In today's NYT: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/fashion/16playgirl.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

"They aspired to bring Playgirl back to its roots, back to a time when the magazine covered issues like abortion and equal rights, interspersing sexy shots of men with work from writers like Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates."

 "The women’s dreams crashed when Blue Horizon Media, which also puts out hard-core magazines, announced it was shutting Playgirl. The last issue, dated January/February 2009, recently arrived on newsstands."

 " Playgirl’s passing certainly will not be lamented as would the death of a more respected, or even a mildly respected, magazine. Yet for its writers and fans, something tangible has been lost in its closure."

“It was almost a way to get back at Playboy,” said Pamela Des Barres, the famed former rock groupie, who wrote a music column for Playgirl. “It was a great idea, and it could have been done better. It did offer women a way to see some gorgeous hot, young, sexy guys, and nothing’s wrong with that.”

“I think a different kind of porn is very degrading to women, but the kind of stuff we were peddling was about what women wanted,” said Ms. Caldwell, who is 26. “For better or worse, this was a real blow for feminism. We were the only magazine that offered naked men to women.”

Yeah, timemanagementforanarchists.com has some great tips for keeping your life useful and productive without need of a boss or externally imposed structure– and through them I found Nomediakings.com, which talked me into self publishing my book next time i'm in town. But all that is trivial in the face of this little meditation: My trip to liberty city where a gentle Canadian narrates a video of his trip to the base of Grand Theft Auto 3, and just walks round, visits a park, mimes a little, just to show how much more there is to appreciate in even the most problematic metropolis. Watch and be touched at the familiar traveler innocence that is possible when you're not just trying to win something.

What could you have harder than a rock, or less hard than water? Nevertheless, water will wear away the hardest rock.

-Ovid ( 43 BC – 17 AD) The Art of Love, Book 1 (also quoted in the tunnel linking the number 7 subway line with other subway lines at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street)

Let America Be America Again                                                                                                                                                                                              by Langston Hughes 

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

        (America never was America to me.)

 Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

          (It never was America to me.)

 O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

          (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?  

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.

I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--

And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--

Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home--

For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."

 The free?

 Who said the free?  Not me? Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung

And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet--

 And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine–the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME–

Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain.

 From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!

O, yes, I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

 And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

 Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain--

All, all the stretch of these great green states--

And make America again!

I am not a drama critic, nor a critic for that matter, but am inspired to write of yesterday's reading of SIN, a stage adaptation of I.B. Singer's story "The Unseen," at the JCC in Manhattan.

It was a ground-breaking literary experience for me. I was swept into another world, and felt moved, lifted, changed, inspired as to new possibilities for life, for art.

It was a drug and I'm still not off it. F. Murray Abraham was a magnetic presence on the stage and became, like electric, Satan. To convince an audience that you are Satan must be a pretty difficult task. The audience was swept away, with Royze Temerl, played so Jewish-beautifully by Marilyn Chris, I.B.'s creation sprung to life.

While this was just a reading, the actors were immersed in the text and characters, and the text was golden, adapted splendidly by Mark Altman who seemed to be able to capture the Yiddish nuances in the English, a difficult feat, pulled off so well. The text was so damn good that F. Murray Abraham, stopped after one of the lines, and exclaimed, "Isn't that a great line?!" and everybody cracked up, including the actors, and he then added, "This is Yiddish Theatre!"

I am sure the reading will lead to a full scale production and I await to re-experience and to be re-invigorated.

Singer And ‘Sin’

F. Murray Abraham is part of a star-studded reading of “Sin,” based on I.B. Singer’s “The Unseen.”

by Ted Merwin

‘Sin,” wrote Andre Gide, “is whatever obscures the soul.” In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, “The Unseen,” a prosperous, middle-aged Jewish man named Nathan is tempted by Satan to leave his loving wife and run off with his lusty housekeeper. He ends up broke, living on an upper floor of a dilapidated guesthouse at the rear of his own former property, dependent on his ex-wife’s continued generosity and reduced to being a ghostly witness to the townspeople as they go back and forth to the synagogue for the High Holy Days. Now, just in time for Yom Kippur, comes Mark Altman’s theatrical adaptation of the story, entitled “Sin.”
Directed by Robert Kalfin, “Sin” will be presented this Sunday afternoon at the JCC in Manhattan

