This semester I taught a college-level Bible as Literature class, and it has been quite the ride, to say the least. Out of 30 students, I would say that at least 25 of them come from conservative Christian backgrounds, which means they view me—and all of my claims about midrash and an evolving biblical text—with more than an inkling of suspicion, despite my own unapparent but sordid, long-lost background in the world of Evangelicals.

On the first day of class, four or five students approached me, and one said, “So, we really need to know: are you Jewish, or are you Christian? We need to know so that we can decide whether we are going to stay in this class.”

And now, my suspicions kicked in. They had been talking about me, and had somehow elected a leader, their own little makeshift Moses, to rise up from among them and ask the loaded question. I was the Egyptian, about to be struck down and buried in the sand. I was sweating on the inside, unperturbed on the outside. In my imagination: this could have been me.

The implied question seemed to be, “Are you going to regurgitate all of the ideas about the bible that have been communicated to me since birth by my conservative Christian community? If not, I’m out of here.”

It’s a literature class, not a theology class, which means that how, or rather if, I define myself is none of their business. But I felt compelled to answer.

My initial inclination was to say “Jewish,” but then I thought, why make it so easy? “I’m both,” I responded, “and neither. If that sounds interesting to you, then you’ll want to stay in this class. If not, I believe there’s a Catholic teaching one of the other sections, and there’s also a Reform Jew teaching a section. Plenty of diversity. The choice is up to you.”

Moses seemed satisfied: “Okay.”

I knew I would never see them again. But I was wrong. I was also impressed—they all came back, and they, along with all of the other students, have been amazing, despite their initial difficulty with reading the bible as literature, and not as theology.

Of course, it has taken some longer than others to shed the tell-tale signs of religious indoctrination. Last week, one young woman, a great student, asked me earnestly if the confusing reference to both God and God’s messenger in the story of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush was a reference to “the trinity.”

In a way, I didn’t mind, because it revealed that she was reading closely and interpreting the text from her own perspective and position. And it was a question—an attempt to understand—rather than an authoritative statement. She was searching for a way to make it mean something to her, and I think I can respect that. I wonder if we might even call it midrash.

A midrashic impulse is what keeps Torah alive. I myself have a slightly unnatural obsession with midrash and anything that feels midrashic, and so I’m happy when I see my students starting to think along these lines. I derive curious pleasure from listening to them during class discussions, as they “turn it and turn it,” much like the rabbinic admonition.

Do they know they are being Talmudic?

But I got a little surprise last week, when Brandon Kleiber, one of my students, turned in his weekly response essay. It wasn’t exactly an essay. In fact, he completely disregarded my instructions, and decided instead to re-tell the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. It made me laugh so hard that I had to share it (with his permission), and give him an A. I only wish I had discovered this little gem in time to post it during the Days of Awe . . .

Enjoy. (And, note how he has even incorporated the Hebrew emphatic—“drink, yes, drink”—into his “midrash.”)

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The excerpt herein is from my humor book, Oh, the Humanity! A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert, which was published in October by TOW Books. I was interviewed on this very site a few weeks ago, actually. You might find it helpful to read a conversation with a writer you've probably never heard of before diving into his equally obscure book. Sorry for the hard sell.

The portion below deals with tactics for wriggling out of deadly conversations. Some of you will find these bitterly familiar.

People Are Strange
Those lyrics are most commonly associated with Jim Morrison of the Doors, and you probably know the song even if you’re not a fan of classic rock or haven’t seen the ’80s biopic starring Iceman. But people are strange, not to mention frustrating. If we all walked around in sandwich boards that revealed our inner thoughts, we would know from a distance if a woman disliked her sister-in-law or if a man had fulfilled his dream of wearing a sandwich board. Unfortunately, we usually don’t know what we’re in for until we’ve entered into a conversation, and by the time we realize that we’re in the presence of somebody we should have avoided, it’s too late. But that doesn’t mean you’re defenseless. Before we look at specific types of undesirables, let’s touch on some general strategies for extracting yourself from an unpleasant conversation.

Call upon your biological urges. You usually can’t walk away from a conversation without at least some sort of slipshod pretense, and hunger’s a good one. If someone’s wearing you down with their reminiscences of gift certificates they’ve received over the years, you can excuse yourself with, “I think I’ll get myself some of those tasty appetizers” or, “Sounds like they’re slaughtering additional chickens. I’m going back for seconds.” Unfortunately, all the other person has to do is counter with, “Delicious! I think I’ll join you” and you’re stuck. That’s where going to the bathroom comes in. It’s an incontestable excuse that begs no follow-up. It’s rare that someone declares his intention to use the facilities and in response hears, “Really? Are you a fan of toilets?” or, “Delicious! I think I’ll join you.” Of course, people are generally squeamish about bodily functions. They just don’t want to know. If you’re worried that your restroom excuse is too transparent, simply concoct something anatomically obscure and unsettling.

• “Hate to cut you off, but my membranes are lathering.”
• “Sorry, I need to void my pus nodes.”
• “I’ve been coughing up sussudio all week.”

