Hurston, Moses and the Responsibilities of Freedom

SUMMER BOOK REPORT
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston

HERE CAME ZORA, to tell me a story I've heard thirty-three times and make it new. Moses, Man of the Mountain is the Exodus story, which I've heard each year on Passover, told in a 1930s southern African American voice. It's like Siddhartha's half-black half-Jewish cousin.

Hurston's biblical characters are not idealized. Aaron is flagrantly annoying; Miriam is bitterly asexual and petty (a far cry from the feminist hero of Debbie Friedman songs and lefty Haggadahs); Zipporah is kinda superficial; Pharoah is not an avataric demon, but a man flawed by grudges and pomposity. Moses is heroic, but in the manner of a real person: arguing with himself about the right things to do, mad at the feebleness of others, forever hated upon.


MOSES SUFFERS the burdens of leadership, and his poll numbers swing with the Israelites shifting fortunes. They are capable of idolizing him when things go well, but even happier to blame him when things go wrong, at which point they go on about how they were better off under Pharoah. Instead of assessing the man and what he has done or tried to do, they take a look around and wail,  He's in charge! And everything sucks! 

Leaders make sacrifices. Hair grays; privacy disappears and responsibilities never do. You might want to just go hoop with Malia or whatever, but the lives of other people are in your hands, and a true leader is acutely aware of the fact. For all the worry: you may never see the Promised Land.


THIS BOOK also concerns what my Bat Mitzvah speech rather bombastically called 'The Responsibilities of Freedom.' Much as a slave yearns to be free, and celebrates when freed, the moment of liberation is actually only the beginning of a rough climb. Just the unshackling is not freedom. The enslaved have been robbed of the opportunity to grow minds and wills of their own; the Israelites spent forty years in the desert battling to become free selves before they could enter the Promised Land.

Hurston writes:

[Moses] found out that no man can make another free. Freedom was something internal...All you could do was to give the opportunity for freedom and the man himself must make his own emancipation. He remembered how often he had had to fight Israel to halt a return to Egypt and slavery. Responsibility had seemed too awful to them time and time again.

THAT IS also a perfect example of how Hurston wrote. She chose simple words when fancy ones were not needed. Her version of the Exodus helped me think about two peoples, hers and mine, and the struggles they have faced in that long desert between Egypt and the Promised Land.

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SUMMER BOOK REPORT: Cleb Does Bellow

I WAS PRETTY SURE I hated Saul Bellow, vigorously and justly. Hated him for his sexism, which is to say he seemed to hate me first. My gag reflex was not Bellow-specific. I felt the same revulsion toward other macho American novelists, who struck me as oversexualizing and insulting and apelike.

However I had at some point to admit that I also found these same writers: fascinating. This attraction-repulsion required further investigation, preferably in post form. So here goes.

Bellow seemed like a fitting launchpad for said investigation, and I picked up a copy of his renowned 1964 novel Herzog. Both being Jews, I figured Bellow and I could bond over quaint Yiddishisms, having little else in common. Which worked out nicely when his character Moses Herzog reminisced on singing "Ma Tovu" with his brothers as a child. I was humming it all the next day. ("Ma Tovu" is a pleasant song to have in your head, since it means "How Good." Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mish'knotecha Yisrael: How good are thy tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.)

I opened the test case macho novel with apprehension. The plan was to face the erection, hoping I'd know what to do with it. And mostly I did, noting the sense in which the hyperactive male sex drive ought to create a happy situation for us heterosexual women. I suppose the rub lies in our ambivalent role as object of those desires. Desire can beget derision, as I am wont to lecture. And too, horniness may beget creepiness. Reading Bellow was at times like being inside the head of some lecherous great-uncle; I did not want to know what was going on in there.

In the Herzog era, the Mad Men era, there seems to have been some glamorous sexual crackle, and simultaneously the sexes were warring. Usually it seems we get along better nowadays, but sometimes it seems men are stewing in their caves while women appear smugly victorious but are privately unfulfilled.

And I worry that our present era has warped and vilified some of the natural distinctions of gender, and that certain prevailing wisdoms attempt to subdivide relationships into unrealistically tidy, sterile compartments (sex, communication, housework, and so forth), neglecting the pulsating, organic whole that is the ever-tenuous but uniquely magical bond between men and women.* I kept these ruminations to myself, however, until I read a wonderful essay in the book review section of the New York Times.

*Sorry, beloved gays. This one's not about you.


