here's a deep fractal zoom

http://kottke.org/10/02/insanely-deep-fractal-zoom

It's pretty awesome

There is empty, concrete land  sitting there doing nothing in front of city hall.

There is a campaign going on now to get the mayor to plant a vegetable garden there, please sign the petition and help make this happen.

http://www.PeoplesGardenNYC.org

hat tip to anivaho

Yhosephus wrote that in the original "about" section, and how about a Chanukkah destruction, during the very 7fatcow week in parshas miketz? In all seriousness I plan to take down 7fatcow.com in the coming days. Any protests and disagreements can be voiced in the comments section. I guess this post is a vote, but the voting populace is like AWOL

Is writing idolatry? (see full interview here: http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/2693 )

OZICK
Until quite recently I held a rather conventional view about all this. I thought of the imagination as what its name suggests, as image-making and I thought of the writer’s undertaking as a sovereignty set up in competition with the sovereignty of—well, the Creator of the Universe. I thought of imagination as that which sets up idols, as a rival of monotheism. I’ve since reconsidered this view. I now see that the idol-making capacity of imagination is its lower form, and that one cannot be a monotheist without putting the imagination under the greatest pressure of all. To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded. Once you come to regard imagination as ineluctably linked with monotheism, you can no longer think of imagination as competing with monotheism. Only a very strong imagination can rise to the idea of a noncorporeal God. The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies.

And God Saw Literature, That It Was Good
(for complete essay: http://www.tnr.com/article/and-god-saw-literature-it-was-good )
…The necessity of the Bible, if it is to be seen solely as poetry and story, may flatten in the same way. All sacred books contain the wise or stirring pleasures of narrative: the Bhagavad-Gita tells stories, the Taoist scriptures of Chuang-Tse tell stories, the Zoroastrian Zenavesta tells stories, the Koran tells stories, Confucius and Mencius tell stories, the Buddha tells stories; African and American Indian sacred tales abound. The earth is flooded with stories, hymns, and parables regarded as holy in their origins. The literary approach can deflate them all. Flannery O'Connor, an intransigent believer, said of the Christian mysteries that if they were not true, "then the hell with them." A skilled teller of tales, she insisted on a distinction between imagination of the kind that she herself could wield and what she took to be divine revelation. And it may be that if all the world's scriptures had long ago been flattened into literature, and packed side by side, despite their dissimilarities and divergences, into a single bookshelf–much as Madame Bovary, say, can stand in civil proximity to Crime and Punishment, and Joyce cheek by jowl with Proust–all our habitations and histories might have been far more pacific. Novels and stories do not war with one another; neither, pace Harold Bloom, do they always engage in supersessionism (at least not of the jihadist variety).

But stories, though they influence and enlarge us, do not deliver Commandments. The Bible cannot be pumped up from literary prestige to divine prerogative through arguing from the power of human imagination, even when that power is "kindled" by positing measureless structures of transcendent dominion. What, then, are unbelieving readers of the Five Books left with? Unless they happen to be moral philosophers who will deduce law and right conduct from reason, it is stories they are left with, and–for non-philosophers–isn't that enough?

On their face, the Patriarchal Tales, like all literature that endures, touch on everything recognizable in ordinary human life: crises between parents and children, between siblings, between husbands and wives; hunger and migration, jealousy and reconciliation, sudden ascent and sudden subjugation, great love and great hatred. Universally felt, they are family annals in a family album. The Joseph narrative is doubtless the most moving story of all: here stands Joseph, Pharaoh's mighty viceroy, interrogating the humbly petitioning brothers who in the past flung him into a pit and sold him to traders on their way to Egypt. Catching sight of Benjamin, the tender younger son of their mother Rachel, "Joseph hurried out, for his feelings for his brother overwhelmed him and he wanted to weep, and he went into the chamber and wept there. And he bathed his face and came out and held himself in check and said, 'Serve bread.'"

In this enclosed fraternal scene, God is not needed, and seems not to be present. So far, the drama of Joseph appears to resemble the stories we call literature; and yet it does not, because Joseph will not permit God to be exiled out of his world. When, bowing before Pharaoh's deputy, the brothers plead for forgiveness, Joseph is again swept into weeping, and invokes not only God, but God's design: "And Joseph said, 'Fear not, for am I instead of God? While you meant evil for me, God meant it for good.'" And further: "Do not be pained and do not be incensed with yourselves that you sold me down here, because for sustenance God has sent me before you … to make you a remnant on earth and to preserve life, for you to be a great surviving group. And so, it is not you who sent me here but God." A few verses on, Joseph dies, at one hundred ten, and is embalmed according to Egyptian custom. And now, portentously, the Book of Genesis ends: "He was put in a coffin in Egypt."

That coffin signifies more than a human story. It is God's story: Egypt will become a coffin for the Hebrews until God redeems them. God in the Hebrew Bible is Causality, and Causality, unlike Joseph or Benjamin, cannot be a character in a tale–an assertion that has been broadly contradicted, or at least qualified, in formulations by both Harold Bloom and Jack Miles. In his winning and ingenious book God: A Biography, Miles is moved to ask, "How did all this feel to God?" and sets out to see Him as a "character who 'comes to life' in a work of literary art." Miles's God has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. And while it may be possible to transmute aspects of Scripture into literature by means of the fictive imagination– certainly Thomas Mann succeeded in turning the Joseph chronicle into a massive and masterly novel–finally Scripture itself rebels against it. Mann's fiction can claim no greater authority than writerly genius.

Just here is the nub and the rub of it: if the God of the Bible is not "real, " then–in creative-writing-course argot–the Bible's stories won't and don't work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austen. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere "comes to life" of character.

