> Cartoon collection, many previously published in the New Yorker
> Roz Chast is one of the authors scheduled to speak in next year's Arts & Lecture Series
> very clever cartoons, thoroughly enjoyable read
Friday, May 27, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
"The Finkler Question" by Howard Jacobson ****
> Opening line: "He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one." (refers to being mugged by a woman)
> British author
> Summer sub club with Beth
> p.6...."It gave him a preternaturally youthful look - this unconsummated expectation of tragic event. The look which people born again into their faith somtimes acquire." - It is weird, but I know exactly the look he is talking about....sort of wide-eyed, naive, and expectant....
> p.6..."But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off." - Hmmmmm, is this true? Author is referring to the BBC, apparently fondly referred to in UK as "Auntie"
> protagonist's name....Treslove....tres means "very" in French.....Hmmmm
> Title: Treslove's friend is Sam Finkler......Treslove starts using "Finkler" to mean Jew. Hence...."The Finkler Question"...and "The Finklerish Conspiracy"....so clever
> Jacobson writes like a stand-up comic and a thinker. I am just a few pages into the book and have already belly-laughed several times, while at the same time running up against thought provoking statements.....bodes really well for the rest of the book
> p.8..."He felt himself to be a stunted shrub in a rainforest of towering trees"...wonderful statement of low self-esteem
> p.10...."His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot."......gotta love this stuff
> p.12..."Malkie had thought he had said her neck was more graceful than a svontz.......Could Libor really have meant that her neck was more graceful than a penis?"------LOLOLOLOL!
> p.15...."What moved him was this proof of the destructibility of things; everything exacted its price in the end, and perhaps happiness exacted it even more cruelly than its opposite."
> Commentary on being "Finklerish" (read "Jewish"):
1) instincts to know on which side his own "bread was buttered" - agree
2) "a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek..." - disagree
3) "the lifeboat position" - "...I've never been there and don't ever want to go there.....but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere to go. That is history's lesson." - Agree
4) willing to take status into account beforing condemning the behavior of others ( "Non-Finklers judged all infidelities equally, ....Finklers were prepared to make allowances if the third party happened to be someon important....")
5) proneness to disaster..... (had his Finklerishness lead him to "allow" the mugging?
6) Jews and music, Jews and families, and their loyalties
7) Self-preoccupation.....read "Herzog" recently, good example of this
8) "...Jews are at furthest remove one another's great-great-great cousins. We don't do six degrees of separation. We do three."
> Why is it okay to stereotype oneself, but not others? I always tell the kids that this is true....but is it fair? Bob thinks it is fair.....
> p.27..."Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects." - Is this an actual tenet of philosophy?
> p.27..."A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has."......like this
> p.28..."...melancholy was intrinsic to longing." Hmmmm....
> p.47...."He was a man who ordinarily woke to a sense of loss. He could not remember a single morning of his life when he had woken to a sense of possession. When there was nothing palpable he could reproach himself for having lost, he found the futility he needed in world affairs or sport.".......I wonder how many people live their lives this way
> Treslove decides his mugger mistook him for a Jew.....decided he is "essentially" like them, "spiritually" like them......the whole fascination/obsession with Jewishness is really interesting....I am wondering if gentiles are really so curious about Jews, or is this, on a meta level, about the differences between ethnic groups and the way in which observation by outsiders of any group develop stereotypes which may feel completely foreign to members of the group.......
> Finkler's wife as "the eternal Finnkler woman"......then finds out she is a convert, born a Gentile.....humurous moment
> p.80....Trelove's research into hate crimes against Jews worldwide.....reinforces the reality of some of his observations, like the "lifeboat" mentality
> p.83...names his mugger "Judith", one of the possible important women to enter his life, according to a fortune teller, also a reference to the confusion over what the mugger said in his ear...."You Ju"....Jew?
> p.83..."He remembered the old sensation of exclusion, envying the men their animal wormth even as they'd argued routinely on the Finkler question of the hour......as though mutual mistrust was stamped into Finklers like the name of a seaside resort into rock....just as mutual love appeared to be."
> p. 101......"the company of preposterously sexy women always makes a man look a fool."
> p.103...."No, it's at your age that the glass is half full. At my age we don't want half a glass, full or empty. In fact we don't want a glass, end of. We want a tankard and we want it overflowing. We are the have-everything generation, remember." - perhaps true of each "younger" generation
> Finkler forms the "ASHamed Jews"....those Jews ashamed of Zionism
> Vocabulary: 1) prepuce: technical term for foreskin
> Treslove meets the predicted Juno at a seder heald by
> p. 138...only Jews can be Jewishly ashamed...."only they could express, from the inside, the emotion of betrayal."
