to be always this way, lacking the precise vocabulary with which to profane the silence that aggravates his body like a pest, without having cultivated his voice's potential sufficiently to be able to cry out to the ángel that had forgotten him, to reproach her for having left him here, already losing his luck, his only star, between the sea and the mountains, in the one moment in his life in which his strength and his happiness were lost in the limits of his words, without which nobody, not even the ángel, could speak, and now here he was, strengthened by the two beers in his body and unable to move forward, and the subway train, the worm-train, the temple-train, the dead train, the holocaust train, was on the verge of arriving at the station, and he, the young man with the shoe in his right hand behind his back, listened again to the woman asking for her shoe, and as he pretended to read the advertisement, he attempted to twist his Spanish into an English that was cool, that was profound, that allowed him to return to her one of her shoes as a promise of his love.

Happy on my way

2009-05-17T05:50:00.002-04:00

This weekend was an unexpected adventure. Friday afternoon, I decided on a whim to tag along with my roommate Galina and her Russian friends on a trip to the Golan Heights (occupied territory in Norther Israel). Our misadventures included:

- one hour stuck on the bus on the side of the road waiting for someone to deal with a rowdy and drunken Israeli man who wanted to get off somewhere that wasn't an official bus stop, while the Shomer Shabbat folks worried about getting home before sunset and the soldiers fell over each other trying to be useful.

- Three hours wandering the deserted streets of Tyberias, waiting for the Russian friends to arrive and trying to find the beach. (Fun fact: Tyberias is on the shore of the Knerret, the source for the Jordern river and also the water that Jesus walked on).

- A night sleeping under the stars on mattresses randomly scattered across a field, on an organic goat farm somewhere in the north. Dinner was delicious homemade cheeses and fish grilled over the fire (the fish was over-salted, Galina said, in russia there is a superstition that if a meal is oversalted it means the cook is in love). breakfast was eggs from the farm hens and freshly fermented goats' milk kefir and turkish coffee prepared over the fire, yeah.

- A mad scramble down a field thick with spikes and loose rocks to what was once a beautiful swimming hole at the mouth of a spring, but is now a scummy pond full of tadpoles and water boatman and brilliant red dragonflies. A brief trek across a cow pond to another spring where the water is good unless you arrive five minutes after the entire herd of cows runs through it, as we did. The absurd picture of galina's friend sergei stripped down to his underwear and squatting in the shallow spring amidst the fig leaves, blond dreadlocks dripping, smoking a cigarette.

- another mad scramble up a steep slope off the (get this, Jess) Israel Trail to a vaguely scenic lookout where Sergei suddenly produced a kettle and matches and fresh-cut sage and we had an impromptu tea party. Across the valley we could see the cemetary for a unit of soldiers hit by a bomb at that site during the second lebanese war. That was three years ago. Later Sergei pointed to some lights at the top of a hill and he said, you see those lights? That's Lebanon.

- A final charge across town (qiryat shemona), half-empty beer bottles in hand, after we suddenly realized while eating dinner that the last bus out was in a half hour. And we made it, no problem, with a few moments to spare. Four hours later, about 2 in the morning, we were back in jerusalem. And I remembered that politics is something that enriches and complicates this country. But there is so much more to do.

the point of no return

2009-05-11T01:21:00.005-04:00

On a bus to s'de boker, a man from ashkelon said to me: America is a slave to the Palestinian cause. On the bus home from Jordan, a man from East jerusalem told me: America and the Palestinians are the same, we are both slaves to the knesset (Israeli government). What both men had in common was the belief that all aspects of the American government are tied up in the israel-palestinian conflict, just like in Israel. What both men shared was the idea that the US is a key to resolving the conflict, and that resolution of the conflict is a top priority in the US. In both cases, I couldn't help but think that in the US, there is a vast majority that doesn't care. Palestine, after all, is a small territory (it's the size of New Jersey) on the opposite side of the world. The US can always say, it's just not my problem. And only the Israelis - and the Palestinians - will care.

This is where the diaspora comes in. I continue to be astonished, in Israel, by the expectations that Israelis hold for diaspora jews like myself. "You don't have to love everything Israel stands for," I have been told kindly. "You just have to educate yourself about Israel so that you can be an international ambassador for the state." Last weekend at a dialogue session between Israeli Jews and Jews of the diaspora, we discussed how to define Jewish identity. Are you a Jew just because your mother is a Jew? Technically. What if your family celebrates Jewish holidays? Maybe. But the only consensus among the group was that people who have undergone an orthodox conversion or were born to a Jewish mother and live an orthodox lifestyle are definitely Jewish. Which makes me, most definitely, not a Jew. Which made me think about one of the major differences between myself and an Israeli. If I find myself fed up with Israeli society; if I begin to feel unwelcomed or frustrated or disappointed; if I believe that the political system is too corrupt to be effective and the democratic hypocrisy is too great to be resolved and the hegemony of violence is too encompassing to be broken down, then I can go home. I can reduce my Jewish identity to family sedars and fasting on Yom Kippur and I can leave Israel to work out its problems on its own.

I am not comfortable being an ambassador. I've studied enough political theory to know that national identity is a complicated and troubled thing. My thesis in college confronted the question of whether you can have a fixed national identity without become totalitarian. The answer I came to is no. I would never allow anyone to give me the label of American cultural ambassador: I am proud of my identity as an individual but I am not interested in being part of a collective identity, especially one with a political agenda. Israelis talk a lot about the international media wars, and some friends of mine work for a non-profit dedicated to improving Israel's image in the media abroad. Let me rephrase that: a non-profit dedicated to proliferating nationalistic propaganda abroad. Somehow the fact that Judaism is an ethnicity, a religion, and a nationality makes it impossibly difficult to keep those identities distinct. This is a problem for diaspora Jews all the time ("What's your feeling on operation cast-lead?" "I don't know, I just really like latkes"). And it's a problem for me.

I came to Israel so that I would understand the Israeli situation from the inside. I came to Israel because I was tired of having the latke/cast lead conversation. I am often told that because antisemitism exists, Israel must exist, and that because Israel must exist, our first responsibility is to maintaining that existence. Then comes politics and social justice. I am interested in Israel and I am very interested in the misconceptions that the American Left has of the state of Israel. But I am not interested in serving as the representative for any kind of nationality. Particularly not at the expense of the serious problems of oppression, racism, and human rights that are ingrained in all levels of Israel's society (women, the queer community, the secular jewish community, arab-jews, african-jews, refugees, christians, israeli-palestinians, bedouins) and Israel's relations abroad. I think that sometimes Israelis like to use the possibility of international intervention as an excuse for not working through the really difficult problems on their own. The logic is that because Israel has to maintain its security, it can't work towards peace: it is up to the diaspora to make peace a possibility. It's that kind of attitude which makes me want to give up, and go home.

