Ah, yes, airplane blogging. I think I need to get with the wireless revolution and start being able to actually post from airports. My laptop has a modem which I think is wireless; what additional gadgetry do I need?
As regular Baraita readers may recall, this past weekend was my cousin A.J.'s Bar Mitzvah in... uh... Coast City. (That's somewhere in the Marvel -- or is it DC? -- comics, right? Someday, my utter lack of superhero knowledge will catch up with me.) It was quite the family production: apart from the Bar Mitzvah boy leading every possible part of the service, as one might expect, and allotting the usual door-opening and Torah[-scroll]-holding honors to assorted cousins, we did all the Torah and Haftarah chanting, introduced both portions, and led several hours of vigorous Israeli dancing afterwards. (I did none of this -- well, it's possible that I might have joined in a Hebrew rendition of the Hokey Pokey, but their synagogue is Conservative and doesn't allow photography or videotaping on the Sabbath, so there's no evidence either way.) My job was to give what my cousin's synagogue calls a "sermon," what my Christian aunts and uncles might well call a "talk" (the Holy Spirit not being anywhere in evidence, which was probably just as well), and what in my neck of the Jewish tradition we call a d'var Torah. This simply means "speech about the Torah," which doesn't limit things too much, but I appreciate the reminder of what it's there for. You see, I believe that anyone who's going to get up during a religious service and talk for awhile -- this is not limited to the Jewish tradition -- should darn well manage to relate their remarks to the rest of the service. I hate sermons which are all about the narrator's experience at summer camp, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or whatever, with no apparent awareness that they're in the middle of the freakin' liturgy, at a specific time in the seasonal cycle, accompanied by specific readings from one's preferred Scriptures, etc. It's not that difficult to relate things; people have been doing it for millennia, even in your more recent scripture-based systems.
A.J., of course, did a wonderful job. So did his sister and his mother and his aunt (my mother) and his cousins, whom he does in fact reckon up by dozens. But I happen to be his only first cousin, and I also happen to be one of a small handful of people in the family whose credentials could reasonably be twisted around to qualify as a "guest speaker." I've read quite a bit about the history of the Jewish sermon -- this was mostly helpful in reminding me that I could be tremendously more boring if I really tried -- and I've even given a sermon before, but in the context of an interfaith service at Unspecified University, and not in front of roughly a kazillion cousins and a large congregation of which A.J.'s family are very active members. I think it went well, actually, and I also stayed awake for the entire service, which was good, since I kept falling asleep in spare moments for the remainder of the weekend. (Suffice it to say that the end of one's first week of classes is not the best possible time to go out of town.) My attitude towards sermon-writing is roughly equivalent to what I imagine most women must feel after giving birth: the process itself kind of sucks, but the afterglow is nice, and it includes some convenient memory loss. I feel as though I could do this again... in two or three years.
Oddly enough, this sermon started out a week ago as an aborted blog post, so it seems only reasonable to repatriate it -- with a few identifying details removed, although that means you don't get to appreciate my brilliance in tying this into the other two speeches given during the service. You do need to know that the Torah portion for last Saturday is called Nitzavim, and that it covers Deuteronomy 29:9 to 31:30.* The Haftarah (Prophets) reading was from Isaiah, and was very much in the Enemies' Butt-Kicking tradition of prophetic literature (complete with the bit about trampling out the vintage of the grapes of wrath), so I mostly stuck with the Torah portion. Oh, and you also need to realize that next weekend is Rosh Ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year, and that the word teshuvah, usually translated "repentance," literally means "turning back" or "returning" and is what the religious season on either side of Rosh Ha-Shanah is all about. The bimah is the raised platform from which the Torah scroll is read and my sermon was given; a Chumash is the printed book containing each week's Torah and Haftarah portions in Hebrew in English. Now that I think about this, in fact, it's interesting how much in-group language I used unconsciously. But for the three or so readers who might be curious... and, uh, bearing in mind that I'm not usually big with the explicit exhortations?
Surely, this instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, "Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.
These verses from today’s parsha, Nitzavim, are as beautiful as they are unexpected. After all, the better part of Nitzavim is taken up with curses and threats. God is warning us against slipping into idolatry, threatening us with misfortune and exile, painting a horrible picture of a people gutted by failure to stick to their ancestral covenant. ...[W]e are still in the weeks of consolation following Tisha b’Av; neither misfortune nor exile are new experiences for the Jewish community. But Nitzavim echoes the seasonal turn from mourning to consolation: “When all these things befall you – the blessing and the curse that I have set before you – and you take them to heart … the Lord your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring to ove the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live.” Then it takes the final step, bringing in an idea that we immediately associate with the High Holy Days: teshuvah, “turning back,” repentance. All the curses will be canceled, and all the blessings will start back up, once you are “once you return to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.” We have only to observe the instruction – some translations call it a “teaching” or a “commandment”; the Hebrew is simply mitzvah – that is in our mouths and hearts.
What is “this instruction,” this single mitzvah, that is so important and so close to us? There are two options in most of the commentaries. The majority holds that the “instruction” refers to the entire Torah, and especially to its commandments and laws – at several points in Devarim, and even in today’s parsha, we read about “commandments and laws that are recorded in this book of instruction.” The Talmud uses precisely this passage – “it is not in heaven … nor beyond the sea” – to emphasize the message that one should set apart fixed times for Torah study.** But there is a minority opinion suggesting that the teaching we should hold close to ourselves is simply the mitzvah of teshuvah, of repentence.*** After all, the immediate context of the passage is undoubtedly about turning back to God, and teshuvah is accomplished precisely with the heart and the mouth, feeling remorse and admitting to errors.
