Where you're going, there ain't no one knows
I am so tired. With an air conditioner in the window and two fans creating crossbreeze in the apartment at all times we have finally been able to get the temperature down to something I can sort of sleep through, but things like "clothes" or "moving around" continue to feel like very dicey propositions. I resent that the night before last I dreamed of watching a movie I wanted to recommend to everyone and last night I had nightmares about familiar locations in Boston turned sites of semi-surrealist horror. More than five things make up a post.
1. I forgot to stalk myself on the internet for a couple of days and totally missed that I am now part of Wonderbooknow.com, the online supplement to the revised and expanded edition of Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013/2018). Specifically I am part of the gallery of examples drawn from the flash exercise "Last Drink Bird Head," which when run with a group of 70-plus writers in 2007—of which I was one—resulted in the charity anthology of the same name. Spoiler: mine has mythology.
2. The Kickstarter for Upper Rubber Boot's Women Up to No Good anthologies has funded! So we likely get a new cover for Broad Knowledge and a snippet of my reprint story is part of the most recent update.
3. Rose Lemberg is now reading submissions for an anthology of poetry in tribute to the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tentatively entitled Climbing Lightly Through Forests and scheduled for publication by Aqueduct Press in 2019.
4. I read this poem yesterday: Bob Hicok, "Redundancy Is Only a Problem When It Gets Repetitious: a poem of patriotism."
5. I am looking forward to this collection from Mark Fisher, although not the reason that it is probably the last: k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016).
6. Many of his experiences were not mine, but much of Jacob Plitman's "On an Emerging Diasporism" correponds strangely with the way I was brought up to think of myself as Jewish. My family's stories were always about carrying home with us. The congregation where I was almost bat mitzvah was peripatetic (it still feels weird to me that it now has a permanent building of its own). Wherever we are is home. What we do here matters most. This passage feels like something I have read before, a poem or a short story, Bryher's Avalon: "Maybe we should open an Embassy of the American Jewish Diaspora, elect an ambassador, print a sheaf of letterhead, and begin taking meetings with business and social leaders. There are a thousand short stories to be written, published and tucked like a prayer into the cracks in the walls of our neighbors' homes." If it were mine, of course, the point of an embassy of a diaspora—as distinct from a government in exile—would be that you can find it everywhere.
7. Robert Macfarlane defined "thalassophile" and I felt landlocked.
P.S. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch: a drunk history of Fort Macon. "So it's interesting that within a couple miles of each other were the 'last battle' of the Revolution and the 'last shot' of the Civil War, and I guess the moral is that the NC OBX is the place to be if a war is technically over but you're holding onto a really long-term grudge."
1. I forgot to stalk myself on the internet for a couple of days and totally missed that I am now part of Wonderbooknow.com, the online supplement to the revised and expanded edition of Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013/2018). Specifically I am part of the gallery of examples drawn from the flash exercise "Last Drink Bird Head," which when run with a group of 70-plus writers in 2007—of which I was one—resulted in the charity anthology of the same name. Spoiler: mine has mythology.
2. The Kickstarter for Upper Rubber Boot's Women Up to No Good anthologies has funded! So we likely get a new cover for Broad Knowledge and a snippet of my reprint story is part of the most recent update.
3. Rose Lemberg is now reading submissions for an anthology of poetry in tribute to the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tentatively entitled Climbing Lightly Through Forests and scheduled for publication by Aqueduct Press in 2019.
4. I read this poem yesterday: Bob Hicok, "Redundancy Is Only a Problem When It Gets Repetitious: a poem of patriotism."
5. I am looking forward to this collection from Mark Fisher, although not the reason that it is probably the last: k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016).
6. Many of his experiences were not mine, but much of Jacob Plitman's "On an Emerging Diasporism" correponds strangely with the way I was brought up to think of myself as Jewish. My family's stories were always about carrying home with us. The congregation where I was almost bat mitzvah was peripatetic (it still feels weird to me that it now has a permanent building of its own). Wherever we are is home. What we do here matters most. This passage feels like something I have read before, a poem or a short story, Bryher's Avalon: "Maybe we should open an Embassy of the American Jewish Diaspora, elect an ambassador, print a sheaf of letterhead, and begin taking meetings with business and social leaders. There are a thousand short stories to be written, published and tucked like a prayer into the cracks in the walls of our neighbors' homes." If it were mine, of course, the point of an embassy of a diaspora—as distinct from a government in exile—would be that you can find it everywhere.
