Halloween

Strange how decorating a new house with spiderwebs, skulls, demons -- colorful signifiers of death, decay, and worst nightmares which we humans can conceive -- has made us feel at home.

A Sign

I visited the old house to witness the progress of the construction. I could not open the door because the lock would not turn.

I was using the key to Six Month House.

The demands of the archive

I nearly self-sabotaged, nearly ended the grip this repository exerts, but I could not.

Since September 19 I have daily deposited one item in this archive. Habit and routine are the nemeses of innovation. To shatter the compulsion to duty, I almost left nothing yesterday for future loss. Breaking the chain of days would break the obligation to leave a quotidian trace, a vow I took without realizing in the middle of September as a new year began. The writing exercises would be good and useful, have been good and useful, especially because my horizon holds a return to my life as a professor. Stories of stone and tales about Jews and Christians as neighbors are calling to me from January, where they already await my arrival.

The vow holds, even today, but I don't see how the vow will endure the year it desires.

Cynicism, skepticism, utopianism

Without going too far into intramural affairs, I want to post about an exchange that happened yesterday at a task force meeting. It's not often enough that I am called upon to articulate my own idealism in an ordinary meeting. Doing so helped cure me of the blues I had earlier in the day.
I've been appointed to a committee whose charge has been difficult to discern: on the one hand our official label speaks of innovation, but on the other our actual mission seems to center upon efficiency and potential cost cutting. My university is attempting to raise more money via fundraising combined with budget savings. The latter effort is a little odd because we are not in fact suffering the kinds of fiscal meltdowns that have gripped other institutions of higher education. The idea is, I suppose, that all universities can find ways to be more efficient, all budgets have fat that can be trimmed, and that it is better to undertake such projects when no crisis propels the effort.

Our committee's particular rubric is "learning," also referred to as "the academic enterprise." At our first brainstorming session, we immediately agreed that we would preface what we undertake with this statement: "The group is unanimous in its opinion that the academic enterprise at GW has been sorely underfunded." Finding ways to reduce costs is therefore a counterintuitive endeavor -- though not a wholly impossible one.

We were surprised, though, when we were informed that our thoughts should be guided by a strategic plan published six years ago, and originating several years before that. The plan is deeply associated with the vision and aspirations of our last university president (who reigned for 19 years) and his VP of Academic Affairs (who retires in May). Given that innovation is the in-folding of the new, I began to fear that the only thing innovative about our project is that budget reduction had been christened with a novel name.

To this objection I was told that our committee would find the economic means by which innovation could be enacted. To my query of who gets to do the innovating, the quick answer was the VP who is about to retire along with the provost who will replace him (that search is ongoing and will not be filled for some time).

So I pointed out that it might not be a best practice to hand $60 million in innovation funds to a person who has not yet arrived and a person who represents the past of the institution and has a foot at the door. I was told two things: (1) faculty cynicism and skepticism are major impediments to innovation; (2) we need to think in terms of what is best for the university.

To the second comment I replied simply that I, my faculty, and my students are the university. I find that when a person says "Get out of your silo and think about the university" what they actually mean is "Entrust this decision to those who have your best interests in mind." To the first comment I said, quite sincerely, that if I were cynical and skeptical I never would have accepted appointment to the committee. Cynicism and skepticism are modes of non-participation. They are lazy. I am in fact an optimist, even a utopianist: I want to be at a university where we move forward through consensus, shared vision, and community. Innovation, yes: that is why I serve on the committee when I have a thousand other demands on my time. I'm willing to undertake the labor ... but not so that some few who work for the university but who are not its entirety can make decisions that profoundly alter the lives of the thousands who actually are that collective.

Such objections did not fall on deaf ears. The mission of the task force is now going to be clarified in light of our discussion.

So what about you: are you a cynic, a skeptic, an idealist, a utopianist? Have you ever been in an institutional situation when you had to deliver your credo?

----
PS I realize that posting this interchange might seem self-congratulatory. I don't mean it that way. For me it's a reminder of what I value, of what I believe. Be a part of any institution long enough and it is easy to lose your credo, to focus on the small and the immediate over the frustratingly vast but enduring. The more demands I find myself answerable to, the more necessary I find it to remind myself not to follow paths of inertia and least effort.

(x-posted from ITM)

Blue, wet day

[illustrations: Tiny Shriner with Blue Tower; Avenue of the Unhappy]


On January 1 2010 my four year reign of terror comes to its close.

