Meshalim 2.0

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Wax Nationalism

It took me a minute to realize why the Wax Museum of Madrid smelled like church. The odor I had always assumed was incense used for ritual purposes is, in fact, the smell of votive candles. Votive candles and wax statues of major figures in Spanish history and culture.

I’m currently writing a new biography of Moses Maimonides for a medieval lives series that will include images. My editor encouraged me to find images that are freely available to use through creative commons license or other means. As I was looking for images to include with my book proposal, I discovered that there is a likeness of Maimonides in the Madrid Wax Museum, but I couldnt’ find any photos that would be good enough to use for publication so I went to take my own. 

Behold Wax Maimonides (r) and Wax Averroes (r) in the wax Nasrid-style palace that holds all of the Andalusi figures, regardless of whether they lived in any kind of temporal or geographic proximity to Nasrid Granada.

 

Continue reading “Wax Nationalism”

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In the Fray

A prose translation in the style of Jack Spicer of Federico García Lorca’s “Reyerta,” part of a larger project I’m working on, but felt appropriate to share now:

In the fray: Deep in the trenches, the switchblades made in Albacete shine like fish, beautiful in the other side’s blood. A hard, playing-card light cuts through the acrid green, the frenzied horses and their riders’ silhouettes. Two old women cry into an olive-wood cup. The fighting bull climbs the walls. Black angels bring handkerchiefs and melted snow: angels with huge wings feathered with switchblades made in Albacete. Juan Antonio, the one from Montilla, rolls dead down the slope, his body full of lilies and pomegranates at his temples. Now he climbs the fire-cross and sets out down the highway of death. Now the judge approaches through the olive grove, National Guardsmen accompanying him. Spilt blood screams a muted serpent-song. Here, officers! The same thing has happened as always and four Romans and five Carthaginians are dead. An afternoon of crazy fig-trees and hot rumors falls on the wounded legs of the cavalry. And black angels fly through the air following the setting sun: angels with long braids and olive-oil hearts.

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Going Walkabout in the Aftermath

This may be a very Thomas Friedman kind of thing to write, but I went out for a walk this morning in the aftermath of the second wave of arrests on campus made of students who were camped out in solidarity with Gaza and I ended up chatting with a parent who lives on the Upper East Side and whose child is a student at Gallatin. She was walking her dog and said she had come by every day this week to see what was going on.

She told me that Gallatin faculty had circulated an email disputing the official account. I said that I thought that was correct, that I had seen nothing that comported with what the communications from the president’s office have suggested about violence, danger, or outside agitators.

She told me her son had started in Tisch, that it had been his dream, I thought she said since he was one and a half but that can’t be, but that he had transferred to Gallatin because of all the “woke bullshit” in Tisch. Like this, she gestured at where the encampment had been.

Oh.

She told me she had been coming down to walk her dog and take pictures to send to her mom, to show her what is happening in New York. She told me they are Jewish.

She told me that yesterday as she walked her dog, she felt safe standing next to one of the NYU security guards who was ex-military and that when one of the students from the encampment approached to ask her to keep protesters’ faces out of any photos she might take, she moved closer to him. She felt safer that way. She made a point of telling me he was a big, Black guy.

She mocked that girl and another who was wearing an anarchist jacket and had thick chains around her boots and was taking photos like she was a fashion photographer.

She told me she felt threatened, that she could “see the anger in their eyes.”

She asked: Do I think the students are motivated genuinely by not wanting people do die or do they hate Israel. I told her I try to give my students the benefit of the doubt and that I really do think they just don’t want people dying but maybe don’t fully understand the implication of everything that they’re saying.

She asked: Do I think they care if Jews die.  

She fawned over my son. She asked does my husband also teach at NYU. She told me about a practice of bibliomancy that some of her Iranian friends — “not Jewish, real Iranian” — practice with the book of a poet whose she couldn’t remember and maybe I knew who it was.

I couldn’t possibly divine.