Word of the day

2009-05-06T01:34:00.001-04:00

Exuviae:

The coverings of an animal that have been shed or cast off, particularly the molted exoskeletons of arthropods.
(history) Roman military term for weaponry and equipment stripped from the person of a foe.

a farther shore

2009-05-03T13:07:00.003-04:00

My cousin Hadar, whose family split from mine way back in lithuania before the war, told me about the time she met some German exchange students in Israel. They were all hanging out and a german boy offered her friend a soda. "No thanks," her friend replied. "We jews don't like gas."

Don't laugh too hard. Hadar's parents are holocaust survivors. And if Hadar's generation is telling jokes about gas chambers to their german friends, that doesn't mean it's time for the rest of us to move on. Last week, Israel marked Yom Ha'shoah (holocaust memorial day) with a national moment of silence and I thought, what if this moment of reflection was enough to keep humanity in check? What if taking one minute out of every year to think about the extraordinary horror which the holocaust represents, the astonishing ability of humanity to sink to depths that none of us, individually, can imagine - what if that was enough to make never again a reality?

But then I remembered that holocaust history isn't taught in most arabic schools in the middle east. I remembered that anti-semitism around the world is still a striking reality. I remembered that mel gibson's father is just one example of the universal ignorance which allows people to still talk about the holocaust as a conspiracy theory. And I remembered that never again has been reduced to a political slogan intended to excuse Israel's most violent and oppressive policies.

The holocaust is a fascinating topic for intellectual examination. The number of people implicated in the holocaust is extraordinary. Early zionist propaganda reworked the story of the holocaust to be a story of desperate and hopeless heroics against unstoppable evil. Primo Levi wrote about the gray zone, the jews who were complicit and the germans whose behavior was tinged with compassion (consider sonderkommandos, jews who worked in the gas chambers, or oskar schindler, who may have received financial compensation for the lives he saved). Then he killed himself. Hannah Arendt (my imaginary namesake) covered the eichmann trials and the banality of evil, the idea that evil actions are perpetrated by ordinary, not insane or extraordinary, people; Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men takes this story further by examining the personal history of the individuals who committed some of Nazi Germany's worst atrocities. Then there's Leni Riefenstahl, one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, an extraordinary cinematographer and director who was responsible for beautiful and terrifying works of nazi propaganda (see: triumph of the will), and there's Shoah, the agonizing 9 hour documentary that records the stories of numerous holocaust survivors. Finally, of course, you can read art spiegelman's truly wonderful Maus, and think about the holocaust as a question of representation and of legacy.

And all of this is to say, read something. Watch something. Remember, and think, and hope that memory and awareness can serve as part of the process of prevention. There isn't much room for hope in this part of the world, between israel and palestine and iran and pakistan and afganistan and darfur. If you can find some in the history of the holocaust, though, then maybe everyone has a chance.

yom hashoah

2009-04-25T04:29:00.001-04:00

10 am, tuesday 21 april. A moment of silence.

Declaration of Intent

2009-04-21T06:32:00.005-04:00

this is an aleph.

Un Aleph es uno de los puntos del espacio que contienen todos los puntos.

An Aleph is a point in space which contains all other points.

[The Aleph], as is well known, is the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. ... In the Kabbalah, this letter represents the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it has the form of a man who points both to heaven and to earth, to show that the world below is the mirror and the map of that above; for the Mengenlehre, it is a symbol of the transfinite numbers, in which any part is as large as the whole.

Jerusalem is an aleph.
And here begins my despair as a writer.

Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

Lord I got to stand there for myself

2009-04-16T10:10:00.003-04:00

In Amman all the maps are labeled: Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Palestine. This morning we were held up at the King Hussein bridge by a hip-hop star from Egypt on his way to play shows in Jericho and Ramallah. On both sides the border guards wanted his autograph. The King Hussein/Allenby bridge crosses over a thirsty trickle of water wending its way between the dry desert hills. The trickle of water is the River Jordan. On one side is Jordan. On the other, the West Bank.

The man on the sherut between Allenby and Jerusalem didn't tell us his name, but he did show us his Israel ID card. He was on his way to Ramallah to renew his ID. He was born 56 years ago when Jerusalem was a part of Jordan; he carries a Jordanian passport, and his official status in Israel is resident. He speaks Arabic, German, French, English, and Hebrew; he considers himself a man without a country. Although he was raised in Jerusalem, he lives in Jordan because there is no work for an Arab in Israel: I could own a shop, he says, but I have a degree in electrical engineering. I want more than that.

I asked him what citizenship he wanted; he said he would prefer an American passport. He says that Americans and Palestinians are the same: both are prisoners of the Knesset, the Israeli government. Americans are political prisoners, while Palestinians are physically imprisoned. He renews his Israeli residency so that he can visit his family in Palestine. He told us the story of his mother, who wanted to go on the Hajj. Every country has a quota of pilgrims that can travel each year. She applied to go with the Israel group, but she is not an Israeli citizen. She applied to go with the Palestinian Authority, but she has no Palestinian identity. She applied to go with Jordan, but although she holds a passport, she does not live in Jordan. She was rejected on all counts; she does not have the political identity necessary to make pilgrimage.

So we drove through the West Bank. I didn't realize that would happen. We drove past Bedouin shacks stacked haphazardly along the wadi, the dry river beds. We drove past cities where Palestinian residents live their lives in the shadow of the wall, and we drove past settlements where Israeli Jews send their roots deep into the earth and hold on, eyes shut tight. We drove through a tunnel and there we were on Har Hatzophim, at the entrance to Hebrew University. It happened that fast. It is all so close.

legacy

2009-04-10T08:48:00.003-04:00

Lace

Bent over
the open notebook -

light fades out
making the trees stand out
and my room
at the back
of the house, dark.

In the dusk
I am still
looking for it -
the language that is

lace:

a baroque obligation
at the wrist
of a prince
in a petty court.
Look, just look
at the way he shakes out

the thriftless phrases
the crystal rhetoric
the bobbined knots

and bosses:
a vagrant drift
of emphasis
to wave away an argument
or frame the hand
he kisses;
which, for all that, is still

what someone
in the corner
of a room,
in the dusk,
bent over
as the light was fading

lost their sight for.