No longer shall I be chair of the GW English department. That approaching future assists me in getting through some of the soul-grinding tasks that are mine to perform: "I can fill out this Master Course Data Form because it is my last one ever!" "I will obsess over the number of upper division literature courses fulfilling the 1700-1900 requirement because once done, never again!" "I will refuse to nod off, think about lunch, surreptitiously check my email or read the book I have hidden in this folder because I'll never attend this series of meetings in the future!" Through the end of December I will be a good university citizen, attend lunches with potential donors, compose memos, answer thousands of emails, plan events, meet and direct and oversee because on January 1 2010 I become the person formerly known as Department Chair, now referred to as "The Hermit." Fleeting glimpses in darkened corridors will become the stuff of legend. "I think I had a Cohen sighting yesterday" will pass for exciting news among students and colleagues.


It's easy to be glib about the end of my term as chair. I'm an academic, after all, and academics are suppose to be hostile to administration. Yet glibness hides the fact that I'll miss much of what I now do. You'll think I'm being too rosy when I state this, but  it happens to be fully true: whereas in my scholarship I wrestle with intractable problems, one of the joys of being chairis that you can solve, sometimes quite quickly, the problems that students and colleagues bring to you. Having someone leave the office feeling supported, assisted, valued, happy gives me great pleasure. I'll miss being called upon to help.


What I won't miss, though, is the constant song and dance routine that I perform in an attempt to have my university acknowledge frequently and loudly that humanities research matters. Much of my chairly scheming involves placing administrators who are far above my pay grade in situations where they are called upon to praise my department (NB: this works only to the extent that my department is praiseworthy; fortunately my colleagues and our students ensure that it is). Nearing the end of my term, though, I'm a bit worn down by the energy required to keep this attention machine running. I have also grown weary of the narrow minded decisions and facile declarations some administrators are prone to make. We have the chance to hire a famous writer who happens to have both a Macarthur "genius" grant and Pulitzer to his name. "But he didn't earn those while he was at GW" is the latest, tediously dumb objection I have heard to hiring him, stated by someone in great power who ought to know better. Sometimes I fear that faulty logic stated with conviction will make my head pop open and render me the first English chair to die in office of massive brain malfunction.


Of course, I'll still be fighting the good fight, scheming the good schemes, and countering illogic with keen memos and plentiful eye rolling when I am no longer chair: partly because I will not actually become The Hermit (I am a member of a department I care deeply about, after all), partly because I will still be an administrator (Director of GW MEMSI). It will be good, though, to have less email to answer, fewer forms to fill, and a little more time to think about medieval studies.


[x-posted to ITM]

Reading, Interpreting, Losing

On Friday I attended a lecture that read as if a literary text the transport system which sped disabled Germans to euthanasia. Window-painted buses and gas chambers disguised as hospitals were groundwork for concentration camps to come. The talk then moved to the DC Metro system, universal access, and worthy citizenship. I was abandoned in Germany. The picture subtitled Gas chamber disguised as a shower room held me so forcefully that I could not return with the speaker to Washington. Bluntness of relentless murders held. I could not interpret.

I had great difficulty with the lecture.

On Saturday I watched, finally, The Reader. Only the film's refusal to yield happy endings, redemptions, unpoisoned gifts made its narrative bearable. "The concentration camps were not a school. There was nothing to be learned." As The Reader moves towards its close these are the words uttered by a survivor. Ilana is weary of being asked the lessons of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. She surrounds herself with art and objects; she retreats from the world; she enables small forgivenesses that serve only to ruin more futures.


Because I am an interpreter, because everything becomes for me a text holding secrets, Nothing to be learned is a wound. Despite my every wish for the contrary, despite my teacher's passion for revelations and enlightenment, the pronouncement seems true.

Presence / Music

Walking Glover Park, cerulean, leaves drift, perfect autumn.

Wendy is beside, we carry our groceries, we should be talking, but my mind is elsewhere.

A man once my brother in law murdered yesterday. A roil of emotions contradict. I can't be in place, I can't feel the day.

Church bells down the hill clang Cielito Lindo. The queerness of the sound wrenches, and I look up to orange and blue, fire on water, hereness.

I don't understand how something so ordinarily beautiful can seize me from the mind of death.

A DC Moment

Last night we held the inaugural GW English Distinguished Lecture in Literary and Cultural Studies. My department decided last year to use some money contributed by a donor to mount an annual talk that will spotlight the vitality of contemporary humanities research. By unanimous vote we decided that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a founder of Disability Studies, would be an excellent beginning to the series.

