HBO has a wonderful new documentary out called Autism: The Musical about, yes, a group of autistic kids working together in a theater group. It chronicles a few kids, as well as their parents and their struggles and triumphs. It’s heartbreaking and moving and really very recommended.
And, lucky for you, the whole thing–all 90 mins of it–is streaming online, here.
One of the best articles in the current issue of Bitch is about the way the NYT Book Review handles titles with explicitly feminist content–and, most notably, who they tap to review such books. I’ve seen this happen a few times (including with friends’ books), and it’s fascinating, to say the least, to see this tracked as part of a bigger pattern.
Sarah Seltzer writes,
The New York Times Book Review has never exactly embraced passionate advocacy—unless it was promoting Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s place in the postmodernist canon. Even worse, it has become the place where serious feminist books come to die— or more accurately, to be dismissed with the flick of a well-manicured postfeminist wrist.
Recently, Times editors—in both the daily paper and the Sunday section—have trotted out a particularly insidious formula for bashing feminist authors. First, hire a female reviewer to unleash misogynist tropes in her piece and then, lest she appear prejudiced against her own gender, throw in an illogical, contradictory statement about the importance of a less threatening version of feminism that isn’t so “polarizing,” “provocative,” or “strident.”
The emergence of this pattern has been troubling for feminist bookworms. One nasty review was irritating, two were bewildering, and three or more became evidence of a downright bias. Professors and journalists have chastised the editors of the Sunday section for ignoring female authors and reviewers. Despite the fact that women constitute a majority of book buyers, the Times has made merely a passing effort to achieve parity on its pages. For instance, none of the paper’s “Top five novels of 2007” were written by a woman, and only 13 of 50 on its short list were female-authored.
Beyond this, though, books that take women’s issues in hand are rarely taken seriously. It’s not just that they are criticized, which they are, but rather that the books, their authors—and heck, the whole feminist movement—are routinely treated with a mixture of giggly naïveté and barbed antifeminist prejudices. In a 2007 op-ed for In These Times, media critic Susan J. Douglas noted that there’s “a robust tradition in the Times Book Review to stereotype feminists as single-minded, humorless ideologues who march daily to some shrine where we all genuflect before images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
Read the whole article here.
Here’s hoping that this trend shifts, speedily and in our days.
Hag Purim Sameach!!
Blessed Good Friday!
Happy Persian New Year (Nawruz)!
Joyous Mawlid el-Nabi!
Most excellent Magha Puja Day!
Fabulous Holi!
Enjoy Birth of Mahavira Day!
Rock on Festival of Naw-Ruz!
Happy Spring Equinox!
Today is, indeed, a very busy day for us religious folk all over the place.
Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing my dear friend Andrea Hodos do her thing. She has a dance midrash company called Moving Torah, and she’s been the artist-in-residence at Hebrew Union College (HUC) this past fall. Last night, she and her students performed a work called “On Dry Ground” that turned out to be an extended meditation on the Red Sea story (Exodus 14-15, wherein the Egyptians are chasing the Israelites, they get to the Red Sea, and have to figure out what happens next), and on moving through fear, how faith and fear work together, what Divine Providence is about. Several famous rabbinic midrashim were woven into the piece, but so were lots of juicy questions and musings on the texts and on what it might have meant to be the Israelites at that particular moment, and what that might tell us about our own relationships to God, trust, leadership, and so forth. It was really yummy.
Then, at the end, she asked a few people to offer their own stories of being at the proverbial water’s edge, and Andrea translated the story into movement, which was really cool. I can’t say that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the creative processes inherent in dance, and it was very neat to get to have a glimpse into that. I walked out of there energized in a way that I am not nearly enough these days.
All of you reading this, go hire Andrea! She is dazzlingly gifted at taking things we’re used to seeing and spinning them on their head, literally.
My original:
“I’d bless and place the second piece just above the hairline on my head and utter a word of praise to God.”
Their change:
“I’d bless and place the second piece just above the hairline on my forehead and utter a word of praise to God.”
No! There will be no foreheads invoked in my tefillin-wearing!
I know it sounds like a minor quibble, but it’d easy enough to misunderstand absolutely the wrong thing. Last time around, my publisher deleted a single punctuation mark that–I kid you not–changed the entire meaning of a sentence, so I went from interrogating the categories we often use around race to boldly asserting that I thought Ashkenazi Jews were people of color. Which is, um, not what what I ever meant to assert. That was kind of embarrassing.
The good news is that the book is almost off to the printer!! Ready to hit stores in August (but hey, why not pre-order now?)
The other good news is that I am about to start what very well might be the last actual real paper for a class in my life. It might not be–who knows what sort of sick decisions I may ever make in the future about additional grad school? But it’s just as likely that it might be. That’s kind of cool.
Someone photoshopped Garfield the cat out of his eponymous comic strip. The results are a little bit troubling:
Check out a whole pile of Sunday Comics of the Absurd here.
It seems that lots of people are talking about the need to unplug from technology lately. The Today show evidently has a whole ongoing feature on people and tech (”could you do your high-powered job without email and your cell phone for one week?” etc.) and the author of a blog I read every now and again has been talking about how she’s taking one night a week off to go low-tech. From the moment that Ariel (this blogger) mentioned that she wanted a night away from email, I naturally began thinking about what a great thing it was that Judaism had this all figured out, and how grateful I am to have twenty-five hours a day not only without email, but also without writing, cooking, creating, doing, and so forth. Having a day just to be. At this late date, I couldn’t even imagine not having the spiritual breathing room that Shabbat affords.
Now it seems that the NYT has decided to comment on this phenomenon, and, interestingly, decided to use the phrase “secular Sabbath,” in their commentary. Obviously (the religious) Shabbat is about more than just unplugging (there’s that whole “service to God” aspect that figures in somewhere), but it’s certainly true that certain kinds of work can only be done when you make the space for it.
As Heschel put it:
To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?
I think it’s a very good thing that more people are talking about the things that we need that all of these clever gadgets not only can’t give us, but make it harder for us to get at all.