Bring in a third party. Some people are so hungry for closeness that they won’t even let you get your name out before presenting you with your half of a heart locket. They exchange poems with prisoners about things like freedom and incompetent public defenders, and they’re not 100 percent sure, but they think the person who sent them an e-mail regarding “vigara schoolgirlz who wants 2 gag on your best hippo cock” is probably their soul mate. No rhetorical maneuver will detach these needy people. And yet, you’re not really special to them, either. You’re just a human who, for the moment, is keeping them from being dragged away in the undertow of their loneliness. You are easily substituted, and you can swap yourself with someone else. If you’re at a social function, it’s not difficult to find someone else, but you can’t just flag down an acquaintance and say, “Listen, Heather, I have to separate myself from this horrible, horrible person. I propose you talk to him.” The trick is to make the switch seem beneficial to both the person you’ve recruited and the person you’re retreating from. Then, as they explore their common ground, you can bow out with a clear conscience.

ALISSA: Heather, come here for a second. Remember when you studied Celtic folklore for a year in Ireland? Well, it just so happens that Brad here also spends most of his paycheck on masseuses who are willing to “finish the job.” I’ll let you two get acquainted. I’m surprised your paths haven’t crossed already.

Reinforce the positive. Even if you’re with someone who hasn’t made the best impression, it helps to end on a supportive note. You never know when you might need a professional contact or want access to someone who really frightens you. You’ll score extra points if you encourage the person in terms of something he or she mentioned earlier in the conversation:

• “Well, it was nice meeting you! Thanks for all the unsolicited recipes for placenta.”
• “I’ve really enjoyed our chat! Ecoterrorism seems like a dynamic field.”
• “Hey, it’s been a pleasure! I’ll be sure to pick up that DVD you recommended next time I’m in the mood to watch people old enough to be my grandparents fuck people old enough to be their grandparents.”

On that repellent note, I'll thank you for reading. (And what would any excerpt be without an Amazon link?)

Although Philip Roth struck out miserably in his latest novel, Exit Ghost, literary Jewry may yet have some reason for celebration. America’s least Jewish novelist, (with some very fierce competition from John Updike) Cormac McCarthy, has brought a little bit of Yiddish with him into the post-apocalyptic universe.

In McCarthy’s most recent, and miraculously stunning, novel The Road, the reader is made witness to the blackened sphere that is the Earth after Armageddon. A father and son trod west across America, trying to outrun the onslaught of a deadly winter. And the onslaught of a deadly everything else too. The book is so absolute in its bleak evocation of hell on earth that it very nearly defies description. As the old expression goes: it’s like describing the color blue to the blind. There’s no humor in the conventional sense. There’s no black humor or sick humor either.

There’s wall-to-wall violence and abomination of religious proportions. There are nightmares made daymares made flesh. However, amid the death with a side of death and a glass of death to wash it down there is a heightened sense of the tender, the precious, and the fragile. And this is about the only reason I can imagine for McCarthy’s inclusion of the otherwise laughably out of place sweet Yiddish word tuckus in the text.

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You can stand under my umbrella: Bandmates Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips Good first-person writing online is an endangered species. A personal essay needs at least thousand words to really get into the nuances of whatever probably-humiliating story you’re choosing to share, but the Internet, being full of distractions, doesn’t reward length. And a personal essay needs honesty to be interesting, but the Internet is meaner to personal essayists than a school bus full of seventh-graders to a kid with bird shit on his shoulder -- the more honest you are, the more abuse you’ll take.

So today's roundup celebrates the good, the honest, and the long.

In this Men’s Vogue excerpt from former Luna frontman Dean Wareham's memoir, he tells the story of how he wound up leaving his wife of seven years for his band’s high-cheekboned bassist. His recounting is the opposite of cavalier, and reading it, you wind up sympathetic to everyone involved. (NB: I’m pretty sure I was at the Philadelphia show where Dean and Britta first made out, but I’d eaten an entire bag of Valentine’s Day candy hearts and spent most of the night outside trying not to puke. Rock and roll!)

There's an exceptionally weird story on Fresh Yarn – always a font of weird stories – by a theater kid whose crush on her fellow Gypsy cast member ended when he stabbed a friend of her parents. OK, yes, total spoiler, but aren’t you curious about the road from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to murder in the first degree?

The Morning News has a lovely, simple, raw tale about the overpowering urge to protect one’s children, and what happens when that urge leads one man – an author of kids’ books, no less – to kick a stranger’s dog.

A few weeks late, but this just came in over the transom. Enjoy.

The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer has cast attention back on some of his early essays, including “The White Negro,” an influential piece that first appeared in Dissent magazine in 1957. Written during a period he described as "the years of conformity and depression," Mailer's essay focused on the hipster—"the urban adventurer. . .who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts"—as a hero capable of providing the antidote to America's stultifying postwar culture.

"The White Negro," and the hipster lifestyle it details, remind us that white Americans have looked to blacks not only as a group upon which they could project the negative aspects of their society, but also as an object of longing: Whites fantasize that the African American embodies the expressiveness and sensuality with which they as whites have lost touch in their self-styled "march toward progress." Bristling under the confines of postwar culture, Mailer admired the hipster as white man who, like his imagined black counterpart, could free himself from "the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization," divorce himself from society, and relinquish "the pleasures of the mind for...the pleasures of the body."

