Impolite Company

A Few More Thoughts on Asher Lev

This is probably going to be more about me than about Asher Lev, which is fine--I think Asher's gotten plenty of press over the years and he won't miss the attention.  On reading the final chapter a couple of days ago I experienced all over again why I loved this book so much the first time I read it, though I think it became more poignant on subsequent readings.  Asher is an Hasidic Jew, caught between the warring traditions of his religion and his art and his father's inability to reconcile himself to the choices that Asher makes.  The first time I read the story I was a student in a small Bible institute, tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains.  Though I was there by my own choice and I wasn't consciously feeling any conflicts between the way I thought and the way of life demanded of students at the B.I., the tensions in Asher Lev resonated with me and I'm pretty certain I cried reading that last chapter.  I had lived that conflict between the expectations of family and friends and the pointing of my internal compass in the past and I may have even figured that those tensions were going to become a part of my life again in the future.  

To Be an Artist

I'm continuing a line of rereading that was touched off by Karen Armstrong's book, The Bible:  A Biography (a treasure trove of Armstrong will be in the next post after this one) and am reading another of Chaim Potok's books, My Name is Asher Lev.  Asher is a young Ladover Hasid, burdened and gifted with incredible ability as an artist and painter.  The major theme of the book is reconciling his two worlds, that of his religious life (powerfully influenced by his father's view of sketching and painting as foolishness) and his all-consuming life as an artist.  At one point, he reads Robert Henri's book, The Art Spirit and I found the following quote thought-provoking:

You can do anything you want to do.  What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing:  wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.

A few pages on, in My Name is Asher Lev, I read the following:

"It will be five years," Jacob Kahn said to her.  "Millions of people can draw.  Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."

"Or a laugh," she said.  "Picasso laughs, too."

"Or a laugh," he said.

"My Children Have Conquered Me"

Taken from Karen Armstrong's The Bible:  A Biography:

There could be no definitive interpretation of scripture.  this point was made in the very early days at Yavneh, when R. Eliezer was engaged in an intractable argument with his colleagues about a legal ruling (halakha) in the Torah.  When they refused to accept his opinion, R. Eliezer asked God to back him up with some miracles, and--mirabile dictu--a carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord; water in a conduit flowed uphill; and the walls of the house of studies shook so violently that the building seemed about to collapse.  But the other rabbis were not impressed by this show of supernatural force.  In desperation, R. Eliezer asked for a bat qol ('voice from heaven') to adjudicate and the divine voice obligingly declared: 'What have you against R. Elizer?  The Halakah is always as he says.'  But Rabbi Joshua quoted a verse from Deuteronomy:  'It is not in heaven.'  The Torah was no longer confined to the celestial world; once it had been promulgated on Mount Sinai, it no longer belonged to God but was the inalienable possession of very single Jew.  So, commented a later rabbi, "We pay no attention to a heavenly voice.'  And furthermore, it had been decreed at Sinai: 'By a majority you are to decide', so R. Eliezer, a minority of one, could not override the popular vote.  When God heard that his opinion had been overruled, he laughed and said:  'My children have conquered me.'

Hasidic Judaism

I love it when I get involved in a project and it starts leading me to unexpected places.  For the last few weeks I've been traveling back to some places in my mind that I haven't visited for quite a while, the fundamentalist perspective on the Bible and some of the times I spent living that life.  To balance that out, I've been reading some other things, Armstrong's book (see below) for instance.  The Bible:  A Biography  and a conversation I'm having about it with a friend of mine has gotten me thinking about the Hasidim again and so I've been rereading Chaim Potok'sThe Chosen, set amongst the Jewish communities of New York City during World War II and following the trials of a brilliant young fish-out-of-water Hasid. 