IN HER ESSAY "The Naked and the Conflicted," Katie Roiphe observes that today's male novelists "have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors." Predecessors like Norman Mailer, John Updike, Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. (Among these Bellow is, incidentally, the most demure, as indicated in the below graphic, which accompanied Roiphe's essay.) She goes on:

The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex...Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.

Of that last she provides an excellent example from Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections: "He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using."

Ladies, if we have given guys the impression that their sexual aggression is loathsome, we have failed grievously to communicate. And communication is supposed to be our specialty. Furthermore, if we have given such an impression, that we want our men de-balled, does that not betray a cowardice of our own?

It is fashionable to speak of men being *threatened by strong women,* but what of insecure women feeling threatened by strong men? Mightn't we women be quick to judge a delicious specimen of masculinity as a jerk or a dolt or a cad, similar to the way some men are quick to condemn a dauntingly attractive woman as dumb or bitchy?

Speakinawhich, check out Herzog's flagrantly displayed desire/derision vortex in this passage from the book:

He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of a woman in a shining black straw hat which held her hair in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray--he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment--a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. [Emboldenings mine.]

Sheesh! What threat can this stranger possibly represent? She's just like sitting on a bench in a train station and he hates her.

I found a possible answer in a description of Herzog's ex-wife, Madeleine. Recalling the beauty of the woman who left him, Herzog is flooded with venomous resentment. "Such beauty," he thinks, "makes men breeders, studs and servants." Stands to reason that Bitch Eyes, likewise, would be a threat to power. A threat to freedom. Bell Biv Devoe said it straighter: "Never trust a big butt and a smile."

Here's another Bellow desire/derision gem, describing a photograph of Madeleine as a child: "In jodhpurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt." I assure you, no twelve year-old girl has ever thought any such thing.

But I appreciate knowing Herzog has these notions. What makes the insidiousness of the contemporary male novelists is their reluctance to be real for fear they'll be caught thinking wrong. This is artistic cowardice, though also understandable. By contrast, in Herzog Bellow ruthlessly exposes the twisted consciousness of an often-despicable character who seems a damn lot like Bellow himself. It reads like plain truth; artless, and thus good art.

Funny thing--Franzen tries to do this, or something akin to it, in The Corrections*: creating a mildly despicable doppelganger with whom the reader must inevitably empathize. But Franzen's Chip comes off wanting to be pitied or sheltered or something. He backhandedly begs absolution, whereas Herzog is (at least in his stream of consciousness narration) guileless. Herzog's not trying to manipulate the reader into secretly liking him; he owns to being half schmuckish and is strong enough not to whiningly finagle your forgiveness. He only asks that his faults be accepted. Who can say no to that.

*I read The Corrections several years ago and did not re-read it for this essay. That was wrong, I know. Just I was loathe to rekindle so odious a relationship. By way of apology, I offer this interesting recent Franzen article.

At any rate, this business of shipping one's self-loathing out into the world in charismatic written package is an excellent trick, one I use often. But I digress from the point, which is: I'd sooner do Saul Bellow than Jonathan Franzen. And the former is dead. (Counterobjectification. Try it.)


I LEARN things from Bellow because he tells the truth, however ugly. I have some idea now how a person of Herzog's ilk, a muddled misogynist mid-century man of ideas thinks. Communication can only be born of honesty, of course. If someone avoids saying in order not to be caught harboring incorrect (politically or otherwise) thoughts, only frustration can result.

But it wasn't only Bellow's honesty that I appreciated. Reading Herzog, I felt a less inhibited version of the attraction to mid-century macho novelists that had formerly evoked feminist shame. Indeed the very things that might make men sexist--strength, dominance, a bit of brutishness--might also make them sexy.

The loins are rarely in accord with the politically correct brain. Trust me. I've read Superhead's memoir. (Sup's writing game can't match Sup's head game.) But I do believe this conflation of sexy and sexist, what we might call the Nigel Tufnel Paradox, can be overcome. It just requires effort on both sides. A male friend once told me it is not easy to find the balance of being a guy. And I believe him. Just as, he kindly added, it is surely not easy to do same as a woman.

In saying such things there is always the fear one's fellow woman will accuse one of letting men off easy, indulging in another pathetic effort to please them. Herein paragraph constitutes my plea for sisterly mercy, so let me reassert that yeah Bellow's sexist. Classically so. Herzog's ideal woman is geishesquely servile, delighted just to please him, bathe him, remove his shoes. And he thinks some mean shit, like, "But this is a female pursuit. This hugging and heartbreak is for women. The occupation of a man is in duty, in use, in civility, in politics in the Aristotelian sense." Ouch! (Resolved to watch PBS News Hour each evening in full. No TMZ.)