Although Mailer did not explicitly mention his Jewish background in "The White Negro," the essay was undoubtedly shaped by the symbolic importance African Americans and their culture have long held for American Jews. Mailer himself was a product of the urban streets where Jewish youth of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s often listened to "race records," formed their own jazz bands, and occasionally made evening excursions to Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. Not only were many of the leading white interpreters of African American music during the interwar period Jewish, but so was the original hipster, Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), a clarinetist who declared himself a "voluntary Negro" and devoted himself—in his own words—to "hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can."

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Consuming too many empty tabloid calories and not enough high-culture fiber? Let us help you get back on a balanced diet.  Three delicious pairings:

The low-brow: Britney Spears' lackluster cover of “All That She Wants” by Ace of Bace is strangely compelling.

The high-brow: Master essayist Joseph Epstein’s looks at the six-hour PBS documentary “The Jewish Americans” in the National Endowment for the Humanities journal.

The low-brow: Scotland Yard is going to investigate Amy Winehouse's appearance smoking crack on camera. In other news, she finally got rid of the awful blonde dye job.

The high-brow: Nikil Saval eviscerates “I’m Not There” auteur Todd Haynes (and barely spares Bob Dylan) in N+1.

The low-brow: Did ICanHasCheezburger really need to weigh in on the death of Heath Ledger?

The high-brow: Poetry Magazine has long ode to the poet Frank Stanford, a “swamprat Rimbaud” who once wrote “I don’t believe in tame poetry…Poetry busts guts.”

I always knew there were two Norman Finkelsteins.

But I was not quite positive about which was which until last week, when this Norman Finkelstein came to Purdue University to give a talk and to read some of his poetry. Yes, I said poetry. This Norman Finkelstein is a poet--and a good one, at that.Norman Finkelstein: ProvocateurNorman Finkelstein: Poet

After the lecture, I was fortunate enough to join the poet Finkelstein and another professor for coffee and a lively discussion. Somehow, I also managed to score a free copy of Finkelstein's newest book of poetry, Passing Over, which is a gem.

Below are a couple of exquisite excerpts from two of the poems.

From "inscription of the body on the text":

Something I know of bodies and something of texts, / how lines are inscribed and how they curve, / how they mingle freely and how they are forbidden, / how they articulate their wonted and unwonted fires.

And, from "Elegy":

Let the Angel of Death stay in his dressing room / forever redoing his makeup, / and let our hopes flourish falsely into flowers / for our lovers, who will laugh and throw them away.

Let the old world remake itself / into a sequence of lights. / There will be crowns in the sky and we will look up amused, / for we were told that the past / could be cleansed of all its imperfections. / Yes, we will laugh and turn the switch; / the lights will be extinguished and we will embrace in the dark, / thinking, before we give up on thinking, this is how it was meant to be.

The other Norman Finkelstein, the political theorist of the recent DePaul tenure scandal (and the subject of recent Jewcy discussions), does not write poetry. Both Finkelsteins, however, do publish books and articles on Jewish-American culture--though one is more politically-inclined, while the other relegates his critiques to the world of the literary, metaphorical, and poetic.

It is funny, though, no?

I wonder if, somewhere, there is also another Alan Dershowitz.

The more you think about it, the less clever a bit of Polonian wisdom seems the line, "Dress British, think Yiddish." The Anglo and Hebraic traditions are bound by a lot more than Isaiah Berlin. Consider the comedy of Albert Brooks: Things are never quite so bad that they can't get worse. Well, well knew that from Waugh, Wodehouse and Amis, didn't we? The basic plot structure of the Jewish sitcom -- from Maude to Seinfeld -- evokes the gambols of Bertie and Jeeves, where every mess manages to get cleaned up at the end of the half-hour (which is usually how long a Wodehouse short story takes to read). In politics, too, the filiations are many and profound: Neoconservatism survives outside the United States only in the United Kingdom: Tony Blair, seethes his Tory critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft, might as well have studied under Bloom and Strauss for all the good he's done us. And the noble history of English radicalism is at least as noble as that of the Jewish variety: Why else did Marx choose the British Museum to formulate his class-based social theory?

I bring this up because there's another fascinating trend that I've just realized does double duty in New York and London: Call it the Ex-Friends Syndrome. Some grubby little excrescence waits around until his old chums are dead to squat and defecate on their corpses, usually at a per-word rate that staggers the euphemism-befuddled obituarist. "I never liked him, anyway" is the typical refrain here, suggesting not just bad faith but transparent bad faith. Why'd you hang back from telling us, then, until he hadn't got the breath to defend himself?

I don't have to name names. Colin Wilson hemorrhages them:

John Osborne ("utterly without talent," according to Colin Wilson - and he's one to talk) ended up bankrupt in Shropshire, begging money to fix his teeth from the Royal Literary Fund. Kingsley Amis became a bulging-eyed boozer and misanthrope, being funny in the Garrick with his zip undone, and virtually incapacitated by his phobias - flying, folk dancing, hailing taxis and sitting on his own, to mention only a few.

Philip Larkin succumbed to "depressive nihilism", expiring of oesophageal cancer in Hull surrounded by his ugly birds, the devoted Maeves, Monicas and Bettys. John Braine ("contrived and perfunctory") drank heavily, grew "downright stupid" and "bored everybody silly". His Room at the Top archives failed to sell at Sotheby's and for Christmas he went to the community centre and lunched with tramps.