About a third of the way through the book there's a chapter in which a teacher explains to his son the history of Hasidism and I really like this one passage that talks about the Ba'al Shem Tov (the "Besht"), the spiritual father of Hasidism.  I won't reproduce the whole of it, but here's a portion that talks about the Besht and his teachings:

Finally, he (Israel) began to travel and he became a Ba'al Shem.  he was kind and saintly and godly, and he seemed to want to help people not for the money they paid him but for the love he had for them.  And so they came to call him the Ba'al Shem Tov--the Kind or Good Master of the Name.  He mingled with the people and talked to them about God and His Torah in plain, simple language that they could easily understand.  He taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life:  eating, drinking, praying, sleeping.  Giod is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.  Evil is like a hard shell.  Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness.  How do we penetrate the shell?  By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy, and by loving all people.  The Ba'[al Shem Tov--his followers later shortened his name and called him the Besht--believed that no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding.  He also believed--and here is where he brought down upon himself the rage of the learned rabbis--that the study of Talmud was not very important, that there need not be fixed times for prayers, that God could be worshiped through a sincere heart, through joy and singing and dancing.  In other words, Reuven, he opposed any form of mechanical religion.  There was nothing new in what he taught.  you will find it all in the Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah.  But he gave it a special emphasis and taught it at a key time to people who were hungry for this kind of teaching.  And these people listened and loved him.  Many great rabbis came to mock him and went away converted to his way of thinking .  When he died, his followers opened their own synagogues.  Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones.  So great was the need of the masses for a new way to approach God.

Shaping the Bible

At the suggestion of a friend, I'm reading Karen Armstrong's The Bible:  A Biography, which is a very good foil for some of the other reading I'm doing these days as I'm reaching back into the fundamentalist library for a project I'm working on.  It's interesting to cross-reference Armstrong's work with Charles Ryrie's book, A Survey of Bible Doctrine and to check to see what Wilkinson's Talk Thru the Bible flatly asserts about the authorship of various books compared to Armstrong's scholarship. 

There's a paragraph in the introduction in which Armstrong talks about the guiding principles of exegesis for some of those who have shaped the selection and the composition of the canon that I liked a lot.  It was actually one of the things that caught my ear when Bill was talking about the book.  So I'm going to get off the page and let Armstrong's words speak for themselves, it's good stuff I think:

Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis:  any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate.  All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao.  But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest.  The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.

Does God Exist?

Simmer down, I'm not going to try to tackle that question, not even peripherally.  Rather, there's a video making the Facebook rounds with that title (Does God Exist?) that purports to tell a story about young Albert Einstein challenging an atheist teacher as a schoolboy.  Having read a bit about Einstein, I'd like to put the video into some historical context.  The quotes below come from the chapter on Einstein's childhood in Walter Isaacson's very enjoyable biography of Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe.  My conclusion is that while it's improbable that the video is factual, I won't go as far as Snopes in saying that the account is definitely false.  I think that the producers of the video could have accomplished much of what they were seeking to accomplish by not attributing the words to Einstein but there has been a longstanding battle to try to present Einstein as a believer in a Judeo-Christian God without a lot of evidence to support the assertion.  I'm assuming that's why they went with Einstein.

Einstein was raised without religious practice in his home, "Einstein's parents, on the other hand, were "entirely irreligious" and felt no compulsion to hedge their bets.  They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father referred to Jewish ritual as "ancient superstitions."  But while his home life wasn't religious, it appears that the schools he attended did include religious practice.  His first school was Catholic:

...Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home.  Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood, the Petersschule.  As the only Jew among the seventy students in his class, Einstein took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.  Indeed, he did so well in his Catholic studies that he helped his classmates with theirs.  (p.15)

Unseen Hemingway

Life Magazine just recently uncovered a small treasure trove of pictures of Ernest Hemingway, taken in conjunction with their publishing of The Old Man and the Sea in the magazine.  Thanks to NPR for posting their story on the photos via The Picture Show:

An infamously surly character, Hemingway was resistant to Eisenstaedt's camera. Only after much cajoling would the writer put on a shirt, and only with the help of his wife and a cocktail would he acquiesce to a portrait. Eisenstaedt resorted to taking stealthy candids of the writer, and for years after recalled it as his most difficult assignment. Very few photographs from the assignment ran in the magazine; some were rendered as drawings. But today, almost 60 years later, the photographs have resurfaced.

