I had intended to write a Tisha b'Av entry last month, but wound up spending the holiday on an assortment of buses, taxis, and trains, making my way south to Rome so I could catch a plane early the next morning. I fasted except for drinking water -- which, on a day when the temperature was hovering around 95F and I was wheeling luggage around several cities, seemed like a legitimate medical necessity. I'm not a great one for fasting without actually going to services or studying or otherwise observing the day in question; last I checked, fasting is a means rather than an end. Still, there's tradition, and there's stubbornness, and there's hanging out with the sorts of Catholics who still eat fish on Fridays, and there's this little event I'm going to tell you about later in this blog, and so I read out the relevant special prayers from my funny British Orthodox siddur and fasted.
I've heard it said that Reform Jews ignore Tisha b'Av, but this is not strictly true (at least as a programmatic statement; no doubt some people do). What Reform Jews mostly do, if we must generalize, is get confused by Tisha b'Av. On the one hand, destruction of the Temples = bad. Other lousy stuff happening to Jews, however they had to cook the dates to get them to correspond to the ninth of Av = bad. This is not terribly complicated. On the other hand, I for one am pretty happy not to be required to sacrifice pigeons for, well, anything short of my own survival (in which case the pigeon's going down). The Temple hierarchy was quite clearly corrupt from very early on -- I don't suppose we have to take the Book of Samuel as historical fact, but the events at the beginning of 2 Maccabees are more or less verifiable elsewhere. And then there's the whole argument about what Maimonides really meant in the Guide, but I'll save that for another day when I have all the relevant books to hand. Suffice it to say that uncertainty about Temple restoration is nothing new, in my intermittently informed opinion.
Reform Judaism as a movement has been equally ambivalent: initially they cut out all the business about returning to Zion and restoring the Temple or its sacrifices, then they quietly slipped the Zion references back in but continued to leave out anything that specifically referred to the Temple or sacrifices, and now some congregations have started sneaking the Temple stuff back in. My own instinct is to put everything in there -- with footnotes, of course -- and let individuals and congregations hash it out themselves, but then that's always going to be my instinct when it comes to liturgy. Otherwise, someone's individual version will wind up in there, and my individual version would run something like: "Restore the service to Your most holy house -- if you don't have anything else to do, and only if you're really in the mood, because we should probably prioritize achieving world peace, not that we'd consider telling You how to do Your job, but... um, right, moving on to that whole thanksgiving thing." You can see why that wouldn't work too well in a prayerbook.
In any event, I can definitely say that I'm not indifferent to the restoration of the Temple. It doesn't exactly keep me up nights, but a few weeks before Tisha b'Av I was schlepping through the Roman Forum with a handful of fellow academic types en route to lunch -- on a purely practical note, high noon in July is not the best time to appreciate the outdoor wonders of the grandeur that was, etc. -- and the Woman Who Actually Knew Rome mentioned that we were passing right by the Arch of Titus. Well, I'd missed seeing that on previous trips to Rome, and it was easy to convince the others to clamber the few additional yards to look up into it. Naturally, I had viewed pictures of the Arch of Titus; I knew it had been erected to commemorate Titus's successful siege of Jerusalem and consequent destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. (on Tisha b'Av, of course). It's pretty obvious in any case, as the arch has a nice visible menorah on one side hovering over a scene of Roman troops toting away assorted valuables. So, there we were, the people with digital cameras snapping away and me thinking I'd have to ask them for some copies, when all of a sudden, I was angry. Really angry. Absolutely fucking furious.