John Wain kept churning out unreadable epics about Oxford, went blind and died "short of money", living off handouts from the Society of Authors. Kenneth Tynan's cheques bounced, too, and he died of emphysema, weighing less than eight stone. Before that, his obsession with sadomasochism got the better of him, and he broke a blood vessel in his penis, which took on "the shape of an egg-timer". He also needed to wear a truss.

So it goes on, Wilson prodding his betters with a toasting fork. Terry Southern wrote a fable about a nymphomaniac and "a demented hunchback", grew fat from loafing in Hollywood, and exemplified "stupidity and coarseness". After Candy and Blue Movie, says Wilson, he "published nothing more" (which is not true: there was his satire The Magic Christian).

There's a simple justice in all this. When Wilson bites it, no one will think to tell of what a nasty-minded mediocrity he was, least of all the publisher of The Angry Years.

• Sitka World's Fair 1977If Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, does not win him a second  Pulitzer Prize, I will pick up and move my family to Sitka, Alaska, an old Russian trading post and current city of 8,986 shivering souls that served as the setting for Chabon's fantastical Yiddish homeland. *
  
  
• Best-selling author Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, and The Fortress of Solitude is giving away the film adaptation rights to his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet. Lethem announced this on his website in March and made his decision this week. Greg Marcks was one of four finalists who submitted proposals for this project. The author explains below why he's opted to give away the film option.
  
  Why?
  
  Lately I've become fitful about some of the typical ways art is commodified. Despite making my living (mostly) by licensing my own copyrights, I found myself questioning some of the particular ways such rights are transacted, and even some of the premises underlying what's called intellectual property. I read a lot of Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, who convinced me that technological progress - and globalization - made this a particularly contemporary issue. I also read Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which persuaded me, paradoxically, that these issues are eternal ones, deeply embedded in the impulse to make any kind of art in the first place. I came away with the sense that artists ought to engage these questions directly, rather than leaving it entirely for corporations (on one side) and public advocates (on the other) to hash out. I also realized that sometimes giving things away - things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic 'value', like a film option - already felt like a meaningful part of what I do. I wanted to do more of it. I ended up writing a long essay for Harper's exploring these issues, and a few months ago I launched The Promiscuous Materials Project - a small first attempt to play with different ways of handling rights to some of my work. That project - and this one - are only experiments, not systematic alternatives to the ordinary ways of doing things. I'm not necessarily recommending them to others, nor am I handling all my rights this way. In a way I see both projects as extensions of the essay: further provocations to thinking about such things a little differently.
  
  
• It sounds like people are turning off the TV and buying books, at least according to a study by the Book Industry Study Group. Publishers sold 3.1 billion books in 2006, though they have no idea how many of those books have gone unread.
  
  
• Nathan Englander speaks. A rare interview with the shyest writer I've ever met.
  
  
• A personal plug. My recently launched 1001 Book Project, a campaign to sell a thousand and one copies of my new novel before publication in September has sold 157 books in the first 10 days. Please feel free to help the cause and buy a book or two.
  
  
• * means that Jon Papernick has no intention of moving to Sitka, Alaska.

Ever read "The Whore of Mensa"?  He could direct eight more Hollywood Endings and still be worthwhile for that short story. Woody Allen's got a new collection of prose out, and Scott Eyman says it's great:

In an ideal world, it might be interesting to see what Mr. Allen could do with a slightly more current view of Jewish intellectuals, or even a less fanciful framework. Let’s face it, the names, not to mention the ideas, of Paul Wolfowitz and Gertrude Himmelfarb are ripe for satire.

Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons has got everyone talking of the prose gene that must have been transmitted down through at least three generations of this scabrous line. The latest laudatory review comes from Joan Acocella in the New Yorker; she seems to have done her homework -- or at least she's been given more word space to dilate on Evelyn and Auberon:

The first thing one notices about Evelyn Waugh’s fiction is his breathtaking prose. He seems to have had a richer vocabulary, a keener ear, a wider range of effects—all of this supported by the firm bones of a Latinate syntax—than any English prose writer before or since. Even his smallest, transitional passages are exquisitely worked. Here, from “Vile Bodies,” is a carful of drunks returning home from the races:

"Darkness fell during the drive back. It took an hour to reach the town. Adam and Miles and Archie Schwert did not talk much. The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance hand-books, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay. Adam tried to concentrate his thoughts upon his sudden wealth [he thinks he’s won some money], but they seemed unable to adhere to this high pinnacle, and as often as he impelled them up, slithered back helplessly to his present physical discomfort."

Waugh was young (twenty-five) when he wrote this, and so he is spreading his plumage a little. Later, his prose became simpler, and more beautiful.

Such writing could become heavy after a while, but it is constantly refreshed by tart dialogue. Waugh, it seems, could do any voice—of any nationality, social class, age, profession, temperament—and make it sound as if it were speaking, that very moment, two feet away. Another balancing factor is Waugh’s extreme economy in laying out his story. As good as what he tells us is what he doesn’t tell us, or only reveals later, through the mouthpiece of someone who witnessed the event, or heard about it. (See Philbrick’s account of the murder of Prendergast.) His use of point of view could pass inspection by Henry James. But his most striking gift is his sheer writerly tact. He knows exactly when to cut something off, and he never explains a joke.

