Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

Wilma’s Orphans is my mother’s dog rescue.

I’m thinking a lot this morning about how important it is not to force change, but rather to create the space where change is possible and then to choose from among the possibilities that present themselves, even if it’s status quo vs a single alternative.

I miss the way my cat, Leila–whom we had to let go a couple of months back–would keep me company while I wrote.

The danger of “the paralysis of analysis:” spending way too much time just thinking, not doing anything about organizing my digital life. Right now, I can’t stop hemming and hawing over whether to make Micro.blog my main site. So many damned questions.

Last night, at the end of a meeting I attended, the presiding officer, a Jewish woman, in the process of wishing attendees happy holidays and happy New Year, included Happy Chanukah among her greetings. This despite the fact that Chanukah has been over for more than a week. It was, I know, a reflex borne of long habit, but let’s be honest, that habit is rooted deeply in the way that Chanukah is all but invisible to non-Jews when it it is not near Christmas on the calendar and, when it is visible, is turned by those same non-Jews into the “Jewish Christmas.” A perfect example of that phenomenon is the Fox News host who declared, after someone allegedly set fire to the network’s Christmas tree, that:

“[The Christmas tree is] a tree that unites us, that brings us together. It is about the Christmas spirit, it is about the holiday season, it is about Jesus, it is about Hanukkah…It is about everything we stand for as a country and being able to worship the way you want to worship. It makes me so mad.”

If that statement doesn’t epitomize cultural appropriation, I don’t know anymore what cultural appropriation is. Not only are Christmas and Chanukah two very different holidays, with very different origins and very different significances, but to say that the Christmas tree is about Chanukah is to erase completely the entire history of the (particulaly European) Christian oppression of the Jews. More even than that, though, what the Fox News host said put me in mind of the central idea explored in David Nirenberg’s book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, which has to do with the ways in which Christians, and Western thought in general, have made use of the idea of Judaism and the Jews, regardless of whether those ideas are connected to the actual individual and collective lives of Jewish human beings.

The way that Fox News host used the idea of Chanukah seems to me a good example in that it served a distinctly (if secularly and ecumenically expressed) Christian end: to reinforce the idea that the United States is fundamentally a Christian country and that it is in fact Christiantiy that ensures “everything we stand for as a country and being able to worship the way you want to worship.”

All of this crystalized for me this morning into the idea that stands as the title of this post. It needs a lot of unpacking, but it’s an idea whose time may very well have come: As whiteness is to people of color, so Christianness–not Christianity, Christianness–is to Jews and the people of other non-Christian religions.

As I said, that needs a lot of unpacking. For now, I’m just going to leave it here, as a provocation to further thought, if nothing else.

Today I put the finishing touches on what is likely to be my last official act as a union officer, a grievance that I hope will be resolved informally but that could turn into a very messy and very ugly. I won’t be there to see what happens because I’m stepping down as of December 31, and I’m feeling kind of sad. This month ends ten years of service to my union. I will miss it, especially the camaraderie, but I’m excited to see what’s next as I turn my attention back to my writing. I had to let too many opportunities slip by because of the union work and I was starting to resent it. That’s how I knew it was time.

Two Trees, by Don Paterson @donpatersonpoet. I love the kind of truth-telling where this poem ends up

Leila after taking her thyroid medicine.

A new blog post: The Music I’d Like to Put Back in My Life:

“My grandmother made sure I understood I could ever be good enough. “You started too late,” she told me. “To be a concert pianist, you need to begin formal lessons while you’re still a young child.”

“In Minnesota, the number of teachers applying for retirement benefits increased by 35… In Pennsylvania, the increase…among school employees, including administrators and bus drivers, was even higher — 60 percent over the same time period.”

www.nytimes.com

Sterling A. Brown from The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetrt. Absolutely beautiful!

My cat thinks it’s time for me to take a break.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #97

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #96

Two new poems up on Unlikely Stories: one about something that happened 30 years ago when I was teaching English in South Korea; the other the first poem I’ve written that explicitly takes on whiteness. @USdotorg

This is a lovely and powerful poem by @RosebudBenOni on Poem-A-Day: “So They Say— They Finally Nailed— the Proton’s Size— & Hope— Dies—"

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #95

First newsletter since the pandemic shutdown. I’m hoping to be more consistent in getting this out once a month.

So this odd: A night with no email. My inboxes—note the plural—have been empty for hours.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #94

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #93

Cat Yoga

I am very happy to have a new poem, #24 from the sequence “This Sentence Is a Metaphor for Bridge” up on Open: A Journal of Arts & Letters, which is a fine literary magazine, both in its design and in its content.

#poetrycommunity

This is very strange and a little disturbing: Duck Sauce - Big Bad Wolf

#TheSealeyChallenge Day 31 (last day): Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil @januaryoneil.

This is from The Rookie

But this is Little League.
This is where he learns
how to field a position,

how to play a bloop in the gap—
that impossible space where
he’ll always play defense