"If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish, even if you're Jewish." -Lenny Bruce (epigraph to Zadie Smith's sophomore novel, The Autograph Man
This is pretty much the main question about life: existance v. essence? nature v. nurture? You know that thing how there are only 32 possible plots and every story since Greek times or whatever has just been some kind of new reworking or update of one of those plots. I feel like this could be the 33rd plotline. You heard it hear first, folks!
TANGENT: I like that ish, I mean use of the word "ish." He's white. . .he's white-ish." Yeah, see? It works way better, way less restricting. Cus my mom calls Barack "white-ish" like every other time dude is on TV. The other day when Rahm Emanuel was on TV she said "he looks so white-ish" and I was like "mom, that's cus he is white!" and she was like "No, that's Eric Holder, he's black!" "No that's Rahm Emanuel, he's Jewish!" (You know you're Azn when. . .) "Oh, well, Holder is a light skinned black and Emanuel is a dark skinned white, Obama picks people that look like him. When they stand together, they all look the same." To that I say, Rahm Emanuel, step up your crop game!
But I wiki'd all of them. Eric Holder grew up in the Bronx, his parents are Barbadian. Rahm Emanuel grew up in Chi, his dad was an Israeli immigrant. I was like whoa, urban ethnic people? Their parents are foreign so you know they have the Fear of God in their hearts, something George Bush definitely didn't have enough of. But it was nice how it was like, people I would know are actually in office. Cus that's how I always felt about Barack Obama that he's like a person I would know. Cus my mom always said "he could have gone so wrong being biracial, he could have been one of those kids hanging around Telegraph smoking weed" (cus everyone on Telegraph is mixed! Or Filipino! Which is also mixed!) There is something very Berkeley about the President for sure.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: I started rereading The Autograph Man because I realized I wanted to review Zadie Smith's style without getting caught up in White Teeth. Because every time I read White Teeth it makes me so fucking happy because it simultaneously reminds me of all of my favorite people I met >2003 and reading the book c. 2002 and just losing my shit because it created a world of possibility for me. Even though I was too young to understand at the time, it's the kind of book that you think couldn't be conceived, published or well received because its too much like you and to quote my mother "who would look at you?" So the fact that it was all these things and won hella prizes and places on top 10 lists meant that there was some room in this world for little Martina. But I digress. . .I started reading Autograph Man again cus it wasn't as well received and cus I wanted to look at how she structures her novels. Also cus its about a Chew (a Chinese/Jewish dude). Mi gente! (the Jews I mean, "eff the Chinese" to quote my mother again)
I think if I had a literary mag I would name is Desultory or Beige Ppl Press. I'm lame like that. I liked BPP as an acronym but then I realized that's because it stands for Black Panther Party so its kinda already taken.
A SIMPLE DESULTORY DISCLAIMER:I get really angry every spring and I think most of my previous posts were evidence of this. My mom's bf asked me what made me happy and I was like "I'm not really one of those people" but I can say, with some hindsight, that I was significantly unhappier c. Spring 2009 than I am now. This is probably the only way Franz Kafka measured his happiness so maybe if I do this someday I'll be as thin as him?
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