Whatever else you may happen to be doing this afternoon, evening, or morning, please take four minutes and listen to the Staple Singers' "Slippery People." I heard the song first and adore it in Stop Making Sense (1984), but this is the definitive version. It could have been written for them.
Other links while I work until I leave the house for a workshop this evening—
1. Not a quick read, but not a shallow one, either: "When an ex-Fatah Palestinian 'neighbor' took up a Zionist author's challenge." They are a small part of the overall discussion, but I was struck by these lines:
[M]ost Diaspora Jews are still speaking about Israel in a 20th century way, which is: Zionism began with the pogroms in czarist Russia, and it culminates in the Holocaust—an entirely Euro-centric narrative. That is problematic for several reasons. One is because the majority of Israeli Jews come from families that have nothing to do with the Shoah, who came from one part of the Middle East and moved to another part. So we are writing out a majority of Israeli Jews from the Zionist story.
Mizrahi Jewishness does have importance in the diasporic circles I read and talk in, but I suspect my diasporic circles self-select for inclusivity and that means I have no idea what anyone else is doing until, cf. recently the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, they do it wrong. It's the sort of widening ring of awareness that makes me feel uselessly naive. In any case, the piece as a whole is worth your time.
2. I am sorry to read of the death of Sylvia Miles. She was not an unreasonable age for it, but I just discovered her within the last six months and in the way of character actors I could have believed that she was raucously immortal.
3. I found William Meredith's "Navy Field" in Poetry's "The Poetry of World War II" and I just like his language. It reads a little like a translation—it makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins—but neither of these is a complaint.
4. I read this article about virtual influencers and I really don't enjoy that we have reached the stage of dystopia where we are just straight-up ripping off William Gibson's Idoru (1996).
5. At least the D.C. Dyke March does not yet appear to have set a trend.
P.S. It took forever and involved nightmares, but last night I slept.
Other links while I work until I leave the house for a workshop this evening—
1. Not a quick read, but not a shallow one, either: "When an ex-Fatah Palestinian 'neighbor' took up a Zionist author's challenge." They are a small part of the overall discussion, but I was struck by these lines:
[M]ost Diaspora Jews are still speaking about Israel in a 20th century way, which is: Zionism began with the pogroms in czarist Russia, and it culminates in the Holocaust—an entirely Euro-centric narrative. That is problematic for several reasons. One is because the majority of Israeli Jews come from families that have nothing to do with the Shoah, who came from one part of the Middle East and moved to another part. So we are writing out a majority of Israeli Jews from the Zionist story.
Mizrahi Jewishness does have importance in the diasporic circles I read and talk in, but I suspect my diasporic circles self-select for inclusivity and that means I have no idea what anyone else is doing until, cf. recently the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, they do it wrong. It's the sort of widening ring of awareness that makes me feel uselessly naive. In any case, the piece as a whole is worth your time.
2. I am sorry to read of the death of Sylvia Miles. She was not an unreasonable age for it, but I just discovered her within the last six months and in the way of character actors I could have believed that she was raucously immortal.
3. I found William Meredith's "Navy Field" in Poetry's "The Poetry of World War II" and I just like his language. It reads a little like a translation—it makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins—but neither of these is a complaint.
4. I read this article about virtual influencers and I really don't enjoy that we have reached the stage of dystopia where we are just straight-up ripping off William Gibson's Idoru (1996).
5. At least the D.C. Dyke March does not yet appear to have set a trend.
P.S. It took forever and involved nightmares, but last night I slept.
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