And yet Moses Herzog, wandering the existential desert, is also a decent person. And indeed decent people have often been sexists, racists, slaveowners and Nazis. How many must there be today who hate gays? Prejudice is one of those peculiar quirks of humanity.



CHEST-THUMPING authors, like Mailer especially, do also use sex and misogyny the way certain rappers do: to flex a disfigured masculine pride. I distinguish such cheap knocks from genuine expressions of imperfect sentiment. And as Roiphe points out, contemporary male novelists can be sexist too; just their version is "wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out." Which is kinda worse, for its camouflage. (BTW, if you ever make your girlfriend mad, just drop five stacks on that makeup bag; it worked on my cat.)

My unsolicited advice to male authors: Writing is not macho. Novelists are not rock stars, not boxers. If writing novels threatens your manhood, perhaps prescribe yourself some other activity to restore it rather than jizzing all over the manuscript. Oh, and tell the truth. Even if someone might hate you for it.

To all the ladies worldwide, I say we have to be strong enough to let men have their strength and know we can handle it. They, in turn, have to promise not to be assholes and to treat us with respect. But the respect has to be genuine. As in literally 'look again'--not some blathering bullshit self-congratulatory fake sensitivity. Beware the man who announces his feminism. I never ever tell people who are not white that I'm nonracist.

What do women want? wonders Herzog. "What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." At another point he lists what women around him seem to expect: "nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater!" But a woman of Herzog's day could easily have made a much longer list of what men then expected from women, including but not limited to: looking pretty, being the cleaning women themselves, rearing young, smoothing down hackles, pleasing in bed, living in suburban traps and resigning themselves to the denigrating attitudes and limited roles of their time.

I presume to speak for all contemporary women in saying we want strength without oppression, sensitivity but not 'paralyzed sweetness,' to be protected and appreciated and understood. And I cannot know but can guess that the men want care without stiflement, independence but not indifference, to be nurtured and appreciated and understood. Tall orders on both sides, but something can probably be worked out.

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Beards

CAN YOU find the bearded rapper among the bearded economists? (Don't be racist!) And can you name all five?


BONUS QUESTIONS:
1. Which beard won the Nobel Prize this week?
2. Which beard, if any, is a gentile? (If you think Jews are money-changers, that's anti-Semitic!)

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Zogt Dein Bubbe: Votn Obama!

Shanah Tovah! This is timely, from my imaginary cousin Sarah:

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Pesach, Baby

Passover really has it all: elaborate symbolism, spring fever, an epic redemption narrative, matzo balls, even a distinct Tupac vibe. (Witness the downfall of my ene-meez.)

It's one of those rare Manischewitz-swilling Jewish holidays that we get to celebrate, not just "observe."

(When a well-meaning gentile says, "Happy Yom Kippur" we have to be like, "Oh, thanks, but I'm uh...fasting for my sins." Here's what to say for Yom Kippur: "May you have an easy fast." No seriously. Aren't we a fun-loving people?)

But Jews do bust out on Passover. We were slaves and we were freed! When else do white people sit around a table singing, "Let My People Go"? Jews belt it out, too: Waaaaaay dooown in E-gypt! la-aand! We're commanded to recline during the seder, like free people (apparently) do. That can be tough on the digestive tract, but it's pretty sweet for the spine.

The Passover story is kind of like an HBO series: there are so many damn characters and plot churnings that you're always just shy of knowing what the hell's going on. Which is my absolute favorite thing. And, God? Eh. He's one character.

Pesach falls this weekend, right at peak lay season. Which is most opportune since it's a holiday dripping with eggs, even by Jewish standards. (Challah: eggs. Kugel: eggs. Latkes: eggs. Matzo brie: eggs, eggs, eggs.) Hennessy and Camilla are all too happy to show off. They're like, Brawk, quadrupling the matzo ball recipe? Not a problem, not a problem, back to the nest box.

The egg is right there on the seder plate with the maror (horseradish) for the bitterness of slavery and the charoses (apples-n-nuts) for the sweetness of freedom. Passover has pagan roots as a festival honoring the return of spring. Hence the egg, symbolizing renewal, both earthly and spiritual. And this, from the resplendent Song of Songs:

For lo the winter is past

The rain is over and gone

The flowers appear on the earth

The time of singing is come

Happy Passover.

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My Fascination With Hip Hop -OR- If Black People Eat Bagels, Does That Make It Okay?