This is a good assessment, and that hangover passage anticipates the more hilarious -- and more philosophical -- one in Lucky Jim. But for my money, Evelyn's most lapidary sentences were in Put Out More Flags, one of his lesser novels about the period "between the wars." And this stave from Vile Bodies has, I think, his full talents on display. He was brilliant at making absurd names (Miles Malpractice, Mr. Outrage, Lord Monomark) seem normal. Also at juxtaposing tradition and modernity, which he hated as much as he defined it:

That same evening while Adam and Nina sat on the deck of the dirigible a party of quite a different sort was being given at Anchorage House. This last survivor of the noble town houses of London was, in its time, of dominating and august dimensions, and even now, when it had become a mere "picturesque bit" lurking in a ravine between concrete skyscrapers, its pillared facade, standing back from the street and obscured by railings and some wisps of foliage, had grace and dignity and other-worldliness enough to cause a flutter or two in Mrs. Hoop's heart as she drove into the forecourt."Can't you just see the ghosts?" she said to Lady Circumference on the stairs.

"Pitt and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr. Johnson" (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorable might surely have occurred). "Can't you just see them--in their buckled shoes?"

Lady Circumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill (a statesman-like and much-needed measure which empowered a committee of five atheists to destroy all books, pictures and films they considered undesirable, without any nonsense about deference or appeal). She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs. Blackwater, Mrs. Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honorable people (Many of whom made the Anchorage House reception the one outing of the year), their women-folk well gowned in rich and durable stuffs, their men-folk ablaze with orders; people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, membarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marked eccentricities, kind people who care for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hoped to meet their Maker with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.

"That's all my eye," she said.

But Mrs. Hoop ascended step by step in a confused but very glorious dream of eighteenth-century elegance.

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say that Terry Eagleton could benefit from having his head given a dollar value by Muslim extremists. Nostalgic for the era when Britain had still had "Blake to dream of a communist utopia," Eagleton laments what he perceives to be the lack of an "eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie come under particularly harsh fire for their negative appraisals of Islamic fascism and the war against it:

The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment's reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Couldn't have had anything to do with the establishment rewarding a man who courageously faced down death in defense of a novelist's right of free expression...

Eagleton has a history of being revolted by "card carrying rationalists" who don't share his nuanced appreciation of theology and theocracy. He claims that Martin Amis "has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people," when in fact Amis said nothing of the sort. I paraphrased the quote to which Eagleton is referring in the opening sentence above precisely because while one may have an urge to say these things, an expression of sentiment is hardly a prescription. After all, Amis has elsewhere written:

The form that Islamophobia is now taking - the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street - disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any minority feels under threat.

Expressing an urge or tendency allows one to indulge in potentially productive thought experiments. I don't hope for any more fatwahs to be issued against writers, but I do enjoy speculating how Eagleton might feel about a war on radical Islamism if he had spent the better part of two decades the target of a worldwide Islamist enjoinder to his assassination. There is no cognitive dissonance in being simultaneously "disgusted" at Islamophobic behavior and imagining how the Muslim community might react if it were subjected to the kinds of abuses that the "Western" society so many of them deplore prohibits. The Western society, it should be added, that Eagleton appears to wish had more numerous opponents.

Interestingly enough, Evelyn Waugh, to whom Hitchens is compared, chided the "left wing intellectuals" who believed fascism was a threat to civilization when it descended upon Spain in the late 1930's. Doesn't Eagleton sound far more like Waugh taking the piss out of folks like Spender, Auden and Orwell?

Orwell knew something about courage that Eagleton and a great majority of his "radical" ilk keep missing. Writing about Waugh, he remarked:

To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy...one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.

As far as Eagleton is concerned, there aren't enough British writers willing to question western society and the capitalist system that undergirds it. Awash on a sea of lock-step orthodoxy, with his the lone courageous voice of dissent, is a literary community that doesn't meet his standard of snuff. It's more likely the other way around. In the long run, the best Eagleton could hope for would be something resembling T.S. Eliot status. Despite having snubbed his compatriots and fellow men of words who managed to condemn the menace of fascism, Eliot's work can overshadow his bad judgment. Until Eagleton produces a Prufrock, a Wasteland or a Four Quartets, he'll be little more than a fellow who got it wrong in a time when getting it right mattered most.

She's NOT biting the apple ... see? Eve got nothin' on me, bitch!I didn't mean to write pages 170-172 of Wendy Shalit's new book, Girls Gone Mild. It was an accident.

I have never been "mild" in my life. I get paid to tell dirty jokes. I have worked as a professional body double. I won't even eat mild cheddar. Or mild salsa. It's "medium" or bust with me.

Wendy and I are unlikely friends. Although we are close in age and both attended liberal Northeastern universities, Wendy is now Orthodox, married, the mother of a toddler, and, well, way more successful than I am. As a profile in the Toronto Star explains:

Shalit is the author of two thoroughly researched books about "young women reclaiming their self-respect" and rejecting promiscuity and the hypersexuality of popular culture and fashion.

Girls Gone Mild has just arrived on bookshelves. Her previous book, A Return to Modesty, was praised by Salon, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, which called her "a prodigy at cracking the codes of culture." Playboy, on the other hand, put it under the heading, A Man's Worst Nightmare.

