ciao raggazei

firstly salutations or CIAO to you all [have the Italians recovered sufficiently yet?]

i'll just come on an' out and say it... it appears i have a beef [or fish actually] with academia.
yes, it's true folks. i have an issue with them. today a prof who i really like announced that he is essentially teaching us an 'upper class life style that will be associated with our future positions'. now that is a swell notion... in a nice, pretentious, ego-loving, prideful, sort-of-way. but, being me, i had to vocalize my absolute objection to this horrific notion.
"excuse me, O Hailed Master of Intelligence, what is the point of the academic institution if it seeks to lock itself up in its own hautigness?"
"explain yourself, Ms. Krinsky,"
"well dear Sir, it just seems preposterous that we, as scholars of the Humanities do not seek to fully relate to the humanity that we study and from which we derive our financial living."
"hmmmm,"
"it seems rather like a form of exploitation to me. in addition to which, it also appears absolutely hypocritical to gain admittance thru the pearly gates of higher education and not seek to make some sort of difference to others... and not to accomplish with all our mental depth and knowledge base some level of humane humility, some form of actual empathy towards mankind...we should not seek to simply legitimize, perpetuate, and rationalize social interests...rather the higher we get the more conscious we have to be of becoming more humane, not further removed..."
*quiet from Hindy's ramble*
"You seem to be the product of a very action-oriented ideology, Ms. Krinsky, promise me, wherever you end up... that you won't lose this sentiment."

Now, i'm annoyed. Academics should not be preaching the ultimate achievement of some kind of elitism... no no no no this is a very bad bad counterproductive, counter-everything sort of idea. nay. the smarter we become the more we need to realize that we are obligated to do something with our intelligence. that we can't simply relax in our oak-paneled offices and be content that we are tenured track while the rest of world occurs disconnected from our reality.

knowledge serves no purpose locked away in your ever-expanding head, the only way to make use of it, is if lies stuck beneath your fingernails from constant labours and physical manifestations.

good theme for the upcoming gimmel tammuz. uncannily odd that i came across 'Lubavitch' today in a book i was reading on the train: Language in Time of Revolution by Benjamin Harshav [a nice easy read]. Also a super-great book i'm reading "Ideology" by Terry Eagelton [hilarious in a mathematical nerdistic manner]...

in case you have a 4th of July break [which i don't as i'll be doing some more research in the Rebbe's Library {how absolutely cool is that???}]
here are some things to definitely check out:
1. camp [ i miss those days]
2. the Ohel if you haven't made plans to go yet....we can always use a bit of return.
3. the Macy's fireworks [for political Republican support, or just an appreciation of art]
4. the Graffiti exhibit opening at the BMA [et al, for liberals]
5. the Aston Magna Festival [for everyone who enjoys good music]
6. Shakespeare in the Park [Liev Schriber is MacBeth]
7. and...check this out. http://www.ajws.org/index.cfm?section_id=5&sub_section_id=8&page_id=227 [cuz i'm tempted....so tempted.]

This is brilliant.
The more i read about Bialik the more i realize how much Chassidus permeates his work. And would you believe that the Rebbe's library actually has the original texts [archives are in my backyard...] His collection of essays is titled "Revealment and Concealment" and all of his poetry bears the motive of light reflected in exile, darkness, illumination... This is going to be utterly amazing... I can bring it all together.... major intellectual synthesis has got be one of the most pleasurable feelings in life, when you can unify all the mental data and form one cohesive thought, almost a single life message...

"For it is clear that language with all its associations does not introduce us at all into the inner area, the essence of things, but that, on contrary, lanugage itself stands as a barrier before them. On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly. "There is no speech and there are no words," but only a perpetual search, an eternal "what?" frozen on man's lips. In turth, there is no place even for this "what?", implying as it does the hope of a reply. Rather there is "nothingness"; man's lips are closed. If, nevertheless, man does achieve speech and with it contentment, it is only because of the extent of his fear at remaining alone for one moment with that dark void, face-to-face with the nothingness, with no barrier between them. "For man shall not look on me and live," says the void, and every speech, every pulsation of speech, partakes of the nature of concealment of nothingness, a husk enclosing within itself a dark seed of the eternal engima. No word contains the complete dissolution of any question. What does it contain? The question's concealment. It makes no difference what the particular word is- you can exchange it with another- just as long as it contains the power momentarily to serve as concealment and barrier.

