“Lately I have been having nightmares. I am always stealing heads of fresh lettuce from dead men.”
~Diary of Ruth Straub, nurse at Bataan in 1942, excerpted in We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan
Oof
November 7, 2013Continuing the Purge
November 6, 2013I am continuing to clean out my work desktop, and came across this amazing print, which I really wanted to buy until I realized it was 10K. Oops! The artist, Mike Levin, is blowing up all over the place. Also, below, a funny little tidbit about the Rebbe’s possible insanity.
The Royal Teitelbaums
From Jewish Ideas Daily, ages ago:
“…[O]ne finds bizarre accounts of three-year-old Joel Teitelbaum repeatedly engaged for long periods of time in rinsing his mouth, washing his hands, and sitting on the toilet, often interrupting his own prayers to return to the outhouse. The explanation offered for this behavior, which was a source of great concern to his mother, is that the saintly child could not appear before his Creator in prayer without having completely purified his holy body of all forms of uncleanness.
“Needless to say, a very different, clinical explanation jumps out from these narratives of childhood fixation: namely, that they testify to an extreme, textbook case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The refusal even to touch Israeli currency can be adduced as another example of the same psychological disorder, as, still more weirdly, can Teitelbaum’s unusual interest in the density of the fabric (the technical term is denier count) of the stockings worn by women in the Satmar community.
“In Meisels’s words, ‘The rebbe taught that even 70-denier stockings should not be worn. The numerical value of sod (secret) is 70, so the secret is out that this [stocking] is also transparent.’ There then follows a lengthy account of Teitelbaum’s creation, with the help of a Brooklyn businessman named Lipa Brach, of an exclusive line of fully opaque women’s hosiery:
Money in hand, Reb Lipa Brach began to work on the project. He went to several hosiery manufacturers, collected samples, and brought all of them to the rebbe to inspect. The rebbe was very pleased with the progress, and he tested each sample by pulling it over his own arm. If his hair showed, it was no good…. The new stockings were given the brand name, ‘Palm,’ the English translation of the Rebbe’s surname…. To this day every Satmar woman and girl wears Palm stockings.
“In many years of reading hasidic literature, from theoretical mystical tracts to tales and hagiographies, I have never encountered anything remotely like this image of a rebbe testing the thickness of stockings on his own arm, let alone naming a line of women’s undergarments after himself. Was he aware of what he was doing? Most people who suffer from OCD are highly conscious of their disorder; a revered religious leader, zealously guarded by a closed circle of worshipful acolytes, would be more likely to mistake psychiatric symptoms as messages from God.…”
Leaving My Job
November 5, 2013Guess what everyone? I’m leaving my day job to blog full-time! (Sorta.) This means I have start cleaning out the folders of random jpgs and writings I have amassed in my nine months at this desk. Step one: bye-bye, Secret Snow.
She’s already developing her artist’s instinct.
Occupy Prada Marfa
November 4, 2013Calling all community activists: you have probably heard that our beloved Prada outpost in the Chihuahuan Desert near Marfa, Texas, has come under fire recently, probably from the same Texan morons who want to micromanage your fetus and fuck a horse (simultaneously.) I don’t particularly care about the nuances of public advertising law, but I do care about DAMN FUNNY ART, and so I am leading a group of serious people down to Marfa THIS SUNDAY via private jet to camp next to the store and protest not just its possible removal, but anything critical that anyone would ever say about it. You should definitely bring your wackiest outfits, tents and/or teepees, whisky, peace pipes, books, and musical instruments. Also, it will be helpful to have chainsaws and other tools, as we will send out small groups during the night to systematically destroy “Playboy Marfa.” We will make signs that read “I ❤ ELMGREEN AND DRAGSET” large enough to be read by helicopters flying above. Prepare to act as dead weight when the police arrive, and scare roaming cowboys by making out with the nearest person to you of the same gender.
To apply for one of the 20 seats on the private jet, please send a short essay describing your most transcendent experience to itinerantdaughterandson@gmail.com. We will be in touch to discuss the Friday shabbat dinner meeting and trust-fall session, and Sunday’s departure. Until then, namaste.