I wasn't particularly upset by my companions, or the other tourists, or even the enterprising locals selling cold water for five euros a bottle. I was angry at Titus. Now, I don't get genuinely angry very often ("irritated" is not the same as "angry"), I don't sustain genuine anger very long, and even at my least rational I realize that there's not a whole heck of a lot I can do about things which happened 1900-plus years ago. I wasn't about to go back and punch out the nice men dressed as centurions loitering around the Capitoline Hill. But there it was. Since there was nobody available to punch, and since an outbreak of ritual cursing would've been (a) rude and (b) tricky to explain to my companions, not to mention the tourists and locals, I stood and seethed. For what was probably the first time in my life, I had the momentary thought that rebuilding the Temple would be an actively good idea -- not, God knows, for geopolitical or ritual reasons, and not that I'm advocating it on a real-world level, but I resent that the Arch of Titus is still standing and the Temple isn't.*
"What's that panel at the top?" someone asked. "It's the apotheosis of Titus," answered the Woman Who Actually Knew Rome. "We prefer the version where his guts burst open," I snapped, and then had to cover by talking about how interesting it was that this same trope gets applied both to Judas and to a variety pack of early Christian heresiarchs, blah blah blah, and so to lunch, where I comforted myself by ordering a large Coca-Cola Light at an obscene price and reflecting on the fact that Titus worshippers aren't exactly going on tours of Jerusalem these days. (I was wrong, actually -- or, at least, I haven't managed to find a version of the gut-busting death applied to Titus. It was an understandable mistake, though. According to BT Gittin 56 and probably some other sources I don't know offhand, God caused a gnat to fly into Titus' brain and hammer at it for seven years, ultimately leading to his madness and death. More or less the same death is attributed to Nebuchadnezzar, another Temple defiler. And why is it that people look at me funny for knowing these things when the same people enjoy watching horror movies?)
It's sometimes embarrassing to realize how much of my religious behavior can be traced back to two little words -- not imago Dei, but "so there!" And it's sometimes funny to realize that "so there!" works pretty well, in limited doses, to get me through life in something approaching good spirits. I wouldn't mind actually getting to attend Tisha b'Av services next year, though.
* -- Granted, one could blow up the Arch of Titus to even things out, but I object to destroying the past whenever it's possible to preserve it (which, yes, explains a lot about my liturgical preferences). Besides, if you happen to be a fruitcake bound on destroying priceless works of Roman art -- and let me stress that I am not advocating this -- I suggest a targeted attack on something really hideous from the Baroque period.
First-day-of-classes jitters were the only kind of teaching stage-fright to survive the first full class I taught, but they're definitely on the wane this semester. Sure, I wasn't exactly enthused about my classes last week, but that was garden-variety avoidance. Now that I've met them, in fact, I find myself rather excited about my latest crop of students. Of course, that might be the peach smoothie I just had for lunch, but... no, I know my sugar rushes, and this isn't a sugar rush. For one thing, both my fall classes (I'm doing a 2-3 load this year) are currently at 25 instead of the maximum of 35. Admittedly, I agreed to teach an 8 am class in large part because I hoped to keep it average-sized -- and so far it seems to have worked okay, plus cross-listing the course in Women's Studies has scared off the population of whiny and invariably male persons who ordinarily target me as the sort of sap who'll let them into my oversubscribed class even though they let their gen-ed requirements slide until the last minute. (I don't, by the way. I just get sick of politely fielding voicemails.)
The only downside to the Women's Studies affiliation is that there's only one (non-whiny) male person in the 8 am class at the moment, and given that I've never learned or taught in a single-sex environment, it feels weird. I do wonder how much of that class's observed feistiness might be due to the gender balance -- but I hope my solitary male person stays put. And speaking of staying put, having the 9:30 class at a manageable size is beyond my wildest dreams, and can only be attributed to the whole summer-long mess with the course being closed and re-opened as something entirely different. (Don't ask.) Of course, I still have a week to go before I can in good conscience close it, so I'd better not crow too soon. But it'll be a good class regardless; some of them talk! Without too much prompting! Even though they're mostly freshman! Mind you, my first-day patter is anything but alarming; I think it's tasteless and abusive to try to scare off students, since most of the ones who could be "scared off" are stuck taking the course anyway thanks to our gargantuan gen-ed requirements.**
The other fun thing about classes this morning was getting to play with gadgets, because I had demanded requested Level Three smart classrooms, the ones with everything integrated into the podium. (Otherwise, you get a VCR and a bunch of ports. So 1990s.) Of course, in the 8 am class, where I needed to bring down the projection screen to show a few images, that turned out to be manual and about seven feet off the ground. I couldn't tell if there was a conspicuously tall person in the class (and asking the Solitary Male Person would've been weird anyway), so I calmly slipped out of my sensible mid-heeled pumps, stepped up onto the rolling chair they provide with the desk (good thing I wore a reasonably long-skirted suit), said "If I fall, don't even think about laughing," and proceeded to bring the screen down with barely a wobble. (I hope I get cool teacher points for that. I also hope I get another classroom soon, or at least another chair, because one of these days I will fall.)