> p. 140....."Far from hating our Jewishness.....it is we who continue the great Jewish traditions of justice and compassion."...to tell the truth I sort of identify with this group...I am proud of so much of the Jewish religion, yet I am not proud to be associated with Zionism....other than I can understand wanting a place that will always be a safe haven for Jews.
> p.143..."...the Comprehensive Academic and Cultural Boycott was the talk of the hour, t......mainly for the reason that its chief sponsors were academics or otherwise cultured persons themselves and could imagine no greater deprivation than being denied access to academic conferences or having your latest paper refused by a learned magazine.".....had to chuckle at this one.....
> p.153 the old friend comes to Libor about the hate crime against her grandson.......amazed at lack of response or outrage
> p.155...the notion of "understanding why people might hate Jews".....as if that excuses acting on it .......I always told my kids, I cannot tell you how to feel about anything or anyone, but I can expect minimal level of respect for them......
> p.175..."You prepared yourself for a Finkler joke and they bamboozled you with Finkler scholarship."
> p.185...".....whether it was any longer defensib le even to use the word Jew in a public place. After everything that had happened, wasn't it a word for private consumption only? Out there in the raging public world it was as a goad to every sort of violence and extremism. It was a password to madness. Jew. One little word with no hiding place for reason in it. Say 'Jew' and it was like throwing a bomb."........frightening concept
> the whole conversation about circumcision was interesting.......I had a friend who refused to attend Dan's bris because to her it was a form of mutilation......not sure I would disagree at this point in my life......
> p. 204..."A woman shouldn't be married to a totally faithful man all her life."....Hmmmmmm, something to ponder here
> p.207.."Nowhere is safe from them because they think nowhere is safe from us.".....could apply to any group
> p.208..."...going from fear to amusement and back again, she was experiencing both emotions simultaneously. It wasn't even a matter of reconciling opposites because they were not opposites for her. Each partook of the other."......I think life consists of trying to hold and experience more than one emotion at one time, and the folks who are overwhelmed by that experience seek out fundamentalist, black and white ways of living.....tidier, simpler, and, in my opinion, extremely rigid!
> Several times in the novel, Libor makes comments about Russians and their limits....perhaps an effort on Jacobson's part to point out that we all have biases and prejudices
> p.215..."You are the one who sees the Jew in the Jew. And cannot bear to look. This is about you, Libor"......two people in their eighties, arguing about how Jews are seen by non-Jews.
> p. 231...."...when she spoke of the breakdown of the Jewish mind, the Final Solution causing Jews to go demented and see final solutions of their own, the violence begot of violence. Indeedc, Finkler would have done no more than illustrate her thesis." (He fantasized about murdering Tamara.
> p.246..."You don't judge fidelity by every act; it's the desire to say you're faithful and the the desire to be believed." HUH?
> In the end, Treslove returns to his lonely melancholy, and begins "....to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again." and has come to believe that "you can't, though, can you, have one happy Jew in an island of apprehensive or ashamed ones? Least of all when that Jew happens to be a Gentile."
>LibraryThing Review:
This was my first experience of Howard Jacobson's writing. His dry wit is wonderful, although "The Finkler Question" is not a funny story or message. Jacobson's protagonist, Julian Treslove, wants desperately to be Jewish, and goes to great lengths to try and achieve this transformation. His two friends, both recent widowers, struggle with what it means to be Jewish v. to be a Zionist, and they tolerate Julian's efforts as only lifelong friends do. The prose in this novel is marvelous, the humor is wonderful, but it is really fairly depressing. Julian starts using "finkler" to substitute for the word, "Jew", just in his mind. He explores Finklerishness....(Finkler is the last name of one of his two friends). So, the "Finkler Question" really means the "Jewish Question".......what is the Jewish question? Who am I? Why am I? Why me? Why not? Where do I belong? How do I get there? What makes this identity different from all others?
I think Jacobson is able to identify the questions to this complicated identity issue extremely well. Are there answers? Your guess is as good as mine!
> British author
> Summer sub club with Beth
> p.6...."It gave him a preternaturally youthful look - this unconsummated expectation of tragic event. The look which people born again into their faith somtimes acquire." - It is weird, but I know exactly the look he is talking about....sort of wide-eyed, naive, and expectant....
> p.6..."But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off." - Hmmmmm, is this true? Author is referring to the BBC, apparently fondly referred to in UK as "Auntie"
> protagonist's name....Treslove....tres means "very" in French.....Hmmmm
> Title: Treslove's friend is Sam Finkler......Treslove starts using "Finkler" to mean Jew. Hence...."The Finkler Question"...and "The Finklerish Conspiracy"....so clever
> Jacobson writes like a stand-up comic and a thinker. I am just a few pages into the book and have already belly-laughed several times, while at the same time running up against thought provoking statements.....bodes really well for the rest of the book
> p.8..."He felt himself to be a stunted shrub in a rainforest of towering trees"...wonderful statement of low self-esteem
> p.10...."His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot."......gotta love this stuff
> p.12..."Malkie had thought he had said her neck was more graceful than a svontz.......Could Libor really have meant that her neck was more graceful than a penis?"------LOLOLOLOL!
