Taken in a photo studio in Bragin, Ukraine. ca. 1900. A formal family portrait. A missing family member is shown in a postcard perched on the pillar in the middle. This is the family of Howard’s father, taken before he was born. You will note, they dressed “Russian,” not “Jewish.”
Toiletries
Swedish ad for toiletries, 1905/1906.
Unknown - This file was donated by Nordiska museet as part of the Europeana Fashion collaboration.
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Thursday, May 16, 2019
Many ways to watch time pass: replacing toiletries is one of them.
Ever think about the products we stuff into our bathrooms?
Think about them as we deplete and replace.
How long does a tube of toothpaste last?
A month?
When, after squeezing every last dollop of paste from the tube, you toss it, don’t check your calendar: it’s a month later than when we first twisted the top.
A roll of toilet paper?
How long does it last?
Two weeks if we’re alone.
One if we have a roommate with whom we share the role.
Floss?
Razor blades?
Everything has a shelf life.
Depleted, each item serves as a reminder.
Another week gone by. Month. Year.
Our blog has settled on a daily count of the number of postings: approximately thirteen years to go.
365 posts times 13 years (reaching for my cell, my calculator and coming up with 4,745.) This is approximate. This post is number 405, almost 10% of the commitment. Not a large percent but a hell of a lot further along than the year+ ago when we started the blog. Tick Tock.
Many ways to watch time pass: replacing toiletries is one of them.
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Announcement
Today we test whether our new delivery service will actually deliver.
To make sure we don’t miss a posting, we’ll also post in the regular way.
If it works, we will all receive a second posting of May 16.
If it works, the postings will henceforth go out at 4.00am of the posting date.
We thank you for you patience.
Love you all,
WebMeister
Although we’ll see rising temperatures, we’ll have a lot of rainy days coming at us.
Let’s not skip a single step because of the weather.
The hours are ticking away and if we don’t make the most of our time another day will soon click past.
Unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Our 405th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 405 posts we’re at the 8.10 percentile of our commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 12.01am.
On Thursday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 61* with a feels-like of 61* with a chance of a thunderstorm.
Dinner tonight is Turkey Salad Sandwich.
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Chuckle for
Thursday, May 16, 2019
A woman announces to her friend that she is getting married for the fourth time.
"How wonderful! But I hope you don't mind me asking what happened to your first husband?"
Mushroom
The toxic mushroom Amanita muscaria, commonly known as "fly agaric."
Amanita muscaria (fly agaric), Norway
MichaelMaggs - Own work
"He ate poisonous mushrooms and died."
"Oh, how tragic! And your second husband?"
"He ate poisonous mushrooms too and died."
"Oh, how tragic. I'm almost afraid to ask you about your third husband."
"He died of a broken neck."
"A broken neck?"
"He wouldn't eat the mushrooms."
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From: Howard Dinin
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2019 10:10 AM
To: Dom Capossela
Subject: so, in a sense, it’s a kind of test...
It only occurred to me as I thought further about it, this “regular person” discussion has inherent a test of the sensitivity of all of us to underlying currents (as the news media like to call them) in our society.
The short version of the discussion so far is that I used what is for me a common expression, unthinkingly, because it’s never been challenged. A very small thing, and in fact, if we have to examine these very small things (and what is life after all, but a succession of very small and even smaller things, interrupted from time to time by somewhat larger things, and the even more rare very big thing?), it should be considered in the full context of what I said that “triggered,” if that’s the correct term in these fraught rhetorical times, first Sally and then Tommie (if she wasn’t encouraged to react by Sally asking out loud, and you deciding to broadcast what she said, and then my response...). I said, “like a regular person and not me.”
I’m important. Not as in Howard Matters (#howardrallyontheBenFranklinPkwyWednesday). But as in, a signifier that some of us were raised to be aware of our otherness, of our having some mysteriously detectable qualities that made us stand out. And of course, the important contextual detail is that Jews, specifically, but I hope it’s clear that this applies to almost any ethnicity or creed that has a strong communal component in its identity, are at some level of consciousness always aware of being Jewish, which is to say, of not being—in our country; as the product language puts it, “conditions may differ in other societies”—of not being the prevailing sensibility: white, Christian of some kind, etc. That is, a regular person. And there is the concomitant obverse of this. Famously, in their cultural history, Jews are stereotyped as clannish, xenophobic, secretive, mysterious (all that mystical Kabbalah stuff). But these qualities, however accurate the attribution, are products of behavior that derives from an awareness of, and a desire not to be, how we may be perceived as standing out, of being different.
My parents both were immigrants from Russia when they met in 1930. This snapshot taken in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, NY, was late in their courtship. They were married a year later. From all appearances, a young American couple in love, if not for some other reason vaguely distracted. As long as you didn’t hear my father’s accent, you’d think he was a regular person. My mother’s accent, also very thick, but unmistakably Bronx.
In time, the substantive anxiety and heightened vigilance are assimilated and titrated and acculturated. I think it’s fair to say that even as much as Jews who emigrated to this country, and who, at first, religion aside, were as “strange” to the New World, as the most staunch and blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and repressive Puritan. As Philip Roth put it, vulgarly and (at least at the time) humorously, in his infamous novel Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1967, p. 89) to a Chinese, “[Jews are] just some big-nosed variety of WASP!” But to Jews, it was of value, always, to differentiate for the sake of both sides in the sociological proposition, who the Jews (the “we”) are, and who the goyim (the “other” for whom the Jew might be seen as an other) are. In Yiddish, in case you don’t know, “goy” means stranger, and more tenuously, other. The word is originally Hebrew, and means, nation. That is, any nation, as a constituted assembly of related inhabitants of the same land, which is not the home of the Jewish people. The denigratory overlay, especially in Yiddish, that inevitably is attached to the word, or perceived as such, came with usage. And undoubtedly the offense of using it, as it was originally merely a neutral descriptor. It came to mean a gentile, and therefore, until proven otherwise, to be observed for possible hostile intent.
All of this, I contend, is bound up in the perfectly, and humorously intended, which is the only way I ever use it, expression, “like a regular person.”
How do you like that?
xo
hd
from my iPad
WebMeister responds: Well enough to publish. May I?
Your piece is thoughtful and lovely and even heart-warming.
besides appearing to be logical and based on knowledge.
‘appearing’ because I know little of what you speak.
a great piece for the existentialautotrip community.
Howard responds:
Fine with me.
But please, use the text immediately below.
There were two typos and I corrected them.
If there’s any question, I’ll send another email with only the text.
As for the bona fides, I hope it’s clear that the explanation is from me. If it were a matter of what I could validate by reference, I’d have to go looking for appropriate texts from sources that can be cited. I did add a citation for the quote from Portnoy’s Complaint.
There is no question of the translation of “goy.”
xoxo
hd
WebMeister responds: I just appended this addendum.
I like illustrating the fastidiousness that pervades your body of work.
if you object, of course remove it.
d
To: d
From: Howard
I have a middle name, like a regular person. It is “fastidious.”
good