Last night, at the Bay Area Record Rockers party The Influence, my friend Matt asked me if I'm into hip hop, or if that's just Crim. I muttered something half-assed about how if he hangs around the American Coot long enough, he'll probably start bird-watching.

But it occurs to me that I've been asking myself the same question.

To wit: if I blast KMEL every time I get in the car, if I catch myself in otherwise casual conversation unleashing diatribes about the phony high-mindedness of Kanye West, if I can recite every word of not just "Bust a Move" and "Baby Got Back," but the double-time Biggie verse on "Notorious Thugs"...

Am I a big hip hop fan?

I try to be a good white girl and listen to rock, but it's really fucking hard. At the peak of my efforts, in high school, I officially listened to just rock, with, like, the requisite Beastie Boys and Bob Marley extras. Only alone in the car did I sneak down the dial to Power 106, where hip hop lives. I didn't even want to program it! Fortunately, at 105.9, it was just four button pushes down--beep-beep-beep-beep--from 106.7 KROQ.

I wasn't always such a little conformist. Earlier I had treasured my cassingles of "Keep Ya Head Up" and "I Get Around," beginning my lifelong study of the ambiguities of Tupac. (He loves women! He hates women! Loves! Hates! Loves! Hates!)

I also tired out my tape of The Chronic, and could spit every nasty, skeezy verse of "Nuthin But A G Thang" by age thirteen. (All you parents, take note: I turned out fine.)

Hell, I was a SoCal kid in the Golden Age of LA rap.

Then came Nirvana and Pearl Jam and four years wandering the desert. By college, I had amassed a collection of what I now know to be exactly the kind of hip hop white college kids listen to: Beastie Boys, Beastie Boys, Tribe Called Quest, more Beastie Boys, Fugees. Nowadays, I suppose that list would be supplanted by Kanye and more Kanye.

Of course it was Crimmie who sealed my fate. Nine years of living with him and his thousands of hip hop records. I usually credit him with getting me to like all this stuff, thus abdicating responsibility. But I wonder if he gave me my affinity for hip hop or if my affinity for hip hop helped feed my affinity for him. He did, after all, woo me by meowing "Push It" by Salt-n-Pepa. (Granted, he has other charms too.)

And cohabiting with those records sure has worn me down. It's not just Snoop, Dre and Pac anymore. I probably couldn't stay in this relationship if I didn't revere Nas. And then there are my secret affairs with Shock G and The Game. Plus I love any beats by Dr. Dre or Timbaland, and probably the Neptunes, too, and anything with either Akon or Nate Dogg singing the hook, and any early 90s LA song with high-pitch synth. Anything by Outkast, whatever the hell Andre 3000 is wearing. All the Bay rappers, especially Keak da Sneak. I've even had to disavow my stated dislike for Wu Tang. So come on in Ghostface and Method Man, RZA, GZA, ODB and all those other ones I can't distinguish. Group hug.

Ever since those days in the closet, the problem has been the same. I don't feel like I should love hip hop. Because it doesn't feel like it should be mine. At my high school, there were plenty of non-white people ready, willing and able to listen to Power 106. I think I felt it was my duty as a white person not to crowd the ranks.

And there are serious questions of cultural appropriation here. Just think the word "wigger." Shudder.

On the other hand...

Black people eat bagels.

Check out the Lakeshore Noah's if you doubt me. So, if black people eat bagels, does that make it okay?

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Jews Come Out, Part Tsvey

In Jews Come Out of the Cultural Closet, Part I, I asserted that Jews are coming out (in the cultcha) and that Jewishness is, of all things, becoming cool.

"And it's not just the comedy world," I wrote, among other things. "Did the Beastie Boys ever rap about the girlies with the big ole tukheses? Hell no. But hip hop producer Scott Storch--who I'm so not endorsing, btw--calls his production company Tuff Jew. And 50 Cent's team of lawyers? They're called Jew Unit."

Well, as usual, I underestimated just how right I was.

After putting up with much chatter this summer about his post-beef disappearance, Rapper Cam'ron (Killa Cam) recently sent the following cryptic message to MTV:

Killa Season again, you little yentas. November 7th. Cam'ron is anonymous. Dipset!

When Miss Info from Hot 97 asked Cam if he knew what a yenta was, he said:

Hahaha, of course! You know my lawyers are Jewish, they be saying that all the time. So then I was watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Larry David—I fucks with Larry—he called Ted Danson a ‘yenta.’ Yo, I fell out laughing. That shit was crazy. I said, that’s exactly what all these folks are doin’, gossiping about me. Yentas.

