DO ANT THEOLOGIANS EXHORT THEIR multitudes against the fate awaiting them under Dante’s Magnifying Glass?
Echo (Pithyism #18)
Words To Bring Back: “Juggernaut”
– Definition: “1 chiefly British : a large heavy truck 2 : a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path”
– Used in a sentence: “My sister’s new baby is a juggernaut of cuteness.”
– Why: Because Old Hindi words sound so innately cool.
First Graf: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1
THERE ARE BOOKS, AND THERE are books. This one contains “The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America,” and is standard issue to all geeks and geekettes who want to know the first thing about things SFnal. (It’s subtitled “Volume One, 1929-1964;” Volume Two (which I haven’t read) is itself two 1973 volumes devoted to novellas written and published between 1895 and 1961.)
I first read this (these? it’s an anthology, after all) when I was eight years old, as part of the first package I ever got from the Science Fiction Book Club. Without it for years, I now have a spiffy new trade paperback which seems almost a facsimile of the original contents in terms of fonts, layout, etc. And the memories! Stuck in Fredric Brown’s alien showdown (which became a Star Trek episode)! Trapped with Lewis Padgett’s mad teaching machines! Exploring Tibetan mythology with Arthur C. Clarke!
Equationary Simples
METAL = ROCKS + FIRE / SLAG.
WRITING = WORDS x TIME / TALENT.
LOVE = PEOPLE – EGO x ACTION.
COOKING = INGREDIENTS + TASTE x EXPERIENCE.
TEACHING = THOUGHT1 + THOUGHT2 x EXPERTISE / TOPIC.
FILM = IMAGES + SOUND x IMAGINATION
MUSIC = RHYTHM + MELODY x SOUL
ART = INTENTION + MATERIAL x ACTION
“Self-Deleting Jews”
(Feel free to skip if you’re not hot for ethnoapologetics.)
THERE’S AN UGLY MEME IN the Jewish community that may or may not have analogs among other minority groups: the so-called “self-hating Jew.”
This term, most often used in online Jewish fora (the Forward, Tablet, Jewschool, et al) when someone Jewish posts a critically outre comment about Israel, is more generally used to describe one who turns his or her back on “the tribe” and spends some significant time publicly railing thereupon. (Peter Beinart and Adrienne Rich come most prominently to this writer’s mind, but someone once used it to describe me when I naively asked in one forum, “Is there such a thing as ‘too Jewish?'” I don’t think so, but some apparently do.)
Pithyism #+/-1
Thank God or your equivalent that the uttermost limits of joy and misery remain mostly unexplored — and largely uncommunicated.