Invisible Man

Excerpt:

...One moment I believed, I was dedicated, willing to lie on the blazing coals, do anything to attain a position on the campus--then snap! It was done with, finished, through.  Now there was only the problem of forgetting it.  If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.  But there was no relief.  I was wild with resentment but too much under "self control," that frozen virtue, that freezing vice.  And the more resentful I became, the more my old urge to make speeches returned.  While walking alone down the street words would spill from my lips in a mumble over which I had little control.  I became afraid of what I might do.  All thing were indeed awash in my mind.  I longed for home.

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

Amazon Clarifies

Amazon has finally come out and made some comments to straighten their awful PR situation out--apparently their situation involved far more than just books related to gay and lesbian themes but extended to over 57,000 books.  Considering their initial response, which I posted about earlier, it's really not much of a reach to interpret their action as focused on gay and lesbian lit.  They claim to have just made a huge mistake and were apparently loathe to admit it publicly.  Here's the new statement from an MSNBC posting, Shocking Truth Behind Amazon's "Glitch":

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Considering that they responded to an author of a work of gay fiction with the following statement, I believe the fault for the misreporting is their own, not the reporting.  I'm glad that they're fixing the situation and publicly explaining it.  But they've got some PR repair work to do.  Here's the initial statement:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

No More Amazon Around Here

For about a month I had an advertisement from Amazon up on the blog, a book related one that not many people found interesting.  I've chosen to take it down because of Amazon's decision to excise certain gay and lesbian fiction from some of their best seller lists.  They did so, not on the basis of graphic sexual content or inappropriate salacious details but because of the sexual orientation of the protagonists and themes of the books.  The method used, the ethics of doing so and the online reaction to Amazon's decision are discussed in Why Amazon Didn't Just Have a Glitch:

This weekend it was discovered that Amazon had filtered out some books as "adult" even though those books had minor sexual or erotic themes (fiction) or were non-fiction discussion classes of people associated with particular sexual orientations. Apparently, these filters began to pop up two months ago and while Amazon was notified at the time, many ¿ including me ¿ weren't aware of the problem until Mark Probst, author of ?The Filly,? realized his book was missing it's "sales rank" from Amazon. He questioned them, and they replied:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

Amazon won't miss us--I think all told maybe one person clicked on the ad once.  But as our ability to manipulate information becomes more sophisticated we have to watch out for this kind of thing, which is far more targeted and difficult to uncover that rather straightforward forms of discrimination, such as redlining or Jim Crow laws.  And, unlike racial or religious discrimination, "sexual orientation" is not a protected class receiving the highest level of protection against discrimination under the Equal Protection clause and so it's up to us to speak up when our friends and neighbors are discriminated against.

Why Evolution is True

It's not a terribly imaginative title, as I stole it from the post I'm linking to, but it is simple, concise and direct (and it's also the name of the book in question).  Bad Astronomy has written a brief post on a book by Jerry Coyne entitled (you guessed it!), Why Evolution is True.  Though I've read a number of books looking at evolution for the layperson, this one sounds like my cuppa tea and I may just splurge and get it.  Here's a bit of what the Bad Man has to say:

Moreover, he shows that the scientific theory of evolution by natural (and in some cases, sexual) selection makes clear predictions which are borne out by observations. And on top of that he shows why these conclusions make no sense at all if you think there is some Creator that made us the way we are out of thin air (or dust, I suppose).