Wendy Shalit - She's So Modest, This is Virtually the Only Photo of Her on the Entire InternetHere's what happened. About a year and a half ago, I emailed Wendy; we struck up an online friendship, and met once in a West Village diner when she came to New York to visit with her publisher. I started reading the blog Wendy writes in collboration with some twenty other modesty-minded women.

I was sometimes sympathetic (it is hard to find a nice one-piece swimsuit these days), and sometimes turned off by the bloggers' self-righteous attitudes (oh, those grapes are sour!) towards female celebrities including Britney, Paris, and the proudly-hot-at-40 Cindy Margolis.

The bloggers are all, as far as I can tell, Christian or Jewish -- and, of course, obsessed with modesty. I would always laugh -- in my high-school-debater, "gotcha" kind of way -- when they commented on the dress of Muslim women. Comments like "Well, that's just TOO modest." In one discussion of an "interfaith hospital gown" (clearly a paper burqua), one commenter writes "Oh- for heaven's sake--Why not just wrap up in a couple of sheets?"

That, of course, is precisely the remark I would make towards the modesty bloggers' own skirted swimsuits and up-to-the-collarbone wedding gowns.

Oy! Imagine the Tan Lines From THESE Modest Swimsuits!So here's the story. One day, a "modblogger" posted a cry for help: "I've offered to put on a Modest Dressing Fashion Show at my church this spring, and I have no idea (yet) how to run it!"

I imagined a bunch of girls in department-store frills and bows, and clunky, secretarial two-inch pumps, marching through a church basement while awful Christian "praise music" blasted from a boom box and everyone stood around uncomfortably, and then nodded and applauded, saying to one another "See, modesty can be fashionable," all while wondering, each in his or her own head, how that spectacle was just so embarassing, and what is it those secular models have that our girls don't have? I was embarrassed just thinking about it.

So I wrote up a reply. Just a long blog comment, explaining things like "...work out ahead of time who walks, in what order, wearing what, and post the list on a wall right in the place that the models see before they walk down the "runway" ...Arrange things so that the hardest outfits to get into come early in the show, so that a model's switch from first to second outfit can be done very quickly."

Wendy's ModestyZone has featured the Gali Girls, which are like Bratz, minus the makeup, T&A, and implications of casual sexWendy asked if she could excerpt it in her book. I said "sure." She offered me an opportunity to edit the piece, but I was going through a divorce at the time (oh, the irony! score one for Wendy) and never got back to her. Next thing I hear, the book is out, and a signed copy is in the mail to me.

Thus, I have written pages 170-172 of Girls Gone Mild. I have also written fifteen posts for Jewcy over the last five days, and this is me, signing off as your Guest Editor.

You can see more of Wendy here. You can see more of me at Jenisfamous.com, or in Brooklyn at Pete's Candy Store. I've also conducted an interview with Wendy -- an extension of this post -- which you can look forward to on Jewcy in the next few days. And finally, I'll be contributing a post here and there as an erstwhile guest contributor.

As for now -- I never did get around to telling you about that time I spent Passover at my high school boyfriend's family's beach house in Nags Head. It was my first Passover; after three days of sunbathing and chopped liver, I had never been so hungry for bread.

This is the most Jewish I've felt since then.

Thanks, Jewcy.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Dziura
Comedian and Retiring Guest Editor

My friend, Stefan Merken, has just published Peace, Justice and Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, a book that argues that peace is one of the "purest and highest" values in our tradition. If there are any skeptics reading this they will say--been there, done that. How many similar books have already been published on precisely the same subject before? While this is true, I believe that this book comes at a most opportune time. In the period since 9/11, the world has become obsessed with terror as THE only important issue facing us. In this country, all that has been important to our government has been security. Everything else has fallen by the wayside. The neocons, prominent among them many Jews, have ruled the roost for the past six years.

But now that the Bush Administration and its agenda have become discredited by the overreaching and failure of their own policies the pendulum is shifting back. It is time that we reexamine the relevance of the Jewish prophetic tradition to issues of war and peace, environmentalism, and economic justice. In an age when war and hatred are everywhere, it would profit us to study the words of the contributors to this volume who have embraced a peaceful way to resolve such conflicts. If there was nothing else worthwhile in this volume, this comment by the editors about my favorite historic Zionist figure would make the entire venture worth it:

Our chapter on...Israel calls to mind a major--if sadly, largely forgotten--figure of the Jewish past: Ahad Ha'am...whose prescient essay This is Not the Way warned that a future Jewish nation would not succeed if it emulated colonialistic thinking. "The main point, upon which everything depends, is not how much we do but how we do it," he wrote in The Truth from Palestine after he arrived home in Odessa from Palestine in 1891. He also cautioned the Jewish settlers in Palestine to consider the rights of the Arabs living there. "We think...that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening...This is, however, a great error.

A strong dose of Ahad Ha'am is a powerful antidote to the most virulent nationalist views expressed by many on the Israeli right and their Diaspora supporters.

Murray Polner, former editor of the late, lamented Present Tense Magazine, was this book's co-editor.

