(contributions welcome)
A as in ?
B as in deBt
C as in indiCt
D as in WeDnesday
E as in icE
F as in
G as in liGht
H as in ligHt
I as in busIness
J as in ?
K as in ?
L as in waLk
M as in Mnemonic
N as in ?
P as in Pneumonia
Q as in ?
R as in ?
S as in horS d’oeuvreS
T as in cloThes
U as in ?
V as in ?
W as in ?
X as in Grand PriX
Z as in ?
Jane Grey
Yesterday I went to services and got conscripted for some cantorial assistance. Felt good, felt like my voice was behaving itself, which especially in the spring allergy season it sometimes doesn’t. And then, near the end of the service, the young woman who was chanting the latter section pulled me aside and asked me for a tune (for the final hymn) suitable for Mother’s Day. I spent the next ten minutes, while she finished up and announcements were promulgated, trying to think of one.
A musicological note here: contrafaction is the process of setting a lyric to a tune previously used for something else. The final hymn of a Jewish Sabbath morning service is a 10-stanza piece in iambic tetrameter. Which means it can be made to fit almost any tune, either in 3/4 or 4/4 time, provided the line has (or can be contrived to have) the proper number of feet. Anything from the Star-Spangled Banner to the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth to My Darling Clementine. It’s a game musically literate Jews enjoy playing.
A tune for Mother’s Day? I’ve played the game for 40+ years and never had to come up with that. Finally, I got it, just in time. After I gave Abby the hairy eyeball for not sending me an e-mail on Friday, we launched into Adon Olam to the tune of Will the Circle Be Unbroken.
Look it up. The narrator is watching his mother’s body being carted off for burial. I didn’t bother explaining, for fear of weirding out the people whose mothers are still living (and even, in many instances, standing beside them.) But for me, and a lot of the others whose mothers are gone, it wasn’t bad. Will the circle be unbroken? If I still can’t think of my mother without a twinge, like an aching tooth, from 40 years ago almost exactly, then, yes the circle is still whole, though not exactly sound. She and I had our differences, and there wasn’t time to patch them up the way those things usually get patched up as the child matures and finds herself stepping through the same markers as her mother, and remembering the warnings, or pointers, or jokes, about them. I had looked forward to being my mother’s friend, once I had gotten past merely being her daughter, and I never got that. It wasn’t fair. Dammit. But yes, the circle is unbroken, and it rolls on and on. And my daughter calls me, and we walk through the markers, and we can be friends, while I edit her stuff and she sends me book titles she knows I’ll be interested in. Yes, the circle is unbroken.
CynThesis
Hankfox, who may well be a distant relative of mine, worries about referentless concepts taking up valuable space in the human mind. From what we seem to know about the human brain, I think he is barking up the wrong tree. The mind is not a finite bounded space, it’s a network. And a network gets more effective as it gets more complex, which happens every time it adds a new node. If some of those nodes lack concrete referents, so what? They give us more, and more interesting, ways to understand concrete realities. If all we know is what impacts our immediate senses, we are all prisoners in the solitary confinement of our own skulls. Perhaps because I have a client who is currently in jail, this gives me the squeams.
Limited to the input of our own senses, we have no way to make contact with other beings, human and otherwise. That way likes psychopathy. Imagination is the moral faculty.
Imagination has obvious evolutionary origins. I think it comes from the way predators teach their young to hunt. A mother cat shows her kittens, “make believe this vine, or that stick, or my tail, is your prey. Watch it. Follow it. Pounce on it. Subdue it.” She also shows them, quite vividly, the difference between imagination and reality—“but don’t bite my tail too hard or I will slap you upside the head and swat you into next Monday.”
From this they learn to chase their daily meals, and also how to behave with critters whom they do not regard as dinner—do as you would be done by. From this, we learn what was first taught to us in Deuteronomy: imagine that other people have insides, like yours. Imagine that they feel pain, and fear, and hunger, and pleasure, and joy, just like you. Imagine, that is, that your neighbor is like you. And then, love.