I was particularly struck by the concept of geographic isolation and how that affects evolution (perhaps because I spent more than a week last year touring the Galapagos Islands). Species isolated on islands adapt genetically and morphologically (or vice-versa) to the environment, and you can see how there are changes in those species as they radiate out to other nearby islands. We only see species on those islands that come from nearby land masses, as you’d expect from natural methods of dispersion over long time periods (but not what you’d expect for a Creator to simply pop life into existence). And all of this fits in with what geologists see by way of plate tectonics and continental drift.

What to Pack: Las Vegas

Rick Steves had a quote in Europe Through the Back Door that has stuck with me through the ages--there are two kinds of travelers, those who packed light and those who wish they had.  Or something similar.  So, in the first of a series of one, I want to introduce you to a list of the essentials you simply must carry with you when traveling to Las Vegas (though I doubt it would make a Rick Steves' list of essentials), the list carefully compiled by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

End of Life Care Choices and Religion

The New York Times is reporting that a study will be released today that shows religious terminal patients are much more likely to request aggressive efforts to stave off death compared to the non devout, Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients:

Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive, a study has found.

The patients who were devout were three times as likely as less religious ones to be put on a mechanical ventilator to maintain breathing during the last week of life, and they were less likely to do any advance care planning, like signing a do-not-resuscitate order, preparing a living will or creating a health care proxy, the analysis found.

I found this article very interesting, but I don't want to broadcast any of my personal conclusions on it because I think most any speculation as to intent would be pretty false.  Certainly Catholics are taught of the primary value of life and I can see that encouraging many people to seek to prolong their lives.  Many other Christian denominations have similar views but their could be a host of other reasons as well. 

Neil Gaiman on Colbert

From the Totally Sucking Up To Reader's Department I feel compelled by some invisible force to post this video of Neil Gaiman (some writer) talking about his new book The Graveyard Book, on The Colbert Report:  Oh, and Colbert goes off on a brief digression on Tom Bombadil (Ol' Tom wasn't good enough for Peter Jackson but, by God, he's good enough for Colbert!)

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Neil Gaiman

Colbert Report Full Episodes
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Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

The Godfather Wars (an article you can't refuse)

If you love the movie The Godfather, love to hear the stories of how movies get made (especially if Francis Ford Coppola is involved) and find the workings of the mob fascinating, you really have to read this article in the new Vanity Fair about the fights over the making of The Godfather.  It's got it all, from the fights over casting Brando, Pacino and Caan, to what it took to get the real Mafia to approve of the movie and stop threatening those involved with the production, this is great stuff.  It's long for the internet--seven pages--but worth every one of them.  A friend of mine, Kate from college days, posted the link on Facebook and so I can't really give her the sort of hyperlink love I'd give a blogger, but I really enjoyed reading it and appreciate her pointing it out.  Thanks, Kate!  The Godfather Wars:

It all began in the spring of 1968, when a largely unknown writer named Mario Puzo walked into the office of Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount Pictures. He had a big cigar and a belly to match, and the all-powerful Evans had consented to take a meeting with this nobody from New York only as a favor to a friend. Under the writer’s arm was a rumpled envelope containing 50 or 60 pages of typescript, which he desperately needed to use as collateral for cash.

Poetry from James Wright

I have a friend's master's thesis somewhere in my house (I'm pretty sure it's the bottom drawer of a see-through plastic set of drawers in my office) on the poetry of James Wright.  I don't read a lot of poetry any more and I'm not sure that I ever liked it quite as much as I appeared to.  But there's some poetry that resonates with me, that sings to me, that not only is beautiful to read but also corresponds to a form of reality that I recognize.  Much of Wright's poetry that I've read falls in that category.  It's often pretty dark and dismal and the silver lining isn't usually that silvery, but it's filled with a spare, stark beauty.

