Nostalgia, Part 2.

I wanted to get all excited about how Stanley Fish blogged about missing the Democratic Primary, too, but, honestly, I was worrying too much to finish reading it. I was distracted by and worrying about the article about Al Queda in Pakistan and the New Yorker article my husband told me about last night in which Seymour Hirsch outlines, apparently, the potential for an invasion of Iran. I write "apparently" because I haven't yet read the article. Still I find myself wondering if Bush and Cheney are still President and VP enough to do this. Do you know what I mean? Could they really start a war with, like, six months left on their watch?

A Small Place

Last week, I was at a friend's house in Philadelphia and there on the living room floor was the most recent issue of Lapham's Quarterly. In it, I read an excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place. The passage was so beautiful, so clear, so choked with feeling, that I had to get the book. I got it on Friday. It's a short book, and it's stunning. Kincaid's language, her control, her use of parenthetical remarks, it's astonishing, all the more so because what comes through the gorgeousness of her words is, primarily, rage. It comes at you like a blast from a furnace, but the language is so gorgeous and sly that it's a little hard to assimilate what's happening to you at first. Like, you don't realize right away that the words on the pages of the book in your hand aren't inanimate strokes of black on white with curves and dots to guide you. They're not that benign and they're not that dead. Individually, they bristle. Taken together, they hurl themselves at you, elegantly. All this to say: You must read this book.

And Lapham's Quarterly, too.

What's in a Rule?

Yesterday, my husband sent me the link to this article by Marjorie Ingall. In it, Marjorie, a fabulous writer whom I can call by her first name because I've known her my whole life, mulls over her feelings about keeping kosher. She writes that she's always been sort of kosher and "sort of" for a long time meant vegetarian. But she's no longer a vegetarian. And she's committed to eating as much seasonal, local and ethically produced food as she can. So what should she do about meat? Because the biggest producers of kosher meat adhere to God's law but not ethical standards of treatment toward either workers or animals.

The question for Marjorie seems to be should she buy ethically raised and produced local meat that isn't kosher technically but feels kosher emotionally? Or, should she buy meat that's technically kosher and ethically produced but whose cost is virtually prohibitive for anything but an annual brisket?

Here's a quote:
"Some friends of mine are starting a share in a cow. Someone knows a farmer. The farmer’s cow leads a pure life, injected with far fewer chemicals than most of our major-league ballplayers. The cow will be killed painlessly, but not by a shochet. Do I want in? I think the last unkosher beef I ate was a Ball Park Frank at a Pawtucket Red Sox game when I was 6. But sometimes I think: If kosher is unkosher, why not go ethical? If I make the effort with fruits and vegetables, why not with meat? And if not now, when?

On the other other hand, I do understand what most Orthodox authorities are saying: Kashrut is entirely separate from oshek, the oppression of workers that Judaism forbids. And a cow staggering around with a slashed throat may have been killed within the letter of the law. The reason for kashrut, they say, is because God said to do it. Period. Ours is not to reason why. And yet I do."

I read that and thought, "Hmmm, there are all sorts of thing that either God says or the rabbis say God says not to do that many progressive Jews do, or don't do, as the case may be. Many progressive Jews don't pray three times a day. Many are gay. Many use electricity on the sabbath or wear shorts and tank tops on a hot day. We pick and choose all the time. So what is it about kosher that's so different?

It's not that I don't get the dilemma. I don't keep kosher, but I don't buy pork chops because I don't want my kids to think it's OK to eat them home. Out? You choose. That's how I was raised. Kosher in the house, not-so-kosher outside of it. And from where, or, more accurately, how I sit, that, while apparently crazy, actually makes (some) sense. Because I take the laws of kashrut to be an expression of difference. This is what "we" eat; this is what "we" won't eat. Like it, lump it, discuss.

After all, Jews have lived in diasporic communities for thousands of years. During all those years, what they chose to eat and how they chose to begin and end their meals were ways to maintain a sense of distinction from the culture at large in which they lived.

Because food is sustaining, but it's also differentiating. We make choices all the time about when, how, what and where we'll eat. Those choices are defining. I don't eat at McDonalds. I shops at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's (coffee), Farm Markets and Fairway. Didn't you run into me there last week?

Beyond food allergies and preferences, food choices reflect who we are in the world and with whom we identify. If you're going to eat according to rules, should they be the rules of the mostly seasonal, preferably organic and primarily locavore or the Jew? If you choose the former and you're a Jew, what separates you from anyone else of any other faith commitment? How does what you eat reflect your identity as a Jew, an identity you might wish to share with your children, if it doesn't comply with Jewish law? If as a Jew you/I don't choose kosher meat, are we all just melting into a great pot of progressive, if sometimes cranky, leftiness? You know: Peace Now, Barak Obama, and grass-fed beef!