In his memoir A Margin of Hope, the great Irving Howe named two key influences on his adolescent development into political radicalism: Marx and Shelley. Growing up in the working-class and ethnic Bronx of the 1930's, this was a fine pair on which to model one's outlook if boroughs and cities, not to mention kith and kin, felt too constricting. The romantic impulse to change the world arose as much from the brick-and-mortar ghettos of the new hemisphere as it did from the Lake District and Rhineland of the old. ("Arguing the World" was the title of the documentary made about Howe and his fellow contemporary intellectuals, who, for the sake of convenience, always had their geographic origin -- New York -- stamped, like an immigrant visa, on their permanent identities.)

The personal is the political but never quite as much as it is with firebrand antagonists of the status quo. Marx lived a yawning private life, but you can't scan his observations about the wife-swapping, adulterous bourgeois without recalling that, even as a catchpenny hack whiling away the hours in the British Museum, he still got around to humping the help.

Shelley's poetry was messianic and revolutionary; so was his boast (somewhat insincere, as it turns out), that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But he wasn't quite the freedom fighter in his domestic routine and, as Adam Kirsch recounts in this New Yorker review of a new imaginative Shelley biography, the author of "Adonis" and "Ozymandias" rather envied the Catos and Caesars of the planet:

Throughout his adulthood, he considered himself a serious radical—even claiming, “I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science”—whose purpose in life was to advance the cause of liberty in England and Europe. But he consistently displayed an indifference to reality which went deeper than his propaganda techniques. Shelley’s ineffectiveness as an agitator we could dismiss with a smile. But his political beliefs demonstrated the same contempt of consequence, the same elevation of pure motive over practical effects, the same lack of self-awareness. These qualities helped to make Shelley a genuinely illiberal thinker, whose politics verged at times on the totalitarian.

The essay that gave us the "acknowledged legislators" line appeared in a short-lived journal, edited by Byron and Leigh Hunt, called The Liberal. (It's since been revived in Britain as a highly engaging quarterly.) But of course, no conservative critic today can write about the radical litterateurs of the 19th century without seeing them, somewhat prosaically, as germinal totalitarians in the line of Stalin and Hitler and Mao. Yet Byron and Shelley only ever terrorized their own households and, not without good reason, public opinion. The beat Kirsch misses in the above paragraph is that Shelley's "contempt of consequence" -- most of all for his own behavior -- is precisely what made him incapable of anything other than a domestic tyranny. He lacked cunning and calculation. Though his self-involvement may have led him to become a lousy husband and a delinquent father, one can't quite envision him administering a Committee on Public Safety, or orchestrating a show trial. He was a frustrated man of action, a dilettante who probably resorted to poetry in the first place, and then made grandiose pronouncements about its possibilities, because he knew he'd never make a proper general or prime minister or king. He seems to have been hurt into poetry by his own practical limitations. (Compare this to the equally Romantic Benjamin Disraeli who wanted to be a writer, and was, but then realized his immortality lay in other realms.)

For good reason did Byron expire in Greece trying to fund a nationalist liberation army, all the while adopting an aristocratic hauteur about his efforts and aiming at martyrdom. It was the closest he ever came to making a sort of political difference he thundered about in his verse.

The ominous consistency of thought, said to be the hobgoblin of little minds and surely a necessary condition for dictatorship, was noticeably absent in the Romantics. Nor could they properly be described as "Manichean" for the simple fact that they declaimed the existence of God, but idolized his opposite, Satan -- if that isn't having it both ways, I don't know what is. Most of them also admired two wholly antithetical earthly figures, Napoleon and George Washington, the one the most radical counterrevolutionary, and the other the most conservative revolutionary. It was their Promethean natures that the poets loved. Ideology didn't enter into it.

Roger Boylen's essay in Boston Review, which, like one of Nabokov's "blues," must now flutter off to find a new branch of distribution, never really surpasses his marvelous opening paragraph. Not that it has to:

When I was a boy in Geneva, sometime in the 1960s, a schoolmate of mine belonged to a society of junior lepidopterists. A couple of times a year, under the guidance of mature butterfly experts, he and his fellow enthusiasts went off to capture papillons in the alpine meadows above Montreux, at the opposite end of Lake Geneva. On one such expedition the guide was a stout, bald Russian gentleman in shorts and a parka who, despite being in his mid-60s, bounded ahead of the pack, brandishing his net and firing off exhortations and butterfly lore in accented but fluent English and French. When the hunt was over, he abruptly took his leave with a cheery “Au revoir, tout le monde.” His name I heard for the first time as, approximately, Monsieur Nabucco. He was, said my friend, one of the world’s leading experts on butterflies. He was also, he added in awe, the author of a really dirty book.

Continue reading...

I really did think—naively, I guess—that this was over and done with, a triumph indicating at least an inkling of collective dignity, when Rupert Murdoch caved to outside pressure and pulled the thing from the presses. 

Oh but no. The American people will get their "If I Did It", courtesy of—wait for it—Ron Goldman's family, which seized the manuscript in a lawsuit. Some of the proceeds will go to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, apparently. The rest, to the devil. 

I mean for God’s sake: they could have had a public ceremony and burned the thing. They could have kept it in a safe in a room in the basement. But no: the bullshit self-consuming therapeutic ethos that dominates so much contemporary fiction says: “the people must know”. For Ron’s sake. Because the truth—which, by the way, this isn’t—will set you (yes, You) free. Ah, closure. What dividends it pays to us poor among the living.

