Jeremayakovka

Weekend Reruns

If you're a first-time visitor, check out some of the "greatest hits" in the right column - plus the choice categories like Humor, Men & Women, The Content of His Character, Poesy, and Chillin', Not Trillin. Ain't it fun?

A Big Thank You

Here's a big Thank You! to everyone who contributed to Jeremayakovka during a recent fundraising drive. Your timely support will go far in the realization of an important offline project related to the Zionist poet, painter, soldier Alan Kaufman. It will also be recognized in the end.
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Sporting an America-Israel lapel pin while posing under a portrait of beyond-the-grave muse Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jeremayakovka perches pretty in the Poetry Room of City Lights Books in San Francisco.

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Happily, recent contributors offer a range of political, cultural, and religious points of view, and hail from several parts of the United States and Canada. So there is no such thing as a typical JMK reader.

If you would like to know more about this project and why, if you value Jeremayakovka, you too might want to support it financially, email and I'll reply with details. If you already know you want to support it, just click on the secure PayPal button in the left column.

100,000

Yesterday saw the 100,000th site hit.
Many thanks! Keep 'em coming.

My IBM Selectric

25 years ago today I found one of these wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag and propped up against a lamppost in midtown Manhattan. A neighbor had taken me to visit the newly-opened Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and afterwards we were hoofing it over to the east side when we scored the clunker. Some office somewhere in the 40s between 6th and 7th (or 7th and 8th) Avenues must have just upgraded and6 not so neatly disposed of their old equipment. Did the thing work? Well, there was only one way to find out. Instead of heading for a bus, we hailed a cab and hauled it home. The rest is history.

My particular Selectric was an older version, a pre-"golf ball" version. It came with a maintenance card inside which documented servicing going back to the 60s. It ran on the simplest plastic ribbon (not cloth) that spooled concentrically, like reel-to-reel film. An archaic item in the world of office machine accessories, I could only find those ribbon reels in dusty stationery stores that had already been carrying them for years.

When being used the machine hummed, rattled, snapped, and popped. When it ran for long periods it got hot under the hood, like a car. Also like a car, on cold winter mornings I had to turn it on and let it warm up for several minutes before it would "turn over" (i.e., for the key hammers to respond to keystrokes). Before I ever owned a computer (or a car) I put everything could into, and got everything out of, this clunker. And just like a car I ran the thing into the ground till, five years later, it just wouldn't go no more.

Bye-bye, my trusty, my rusty IBM Selectric.

Thresholds

This past weekend the Jeremayakovka blog enjoyed its 50,000th unique site visit and 100,000th page view. In fact July 2007 has been the busiest month yet, with over 7,000 unique visits.

Many thanks, Gentle Readers, for your interest and comments, for your occasional praise (and even your scorn). All of it helps.

The Taqiyyic Calm Within The Jihadist Storm

I love my native city more than my soul.
-- Niccolo Macchiavelli
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This from midtown Manhattan, Pamela waxes lionesshearted in "Waiting for Abu Godot":

I clock the war. It's what I do. I watch, I report and observe - I tell you when it's an observation. I distinguish between the actual news and my opinion. Something the mainstream media stopped doing long ago. They abdicated their role as public servant in delivering the news.... The crisis of our time is so pressing, so imminent, it has seized me. To my very core. I walk the streets of New York and feel as if I am walking the garden of the Finzi-Continis....

When I saw The Garden of the Finzi-Continis the first thing I thought of were those trimmed, magisterial residences of Fifth and Park Avenues and East End Avenues. Including, for that matter, Gracie Mansion.

How well I remember Manhattan's Upper East Side on hot summer weekends when the foot and street traffic dips 30+% because residents have skirted off to their second homes, time shares, etc. on the Island, in Rochester or Putnam County, on MV (that's Martha's Vineyard, for those not in the know) and beyond. At 4:00PM on a Saturday afternoon on Madison Avenue anywhere above 72nd St. you don't just hear a pin drop -- you see it drop.