Now, starting Thursday, we'll see if any of them can read, and if the Registrar's Office has sorted out that teeny little problem with putting me in back-to-back classes halfway across campus from each other. I pointed this out to them three weeks ago, so it's not like it came as a shock to me; I'm just cranky about having had to hike around in oppressive heat while they fix a situation which never should have happened if they had decent room-assignment software. My sensible mid-heeled pumps were not designed for half-mile hikes, and I won't be able to let the first class out early on a regular basis, so there's basically about one more day before I completely lose patience with the Registrar. It would've been today, but, y'see, that was where the peach smoothie came in.
I love peach smoothies my job.
* -- On the way out of the building, I heard one of my new students tell an acquaintance that my course was nothing like (what he inaccurately perceives as) its high-school equivalent. Bwahahahaha. One down, twenty-four more to go.
** -- Scheduling a class at 8 am is one thing -- I actually kinda like teaching at 8 am. Of course, I should really work on getting to bed before 3:30 in the future. Or take lots of afternoon naps.
A house comes with a shocking lot of machinery that the homeowner is responsible for, but I think I've tested out almost everything now: I've finally run the dishwasher,* used the creaky old gas stove (not the oven, yet -- it's too hot), and ironed out the technical difficulties so that I can check email from my bedroom. I need to level the dryer properly, and there's that business with the air conditioner (you know, the part where it doesn't exactly work), but otherwise all systems seems to be running smoothly. Now that the fun stuff (mostly books) is in place, I'm already starting to slow down in my rush to unpack. I really want to have people over before the New Year, but I am hedging my bets by failing to specify which New Year I mean.
Of course, I'm also slowing down because I spent much of the weekend trying to escape into any fictional world which would take me. (I am upset about my grandmother's health, which is failing -- okay, which I am now acknowledging to be failing. Why it is that reading trashy novels distracts me while working on fall course prep doesn't is just one of life's little mysteries.) On Saturday morning, I went to Torah study but skipped services proper -- there was a Bar Mitzvah and the sanctuary was jam-packed with people I don't know -- in favor of a visit with a friend, a few errands to run, and then a swing by the local library branch I'd noticed on my way to shul. A nice young man with more facial piercings than I would've thought strictly advisable (it turns out he was a former community-college history instructor) promptly processed both my new library card and my voter registration, giving me a warm glow of civic duty fulfilled. Then I started my own little tour of the library.
I have -- I just checked -- four different local library cards in my wallet right now, and it's almost a pity I'm staying put for awhile, because I'm always curious about the organization of each system and how they relate or fail to relate to their communities. (I've helped my mother edit one too many grants for her system, I guess -- or maybe this is left over from doing MLS coursework in utero.) The Boondoggle City system seems reasonably well-off judging from the profusion of branches with Sunday hours, and this particular branch building was clearly new, with lots of space given to computers and lots of teenagers using them. In short order, I acquired an armful of books, although none of them were the ones I was actually looking for; judging from the catalogue, some of the other branches have better selections of what the system calls "sci-fi" and "nonfiction."** Several hours later, after flipping through the Books Too Trashy To Even Check Out (But Not Too Trashy To Stand Up In The Library And Skim Through Until You Find The Good Parts), I decided to approach the circulation desk.
In short order, it dawned on me that there wasn't a circulation desk -- or, rather, that its place had been taken by the desk under the sign reading "customer service" where I had originally gotten my card. I prefer "patron" to "customer" and "circulation" to "customer service," but this is nothing like my feelings about what counts as "YA" and what doesn't, so I just headed for the appropriate desk. There was only one young woman behind the counter, and she was engaged in checking out multiple multimedia items for another patron -- so I glanced around and noticed another sign. "Please Use Our Self-Service Checkout," it said. Huh. I raised my eyebrows, adjusted the books I was holding, and spun around gracefully (well, I'm telling the story, and I like to think it was graceful) until I figured out that the Self-Service Checkouts were three hulking machines on tables right behind me -- I had assumed they were old-fashioned microfilm readers or something.
