This Glamorous Writing Life

1) I’ve just crossed the line–that is, from tea to coffee when working at home. At least I’ll have to detox for Yom Kippur, so I have hopes that, briefly, I’ll ever be able to feel caffiene’s effects on me again. It’s not going to be pretty by the time we get to spring.

2) I think it’s just dawning on me how hard this book is going to be to write, and how much work it’s really going to demand of me. Ow ow ow. Still waiting to get edits on the first three chapters back from my editor, I suppose then I’ll really have a sense of what I’m in for, won’t I?

2b) Why does my evil brain keep asking me to address questions for which I don’t yet have the answer? Come on, when do I get the easy ones?

3) For those of you looking to get a publisher or an agent, here’s a handy field guide to the ways in which querying is like dating (and how not to get yourself in the “loser” pile right away).

Inevitable

There is an increasingly long list of things that I need for this project that are not found among the 120 lbs of books that I brought back with me from America. Some of them can be found online, but not all of them, and there’s a limit to how much vague search-terming a person can stand to do when she knows that the exact set of things she needs is in a folder in Los Angeles. It’s very irritating. I hope the writing doesn’t suffer too much for it.

The woman who’s subletting my apartment is very nice, and I’m sure if I begged, she’d be willing to mail me things on my shelves (though it’s impossible to tell her how to get into the tangled mess of folders in the back corner of a crammed-full closet and to navigate my, er, special filing system). But as many things as I think I need now, there’ll be a whole bunch more in another chapter or so, and there’s a limit to how many times I could ask the poor dear to go to the Post Office for me. So I think I’m just going to… well, I dunno yet what. Something. I’ll figure it out. I hope, anyway…..

American Apparel is Not Good

Despite trying to market themselves as a hip, sweatshop-free haven for social justice, it’s really a union-busting org with skeevy advertising practices and an unapologetically sexually harrassing CEO, with a habit of trying to intimidate media sources critical of the company. Clamor Magazine is their newest target; they’ve run a series of accurate stories (and a parody), and AA is threatening to sue.

This is just icksa. You can read Clamor’s three stories on the nastiness that is this company (such a pity, no? We need a big sweatshop-free success story, but they ain’t it) here, here, and here.

From the Clamor Magazine press release (note the irony of the single inaccuracy that they had to fix):

Cynthia Semon, Media Relations Director at American Apparel, sent an email to Clamor Politics co-editor (and editor of the American Apparel section) Mariana Ruiz and Clamor co-founder Jen Angel, citing inaccuracies and accusing Clamor of shoddy and amateur journalism. Ms. Semon demanded, “if the article is not immediately removed online, along with a retraction and an [sic] public apology posted online and published appropriately, we will be forced to seek legal action in light of such gross, blatant, negligent and irresponsible journalism.”

“We have issued a correction of unintended factual inaccuracies,” stated Angel, “However,
we have no intention of retracting the stories or the issue in which they appear. Apart from the correction we have made, we stand by those stories as they appear.” The correction is noted below.

“We’re publishing articles here that are critical of American Apparel’s business practices and challenge the credibility of their carefully crafted ‘progressive’ identity, and they’re not happy about that,” said Clamor co-founder Jason Kucsma. “That a social justice magazine with a yearly operating budget of less than $150 thousand is being issued an ultimatum by a company that turned $250 million in profit last year seems a little incongruous to me.

Three articles, one photo essay featuring a former American Apparel employee, and a series of parody American Apparel ads make up a 10-page section analyzing American Apparel’s business model, sexual harassment claims made against founder and CEO Dov Charney, and the co-opting of progressive values to hype an otherwise less-than progressive workplace.

*Advance Correction:
In this Fall 2006 issue, we incorrectly reported that Mary Nelson, a store manager at American Apparel, had withdrawn her sexual harassment suit against CEO Dov Charney. It has come to our attention that the suit by Mary Nelson, a sales manager, is still
pending, and that an unnamed store manager withdrew her suit against the company.

ETA: Check the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s list of sweatshop-free alternatives in the PDF here.

If you have other links to similar resources, please let me know!

Oof

There are some days you plan to work, and discover that all you got is sleeping instead.

Dunno if it’s a low-grade bug or what, but it’s knocked me right out the last two days. Yesterday I slept most of the day until 4pm, and would have kept going but I was meeting a friend for dinner and didn’t want to cancel at the last minute (luckily my friend was amiable to meeting me someplace a little closer to my apt.) Today it’s been sleeping and trying to sleep, but there’s construction of some sort happening in our building so, you know, not so much.

I’m slogging along with the drafting. I’ve sort of petered out on this current chapter (5, for those of you watching at home, which is actually the fourth chapter, as 1 is getting written last) and need to find a second wind. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to keep my eyes open long enough to dig in.