-Eavan Boland

no one knows my name

2009-04-10T08:15:00.003-04:00

Here's a link to a little pr about mass academy, which might be the victim of budget cuts this year. I don't know how I feel about that. Is Mass Academy - the two year magnet school for engineering which I graduated from - a good utilization of state education resources? I have a feeling that mass academy, with its mediocre space and low staff numbers, keeps its overhead down. I also know that a lot of my classmates found it to be an important alternative to their public education, where they were not challenged academically and where the education was certainly not tailored to the specificity of their interests. Particularly for my friends who saved a year of college fees by attending WPI our senior year, and even more particularly for those who did end up becoming engineers, I know Mass Academy provided some positive opportunities. On the other hand, there were some serious flaws with the mass academy education. I was not the only student who slipped through the cracks in that program, and in a graduating class of 42, that's simply not acceptable. Maybe Mass Academy would function better as a special scholarship program that allows high-achieving students to attend WPI in their senior year, perhaps with a junior year after-school preparatory component. That would cut costs dramatically while still maintaining, and even possibly improving, the major benefits of the program.

**18-april: the Save Mass Academy Website is practically inspiring. Maybe things have changed for the better there. Maybe my own narrative is revisionist. & perhaps the value the school holds for so many students overshadows the negative impact that it had on me.

ghosts

2009-04-08T05:50:00.002-04:00

from an interview with bob dylan

BF: Are you a mystical person?

BD: Absolutely.

BF: Any thoughts about why?

BD: I think it’s the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I‘m more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

BF: But the album is all about love – love found, love lost, love remembered, love denied.

BD: Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

1000 words

2009-04-04T09:42:00.003-04:00

I don't think in images but I understand the appeal. I have posted a photo-tour that walks out of my apartment and counter-clockwise around Mount Scopus. Here are some choice pictures, for your viewing pleasure.

I didn't know it was spring in jerusalem until I stepped out of my apartment and saw the trees blooming over the british military cemetary. My bus stop is across the street and there is something almost comic about seeing this solid colonial landmark every morning before I head into the fray.

Just south of mt. scopus is the Old City of Jerusalem. Perhaps the holiest location in the world. It is hard to separate history from mythology: it is here that God selected the earth used to make Adam; Abraham prepared his sacrifice of Isaac; Solomon built the first Jewish temple; Herod (?) built the second Jewish temple; Jesus was crucified; the Prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven...

This lookout point was funded by the Winnipeg Negev Dinner, 1995, honoring the survivors of the holocaust and memorializing those who perished in it.

Beyond the holocaust memorial stones is the West Bank. In the center, the wall separating Israel from the Palestinian territories. A little south of this picture (to the right) is the Dead Sea.

ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum

2009-04-03T01:41:00.004-04:00

So that, nothing that has been heard can be retold in the same words

In Israel there are two national languages: Hebrew and Arabic. Both languages are sacred - the Old Testament and the Qur'an are transcriptions (not translations) of the voice of God. In literary theory, this means that they are languages with a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified - in literary theory, this means that in Hebrew or in Arabic it is possible to pinpoint Truth. This is why very religious Jews are opposed to the use of Hebrew in colloquial correspondence (they prefer Yiddish). There is something disconcerting and slightly illicit about hearing a language which I learned in synagogue used to discuss things like bathrooms, money, and politics.

The two sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict speak two different languages; both sides (and this is not a religious argument) believe that the words they use are direct signifiers for Truth. At a mosque in Haifa yesterday, a man argued in English that violence in Islam is the fault of a misreading of the Qur'an: go back to the text, he suggested, and you will find peace and justice. A recent Slate magazine article argued that the Truth of the Old Testament is inherently violent (I refer you to my own Bat Mitzvah torah portion, in which God opens the earth and swallows the followers of Korach). It is a question, of course, of interpretation: not the liberal-arts everyone-is-equally-right kind of interpretation, but the kind in which there is only one right answer, if we could only define it.

In Israel, language is another battleground in the war against co-existence. In Jewish schools, students are taught Hebrew and English; in the Arab schools, Arabic, English, and Hebrew are all taught seriously. When student groups are brought together, the closest common language is Hebrew. "Why don't the Jewish kids learn Arabic?" asked a girl in an elementary school in Ein Rafa. Ruti, a graduate of the Jewish system, told me the answer was obvious: it is a conscious effort to maintain distance between Jewish and Arab communities. Certainly, the Jewish diaspora that travels to the Middle East has demonstrated minimal interest in learning even the basics of the Arabic language. With that in mind, I offer you the following crash-course in tourist's Arabic and tourist's Hebrew. Questions are followed by the relevant responses, and accented syllables are sometimes in bold. Genders in Arabic are a little uncertain.

Hello:
-Salaam aleikhum
-Aleikhum esalaam (answer)

-Shalom

What's up?
-Kif halek (f)/ Kif halak (m)
-Mabsutah (happy!)

- Mah nishmah?
- B'seder (all good)

What's your name?
-Shu ismak (m)/ Shu ismek (f)
-Ismi [Hannah]

- Mah shemcha (m) / Mah shemech (f)?
- Shmi [Hannah]

Nice to meet you
- Tcharafnah
-Na'im M'od

Thank you
-Shukran
-Todah

You're welcome
Afwan
B'vakeshah (also means please)

I don't speak Arabic or hebrew
Ana ma bahkish arabi, ibrani

Ani lo m'deberet arabit, ivrit (f)
Ani lo m'deber arabit, ivrit (m)

I speak English
Ana bahki inglizi

Ani m'deberet anglit (f)
Ani m'deber anglit (m)

No
La'
Lo

Yes
aiwa or aa (casual)
ken

Good-bye
-Ma salameh
-Shalom

but i know it's mine

2009-03-29T15:38:00.003-04:00

I just came across an article in the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture* which drew my attention. The article is about the lawyer who runs The Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education in Nazareth. It talks about the importance of holocaust education in the Arab community as part of co-existence efforts. It is interesting because while Jews can talk forever about the relationship between Israel and the holocaust (Israel must exist because of the holocaust; the holocaust is no excuse for Israeli violence) it never occurred to me before that the Arab community might not even know all that much about holocaust history or the anti-semitism and violence which is such a part of Israel's own nation-myth. Talk about a gaping communicative chasm.

*3-april-09: the article is "Adolf Hitler Cannot Determine This Conflict's Course"

that solo's really long but it's a pretty song

2009-03-29T13:59:00.002-04:00

Check this out:
Radio All for Peace is a co-existence initiative that brings together palestinian and jewish Israeli culture through a collaborative radio project. The station website is www.allforpeace.org (find the button on the upper right corner for English). It offers a combination of radio-chat, discourse, and some pretty fantastic music; it can be streamed in Jerusalem and, I imagine, around the world.

Actualization

2009-03-25T16:23:00.000-04:00

I was recently reminded that I have yet to write at all about the work that I am doing in Jerusalem. This is perhaps because I am overwhelmed with the intensity of my impressions and am having a difficult time drawing out abstractions. I should, however, be able to stick to specifics. Here then is a brief description of my working life.