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My Letter to the President and Provost of NYU

On Monday, 150 of my students and colleagues were arrested on campus during a peaceful protest. This is the letter I wrote to the president and the provost in response:

Dear Linda and Gigi,

I am writing to you adjacent to the letter you will have received from a group of Jewish faculty members regarding recent events on campus. I am writing separately because I do not want to co-sign a letter that calls for BDS or the closure of the Tel Aviv study abroad site; however, in every other respect I am in agreement with the concerns outlined in the letter by those colleagues with whom I am in religious community.

As a matter of principle, I do not believe in cultural or academic boycotts. As a practical matter, I conduct research in archives and libraries in Israel and have fruitful collaborations with colleagues there, many of whom are among the fiercest critics of the Israeli government and its policies toward Palestinians and regarding other matters such as judicial transparency, religious pluralism, and gender equity. I consider myself fortunate to have spent time at NYU-Tel Aviv as part of the GRI. However, I do believe that the value of boycotts is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree and that students and faculty must not be inhibited from expressing their opinions, demanding change, and trying to persuade others of their perspective.

Like my colleagues who have already written to you, I am dismayed by the extent to which claims of antisemitism have been exaggerated and used to quash student and faculty expression. While I may not agree with the substance of much of the protest or the set of demands coming from the students who formed the encampment on Gould Plaza and while I may find some of their commentary, chanting, etc., to be disagreeable, in poor taste, incorrect, or objectionable, I have a difficult time construing those things as threats to me as an American Jew on an American university campus.

I have seen the national debate at large about US involvement in Israel and about Israeli policies use antisemitic tropes and trade at times in antisemitic ideas. However, by and large that has not been the case at NYU and I am grateful to my students and colleagues that we can disagree about a very serious political matter without our discussions taking that sinister turn. It is my own opinion that calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish state without similar calls for the end of other theocracies or countries with records of human rights violations may be questionable in their motivation and their impact. However, I can also recognize that many people, including many Jews, do not view it that way; and it is precisely because disagreement exists on this question that I could not imagine imposing my own perspective on this matter, foreclosing discussion entirely, or asking the university to do it in the name of protecting me and my peers.

Linda, we have only met a few times in the context of your previous role in Global and my involvement with programming at NYU-Madrid, but if I may address you directly as I close my letter: It meant a tremendous amount to me to see a Jewish woman appointed president of the university. There’s no real reason for it except that affinity is funny like that. Now, however, I am embarrassed and angry to see a coreligionist quashing debate, which is so central to the Jewish tradition, and, what’s more, turning state power on other religious minorities — I am truly at a loss for words to describe my reaction to seeing photos and video of arrests being carried out while Muslim students were praying maghrib. First and most importantly, it is simply wrong. And second, I am acutely aware that anything that the state can do to a Muslim minority it can ultimately do to a Jewish minority as well. The actions of the NYPD on campus this week sanctioned by your office have not made us safer and have instead enacted a permission structure for repressing not only political but religious speech.

I know through my own area of academic expertise, namely the intertwined intellectual history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain, that members of the same and different religions can disagree fiercely, pray differently, and sometimes even insult each other polemically while most of the time still managing to walk the fine line of coexistence, resolving tensions through thoughtful engagement and agreement to disagree; based on what I know of your work as a filmmaker, I suspect you know this, too.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider your position. Please: do not impose punishments on the students who have exercised their freedom of expression this year and especially this week and do not sanction my colleagues who were arrested while trying to protect them. Treat their demands as demands to be addressed on their face and not as trespass against the university or any of its constituent communities. And barring real violence, please do not breach the trust of our university community by inviting the police to arrest students and faculty on campus. In short, please uphold the university’s own existing commitments to student and faculty freedom of expression and the right to protest.

I appreciate your consideration of my concerns.

Sarah Pearce

Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

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Why is Nobody Here? Who is Listening to Us?

