My kid is in London and has sent us a picture of a tank. She likes tanks. A lot.

I feel like I don’t talk about my love of Allan Sherman enough. When I was at Camp Ramah (which I hated, and where I missed my first chance at Golem) my mother would send me audio cassettes of Sherman. She had a patient who loaned her the records, which she taped for me and posted.

I shared this elsewhere, but I had to read ‘The Pawnbroker’ in high school and I hated it at the time, being one of the only kids whose book didn’t have a Norton edition to get so I had to go to the Uni library… I think it *made* me.

Well, the man decided that a call centre getting yelled at by people all day was a great job prospect for someone who is quite deaf post Covid and whose speed is “dead Yiddish poet,” so here I am.

I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet….

Best time of the year — our first back garden bat sighting of spring!

I am teaching kid the joys of stuff layered in dishes. Looks complicated. Impresses people. No real work involved.

Gonna be reading my smut at the swim meet again tomorrow.

Is Florida just the Chelm of America?

Ahaha, this place is popping today. My goodness.

It’s not even the current ‘discourse,’ it’s just that I am in total awe of how a field/area of interest manages to rip itself apart even more spectacularly that my old one did (and that was largely because we were all fucking each other — or not)

I don’t think I really get to comment, because I learned a Yiddish in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons and do all the wrong things with it but… Can we stop with the proclamations for a bit?

It’s always great to see discussion come back to Hirsh Lekert. I have a very special relationship with Lekert. In a ‘oh nooo, not him again’ way. (Let me clarify, I am joking. But seriously, so much Lekert)

Party at my house growing up

More election twaddle. Missing the ’Reform Party’ one that I shredded and messaged someone that ‘as an immigrant, I’d like to deport Nigel Farrage’ about.

I was trying to think some something intelligent to say about Jan Morris and her ‘jeu d’amour’ with Admiral Fisher and how that is treated in reportage versus the new Judy Blume bio, but I went to make a cup of tea and now it’s gone

More sneaky line-stealing. Er…intertextuality…

I love some of these uncollected poems to bits.

I probably won’t talk about these poems in a longer article/essay/post, but I sincerely love ‘Letter from my Father, A”H’ and ‘Letter to my Mother, A”H.’

Yay, another caricature! I have a modest collection now.

I am having one of those days where it takes more than one try to get a book the right way round.

So my crackpot musing about getting ‘Emil and Karl’ on the curriculum here (I’d be happy for anything by a Jewish writer. Or anything, really, by not-John Boyne) was spurred by a lovely little review. Translation in alt text

I have had the utterly insane idea of trying to get Emil and Karl into school here instead of ‘Striped Pyjamas’.

The only thing worse than not buying your kid a ticket for the school disco is buying them one, apparently. Kiddo has lost it. Mumbling something about now she has to find something to wear. Like she wouldn’t have ended me with her bare hands if I didn’t buy a ticket.

Now that I know what went into collections, I am busy obsessing about what *didn’t* get collected. Which is, of course, a permutation of my interest in what got left out/rearranged/edited in the 1940 Ale Verk.

I made the mistake of stopping at Facebook and there are some mightily bad takes today, even for Facebook.

I always love the return of the ‘chosen for what?’ goose meme. Haven’t we always been asking that?

I’m still rather obsessed with all the hospital poems. There’s a really good batch of them in this last books from being in hospital in Jerusalem in 1957 — are there any other poems in Yiddish about a IV drip?

Me, sitting here in the UK

Further griping — If I say that both money and childcare are issues, the solution to this is not ‘bring the kids,’ which (at least) doubles the cost. ‘We raised the scholarship amount but didn’t tell anyone and it’s too late to apply now anyway’ is also a fucked up way to communicate.

The school needs to stop sending shit to the what’s app group that you need to be buddies with the PTA president to be invited to and nowhere else. I can do your ‘paperless’ school, just funnel your damned stuff all to one app or email please. Not fifteen different pieces of shit.

Does ‘has an imaginary conversation with Hitler under his bed’ go in an annotated table of contents or not?

Rehashing old material on my part, but my sentiments remain unchanged: blumalangerobertson.substack.com/p/the-celebr...

Woke up wondering again how I have come to this land of no marbled rye.

I’m still waiting for the ‘people like [me]’ to be sent my way. Surely people as absolute shit as I am at stuff are a dime a dozen.

Ok, so, someone who actually reads Bashevis — how many fake-seances with a confederate who hides in the bathroom and gets caught *are* there? I can think of at least two.

Unusually chill today because I had a wonderful memory lapse/autopilot moment and took my heart pills twice. Don’t tell anyone, but this is fantastic. This must be what being a WASP is like all the time.

Caligula the Guinea pig has apparently decided that human fingers are delicious. I await more news

I yearn for the Ashkenazi Hebrew of my childhood. At school we learned the ‘proper’ pronunciation. But what I really yearn for is shul c1985 with all the old guys that are gone now.

I found *a* good rock in my pocket, but not THE good rock I got in Normandy. Or the really good agate my partner threw out.

Charmingly these sonnets are all from Jonah’s point of view, inside the fish.

I’ve entered the stage of migraine where the pills are starting to work and now I feel like I’m in that early hangover phase where you’re still drunk but you know it’s going to be a bad one.

One last ring of sonnets. Then I’ll have read two (very non-fiction) books, seven books of poetry, some 21 plays and play-like things and hundreds of newspapers articles.

Madame George is such a wonderful song (Hell, all of Astral Weeks) but Van Morrison…WTF.

I just found something I think is really neat, but I don’t have anyone to talk it through with.

In an interesting development, Leivick has abandoned decades, centuries, even thousands of years — we are now firmly into millions and billions. And I’m left to ponder the reasons for this expansion.

Oh, look, it’s not even lunchtime and it’s already too much internet.

Fun fact: I know that you don’t really want to know how I am when you ask. I just don’t care.