This morning, while tracking down something that sounded interesting from NPR, I traveled over to Speaking of Faith, which in turn led me to a little post about one of Wright's poems, "In Terror of Hospital Bills."  Why do I like it?  I don't know, does it make sense to like a poem because it evokes in you the image of the tiny spark of wildness in us that will do anything to stay alive when you're stripped down to nothing but survival?  I'll post a bit of it here and if you're keen, you can go read the rest of it where the folks have permission to reprint it in full, A Poem for Hard Times (it's pretty short, no more than twenty lines or so):

"In Terror of Hospital Bills"

I still have some money
To eat with, alone
And frightened, knowing how soon
I will waken a poor man.

The Idiot

(No, I'm not talking politics this time!)
When I was at Word of Life Bible Institute, this odd little cloister in upstate New York where there weren't really any tv's and very little contact with the outside world, there wasn't much to read aside from the Bible and related texts.  Admittedly, I sneaked in a copy of The Catcher in the Rye while I was there but since we didn't get a whole lot of opportunities to go book shopping, you made do with what was available.  They had a tiny little one room library, which was mainly filled with books related to the Bible and Christianity but there was this one, singular anomaly--a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.  How or why this novel was there, I have no idea, but it was pretty much responsible for awakening my love of Russian literature.  Starting this weekend, the Performing Arts Center at UT will be hosting a theatrical production of The Idiot, it seems I'm going to have to go see it, so let me talk a little bit about the novel.

The Book of Longing

I got an email a few weeks back, a mass marketing tool from a friend who was trying to find a taker for a ticket to The Book of Longing, Philip Glass’s composition based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen (for a more of a review of the music and the show, check out Cohen, Glass Collaboration Explores Multiple Art Forms I haven’t read any real reviews yet because I don’t want to taint this).  I was curious from the get-go and sent her a tentative reply that I’d be willing to be her fallback—while I don’t listen to Glass’s music very often, I do like a number of Cohen’s songs and thought it would be a good stretching experience.   Time passed, she didn’t get any other takers and so I made it a plan. 

I had a gift certificate to Eastside Cafe that had been burning a hole in my pocket since November of 2007 (very slow-burning certificate) and decided to make it a night.  I worked at Eastside for a couple of years and even though I don’t get up there all that often, I like popping in occasionally to see how things are going.  I’d also read a bit lately about one of the owners taking over the garden and I’ve wanted to see what changes she’s made ever since.  As I only had one ticket for the show, I tucked my copy of Invisible Man under my arm and set out for Eastside Saturday evening.

Kissing Fish Logo

A friend of mine used to collect different versions of the Jesus Fish and Anti-Jesus Fish car magnets and logos and so I've gotten in the habit of noticing them.  The other day, I saw one I'd never seen before, though it apparently has been around for awhile.  It wasn't just a magnet, though, it was on the side of a white van and it looked like this:

I don't know anything about the website (click on the picture to travel there) or the quality of the science he peddles there--he does seem a little over enthusiastic.  Which is cool, I guess.  I just looked at his speaking schedule and he was in Austin over the weekend, which I guess would explain the van with the logo.  I don't endorse it, as I haven't read it, but here's a quick bit about his book, Thank God for Evolution:

A movement has been growing over the past few decades that takes our common creation story -- the epic of cosmic, biological, and human evolution revealed by science -- as the basis for an inspiring and meaningful view of our place in the universe. Rev. Michael Dowd, “America's evolutionary evangelist,” is at the forefront of this movement. This well informed, thoroughly researched, and inspired book proclaims a gospel billions of years old. It builds bridges, provides guidance, and restores realistic hope for virtually everyone, regardless of belief or worldview.

John Updike and Mankind's Place in the Universe

This was posted by Biophemera and there's really no way to do it justice and no real point to posting about it without reproducing the whole thing.  So, with a grand sweep of the hat to Biophemera and a goodly amount of thankfulness that John Updike once walked and wrote amongst us, here's what he had to say, Updike on the Implications of Evolution:

The non-scientist's relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century's revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know.

John Updike
December 30, 1985
excerpted in the New Yorker, Feb. 9, 2009