I’m in a group that’s reading through Jack Spicer’s poetics this spring, and by way of introduction, we were asked to respond to his “The Poet and Poetry” and it spurred me to make some notes about something that I’ve been trying and failing to write since October. I’ll get there eventually.

***

— I hate the idea of introducing myself as a writer with something super unpolished so I’m going with bullet points so that I don’t feel like I’m uploading a shitty first draft (Anne Lamott) but rather notes for a shitty first draft that I can then share with no-one.

— Spicer’s “embarrassing question” (“why is nobody here? who is listening to us?”) resonates with a lot of the questioning about the relevance of the humanities today, and that’s even before he gets to his jabs at the New Critics.

— In my very small corner of the academic-study-of-poetry world, cited to the point of cliché is the question posed by Mahmoud Darwish: “Is al-Andalus in the earth/ or in the poem?” He’s asking whether this place in time (medieval Spain) that is so lionized or demonized or something-else-with-teethized is or was real or exists only in the imagination of poets.

— Since October I have been avoiding writing something about the unfortunate coincidence in my undergraduate syllabus that had me teaching the Andalusi Zionides the week that the war between Hamas and Israel began. These are lengthy poems written in Hebrew by the otherwise-Arabic-speaking Jewish poets of medieval Spain that express a longing for Zion, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes geographical and real. Normally I try to draw some distinctions between “Zionism” in the Middle Ages and political Zionism in the modern world. This time I just avoided saying the word as much as possible.

— I did a terrible job teaching poetry that I normally love and teach well because I just. didn’t. want. to talk about it. My friend Noam posted on Facebook that he teared up that week in a seminar he was teaching all about Andalusi poetry; I think he did the better job of it because he let his students see the impact that medieval poetry could still have on a person.

— Me? If I cry, it’s about the Sarajevo Haggadah. (Look up Geraldine Brooks’ piece from the New Yorker a bunch of years ago if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

— NYU kicked Faculty for Justice in Palestine out of the atrium of the library where they were holding a reading of Palestinian poetry because you can’t read poetry aloud in the atrium of the library.

— “Live poetry is a kind of singing… Poetry demands a human voice to sing it and demands an audience to hear it. Without these it is naked, pure, and incomplete — a bore.” Spicer was trained as a medievalist. Of course he knew this.

— One more bullet point would be putting, well, too fine a point on it, no?

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The Call de Girona Strikes Again

I’ve written about the Call de Girona before and the perils of trying to commodify Jewish history for a nation that expelled its Jewish population over half a millennium ago: Spain, I love you so much. And then you go and do stupid sh¡!t like this.

The Call museum has struck again, this time with a Purim post that I thought was maybe a joke, maybe playing on the instruction that one should drink until he does not know the difference between Haman the villain and Mordechai the hero. They posted a 19th-century Italian megillah (the Scroll of Esther, read for Purim) with one of the detail photos upside-down and backwards.

         

I posted a comment letting them know, suspecting that it was not a joke but prepared to take it in good humor if they came back at me with a “haha, you missed the humor!” They’ve deleted the post with my comment and re-posted it exactly as it was.

I’ve decided to try one more time, and as I promised them, I’ll leave it at that:

 

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My (Incomplete) Year in Books: 2023

I know I say this every year but I really didn’t read that much beyond what I needed to for work. Lots of true crime podcasts and cooking shows — that was about all I had bandwidth for. I also don’t think I kept as careful record of what I read this year as I usually do. And I did read poetry, but not a lot of it stuck. What I did read and make note of, though, was:

Because I don’t actually mind being disliked but sometimes it gets to me: The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

This was as hard to get into on a reread as I remember it being the first time around: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

So much better than I remembered, partly because of the new translation, partly because I wasn’t trying to read it in the space of a week for English 129 on top of all my other freshman-year-in-college coursework from that week: The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

I wanted the narrator to be a little more critical/skeptical: Black Girl from Pyongyang by Monica Macías

As it turns out, Captain Nemo is a better materials scientist and science communicator than the Titanic guy: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, audiobook read by James Frain