Rosemarie has been my friend since 1995, when we met in a Body Theory Reading Group, an interdisciplinary array of DC academics. I knew she would be very good, and she was ... but so much was riding on the evening's success that I had been nervous for days before. I wanted the evening to be a resounding statement that the humanities matter at GW.

The university president gave the welcome. In my nightmare version of the evening's events, he would arrive, see only six or seven people gathered in the room, and depart in a huff. Fortunately about 120 attended. The reception afterwards meant all kinds of small talk and hobnobbing. By the end I was weary of being "on" as department chair.

Eight of us went for a late dinner, and that's when I finally breathed, relaxed, enjoyed myself. The group was convivial, the food and wine excellent. The highlight: just as the evening was moving towards its close, Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonya Sotomayor emerged from the back of the restaurant, where they had been dining together under the watchful eye of the Secret Service. As they descended the stairs directly behind us, every table erupted in spontaneous applause. All of us found the moment to be incredibly moving: our first Jewish woman on the court, our first Latina, smiling to be in each other's company on an evening together, a little overwhelmed by the sudden effusion of communal love.

Two Keys

I. On every approach to the Six Month House I extract from my pocket the wrong key. I slide into the lock what belongs to a house with holes in its walls, a house that Alex decorated with monsters on the day we left. The key fits, but the tumbler will not turn.

II. A warm evening, 1988. I'd biked from my little room in Cambridge to the house where I'd grown up, the house where my parents still lived, a house I did not know they did not love. They were not home. Around the lock, signs of mortality: the paint of the door scratched where my father had overshot the key's hole. I looked at the etched lines, and read in each the omen of loss to come. His vision is fading.

One year later they sold the house of twenty-four years. Twenty on from that, whenever I arrived at their new home, the place theirs not mine where I have never slept, I look for the scratches around the lock. They promise me that all is well.

On My Way to Campus

The Watergate to the right; to the left the former Howard Johnson's where G. Gordon Liddy stayed as he burgled; the Washington Monument ahead, looking like the Eye of Sauron is scouring the land from its pinnacle; and a morning sky washed citrus all around.

Habit and Routine

I. Habit and Routine are the Nemeses of Innovation
Each morning the same morning. We rise at five. One departs to run, the other makes ready the day (coffee to start, bowls to fill with oatmeal or cereal, lunches to their backpacks, the hundred small tasks that keep a family moving). We read newspapers on laptops around six, breakfast as darkness yields day. For no good reason at 6:18 and not 6:20 one of us cleans the dishes and walks the dog, the other has a turn to shower. We wake the kids, Alex first so that he can eat before school, Katherine a little thereafter so that she have the time royalty requires for languishing before rising. One of us to work at seven. Alex walks to school at 7:10, and at 7:35 or so the two Cohens who remain arrive at "Before Care," where Katherine is fed, adored, allowed to play. Kindergarten begins at 8:45, but both parents are at work by eight.

The schedule is demanding, but has become part of our blood. Our bodies know how to fulfill its wonts even when the mind is unaware. Habituation does not mean that routine is not at times oppressive, even suffocating. What I love about the Six Month House is its compulsion to alter routines. We do not inhabit our accustomed space. The mornings seem new.

II. Habit and Routine are the Precondition of Innovation
Sleepily at five, every other day, I rise to run. I listen to the same song as I stretch, then shuffle the familiar two hundred and four placed on my iPod a year ago. I course neighborhood darkness with little cognizance of street or tree. My body knows the route: houses, hills, dark patches, broken asphalt. Somatic knowledge. I make the necessary turns without asking my legs. I climb the required inclines without complaint, without thought of turning back, because my muscles know the duration, the end, the rewards. Sometimes I lose myself in music. Sometimes because I know the music too well I drift in thought: the day to come, the days that have been, the work I am doing or might someday undertake. Because I do not wander the route my mind becomes nomadic.

The Six Month House demands a new paths. Yesterday I ran in early darkness, but with a tentativeness. I did not trust my body to its journey. I'd planned a route in my head: Military to Wisconsin to Albemarle to Connecticut to Military to Wisconsin, to start. I followed its rough contours, but too many side streets promised interest, and I am easy to distract. So intent on discovery, so intensified by novelty, the course itself swallowed creativity into dark.

Homework

Katherine with her kindergarten homework packet. The picture: A jagged house brimming with lonely boxes. The caption: I am at my new hous. And I am hom sic.