Well, I had plenty of time and no lack of curiosity. I'd used a self-service library checkout machine once or twice back at Unspecified University, but since the machines weren't much good with "tell the Preservation Department I'll keep it in a box but I need it right now" and remained stubbornly immune to my devasting personal charm when I requested Yet Another Renewal, I tended to prefer the circulation desk. Luckily, my public-library needs tend to be a sight less exotic: on this particular day I had seven hardback novels of different sizes, all of which I wanted to check out for the standard period using the standard library card. So I put my stack down next to the nearest machine and looked at the directions.
The directions were not complicated: in essence, you exposed the bar code on first your library card, then each of your desired books, to a little beam of red light intended to read it. Once you were finished, it spat out a receipt telling you when the books would be due. As I later discovered, the little beam of light also told the machine to shut off the anti-theft devices in each book; whoever wrote the directions must've considered this unnecessary background information. Whoever wrote the directions also failed to mention details such as which direction the bar-codes ought to be facing, but after one moving-the-card-too-soon error and one wrong-way error, I finally got it to scan my library card. That's when the fun really started.
It didn't take me long to formulate a theory about the fundamental design principle behind these suckers: No Breakable Parts. The problem with this is that No Breakable Parts means No Movable Parts, and No Movable Parts means that one has to engage in all sorts of bizarre gymnastic manuevers to get the relevant bar-codes (remember that many books already have one bar-code from the publisher on their backsides, plus another one from the library) under the completely unmovable little red light. There's a reason why your typical cashier -- or, come to that, circulation worker -- has a hand-held scanner thingy; s/he can manuever the laser beam instead of the object it's supposed to read. I like to think I'm pretty competent, mechanically speaking. About two minutes into trying to scan my first book, and beginning to wonder whether I was supposed to offer blood sacrifices or just call on some half-remembered college yoga classes in order to get the book into some position the machine might recognize, I looked over at the now-patronless Customer Service desk and cleared my throat significantly.
The young woman at the desk (I don't know what her title was, although I fear something with "facilitator" or "agent" in it) obligingly came over and started demonstrating proper book placement. She had clearly done it before -- she even told me about the little "clunk" that was the anti-theft device being shut off -- but out of seven books, she only got two to scan on the first try. One required that the publisher's barcode be covered by hand, three failed to scan using the external barcode and had to be opened and flipped to a front page for another barcode, and the final one caused the machine to freeze and required us to wait thirty seconds and scan my library card again. We also had to wait for various screens to clear each time we checked out a book, so the elapsed time was something like ten minutes. I can't imagine what they have powering that device -- a leftover calculator battery from 1985? -- but it clearly needs work.
Now, I'm pretty sure I'm not a Luddite -- quite apart from my lack of animus towards Jacquard looms, I tend to get on well with machines.*** They're fun to play with, fun to tinker with, and can be made to do useful things. I really can't imagine my life without cell phones, PCs, ATMs, and dozens of other gadgets, and I tell most of those gadgets what to do on a daily basis with great success. The Self-Service Checkout facility, on the other hand... is just mind-bogglingly inefficient. I could've filled out date-due slips faster -- by hand! -- and I hate to think how much those machines probably cost, or what else (personnel, media, enrichment programs?) could've been purchased with the same money. Plus, apart from the novelty value, they weren't much fun to use -- although I have a sneaking suspicion that the Customer Service desk workers view those machines as their own personal reality show ("next spring on FOX: When Patrons Attack!").
At least I got my books. Anne Lamott is a better essayist than a novelist. Barbara Michaels is still great fun, although I wish her heroines were a little swifter on the uptake (being stuck in a Gothic will do that to you). And Nora Roberts is painfully in need of a good copy editor, a human one who can catch mistaken homonyms or near-homonyms. (My personal favorite example is the way she has Irish characters exclaiming "Bullocks!") As for the Self-Service Checkout fiasco, it certainly gave me a good story to tell my mother -- via cell phone, of course -- and to turn into a blog post. What would we do without machines?