Jane Grey
Spurred by endless repeats of the trailer for “Valkyrie,” I’ve started reading up on the German resistance to Hitler, and on Stauffenberg in particular. (This gives me a familiar twinge of grief, because my father, may he rest in peace, majored in German history in college, and we could probably have had some really good discussions about this. I usually get these twinges about much more prosaic things, like federal tax inquiries, since he was a CPA.) Anyway, I’m distressed and surprised by the lack of good reading material—and no historical novels at all–as well as by the fact that a lot of what the Chicago Public Library claims to have on the subject isn’t actually on the shelf. I noted a while back that this was also true of most of the supposedly available stuff about Mussolini and Italian fascism. Is this a plot? Are the fascist paranoids out to cover their tracks? Who knows?
Anyway, contrary to what most of the more erudite movie critics have to say, Tom Cruise wasn’t necessarily miscast as Stauffenberg, who in real life was exceedingly handsome and charismatic. And the lack of material about him results at least partly from the fact that the Nazis, or somebody, disappeared all of his personal papers almost immediately after his execution (unless they turn up in some Iron Curtain archive, which is not impossible, but should have happened already if it was going to.) So the people who do write about him can cast him as a religious fanatic, a superconservative aristocrat, or a socialist sympathizer, since what little evidence there is could support all of those hypotheses. His politics kind of remind me of the author of the Blog Which Shall Not Be Named, actually, but please nobody tell him I said so.
But what really fascinates me is not Stauffenberg individually, but the movement he was part of, which seems to have thought of itself more as an opposition party in the European parliamentary style than a resistance movement. Since opposition parties were illegal, of course that was really a distinction without a difference. But the upside of that was that, unlike most resistance movements and coup plots, the participants had a long and broad view of what would happen after they succeeded, if they did. Most successful coups are followed by several years of chaos, while the participants figure out what to do next. This one might not have been. The downside was that, because action was so difficult, they overthought everything, and because they could speculate about everything, they could and did argue about everything. Foreign policy, including visions of a united Europe that look familiar now. Economic policy. Constitutional structures—are political parties to be allowed, and if so, how many and what kind? Education of the next generation. Why aren’t the alternative history buffs reading this stuff?
I suppose I’ll see the movie when it comes out on cable. The history is undoubtedly a lot more interesting.
Jane Grey
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the analysis we’re seeing here. Back in the days when marriage was about children, it was mainly about insuring that the children born to a man’s wife would be his children and not some other guy’s. And, back before DNA was invented, the cheapest and most effective way to do that was to control the wife in question. No doubt that was good for the family and good for the community. But it wasn’t good for women. It led to purdah, honor killings, and a lot of other bad stuff. As well as a bonanza for the textile industry, given how much more fabric it takes to veil a woman than to blindfold a man.
If, OTOH, marriage is just about sex, well, shoot, all that matters is that your partner has sex with you more or less when you’re in the mood. What s/he does the rest of the time is no big deal.
Which is not how Mr. Wired and I live our lives, of course. For 44 years, we have done the monogamy thing. Which has been good for our families and our community, no doubt. We have maintained a household which has provided care for a child and help for several other children, as well as for each other in illness and injury.
But we made the choice to do so. It was about each of us as an individual.
I’m of two minds (at least) about this. Or maybe each of the Wired Sisters should speak in turn:
Red Emma—The communitarian nostalgiacs tell us that the family does, efficiently and at no cost, things for its members that the market economy and the state do only badly and at huge expense. The family maximizes the range of choices for its members in ways that the market and the state cannot possibly do. But, in the process, it discounts completely the value of female labor and loss of choices. Yes, the result may well be a better society than what we have now, for men and male children. Similarly, classical Athens was a wonderful place to live, if you were free and male. Probably the ante-bellum Southern US was pretty good too, if you happened to own a plantation and the people who kept it running. But any society which can maintain its advantages for some of its members only at the cost of some other members’ freedom does not deserve to survive. Whether we like it or not, if we cannot devise a good society, based on good families, without returning women to servitude, all we have a right to do is muddle along until we figure out how to. Remember those family comedies in the ‘50s, in which Mama was called out of town for some emergency and the family suddenly had to survive without her and discover just how crucial her work really was, now that they didn’t have it? Well, folks, that’s where we are right now. And just demanding that Mama come home won’t cut it any more. She may not want to, and she may not even be able to.