How shady was my concrete canyon! [*]

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And this from Site Meter, someone (from undetermined motivations) pines to learn more about "kill Americans":

Domain Name		comcast.net ? (Network)
IP Address		69.136.82.# (Comcast Cable)
ISP		Comcast Cable
Location		Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : Delaware City : Wilmington Lat/Long : 39.7592, -75.5664 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinVista
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath.2)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution : 1280 x 800 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Jul 26 2007 11:28:22 am
Last Page View		Jul 26 2007 11:29:20 am
Visit Length		58 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...&hl=en&start=70&sa=N
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		kill americans
Visit Entry Page		http://jeremayakovka...if_a_muslimamer.html
Visit Exit Page		http://jeremayakovka...if_a_muslimamer.html
Out Click		Islamic Evil http://kenlydell.typ...ad.com/islamic_evil/
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Jul 26 2007 2:28:22 pm
Visit Number		49,059

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*: Cf. the title and last line of dialogue from How Green Was My Valley (novel 1939; film 1941, trailer here)

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Nominated for Best Political Blog

Longtime loyal reader Black Belt Mama just nominated Jeremayakovka for "Best Political Blog" of the 2007 Blogger's Choice Awards. Please check out BCA, carefully consider all the quality nominees and then vote -- including for Jeremayakovka. (Reg. req'd, but hey it's worth it.) Thanks, Bbm!

The most notable, sometimes controversial, political posts appear in the categories "Second Thoughts", "Elections", and "Gay/Lesbian". More literary and humorous takes on politics appear in "Chillin', Not Trillin".

(It's not about winning, it's about competition, excellence, and exposure: since truth runneth over every cup it filleth, every trophy is always of limited value.)

Mister, I've Been To The Zoo!

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
-- Jerry, in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story

Rolling Out The 9/11 Neocons Logo

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What does it mean? you might ask.
Don't just stand there -- Guess!
If that doesn't do it, just go to the left column and scroll down a ways.

And thanks to George for the 411 on uploading the 911!

Correction: Horowitz Did Not Publish Guevara in Ramparts

A mass email I recently sent out led with a quote from Ernesto Guevara's Bolivian diaries. Unfortunately, I mistakenly attributed it to being published in Ramparts magazine when David Horowitz was its editor. Ramparts did originally publish Guevara's diaries in English; not, however, at a time when David was editor.

The quote struck me as so prophetically ironic, so appropriate to David's long road and my own, that it didn't occur to me to fact check his exact dates at the helm of the New Left's most influential subversive publication. The "rough" of finding the quote in an original paperback from that era (with an Introduction by Fidel Castro), and of finding the well-worn paperback in a bookstore in the Bay Area -- where so many radical antics and crimes have occurred -- made the single sentence seem that much more like a "diamond":

The most honest and combative men are with us, although some of them have occasional struggles with their consciences.
-- Ernesto Guevara

"Doubts and Intuitions," or American Me

That's the first name I had in mind for this blog. It's based on a line out of Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

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In high school we had to pick a great American novel to read and do a report on, so I went and picked what seemed the most ambitious of them. And that line, more than any other, jumped off the page and stayed with me. It just might express the best of the American 19th Century: a pragmatically skeptical yet searchingly open-minded quality that --  in its post-Puritan, pre-secular radical fashion -- truly was progressive, in the best sense of the word.

While running "Doubts and Intuitions" past a few friends, one woman said it made her think of a scared girl. Not my intended effect. So I scrapped it and went back to the drawing board. Hence "Jeremayakovka" (Jeremiah+Mayakovksy+Kafka). It was going to be that or even -- at least conceptually (don't laugh) -- "Jeremodigliasternak" (Jeremiah+Modigliani+Pasternak). (JMP would have been true in its own way, but JMK clearly is more economical and, in the end, even truer.)

For conveying my Americanness, though, nothing does it better than that line from Melville. Here's to being neither a believer nor an infidel.

What Brings You Here?

Some recent searches which have led visitors to this site:

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"a poem in memory of a person that was murdered a year ago today"
(Toronto, Canada)

"corey lidle jokes"
(Ontario, CA)

"nasrallah man of the century"
(Adana, Turkey)

"iran holocaust nuclear"
(Haifa, Israel)

"games that Islamic people play"
([Maine Libraries/Department of Education] Orono, ME)

"terrorist in your neighborhood"
(Phoenix, AZ)

"jefferson's victory over the muslims lives on today"
("unknown," USA)

More People Playing Games

The other day in "Games People Play" I spilled some beans with five previously undisclosed personal facts. ("1. As a child, was carried from a burning building.").