The End of the Rain / The Top of the City

Because the clouds ceased to shower but the wind didn't yield, we took our kites to Fort Reno, around the corner from the Six Month House.

Running the steep hill gave us a bird's view of the city. Dogs wandered off their leashes. A mutt named Carly made us her friend.

Katherine flew to the end of her string a pink and purple kite with doubled unicorns. Alex tried to mount his Chinese dragon but the gusts were shifting. Scudding clouds, the green freedom of the grass, an afternoon to hold.

Food/Place/Home

Our favorite family meal, especially on cold days, is fondue. Everyone can be involved in the process: grating cheese, cutting a baguette into squares, slicing apples, steaming broccoli, setting the table so that each family member does not get their favorite colored fondue fork, ensuring complaints and secretive utensil snatching. The cooking unfolds slowly enough that a child can toss handfuls of flour-coated cheese into the wine base, then help with the constant stirring. The aroma fills the house. We dine from a messy communal pot. We "accidentally" swat bread from other's forks and mock efforts to retrieve lost food. Then we take a break, walk or play a game, and return for a chocolate fondue with pound cake, strawberries, and bananas. By the end of the meal we can barely move.

January cold held the night again. To exorcise the lingering house sadness that Casa Fiesta embodied, we decided to christen our new place by making fondue. The Safeway around the corner sold only blocks of a cheese labeled "Swiss" rather than the Emmentaler and Gruyère our snobby children demand, but we didn't complain. The meal was warm and deeply satisfying. Our spirits lifted: something about cooking a favorite dish in the Six Month House made the place a home.

I was thinking about that transformation of place this morning, when I took the kids on a walkathon to raise money for homeless families in Washington. The event has special urgency this year. Perversely, just as the number of people who have lost their houses is rising, DC has cut its budget to sustain emergency shelters.

The rain finally relented just before we made our way around Glover Park. The wind was raw, and we were cold. Eating doughnuts and cider afterwards we agreed that the walk had given us some needed perspective on our recent feelings of homesickness. We take the certainty of shelter for granted. Too many families who live very close to us cannot.

[Help the Homeless DC is sponsored by Fannie Mae, a local organization that is not guiltless in causing the current housing crisis. We've walked in the annual event they sponsor for the past seven years; despite any corporate failings on Fannie Mae's part, this program does achieve a great deal of good. You can donate here]

Casa fiesta

[Every Saturday I make cinnamon rolls for K. and A. I tried to make them this morning, but they came out flat]

The wet raw of a November in London held Washington for its third day. When the movers arrived at 8 AM, we were happy. Drenched and cold were our state to come, we knew, but we were eager to have this event of long anticipation finally underway.

The old house was a box for echoes by ten, the Six Month House stacked with boxes by noon. The truck pulled away. Wendy and I unpacked a little, our hearts not in the vast task. We crossed the street to a cheap Thai restaurant that has long been a favorite for delivered meals Sunday evenings. We sat with warm bowls of lemongrass soup, and I said "I'm afraid that we are going to love the Six Month House too much. We won't want to move back." I meant it. We are within a two minute walk of restaurants with names like Matisse and Le Chat Noir. An Indian café is about to open on the corner. At the house we just left, our nearest place to eat is ten minutes by foot, and that's pizza. There is a liveliness outside our new home that reminds me of the flats and apartments of favorite trips abroad.

By five both K. and A. were home. They were quiet. Despite our attempts to have familiar rooms to welcome them, too much was missing, too much was out of place. For a month I had been telling them: this will be just like London and Paris. We will have an adventure. But the Six Month House is a mile from a home whose rooms echo in emptiness, a home already cold when we dropped by for last objects. At the Six Month House K. and A. have new bedrooms, but their contents are too familiar: a pink princess comforter, but without its matching pillows; the study desk, without its hutch and Legos and messy books; clothes without bureaus; beloved toys making their presence felt by their obvious absence.

The house darkened early in the evening. We did not realize we would be poor in overhead lighting, that we needed to bring many lamps. Though the rain had not relented, we decided we would cheer ourselves up away from this house that was not our house. We would have dinner at the Salvadoran restaurant across the street because we liked its name, Casa Fiesta. Its strands of October Christmas lights promised cheer.

