[powerpress] In honor of Sonja, my friend Louis Janus’s cat, a real beauty who died yesterday after a long illness. Louis would have been my favorite Norwegian prof had I been smart enough to take Norwegian while I was at St Olaf College. Instead I got to know him when he came to the computer…
a kaddish for self-evident truths
A good friend jogged my memory a week or two ago at the tail end of a post on his blog. Well, it was more like a jolt than a jog. It was something about the Declaration of Independence. Which I suppose we’ve all been taught nothing but respect, awe and reverence in the face…
kaddishim for preemption, el akarib, & monotony
recent kaddishim address questions of musical expression, tragic events in El Akarib, and the cold solitude of musical labor
daily kaddish: el Arakib
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news on our virtual, asynchronous minyan
For our purposes, the “minyan” is our community of listeners. But we’re not all Jewish. (So far we’re all adults.) We don’t gather physically but virtually, by internet. And we don’t gather at the same time, exactly—we’re asynchronous.
daily kaddish: bitchy
Mira and our mutual friend Tina have a paper-grading-and-bitching party planned for tomorrow night, so by special request I have prepared a bitchy version of the Kaddish tonight and will do so again tomorrow. Also, I’m wondering how I’ll manage to get tomorrow’s Kaddish recorded; the dailiness of daily ritual becomes tricky at times.
death and the evil eye
George Foster long ago wrote a delightful article on envy and the evil eye. He spelled out exactly how the phenomenon works, particularly in Tzintzuntzan, but he claimed it extended throughout peasant society worldwide. The critics, primarily Marxists, claimed that he was wrong — but claimed it in such a way the affirmed his essential…
daily kaddish: uff da
[powerpress] Tonight’s Kaddish (2010.11.28_uffDa) was humbling. I tagged it “uff da,” which is the Scandinavian version of “oy vey.” In the course of schlepping to shul (certainly it must feel that way some days) to say Kaddish day in and day out for a year and a day, I figure there must be days that…