Some of the blogs I tagged have spilled their own beans, too:

Douglas -- a survivor who knows true love
American Princess -- reinventor of the breakfast of champions
Erica -- who wants to be all she can be

Games People Play

Have been "tagged" by Fausta to spill some beans in the little virtual game, "Five Things You Don't Know About Me":

1. As a child, was carried out of a burning building.

2. High school prom was held in Windows on the World restaurant (atop the World Trade Center).

3. As a young man, visited Auschwitz.

4. During that voyage got drunk on New Year's Eve on the Champs Élysées.

5. As a slightly older man, stayed home on another New Year's Eve laboring through The Brothers Karamazov.

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I tag: Erica, Douglas, Ari, American Princess, Daniel.

One Way of Starting the Year Off

Yesterday JMK happily received its first unsolicited PayPal contribution. What a pleasant and practical token of appreciation! More than a token, for all the derring-do that go into the goings-on here incur actual costs, and the actual assistance JMK actually receives will directly help defray them.

Gentle Reader, won't you consider doing the same? If you do, your contribution will promptly be applied to one or more of the following real aspects of JMK's virtual contribution to the 21st Century's Good Fight:

* picking up the monthly tab at my hosting service
* costumes, signage, and other neoconservatively subversive propaganda
* books, journals, and other research material
* misc. operating expenses -- from power cords to coffee refills -- whatever it takes to update the site anywhere, anytime

Please take a moment, Gentle and Generous Reader, and donate to JMK today!

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Gift Bonus - Free SOAP!: To all who donate JMK will personally email The Secret Of All Poetry -- three, very specific words which are worth a semester of any MFA program. Not even a MasterCard ad can communicate how priceless is The SOAP.

2006 Weblog Awards

The 2006 Weblog Awards is now accepting nominations for the year's best blogs. There are dozens of categories under which you can nominate your favorite and well-deserving New Media sites. Guess who's been nominated? That's right. A loyal JMK reader entered us under -- are you listening, people? -- Best Conservative Blog.

Baby, I have come a long way! Since Day One (April 3, 2006), although readers have in a variety of ways expressed their interest, confidence, and trust, to receive an email yesterday that informed me I'd been nominated was a bit of a chin-dropper.

Everything's preliminary at this point. The real competition will begin once the finalists are selected. Then, in the race to the voting finish, distinctions between enthusiasm and ambition, pride and vanity, etc. will in most cases blur beyond recognition. Hopefully, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

If you would like to nominate JMK -- and any of your other favorite blogs -- in an appropriate categor(ies), just click over to the 2006 Weblog Awards and make your voice heard.

Small Steps for Bloggers, Giant Leaps for ...

Yesterday JMK enjoyed its 10,000th unique visit. Tomorrow Atlas Shrugs will enjoy its  2,000,000th!  Thanks to everyone who's given JMK a look-see, a pat on the back, and criticism (including hostile criticism). encouragement. Big congrats to Pamela, clearly one of the blogosphere's superheroes.

A Man

Here or there, they would eliminate you in the end. And not for what you wanted to do, armed resistance on the mountains, attacks on the barracks, radio stations to stir the people to revolt, but for what you were, for your singularity, the rebel poet, free of any restraint, any pattern, any taboo, even from the concept of licit and illicit, because of your uniqueness as solitary hero, clinging to the chimeras of the dream, the imagination. The rebel poet, the solitary hero, is an individual without followers: he doesn't sweep the masses into the streets, he doesn't provoke revolutions. But he paves the way for them. Even if he doesn't achieve anything immediate and practical, even if he expresses himself through acts of bravado or madness, even if he is despised and rejected, he stirs the waters of the silent, stagnant pond, he weakens the dams of repressive conformity, he saps the crushing power. Whatever he says or undertakes, even an interrupted sentence, a failed enterprise, becomes a seed destined to blossom, a perfume that hangs in the air, an example for the other plants in the forest, for us who haven't his courage, his clairvoyance and his genius. And the pond knows it, the Power knows that he is its real enemy, the real danger to be liquidated. It even knows that he cannot be replaced or copied: the history of the world has given us clear proof that when one leader dies another is invented, when one man of action dies another is found. But when a poet is dead, a hero is eliminated, there is a void that cannot be filled, and you have to wait until the gods resurrect him. The gods know where, the gods know when.

