End: Aleph & humility
Intro; 2. RockBill/Leonard Cohen; 3. Margo; 4. Crown Heights; 5. RockBill/Tom Waits, Geo. Clinton/more berating friends; 6. Reuben, talks with; 7. END (calls Josh, cries, HUMILITY, the aleph, the living and the dead)
A.
I was born a Roman Catholic, Irish Catholic, and although my brothers and sisters and I all made our first communions, our first confessions and all were successfully and XX confirmed XX, we were never particularly sentimental about our ethnicity: no Irish jigs or XX, no one drank excessively--not really-- (dad sz jaysus); and Saint Pat's Day was no big deal (green). We attended church every Sunday until I was about twelve, then we stopped going just as easily as we XX, that is, we slipped off the XX of just as the XXXX, and yet, there was one thing that, over the years, rankled me, the idea that the Irish are XXX and XXX.
"When the Irish potato famine happened," an old college friend started with XX, "they didn't have to starve. I mean, they could've just fished for their meals out of the XXX."
Oh my God, I had to mutter under my breath as XX. "Oh, my XXXX god. Are you fucking stupid, or what?" I shot back at him. "The point isn't that there were no potatoes to eat, asshole, the point is that their entire economy, their entire XX in trade was purposely wiped out by the British and all those poor tenant farmers ended up in XX debt to their XX Protestant landlords. They had to pay rent, too, dickhead. Just like you and me."
You see, I knew what he was doing: XX couldn't defend his point about XX, so he resorted to bigotry, and was saying, essentially, that the Irish XX were too goddamn stupid to feed themselves; too XX to put a fishing rod in the XX and feed their families---and he was saying this, or implying this, because his position was completely indefensible and he knew it.
"How fucking stupid do you want to be?" I continued with Xx. "Even a hungry dog, a mangy, flea-bitten mut will feed itself any way it can. Are you still taking the stupid pills? Are you, like, so pathetically XX by your XX, that you literally can't distinguish your asshole from a XXX?"
I couldn't stand the arrogance and prejudices of some of my friends—absolutely hated the XX—but I could always get my revenge by berating them for their XX. And it was especially sweet to XX and XX my Jewish friends. You see, I was a precocious child, I knew XXX by the age of seven and I loved it ---I didn't like it, I loved it ---when my Jewish friends said something not XXX and I could correct them. In other words, I loved telling my Jewish friends how stupid they were. I'm not an anti-Semite, it's just---well, let's face it---how many times does an Irish Catholic get to tell Jewish professors and publishers and XX that they're so fucking stupid, he can barely XXX?
"Wait," I stopped another friend, Joshua Moses, my former editor. "You're telling me that crime went down in the 1990s because abortions were more available in the 1970s? You mean, the answer to the problems of crime, XX, xx is killing black babies? Is that what you're saying? Shit, you'll believe anything they tell you. Anything the mass media wants you to believe, you accept. How can I even stand in the same room with such a XX moron? You're an embarrassment, do you hear me? You're XXXX."
Describe his response.
The word applied to me, eventually, was 'strident.' I was XX and XX. Couldn't be dealt with.
loved calling them stupid:
golding (a burnout; too much PCP)
grossman: legislature & Hispanic; nose job
larry king
nancy speez, scandalously ignorant; pours back soup, Bucky, Casablanca
my favorite: "the shit that comes out of your mouth"
1. holocaust/good ordinary people
2. "that's the tragedy"
3. Vietnam and Jim Crow--neighbors look the other way
4. "you're a dolt!"
5. "I didn't know they made Jews that dumb."
Conversations w JM: politics, spirit
w blau: cosmos, holocaust
B. RockBill (before Crown Hts): Cohen, Phil Bloom , Hubert
C. Margo (same chapter?): all about the dog, beauty and sweetness, and I hope she wrote her story.
D. Crown Hts, Ivan and the Russians, Ellenville, aleph-beis, smells of room
(i.) A beard or whatever you call it
(ii.) That's what I'm afraid of
(iii.) just what Reuben shows you
(iv.) "i wouldn't say he's brilliant"
(v.) Reuben the Gentile story
(vi.) other Rockbill interviews, later: Tom Waits, Geo Clinton (Hammer: “you’ve infiltrated the community”)
A.