We may be able to reconcile these opinions if we remember what time of year it is. We are approaching the end of Elul, a month when it is traditional to -- in effect -- cram for the High Holy Days. From the fifteenth of Av forward, so the custom goes, we should be devoting additional time to Torah study. There are also a host of special laws pertaining to Elul, Rosh Ha-Shanah, and the rest of Judaism’s high-octane holiday season, which we are supposed to familiarize ourselves with each year around this time. In other words, learning about Jewish laws and customs is supposed to help us gear up for teshuvah. Now, many of you are probably thinking that the special laws pertaining to Elul aren’t your biggest worry. If you’re not in the habit of reciting Psalms every morning, the addition of one or two extras doesn’t really have an impact. If you’re a little fuzzy on exactly what the Talmud is, you’re probably not losing sleep over whether or not your Sukkah’s going to meet the exacting standards set forth by second- or fifth-century rabbis. In fact, if you’re like most Jews I know, you’re spending the last weeks of Elul trying to rearrange your work schedule for whichever High Holidays come during the week, deciding whether the brisket should be for the first or the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah, and trying to remember where you left the honey cake recipe last fall.
I’m all in favor of brisket and honey cake, but I also want you to remember what our Torah passage says about the many commandments and even more laws in Judaism. ...[T]he message of Nitzavim is that you don’t have to be some kind of genius to get this stuff. Our mitzvot aren’t in the heavens; they’re not beyond the sea. They’re available in translation. Of course, it’s sometimes tough to remember this. There’s always someone who knows more than you do about Judaism – if you finished religious school, then there are the Jewish day-school people, and if you’re Jewish day-school people, there are the really observant Jewish day-school people; even if you’re a full-time scholar, there are the people who read Aramaic fluently, and the people who refer to all the commentators by their cute little nicknames. No matter what, you’re always behind.
As an added bonus, our tradition is packed just full of stories designed to make us feel like idiots. There’s the tradition about Hillel’s eighty students – Hillel taught in the first century of the Common Era, and we can all blame him for the maror sandwich at Pesach and for a lot of Jewish student centers on university campuses – anyway, of Hillel’s eighty students, thirty of them were apparently worthy of having the Divine Presence descend upon them, like Moses, and another thirty were worthy of having the sun stand still for them, like Joshua. (Hillel’s best student could burn birds which flew above him while he was studying Torah; no doubt this was a useful talent in the Tannaitic, or pre-rotisserie, era.) The remaining twenty weren’t so shabby, either; the least of them all, a guy named Yochanan ben Zakkai, had merely mastered the Tanakh, the Mishnah (which hadn’t been completed yet, but that’s beside the point), Halakhah, Haggadah, Midrashic literature, several fairly complicated methods of deriving new laws from the Torah, and all the rabbinic enactments to date. He had also picked up a few sidelines: the calculations of solstices and equinoxes; parables about launderers and foxes; the respective languages of demons, angels, and date palms; and “other matters large and small,” which included the entire corpus of Jewish mystical knowledge.****
Every time I think about that, I get discouraged. (Well, first I get curious about why anyone would want to talk to a date palm, but that’s a whole different sermon.) Compared to Hillel's students, I don't know bupkis. I was, after all, a religious-school delinquent: I simply walked home whenever I got bored, and I got bored a lot. ...[I]t’s still all too common for kids – excuse me, Jewish adults – to hit their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, perhaps their Confirmation, and exhale a sigh of relief as they realize that their Jewish educational obligations are over for good. That’s not what we want them to be doing, though, and that’s not what we should be doing, either. Judaism isn’t just about going to services and eating honey cake. It’s not even limited to community service and synagogue activities. Judaism is also very much about continuing education. Learning more about Jewish law doesn’t sound like fun to most Jews -- we’d rather learn Israeli dancing -- but our Torah passage tells us that it should be as easy as -- loosely translated -- falling off a log. It’s not in the heavens or beyond the sea, where Hillel’s best students could probably get it, but we certainly couldn’t. It’s close to us, in our mouths and hearts. If you’ve never gotten to know the rabbis of the Talmud -- and some of their stories would make for a great miniseries-- you’ll miss the implicit punch line in that story: Yochanan ben Zakkai made it out of Jerusalem when most of Hillel’s other students perished in the year 70 of the Common Era. He survived to teach a new generation of rabbis and to help them transform Jewish observance after the destruction of the Second Temple. It’s not always the best student who saves the day.
