Does anyone but me think the new site template is too feminine? Something about the 1.5 spacing.
friday: poland
Inspired both by a cousin’s Bat Mitzvah and a friend’s theatrical activities in Poland for the 2009 Grotowski Year, I’ve been finding out more about some of my family’s origins in the small town of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a village that dates back to the 1300s. My father sent me this link to an image of the stones from the Jewish cemetery – Ostrowiec’s population was over 60% Jewish before WWII. The town website puts the death toll at 11,000 Jews. The brothers of the Weinberg family who survived, as far as we know, were Isadore, Murray, and my grandfather David, all of whom came to the US (the Midwest) before things got so bad you couldn’t leave.
The Chicago Weinbergs I’ve met are descended from Isadore and Murray. I’ve just learned that there are more Toronto Weinbergs to whom we might be related somehow, although I’m not sure whose descendants they would be – and that David spent 5 years in Toronto before making his way West.
If I were to go back to Europe I think I would be more prepared to visit some of the Jewish history of the region that I was when I went to Berlin, at 21. I didn’t visit a Holocaust museum, a graveyard, or even a synagogue. It felt like just being there, as a Jewish director working with German actors, was close enough to the past, and if I did more than that, I would implode. The most glaring reminder was traveling through Munich on the anniversary of Kristallnacht and seeing that Dachau was still a stop right in the middle of their subway line.
I was also more concerned, at the time, with the cultural and ethnic turmoil of the present – the relationship between Germans and Turkish immigrants in Berlin, and the ongoing situation in Israel (which was bad in 2001, but not as bad as it is now). It seemed like dwelling on the events of the forties wasn’t going to help anyone more forward on any fronts.
It’s easier to think about these things from the distance of the US, but if I were to go back, I guess I would have to make more of an effort to visit that history in person.
There is underneath the sun
nothing in true earnest done, right? But what if you’re supposed to be writing something that’s supposed to be true?
I am trying to start a new series of articles about some personal experiences, which are, most unfortunately, as real as…what do people compare reality to? Second base? Seventy-Second Street? Apparently something with seconds in it. Anyway, they’re real, and I’ve come up – not for the first time – against this stupid pseudonym problem. I think that if your writing is as good as it’s supposed to be, you shouldn’t need one. The only really good excuse I’ve ever seen for a pseudonym was Neil Gaiman’s for publishing too much, or similar concerns – like wanting to switch genres. I read an article online once, which I thought was on SFWA but couldn’t find it this time, about someone who had to change her name to get out from the authorial reputation.
But inevitably, the pseudonym becomes more successful than your name (Oronte Churm) because of the freedom of writing under it. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. This isn’t a very coherent way to begin a new blog theme.
I guess I just haven’t made up my mind whether I feel publish-and-be-damned about it or whether I feel private about it. This wouldn’t matter to me at all if it weren’t so clear that I’m writing these for the purpose of publication. Now that’s interesting.
The last time I used a pseudonym was in college and that was from just being shy. If I determine it’s just the same thing, I’m going to use my own name.
I think that I shall never see
a WordPress theme that’s exactLY
what it is that I’m looking for –
but I’m not trying any more.
So this is how S.O.S. looks.
If you don’t like it, read a book.
(Trying.)
not that there’s anything wrong with that
Blogging: writing for yourself as if someone else was listening.
I’ve got your “social network” right here
This nonwithstanding, the only new site I have joined today is www.tribalpages.com – a family tree plotting site. I recently was present at the Bat Mitzvah of a second cousin here in Chicago, and was inspired to plot out the three-tiered Weinberg family tree. There were three brothers, Murray, Isadore (Izzy) and David, who came to the US from Poland before WWII. Two stayed in the Midwest and one, my grandfather, came to California.
Having now returned to the Midwest, I’m meeting, mostly for the first time, the many, many Weinbergs who descend from Izzy and Murray. And for my own edification more than their own, I’ve plotted how we are all related. I spent so much of the Bat Mitzvah going, “Well, there were three brothers…” like a fairy tale or something, to all the people who wanted to know who I was.
Tribalpages has lots of neat widgets, like the ability to sort the entire tree, with a click, by any one person in it – to see all their descendants and ancestors. Very user-friendly.
I want a new WordPress theme
but I don’t know which one. This is a warning, I guess, that you should get un-used to the green. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve been avoiding blogging because I don’t like to look at the site. So gray – like the sky most days – and the font is too teeny. I want to do something radical and replace the entire thing with a styeleless setup. White background, plain text.
That’d be good for a blog about style, right?
continually conditioning society
So, some scientists have found, based on a questionnaire about whether or not Darcy and Elizabeth and Heathcliff are nice or nasty, that novels are “not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation,” but actually “continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way,” especially Victorian novels, which “have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.”
This makes me sick. If I believed that, I would stop writing immediately.
It’s amazing how this particular Platonic error of interpretation about literature persists, century after century – how we keep trying to find justifications for literature which somehow make it contribute to the social good. Literature is good for religion, good for politics, good for philosophy, good for science – now it has to be good for evolution?
Literature is not “good” for anything except being itself. Poetry makes nothing happen. The Victorian novelists were writing against the social order as much as within it, and the fact that their characters reflect facets of that social order does not mean that the novels helped bolster it.
No one can predict who will be inspired to do what by a work of art. The same books and the same music have been inspiring to both pacifists and murderers. The other side of this argument about Victorian novels leading to a better society is that old familiar one about Marilyn Manson being responsible for Columbine. We have to take responsibility for our own actions and stop blaming (or crediting) the books, the music, the art.
This is the first time in my life that I have found myself arguing on the opposite side of the fence as an evolutionary scientist.
Dara Weinberg 