I *really* wanted to read this book from a methodological standpoint and still do, but am not currently in a frame of mind to power through all the airline safety issues (DNF for now): My Hijacking by Martha Hodes

Further DNF: Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow (was really put off by the self-indulgent teenaged rape-voyeur fantasy in the opening chapters) AND The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith (and since that’s two in a row, I think I’m officially off that series)

Read for Reasons(tm): Cribsheet by Emily Oster

I thought the last one was the last one, but this is really the last one: Riccardino by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Steven Sartarelli, audiobook read by Grover Gardner

I thought being one of four Sarahs inevitably in every room was bad, but: Doppleganger by Naomi Klein

Reread because first time through was on paper and the audiobook is narrated by Kenneth Brannagh: The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Reinforced my belief that poets are the best prose writers: Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Sean McCrae

I’m sure I read more this year, but maybe not much more, and a lot of it was books ranging from popular biographies to academic monographs about Moses Maimonides for work-related reasons. But I think this is as complete as this year’s list is going to get. 

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Life After Twitter

I began using Twitter in 2012. My first tweet was about the death of the unconventional Inquisition historian Benzion Netanyahu and I joined the site because I wanted to share the news, knew that none of my Facebook friends would particularly care, and had a vague sense that academics hung out on Twitter.

It’s been just over ten years, and my time on Twitter is evidently over. While I was setting up my (gloriously purple!) new iPhone, I accidentally disconnected my account from the two-factor authentication app that I have been using since Elon Musk limited 2fa-by-text message to paying subscribers. I’m locked out of my account, the three employees left at Twitter can’t verify my identity, and that’s that. 

Early on, Twitter was a lifeline for me. The #medievaltwitter community really helped me conceive of myself as a medievalist rather than as any of the other things my odd-duck, interdisciplinary, multilingual self might be.  I met folks who were supportive and encouraging as I raced against the clock to finish my first book and earn tenure. And it was a huge privilege to be able to listen in on and begin to participate in conversations in other corners of the wide academic medieval world. 

Transformative as it initially was, those benefits didn’t last. I grew increasingly frustrated with folks in the English-medieval world who have come to believe that the myth of the magic medievalist (which holds true for teaching — we can teach absolutely anything we’re asked to at the undergraduate level, and we’re often asked to teach everything before the 18th century) holds for research as well, and that being an Anglophone medievalist qualifies you to pronounce ex cathedra on everything from Arabic paleography to Ethiopic chronicles, even if you don’t read the languages. It ranged from disappointing to despair-inducing to watch my own hard-won expertise and that of my colleagues totally denigrated and disregarded because any medievalist can do anything that any other medievalist does. 

By the time the Musk-induced mass exodus from the platform began, I’d already bowed out of most of the #medievaltwitter conversations by now, mostly enjoyed the platform for enthusiastic recommendations of new-to-me books, and had begun branching out into following poetry twitter. My view wasn’t as apocalyptic as some; I don’t imagine the site truly going under any time soon. But all the same, I’m out.

Forty-eight hours off the site have been pleasantly quiet. I might create a new account and try to recreate my community of readers with fascinating and wide-ranging taste, and of Arabists, who never doubt the importance of actually being able to read Arabic before having an opinion on what a text says. But that won’t be at least until the fall, if at all. Right now I’m enjoying the quiet. I’m increasingly burned out, both because of changes in the pastoral care responsibilities we have for post-pandemic students and, mostly, because of the increase in electronic communication that the pandemic forced. I’m happy to have one less thing to check, one less set of notifications. 

I’m also happy about the prospect of returning to longer form writing here. I’ve been thinking for a long time about returning to blogging more seriously, but between Twitter for short things and trying to do more public-facing, proper, edited, in-a-periodical publishing for longer things, I was at a loss for how to use this space. So hopefully that will become clearer. 

It’s the end of an era for me, but between the Musk takeover and a lot of changes that I have coming down the pike in my personal and professional lives, it’s a good moment to mark and make a change, even if it was all because of a tech glitch. 