And then this from Jay-Z's new American Gangster album:

Black Bar Mitzvahs
Mazel Tov
It's a celebration bitches
L'Chaim
I wish for you a hundred years of success
But it's my time

Am I right or fuckin what. Mazel Tov. It's a celebration, bitches.


Research courtesy Crimson & Associates. (Motto: "Get rich and don't spend it.")

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Jews Come Out of the Cultural Closet

Ah, what a time to be a Jew. No slavery, no pogroms, no shtetlech, no concentration camps. And for the first time ever, we're cool!

On Wednesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart Jewed it up with Ted Koppel--"It's like when you're sitting there at Passover..."--as he now does whenever he has on a fellow tribe member and I'm thinking, Jesus. This is almost too much. One more "mishpocheh" or "punim" and I might get nauseous.

(And incidentally, Koppel with Stewart...How many degrees does that put me from Stephen Colbert?)
I mean, yeah, there have always been Jewish entertainers, as is the case in any population that would otherwise be depressed by all the oppression and stuff. I'm sure up in the Catskills they were making gefilte fish gags. But for a while there, even Jewish comedians purveying obviously Jewish humor weren't acknowledging that they were Jewish.

Take Seinfeld. (Please.) His show was all about New York Jews and their neurotic nothing-doing. But did Jerry and Elaine ever flake on a Bat Mitzvah invite or scalp for High Holy Day tickets? Contrast that with Seinfeld co-producer Larry David's current show Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which characters do both. Also on HBO, the most Jewish character ever played by a gentile: Entourage's deliciously dickish Ari Gold.



Sarah Silverman debuted her Comedy Central show last year by warning viewers to expect "full frontal Jewdity."

Shoot, had he come up these days, Jon might not even have felt the need to change his name to Stewart.

And it's not just the comedy world. Did the Beastie Boys ever rap about the girlies with the big ole tukheses? Hell no. But hip hop producer Scott Storch--who I'm so not endorsing, btw--calls his production company Tuff Jew. And 50 Cent's team of lawyers? They're called Jew Unit.



I could go on. I already mentioned Stephen Colbert's 1-800-OOPS-JEW Atonement Line. And one channel up, on E!, Sal Masekela (who is, by the way, the son of South African jazz legend Hugh Masekela, in case you, like me, were wondering like crazy) was wishing the Daily 10 viewership a "Shanah Tovah."

For a little Jewess who grew up in a desert exurb in which "Jew" was not even, for better or worse, a category (the categories: white, black, Mexican), it's all very heartening. When Adam Sandler came out with the Hanukkah Song, I thought that was as good as it was gonna get.

UPDATE: Check out Jews Come Out Part Tsvey.

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Days of "\ ä \"

A Pronunciation Guide for Gentiles

Stephen Colbert's genetic lineage testing gave him a 75% shot of being Jewish. But the 25% must have won, because as he plugs his 1-888-OOPS-JEW Days of Awe atonement line, he says:

R\ä\SH H\ä\SH\ä\N\ä\
(RAH-SHAH-SHAH-NAH)

and

Y\ä\M K\i\P\u\R
(YAHM KIH-POOR)

As do many gentiles, even those with Jew friends like me or Jon Stewart. I understand. It's weird.

We American Jews make this more confusing by our own ambivalence. We vascillate between old-timey Ashkenaziphilic Yiddish and the ancient/modern Sephardiphilic Hebrew.

It is sometimes said (by Brian), that all rappers are either enunciaters or slurrers. If the two great Jewish languages were rappers, let's just say Hebrew would be the enunciater. Thus the more formal, upright Hebrew pronunciations:

R\o\SH H\ [a'] \SH\ [a'] \N\ [a'] \
[ROSH (rhymes with "roach," not "posh") HAH-SHAH NAH]

and

Y\o\M K\E\P\u\R
[YOME (rhymes with "tome," not "Tom") KEY-POOR]


But when I was a kid, everybody I knew used Americanized Yiddish names for the High Holy Days:

R\ə\SH\ə\ SH\ə\N\ə\
[RUSHA SHUNNA]

and

Y\u\M K\i\PR
[YUM KIPPER]

Got it? Is my poor use of diacritical marks helping?

Seems nowadays nobody but old American Jews use the Yiddishized "Yum Kipper," so I've adapted to the Hebraicized "Yome Key-poor." But the Hebrew sounds too formal for me for New Year's. I still say "Rusha Shunna."

Here's one everyone says right:

SHANAH TOVAH!

WOOHOO! 5768!

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