#MicroblogMonday – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Art, Truth, Feminism, JD Salinger, Lena Dunham and Sex

when: From Lena Dunham’s Website

Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.

Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.

Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:

Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)

Lost: a Rapper from 8 Mile and some Men, Women and Children from Austin

Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?

I kept thinking about it as I watched Men, Women and Children, the profoundly moving story of a different kind of alienation at least partially enabled by the Internet. Nobody’s mom was an abusive alcoholic, but one mom fled her family so completely that she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account, one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone; Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.

It’s a beautiful film, a survey of young people so much on their own ; life online allows so much distance from parents and any love or wisdom they might offer. And even though they make mistakes beyond the web, the same technology seems to have trapped their parents, too.

Reitman chooses to move beyond individual dramas, however, and take us beyond his own observations as he closes the film with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – with a hopeful description that connects us all to one another: enemy or friend, alive or dead, present or past, online or off:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Being a Grandmother, a Mother, a Daughter, and Sad

Once a year I pay special honor to my parents. In a service on Yom Kippur called Yizkor, I say a prayer to their memory and pledge to do something to remember them: to donate charity for their sake.

This year, even more than usual, I wept as I prayed, and afterward. I have three grandsons now, one of whom shares my father’s name, and my parents don’t know it. They aren’t here to enjoy these lovely boys, or to help me handle the issues that emerge when one’s children have children.

Our boys and their wives are stunning parents (and wonderful to us) and our grandsons are, of course, perfect; that’s not the issue. It is, rather, that I know now some of what they must have felt and I would be so grateful if I could tell them what I have learned about their own grace as grandparents, and ask them for advice on the moments that grab the heart, or maybe even, as in every family, for a moment, break it.

Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!

Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.

My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:

The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
A tragic battle over the insanity defense in a death penalty case: a two-episode story on The Defenders* (1961-65) , starring Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch.

There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.

* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”

When the Children Become the Parents: After You…

Two new grandsons have joined our first (born almost three years ago); one is 6 days old, the other just over two weeks. They are beautiful and delicious; watching our sons with them is breathtaking.

With the birth of that first little boy, we became grandparents; he brought us a new identity. Just after the birth of the second of the three, though, the rabbi took us beyond that. With the birth of their children, our children have become ancestors, taking their places, as we had done, in the thousands of years of Jewish history.

I’ve written before about the special meaning of our “Biblical” lineage , especially since we can’t trace our personal ones very far back, but I’m saying something else here: look forward as well as back. There’s something compelling about the concept of one’s children becoming ancestors – something wonderful and profound.

Our Gigantic Family #MicroblogMondays

Two new little boys will enter our family before the end of September. We’re excited, happy for our lovely sons and their wives and very happy too that our grandchildren have such wonderful people as parents.

There’s another thing, that (even though it is, of course, obvious) I hadn’t thought about in a long time: these children, while we can’t trace personal generations very far back because so many records and stories were lost in the Holocaust, have a family that goes back to Abraham and to Moses and Mt. Sinai and to Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca. Of course, we all, biblically, begin with Adam and Eve but because I’ve always known I couldn’t trace our family, I didn’t let myself consider what we might never know – it was too painful.

I think that’s why the sudden recollection of this spectacular Jewish lineage became an almost new discovery even though the reality has always been part of our lives. We, and our children, and theirs, are part of something well beyond ourselves. I am grateful to be part of the tribe – and pray that our boys, and theirs – and their moms – travel safely as the world continues on its magnificent, scary and complicated trips around the sun.

I Saw It at the Movies: History and Film on #MicroblogMonday

Meryl Streep and Robert deNiro, Best Picture for 1978

I saw The Normal Heart, then Love is Strange — with no premeditation, both in the same week.

Each is a great document of a time in our history. I began thinking about the power of these films and how valuable they would be as teaching tools. With that in mind, I hereby initiate the “films to teach American history by” list. Here are some more of mine; please add your own in the comments.

Kramer v Kramer Hair Do the Right Thing The Deerhunter

Bullworth Dead Man Walking Valley of Decision Gentleman’s Agreement

Good Night and Good Luck The Green Berets Get on the Bus The Pawnbroker