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My Year in Books: 2022

Abridged: The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoyevsky

“I am in the wrong city/speaking the wrong language”: The Italian Professor’s Wife by Ann Pedone

This must have been what Amichai was talking about when he crafted the image of translators’ fleeing a conference where their desks had been set on fire: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with more ways) by Eliot Weinberger, + all of Octavio Paz’s interventions within the book + Russel Maeth’s Para leer “Nineteen Ways…”.

Reading the kind of poetry I’d aspire to write one day: Leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess, Blackacre by Monica Youn, Darwin by Ruth Padel; Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

Learning the craft:  The Art of Daring, by Carl Phillips

The Seamus Heaney Syllabus: All of it. 

But then I also met Jack Spicer, posthumously: After Lorca, The Holy Grail, Golem.

The Sealey Challenge (not all completed in August): Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems; John Ashbery, Houseboat Days; John Ashbery, Some Trees; Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems; Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note; James Tate, The Lost Pilot; Jorie Graham, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts; Sharon Olds, Satan Says; James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem; Kenneth Koch, Selected Poems; Tracy K. Smith, The Body’s Question ; Richard Siken, Crush; Ada Limón, Lucky Wreck; Shane McCrae, Mule; Eavan Boland, The Historians; Barbara Guest, The Location of Things; Alice Notely, Selected Poems; Chris Abani, Smoking the Bible; Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, Lyric Poetry is Dead; Achy Obejas, Bumerán/Boomerang; Rachel Kaufman, Many to Remember; Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded; Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice; Bernadette Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader; Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies; Lisa Richter, Nautilus and Bone; Nathaniel Perry, The Long Rules; Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa; Solmaz Sharif, Look; Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets; Jessica Greenbaum, Inventing Difficulty

Other Brooklyn Poets’ miscellany: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman 

Discomfitingly timely: Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen

Saw the ad for the TV series, wasn’t super interested in watching but did want to read the book it was based on: Tokyo Vice by Josh Adelstein

Kept falling asleep in the middle of chapter five: Silverview by John LeCarré

Surprisingly, as bad as the internet said it was, DNF: The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbreith

Keep going back to him: A Nest of Vipers by Andrea Camilleri

I know I’ve said it before, but what I like about my current book project is the way it blurs the lines between what I read for pleasure and what I read for work: The Moor’s Last Sigh (for about the sixth time) by Salman Rushdie;  The Last Anglo-Jewish Gentleman by Todd Endelmann.

Philologists behaving badly: The Latinist by Mark Prins, Babel by Rebecca Kuang

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The Work of Art in the Age of Animal Crossing

I’m really into art crime: I have informed, well-considered, capital-T Thoughts about the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum heist and Hannah Arendt’s report on books and silver that the Nazis appropriated before deporting their rightful owners and other things as well. It’s interesting in all the parts of my brain, but with an edge. In another lifetime, if I hadn’t been an academic, and if my plan B weren’t driving a snowplow for the city and curating the Department of Sanitation’s in-house museum during the months when it’s not snowing, then I think I might have liked to join the FBI’s art crime squad. Highbrow, interesting, multi-sensory, but with an edge and a goal. I have an assignment for my honors students where I ask them to plan a heist in the Islamic Art galleries at the Met. It’s a way to get them to start asking why? without me having to be pedantic about it: an edge and a goal.