....[A]ny one of us might be asked to explain why we care about all this “law” and “commandment” stuff. It’s our responsibility as Jews to answer that question, and to answer it well, even – in fact, especially – if we happen to be non-traditional Jews who let women up onto the bimah. Remember, we learned in today’s parsha that Jewish law isn’t supposed to be inaccessible, and that it’s a crucial part of our seasonal efforts to return to God. Teshuvah and mitzvot boil down to the same idea: in order to return to God, we must continually strive to learn more about God’s laws and commandments, the better to observe them in whatever ways we choose.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you all run out and devote every day to studying at a yeshiva. There are a lot of ways to study Jewish law, and not all of them require setting fixed times. You could go sign up for a night class, sure, but you could also drop in on one of the post-Kiddush discussion groups that so many congregations have – I know I’ve sat in on one or two great ones here during my visits. You could buy a few books about some topic in Jewish law or history which interests you, then read through them yourself or discuss them with a friend. You could pick your favorite holiday and learn everything about its observances and customs. You could what I do, and subscribe to half a dozen email lists with weekly outlines of Torah portions or daily lessons from the Talmud. You could do what I did when I was younger, and spend the parts of the service you don’t understand flipping through the less age-appropriate passages of the Chumash. But you should do something. Make it a New Year’s resolution.
Today... we’re celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of my cousin [A.J.], whose love for learning has made us all very proud. ...Today we’re also thinking forward to the new year, and praying that it will indeed be a sweet one, that we will experience blessings instead of curses. We may not be able to change many of the things that trouble us about the past year, but we can certainly change our attitudes toward Jewish learning. After all, God’s teachings are placed quite specifically within our reach, and their mastery is what will lead us to the blessings enumerated in our Torah portion. It’s the right year, the right month, even the right week. To borrow Hillel’s best-known sound bite, “If not now, when?”
* -- The portions (par[a]shiyyot) are typically named after the first significant word or two of each portion; nitzavim refers to "[you all] standing [together]." As a result of this naming convention, we have portions called "Because" and "Go!" and "After the death" and "[A woman] bringing forth seed." The books of the Torah are named the same way, and so Deuteronomy is simply called Devarim, "words," as in "These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel...."
[The remaining endnotes were actually in my sermon text, but you will be relieved to know that I did not read them aloud. ;)]
** -- Eruvin 55a, in the name of R. Avdini bar Hana.
*** -- Nachmanides and Albo, among others.
**** -- Bava Basra 134a, a baraita. (The full list of subjects R. Yochanan knew is actually about twice as long as the list I supplied – there are a number of technical terms which it’d take too long to explain.)
Long ago and far away, I wrote about why -- in my not terribly humble opinion -- crossovers seldom work. (Those that do are usually the funny ones -- I mean, everyone agrees that Yahtzee's Them Mean Ol' Low-Down Lando Calrissian Blues is hilarious.) What's started bothering me recently is the question of whether or not writing fanfic in multiple fandoms usually works; what with the exodus of many of my favorite Buffy authors into other fandoms, the flowering of multi-fandom fanfic lists, and the way that that favorite-first-lines meme got me clicking on some new stuff, I've been poking into some fandoms I normally wouldn't've sought out. I've learned some new things and had a lot of fun. But I'm beginning to suspect that, on balance, multi-fandom writing doesn't usually work, and for good reason.
Of course, if you have a technically competent and conceptually inventive author, s/he will be able to put together a good yarn no matter what the characters' names are. But that's precisely the problem. I continue to assert that "fanfic" has no literary meaning whatsoever -- anyone who wants to provide a coherent non-legal explanation as to why umpty-gazillion adaptations of everything from Genesis to Sherlock Holmes aren't fanfic, but adaptations starting around Star Trek: TOS are, be my guest -- but there is a useful distinction to be made between borrowing plots or character traits or names from somewhere else (as almost all authors, and most spectacularly Shakespeare, have done) and consciously, self-referentially, using characters and/or entire worlds you did not create. Now, it's clear to me that the contemporary Sherlock Holmes stuff does the latter; as such, it has the additional challenge of making Holmes and the world Holmes moves in believable to readers of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Some of the Sherlock Holmes novels/movies/etc. succeed better at this than others. Similarly, fanfic writers have an obligation which goes beyond the ordinary writer's responsibility to her craft; their characters and the atmosphere of their story have to fit in with -- not be identical with, just fit in with -- the original source material.
I've read a number of authors in multiple fandoms -- sometimes fandoms where I know nothing except a few characters' names -- and I've come to the conclusion that, in the vast majority of cases, each fandom's set of characters and the atmosphere in which those characters move start sounding, well, sort of similar. This isn't unique to fanfic; anyone who reads multiple novels by a single author will probably start recognizing more or less egregious recycling of concepts, characters, plot points, etc. But the problem this creates is unique to what I'll call referential fiction (i.e., fanfic plus All That Other Stuff which is consciously based on a previous body of narrative). If you're going to claim that you're writing in a universe with preset rules, characters, style, and atmosphere (or even an alternate form of that universe), you have to actually accomplish this. Human nature certainly spits out stereotypes as well as archetypes, but lite-evil bad-boy Spike from Buffy shouldn't sound like lite-evil bad-boy Lex Luthor from Smallville shouldn't sound like lite-evil bad-boy Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter shouldn't sound like lite-evil bad-boy Krycek from The X-Files. Considered as a group, these characters do share some very broad similarities -- no doubt there's a member of *NSYNC whose persona fits into this type, and someone somewhere in the X-Men universe, and so and and so forth.* But one shouldn't be able to swap character names in and out (along with the corresponding names of the Loved One Who Can Redeem Him) and keep the exact same plot, dialogue, etc. Similarly, a dark Buffy AU (which possibility is well within canon for that show in any case) shouldn't read like a dark West Wing AU, and I'm not talking presence or absence of vampires.