I am currently an intern at the Center for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage. In Hebrew and in Arabic, the programs offered by the center are referred to simply as "Simon," as in "it's time for simon now." Simon says this is probably not quite appropriate, but after 17-odd years of running CCECH, he has earned his cult of personality.

CCECH is a non-profit organization which runs a co-existence program for fourth and fifth grade students. The two year curriculum is based on the study of folklore - religion, games, toys, and family traditions. Children work with their families to develop an understanding of their own background. Student groups from Arab and Israeli schools are then brought together to share folklores and develop relationships.

My first day with CCECH, I arrived at a beit sepher (elementary school - literally, 'house of books') in western Jerusalem and found myself suddenly surrounded by crowds of students who couldn't understand each other, never mind me. The program is bilingual hebrew and arabic. If you thought group management was difficult in English, try doing it through a translator. CCECH is fortunate to have a group of truly extraordinary bilingual educators who somehow manage to teach name games to twenty-five nervous kids in two languages without imploding. For a mono-lingual english speaker, however, every day seems to run a little closer to disaster.

The day started with name games and greetings read by representatives from each school. It was the first time that this group of students had met each other and they were brimming with nervous energy. Fortunately, the first group activity was a 10 o'clock meal, and that's something everyone can get involved in. After a few moments of hesitation, the fifty kids (divided into two groups of girls, two of boys) were wreaking havoc on plates of hummos and labneh with olive oil and zatar, olives and pickles, sliced vegetables and pita - the Israeli diet is so hippie-friendly. After the meal, everyone charged outside to the playground, a sparse and dusty field of cracked-cement where four game-stations were set up. Duck Duck Goose, it turns out, also exists in both Israeli and Arabic culture, each with its own variation and entertaining song. Traditional American duckduckgoose has nothing on these guys, although the kids were up for a couple of rounds in English. Opposite the goose circle, kids tossed stones into holes cut into a box - each hole represented points, and points translated into... more stones! Apparently a british game, but similar activities can be found in arcades throughout the suburban united states. Around the corner, an Arabic mother taught everyone a game from her childhood, 'seven stones.' The kids were divided into two teams, and stood in a semi-circle facing a carefully balanced tower of stones. One team had a tennis ball: their task was to knock down the tower. As soon as they succeeded, the semi-circle broke and the teams faced off. One team tried to rebuild the tower, while the other team attempted to tag them out by hitting them with the ball. Definitely a street game. My favorite game was called "salt fish," and I think it was Israeli. All the kids stood in a circle, with one person in the center. She started to tell a story, tapping one person for each word she spoke. The theme of the story was "salt fish." When she had said the phrase three times, the circle dissolved and it became a game of tag, with the storyteller as IT. Once someone had been tagged, the game shifted again, and became a variation on red-light, green light. Once the first kid passed the end-line, everything started over again.

Even kids have a limit on how many games they can play - eventually, everyone was exhausted, and the day devolved into free play, which is potentially the most meaningful time of the afternoon. Although kids tended to segregate by school, there were certain activities - jumprope and soccer were the most remarkable - that cross-cut social and cultural boundaries. It is thrilling to watch these kids try to develop a relationship despite cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries. Just like so many alternative education programs, success seems to occur when it is least expected. At the end of the day, the kids gather back together and thank each other for the day. Each time, their statements are consistent. I was afraid, they say, of what the day would be like. But now, I have found a new friend. And they look, with a smile, into each other's eyes. If they were a couple of years older, they might even find each other on facebook.

I could say to myself I've got the words but I can't speak

2009-03-21T18:45:00.003-04:00

Today I am in a nostalgic mood. Last night in a bar in downtown Jerusalem they were playing the cardigans and I asked Celli why Israel is so nostalgic for the nineties. He said Israelis are nostalgic in general. I quoted Yuri my Ulpan instructor, who argued that Israeli nostalgia stems from being a country of displaced individuals, caught in the memory of a home in the diaspora that no longer exists. The countercurrent to haaretz yisrael. To my surprise, Celli took me seriously and offered confirmation. Then he said the cardigans are a good band and it's a shame to forget them so quickly. And I said yes, I used to have the cardigans on tape cassette.

Today I drank tea and ate popcorn and cake with a group of Russians who spoke with beautiful if incomprehensible expressiveness. In a lecture at Harvard, Borges suggested that poetry like music can be understood across language barriers. Today I went backwards through this blog to its original conception, a forum for my academic and literary pursuits. It's astonishing how far away from that world I have moved and how smoothly my writing has transitioned with me. Last night I came across a copy of Borges' lecture on a bookshelf at my boss's house. I reached out to touch it reverantly but I pulled back. I am not in a reverant space. Right now I feel as though politics are encroaching on my poetry and my philosophy and I am not comfortable with that. Right now I feel as though poetry and philosophy have no place in such a trouble world. I am afraid of that.

There is a lookout point not far from where I live that offers an extraordinary view of the desert, stretching out past the crumbling fingers of East Jerusalem. There are narrow footpaths that lead down the mountain; in the distance, the desert fades into dust. The desert is rapidly becoming a powerful symbol for me, the possibility of a safe space in a world of traffic and public transportation, shopping and god and poverty and politics and also something beautiful. Running perpendicular at the foot of the mountain is a road, and running along the side of the road is a wall. I am not sure that this is the defense wall which separates Jerusalem from the West Bank but it could be. On the delicate ledge that lines the lookout there is a plaque and the plaque reads: funds for this park came from a dinner held in honor of holocaust survivors and in memory of those who perished, Toronto, 1991. Every day in Jerusalem there is a reason to cry.

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

2009-03-21T04:52:00.002-04:00

Shabbat shalom! I am writing from my laptop in my new apartment in Jerusalem, which is illegal under the eyes of god on account of technology and writing are both impermissible on the Jewish sabbath. I am living with three girls who are both kosher and shomer shabbat, so I will review some of the other things I have learned about Jewish regulations:

1: My house keeps pretty much kosher. This means that we have two sets of dishes, one for meals prepared with dairy and one for meals prepared with meat. As a non-meat-eater, I use exclusively dairy dishes, although sometimes my meals are vegan ("parve" in Jewish terminology), and could be prepared anywhere. We also have two sinks, with two sponges, for washing the two sets of dishes. Additionally, in a law that I had forgotten, there are regulations as to when and how you get to switch from milk to meat. As I understand it, if you eat dairy, you are allowed to switch immediately to meat (icecream before the meal) but if you eat meat, you must wait several hours before partaking in dairy. Even chocolate. This strikes me as extremely challenging. But I've never been good with gastronomic self control.