Like a lot of other people, I fell into the Zeitgeist and played Animal Crossing every day for over a year at the start of the pandemic. Totally lowbrow. I had to get over my primal fear of raccoons, as they are the characters who are in charge of the construction company that your character works for in the game, building up an island village inhabited by you and a bunch of animal non-player characters. I am so afraid of raccoons that I was perfectly prepared not to play a game features even cute cartoon ones. It helped when someone explained to me that these overlords are really tanooki, a kind of Japanese dog known for their enormous testicles and otherwise looking like long, skinny raccoons. They are dogs but they are called raccoons in the English version of the game, although the Japanese name is why it’s slightly funny that the chief raccoon-dog is called Tom Nook. Tom-Nook-i. Tanooki. Get it? So, there’s Tom Nook and a very enthusiastic Shi-Tzu named Isabelle who makes daily announcements for the residents and is responsible for putting up the Christmas lights all over your island and definitely got turned into a Bernie Sanders meme after Joe Biden’s inauguration  — this is ridiculous. I know. But it’s a game that can be played online and you can “visit” other players’ islands and I needed a way to stay connected to friends during the lockdown.

There’s also a pirate, a fox named Redd, who pilots a smog-belching fishing trawler called the Jolly Redd from which he overcharges for home goods and — and I promise I’m coming to the point — sells works of art priced out in the local currency. Some of the paintings and statues are real and some of them are faked. So Redd might be selling Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring” as Vermeer painted it, or he might be selling a similar canvas but the girl’s earring is star-shaped instead of round. It’s up to you to discern the reals from the fakes, buy the reals, and then donate them to the art and natural history museum that’s directed by an owl who loves fossils but is disgusted by bugs, whose sister is into astrology, and who is friends with the pigeon who runs the museum café. There are all kinds of player guides for the game online, including some about the art. It always feels a little like cheating to go straight there than to try to figure out myself what the painting is, then go to the real museum’s web site where the real painting really is, and see if I can spot the differences myself. I absolutely go straight to the player’s guides so I can buy the art and keep playing. What I don’t do is donate my purchases to the museum. Instead, I play as a criminal art dealer who matches Redd in shadiness.My in-game basement is full of Vermeers, Breughels, Seargents, Da Vincis (the fake “Vitruvian Man” has a coffee ring on it, which I find charming), Turners, as well as classical sculpture in monochrome and Japanese block-prints. The whole, full-sized “Las Meninas” is hanging in my in-game kitchen, Velázquez next to Pissarro and Cezanne, next to my digital stove and fridge and table.

I’ve been playing this game (less so now, but I was) and thinking about how it changes the ways we look at art, or at least how those of us who were playing it obsessively during the pandemic look at art. What does it mean to scrutinize the shade of purple of a tree not because the purple itself is interesting but because if it’s redder than it should be, then the work is a fake. What is a fake in this context, when it has been invented for a particular game and has no relationship to a forgery or a reproduction or a souvenir out in the world? It’s a harmless digital fake of a digital reproduction that claims in-game authenticity. You might, inexplicably, get the opportunity to buy multiple copies of the authentic “Girl with the Pearl Earring” (the fox is, don’t forget, a pirate), so how do artistic workshops and the art market function in the world of the game?

And what does all of this do to the possibility of ekphrasis? What happens when there are eight famous poems about “The Hunters in the Snow” but the version we keep encountering has the dogs in the foreground removed to serve the profit interests of a fox made of light? What is the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction that makes the Mona Lisa look much more surprised than she did when she was spirited out of the Louvre in 1911 — the theft that made the painting famous — or covered with whipped cream last year as part of a labor action? How do you read that first chapter of Les mots et les choses when the guy in Velázquez’s studio doorway is pointing at the king and queen and not just looking at them?  Is there even meaning here, or have I lost my mind after all this pandemic-time inside my own head and become a parody of myself?

I’m fascinated with cartoons and defacements of art meeting in this way and I want to write about it, but I feel like I’d have to read quite a lot of art theory and criticism before doing that and I don’t have the will or brain power for it, at least not right now. I’m burned out from writing prose but all I’m good at is writing prose. I’m burned out from research, but the personal essay is overdone so I’ll never get to explore these ideas except in poetry. Plus, the moment for Animal Crossing has really passed. But every time I sit down and try to write a kind of surrealist prose poem about this, it requires so much setup that it ends up being like flash fiction except I don’t write fiction because I can’t swing a plot. I’m burned out and I have a genre problem and this is all ridiculous anyway.