It is the directness and the consummate clarity of Robert Alter's rendering that forces this conclusion. The translator's richly developed notes and reflections are informed by scholarship, wit, and intuition; without the intrusions of didacticism, they educate. But the antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty–whether or not we are willing to go there.

i was in brooklyn college in 1992, in the spring, after pesach… i was in the stacks section looking for old american Jewish literature review articles about chaim potok. (out of suny albany, this publication had some nice stuff, one with a title "the crucifixion of chaim potok" about "my name is asher lev", including a rebuttal by potok in the next or same issue. i am paraphrasing here, it being some years ago…this name kept on popping up in these fancy periodicals which at first i completely ignored. then it kept on coming up, and the titles appeared to be straight up my alley. so finally one day i took out "the pagan rabbi and other stories" and headed for the overpass on bedford avenue sitting down on the cement table-seats , seats which nobody ever used and have since been torn down.it was a sunny day. i began at noon and remained there until i could no longer read…. i don't remember even going to the bathroom. i was that transfixed. and it has never really left me. the next book i read was "the messiah of stockholm", a fictional account of an auschwitz survivor turned book reviewer for a stockholm newspaper who believes his dad to be bruno schultz, and of rumors swirling that schultz' mythical lost manuscript, "the messiah", which had thought to be written by him and destroyed along with schultz in the holocaust, that this very document had popped up in stockholm.but besides for brilliant  plot and her sheer b'kius in  jewish texts, from the talmud to history to hallacha to yiddish, and her command of many languages, and the fact that she hapens to be a frum woman who puts up the chulent every friday afternoon for her family, all of this, peaked shall i say, my interest.I wish to do a series here on Ozick, her essays and perhaps excerpts from her fiction, both short stories and novels.She is of the Lithuanian persuasion. she is considered to be one of the top living american writers by the international literary establishment… she is right wing on Israel… but very explorative and open about everything in her fiction. this is hardly what some term "charedi fiction".

Ben Atlas gives some serious treatment to the Coen Brothers' most personal and most Jewish movie, A Serious Man, and here's an excerpt (Ben Atlas should be writing for commentary, not a blog),

The film opens with a rashi quote: “accept with simplicity everything that happens to you”(where did he say that?). Larry Gopnik, the father, enters a Kafkaesque plot preempted by the five-minute Yiddish mini-film. An episode with the Dybbuks omewhere between Lvov and Lublin. And although there is no obvious connection to rest of the story, I see it as an announcement by the Coen brothers that the film is about Jews who call themselves ivrim because they are m’ever, from the other side of the river and everything they do is connected to what happened elsewhere, i.e not here. Ethan Coen said “it feels right”. The paradox of this film is that you are not really sure if this is a comedy or a horror. I am leaning and landing on the horror side of the river.

Continue reading A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers by Ben Atlas and here is the addendum.

Tzemach wrote pertinently in an email,

 The problem with Chulent is most people there need to move forward but
the framework is set up to pull people backwards. Instead of detox
from the Judaic indoctrination it is a comfortable opiate figuratively
and literally.

I cant believe that in NY there is no place for cultural
deconstruction and reconstruction. Instead there is a regurgitation of
the same uninspired and gaseous matter. People need to take the past
to task instead of succumbing and resigning to it.

This letter was sent by the Rebbe Reb Bunim to one of his Chasidim who couldn’t make to him for the holiday. It was also signed by some of his other Chasidim as well as Reb Bunim’s son Avraham Moshe.

Sunday, Ki Savo, 1826 – here in Pershuschah.

Life, peace and joy to his honor, the friend of my soul and heart, the brilliant and sharp rabbi of renown, the perfect sage, his name is known at the gates, his honored name, our teacher the Rabbi Alexander Ziskind, may his light shine.

Since it is a number of years (until the coming of the Redeemer) that ‘the honor of his torah’ resides within the chamber of my heart, and is a friend in the hidden reaches of my thoughts’ legacy, I will speak this time as to my own heart.

It is written (II Kings, 4:13) “I dwell in the midst of my people” and it is written (Jeremiah 31:3) “God appeared to me from afar” – and this is the secret of Rosh Ha-Shanah. The joy and the anxiety are concealed in fear (ha-simchah ve-ha-da’agah musteres be-pachad) may god grant us both together. The understanding grows from the deed; for the deed is “mystery” and the understanding is “light,” and they resemble each other (ha-binah tigdal me-ha-ma’asah ki ha-ma’asah “raz” (=207) ve-ha-binah “or” (=207) ve-sh’neihem domim).

And bless God, who has preserved and sustained us, that we rise in remembrance before the Lord of all, so that perhaps it arouse mercy to take us from darkness to light. With God’s help, ‘the honor of his torah’ will not be forgotten from our hearts and from the hearts of all the members of our group, for a good remembrance. And may God in His mercy give him joy and life and a “writing and sealing of good” to him and his household and his entire city.

Thus the words of his soul and heart which yearns with love,

Simchah Bunim.

We too, his loved ones and friends, seek his welfare with love and may the blessing of our Rabbi (may he live) be fulfilled and may we merit to hear from him good tidings and rejoice together always, with his soul and the souls of his friends,

The small one, Yitzchak of Zarik (Vorker Rebbe)

The small one, Yitzchak Meir (Chidushey Ha-Rim)

The small one, Menachem Mendel of Tomishov (Kotzker Rebbe)

Meir Kvaller

R. Yaakov Vorker (Radzminer Rebbe) and R. Shlomo Zalshiner indicate his welfare as they are in the middle of praying.

I, the young one, too seek his welfare and I ask of him that he preserve this letter and bring it with him, god willing, when he travels here and then we shall study it together in an in-depth seminar.

The words of his beloved friend, the small one,

Avraham Moshe

-atgate231