The restaurant was cold, and we were the only customers. The waiter misunderstood our order. The small TV was turned to a station with a gameshow that translated to something like "Make You Crazy!" The host tried hard to elicit laughter, but his timing was poor. K. spilled ice water onto Wendy's "Salmon Fiesta." We tried to muster happiness. The cold rain continued outside. We ate our meals with our coats on, and noticed that the strings of holiday lights on the walls had gone dim.

We walked back to the Six Month House. It was quiet inside, and cold, but the heat was finally kicking in.

A Suitably Literary Moving Company Was Difficult to Discover

Deny it all we want ...

We might hide in bed hoping to escape the reality, but the day is nigh upon us regardless. A large truck arrives tomorrow and carts the majority of our belongings to the Six Month House. Pouring rain and swine flu are not assisting the de-stressing of the process. All of us, though, will not miss living surrounded by boxes, eating from leftover paper products that command us to be festive out of season.

Why I Do Not Live in DC. Also, Why I Am About to Live in DC.

As we planned our relocation from Cambridge MA to Washington DC in 1994, we knew the area we'd ideally inhabit: the stretch between the West End and Dupont Circle. We wanted to live in place where we'd feel part of the neighborhood. Finding an apartment that was not located in a vast, anonymous building proved, however, an almost insurmountable challenge. Anything advertised in the Post had multiple applicants by the time we showed up. No realtor was interested in the meager commissions to be gained by brokering rentals. I remember walking the humid DC streets with an admixture of grape Snapple and mocha frappuccino in my stomach, for reasons even now I am at a loss to explain.

A realtor named Arjul finally took pity on me, though, and gave me this excellent advice: get a copy of The Blade the moment the bundles are tossed from the truck, open it to "Apartments for Rent," make appointments immediately, come checkbook in hand. Through this wisdom I arrived at nine in the morning at 1514 T St NW, a two story brick townhouse on a tree-lined street. Jim was the landlord and lived on the ground floor; rent from the apartment on the second helped pay his mortgage. I tried to get Jim to take a check right away, but he would not. Four others were coming to see the place that afternoon. I left dejected, thinking that I'd lost another apartment ... and I must have been heading towards the nearest convenience store for a grape Snapple when in desperation I called Jim back and offered to pay more money. "Oh don't worry," he said, "you were so pathetic you broke my heart. You can have the place."

We moved in two months later, and Jim became a family friend. Now he is Uncle Jim to K. and A. His partner and he moved to York, Maine, three years ago, and we see them when we make our yearly visit to Ogunquit.

Two years after moving to T Street, the time arrived when we were considering starting a family, and thinking as well that we were ready to commit to being in the DC area for some time to come. We pooled together every cent we had been able to save (the vast sum of $5000) and started looking at houses in DC and Maryland. We almost bought a place not far from Meridian Hill Park, but four facts convinced us that investing every penny we had in a DC property might not be the best idea:

1. DC was hit with a snowstorm which in Boston would have been inconvenient, but in this city was the Apocalypse. City strategy for dealing with the impassable streets and inaccessible garbage: close everything -- even bus service -- and hope for a thaw.
2. DC has no vote in Congress. This fact might seem minor to those who do not live in DC. It is not minor. To dwell in the District of Columbia is to be denied representation by a voting member of Congress. (Fun Fact: DC lacked even presidential voting rights until 1961).
   
3. As if to further stress the colonial status of the city, democracy was suspended by Congress and a control board appointed in 1995. The District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Act allowed congress and the president to appoint a governing body with the power to override the elected mayor and city council. We were looking for a house while a Control Board ruled.
   
4. The city school system is in perpetual turmoil. Neither of us wanted -- and both of us doubted we could afford -- private school for our potential progeny.

Those four facts (OK, three: the snow was an annoyance rather than a true obstacle) seem, when listed like that, to be a lucid argument for not staying in the District. To be honest, though, our hearts were in the city: we loved living in DC, and were not eager to move beyond its borders. Yes, a part of us knew that this ambivalence was silly. Given that DC is so tiny, we'd be relocating to an area that was essentially part of the city anyway. Still, we waffled between two similar houses: one on Ellicott Street NW in DC, the other just off Western and River in Montgomery County, MD. They were exactly one mile apart from each other. They were about the same size, same price, same vintage. What separated them more than anything else, though, was Western Avenue, the border between DC and MD.

In the end we chose the Maryland side. We're satisfied with our decision: a left-leaning and progressive place; substantial ethnic and racial diversity; a county that places significant resources into its educational system. MoCo citizens don't get up in arms because property taxes are being raised to build schools; what elicits the hue and cry are potential cutbacks. Because we moved a mile farther from the house we really wanted, our kids get to walk to schools that seem to me as good as any private ones, only their mission is to serve all residents, not just those who can afford tuition or excel at certain tests.