2. Keeping kosher is confusing (can I drink water in a dairy cup that came out of a meat tap? which sink do I use to wash the table with? What if I'm using vegetables that weren't killed humanely?). But keeping shabbat is so much harder. Shabbat starts on Friday night at sunset with a shout that echoes through the city. Actually several shouts, just in case. After sunset, officially, you are not allowed to do the following things: use electronics or technology, write, drive, ride a bus, cook (or prepare?) a meal, make a phone call, turn on lights, turn off lights, publish a blog post. Some implications of this include the fact that if I turn off a bathroom light, my roommates will be in some serious trouble. Also the heat in our apartment was mega-high all night because it was cold yesterday afternoon. Also, because Israel is something of a theocracy, there are no buses running in Jerusalem after 4pm friday. and that gets challenging. Fortunately, my boss's son picked me up in his car for dinner at their house. But more on that later.

For those of you who don't already know, my roommates are wonderful. They include "la trois francais," a trio of fun and excessively friendly Jewish french girls who all have curly brown hair and pale faces and who speak very quickly. also galina, my similarly secular friend from st. petersburg, who thankfully is fluent in everything and spends a lot of time with a headache from all the translating she does. A lot of people here talk about "losing their language," which is the term used to describe the inability to remember even your native tongue. My cousin Hadar, who is more cheerful about the situation, simply says "vodka!" to fill in the gaps.

but not right now

2009-03-19T16:55:00.004-04:00

I am filled with an overwhelming number of things to say. Something about folklore and pride and whether you can appropriate your own cultural traditions; something about land and zionism and turning the desert green; something too about language and french and hebrew and arabic and russian ("What did you think I was speaking, romanian? asked Galina) and it's too much so instead, here is a picture that another Hannah took near ben-gurion's grave in the Negev, which is not green, and to which I hope to return.

somedays aren't yours at all

2009-03-10T14:52:00.003-04:00

There was a man on the boardwalk feeding the cats. Remember Plato? There was a man on the boardwalk feeding the shadows of cats. He was singing under his breath in Hebrew and he was scooping dry bits of food out of a pushcart and the shadows whispered across the sandy stones that line the palisade, cautiously approached his offering.

There were three boys swimming in the ocean. There were three boys with their juvenile stomachs sticking out over the elastic of their swimming trunks (the youngest was wearing a speedo) splashing in the waves and there was one girl standing still while the water drained around her knees and she was wearing jeans and they were heavy and salty and wet.

On the other side of the breakwater there was a man walking barefoot in the sand. He was beautiful and lonely and he was throwing a tennis ball for his barefoot dog. He threw the tennis ball and his dog chased it right over the breakwater and into the sea.

On the crumbling cement of the breakwater, someone scrawled in blue spray paint, "Know Hope." Underneath, someone sprayed a crude blue Mogen David, a star of David. I was sitting on a rock looking out over the gray waves of the Mediterranean, looking out over the breakwater. Remember the ache of salt on your callused feet? Remember the terrifying thrust of the waves, the frenetic pounding and ascenscion of the sea? To my right, the awkward girl stood uncertainly in her jeans and her hijab, watching her brothers dive in the waves. To my left, the barefoot man and his barefoot dog stood lonely on the rocks. It was sunset, and dati couples in kippahs and tallitot kept a respectable distance as they walked along the promenade, observed in silence by the shadow of a dozen cats.

you gotta live when the spirit says live

2009-02-27T16:59:00.003-05:00

(on another note)
I miss being able to take an environmental ethic for granted among my peers. I miss being able to assume that nobody around me drinks Coke products or eats at McDonalds. I miss being able to walk down the street without worrying about harassment. I miss being able to walk alone on the beach without worrying about rape. I miss not having to worry about shomer shabbat and I miss always having someone to call on a friday night. I miss truly respecting all of my housemates. I miss sharing musical tendencies and feminist ideologies and an irreverant fashion sense with the people around me. I miss the days when being a vegetarian was more common than being kosher and when god wasn't a part of it.

But I like being spoken to like a native. And I like it here, so far I do.

L'shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim

2009-02-27T15:29:00.003-05:00

One interesting and controversial element of Israeli policy is the "law of return" (hok ha'shvut), which gives members of the Jewish diaspora the right to Israeli citizenship. For me, the law of return has some interesting implications - it means that I could choose to "make aliyah" and become an Israeli citizen, a decision that has some major financial perks. There are some controversial elements to the law (don't Palestinians have the right of return, too?) and there is definitely a possibility that it is part of the "unspoken demographic race" between Jews and Palestinians, battling for a population majority in a theoretically democratic society (another topic, for another day). Yesterday, though, I went to an interesting talk about making aliyah that I wanted to share.

The speaker was a middle-aged Chicagoan with a gut hanging over his belt and a sandy comb-over. He had a round, smiling face and a white schmear of spittle in the corner of his mouth and he spoke excitably and spat when he talked. He was an extraordinary and well-rehearsed storyteller and even though we had already spent over two hours listening to a disorganized Amnesty lecture about Darfur, it took him about five minutes to get the entire audience hooked. His own family made aliyah when he was fourteen and the story he told was about his participation as an officer during Project Moses, the 1985 evacuation of several thousand Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

It's a totally crazy story. As told by this enthusiastic and gregarious Israeli, the Ethiopian Jewish community (known as Beta Israel, children of Israel) represents one of the lost tribes of Israel. They are thought to be descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba - their rituals, according to the speaker, descend from the first temple period (ie Passover but not Purim; Sacrifices but not prayer; temples but no synagogues) but their traditions are definitely Jewish. As the story goes, famine and civil war in Ethiopia put the survival of this small and isolated Jewish community at risk, and the Israeli government decided to air-lift the entire community to Israel and provide them a home under the law of return. Israeli soldiers and Ethiopians walked for more than two weeks across the desert to Sudan, where they were airlifted by chartered planes (US, I think) to Israel. The whole operation was secret, and Sudan, of course, does not recognize Israel as a nation, so when the story got leaked, the operation was called off. Two other operations - Operation Solomon in 1991 and another in 1995 resulted in a total of, well, according to the BBC more than 60,000 Ethiopian refugees in Israel.

If I'm tentative in my retelling, it's because a little bit of research on the BBC (there's a nice summary here) showed some major flaws in the speaker's story. According to the story I heard, for example, Beta Israel was a totally isolated community. In fact, they were first introduced to the Western world by Christian missionaries in the 1800s, who in turn attracted the attention of European Jewry; an 'educated elite' among the Beta Israel then decided to adopt international Jewish practices to bring them closer to the international community. There are questions, too, about the ethics of the operation. The BBC asks whether the removal of Beta Israel was a humanitarian act, or a bid to swell Jewish populations in Israel. You might ask if it's appropriate to pick up an entire African civilization and stick it in the middle of Tel Aviv. You might wonder about the incredible process of assimilation necessary (for better or worse) to convert a community of African substitance farmers into high-tech Israelis. And there remains the question of the people left behind: while it sounds like the situation in Ethiopa was dire enough to require desperate measures, there is something uncomfortable about extending humanitarian aid exclusively to Jews, especially Jews whose connection with Western Jewry really is biblical. The BBC comments that several sub-sects of Beta Israel, the Quarans and the Falas Mora were rejected at least until the 1990s on the grounds that they maybe weren't Jewish. And what about the other minority communities in Ethiopia who have suffered because of civil war? And what about the majority civilian populations, who are suffering as well? What does it mean to reject them?