I started thinking about this when I read a Harry Potter fic I really liked. I hardly ever read Harry Potter stories, because most of the ones I have read left me strangely unenthused. They were always well-crafted, often moving, penned by talented authors -- but they didn't feel like they were based in the Potterverse in any way except some names and places. The characters were often unrecognizable -- too angsty, too bitter and cynical, too suddenly mature, or too focused on the single relationship depicted in the fic to the exclusion of everything else. What really stuck out for me in the Harry Potter fics, though, was the extent to which the atmosphere was almost always untrue to the Potterverse -- by and large, too horrific and/or too romantic. Now, while the Harry Potter series is certainly getting darker, it's not fundamentally horrific. Sure, some (more) of the Good Guys are likely to die before the series is over, but it's a safe bet that the series won't end in a post-apocalyptic world in which Harry and Draco have acrobatic magical sex atop the mutilated bodies of all their friends before one of them whips out an Unspeakable Curse and kills the other.** Harry Potter is also not fundamentally set in a romantic world, which isn't to say that the characters aren't likely to continue coupling up -- just that they don't spend scenes and scenes (a) going on about it to the exclusion of all else or (b) having explicit wild monkey sex. Romantic relationships are largely subordinated to other sorts of relationships -- especially the bonds of friendship. There are many created worlds (fandoms, if you will) in which heavy doses of romance and horror make perfect sense -- Buffy, certainly. I think X-Files tended to be more congenial to horror, and so far Smallville has been a lot more congenial to romance, but there's ample room for the other category in each case. There are also some created worlds in which pure romance and pure horror don't have much of a place, and I think Harry Potter is one of those.
I'm definitely not saying that fanfic should be written in precisely the same style/genre/medium/language as the original. I'm simply suggesting that the fanfic should be in some way compatible with the body of work it's referencing; I can't seem to get much more precise than that, but I can give examples. The Harry Potter books are, for lack of a more elegant description, children's adventure novels. The HP fic I liked so much is a novel-length comedy of manners/mystery, and it has a number of elements that I'm pretty sure won't make it into the complete HP series, most notably a central romantic relationship between two male characters. However, the fic's characters are perfectly recognizable as variants on their canonical originals -- even its new characters fit seamlessly into the Potterverse -- and the world they move in is pure Harry Potter. There are certainly some missteps here and there in extending the Potterverse (for one thing, I refuse to believe that the wizarding world lacks any institutions of higher education), but the vast majority of it rings true.***
There are authors I could name who write brilliantly in more than one or two fandoms. I'm not familiar with enough fandoms to be sure of more than that, but it's perfectly possible that there are brilliant people out there who manage to write convincingly in half a dozen fandoms. But many multi-fandom authors whose work I've looked through... simply don't convince me that they're really trying to evoke a different universe each time. Instead, they're staying in their own universe and switching around people, places, and things as necessary. That's not such a terrible thing; it might even produce very good fiction. Unfortunately, it's not good fanfic. It fails as referential fiction. Issues of false advertising aside, that strikes me as kind of sad, because I especially enjoy the referential dimension of such fiction.
I think what I'm demanding of fanfic is a combination of reference to and respect for the original source material. If anyone wants to offer me some better terms than "compatibility" and "staying in the same universe" for what I'm getting at here, that'd be great, too. Meanwhile, I plan to keep reading -- just very, very thoughtfully.
* -- Speaking of bad boys, redeemed and otherwise, does anyone have the eerie sensation that a good nine-tenths of all fanfic involves ringing changes on Two Gentlemen of Verona and Hamlet with more explicit sex and fewer explicit venereal-disease jokes? No? Just me, then? Right....
** -- I just made that up, so if there really is a fic out there with such a plot... uh, I pity it.
*** -- The name of this fic, incidentally, is Lust Over Pendle, and it's novel-length, so look into it when you have plenty of time to spare. ;)
[Edited to change the title, because I only thought of the perfect title a day later. I'm sure everyone can deal.]
Here at beautiful Boondoggle U., it's Orientation Week. The administration keeps trying to call it "Welcome Week," but I don't think that's sinking in, and I certainly didn't feel a palpable sense of welcome this morning when I arrived on campus (at 8:15!) and realized that every parking place within a mile of my office was occupied by students moving in. In fact, my subconscious mind dug up a quote which it took my conscious mind a good five minutes to identify: "Like a plague of boils, the race of man covered the earth...."* Fortunately, I couldn't stay misanthropic for long -- the students look about 15, and they're all lugging around brand-new computer boxes, and their parents are following them around, and it's really kind of sweet. They have Orientation this weekend. I think they'll need it.
Earlier this week, I attended the faculty version of Orientation, an event marked by the presence of one of the most unusual lunch dishes I have ever encountered. If you were catering a luncheon for new faculty, current faculty dragooned into participating in panel discussions, and assorted University dignitaries, wouldn't you pick something, I don't know, identifiable? Grilled chicken, wild rice, a tasteful vegetable medley, a vegetarian option involving the rice stuffed into peppers and topped with marinara sauce -- I've sat through enough of these things that I can almost recite the menu. This was, uh, different. The salad was fine, but after much debate, our tableful of Ph.Ds concluded that the entree was... er... well, the favored hypothesis was that it might have been some version of lasagna, but it could equally well have been albino manicotti. There were definitely layers, but too much cheese to make out other structural details -- just large numbers of capers and artichoke hearts, lots of white cheese, some flat pasta, chunks of something we're pretty sure was chicken, and cream sauce. Our table's vegetarian was out of luck, although she did nibble at some of the artichoke sections. Dessert was cheesecake -- or possibly ice-cream cake, but I'm fairly sure it just hadn't been thawed long enough -- which only enhanced the impression (sensory, not culinary) that the menu had come from the Great White North. Sadly, we did not have the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show come out to entertain us.