* -- It's high summer, and I mostly eat sandwiches on paper plates. This does not generate a great many dishes. I feel that I have to explain why it's taken me two weeks to run the dishwasher, OK?
** -- Somewhere fairly far down that list of qualities for an ideal mate that I occasionally admit to keeping in my head -- less important than "likes arguing about halakhic authority" but more important than "inexplicable passion for doing all household laundry chores" (hey, it's worth a shot) -- is "willing to engage in vigorous debate over LoC vs. Dewey."
*** -- If you want a pro-machine standpoint, by the way, I am usually entertained by small -- very small -- doses of Charles Babbage's prose in the 1835 work after which this entry was named. (Please note, however, that I am entertained by his prose and not by his views on fair labor.) I should really be recommending C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, as having a great deal more to do with the modern use of "Luddite," but Snow's views on matters close to my heart irritate me considerably more than Babbage does. Also, Snow's still under copyright, so no e-text.
"Countersubject" is a perfectly good musical term: it's the secondary theme in a fugue, or what the first voice sings while the second voice is answering the original subject. I would give a great deal to be singing a decent fugue right about now. The obvious title for this post was "boring alto parts," as per the comments a few posts back, but I decided that "boring" wasn't really expressive enough. Yes, most alto parts written for your average four-part liturgical setting are pretty dull. Some alto parts go beyond mere boredom into active inanity. But some alto parts you couldn't make interesting if you sung them while performing the Dance of the Seven Veils in an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with two tons of lemon Jell-O.
An example of this last category is the eleven-page "Hinei Ma Tov"* setting I rehearsed last night with the Temple Boondoggle High Holy Days choir -- it's composed by our accompanist, so I have the sense I shouldn't say anything nasty about it in his hearing -- and it's one of those songs that sound nice enough but is deadly dull to sing. Especially if you're an alto. Especially if you object to spending about half of those eleven pages singing the words "hinei ma tov" in eighth notes at a constant pitch of D above middle C. I think my tone-deaf uncle could manage this one: hinei ma tov hinei ma tov hinei ma tov hinei ma tov (phrasing not a real big problem here) hinei ma tov hinei ma tov (on the other hand, when the heck do you breathe?) hinei ma tov hinei ma tov... oh, but the other half of the piece lets us go all the way up to A sometimes! And then back down! It's like a giant... warmup exercise! Hinei ma tov hinei ma tov hinei ma tov hinei ma tov.... There's one page where we get to sing something other than the blinking eighth notes, although we're still basically providing the sopranos with bottom notes to chords. One page. The other ten are solid eighth notes, mostly going down to C sharp for four and up to E for four and then back to D for eight or twelve or sixteen or until your ears bleed: hinei ma tov hinei ma tov shoot me now please hinei ma tov ....
I'm no undiscovered diva, but I have a reasonably pleasant voice, a good memory for tunes, a taste for polyphony, and decent sight-singing skills. It will surprise none of my regular readers to learn that I especially enjoy singing sacred music in its original language. I also find sitting through services while other people sing to be dead boring. Ergo, my involvement with various sorts of special choirs for the High Holy Days, which has been happening on and off for a good two decades now. Singing at Temple Boondoggle is a treat, it's easy to reach from work, and with only one rehearsal a week for two months, it's a manageable level of commitment. It's been several years since I got to do this, and it feels good. (In the years when I'd moved too close to the High Holy Days to be comfortable waltzing into a new synagogue -- much less joining its choir -- I'd sit down and go through old choir music to make myself feel better about missing services.) But, oh, God, the alto parts!
I'm exaggerating a bit -- well, not about the "Hinei ma tov," but a lot of our music is by Bonia Shur, and he writes some decent alto parts, even if I prefer many of the older tunes out of sentiment. (The repertoire of Reform choral settings** is surprisingly limited; I already knew a good half of my "new" music from Temple Boondoggle.) When I was a kid, though, I sang soprano -- my voice went higher, I was sort of the mascot of the choir in My Home Town, and it's frankly easier to pick out the melody, or at least the highest line. My adult vocal range is unquestionably alto, and I've gotten a lot better at singing harmony, but I've never quite adjusted psychologically: there are hardly any nifty solos for altos, not much testing of the range, not enough movement, and far too many pieces in which you're basically the vocal equivalent of a damper pedal.