Before the lecture on Ethiopia, a group from Amnesty came to talk about refugees in Israel. In particular, they spoke about African refugees, and especially the case of Darfur, because refugees from Sudan have travelled north through Egypt into Israel. Unlike the Ethiopian case, these refugees are not Jewish, and do not have the right of return. Their welcome into Israeli society has been questionable at best. Because Sudan does not believe in Israel's right to exist, Darfurian refugees (carrying Sudanese passports) are actually viewed as enemies of the state. At the same time, the Israeli stamp on their passports means that if they do try to return to Sudan (or if they're deported by Israeli) they will face certain death. African refugees hold an uncomfortable place in Israel, due apparently to the fact that Israel has no official, coherent policy on refugees. While Israel is desperate to increase its number of Jewish citizens, it is consistently wary about extending that status to non-jews (again, a question of voter demographics). African refugees do not hold Israeli citizenship, and many of them don't even have refugee status. There is little attempt to support the refugee communities or to help them assimilate. The Amnesty lecture was weak in a comforting way (too much anger, too much body odor, not enough coherent proposals for change) but it brought up interesting questions. I am something of an egalitarian and a cynical idealist. If Israel represented anything in my childhood, it was the idea of a place of guaranteed asylum for the opressed minorities of the world. Instead, Israel is a place of guaranteed citizenship for the Jewish diaspora, from starving Ethiopians to the disatisfied Western elite. I understand that losing a Jewish majority is a risk that the Israeli government is terrified to take (remind me to talk about Lieberman next week). But it's disappointing that the values that I share with the founders of Israel have become submerged beneath the heavy weight of Jewish pride.

Good car to drive after a war

2009-02-25T14:26:00.001-05:00

I am sitting in a small but functional apartment on rehov hamelech george, five minutes walk from the shuk where I bought pungent cumin and basil and tomatoes trucked in this morning from up north. Today I went running on the beach and I chased the waves around hippie couples cuddled in each other's arms, men with yamikahs perched on their foreheads and one man upside down with his head in the sand, still as a stone. Here I am in Tel Aviv and today I am living in a city of the world.

My run takes me downhill past hip little clothing stores and coffee shops, residential buildings under construction and a thousand convenience stores, towards the sea. I dodge several chic hotels and strange promenades and run straight onto the sand, firm in the wake of a receding tide. I pass young shirtless men hitting small rubber balls at each other with wooden rackets, a distinctly Israeli game. People in sophisticated athletic wear work out at the colorful exercise stations lining the beach. In a small park, men in harnesses are hooked into giant ballooning kites, learning how to kite surf (my new obsession. I want to learn too, I do).

Keep running. Pass an orthodox couple, the man in yamekah and nice clothes, woman with her hair in a scarf. Pass a lady leaning against a railing overlooking the beach, fully covered in Islamic garb. Suddenly shamed by my own exposed (and unshaved) legs. On my left, an ancient mosque stuck between shiny Israeli buildings, old sandy stone and beautiful keystone windows. On my right, the gutted remnants of an old nightclub, abandoned and left as a memorial after a terrorist attack in 2001. Suddenly looming ahead, the strange white towers of Jaffa, old Arab city attached to Tel Aviv, now a major shopping destination and the end of the beach.

So this is Tel Aviv, and in so many ways it is a comfortable city. Translated street signs and everyone m'deberim anglit. Five minutes walk from a laundromat and a supermarket, the shop next door plays Belle and Sebastian on loop and my Ulpan (Hebrew language class) is in a community center for sexual minorities, lined with rainbow flags and frequented by happy couples and, today, by an Israeli musical superstar. Such is life in Tel Aviv and it's only forty minutes from Jerusalem but I think there is a determined insistence here that we are somewhere else entirely, in a cosmopolitan international community with an open mind and lots of sun and good times. Today I went to a lecture on the political system in Israel and after I asked my roommate what she thought, and she is intelligent and Russian and she said to be honest, I didn't hear anything he said, but he moved his hands a lot and I think he was funny. He was a top political reporter for the Jerusalem Post and he was funny. His political views were lukewarm and zionist and painfully revealing but he made fun of Sarah Palin and that's always good. He said the Palestinians are fully culpable for the failure of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He said the hardest problem reporters face right now is how to show the world that what Israel is doing is right.

2009-02-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

You know that painting that Benjamin likes to quote with the angel of time facing off against history in some sort of violent sepia apocolypse? Envision that apocolypse as an interior experience and try to comprehend how it felt to be standing on cobblestones laid down by Herod the Great and watching Haredim men in hats and coats bowing and praying at the Western wall and in the background a mad crowd of Masa tourists clammering to get out and maybe we should all just go get a drink.

Some things I didn't know: get biblical. Start with Abraham and Isaac, you know the story, where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son and he climbed a mountain and there on the side of the mountain he prepared a sacrifice and that mountain is in Jerusalem and the sacrificial site is known today as the Holiest of Holies in Jewish lore. Highway 61. So a temple was built on the mountain (that's temple the first) and then it was destroyed and then along came Herod and he decided the mountain wasn't big enough (mountain? my Western friends, don't misunderstand, this is more like a bump in the landscape) so he built a platform that covered the entire goddamn thing. And on the platform a temple. And seven years later, that temple was trashed, too.

And this afternoon, just for a minute I thought I understood something when I claimed that Israel was a colonial enterprise. What eurocentric postcolonial bullshit have I been reading? English colonialism barely earns a spot on the timeline of this story because Jerusalem has been conquered by including:

King David and the Jews
King Herod (jewish, ish) and the Romans (not)
Byzantine Christians
Ottoman Turks
British Protestants
Israeli Jews

And then some. Did you know the Dome of the Rock (Islamic symbol) is located on the platform where Herod constructed the second temple (Jewish symbol)? Did you know that you can stand in the courtyard of a mosque where the last supper is rumored to have taken place and where the biblical King David's tomb is said to be? As we walked towards the Western wall, the exterior wall of the temple ruins where religious Jews come to pray, we went through an archway peppered with bulletholes. And as we stood on the platform behind the fence which divides women's prayer from men's (visitors, this is the site of the Holiest of Holies where the Lord is Always Present, please make sure to dress appropriately so as not to distract the religious from their prayers) and an American girl complained about the unsightly curtains obscuring construction on the bridge leading to the Dome of the Rock (no Israelis allowed) I found myself in a crossfire of gender inequality and religious tension, cultural appropriation and tourism and history and I found myself unexpectedly confronted with the ethnologic realization that there is no Other, and that this heritage is my own.