> p.15...."What moved him was this proof of the destructibility of things; everything exacted its price in the end, and perhaps happiness exacted it even more cruelly than its opposite."
> Commentary on being "Finklerish" (read "Jewish"):
1) instincts to know on which side his own "bread was buttered" - agree
2) "a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek..." - disagree
3) "the lifeboat position" - "...I've never been there and don't ever want to go there.....but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere to go. That is history's lesson." - Agree
4) willing to take status into account beforing condemning the behavior of others ( "Non-Finklers judged all infidelities equally, ....Finklers were prepared to make allowances if the third party happened to be someon important....")
5) proneness to disaster..... (had his Finklerishness lead him to "allow" the mugging?
6) Jews and music, Jews and families, and their loyalties
7) Self-preoccupation.....read "Herzog" recently, good example of this
8) "...Jews are at furthest remove one another's great-great-great cousins. We don't do six degrees of separation. We do three."
> Why is it okay to stereotype oneself, but not others? I always tell the kids that this is true....but is it fair? Bob thinks it is fair.....
> p.27..."Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects." - Is this an actual tenet of philosophy?
> p.27..."A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has."......like this
> p.28..."...melancholy was intrinsic to longing." Hmmmm....
> p.47...."He was a man who ordinarily woke to a sense of loss. He could not remember a single morning of his life when he had woken to a sense of possession. When there was nothing palpable he could reproach himself for having lost, he found the futility he needed in world affairs or sport.".......I wonder how many people live their lives this way
> Treslove decides his mugger mistook him for a Jew.....decided he is "essentially" like them, "spiritually" like them......the whole fascination/obsession with Jewishness is really interesting....I am wondering if gentiles are really so curious about Jews, or is this, on a meta level, about the differences between ethnic groups and the way in which observation by outsiders of any group develop stereotypes which may feel completely foreign to members of the group.......
> Finkler's wife as "the eternal Finnkler woman"......then finds out she is a convert, born a Gentile.....humurous moment
> p.80....Trelove's research into hate crimes against Jews worldwide.....reinforces the reality of some of his observations, like the "lifeboat" mentality
> p.83...names his mugger "Judith", one of the possible important women to enter his life, according to a fortune teller, also a reference to the confusion over what the mugger said in his ear...."You Ju"....Jew?
> p.83..."He remembered the old sensation of exclusion, envying the men their animal wormth even as they'd argued routinely on the Finkler question of the hour......as though mutual mistrust was stamped into Finklers like the name of a seaside resort into rock....just as mutual love appeared to be."
> p. 101......"the company of preposterously sexy women always makes a man look a fool."
> p.103...."No, it's at your age that the glass is half full. At my age we don't want half a glass, full or empty. In fact we don't want a glass, end of. We want a tankard and we want it overflowing. We are the have-everything generation, remember." - perhaps true of each "younger" generation
> Finkler forms the "ASHamed Jews"....those Jews ashamed of Zionism
> Vocabulary: 1) prepuce: technical term for foreskin
> Treslove meets the predicted Juno at a seder heald by
> p. 138...only Jews can be Jewishly ashamed...."only they could express, from the inside, the emotion of betrayal."
> p. 140....."Far from hating our Jewishness.....it is we who continue the great Jewish traditions of justice and compassion."...to tell the truth I sort of identify with this group...I am proud of so much of the Jewish religion, yet I am not proud to be associated with Zionism....other than I can understand wanting a place that will always be a safe haven for Jews.
> p.143..."...the Comprehensive Academic and Cultural Boycott was the talk of the hour, t......mainly for the reason that its chief sponsors were academics or otherwise cultured persons themselves and could imagine no greater deprivation than being denied access to academic conferences or having your latest paper refused by a learned magazine.".....had to chuckle at this one.....
> p.153 the old friend comes to Libor about the hate crime against her grandson.......amazed at lack of response or outrage
> p.155...the notion of "understanding why people might hate Jews".....as if that excuses acting on it .......I always told my kids, I cannot tell you how to feel about anything or anyone, but I can expect minimal level of respect for them......
> p.175..."You prepared yourself for a Finkler joke and they bamboozled you with Finkler scholarship."