I was born a Roman Catholic, Irish Catholic, and although my brothers and sisters and I all made our first communions, our first confessions and all were successfully and XX confirmed XX, we were never particularly sentimental about our ethnicity: no Irish jigs or XX, no one drank excessively--not really-- (dad sz jaysus); and Saint Pat's Day was no big deal (green). We attended church every Sunday until I was about twelve, then we stopped going just as easily as we XX, that is, we slipped off the XX of just as the XXXX, and yet, there was one thing that, over the years, rankled me, the idea that the Irish are XXX and XXX.
"When the Irish potato famine happened," an old college friend started with XX, "they didn't have to starve. I mean, they could've just fished for their meals out of the XXX."
Oh my God, I had to mutter under my breath as XX. "Oh, my XXXX god. Are you fucking stupid, or what?" I shot back at him. "The point isn't that there were no potatoes to eat, asshole, the point is that their entire economy, their entire XX in trade was purposely wiped out by the British and all those poor tenant farmers ended up in XX debt to their XX Protestant landlords. They had to pay rent, too, dickhead. Just like you and me."
You see, I knew what he was doing: XX couldn't defend his point about XX, so he resorted to bigotry, and was saying, essentially, that the Irish XX were too goddamn stupid to feed themselves; too XX to put a fishing rod in the XX and feed their families---and he was saying this, or implying this, because his position was completely indefensible and he knew it.
"How fucking stupid do you want to be?" I continued with Xx. "Even a hungry dog, a mangy, flea-bitten mut will feed itself any way it can. Are you still taking the stupid pills? Are you, like, so pathetically XX by your XX, that you literally can't distinguish your asshole from a XXX?"
I couldn't stand the arrogance and prejudices of some of my friends—absolutely hated the XX—but I could always get my revenge by berating them for their XX. And it was especially sweet to XX and XX my Jewish friends. You see, I was a precocious child, I knew XXX by the age of seven and I loved it ---I didn't like it, I loved it ---when my Jewish friends said something not XXX and I could correct them. In other words, I loved telling my Jewish friends how stupid they were. I'm not an anti-Semite, it's just---well, let's face it---how many times does an Irish Catholic get to tell Jewish professors and publishers and XX that they're so fucking stupid, he can barely XXX?
"Wait," I stopped another friend, Joshua Moses, my former editor. "You're telling me that crime went down in the 1990s because abortions were more available in the 1970s? You mean, the answer to the problems of crime, XX, xx is killing black babies? Is that what you're saying? Shit, you'll believe anything they tell you. Anything the mass media wants you to believe, you accept. How can I even stand in the same room with such a XX moron? You're an embarrassment, do you hear me? You're XXXX."
Describe his response.
The word applied to me, eventually, was 'strident.' I was XX and XX. Couldn't be dealt with.
loved calling them stupid:
golding (a burnout; too much PCP)
grossman: legislature & Hispanic; nose job
larry king
nancy speez, scandalously ignorant; pours back soup, Bucky, Casablanca
my favorite: "the shit that comes out of your mouth"
1. holocaust/good ordinary people
2. "that's the tragedy"
3. Vietnam and Jim Crow--neighbors look the other way
4. "you're a dolt!"
5. "I didn't know they made Jews that dumb."
Conversations w JM: politics, spirit
w blau: cosmos, holocaust
B. RockBill (before Crown Hts): Cohen, Phil Bloom , Hubert
C. Margo (same chapter?): all about the dog, beauty and sweetness, and I hope she wrote her story.
D. Crown Hts, Ivan and the Russians, Ellenville, aleph-beis, smells of room
(i.) A beard or whatever you call it
(ii.) That's what I'm afraid of
(iii.) just what Reuben shows you
(iv.) "i wouldn't say he's brilliant"
(v.) Reuben the Gentile story
(vi.) other Rockbill interviews, later: Tom Waits, Geo Clinton (Hammer: “you’ve infiltrated the community”)
1. vi. Still berates J friends for ignorance (at RockBill)
ALEPH: “If a man is humble, he can go anywhere,” stated your teacher, Reuben, in his high-pitched voice; higher-pitched than yours or JoMo’s.