Flesh becomes water, wood becomes bone

2009-02-11T09:43:00.002-05:00

Day one in the homeland:

There was a beautiful girl waiting for the train with us who was carrying an M16 (Rachel told me it was an M16, I don't know my guns) and I couldn't stop looking at her. On the train I was brushing knees with a massively overweight soldier-boy in khakis and as we walked down the beach towards the sunset last night we passed a man in a wet suit and three guys jogging with army-weight backpacks on. There is a naval base in Haifa and there are soldiers everywhere but I think more importantly there are soldiers everywhere here.

So, day one in the homeland and I'm concerned with the idea that I am coming home. The bartender at the private Irish pub last night where we celebrated my first day in Israel and Rachel's one year anniversary went by the name Tobasco. His parents are from Argentina and he told us about the difficulty they had in learning Hebrew and I never would have guessed that he was an immigrant because of course practically everyone is an immigrant here. Practically everyone, says Rachel, is an immigrant or Arab and I can't help but think that there is something complicated about how Israel might be my homeland but in some way, it's no longer theirs. The first thing the bartender asked me as he gave me samples of the different beers (something from Haifa, something Czech, and Nazi Brew, made by something-something-German-unclear) was whether I was scared and of course I am terrified to be here. I am terrified because I have never lived in a country at war before. I am terrified because I can't distinguish a friendly hello from harassment and because I don't know how to order lunch or how to take the trains or how to read the road signs and recognize my bus stop. The bartender taught me how to say “don't rape me” in Hebrew and thought it was funny and I guess it's funny. But then, for him this is home.

So shalom is hello and slichah is excuse me and I still don't know how to say “I don't speak Hebrew” but the words are on their way. I will get this. I will learn the language and I will learn the letters and I will become comfortable enough to travel alone. I will learn my history and a little bit about culture and about community and about immigration but I can't imagine, really I can't imagine that I will ever feel at home.

plagues

2009-02-06T12:24:00.002-05:00

Science magazine reports that scientists have identified the neurochemical mechanism that makes locusts swarm. The tendency of locusts to swarm is referred to as "density-dependent phenotypic plasticity." In other words, when locust population density increases, locusts exhibit a transformation from a solitary lifestyle ('solitarious') to a social, swarm-forming lifestyle ('gregarious'). The scientists involved in this study determined that a change in seratonin levels (yes, that's the same stuff that makes us unhappy) switches locusts from mutual aversion to mutual attraction. Maybe, to manage locust swarms, we need to give them zoloft?

From another persepective, how exciting is this research? I'm thinking I should drop everything I love and become a research entomologist. I could probably be happy living that way.

the early bird gets fucked over by the irs

2009-02-02T15:14:00.002-05:00

A warning to anyone thinking about filing their taxes early:

so I thought, good idea, I'm leaving the country in two weeks, I'll file my taxes now and get it over with. Spent a good four hours sorting my way through federal and 2 state taxes, trying to work my way through impossibly complicated numerical formulas designed for people unable to understand basic seventh grade math, submitting online and paper forms and spending time chatting with a guy whose son applied to Olin about why the website was dysfunctional, and then decided to take a break before tackling my final form to walk down to the mailbox and discovered to my astonishment an unexpected 1099-MISC form, that is, a formulaic change in my income which will decrease my federal tax refunds, increase my maine state refund by two dollars, and decrease my massachusetts refunds. We're talking pennies here but we're also talking I have to go through and rework all my bloody numbers for all those bloody forms and I am going to new york tomorrow and I fucking hate paperwork god damn it.

the end.

emma, a prelude

2009-02-02T10:13:00.005-05:00

what better way to run away from your lover than with a pun? Adieu, emma, a dieu - goodbye, and go with god, and the sleazy lover takes off into the night and leaves emma behind. Adieu, emma, a dieu and basta emma basta! Marcello says that when his girlfriend goes crazy in la dolce vita and his emotionally distanced mysoginist character can't take it anymore. basta emma basta that's Italian and 1960 and adieu, of course, that's nineteenth century french (flaubert, did I mention that? Flaubert and Madame Bovary) and who would have thought to put the two of them together but when I'm done and ready to move I say basta, emma, basta and adieu emma a dieu. Is it just the recipocracity of emmas? I knew an emma once she was not thin or pallid or weak and she wouldn't look twice at a mysogynist man but me? maybe I could be an emma and maybe you could be rodolphe, so I could keep on eating men alive and tending towards hysteria (hysteria! caused when the uterus becomes light and dry from lack of sexual intercourse, causing madness and weakness and of course the cure is sex, if you're greek, or repression, if you're flaubert, or drugs and therapy, if you're fellini - or brain imaging, if you're the nytimes) but really where all this leaves me is on the other side of the line, it's emma that I'm trying to leave behind and that puts me in an altogether peculiar position in terms of basta and good-bye. In terms of characteristics I am none of the above so I can only say this. That I fall somewhere between fellini and flaubert and that I like to see the world through the emmas and their men and that I like to say enough! and I like to say good-bye. And go with god.

the secret chord

2009-01-30T08:45:00.002-05:00

Smile like you mean it

2009-01-23T09:36:00.003-05:00

Did you know: tree mortality rates have more than doubled in recent decades in otherwise undisturbed forests of the western United States? So states Science Magazine in this week's Science report. Here is what we know about tree mortality: that it is not related to elevation, tree size, taxon, fire history, or competition - thus, likely, global climate change. Just another reminder that environmental conservation cannot be merely the isolation of nature reserves, although of course the more of those the better. As I learned in New Mexico, nature isn't interested in borders - the invasives growing along the farm's boundary will cross over into the wildlife refuge, and gas emissions in the city will spread beyond the city limits. (Although, interestingly, the invasive fire ant has surprised all scientific expectations by respecting the Mexican border. Hah?) Worldwide impacts, remember? Let's just keep those in mind.

oh the glory

2009-01-23T08:25:00.002-05:00

Mine eyes have seen the glory - and no, it wasn't Obama (although that was exciting too). This week, on my brother's insistence, I rented the movie microcosmos. We were sitting in my parents' den, a cloth laid out beneath us, and I cut my brother's hair while we watched the movie play out across the screen.

It is an impossible beauty. It is an amazing film.