> p.185...".....whether it was any longer defensib le even to use the word Jew in a public place. After everything that had happened, wasn't it a word for private consumption only? Out there in the raging public world it was as a goad to every sort of violence and extremism. It was a password to madness. Jew. One little word with no hiding place for reason in it. Say 'Jew' and it was like throwing a bomb."........frightening concept
> the whole conversation about circumcision was interesting.......I had a friend who refused to attend Dan's bris because to her it was a form of mutilation......not sure I would disagree at this point in my life......
> p. 204..."A woman shouldn't be married to a totally faithful man all her life."....Hmmmmmm, something to ponder here
> p.207.."Nowhere is safe from them because they think nowhere is safe from us.".....could apply to any group
> p.208..."...going from fear to amusement and back again, she was experiencing both emotions simultaneously. It wasn't even a matter of reconciling opposites because they were not opposites for her. Each partook of the other."......I think life consists of trying to hold and experience more than one emotion at one time, and the folks who are overwhelmed by that experience seek out fundamentalist, black and white ways of living.....tidier, simpler, and, in my opinion, extremely rigid!
> Several times in the novel, Libor makes comments about Russians and their limits....perhaps an effort on Jacobson's part to point out that we all have biases and prejudices
> p.215..."You are the one who sees the Jew in the Jew. And cannot bear to look. This is about you, Libor"......two people in their eighties, arguing about how Jews are seen by non-Jews.
> p. 231...."...when she spoke of the breakdown of the Jewish mind, the Final Solution causing Jews to go demented and see final solutions of their own, the violence begot of violence. Indeedc, Finkler would have done no more than illustrate her thesis." (He fantasized about murdering Tamara.
> p.246..."You don't judge fidelity by every act; it's the desire to say you're faithful and the the desire to be believed." HUH?
> In the end, Treslove returns to his lonely melancholy, and begins "....to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again." and has come to believe that "you can't, though, can you, have one happy Jew in an island of apprehensive or ashamed ones? Least of all when that Jew happens to be a Gentile."
>LibraryThing Review:
This was my first experience of Howard Jacobson's writing. His dry wit is wonderful, although "The Finkler Question" is not a funny story or message. Jacobson's protagonist, Julian Treslove, wants desperately to be Jewish, and goes to great lengths to try and achieve this transformation. His two friends, both recent widowers, struggle with what it means to be Jewish v. to be a Zionist, and they tolerate Julian's efforts as only lifelong friends do. The prose in this novel is marvelous, the humor is wonderful, but it is really fairly depressing. Julian starts using "finkler" to substitute for the word, "Jew", just in his mind. He explores Finklerishness....(Finkler is the last name of one of his two friends). So, the "Finkler Question" really means the "Jewish Question".......what is the Jewish question? Who am I? Why am I? Why me? Why not? Where do I belong? How do I get there? What makes this identity different from all others?
I think Jacobson is able to identify the questions to this complicated identity issue extremely well. Are there answers? Your guess is as good as mine!
Monday, May 16, 2011
"Dancer" by Colum McCann ****
> Fictional bio of Rudolf Nureyev
> Love McCann's writing......
> Audiobook.........multiple narrators
> his relationship with Margot Fonteyn was fascinating.....looked it up, really was incredibly close....they said they danced together "as one soul"
LibraryThing Review: All of a sudden, about an hour into this novel, I realized the author was setting Rudolf Nureyev up as the protagonaist. The novel is fictional, and is really more about the ripples experienced by the people in his life, in the life of a famous person. In the novel, Margot Fonteyn (Nureyev's partner for many years) says that the dancer's life is magnificently full, and desperately empty at the same time. That statement really sums up the gist of the story. Passion and tragedy walk hand in hand throughout his life. I have gathered that from some biographies of famous individuals, particularly "Long Walk To Freedom" by Nelsom Mandela. It seems that fame requires adjustment to a level of imbalance in life which, from the outside looking in, seems exquisitely painful. Very good book!
> Love McCann's writing......
> Audiobook.........multiple narrators
> his relationship with Margot Fonteyn was fascinating.....looked it up, really was incredibly close....they said they danced together "as one soul"
LibraryThing Review: All of a sudden, about an hour into this novel, I realized the author was setting Rudolf Nureyev up as the protagonaist. The novel is fictional, and is really more about the ripples experienced by the people in his life, in the life of a famous person. In the novel, Margot Fonteyn (Nureyev's partner for many years) says that the dancer's life is magnificently full, and desperately empty at the same time. That statement really sums up the gist of the story. Passion and tragedy walk hand in hand throughout his life. I have gathered that from some biographies of famous individuals, particularly "Long Walk To Freedom" by Nelsom Mandela. It seems that fame requires adjustment to a level of imbalance in life which, from the outside looking in, seems exquisitely painful. Very good book!
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