I know you do it like a Greek and you're hung like a Christmas tree

The sandwich I made for dinner tonight was probably not a Reuben by any canonical definition, but it was delicious: I toasted Wensleydale with cranberries on two pieces of challah, filled the intervening space with corned beef and a lot of red coleslaw, sliced the whole thing in half and ate it while reading more Alexander Mackendrick. The cranberries picked up on the orange and the tart cherries in the slaw and the Wensleydale combined very savorily with the corned beef. The sole drawback is that it will be almost impossible to repeat unless I feel like making this particular coleslaw again, which was something of an adventure—I had been aware for years that red cabbage can be used, like beets and onion skins, to dye Easter eggs, but somehow this failed to translate into a practical understanding that slicing enough red cabbage for eight people's worth of coleslaw turns your kitchen into a Tyrian dye-works and your fingernails cyanotic for the rest of the week. Everything I touched was going porphyry. (I took some photographs; I may post them. At the point where I gave up and dumped everything into the Cuisinart, it actually became quite attractive.) If I could get the red slaw Reuben at a local sandwich shop, I'd be a regular, but I'm not sure how reasonable it is to go around marking red-letter days on all the dishcloths every time I feel like a hot sandwich.

I discovered Schmekel last month in an article in the Jewish Daily Forward and then never posted about them or Berel-Beyle of Krizover. This weekend I saw they'd gotten a writeup in the New York Times. Today I actually bothered to figure out Bandcamp so I could download their last year's Hanukkah single. It's pretty awesome. Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band. I should probably just preorder their first album: they have songs called "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur," "Pharaoh/Moses Slash," and "You're Not the Only Bear I Fisted."

It feels infinitely more natural for me to be awake at three in the morning having stayed up translating Yiddish songs, as I've been doing since around one o'clock, than for me to fall asleep around three in the morning having gone to bed around midnight, as I did last night when I felt abysmal. By now there are years of evidence that it's worse for me. I find this very frustrating.

Pro lásku Boží započatou

Ivan Jirous, poet-dissident and manager of the Plastic People of the Universe. It is entirely possible I would not have known of his existence if I had not seen Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington Theatre in 2008. But I fell in love with the play, so I tracked down a copy of Ach to státu hanobení (1976) and now I'm sorry he's gone. If he did not exist, it really would have been necessary for Stoppard to invent him.