-- from A Man, by Oriana Fallaci

American Beauty

Cute video, "America's Hottest Patriots" -- a slideshow-with-soundtrack of some of the pundits I've read and studied this year. If you think I don' t admire them for their minds, then you don't know JMK very well, or them. Watch and learn. Then read and learn.

Desperately and angrily trying to interfere with this transition, my father protested, "You're a good man, son. You don't need to read Ann Coulter!" (Note the sentimental hook that starts the protest.)

Charlie Brown's "a good man." I'm better than that.

Fathers, Be Good To Everyone, Not Just Your Daughters

The rapidly unfolding House scandal in which (former) Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) repeatedly engaged underage, teenaged Congressional pages in seductive and pornographic communications, including "Internet sex" and who knows what else, has caused unknown harm to many individuals.  It threatens a sitting Speakership and potentially the GOP's 12-year majority, and will forever spoil many reputations, most notably Foley's. (His lawyer, btw, categorically denies any sexual contact with minors.)

Deservedly so. Foley's and the Republicans' reputations are taking a beating. So, too, are the Florida delegation's and that of the entire Congress. Depending on how the media and blogs pursue the story and on how authorities succeed (or fail) to prosecute criminal activity, their and our reputations are on the line, too.

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"The personal is political," in which a personal anecdote or sentiment (rightly or wrongly) justifies a public stance, belongs to no party or ideology. While sparks fly in all directions -- The GOP says they're for 'family values'?! [spit]... Aha! The Democrats' 'October Surprise' ... "The MSM misreported this!" -- and while the Democrats (Barney) frank(ly) lack the moral authority to condemn Foley and the GOP leadership -- at least two conservative commentators are contributing to this story in a timely and meaningful way. Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel have recently come forward with stories of their own Washington internships.

From Ms. Schlussel's "Mark Foley moment":

I know this first-hand. When I was in high school and college, I worked as an intern on Capitol Hill for three Republican Congressman--Mark Siljander of Michigan, Phil Crane of Illinois, and Donald E. "Buz" Lukens of Ohio. During my junior year of college, just after I worked for Lukens, he was caught in a sex scandal, broken by tabloid show "A Current Affair" (then hosted by Bill O'Reilly). Lukens was blackmailed on tape (all set up and arranged by the FOX show) by a teen-age prostitute and her mother, who was apparently her pimp and "marketed" her as "of legal age." Lukens was apparently one of their "customers."

It gave new meaning to the Christmas cards he sent me that said "Debbie, We hardly knew ye." It was the other way around, apparently. I hardly knew him. Still, I felt bad for him--it was a sleazy situation created in part by a sleazy, sick pimp mother (to whom nothing happened) and a sleazy TV show whose host now claims he's a "culture warrior." Buz Lukens was always nice to me (no, not in that way) and all of those who worked for him. And I saw him lose everything. He lost his Congressional seat, the scant money he had, was forced to take AIDS tests, and had to attend sex offender education. He lost everything.

From Ms. Malkin's "Reflections of a former intern":

The most important lesson I learned, however, came before my internship even began. Several weeks preceding my arrival in Washington, I got a call from an East Coast congressman. My college had sent out notices requesting help for interns in need of temporary housing. The congressman offered me a room in his Capitol Hill residence --- for free. He was married and had a family, but lived alone in D.C. while Congress was in session. How generous, I thought. And how exciting....

A few days after the congressman had extended his offer, I still had not made up my mind. Then I received a call in my dorm room that sealed my fate. It was the congressman's wife. In a brief and bizarre conversation, she started pouring her heart about the difficulties she was having with her husband. She asked me not to come. She cautioned me that it wouldn't turn out the way I thought it would.