I ate most of the meal anyway; it's important to keep oneself nourished (not to mention caffeinated) during an entire day of sitting around listening to extremely well-meaning people tell you things which you could generally learn much more effectively by reading the stacks of pamphlets they have just given you. As a matter of fact, I did page through most of the pamphlets during especially dull panel discussions -- I discovered several useful nuggets of information which the speakers had neglected to mention -- and used the notepad I had brought along to sketch out a website design, brainstorm extra-credit assignments for my intro course, and doodle flowers all over the margins. It was only an exercise of willpower, the fear of discovery, and the realization that I'd left my stylus in the car that prevented me from whipping out my Palm Pilot and indulging in a quick game of Tetris.
The fun part of Orientation, for the record -- not counting the exercises in food taxonomy -- was meeting other new faculty members. I now know another half-dozen or so people in my office building, plus a few specialists in related fields whom I'd otherwise never meet, since their offices are all the way on the other side of campus. Indeed, we were firmly bonded in adversity by the end of the program, at which point we discovered that the "cocktails" promised on our schedule consisted of soft drinks, beer, and wine. ("We were promised hard liquor," grumbled one colleague. I was more disappointed about the lack of little plastic swords and maraschino cherries, but I knew better than to admit as much.) And, really, the silver lining to all of this is considerable: as long as I can supply alcohol and easily identifiable foodstuffs, I think I should have very little trouble pulling off a successful dinner party or two.
Of course, entertaining would require me to have free time (and a dining-room set, but I can work around that). I'm still putting together the dratted course packets -- if they run into next week, I'll be able to shuffle some of the photocopying off onto my research assistant, who has a much better idea of what his job entails than I do right now. I'm also conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether my intro course would be better served by using WebCT bulletin boards, Movable Type blogs, or none of the above. I'm leaning towards trying it without any fancy software for the first semester -- simply putting the syllabus and handouts on a class website means that I get credit for "using technology," for what that's worth. (One of the funniest parts of Orientation -- at least from my perspective -- was the terrifically sincere associate dean who encouraged us to use not only "technology," but also "media," in our classrooms. Ah, yes, those famous media- and technology-less classes. Do they meet outdoors and stand around in a circle uttering primal howls? I mean, I was going to try that this coming spring, but now that you tell me about the great faculty resources available here for using technology....) To top it off, I have a couple of professional-community obligations, a handful of bills to pay, and a five-hour faculty meeting tomorrow.
On the plus side, the course I had started referring to as the "Zen Class" -- it had neither textbooks in the bookstore nor an assigned classroom, and I was starting to wonder whether we'd have to simply spend the first meeting gathered in a quad somewhere meditating -- has finally been assigned some classroom space. The classroom is "smart," and Level Three at that (Smallville fans will kindly stop snickering), a designation which means that there are half a dozen cool gadgets implanted in the podium for me to play with. Also, I can borrow everything from DVD players to digital cameras from our instructional media resource center. I was just looking over their list of videotapes, and while they don't have the movie I plan to show in the last week of classes, they do have something called Vampyr.** Sounds, uh, instructional.
I'm told this whole faculty thing gets less insane with practice -- but I'm a little unclear on when exactly that takes place. One month? Six? A year? And why didn't they cover that during Orientation?
* -- Those of you who figured it out before peeking should be very proud of yourselves. Luke, the Master's vampire henchman in "The Harvest," wayyyy back at the beginning of the first season of Buffy. The Order of Aurelius wasn't even a subtle inversion of Christianity, which may be why I enjoyed it so much.
** -- And speaking of vampires... if "Welcome To The Hellmouth" had featured anyone except Giles showing Buffy a book entitled Vampyr, I might've suspected the book of being one of those faux-literary plastic cases used to hide videotapes. Giles, however, would know better. That said, it's still a funny coincidence. If I weren't so busy, I'd go ahead and splurge on the Buffy S1 DVDs right now -- after all, my office computer has a DVD drive purely for *cough* pedagogical reasons. Maybe in a few weeks.
Quick prefatory note: I seem to be doing a great deal of unwarranted navel-gazing in here lately -- I mean, my navel is nice enough, but nothing to go on about for pages. The following post is more of the same, although I drag in some other peoples' navels for comparative purposes. I promise to make my next post about... well... fictional navels. Or maybe Freudian dream-navels. But not mine. Anyway....
One of the unbreakable rules of "speculative literature" (note to self: find a more specific and less affected phrase to substitute for "sci-fi/fantasy") is that time travel is cool but complicated. It has a way of creating paradoxes which alert fans can, and will, debate endlessly. I wonder if that's not an observer's problem, though. One can't, by definition, be conscious of living through a time paradox; only outsiders, people who are going in a different direction (or at a different speed) through time, can see the paradoxes.