At least singing Jewish music is relaxing -- sometimes I suspect I've put off learning Hebrew fluently because I can just let the pretty sounds wash over me and not think about the perils of inclusive language or something. Also, it's occasionally nice to sing without one's left brain working out a full-fledged theological critique. My fondness for sacred music knows very few boundaries: I love a good Mass cycle, where the alto parts are sometimes pretty interesting, and I spent most of grad school singing in an informal little choir for a chapel where I personally (and usually single-handedly) made our worship interfaith. Except for the occasional service where I brought in the music, we were singing Christian music -- but sometimes it masqueraded as something else. I mostly found this amusing: I still chuckle every time I think about "The God of Abraham Praise," which is set to one of the traditional tunes for "Yigdal" and starts out as... well, let's be generous and call it an adaptive translation of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles. (In case you're not familiar with the Thirteen Principles, let me stress that "He shall save me to the end, thro’ Jesus’ blood," is not really an accepted rendition of #13.) Then it starts talking about the Trinity. I also have fond memories of explaining very calmly to a Presbyterian soprano that "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" couldn't be a paraphase of Psalm 23 because, y'know, there's not a cross mentioned in Psalm 23. Sometimes, though, it's nice to relax and sing to the Lord without the constant theological disclaimers.
Truthfully, I am greedy. I want it all: music in my own religious tradition and good polyphony. After all, there were Baroque-era Jewish composers -- I mean, there's got to be somebody besides Salamone Rossi, right? -- and some of them probably knew how to write decent fugues. With, coincidentally, non-boring alto parts. Now how would I go about ordering some sheet music and leaving it in the choir director's mailbox before next year? Or, even better, before I start flinching every time I hear the phrase "hinei ma tov"?
* -- Background info for the non-Jewishly-literate: "Hinei ma tov umanayim shevet achim gam yachad" is the transliterated Hebrew for Psalm 133:1: "How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity." I am not unaware of the implicit joke in using this line to demand decent polyphony.
** -- "Reform" because there's instrumental accompaniment. I have nothing against a capella singing, actually, but most of this stuff's going to be accompanied on either piano or (I think) guitar.
There's something comforting -- downright seasonal, in fact -- about the natural rhythms of academic life starting up again after the summer. My textbook orders have finally shown up at the bookstore, there's an all-day department meeting coming up, and the Registrar has -- for the second semester in a row -- tried to put the two classes I'm teaching back-to-back in different buildings several blocks apart. (I opted to respond to this news with "A world of no" instead of "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a distance runner." The people who help me fix these things might have basic Trek literacy, but there's no reason to count on it.) I am putting off dealing with syllabi. As a matter of fact, right now I'm working on one of the most important parts of my pedagogical strategy for the coming term: new office-door comics.* Eventually, I'll get around to writing those pesky syllabi, too -- but since I have downloaded most of the comics, they must surely qualify as Using [New Media] Technology In Teaching, and we all know how crucial that is.
As this semester begins, though, I'm also realizing that I need to start keeping notes of all the brilliant ideas I have for Things To Do In Tenure When I'm Dead Completely Caught Up. That is, apart from all the research ideas I have which are just a little bit too wacky to pull off before I'm a Respected Scholar -- I have a private file for those, and I've been keeping notes. But I've been hanging out with mostly tenured folks this past summer, and there are all sorts of interesting possibilities which could be available to me in the only-somewhat-distant future. These are really for my own reference, but I imagine some of you will be entertained:
... huh. I bet they want to see a syllabus.
* -- Suggestions welcome, of course, if anyone cares to point me to a few good panels about academia and/or the humanities. Poetry and (tasteful) jokes are also an option.
** -- I believe in older people's inability to acquire new languages significantly less than I believe in Tinkerbell, and I consider both phenomena to be purely subjective.