The background. Microcosmos is a film of insects. It is footage - just footage - and sound. Hardly any voice-over. Certainly no David Attenborough (to whom I gave my heart many years ago) or profile shots of intelligent officials. Certainly no science, or context, at all. Just the French countryside, just the movement of the sun across the sky, just insects, and sound, and song.

This is not to say that there's no narrative. We all know how to read music, and the music, when it occurs, tells stories only slightly tainted by anthropomorphization. Watch - no, live the adventure of a dung beetle as it rolls a ball across the treacherous earth. Experience the drama of a rainstorm that crashes indiscriminately against water, earth, and leaves. Dedicate yourself to the astonishing effort of a water bug as it forms an underwater bubble and puts a shrimp inside. (Why? Absolutely no idea. But the work is fascinating).

The film is fascinating too. Imagine the technology and the patience necessary to capture the slow marching of an endless line of soldier-caterpillars on film. The emergence of an insect from its egg and its movement to devour its own former shell. And the sounds - I know the BBC has a massive collection of sound and that sound tends to be a special effect, but my understanding (and I have no legitimate source here) is that they also used special microphones to capture the noise a caterpillar makes when eating a shell. Whether it's 'real' or not, the film puts natural sounds and music in conjunction to tell a story, and its success is a phenomenal work of art.

The tagline on IMDB for this film is "it's Jurassic Park in your backyard." If you're looking for a human adventure, this is not it. Anthropomorphization, one of those dangerous literary words that implies the incorporation of evil into art, is at play here, but by removing science from the story, the artists actually make their story both more familiar and more alien. This is not something we can contain or fully explain. But we can observe and thrill at what we're seeing, from the human's-eye view which is the only view we'll ever have. An anonymous viewer on IMDb wrote, "I have no interest in bugs, but if youre ready to be enlightened; this will do it for you." I have a vast interest in bugs and little desire to be enlightened, but I found the film equally worthy.

Whether you're looking for bugs or enlightenment, if you do see Microcosmos, keep an eye out for the extended shot of two snails mating in the grass. Hollywood may never have filmed a more perfection depiction of love.

word of the day, II

2009-01-19T23:05:00.000-05:00

eclosion: [a. F. éclosion, n. of action of éclore, f. é- =EX- + clore:L. claudre to shut.] Emergence from concealment; spec. in Ent., the emerging of an insect from the pupa case, or of a larva from the egg.

word of the day

2009-01-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

favonian: [ad. L. favnin-us, f. Favnius the west wind.] Of or pertaining to the west wind; hence, favourable, gentle, propitious.

Word of the Day

2009-01-17T10:32:00.003-05:00

Dissipation (n) [ad. L. dissiptin-em, n. of action from dissipre toDissipate.

Cf. F. dissipation (16th c.).]

In reference to the world:

- Optics. The scattering or dispersion of rays of light.

- The passing away or wasting of a substance, or form of energy, through continuous dispersion or diffusion.

- Reduction to atoms or to an impalpable condition; complete disintegration or dissolution. "Another attempt to reconcile this expression of our Lord with the idea of dissipation of the soul." (E White, 1876)

In reference to people:

- Wasteful expenditure or consumption of money, means, powers, faculties, etc.; squandering, waste.

- Distraction of the mental faculties or energies from concentration on serious subjects: at first often with colourless sense, as the scattering or distraction of attention, or with laudatory sense, as the dispelling of melancholy or sadness; diversion, amusement; but later implying the frittering away of energies or attention upon frivolities, and thus gradually passing into sense 6; also, with a and pl., a distraction; a diversion; a frivolous amusement. "Change of place..inevitably produces dissipation of mind" (Johnson, 1759)

- Waste of the moral and physical powers by undue or vicious indulgence in pleasure; intemperate, dissolute, or vicious mode of living. "He died young, worn out by dissipation." (Sir W. Gregory, 1894).

make the world go blind

2009-01-16T20:27:00.003-05:00

On the front page of the nytimes.com: "Questions over Israel's military conduct: has Israel committed a crime?"

No doubt, Israel has done terrible things. Civilians in Gaza are living in a difficult situation. They don't have sufficient water or electricity, they don't have sufficient health care, and the civilian death toll has been massive. (Would Hamas act any differently? Probably not. Does anyone still believe in lex talionis, that is, an eye for an eye? come on.) At the same time, I've been watching the debates over responsibility and guilt and they seem increasingly irrelevant. Israel is in a war situation. I have a hard time believing that it's possible to sustain any kind of war without encouraging the attitudes that permit war crimes. I wonder how any army can dehumanize the enemy enough to kill them, violently, en masse, without making their suffering seem irrelevant, or even good. I think it's great that the world ( the west?) has written down rules to attempt to maintain the morality of war. But I think it's wrong to imagine that unfair suffering and incredible, unnecessary tragedy is separate from the act of war. I'm not saying that Israel shouldn't take responsibility for the deaths and suffering it has caused. I'm just pointing out that there's no such thing as a just war. Non-violent solutions are the only ones that aren't criminal.

and I am progressing abominably

2009-01-15T11:26:00.003-05:00

First, a quick comment on the weather:

Saul: too bad we don’t have any marshmallows

Me: we could get some

Saul: No [hopeless]… I can’t go outside today.

And now, some thoughts on the state of being:

Recently my mother commented that, for a self-proclaimed pragmatic atheist, I am very concerned with the state of people's souls. She was right on. My worldview is based entirely on the soul and the soulless. Below, some things that can make you lose yours:

- Corporate jobs
- Perfect teeth (they go against the asymmetrical laws of nature)
- Excessively groomed eyebrows (cartoonists know that all personality is channeled through the eyebrows)
- Retirement funds for the under-25 age group
- Excessive involvement in town government
- Excessive involvement with celebrity activities
- Politics.
- Laboratory research.
- The advanced training necessary to work in exciting technology fields
- Facebook, myspace, instant messenger, text messaging (you know it’s true.)
- Cover letters, resumes, transcripts
- Spending too much time in cities. Spending too much time in the middle of fucking nowhere. (come on. You didn’t really think - ‘nature’ was a solution, did you?)
- Suburbia
- Lawns
- Money
- Weight lifting. (I’m ambivalent about treadmills. They’re definitely soulless. On the other hand, I kind of really enjoy them. Running to nowhere, burning all your unfocussed passions and excess body fat via machine. Amazing).
- Microsoft Word Spellcheck (incidentally, Microsoft word just put a squiggly red line under the word spellcheck. But not Doritos?)
- Shopping Malls.

And here are some additions from my brother:

- The mp3 format of songs
- Death. Robots.
- Those people who believe that everything has a soul, even tables. (ie hylozoism)
- Scrap-booking
- Doritos

As for my soul? I'm pretty sure I lost it long ago. Probably about when I started watching House. And you, faceless i-readers? What aspects of the world do you consider a danger to your soul?