I flew back to My Hometown this weekend, on a last-minute cheap airfare, mostly so that I could visit my grandmother. Despite a certain lack of short-term memory, she's pretty darn lucid, and can identify me instantly over the phone after no more than "Hi, Grandmother" (since most of my cousins have already started multiplying, this narrows it down to a mere fifty or so people). The thing is, she switches between times a lot. Sometimes she wants to go visit her mother, who died when I was two. Sometimes she tells me that my grandfather has died; that happened when I was four. Sometimes, she worries about who's looking after "the twins" -- that'd be her youngest sons, who just turned fifty-two and have wives to look after them. She also has some odd ideas about space, like the whole business where she has three other suites along with her current one at the assisted-living facility and doesn't really live in any of them, but I view those as a subset of the time thing; she doesn't want to acknowledge that the home she lived in for decades was sold to one of my cousins several years back, redecorated to within an inch of its life, and is currently doing a convincing imitation of a House With A Long-Term Addiction To Pottery Barn Catalogs.* I used to try and point out the problems with these fixed ideas -- Grandpa died in December and it's clearly July; also, I am well past four years old -- but I couldn't change anything. She just gave me the Look of Long-Suffering Adulthood (it works over the phone, too) and went on with her story.
The time-switching thing bothers me less than I would have thought, except that I become embarrassed when she does it in front of other family members and they exchange those awful knowing glances. But when we're alone, or when I'm talking to her on the phone as I do most weekends, it's usually okay to realize that we are currently somewhere in the 1950s. After all, my not being around during the 1950s in no way impedes Grandmother's ability to involve me in them. And while I'm lousy at "living in the present" in the way people usually mean it -- I'm very fond of both past and future, not to mention the aorist and the pluperfect-- I do a damn fine job of redefining terms as needed. In this case, I rip them off from Augustine:
But perhaps it might properly be said that there are three times, the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future. These three are in the soul, but elsewhere I do not see them: the present of things past is in memory; the present of things present is in intuition; the present of things future is in expectation. If we are permitted to say this, then I see three times, and I affirm that there are three times.**
There are many cogent critiques of Augustine's overall philosophy of time -- no, I won't go there right now -- but I've found this passage oddly comforting for years. During college, I used to apply it to ill-considered love affairs, which indicates that (a) I am hopelessly geeky and (b) my subconscious knew they were going to end eventually, which is greatly to its credit but not much help in retrospect. Lately, though, I find that it works very well in dealing with familial time-travel. Grandmother's perfectly well anchored in the present; she's just switching between the present of things past and the present of things present. I can do that, too, except that the present of things future suggests she won't be around forever, and... y'know, I'll just give that one a miss.
I'm leaving tomorrow, which isn't enough time, but neither the airline nor my orientation-week commitments back at Boondoggle University will be swayed by out-of-context snippets from the Confessions. Oh, well. "These three are in the soul, but elsewhere I do not see them." Augustine, poor dear, never got to read science fiction, and had to settle for speculative theology instead.
* -- As you might have guessed, I do not like this cousin for reasons quite apart from her interior-decorating taste, but we remain civil because I feel that there's a slippery slope starting at being actively rude at family gatherings and going down to being actively rude on Jerry Springer.
** -- "What I tell you three times is true." There's no chance that "The Hunting of the Snark" is an elaborate riff on Augustine's Confessions, is there? ("He could only bake Bridecake--for which, I may state, / No materials were to be had.") No? Just checking.
So my daily-Talmud-portion email list is still stuck in Bava Basra (ooh, another question about deathbed gifts, hold me back), but a few weeks ago we hit a passage that was actually interesting, if not actively disturbing. BB 91 is winding up a discussion of the Book of Ruth (something to do with inheritance issues) and starts explaining what the proper names of Naomi's sons and Ruth's husband were (there are several alternatives). From there the Talmud segues into an impromptu game of Bible Trivia which not even the Flanders kids could win. What was the name of Abraham's mother? What about Haman's mother? I have no idea what extra-Scriptural traditions were being mobilized here, but both women were allegedly named Amaslai, and their fathers' names form a mnemonic which allows you to remember that Abraham was good and Haman was bad, in case you were in danger of forgetting.* Then we have names for David's mother, and Samson's mother, and Samson's sister, and they all probably mean something, but let's not worry about that. The part that made me think was the end of this little excursus. The question is posed: why must we know this? The answer, of course, has nothing to do with reclaiming the role of women in Judaism, or preserving some sort of historical record, or providing accurate genealogical data, or just knowing it for the fun of knowing it. The answer is: so that we can answer minim when they ask us these questions.
As you may have gathered, I thought they were perfectly good questions. Which, logically enough, leads to the question of what that makes me. In this particular context, the word minim is usually translated as "heretics." It's not an awful translation; haeresis in Greek originally referred to a political party or other voluntary association, and it took quite a few wiggles before it turned into the specifically Christian understanding of "heresy." Minim in Hebrew originally referred to "species" or "kinds" -- the various plants we shake around at Sukkot are the arba minim, the four species. Somewhere in the Second Temple period -- I could suggest articles about this if you're curious -- it started to be used in reference to Jewish groups who deviated from some perceived norm. By the time the Gemara was being finalized, minim could also refer to non-Jews.** There are also a host of other terms for referring to people who are technically (by birth or conversion) Jews but don't behave or believe properly, thus doing themselves out of wine-sharing privileges and an afterlife, among other things.*** There are apikursim, which is an Aramicization of the Greek word "Epicureans" and refers to a similar outlook; kofrim, which means something like "denier" or "atheist"; mumim, which refers to someone who's unobservant... and the fun just keeps coming.