Yay for Writers Who Don’t Stink

I got my second book of Etgar Keret short stories on Friday for the 2-hour bus trip each way to Haifa (people are pretty much back to the regular routine, though some still understandably quite rattled), and have been enjoying them so much I thought I’d post about him.

He’s basically the reigning Young Israeli Writer–I think he’s in his late 30s–and is a master of short, sharp, black-humored stories that leave this silence dangling in the air after you finish them. Here are a few: Halibut, The Nimrod Flip-Out, and do not miss the audio versions of Pipes and Fatso (read by Ira Glass, no less) You can go here to read some of his stuff in the original.

If you’re going to buy one book of his, though (and you should) it should be this one, because “Kneller’s Happy Campers” is one of his most famous stories for very good reason. I guess there’s even a movie based on it that’s getting good reviews and features, dang it, Tom Waits.

That’s all. Now those of you who don’t know, maybe will.

Retro Journalism

The internet (or at least a section of it in which I occasionally dwell) is all abuzz with response to Forbes’ little ode to neanderthal dumbistry, Don’t Marry Career Women. (Note that they had to QUICK! find a woman to respond). The fact that women (as men) who don’t want fancy careers are welcome not to have them is not why this is insulting.

To be clear, we’re not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a “career girl” has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

This guy isn’t against women working, just against intelligent women doing work that is meaningful and/or respected enough in our culture to be compensated above minimum wage.

(Don’t forget to check out the companion piece, How to Marry a Rich Man,”, which endearingly opens with, “Apparently the entire feminist movement was some sort of hoax.”)

The funny thing is, this guy’s attitude is kinda like that which started second wave feminism off in the first place. I hope one of his cranky readers sends him a copy of The Feminine Mystique so that he can learn all about “the problem that has no name.” Let’s not even get started on households in which the family actually needs two incomes.

Feminist dynamo Hanne Blank’s response pretty much covers it, I think:

Autonomous people who can support themselves economically have little compelling reason to stay in otherwise unrewarding relationships. If they do remain in those relationships, they have little compelling reason to remain monogamous if they do not wish to do so — because they can afford, quite literally, to take the risk of having a relationship end.

This has always been true. The only reason any of this is even remotely newsworthy is that feminism has generated a few strides toward genuine equality and now women increasingly have the opportunity to consider relationships and marriage in more or less the same dynamic as men have historically taken for granted.

If you want more, check out media activist Jennifer Pozner’s response or Gawker’s cranky little remix of the article’s slideshow.

EDIT: Looks like the original slideshow is down. Gawker’s original post has one screencap. It’s kind of funny, pity it’s not online anymore.

EDIT NUMBER TWO: Oh, schweet, the guy who wrote the first piece also has one that starts off, “Wife or whore? The choice is that simple.” Here’s the excerpt from Gawker, since it looks like Forbes took the article down:

Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist’s sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises–like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and whores are–if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi–something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.

I wonder what, excactly, is this guy’s issue? He sounds like a very angry man.

Chodesh Tov

It’s Elul. Can you believe it? I can’t, quite.

I mean, it always comes as a surprise–hey! Tisha B’Av is over! We can play, now! Uh. And this year, with the heat and the summer and the relief of having a break from war (though the post-game processing seems to keep on), it’s no exception.

Then again, at least in my little life, all I seem to DO these days is introspect, so I guess adding a little more recent scope to my wide-angle lens shouldn’t be too hard. I should find an extra half hour every day for a proper meditation sit, not whatever it is I do to clear my brain before I pray in the mornings.

Getting to take Elul for what it is–a time of clearing out, introspection and tshuvah is a real luxury for me this year. Most rabbis (and soon-to-be rabbis) get frantic right about now, in preparation for the upcoming whirlwind of holy days to come. Which isn’t to say that the good ones don’t also make time to deal with their own stuff (or at least work it out in their sermon-writing ;-)), but it’s different. I had a couple of opportunities to have a High Holy Day pulpit this year, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t the right thing–it’s a lot of work to make sure one does that right, and I have a um, book that I need to be writing. I wouldn’t want to cheat either project.

It’s also hard, I have to say, this job of High Holy Day visiting rav–you come into a community without really knowing anybody, without (usually) having a lot of background on dynamics, history, and so forth, don’t know minhag ha-makom (um, how they do things there) and it’s the time when the most unaffiliated or vaguely affiliated folks come out of the woodwork–so there are a lot of people sitting in your Yom Kippur services who know much less about the liturgy and what’s happening than would be the case on your average Friday night or Saturday morning, and it’s important to find a way to make the experience meaningful to them. On top of this, they don’t know *you*, and it’s really only a few days’ work, so the margin of screw-up is a lot lower. If you see the community every Friday night, you can have a sermon every once in a while that’s not a home run, because they’ll hear enough that are. But as the visiting New Person, all they know of you is what you give ‘em there, so it’s best if it’s some A-game Torah.