Dumb music and symbolic mathematics- two hostile kin at two parallel extremes- attest unanimously that the word is not necessarily what it seems, that it is nothing but a manifestation of the void. Or rather, just as physical bodies become sensible to the eye and determinate because they serve as barriers before light in space, so the word's existence takes place by virtue of the process by which it closes up the small aperture of the void- constructing a barrier to prevent the void's darkness from welling up and overflowing its bounds...."

i love that. the language is so beautiful... and its translated. don't worry none of my 2 1/2 readers has to get it. or my thesis for that matter.... but while i'm talking to myself i might as well add, it's going to be so interesting... yeats into his kabbalistic terminology and endless quests for truth, and bialik writing, apparently unknowingly, in the same vein and intellectual scope as the Chassidus [i'm not comparing the Rashab to Bialik but i can't help but wonder if the two ever met]... what was their truths? what did they seek to illuminate? what divine space did they search for? and why is identity and language so intrinsic to their quests? perchance, as one novice literary critic postulates, all they ever sought was the One Word...to find that one single pattern of speech , the entry portal of the Infinite source of Creation. ..


and guys- i'll take some fresh sun from Italy as a gift. preferably bottled and from the sea-side.

back to krenitz...

sometimes the most familiar becomes the greatest mystery. although i've begun my preliminary research, i haven't been entirely comfortable with the relevancy of my thesis topic. after much contemplation i realized that i ought to write about something i actually know, instead of trying to completely reinvent myself in academic terms. like, why not use the opportunity to understand something a bit more Jewish? Why shouldn't these lesser known writings be brought to the academic forum? Although i've read works like Memoirs etc. i've spent most of the past years catching up on the never-ending cannon of Western literature...

this past spring, i gave a lecture on literary relativism from the position of Jonathan Safran Foer...a chassidic interpetation actually [i know that makes some of you cringe]. i argued that books must be interpreted as individualized stories, in a particular context and reference base...removed from the tradition of grand narratives. writing about yeats [who has been written about altogether too much and uber-extensively] seems stupid, one; because i am not irish, two; because it all seems to have been 'said' by someone who actually is, three; it seems wholly irrelevant to the course of life. so although i love yeats' works, it doesn't seem to mean much as far as academic innovation is concerned. i'd hate to spend my entire summer subconsciously rewriting what has been written about throughout the 70s and 80s.

thus, enter newly revamped idea: write about the role of language as used in the 20th century modern period, particularly relating Yeats' Gaelic Revival to the Zionist movement towards Hebrew [namely in the works of H.N. Bialik]. This is going to be much cooler. Because I speak Hebrew and Yiddish, i'm aiming to document the linguistic shift from ghetto yiddish to nationalist hebrew as reinvented through the poetry of secular zionists. just like yeats extracted himself from catholicism and developed a new, 'return' to old irish and folkloric traditions, i'm hoping to draw some comparisons and differences with the early ideology of zionists and the final decades of the shtetl. the idea of the language of revolution/innovation/nationalism as it relates to the end of british colonialism [post-colonial theory as interpeted by Edward Said] is fairly new as are themes of transnationalism from a literary persepective. this is way more fascinating... admittedly, i've never truly studied yiddish poetry or early hebrew work [minus the old Spanish few. my grandfather's father actually owned a printing press and it seems somewhat pathetic that i have never really read the works belonging to my own immediate background. Besides i have such amazing resources... Bubby Nemes, my grandparents... i'd be stupid not to do it on something so easily accessible. so yes, sometimes we should stick with what we intrinsicly know, and we might surprise ourselves by realizing how little of it we actually do know.

in other post-Shabbos news:
i'm contemplating accepting a position as a Bais Rivkah HS English teacher for next fall. also- grandparents are here for graduation season, 'tis fun as always.
moo's party was nice, milchig cinnamon buns rock.
over and out to the italian contingency [actually, i'm not too sure why i still have a blog]
i am planning to drive to Seattle in January- when this whole crazy whirlwind finally passes.
and no. i don't want company.
i'm definitely going solo.... but maybe... just maybe... i'll find my way back to krenitz.

Future generations,
brothers still to come,
don't you dare
be scornful of our songs.
songs about the weak,
songs of the exhausted
in a poor generation,
before the world's decline.

We were all imbued
With the idea of freedom,
yet sang our songs about it
with voices lowered.
far from our good fortune
we met at night, in darkness,
and worked at building bridges
in secrecy.

We hid from our foes
who lay in wait for us,
and this is why our songs
resonate with grief,
and why our melodies
have a dismal longing
and a hidden rage
in the warp and woof.

-Avraham Reisen
trans. Leonard Worf

i wish women learned talmud... really this whole Aristotelian logic thing would be so much easier... i bet there's gemara lingo for all this terminology.
well.
one must constantly ask themselves if they are in college because they need to be or because they are in search of a sophisticated distraction from life. this is my self-reflexive meditation every morning from 6:42am to 6:55am. The closer i get to finishing the more i realize that i am doing this for a reason... and yes... all this success is hashgacha pratis.

what a smashing weekend.
Moo and I finally tried out that 50's diner [Lucky's] where we ordered stack of pancakes for dinn dinn - man, i love breakfast [except in the morning]. followed by dessert at tovelli's that gelato homemade ice cream place. amazing. i recommend the amaretto.
the moo and i are on a roll... we are now experiencing some laundry issues.
uh oh.