STEP AWAY FROM THE STORE!
BRAINSTORM
November 1, 2013Someone come up with an app that hooks up people with large credits at stores who’d rather have the cash with people who were already planning to spend that kind of money on Fancy Boutique Emporium Whatever, so they can circumvent the system and end up with what they need most. Calling all web designers!
A Glimpse Into My Twisted, Twisted Mind
October 31, 2013Today, my intern came in wearing a short reddish wig, fake glasses, and a very short red skirt, and I internally panicked. “Fuck,” I thought, “she’s having an Amanda Bynes-style nervous breakdown. EVERYONE knows that wigs are the first step. I’m going to have to call Bellevue and then get in touch with her parents and then maintain a mentor-type relationship with her for years to come, and she’ll show up at my doorstep when I’m 43 with 3 kids in the middle of the night wailing that everyone’s after her and I just am NOT in the mood for this.”
And then I realized: it’s Halloween.
Um, Ew?
October 31, 2013M and I went to see the Balthus show at the Met on Sunday, and coincidentally, in the new issue of the NYRB I snagged from my office (man this sentence makes me sound pretentious) there was a review of the show by Ian Buruma. Serendipity! Here’s a gross fact I learned from the piece:
“His painting The Guitar Lesson shows a music teacher, modeled after Balthus’s own mother, maliciously pulling the hair and pawing the crotch of a half-naked girl in white knee socks sprawled helplessly across her lap. Robert Hughes called this picture of molestation “one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings by Western artists in the last fifty years.”
The Guitar Lesson, not on view in the Met show, was once stored at the Museum of Modern Art, then sold to the filmmaker Mike Nichols, and now belongs to the Niarchos family—the old shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos had it in his palatial bedroom.”
Ouch.
Non-Catholics for the Pope
October 28, 2013I would like to thank my fellow NCP members for helping us help Pope Francis reach his goal of 10 million Twitter followers! Below is a news article on the subject:
“Hallelujah! Pope Francis Rejoices After Reaching 10M Twitter followers (Mirror)
As leader of the worldwide Catholic Church, Pope Francis already has something in the region of 1.2 billion followers. But that didn’t stop the technologically-savvy pontiff rejoicing Sunday morning when he hit 10 million followers on Twitter – a relatively conservative figure in comparison. Times Live “Dear followers, I understand there are now over 10 million of you!” Francis wrote on his account, @Pontifex. “I thank you with all my heart and ask you to continue praying for me.” Reuters The first non-European pope in 1,300 years has tripled the number of followers of the @pontifex handles since succeeding Benedict XVI in March, according to the Vatican, which announced Francis had reached 10 million after adding together the followers of all his accounts. This would make the pontiff more popular than The New York Times and just behind rapper Kanye West, according to websites.
“The account was officially opened on Dec. 12, 2012 in times of Pope Benedict XVI, who at the end of his term had over 3 million followers. After the resignation of German Joseph Ratzinger to the chief office of the Catholic Church, the account @Pontifex was suspended until March 17 this year, after the assumption of Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio.”
The next meeting of the NCP membership committee will be on November 1st (All Saints Day). Time and location TBD. For information on joining the group or RSVPing on behalf of your immortal soul, please contact Siobhan, whose newest administrative tasks on behalf of this group will be compensated for after her death.
There Are Two Kinds of Writers in This World
October 22, 2013“I will send you a note later about the specific difference between those writers who possess the natural confidence that is their birthright, and those fewer writers who are driven by the unnatural courage that comes from no alternative. It is something like this––some walk on a tightrope, and some continue on the tightrope, and some continue on the tightrope, or continue to walk, even after they find out it is not there.”
~Note from Maeve Brennan to William Maxwell, 1965
Bah
October 21, 2013I have some really good shit on the horizon, I SWEAR, but first, a book written by a fascinating woman named Carolyn Heilbrun, a former Columbia University English professor whose story was told on the Freakonomics podcast about suicide.
Add to wish list immediately
