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• Jovino, Union St., SF. Great great place. I would write a YELP review, but I am too agitated. The reason for my agitation follows.
Well, she somehow got into my head that my perception of utmost privacy which leads me to expose my life in this blog is false, so I will try to tone down my exposure level after this last post. (I might not as usually I am strongly preoccupied with me, myself, and my own).
It’s funny – I feel like she is a child I need to worry about; I’m actually anxious that she will miss her flight from Heathrow, or that she somehow neglected to catch the plane at SFO – although I did see her off until the security point. Anyhow, I can’t concentrate. I hope I don’t spend the next 20 hours (that’s how long her voyage is if she doesn’t take any wrong turns…) feeling this way.
I pledge my next post will be actually worth reading.
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* written from the deck
Anti-Semitism is the rage. Ya, Yo and I just came back from the film The Reader and I am positively shocked. How could everybody sit there nodding while this piece of blatant anti-Semitism is displayed in front of their eyes?
At first I wasn’t at all certain of my interpretation. It is possible, I thought, that the mishap at Fertile Grounds and my own insecurities about the latest war made me see hatred where there is none. But then came the last minutes of the film and now the feeling of nausea is pushing me to draft this explanation in writing. I’ll begin with this last impression;
A poor, beautiful and humane guard, who merely followed orders commits suicide in a prison, ending her life lonely and destitute. Her dying wish as expressed to her warden is that all her savings be given to the daughter of a woman who survived the camps and implicated her in the trial. The next take brings us to Manhattan, to a lavish apartment, where the obviously rich Jewish daughter lives. Both her affluence and her jewishness are exemplified by the golden Menorah placed on the mantelpiece. The Jewess refuses to absolve the poor woman of her sins, but ultimately agrees that the money which was bequeathed to her and placed in her carefully manicured hand in the tin can in which the poor German saved it would be transferred to a literacy charity, although, as the heiress explains, there are many illiterate among the privileged minority.
Anyhow, this was enough to convince me that other instances of blatant anti-Semitism in the film weren’t just my imagination. I’ll be concise – do you remember the scene at the trial where the jewess pointed out the guards? Notice how aggressive she was? Notice she picked six of them? Notice that moments earlier we were told that at the selection process each guard was responsible of selecting 10 jews to be sent to the gas chambers? If you noted all the prior facts, the reference to the “selection” the Jewish survivor made became obvious as – how do they say here? – as apples and pears? Something like that… the fact that the selection of the blameworthy is recognized by a law student as the crime of the German nation doesn’t do anything to attenuate the seriousness of the implicit comparison.
There’s more and more and more and it is done so meticulously that it can’t be unintended. Please do not go to see this film, and if you do, please try and use your voice to attest it, before it becomes part of the truth.
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It’s valentines’ day. Ya, Yo and I are in San Jose. To my aggravation, Ya insists on pronouncing the name San Jose while accentuating the first syllable in Jose. We are here to watch a tennis game at HP Pavilion which Ya is completely psyched about, it’s Roddick (or in Ya's exasperating lingo: Rudik) that is about to play and we are holding our breaths to see if he will wear his cap while playing or not (seriously – Ya is extremely preoccupied with that).
I am trying to be excited about the game too. The only problem is that I have a lecture to prepare for and it is sucking all jolliness out of me. Tuesday is going to be such a climax for me and I feel like I am not applying myself as I should.
My comment is about pleasing others. Ya doesn’t know how to react in a way that makes you feel that she is excited or happy and that you had something to do with it. She just isn’t a people pleaser. In a sense, I feel like I was more excited about making this thing happen for her than she was about it materializing.
Ok. I stand corrected. Ya was excited! Heck, I was excited! I nearly hit the guy who sat behind me that chanted “Go Andy!” all the time, no matter win or lose. (superfluous to say, my guy – the awesome Stepanek won!) At one point I even mimicked him and his girlfriend in a way that wasn’t too flattering and was accused by my companions for being un-American (I think they were just afraid that a fight will ensue. coming to think of it, I should have told them Ya calls the guy Rudik. That would have sent sparks through the stadium). I didn’t even give terrifying next Tuesday a single thought.
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I come home from school. It’s 18:30. I run to pee as I’ve been holding it for the last 5 hours. I hurriedly open the door to discover Levinas in my toilet. He lies there calmly, face down on the side of the bathtub, waiting to philosophize to the ruminative, albeit seated interlocutor. How is that for the house of an intellectual?
(naturally the intellectual isn’t me but Ya. It's just that I believe that a lavatory should be reserved strictly for Heidegger and never overcrowded)
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• Written from l’apartement – very late.
What a mélange – first the three of us, Ya, Yo and I went to a bluegrass show with friends from JSP. Then we went to see Gran Torino. The first place was a typical Berkeley place all cozy with weirdoes galore and the second, a typical AmericA cinema house, gilded with butterscotch, or rather, to be more exact in my description of this American experience, it was smeared with butterscotch, coca-cola, popcorn, reeses and the like with giant people putting their legs on the top of the seat before them, laughing away in places where I thought it more fit to cry.
Anyhow, I had fun.
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- Written partly from home, partly from crixa, partly from the library, partly from room 014
I am going to have a tough day: three classes and a meeting I am anxious about. I had a bad dream. I woke up fat (has to do with Katie’s birthday dinner at Café Raj yesterday night) and tomorrow isn’t going to be any less stressful. Still, I am happy. I’ve rationalized myself into being aware of my good fortune immediately after the regular morning נאחס (what’s wrong with this language! No word for Nachs! English – such a poor destitute, paupery language… something has to be done about that – I am contributing “paupery”. But this is just a meager beginning – this language doesn’t have די, נאחס, or נודניק one invented word isn’t going to save it). Anyhow, I hope this mood is a keeper. So far I’ve been stupidly happy, enough so that Jamie whom I met at the JSP building near my office nook told me that I looked cheery.
But that’s it! Tomorrow I’m writing about politics even if I have to make something up (btw, did you know that Iceland elected the first lesbian ever prime-minister? Had I been less self absorbed I might have written about that).
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