in a star-studded reading featuring F. Murray Abraham as Satan, Paul Hecht as the main character and Alvin Epstein as his wife’s second husband, Moshe Mecheles.
Time and again, in his many novels and stories, Singer created memorable male protagonists who gave themselves over to their passions — think of “Satan in Goray,” “The Magician of Lublin” and “Enemies, A Love Story.” But what struck Altman in particular about “The Unseen,” which he called “crushing and merciless,” was its exploration of the very idea of sin.
“I tried to question all of our concepts about sin,” Altman, who formerly worked with the Folksbiene and the New Worlds Theater Project, told The Jewish Week. “Our connection to God seems so tentative. But unless you have a real relationship with God, how can you sin against Him?” Altman pointed out that while “The Unseen” seems on the surface to refer to the protagonist, the title can also refer to God, who never appears or resists Satan in any way.
Abraham, who is not Jewish, is frequently drawn to playing Jewish characters. The Academy Award-winning actor appeared Off Broadway last year in Theater for a New Audience’s twin productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Jew of Malta.” But “Sin” brings him back to Singer; he starred in the Yiddish author’s “Teibele and Her Demon,” which ran briefly on Broadway in the late 1970s.
“Satan is the ever-present evil in each of us,” Abraham said in an e-mail message.
“And yet we do indeed make our own demons.” This is why, he recalled, he was “so carried away” by playing Shylock. “I never thought of him as a demon, but as a proud man of great dignity who was trampled upon.” Abraham noted that “the greatest contribution of the theater is the collective experience of shared torments that each of us thought were shameful and personal.”
“Sin” will be read on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. at the JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th Street. For tickets, $10, call the box office at (646) 505-5708.

There was a piece in Harper's (it's not online and I forget the author) 2 months ago about assimilation killing off that unique voice. It died with Roth, they say.

For there to be a an American-Jewish literary genre we must hark back to what? to Yiddish? To religion? To an East-European shtetl mindset? These three still exist. Like where we all came from.

I hate when they ignore Charedim in their survey of the American-Jewish scene.

The first long quote is about "Commentary", "The Menorah Journal" and his relation to Judaism; the second quote is about Ginsberg, Kerouac, Carr and the David Kammerer murder.

from Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and his discontents by Louis Menand

The Middle of the Journey” is the last work of fiction that Trilling published. The explanation usually given is that he was wounded by the reviews, particularly one in Commentary, by Robert Warshow. Warshow was a likable man, but he was a coldhearted critic, and he knew where to slip in the knife. Among many other things, he complained that none of the major characters in “The Middle of the Journey” are Jewish, even though “the middle class which experiences Stalinism was in large part a Jewish middle class.” The insinuation was that Trilling was trying to conceal his own Jewishness. “Mr. Trilling might have come closer to the ‘essence’ of the experience,” as Warshow dryly put it, “if he had been more willing to face his own relation to it.” The sting was that Trilling knew Warshow, they had the same politics, and he knew the editors at Commentary. He must have felt that this was family.It was family, and so there is a back-story. Commentary had been founded by the American Jewish Committee two years before, in 1945. Its editor was Elliot Cohen, and Trilling was invited to join the advisory board. He declined. He didn’t want to be associated with a magazine that approached issues from a self-consciously Jewish perspective, and he was suspicious of the editor’s motives. “Elliot’s invitation to join the contributing board of editors of his Jewish magazine—not made in good faith—impulse to ‘degrade’ me by involving me in a Jewish venture,” he wrote in the journal. His refusal was not taken well by the editors, and Warshow’s review was evidently payback. Soon after it appeared, Trilling had a dream in which he watched three adolescents murder a bus driver: they pat him gently on the neck while they explain that they are going to kill him. “No emotion on the part of leader or his two followers except cruel intent—my sense that I was witnessing the cruelest possible thing,” Trilling described it in the journal. He associated the dream with Warshow’s review; he thought that the bus driver must be Cohen.

The question that Warshow raised about Trilling’s relation to his Jewishness was raised many more times after Trilling became a public figure. There were rumors that he had changed his name from Cohen, and remarks about his Anglophilia and his genteel manners. The case is not complicated. Trilling’s father, David Trilling, was an immigrant from Bialystok. His mother, Fannie Cohen, was born in London; her parents were Polish and Russian immigrants. The family was middle class when Trilling was a student, but the parents suffered during the Depression and afterward, and Trilling had to help support them. Most of his early short stories and reviews were on Jewish themes, and a lot of them appeared in a magazine called The Menorah Journal, which he wrote for frequently between 1925 and 1931, and where he was an editorial assistant from 1929 to 1930.