These categories remind me of reading those extremely vague descriptions of psychiatric disorders in the Diagnostic Manual Formerly Known As The DSM; if you stare at them long enough, you're sure to see yourself in there somewhere. I don't have much trouble asserting my sanity, but I'm less sanguine about my... well, Judaism doesn't exactly have "orthodoxy." It doesn't exactly not, if you take the entire tradition, and I'd only score 11 on Maimonides' Thirteen Principles of Faith (unless there's partial credit -- I'm willing to negotiate on both the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead). But my questionable orthodoxy is less troublesome to contemplate than my barely-there-orthopraxy. You see, I don't really think that God cares whether or not I eat a piece of pepperoni pizza; I feel a lot more guilty about not being a vegetarian than I do about eating pork, or milk and meat together. I am convinced that God has better things to do than worry about whether or not I flip light-switches on the Sabbath, or even whether or not I light candles beforehand (although I try to do the latter). Unfortunately, I also think that it matters what Jews have traditionally done -- not "matters" in the sense of "is always right," but "matters" in the sense of "should not be easily ignored." And I think God cares about that, too Therefore... I wonder what I qualify as, and why I'm asking these questions.
There is an essay by another woman named Naomi over at KtB which describes her efforts to rebel against a highly observant upbringing intellectually (she enjoys it when her brother calls her an apikores) rather than sexually. (The latter, as she points out, is the traditional option for rebellious Jewish women, but I have no trouble throwing out that tradition; it's not even particularly Jewish. By comparison to the ultra-Orthodox, however, I already dress like a loose woman, so there you go.) It's interesting, especially since she's apparently a professor of Jewish Studies now. Of course, Jewish tradition will always catch you somehow (they tell me Catholicism works the same way). I was about halfway through this post when I remembered that it's the month of Elul, and therefore precisely the right time of year for a good Jew to be evaluating her religious commitments. Unfortunately, it's not the right time of year for me, since I'm still throwing course packets together -- but, then, I have several weeks till the New Year. One thing, however, is clear: I still think the questions are worth asking. All of them.
* -- The handful of people following a certain LJ discussion about purity laws in Judaism may find the full details of interest here: Rav Chanan bar Rava says that Abraham's mother was called Amaslai bat Karnevo and Haman's mother was called Amaslai bat Orvasai. We remember this (well, they remember this; I cut-and-paste) because tamei comes from tamei, and "Orvasei" is like "Orev" (raven; a non-kosher bird); tahor comes from tahor, and "Karnevo" is like "Karim" (wool pillows, which come from sheep, a kosher animal). In that one passage, then, we have tamei associated with scavengers and with Haman -- and, of course, with women.
** --At some point in the first five centuries of the Common Era, it became reasonably common to use minim as a semi-tactful way of referring to Christians, but the term was never confined to that. And the part in our daily (unreformed) liturgy about God's showing the minim what-for (a loose translation) is... uh... well, all the branches of Judaism I'd consider have kind of dropped it. I almost regret this, as I think one could have a blast redefining the term... but not quite.
*** -- I never cease to be amazed at how many intelligent, liberal Jews and Christians alike have gotten such a rotten religious education that they believe that there's never been an afterlife in Judaism. Where do you think John the Baptizer got all the fire-and-brimstone imagery from, the Odyssey?!
**** -- Technically -- like, really technically -- I think I must be an apikores, because my issues have mostly to do with how the Torah is binding on human behavior. I am neither an atheist nor a polytheist, and I think this trumps garden-variety unobservance. Maybe.
I'm used to thinking of August as a fairly relaxing month -- summer's still in full swing, school's still a little ways away (it helped that Unspecified University starts in September), everyone's ready for some serious cookouts and one last trip to the beach. (You can tell I didn't grow up in the Midwest, can't you?) All of that's going to have to change, though. I start teaching at Boondoggle U. in two weeks. I still need to submit reserve lists to the library, finalize syllabi, make up one of my course packets, figure out where on campus I can buy lunch when I'm not organized enough to pack it, tidy up a few things left over from the summer, unpack all the way (I'm almost there, honest!) and finish getting my car registered here, not to mention a new driver's license. Oh, and my cousin's getting Bar Mitzvahed over Labor Day weekend and they wanted me to give the sermon, which means I have to come up with a fifteen-minute talk on a topic that doesn't offend the Jewish community. Wish me luck. ;)
All of this is to explain why my blog posts are growing fewer and farther between. I'm wondering just how possible it is to teach full-time, research during my free afternoons, attend the usual round of meetings and lectures, try to develop a social life outside my department in a new city, give a couple of conference papers, and update this sucker regularly. I'll keep you all updated, OK?
The one thing I did manage to finish this past week was a (slightly overdue) Buffy article. The Flimsy Secret Identity prevents me from discussing it in detail (which is a pity, because I think I know what's going on in "Grave" now), but I'm celebrating by actually filling out the latest Buffy quiz that's taking over so much of my LiveJournal friends list.