The idea that "exposing this confessional” to the rest of the world bravely—self-sacrificingly!— does justice to OJ's victims is so bogus it hurts. For starters, it is nothing the rest of America doesn’t already know, and know, and know. This is redundantly cruel, like a Shrek 3 with murder. 

 Anyhow, Timothy Noah has a multi-part review of the book’s actual merits:

 "Sit back, people," O.J. writes on the book's first page. "The things I know, and the things I believe, you can't even imagine."

"And I'm going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that's not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong."

By even half-considering the book seriously, as, you know, literature, Noah manages to send several frissons equal parts anger, disgust, and fear down your spine.

What Would Plato Do?: Allan BloomIf one were looking to uncover the evolution of neoconservatism as a cultural attitude or cast of mind, one could do worse than imagine Saul Bellow's Augie March growing up to become Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog. An inner-city Romantic -- a Columbus of those near-at-hand -- gobbles up Western literature and feels his lungs expand with the air of radical hope. He then morphs, after a series of punishing defeats, into a hard-bitten pessimist clapping out angry but unsent letters to statesmen and public figures.

Augie is whiling away his time in Mexico when he encounters the haunted and hunted figure of Leon Trotsky:

I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of the persistence at the highest things.

Herzog is slowly losing his mind (and that's all right with him), surveying a different source of marine tranquility:

His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too simple. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.

It's easy to judge these two passages as the before and after outlooks of a man who was strongly influenced by the late classicist Allan Bloom.

Author of The Closing of the American Mind, a finely written if slightly overwrought manifesto on behalf of tradition’s army in the "culture wars" of the 1980's, Bloom had argued that the Western canon was a monument to human achievement that should never be threatened with demolition by the impending forces of relativism or identity theory. He was a student of Leo Strauss and a champion of the Athens-to-Jerusalem school of philosophy, which means his trenchant analysis of the ever-lowering standards of university education was therefore informed by a Hellenized Judaism that was itself the synthesis of competing traditions.

A well-intentioned but reckless attempt to open young minds to self-criticism, Bloom argued, had instead welded those minds shut to ancient wisdom and truth. “Truth” itself was now a scare-quoted controversy, a shibboleth invented by “cultural imperialists” looking to plunder the heritage and resources of other no less august civilizations. In this context, all human knowledge was relegated to sociology, the brute aggregation of facts, which could never be assigned moral values.

Bloom further inveighed against specialization within the academy – freshmen going premed and foregoing Plato or Rousseau – because he saw it as a deadening side effect of materialism. (For a conservative, Bloom was no fan of big-money careerism; he thought a life of the mind was its own return on tuition.)

I bring this all up because Rachel Donadio has got an interesting essay in the New York Times Book Review about how the culture wars have terminated 20 years on. I was most struck by one aspect of her research: Both the left and the right now agree that the dilution of the classical liberal arts curriculum came at too high a price.

We all know of David Horowitz’s proposed bill of Academic Freedom to ensure that Adam Smith and Bill Buckley get as much as classroom time as the Vagina Monologues. But consider the following:

Martha Nussbaum hated Bloom’s book, but now concedes the very problems he alerted us to have resulted in the “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” She adds, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut” – sentiments with which the ghost of Abe Ravelstein, Bellow's fictionalized Bloom character in the last novel he wrote, would no doubt be nodding along.

Louis Menand says: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.” Hasn’t it, though?

Even the dean of postmodernism, Stanley Fish, who tells Donadio that “the message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” is hard at work on a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time. What’s that book about?

[It] argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The hell, you say! (As a sidenote, Fish fails to account for Bloom’s atheism, his open-secret homosexuality, and his fluency in French and German philosophy – from Rousseau to Nietzsche – which he wrote had been muddled and misunderstood upon importation to the U.S.)

For my own part, I never bridled at the multiculturalist esteem granted to Toni Morrison or Chinua Achebe, writers that are typically met with as much venom by conservative critics as Dostoevsky was met with by Nabokov.

Defenders of the canon should go back and read what the canon had to put up with in its own time and place. Standards were by no means universal. Byron thought Wordsworth was a hack, Pope had his famous rivalry with Dryden. These were equally febrile “wars” that lasted decades but eventually petered out before the more discerning eyes of posterity. The one crucial catch then was that Byron, Wordsworth, Pope and Dryden all knew about the Greeks, the stories of the Bible, and had a common arsenal of literary references with which to combat one another. Not so today's readers of Beloved.

However, there is cause for optimism in a cultural landscape in which Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is "adapted" for a Caribbean setting, as it was in my old college. One of the blessings of globalization is that it has made Western literature the gold standard of those cultures whose native literature the West is now instructed to exalt, perhaps to unwarranted degrees. You have to read the dead white males before you attempt to unhorse them.

And for those who do pay tribute to a border-neutral literary heritage, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipal and Haruki Murakami would be unimaginable without Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens. (Where is P.G. Wodehouse nightstand reading? In India.)

Bellow’s scabrous line against the multiculturalists was: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?'”

The answers have become increasingly clear: Tolstoy and Proust.

Revisiting the Canon Wars - Books - Review - New York Times