On Friday a moving truck arrives and we move back to DC. We've rented a small house one street over from that future we did not choose on Ellicott. The little brick colonial we purchased in 1996 is now nearing seventy years old. Its wiring and plumbing are beginning to fail. The furnace needs an upgrade. The box-like extension was perfect for life c. 1940, but not so much for 2009. So we are gutting the first floor, moving the kitchen to the back, demolishing some walls, enlarging the living room, digging out a slightly roomier basement. We're not touching the second floor, but we have to seal the space against construction dust. At this moment most of our life is in boxes, ready to be stored or moved. Someone asked me this morning if we had packed the kids, and I had to answer: no need, they keep packing themselves. I get nervous passing by the larger ones because I never who is going to pop out.

Caravan/Caravanserai

كاروانسرا / کاروان
Three days and we move to the Six Month House.

For two weeks I have been filling my car with the books that used to line my study. Once painted with stars, suns and moons, this room had been a nursery. Sometimes as I work I think about midnight nightmares, fevers, unbidden naked dances, diapers, the moons and stars beneath the coat of paint. When construction begins, the upstairs of our house will be sealed. Anything that remains will be untouchable until the renovation closes.

Because the Six Month House possesses no spare bedroom to transform into workspace, all books, folders, xeroxes, notebooks, files must reside at GW. Every day when I come to campus, I escort bags and boxes of materials to their new home. My office bookcases are already full. Book-formed stalagmites are growing on the floor.

In two months these books will move again, down one floor. A new chair will reign over the department, and I do not think she will have much use for Latin dictionaries, treatises on medieval Jewish families, and assorted tomes about British prehistory. For the time being, though, as small as my office has become, I enjoy their messy company.

Child / Future

Visiting day, so parents can limn the edges of the classrooms and watch how alien their children become upon departure from home. How does school render feral beings so compliant?

K. was busy at her artwork, mixing primaries into swirled orange, green, purple. The intensity of her color study made me wonder what she was thinking: were the two colors transforming into something new only because she desired the change with such passion? Did she fear that her red and her blue might yield something other than crushed grapes?

I've read much lately against the cult of the child: Edelman, Duggan. Does Romanticism hold such enduring power, that future and hope and child are one, the entirety of world to come? Twenty-three swirled their paint with pleasure and dread. Parents watched, with pleasure and dread. Will my child do as others? will she ever get it? will he jump around the room and paint other children? will she learn what she must learn? will the world come to its murderous close after I am gone, while my child lives on? into what hell have I committed this being? can the future subsist? can what is to come trump our tenuous now, or must we fear the worst?

That is hope, I think: to send into a likely dark one who might forgive us for what we have done.

The six month house

On Friday we relocate to Fessenden and Wisconsin, a bit more than a mile from our outgrown house. We met the landlord this evening to receive our keys. To ease the worry of transition for K & A, we walked across the street to Rodman's just beforehand, and let them purchase their favorite Cadbury candy bars.

We walked the neighborhood this evening: small bright houses, close together, streets lined with cars, patches of trees and grass but still a city. Reminds me very much of childhood, of Cambridge and Somerville and Belmont. Reminds me very much of home.

Habit and routine are the preconditions of innovation

Simchat Torah, procession of the American League fans.

Somehow we thought during this bar mitzvah year the necessity of being at synagogue frequently would be tedious. Instead what we have witnessed, mainly, is the transformation of ancient traditions into modern celebrations. Last night was Simchat Torah, as well as consecration. We all held the vellum as it unspooled and rerolled. The procession was spontaneous, enjoyable, never somber.

Katherine is in the kindergarten class. In medieval times she would have been given something sweet on the tongue, like honey, because the study of torah is supposed to be sweet. Last night she received an Israeli chocolate bar "with popping rocks." She asked this morning of we could go back and get some more.

Ushpizin/Carmen

Last night in a neighbor's sukkah, her guests and for the evening her family. Mariana's parents fled Germany for Argentina before she was born. They believed a day would arrive when every Jew would be forced to vacate. Each morning they sent her to retrieve the newspaper from the steps, to scan the headlines for them, to behold whether the fateful day had come. They left Argentina because they could endure the wait no longer.