7. Robert Macfarlane defined "thalassophile" and I felt landlocked.
P.S. Courtesy of
spatch: a drunk history of Fort Macon. "So it's interesting that within a couple miles of each other were the 'last battle' of the Revolution and the 'last shot' of the Civil War, and I guess the moral is that the NC OBX is the place to be if a war is technically over but you're holding onto a really long-term grudge."
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P.
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Thank you.
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Out of curiosity, why "almost?"
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Most immediately, the rabbi left town at just the wrong moment. He had serious environmental allergies and ended up having to move either halfway or entirely across the country (my mother and I have different memories) right as it would have been necessary to start making plans. We missed a connection with his successor and it just never happened. The larger picture is that we weren't local and the logistics of study and preparation would almost certainly have been complicated—the responsibility of teaching me how to read and write Hebrew had already fallen to my grandfather as the one person in the family with experience of this process, although of course his own bar mitzvah in the early 1930's had been the time-honored experience of frantic memorization and having no idea what it's all about beyond the utterly certain fact that if you mess this up, your parents will die of shame—and both my grandparents and my mother and even the rabbi before his departure had been very clear that the ritual was valuable but not essential in the sense that at the age of twelve/thirteen* I would be an adult by Jewish law whether it was marked with a ceremony or not. If I had really pushed for it, I suspect they would have supported me, even with the logistical headache and the new rabbi whom no one in my family liked as much as either the previous rabbi or his guitar-playing predecessor, although this one did all the right things when my grandmother died. As it was, I learned to chant Torah at Brandeis at the age of twenty-one; it took me thirteen days and I regret nothing.
* Orthodox and Conservative Judaism hold that a girl becomes a bat mitzvah at twelve and a boy a bar mitzvah at thirteen; Reform Judaism recognizes the changeover at thirteen regardless of gender. My family must have existed in some kind of overlap between what my grandparents had been raised with and what was practiced by Congregation Bet Ha'am, because my own memory is that it was considered valid from age twelve (that was when my mezuzah was made for me by a friend of my grandmother's), but we were talking about holding the ceremony when I was thirteen.
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I knew nothing about my Romani ancestry either.
The harm people do with their well meaning silence!
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So what you do in your generation is tell the story.
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I tell it to anyone who will listen.
I'm a historian and we don't thrive on silence.
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Thank you! It makes me really happy.
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Now I am intensely curious to know whether this has any relationship to the oddly anti-Semitic white evangelical support for Israel. That group supports Israel because they see events there as a necessary item on the Second Coming checklist, and they similarly tend to fall into a mode of thinking where your time "here" is merely an interlude before you advance into "there" -- only "here" is life before the Rapture, and "there" is heaven where you'll go after you get Raptured.
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I agree it's especially acute with the Evangelicals, but I tend to think of Christianity in general as very there-ish—it's not just the Rapture, it's all your earthly life. Where you are in this life matters less than where you'll spend eternity, and what you do here matters mostly insofar as it affects that final disposition. The world is the testing ground, the playing field for the battle of the human soul. It is by definition flawed and impermanent. (By some Christian denominations, it seems to be regarded as essentially disposable. I wonder a lot whether this is a factor in the right-wing Christian denial of science: it's not just blasphemous, it's irrelevant. So what if we permanently wreck the climate and trigger mass extinction events? The animals were given into our dominion. This planet was created only so that we might exist.) It's good for comforting people against present miserable circumstances and historically bad for persuading them to do anything for others that does not directly influence their heavenly credit score. I recognize the existence of socially conscious, environmentally conscious modes of Christianity, but all the textual as well as traditional preferment of the afterlife at the expense of the life here and now really makes me feel the failure mode is baked in. I think of that as much more of a factor in Christian Zionism than Jewish Zionism itself.
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Please send wireless internets and a conditioned piece of air.
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The Left Hand of Darkness. I think you should write at least one poem for Changing Planes. I am thinking seriously about Orsinia.
Please send wireless internets and a conditioned piece of air.
I wish you could get temperature over an ansible.
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Of course. But I still think you should make someone give you this one.
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Have a lockpick for the land.
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How did I miss this comment? Thank you!