Why I Love the Internet Sometimes, and Summer's Still Going Strong

Yiddish and Books and Yiddish Books and My Book and Trash Haiku

Why I Love the Internet: Yidish postkartlekh

So I mentioned Postcrossing a few weeks ago. The other day I was on Bluesky and just talking. My thrust that day was about how difficult it is to learn to read handwritten Yiddish, and how I think in class we should not only have to do handwriting exercises with feedback but have to read others’ handwriting too. One of my Yiddish buddies replied that he’s in a postcarding group where people send each other cards in handwritten Yiddish- and now I’m in the group, too! So fun. Now I just have to come up with some Yiddish stuff to write about myself. I’m collecting vocabulary like “quilts” which is something like קאָלדרעס and some other words to use. If that’s not the right word for quilts please let me know! And if you want in on that group, let me know too!

Another Yiddish Podcast

Proste Yiddish or פּראָסטע ייִדיש is another fun podcast I found for beginner Yiddishists. The host has simple texts you can download, listen to, translate and use to practice handwriting. Fun!

Reading

I started reading Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield; this is a love story that reminds me a little of Jeff Van Der Meer’s Annihilation of all things although it’s not explicitly science fiction- yet. Annihilation is about a woman who goes on an expedition to a weird place after her husband goes there and returns changed in ways she struggles to understand. Our Wives is about a woman who comes back from a deep sea crash changed but as the book opens we don’t know how or why. Armfield tells the story in alternating first-person from the perspectives of Leah, the woman who came back, and her wife Miri who was (and is) left behind. Both women are at sea still, each in her own way. I love how Armfield combines lyrical writing and emotional touches with a propulsive, page-turning plot.

I loved Armfield’s earlier work, the collection salt slow, and would place her with Van Der Meer, Kelly Link, Mona Awad and China Miéville for sheer weird-fiction inventiveness, but with an emotional depth that goes further still.

I also started reading Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods, for obvious reasons. It’s fun. I like it. Definitely non-academic and written in the spirit of its subject, it’s a good time and I’m learning a lot.

TV Time

Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building started on Hulu this week and so far, so good.

I, Dolours (2018)

I, Dolours is a documentary I watched this week, about Dolours Price, former Irish Republican Army operative also featured in Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Keefe’s book focuses on the 1972 murder of Jean McConville and uses it as the basis for a profile of Price and her sister Marian. The movie is a more focused account of Price’s life from her point of view (she died in 2013). It’s always fascinating to listen to a villain tell their story in their own words. If you’re interested in the Troubles I recommend both the film and the book. How you feel about Price as she portrays herself in the film will probably depend on how you feel about the IRA generally, what else you know about her and whether you read the book before or after you see the movie. The movie is available to stream for free on Peacock.

The Bookshop.org link to the book is an affiliate link; I would receive a small commission on sales.

Summer Into Fall

I’m keeping busy for the rest of August. I have a quilting retreat this weekend, a couple of writing workshops coming up and a weekend trip to Cape May that will include a visit to an alpaca farm. My autumn is filling up with a Yiddish class (Beginner 2 with YIVO and the magnificent Lucas Fizsman) and 6 Weeks, 6 Essays later on with the great and powerful Meta Wagner and Grub Street.

My own writing is lurching forward. Slow and steady is going to win this race. I’m up to 90 manuscript pages and more that I haven’t typed up yet, or even written down. I’m collecting quotations to use for inspiration and possible inclusion somehow. Today I picked one out from Ford Madox Ford’s masterful novel about depressed people having affairs, The Good Soldier:

So for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants…But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials…Well, this is the saddest story.

Fun times!

Trash Haiku

Coffee got spilled on

a bunch of my books so now

I need some new books.