Jane Grey—The family maximizes choices for its members in ways the market economy and the state cannot possibly match. Barbara Ehrenreich refers to the family as a “socialism of two” (or, presumably, three or four or more.) Within and because of the family, individuals can choose to take part in the market economy or not; to work for a corporation or run a small business or be an independent artisan. The family can choose to support one or more of its members in the arts, countercultural politics, or community service. Nobody else is going to pay people to do that. If we allow the family to shrink and disappear, we will have nothing left to support individual choices except the market and the state, which have both, over the millennia, done a really poor job of it.
CynThesis—We may not even be able to make this discussion fruitful any more. Whether we like it or not, the market has already come pretty close to destroying the family. An increasing number of our families are formed when young people go away to college or the military, marry other young people they meet there, and then settle down in the first place they find jobs afterwards. In the meantime, their respective parents move someplace else for their jobs, and then, ultimately, some other place for their respective retirements, until the families in question have one end in Florida, one end in Boston, and one end in Chicago, and, if they’re lucky, can make enough money between them all to see each other once a year at most. If we can’t find a way to create families where people actually live, there just plain won’t be any. It doesn’t matter whether a couple moves for her job or his job (or, for that matter, for her job or her job.) The market will determine where and for how long they will sink roots, and who their neighbors will be. If they cannot form a community with those neighbors, there will be no communities.
Sorry to be so gloomy. Happy New Year, and peace and light to you all.
The Wired Sisters
I wish you more
Of whatever lights your darkness;
Fire by night, a friend’s embrace,
A lover’s touch, the wisdom of the past,
Whatever bears you up through life’s endeavor
And whispers to your heart that winter
Will not last forever.
I wish you more
Of whatever warms your winter,
Wine and tea and coffee,
Song and dance and sweet waiting silence,
Whatever ties to life time cannot sever
That call to your mind that darkness
Cannot last forever.
As winter closes,
Night devours your days,
Join me and those who light
The candles, logs, or trees that fire our faith
That life is more than bending to the weather,
And sing, proclaiming in the winter darkness
That darkness will not last forever.
Marian H. Neudel
2000
Women rarely have existential crises. I remember having one in college, desperately trying to figure out what my life was for. Forty years later, I realize that I haven’t asked that question in—well, in nearly forty years. Because most women have no trouble figuring out what their lives are for. We are surrounded by people eager to tell us, if the question comes up. We are for doing all the stuff that falls around the edges and between the cracks of what Important People do, so that Important People are freed up to do their thing.
At the moment, I have a disabled husband, a small independent law practice, a cat, and a cluttered condo. And Social Security, Medicare, and a free public transportation pass. Not much in the way of savings, no investments whatever. (Mr. Wired never believed in the stock market. By George, he was right!) So I’m having a sort of existential mini-crisis about whether I should retire, or just cut back on my law practice to the extent possible, or try to ramp up my practice so I can put some money away while I’m still up to it.
Most lawyers don’t exactly retire anyway, they just cut back their practices. (The only lawyers I know who have actually retired within living memory are one of my colleagues who shut down his practice and moved to Florida to live on his investments, and then got bored by Florida and impoverished when his investments tanked ten years ago or so, and who is now back in court where I see him just about every time I’m in his regular courtroom, and a former judge who just got back safely from the bloodbath in Mumbai and who is probably reconsidering retirement as I write.) A colleague I used to work with at Legal Aid, who was admitted to the bar the year I was born, has cut back to part-time. I asked her at the time what differences she noticed. She said mainly it was that now, when she was doing the laundry, all she had to do was the laundry. Another colleague, who had his hundredth birthday a couple of years ago, is still more or less in practice.
And retirement, for most women, doesn’t exactly mean playing golf and reading magazines all day. I asked a friend of mine, who recently retired from her IT job with the Federal Reserve, what she noticed about being retired. She says it’s mostly that she no longer falls asleep in concerts and movies, because she is no longer sleep-deprived.
Retirement, for me, would mean spending a lot more time with Mr. Wired, who would like that a lot, since he doesn’t get out much. And a lot more time with the cat, ditto. The condo would be cleaner, obviously. I might have time to get rid of some of the clutter on Craigslist and Freecycle. (Anybody need a Sharper Image Bionic Air Cleaner with extra filter, still in working condition? How about an Onion Blossom maker? Lotta books? Miscellaneous kitchen gadgets? Coupla humidifiers?)