In my own home, as I said, I've decided not to keep kosher. If I buy meat, it's only the gently raised kind. But that only solves the question of dinner. It doesn't begin to address the much bigger issues of identity, community, or difference. In spite of her kosher dilemma, Marjorie seems to have got that stuff covered. Me? To quote her: "I dither."

Nostalgia

Yesterday I blogged about my facial. Does anyone else secretly miss the democratic primary? Just a little tiny bit?

The Facial

Yesterday, I took all the money I saved on that Orla Kiely bag (and then some) and threw it at my face. Literally. I had a facial during which Dona, the amazing facial-giving owner of Rescue Spa in Philadelphia, steamed, scrubbed, and sanded the skin on my face. Then she stimulated it with electric paddles, which made my mouth taste like a melting metal spoon. But my skin? Gaw-juss. Seriously. I first went to Dona about a month before we moved from Philadelphia to New York City, and my skin had never looked so good. I've continued to go to her, -- if once or twice a year facials can be called "continuing" -- and I've bought the products. Oh have I bought the products. But my skin?! Seriously. Today, after the facial, I look like I'm 37. And I never had skin with pores this small before. Even my mom says my skin has never looked better. When she tells me this, we fall into a discussion of what we'd do to our faces when and what options are available. My mom, like her mother, has gorgeous skin naturally. She's one of those women who could shear vaseline on her face and it'd look beautiful. Me, not so much. Which is to say, the products, the facials, they're worth every penny I lavish on them. But it also means I have to wear a hat. Always. Because you can't cough up the change for the products only to singe your skin in the sun, can you?
So I mostly have much better skin than ever before, but sometimes I look silly. A reasonable trade-off, don't you think?

The Juice Bag

I'm bad at bags. They make me nervous. They're so expensive! And I never know what to do with them once I'm in a restaurant. I never have the right bag for an evening out, but during the day, I do OK, mostly because my days are extremely casual and because last spring I bought this bag. I liked it so much I got one for my friend E. for her birthday, because I figured it was just the kind of thing she'd like, too. I wasn't wrong about that. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how much everyone else would like this bag. Just this morning E. called to say that when she pulled out the bag for summer, her fashion quotient went way up. Everyone gives her props! She lives in Philadelphia, and I live in New York, but I've experienced the very same thing here. People on the subway, in stores, in restaurants, tourists, hardcore New Yorkers, older people, 10-year-olds, you name it, they've complimented me on this bag. I've never seen the likes of it. Nora Ephron described a similar phenomenon in I Feel Bad About My Neck, for her it was the result of an MTA bag. I thought of Nora the other day when I saw an Orla Kiely bag that I really liked. The colors, the straps, the shape, it was all very appealing. It was also $198.00. Not outrageous in the spectrum of bag prices (although it's outrageous that I think $198 is not an outrageous price for a bag), but a heck of a lot more than my fantabulous Basura Bag made of stitched together juice boxes that would otherwise clog the sea. I may even buy another juice bag. Just for fun. After all, I saved $198 the other day when I didn't buy that other bag......

Michelle Obama on The View

I know I should have said something about this last week, but the fact that I didn't tells me something. The "this" in this case is Michelle Obama's appearance on The View. Can I just say? I do not care about how Michelle Obama is fashioning herself into a first lady. Or, more honestly, I care that she has to do it and I wish she didn't. I think we'd be lucky to have someone as tenacious and accomplished as she filling the role of first lady just as she is -- whether she wears an off-the-rack dress or not. I'm just not so interested in watching her turn herself into someone more "first ladylike" -- whatever that might mean. I don't actually know what it means because I didn't read anything about Michelle Obama on The View (OK, I read one blog post, but I really didn't like it), and I've seen just one headline tauting her image revamping. But it's enough. I know what's going to happen. She's going to become wifely. When Hillary Clinton tried to do that early in Bill's first term, I actually wrote her a letter. Swear to God. After reading an article about how HRC, as she was not yet known, invited the editors of women's magazines to the White House to talk about her image, I wrote her a letter saying how sad I thought that was. That I'm even still writing about this because of Michelle Obama a bazillion years later (OK, maybe 14) is just so, what is it?, sad. Or maybe pathetic. But there it is. We in America, we like our wives wifely. Maybe that's why no one liked Bill all that much this go-round. He just wasn't much of a wife. Maybe he should have gone on The View.