I refuse to force this ridiculous meme onto others but because people I respect have asked:
1. I am a Jewish intellectual from Northern California
2. There were three times in my life when I genuinely thought I was going to die. In retrospect, the first time I was just being overly dramatic — a point the second and third times drove home rather forcefully.
3. As a result I value human life now in a way I didn’t before.
4. I think Arvo Part’s style works well for instruments but not voices, so stop asking.
5. I think lists like this are a rather cheap form of narcissism given the amount of navel-gazing the Internet enables.
6. Deep in my head at night before I fall asleep I am writing two novels set in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Ekumen” universe.
7. I prefer to eat small, intensely flavored objects.
8. My wife says I am “compulsively irreverent”
9. I am 90% sure that I know who I was in my previous life, and a little disturbed that I could believe in such a silly thing.
10. I believe in the positive power of conflict and am skeptical of people who want to ‘resolve conflicts’ instead of seeking ‘empowerment through crisis’.
11. I don’t care if I am on the top of the ‘healing done’ meters as long as I am at the bottom of the ‘percentage overhealed’ meter.
12. I am against cruelty to animals but I am not going to stop eating foie gras and I cannot reconcile these two commitments intellectually.
13. I totally believe that we must not give in to the “bigotry of low expectations” even if the phrase was popularized by a President I didn’t vote for advocating for a kind of education reform I oppose.
14. I can sight-read a Palestrina motet, and I’m proud of it.
15. I used to be obsessed with obsession, but I think I’m getting better now.
16. I believe in human duties, not human rights.
17. I think it is about time that we dusted off second wave feminism and gave it another go.
18. Latkes, not hamentaschen.
20. To the extent that I still have a favorite movie, Miller’s Crossing is it.
21. I think the best text that can be used to understand how borders organize difference is the “Mexico” episode of Tony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”
22. I believe that Real Artists Ship.
23. I have never listened to Led Zeppelin II or Help so that I will not ever run out of things to listen to by The Beatles and Zep.
24. I was going to write a long blog entry pondering what it says about America that in the original Star Trek Kennedy-Era liberalism’s fantasy of the Racial Other was an Ashkenazi Jew playing a Vulcan but in Obama Era new version of Star Trek it is a Mexican until I learned that Zachary Quinto was Italian.
25. I think Willow Rosenberg is a fine role model for Jewish people everywhere.
-
That Mexico episode is what pushed me from thinking that Anthony Bourdain was an arrogant, opinionated, and brusque man to thinking he was a sexily brilliant, arrogant, opinionated, and brusque man.
-
On foie gras: some (such as an article in Gastronomica a while back) claim that the actual enlargement of the goose’s liver is not a diseased condition but is a natural adaptation that lets the geese store enough energy for their absurdly arduous migratory journeys. The Wikipedia article is more equivocal, but does mention foie gras as a sort of by-product of schmaltz production in central and western Europe back when, say, olive oil was hard to come by.
#10 and #16 could be the subjects of essays themselves—or is there already good writing on these out there?
-
Re: #8. Your wife, as in everything on which I’ve yet had the pleasure of hearing her render judgement, is right.
Re: #10: I knew it from theory in graduate school. After Proposition 8, I’m convinced from experience. As for good writing on this, I think one could start with Hegel and/or Marx and move on from there.
-
thm: re #10 see “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order” by Bob Cover in “Narrative, Violence, and the Law”: http://books.google.com/books?id=D0gA_c3k7DYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=robert+cover#PPA1,M1
re #16 I think sort of is a result me being socialized to Enga. Although it also comes from the surprisingly insightful commentary from Meg Ryan on the DVD extras for the film “Proof of Life”. Oh yeah and also Hegel and Marx like RBL said.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article