The Brunch Table

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center…

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

Speaking of which, when I was in Vancouver the other day I happened to walk by the original steam clock precisely at noon:

Circa 1977, go figure.

I just finished reading Michael Chabon’s exquisite The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a detective story set in the present day of a parallel universe where Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Jewish refugees of World War II to settle in Alaska. The Holocaust was therefore brought to a premature end, with two major consequences for this alternate history. First, speakers of Yiddish still vastly outnumber speakers of Hebrew. And second, without the Displaced Persons (that real-life remnant of Holocaust survivors and Soviet-trained guerillas who formed Israel’s patchwork revolutionary army), there is no Israel. Beyond the story itself, well-drawn and clever, I detected a wonderful hidden motive: to put together a world where Yiddish survived the 20th century as a living language, with its own words for cell phones and SUVs.

Having finished the book, no longer scared of running into spoilers (it is a murder mystery, after all), I promptly found this essay by Chabon, which neatly confirmed my theory. He came up with the idea for this book, it seems, discovering a Yiddish phrasebook for travellers–and realizing that such a thing no longer had a reason to exist.

Fascinating NYT article on a small Syrian Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that, beginning in 1935, decided on the strictest interpretation possible of the Orthodox intermarriage ban. They’ll permanently exclude not only the offending member, their new spouse, and their children, but all of their future descendants.

In the short term, this attempt at social engineering has been indisputably successful; the congregation is thriving and growing. But, taking a broader perspective, this Wired article suggests the long-term futility of such efforts–telling the story of the profound confusion that erupted when, in 2004, the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma attempted to genetically screen their members for “authentic” Native descent.

But if the young discipline of DNA testing has taught us anything, it’s that the very notion of race is fading, at least from a genetic perspective. The world is populated by mongrels and half-breeds. Even those who base their self-worth on being of “pure” racial stock probably aren’t. Every family tree has a thousand branches.

That’s certainly true of the Orthodox-minded Jewish folks I know personally, many of whom are forced to conceal an ancestry even more muddled than mine from their co-religionists. I hope that at least a few of them can come round by the time I produce some Muggle children.

An article on digital library projects in the latest New Yorker has a helpful explanation of the orphan works problem:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.