Mariana told us the story of Carmen, who has lived with her for 34 years. Carmen's mother and father brought her to the United States as a teen. When they returned to Peru, they returned without her. Mariana befriended abandoned Carmen, housed her, paid for her to learn English, paid for her stomach ailments to be repaired. Though both were raised to speak Spanish, they never communicate across their familiar language. They are here; they speak the local tongue, a conglomerate household that possesses only three walls.

Ambivalence Machine / Hope

תיקון עולם
From some recent reading: "When I think about hope, I set it alongside happiness and optimism, which I immediately associate with race and class privilege, with imperial hubris, with gender and sexual conventions, with maldistributed forms of security both national and personal. They can operate as the affective reward for conformity, the privatized emotional bonus for the right kind of investments in the family, private property, and the state. They are bestowed upon the normotic ... those who endorse domination and call it freedom. Such happiness and optimism call out for ruin." (Lisa Dugan, "Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue").

I think about the post I wrote yesterday, about the archive of a year I compile here, my letters to no one. Postcards of conformity? Glossy advertisements for normotic domination? Little vignettes of hubris, conventionality, privilege? Everything beautiful is toxic beneath. I believe that, I do: no beauty prevails without the forgetting of violence. Documents of civilization inked only by barbarians. Wonder subsists, but only when looking past blood and shit, the detritus of a broken world.

Yet the body in its materiality is beautiful. A pop song in Italian is not less real. Is its demand of detour any less serious?

Last night I said to my daughter, I have told you before, you cannot ask me questions when you know the answer already. A night time walk, when I took her from the house so that her brother could read Tom Sawyer in stillness. She brought her Little Mermaid flashlight, its beam on the road, in house windows, in my eyes. I told her Stop asking me what nonsense spells, because she demanded to know what word is born of Y-K-L-M-Z. I said Stop walking behind Scooby's tail, because you are making her nervous, and she's pulling and she won't pee. All the petty bitchiness of which I am capable, when all I want is to be alone in my head, and I take it out on those whose love intrudes.

Habit and Routine are the Nemeses of Innovation

Tuesdays are regimen, and proceed along routes well known.

As the day moves towards its end, I pick Alex up from Hebrew School, a short drive protracted by a crush of DC traffic. My route to Temple Micah never varies: Massachusetts Ave to Cathedral to Wisconsin. Our course home, though, is variable -- not because one way is faster than some other, but because to cut through the campus of American University and to see the house with the lion rampant, or to glide past the home of the Korean ambassador with its limousines in patient lines, or to peer through the windows of the Belgian cafe at Mass and 49th: these vignettes seem better than the weary streams of headlights these shortcuts that are not brief avoid. Although we head towards home and homework (l'imparfait to memorize, the biology of the eye to diagram), sometimes for no good reason we veer left when the curve right is faster. Sometimes we find a quiet street with a gas lamp, or an apartment building so massive we wonder why we have never seen its fortress of balconies. We make up stories about pedestrians. We roll down our windows if the night is warm.

Yesterday at Alex's suggestion we convinced those who peered into our open windows that we were Italian. Our new ethnicity consisted entirely of singing ineptly along to Pink Martini's Una Notte a Napoli. Alex set the car stereo to 37, the highest we've ever turned the knob. Even Katherine in the back sang along, and mouthed to those in nearby cars We are Italian. The music was too loud, we all had throbbing temples by the end, but the night lost for three long minutes the dullness of its would-be trudge.

A day that conspires to leave nothing in the archive

A day of writing job letters, meeting with advancement people, conniving to ensure that a Famous Writer sells his soul to us and teaches here forever, budgets to look over, merit raises to agonize upon, Master Course Data Forms and Master Program Data Forms that demand processing, meetings to have and to schedule and to avoid...

Perhaps a day that should not be in the archive, after all. An ordinary day, and administrative day.

Stony Arguments

Lithic metaphors tend to dwell upon stone's perdurance. When transferred via trope to the human, this most durable of substances becomes a figure for impermeability, for being closed off to change. A Jew might be called stone-hearted by a medieval theologian, because to that philosopher of the divine God's no longer Chosen People had hardened their hearts to a message that should have transformed them utterly. Stones seem a blunt material useful for ending argument, easier to hurl (verbally or physically) than to touch, work, transmute.

I say all this because in my own work on stones, medieval and otherwise, I have discovered either in them or in myself (or perhaps in the interspace between us) a resistance to argument. Rocks, gems, lapidaries, desert landscapes, ruins, neolithic architectures: all have demanded a porous, adaptive, meditative prose rather than the keen structure of exposition, building of thesis through citation and carefully staged deployment of evidence, dénouement based upon coldly rational system of argument. Oddly, my work on stone has demanded a move to an affective register that ahs always been present in my work, but nowhere so pervasive.

