Category: Culture

Essays History Literature

Interleavings: Serendipity and the Auto/Biographical Process

Biographical and autobiographical writing entwine. Why did I choose to write about a woman I never met and had no ties to—except for my interest in Jewish women’s history and the field of Psychoanalysis? Immediately the writer’s self is injected into the story. Sometimes Dr. Buxbaum turns up in my dreams, and in the morning I have to sort out the dream so it won’t get mixed up with biography.

Advice

Dear Wizard…

Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Dear Wizard.” This is an intuitive advice column. It’s not an etiquette column, it’s not an ethics column, it’s not an advice column about the practical logistics of things. It’s a column where you bring me your most tender, sticky dilemmas, and I help illuminate the energetic patterns that are running that affect the situation.

Culture Drama Theater

Bardolatry and Its Discontents

Shakespeare is treated with a true idolatry–Bardolatry. Producing groups do not help when they treat audience members like sheep and imply that they need not understand Shakespeare. Theaters are there to pass down the Law. They expect that the barbarians simply arrive at the Church of Theater, convert to the cause of Bardolatry and receive William’s Holy Word like a communion wafer. Whether or not the barbarians understand transubstantiation is immaterial to the purposes of the Church.