Then again, the Holy Days have that effect on a lot of people–I know a pulpit rabbi who NEVER, I mean never, writes down his sermons, and usually figures out what he’s going to say about 5 minutes before he starts talking (and it’s usually pretty amazing stuff–this guy is good). And even he plans out his High Holy Day sermons ahead of time–there are too many of them to give in too short a period of time, and what with all the new people showing up, he wants to make sure it’s strong stuff.

All of this is not to say that I don’t really love working as a rabbi on the High Holy Days–I’ve only done it once, but it was amazing, helping to bring people through this powerful time with this extraordinary liturgy. But it is a formidable task, not to be taken lightly. And, since I need to be focusing my work energy elsewhere this year, I’m going to have the luxury of being a Jew in the Pew during the holidays themselves. It might be my last chance–next year, God willing, I’ll have a year-long internship, and after that (God really willing) I’ll be, like, a rabbi with a job. So I better use this Elul for what I can, since it’s not going to involve trying to crank out six 15-minute sermons aimed to move people to ecstasy and tears. Instead, all I have to do is Chapter 5–which, mind you, is harder than any sermon I’ve ever written. So there you go. I hope God’s having a good laugh over that one.

more prayer posting

The mysterious thing about prayer is that even when I’m an antsy, unfocused mess of monkey mind while I’m davvening, I still take off my tallit and tefillin with the awareness that it has worked, at least on/in me (I’ll never claim to know what prayer does or doesn’t do vis a vis God). I believe the Christian word for such an event is “grace.”

More Post-War Analysis

Worth reading from this Friday’s Haaretz:

Tom Segev’s Ten Theses to consider viz the war’s place in history, why it happened the way it did, and who’s responsible. Favorite sentence: “The Americans are now angry, as though Israel were a pizza delivery boy who was delayed and in the end ate the pizza himself. ”

Also good is this soldier’s (Yonatan Nir’s) take on what went wrong.

I think Ari Shavit (also a Ha’aretz columnist, writing in the World Jewish Digest) is right about the failure of disengagement and the need to try to find another way to do this. I personally would love to see the peacemaking approach come back, perhaps with a bit of Ricoeur’s “second naivete”* in there. Perhaps with Hamas and Fatah willing to work in coalition, we might be able to get there. Please God, I hope so.

*originally a term used to decribe coming to the Bible with full knowledge of Biblical/historical criticism and being able to find the Divine shining from behind the text–ie moving beyond the simplistic and beyond cycicism into something more sophisiticated.

prayer, memory

Today I’m trying to write about what it was like to start to get interested in Judaism. Somehow, I’m finding this to be more of a challenge than some of the other bits I’ve had to cover for this book. I think part of the reason may be that I’ve very clearly differentiated from some of my various other incarnations–I’m no longer a snarky little athiest undergrad immersed in the Religious Studies department, and I’m no longer a sparkley hip kid in San Francisco trying to figure out this whole “God” thing (well, I still haven’t figured out God, but I’ve figured out that I believe in God, anyway. It’s a start.) And with some aspects of getting into religious Judaism, I am capable of stepping back, of remembering who I was and how I felt at the time. But with other things, it’s much harder.

Take prayer, for example. The chapter I’m working on now is (as some later ones will as well) on at some length about prayer, what it is to pray. And this is something that I do so often now (several times a day, natch), and with such familiarity, that it’s hard to put myself back into the world of just figuring out how to do this, what it felt like to be so… skittish and embarassed… about my prayer life. It’s not that I shouldn’t be somewhat uncomfortable with prayer, now–a little discomfort is a good thing, keeps one from getting too lazy or complacent, keeps one remembering what a tremendous and insufficient thing prayer to the Divine really is. It’s that, for example, I’m trying to remember what was running through my head when I started to learn how to say these words. It’s like trying to remember what you thought of your oldest, dearest friends when you first met–it’s doable, there are first impressions that linger, but even those impressions are now layered and layered again with everything you’ve learned since about who this person really is.

Like, I remember being totally blown away by the word “kadosh” (holy) when I first started praying. It’s a word on which one could spend lifetimes and not fully unpack, but trying to separate out how I experienced it then, versus what resonates for me today is hard. To some degree it doesn’t matter, for what I want to say and how I want to say it. But to some degree it might. And it’s very funny to me that I don’t remember where I was with that word, then. I only remember that everytime I got to that blessing in the Amidah (the silent, standing prayer with many benedictions), my lips would start to tingle. Maybe that’s enough, really.

In any case (don’t know if I’ll wind up using this or not), here are some words from Malcolm X, z”l, on coming to prayer:

The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying. You understand. My comprehending, my believing the teachings…had only required my mind’s saying to me, ‘’That’s right!’ or ‘I never thought of that.’ But bending my knees to pray—that act—well, that took me a week.

You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up. For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world.