Retirement might also mean getting back into freelance writing, or maybe even working on a book, which I have roughed out in my mind. And knitting, which is coming back into style, and which I haven’t done in a long time. (Mr. Wired’s mother, of blessed memory, used to keep us both in beautifully knitted sweaters, but they’re wearing out now.)
As it is, I come in to the office later when I don’t have to be in court first thing in the morning. I often leave early, especially in winter, so I can get home before dark. I work from home more than I used to. But sometimes retirement really appeals to me. Simone de Beauvoir warns women against letting their lives be consumed by “women’s work,” but sometimes it’s tempting, and shoot, I’ve spent more than enough time doing The Important Stuff. I still fall asleep in movies, and when I do laundry, I’m generally doing a bunch of other stuff too. I welcome feedback. Peace and light to you all.
CynThesis
The Blog Which Shall Not Be Named has recently undergone some software rejiggering. This is the sort of thing I normally don’t pay much attention to. But this particular batch of tinkering has produced two results that drive me nuts. One is, of course, the “Captcha” graphic. Three times out of four, I don’t seem to be copying it right. That’s partly because I’m never sure whether those gaps in it are spaces or just typeface peculiarities, and partly because my eyesight is not what it used to be. In addition, while I’m trying to copy the graphic, my name somehow gets dropped out. This apparently happens a lot, and has produced a whole batch of Your Name posts.
In addition, the links and continuations seem not to work very well or very often. Instead, when I click on them, I wind up right back at the top of the newest post.
All of this puts me in mind of the state of liturgical music in Reform Jewish congregations (about which I can speak with some knowledge, having studied organ and been a professional chorister in earlier life.) Orthodox Jews, and most Conservative Jews, do not use musical instruments of any sort on the Sabbath, even in Sabbath services. Reform Jews, OTOH, do. But many Reform congregations, at least a couple of generations ago, were divided between older and more orthodox members, who generally made the largest financial contributions and were most active on the various committees, including the ritual committee, and the younger folks who went with more modern styles in ritual. My theory has always been that such congregations made their decisions about whether to purchase an organ by compromising between the two parties: “We’ll have an organ, and make the younger folks happy. But, to keep the old guys on the ritual committee happy, we won’t buy a very good one.”
I think perhaps the Blog Which Shall Not Be Named, which has distinctly Luddite tendencies, somewhere or other has made a decision that they will use the tools of modern communication technology—they just won’t use them very well.
Red Emma
“Clever terrorists can use innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities. But don’t forget that most bombers are not, in fact, clever. Living bomb-makers are usually clever, but the person agreeing to carry it may not be super smart. Even if “all” we do is stop dumb terrorists, we are reducing risk.”
Well, yes. Most criminals are pretty dumb, which is why they generally end up behind bars. Most tyrants are, if not dumb, at least inadequately advised, since nobody tells Attila the Hun anything he doesn’t want to hear. Which is why most tyrants do ultimately fall. And most governments are inefficient, which is why we have any civil liberties at all.
But is it possible to devise a society that is law-abiding and free, but governed and inhabited by intelligent, well-informed people? Or are we always dependent on the stupidity of strangers to leave gaps in tyranny and crime in which we can continue to survive?
It may be time to start worrying about this problem, as governments, for instance, get more efficient and better informed. Chicago has almost as many video cameras in public spaces as London, for example. Most of the time, I like that. It’s nice to know somebody is watching the idiots who zoom through stop signs and red lights, and the mopes who lift my wallet. But do I want those same people, or maybe a more maliciously disposed subset of those people, to watch me on my way to a political meeting?
I mostly don’t care that my phone calls and emails are probably the subject of some overworked spook’s surveillance, because we have learned from the lessons of 9/11 that merely possessing information does not necessarily improve the Establishment’s ability to use it. As one spook pointed out to the 9/11 Commission, you don’t improve your chances of finding a needle in a haystack by increasing the quantity of hay. Once again, our freedoms are dependent on the inefficiency of government. What happens if They find a solution to this particular problem? Do we just presume—not unreasonably, so far—that another problem will arise out of the solution, and so on? It was good enough for Hegel and Marx. Maybe for now, it’s the best we can do.
Red Emma
Mr. Wired has discovered a whole new class of numbers. Each of them is divisible only by itself, the number one, or the current balance on your mortgage. They’re called, of course, subprime numbers.
Jane Grey