Arch in Washington Square Park is ALEPH (we’d joke)
“All Hebrew letters extend upward on the right side,” fat, incisive and delightful Rabbi Wudowsky once explained, “because every one, every letter, yearns to be with Ha-Shem (God) in the World to Come. It’s the yearning, the desire that saves us, not the attainment of the impossible. It’s the unquenchable passion for redemption, souls on fire, that redeem the world, even when we can’t help but hate.”
And there was indeed hate, cheis, even in Crown Heights, even among those named for the city of love (Lubav), among those who can talk to the dead. There were racists, some who cursed at the ‘schwarzes’ and ‘niggers’ on Eastern Parkway. There were insurance scammers and adulterers. There were other unsavory aspects: weeping, wailing beggars from Minsk and Buenos Aires with their cups out on Sunday morning, tears rolling down pancake make-up faces. There were lecherous old men.
“He’s fucking the mother,” Blau said of one hasid, “to get to the daughter.”
“This world and the One to Come can be harmonized,” said Rabbi Krinsky over lamb shanks. “Must be harmonized.”
Sanity.
But where were the women?
One evening, while you and the other Reuben were studying in the shule’s (school’s) rather charmless wood-paneled basement room, which always smelled like roasted chicken and lamb and carmelized onions, a dozen or so men, most of them bearded and clad in black or dark blue, began filing in as the air-conditioner continued to crank out a cool electric breeze. Most of them sat down at one of the long tables and, in no time at all, were voicing songs of mercy and desire, all but forgotten melodies; bashing their fists on the table in the hope of ushering in the Messianic age. One of the men clad in black placed a bottle of vodka and a bag of tiny cups on to your table. Reuben began pouring it into the tiny cups.
“The king is in the field now,” Reuben exclaimed over the growing din. “Anyone who wants to see the king can do so now. But if you wait too long, the king will no longer be in the field. He will be in the palace and the door might be locked.” Reuben placed a cup of vodka in front of you. “It will be a lot harder, then, to see him.” Male voices shaped the shira or song:
“The king is in the field, the king is in the field, don’t you want to see him now?”
END: When you told Reuben that you could no longer continue studying with him because you’re not Jewish, he expressed surprise, then said it was okay with him. You could keep coming to shule in your black suit jacket and yarmulke for Hebrew and religious instruction.
“Your parents must think you’re off the wall, eh?” Reuben said over the phone.
“I haven’t mentioned it to them,” you replied.
**Crown HeightReuben:
1. what music (viola) teaches you: share, listen, be silent, act instead of criticize
- major keys/minor keys: waking and dreaming
- Dylan says this: “you like Dylan?” (everybody must atone/I would not feel so all alone)
2. humility/aleph
3. nothingness & zero
4. that means you really wanted to be here
5. judge the state not the man who inhabits that state
5a. arthritis
6. macrobiotic
7. yang/yin
8. men/women
X. *Ellenville, sabbath, Russians
Y. **Rockbill, ribbed about Lubavitch (infiltrated the community)
Z. Margo and Josh Moses
9.death and life: asking questions at night; answer in morning; the Temple
9a. Moses by Emil bock; the Dead Are with Us
10. Cain and Abel
11. Beth-Hakmidsash
12a. the dead
13. kindness
14. sword
15. hand on mine; Yakov @ turnstile/micah, new orleans
16. Chani
17. the living & what we can do for the dead
18. Reuben ruminates, meditates on his illness
10. Cain and Abel
11. Beth-Hakmidsash
12a. the dead
13. kindness
14. sword
15. hand on mine; Yakov @ turnstile/micah, new orleans
16. Chani
17. the living & what we can do for the dead
18. Reuben ruminates, meditates on his illness
ROCKBILL NOTES:
- Tom Waits
- Leonard Cohen
- Berating
- HKD, Hammer
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