The Menorah Journal focussed, as one might expect, on subjects of interest to Jews. But when it came to “the Jewish present,” as Trilling described the editorial policy many years later, the magazine “undertook to normalize it by suggesting that it was not only as respectable as the present of any other group but also as foolish, vulgar, complicated, impossible, and promising.” The editors regarded it as a provincialism, a limitation on their intellectual freedom, to assume that there must be something called “the Jewish point of view”; the writers made fun of Jewish pieties about Jewishness without losing their feeling of solidarity as Jews.

“It is never possible for a Jew of my generation to ‘escape’ his Jewish origin,” Trilling explained, in a symposium on Jewish writers in 1944. Still, he said:

I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a “Jewish writer.” I do not have in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish.

Around the same time, Trilling was asked to address Jewish students at Columbia. There is no innate quality of Jewishness, he told them. The culture of an American Jew is not Jewish; it’s American. Jewishness exists only because of “the belief of non-Jews that Jews constitute a racial entity and a certain kind of action on the part of non-Jews based on this belief.” Without this prejudice against the Jews, “the idea of Jewishness would largely disappear.”

Sartre was criticized for making the same argument, a few years later, in “Anti-Semite and Jew,” but there are always non-Jews who have ideas about “the Jews,” and so there are, on Trilling’s theory, always good reasons for Jews to feel Jewish. Even at Columbia, Trilling was not talking in a vacuum. When he was a graduate student there, he was advised by his professors to leave the English Department on the ground that it was not a congenial place for someone who was, as they put it, “a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew.” He was the first Jew to become an assistant professor in the department; he was appointed by the autocratic president of the university, Nicholas Murray Butler, during the summer vacation, so that the faculty would not have to be consulted. Afterward, his former dissertation adviser, Emery Neff, paid a visit to him and his wife, Diana, to explain that he should not understand his promotion to mean that the department would welcome any more Jews. The Trillings were not the kind of people to trim their style to suit the prejudices of people like Emery Neff. They had a mild scorn for Jews who, in their view, wallowed in Yiddishkeit, as they thought Kazin did in his memoirs; but Trilling was offended when a Jewish critic, Robert Alter, characterized his relation to Judaism as “honorable.” “What nonsense,” he wrote in his journal, toward the end of his life. “It had always—almost always—been a positive pleasure, an excitement.”

The oddest part of the Commentary episode is that the editor of The Menorah Journal when Trilling wrote for it was Elliot Cohen. Cohen had been a brilliant English major at Yale, but he had decided not to pursue an academic career because of anti-Semitism. Thus Trilling’s suspicion that Cohen was trying to “degrade” him: Trilling thought that Cohen resented his academic success. Eventually, Trilling did become a contributor to Commentary, and he and Warshow became good friends. After Warshow died, of a heart attack, in 1955, at the age of forty-one, Trilling wrote an introduction to his collected essays, “The Immediate Experience” (1962). He did not ask the publisher for a fee, out of friendship for Warshow.

There is in Trilling’s writing much of what Arnold called “the Hebraic”—a concern with right conduct. But you don’t have to be Jewish to love Hebraism. If there is a religious analogue to the spirit of Trilling’s criticism, it is one that he shares with most modern American thinkers: the Protestant Reformation. From his break with Communism and the Popular Front to the end, his work was about fighting the evils of institutionalized authority. The recessional at his memorial service, in St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus, was Martin Luther’s great hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

and then on the beats

A few years after he published “The Middle of the Journey,” Trilling had a conversation with Allen Ginsberg, a former student whom he had ministered to during various adventures with university, medical, and legal authorities. They talked about a novel that Jack Kerouac, who had also been a student at Columbia, was finishing. Kerouac had once been involved in a murder committed by another Columbia student, Lucien Carr: he was arrested for helping Carr conceal the murder weapon. Trilling insisted to Ginsberg that a novel by Kerouac could not be any good. “But later I saw with what bitterness I had made the prediction,” he wrote in his journal, “not wanting K’s book to be good because if the book of an accessory to a murder is good, how can one of mine be?—The continuing sense that wickedness—or is it my notion of courage—is essential for real creation.”

from your favorite news source                                                                                                                                                                                  http://tinyurl.com/3f7yxn                                                                                                                                                                                           with a hat tip to  Schmorgel (van Borgel) 

Literature seems to be bad for your health 

Postmodern Writer, David Foster Wallace, Is Found Dead at Home