Right now I am eyeballing the copyedits of an essay with the deceptive title of "Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval Exotic," forthcoming this March in the new Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (follow the link and check out the ToC: the book is going to be wonderful). The piece is in fact simply a better footnoted version of my SEMA keynote on Mandeville's geologies (here, here, and here). What strikes me most upon rereading the essay is its utter lack of the usual template (overview; review of previous criticism; close reading with scholarly footnotes; strongest articulation of argument; closing). I can't call the work anything but a meditation. Apparently I have grown weary of arguing.

Another Jewish Identity Crisis? As Opposed to What?

A. O. Scott riffs on a new Coen brothers film to contemplate Jewish identity as an unabating crisis state.

Here's my favorite section -- which has nothing to do with the Saint Louis Park of the Coen brothers (the very suburb of Minneapolis my own Cohen brother, Mark, now dwells), but instead jumps from Quentin Tarantino to Michael Chabon and Philip Roth:

In the real world of ethical reasoning, a crime like the Shoah refutes the logic of vengeance, which is the only story Mr. Tarantino knows how to tell. He derives it from westerns and martial arts films, among other sources, but the honor-based personal vendettas that propel those narratives become preposterous in the face of mass killing. Which may be why the machinery of death that has become a fixture (and something of a fetish) in so many Holocaust films has no place in the world of “Inglourious Basterds,” where the murder is retail, specific and individual.

But Mr. Tarantino’s brazen wishing away of genocide — an act of mad generosity and startling egotism — may not be so rare. After decades of sifting through the Jewish past in the interests of commemoration and comprehension, writers and filmmakers have more recently taken up the task of imagining it otherwise. A local variant of magic realism has flourished in Israeli literature for some time, most powerfully in the novels of David Grossman, but in America this impulse has at times taken a speculative, frankly fantastical turn.

What if things had been different? What if, instead of claiming a permanent home in Palestine, the displaced Jews of Europe had settled for a temporary claim on a sliver of Alaska? Or what if, just as Hitler was undertaking his murderous, expansionist policies, an anti-Semitic popular hero had been elected president of the United States and had visited upon America’s Jews a set of policies that combined Jim Crow and the Nuremberg laws?

To end with a question: what if? Isn't to unhitch the future from a past's overshadowings the urgent work of contemporary Jewish art, the only way that Jewish identity will remain in crisis?

Sukkot

סוכות
Today begins the festival of tents, a week when to eat and sleep outdoors are mitzvot. Wendy often declares "Jews don't camp," and I admit to having never slumbered under a star. Sukkot is celebrated modestly here.

We reclaim from Katherine her Ikea tent -- two poles and a canvas, designed so idiots cannot hurt themselves when they construct a play house for their children. Though built by Chinese labor for indoor use ONLY, the tent rises in our little yard. We decorate its yellow and blue cloth with bright drawings of fruit, of vegetables, of crazy flowers: offerings of the field that declare the year's waning. As leaves patter the canvas, we cram inside and eat bagels and M&Ms -- a hunched feast that bears no relation to the cycle of field and harvest in which these tents were dreamed.

Morning Walk to Metro

An iPhone view of a routine I seldom consider. Attentive to the view for once, capturing pictures without thinking of their framing.

I'll let you guess which images I labeled in my head Stranded leaf with limen and headphone wire; Inauthentic fog with commercial arc; Do not walk; The angle of your sun; Lost, music, earth.

The Lifespan of Parental Love

For six months we will live in a smaller house, a mile from the one we own. After thirteen years we are admitting that a little residence quickly built in 1940 might not have had long prospect mortared into its brick, or joined with its uneven wood. We are sorting our possessions, declaring the objects we still love, the objects that might love us, what will become donations, recyclables, mere trash.

Paint and marker projects hurt the most. Not because it is difficult to consign to the blue bin these fingerpainted skyscapes, gifts from a five year old now twelve, from a two year old turned five. Because disposal is too easy. The feisty and thick colors were Picasso, once, but now a jetsam of green bunnies, dulled rainbows, tremulous tries at lettering A B C heap to be discarded. The pile had been a trove.

Some remain, though, and some we archive in plastic boxes: monsters of inscrutable origin, largesse of a darker world.