1) Favorite female character: in S1 and S4, Buffy; in S2 and S3, Cordelia; in S5 and S6, Anya. Apparently, I like snarkiness.
2) Worst female character: Willow, who last took responsibility for... uh... I'm thinking the Moloch debacle in "I Robot, You Jane." No, wait, that was the monks' fault....
3) Favorite male character: Giles. Duh.
4) Worst male character: Riley -- too much screentime, not enough chemistry, and the ethical awareness of a five-year-old juxtaposed with the writers' idea that he was Buffy's Perfect Guy and a hero. And that was before "Into The Woods" and "As You Were." Buffy, not to mention the fans, deserves better.
5) Favorite watcher: again, Giles. (Wesley belongs over on Angel.)
6) Worst watcher: those schmoes in "Helpless" who couldn't seem to figure out how to transport an insane, extremely dangerous vampire without getting snacked on. People, it's called a cage. Look it up.
7) Favorite vampire: the S2 tag-team of Drusilla and Spike.
8) Worst vampire: Dracula. Can we just pretend that episode never happened?
9) Favorite ex-character: Jenny Calendar. I miss the days when there were adults in Sunnydale and someone had a conflict of interest involving people outside the Scooby Gang. Plus, she gets points for recognizing Giles's hotness.
10) Worst ex-character: Ben. Bad acting, bad character, bad chemistry, bad plot, and did I mention "bad"?
11) Favorite writer: either Joss Whedon or Jane Espenson, when they're good.
12) Worst writer: Marti Noxon, when she's bad.
13) Favorite actor: Anthony Stewart Head.
14) Worst actor: David Boreanaz in S1. "Winner and still champion."
15) Favorite actress: Emma Caulfield, who nailed her star turn in "The Body."
16) Worst actress: Alyson Hannigan in S6. "I think this line's mostly filler" was apparently her season-long motto.
17) Favorite bad girl: Faith. Her only serious competition would be, what, Buffy in "When She Was Bad"?
18) Worst bad girl: Glory, although S6 Willow runs a close second.
19) Favorite bad guy: the Mayor, although the Master runs a close second. I can't stress enough the need for a reason why the Big Bad waits all season to strike.
20) Worst bad guy: Adam. The actor seemed decent enough, and I could think of half a dozen ways to have made him more interesting, but apparently Mutant Enemy wanted to stick with a bad rehash of Frankenstein's Monster.
21) Favorite episode/s: "Prophecy Girl," "Anne" (where this post's title comes from, if you were wondering), "Gingerbread," "Graduation Day," "Once More With Feeling." (Yes, I'm leaving "Becoming" off the top five. So?)
22) Worst episode/s: "Reptile Boy," "Buffy vs. Dracula," "Wrecked," "As You Were," and the entirety of S5 after "Forever." (Yes, that's cheating. So?)
23) Favorite season/s: three.
24) Worst season/s: five.
25) Best of Buffy's Boyfriends: Angel, not because I'm a B/A 'shipper, but because they were a perfect send-up of the doomed star-crossed romance every high-school girl dreams of.
26) Worst of Buffy's Boyfriends: Riley. I find it far more squick-worthy to date someone whose tests you're grading than to date someone who's a couple centuries younger than you.
27) Most irritating character: Willow, because nobody on the show calls her on being irritating. Dawn hasn't been around for quite as long, or she'd be stiff competition.
28) Best running storyline: Research saves the day.
29) Worst running storyline: Buffy becomes a perfect mommy to Dawn. Why, yes, I do fear S7.
30) Favorite "Once More With Feeling" song: "Walk Through The Fire." I'm such a sucker for ensemble pieces.
31) Worst "Once More With Feeling" song: "Six Feet Deep." James Marsters's voice sounds fine in the other songs; what the heck happened with this one?
32) Favorite recurring character: Ethan Rayne. S6 Tara gets honorable mention, but she was so dull in S5!
33) If you could date any of the characters who would you date? Giles. (This would be a much more difficult question if I were bi. As it is, Oz never did anything for me, early-season Xander's way too young, and I wouldn't want to touch most of the other male characters (including S5-6 Xander) with a ten-foot pole.)
34) If you could date any of the actors who would you date? I don't know any of the actors. I'm fine with this, and so, I imagine, are they.
35) If you could be any of the characters who would you be? Anya. Vengeance demon powers, awesome enterpreneurial skills, extensive knowledge of the supernatural, and the only person who can decide whether Xander, Spike, or Giles kisses the best.
36) If you could dress like any of the characters who would you dress like? I really liked Buffy's winter-white ensemble in the teaser of "Tabula Rasa." I also really liked Willow's vampiric corsetry in "The Wish" and "Doppelgangerland." I am far, far more likely to wind up in a version of the former, though.
37) If you could choose any character to be your best friend who would you choose? Giles, I think, or maybe S6 post-Willow-breakup Tara, who had some coolness potential.
38) What do you think of Buffy the movie? Never got around to watching it.
39) What Buffy merchandise do you own? None.
40) What Buffy merchandise do you want to own? The DVDs. I need a DVD player first, though.
41) Who is the creepiest bastard in the universe? The Mayor, although the Gentlemen get honorable mention.
42) Favorite one-shot character: the Hansel-and-Gretel demon in "Gingerbread."