The Brunch Table

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.

From an A.V. Club interview this week:

“I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. I was thinking about that this morning, and I thought that the thing about growing up in the South in the 1950s and early ’60s was that it produced memories that look like the 1930s and 1940s…I think that contributed a lot to my worldview, and the way I look at things as a writer. I could simultaneously see this ancient Cormac McCarthy kind of reality in this Southern mountain world, plus Sputnik and Twilight Zone on television. The gap between where I lived and the media universe was much wider than it possibly could be, now that everybody’s online.”

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on Philip Dick, and I came across this amazing fact:

“When his twin Jane had died [shortly after birth], a tombstone had been carved with both of their names on it, and an empty space for Philip’s date of death. After fifty-three years, that final date was carved in, and Philip K. Dick was buried beside his sister.”

Wow…wouldn’t that give you a different perspective on life?

The Aleph

from memepool:

1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Holy crap. The book nearest to me right now is Heart of Darkness. There’s probably an outrageously offensive fifth sentence just waiting for me on page 23. Let’s see…

One…two..three…four…five. Shit. I knew it. I’m really tempted to just put the thing down and grab another book. Or just forget this exercise entirely. But here goes anyway:

“Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.”

It’s interesting, though…having finally gotten around to reading the story (and I’m not quite done yet; it’s thick as syrup, slow reading), it’s easy to see how it’s managed to piss people off. But my edition has a lot of footnotes, and the historical background in the appendices takes up more space than the actual story…and so, looking at the footnotes, I learned that Deal and Gravesend are towns in England…so what sounded like dumb, outwardly-projected hatred suddenly twists around and turns into self-criticism (Marching around with fearsome weapons and enslaving villagers is exactly what the narrator’s outfit is there to do.) And there’s an early passage where he imagines an ancient Roman’s thoughts on the savage Angle tribes in England…it sounds like an obvious point to make now, I guess, but it struck me as a pretty interesting attitude for 1899.

Oh, and a quick google check confirms that other people have thought what I’ve been thinking–there’s a big ol’ homoerotic, sadomasochistic vibe running through this thing too…all that talk about bodies–men’s bodies; the female characters aren’t really described too clearly at all–and torture. Self-hatred on a whole lot of levels…

‘Course, however you come at it, in 19th-century terms, the narrator’s a heroic explorer; in modern terms, he’s a war criminal with a conscience….

“The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all…’Deconstruction’ is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.”

I found this on one of our mailing lists at school…it’s an article written by an engineer (with the very Lucasesque name of “Chip Morningstar”) who takes us with him as he tries to read Derrida and Baudrillard.

What’s odd, though, is that after a lot of funny insights, he reaches the conclusion that communication in engineering is superior because “At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it.”

Well, where were those communication skills when General Electric handed off toxic depleted-uranium artillery shells to the Pentagon, without telling the military that tank and air crews who handled them would need to wear protection? Mr. Morningstar may have a point that practical concerns tend to hold engineers to a higher degree of intellectual honesty, but this smells like the same old Reaganist argument about the sanctity of the market.

I just found out that the ancient Egyptian Paradise was called the Nefer Nefer Land. (”Nefer” means “beautiful.”) Ain’t that cute?

Think of a wonderful thought / Any happy little thought / Pull your brains out through your nose / Wrap you up and off you goes / Like reindeer in the skyyyyyyyyyyyy / You can fly, you can fly, you can….

Having devoured all the George Saunders works I could get my hands on, I’ve moved on to Matt Derby’s Super Flat Times: Stories. I haven’t gotten very far yet, but he gets a gold star for delirious passages like these:

At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called “Eating,” and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle. “When you think about eating,” the trainer on the tape said, strolling past a series of staggered food murals, “think about the part of yourself that has to leave to make room for the food coming in. Where does it go? That is the central question. That is when we turn eating into Eating.”
…
I stood behind her, arms crossed over her abdomen, pressing my palms upward just below her ribs, demonstrating rapid breath technique. I only came up to her shoulders, which made positions such as Filtering the Pool and Attending the Korean Audio Science Museum more challenging than they should have been. Gradually, though, her body yielded to my embrace.
…
“What — are you?” she said, pointing to my body. It was difficult, in those first days, to understand everything she said — what came out of her was more like a set of breathy, musical notes, whole mouthfuls of them. Pretty, though. I am sure she had the same trouble with my own spittled, mawkish bursts of language. We relied heavily on clothes, sketches, and the arrangement of objects in the room to convey meaning.

Like Lem at his most satirical, he just piles on absurd premises, one after the other, until you’re simply forced to accept the whole teetering, improbable mess. Incidentally, the promotional site is appropriately disorienting—be sure to check out the DVD-style “deleted scenes”.

I just started reading Lionel Casson’s Libraries in the Ancient World, and I just came across this gem from the colophon of an ancient clay tablet:

He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse that cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth!

They need to figure out a modern equivalent for rental DVDs–judging from the condition I get them in sometimes, people must use them as frisbees or cutting boards.

I just got John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism from the library, and while I haven’t read enough to judge the book as a whole, this sentence from the first chapter just struck me:

The free market created a new type of economy in which prices of all goods, including labour, changed without regard to their effects on society.

Exactly!

Cash money link: Divorce Your Car!

I had heard of this book before, but I had always been put off by its smarmy self-help/activist title. However, my wonderful neighbor loaned it to me the other day, so I finally decided take a look. (more…)