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Feb. 4th, 2005 08:18 pmMy beautiful fandom, exploding in wank. "Gaaaaaah, new fans suck!" vs. "But we are all fans--share the (rock) love!"
I'm personally happy that more people are digging them. It means fewer blank stares when I talk about them.
Meanwhile, Wendy Shalit (you know, her who seems to think that rape is caused by lack of modesty and was the 'pretty girl at the dance' for conservatives in the late nineties) is horrified that people write less than glowing fiction about Orthodox Jews.
Tova Mirvis schools her:
Insiderness, at least the kind that's useful when writing fiction, is neither easily shed nor easily adapted. . .[I]t comes from knowing that transgressions, large or small, don't threaten the entire system. . .
Literature in service of some other value is not literature, or at least not good literature. When we require our novels to promote, idealize and proselytize, we strip them of their capacity to explore, express, examine and, most importantly, imagine other lives besides those we actually live. The act of reading lets all of us be inside and outside at the same time.
And that's what's so threatening and so exhilarating about books. There's a reason that the mullahs of Tehran ban books, and a reason that Shalit finds these books so problematic. Books are dangerous and interesting because they're about people, and people are dangerous and interesting.
(For the record, while I have not finished it, I liked The Ladies Auxiliary, and there are folks who see themselves as having past lives as Jewish people. There was a book on that, but I cannot remember the title. Ms. Shalit is sincere, but the bulldozing over other people's experiences with Orthodox Judaism (or any other movement, for that matter--if she was into Reform Judaism and wrote that, I'd feel the same way) is, as I see it, propping up a rigid idol rather than a living religion.)
I'm personally happy that more people are digging them. It means fewer blank stares when I talk about them.
Meanwhile, Wendy Shalit (you know, her who seems to think that rape is caused by lack of modesty and was the 'pretty girl at the dance' for conservatives in the late nineties) is horrified that people write less than glowing fiction about Orthodox Jews.
Tova Mirvis schools her:
Insiderness, at least the kind that's useful when writing fiction, is neither easily shed nor easily adapted. . .[I]t comes from knowing that transgressions, large or small, don't threaten the entire system. . .
Literature in service of some other value is not literature, or at least not good literature. When we require our novels to promote, idealize and proselytize, we strip them of their capacity to explore, express, examine and, most importantly, imagine other lives besides those we actually live. The act of reading lets all of us be inside and outside at the same time.
And that's what's so threatening and so exhilarating about books. There's a reason that the mullahs of Tehran ban books, and a reason that Shalit finds these books so problematic. Books are dangerous and interesting because they're about people, and people are dangerous and interesting.
(For the record, while I have not finished it, I liked The Ladies Auxiliary, and there are folks who see themselves as having past lives as Jewish people. There was a book on that, but I cannot remember the title. Ms. Shalit is sincere, but the bulldozing over other people's experiences with Orthodox Judaism (or any other movement, for that matter--if she was into Reform Judaism and wrote that, I'd feel the same way) is, as I see it, propping up a rigid idol rather than a living religion.)