Yikes. I was just looking for a place to stay -- not a real-life role in the D.C. version of "Days of Our Lives." Freaked out, I immediately turned down the invitation.

Update 10/4: "It's the predation, stupid"

Mercifully, we're not hearing from the teenaged pages whose trust has been molested by the dishonorable Congressman from Florida. I would like to state for the record, however, that Ms. Schlussel's and Ms. Malkin's remarks bring to mind the teenager I once was....

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When I was 17 and applying to colleges, a professional newspaper writer helped me write an essay that was objectively persuasive and personally meaningful. A heartstring-plucking, 700-word coming-of-age story, it helped me win acceptance to a top-tier, private New England university. Sticking by me from start to finish, he and I together identified les mots justes and purged all others. I couldn't have done it without him.

Then he tried to force me to have sex with him.

Nothing happened in any graphic (or "Prince of Tides") sense. My objections, which eventually showed him I'd fight if necessary, collapsed his resolve. He quickly teared up when he realized what he was doing, and abjectly apologized.

Call it what you want -- "a moment of truth" ... "the drama of the unlived life" ... or whatever -- the trust had vanished. I felt like the garbage in a little office wastebasket -- after you crush it down with your foot to make room for more garbage. I walked out of his apartment and never looked back.

How little it takes for a pivotal role model to turn into a cringing weakling, leaving only confusion, anger, contempt, and sadness -- and the sting of a psychological slap that never quite goes away.

A Day in the Life of an "Ex"

You know it's time to get out more when ... your "ex" calls to invite you to a dinner party because one of her confirmed guests has cancelled at the last minute.  We're OK friends (we get together about once a month) and I might have agreed to go (it would have been interesting to see some of her other friends again) had I not had other plans and, of course, had she invited me earlier.

But the double-edged truth crystallized as, without rancor or pity, I declined over the phone:

Thanks. It's nice to know I'm at the top of your B-List!

We laughed -- as always, when "ex"es laugh together -- knowingly.

The Light of a Black Sun

Sultan Knish (another blogger at home in a black background!) posits his take on the declining West.  My short response: I agree. 

Very few minds are capable of thinking civilizationally, that is, with a perfect moral, philosophic, cultural, and historical pitch -- with an ability to stare into the light of a black sun.  Holderlin, Nietzsche, Artaud, Wittgenstein, Chambers come to mind.  Such train of thought is perhaps a holdover from those fruitless years, both wild and meandering, when I pondered certain shooting stars of the academic Left -- Adorno, Derrida, Said (for starters), none of whom, during my flirtation with the Academy, their critiques' seductions notwithstanding, completely purged my melancholy, interrogative temperament.

So, grasping ever tightly the dagger within my mind's cloaking folds, I refer you, Gentle Reader, to SK's "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization":

Neither the right nor the left is actually offering a vision of a future for America, all they're doing is wrangling over the terms of its dismantling....
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Kids

No, not Kids, the seedy, artsy flick about corrupted and corrupting American adolescents (which, as a tricked-out screen version of David Bowie's "Young Americans" happens to approximate some scenes and themes of my own urban upbringing). No, I don't want to call your attention to that.  Or if I do, it's to call attention to this:

Real kids.  Kids who have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and need some dedicated encouragement -- the unique encouragement that only you can give them -- in order to come out on the other side beyond their or anyone else's expectations. 

Perhaps the kindest and most courageous of my blog-buddies, GM, is putting the word out for the best advice we can offer to "Those Amazing, Troubled, Wonderful Kids," his "Dear Kids." Please waste no time (his deadline is just a week away) and click on this latter link. This is an opportunity to remember what it was like, to reteach what you were graciously taught by others and/or had to learn through hard experience -- and to let the kids feel the love.

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Just click on that last link (above) to learn more about this image.

Why We Write

Journalist Steven Vincent was murdered one year ago today in Basra, Iraq. Arriving of late to blogosphere and the war on terror effort, I still have a lot to learn about him. Freedom-loving people everywhere owe his memory, and those of all journalists killed in these wars, profound thanks.  Yehudit is making sure the blogosphere pays him full honors today in a three four-part post at Kesher Talk.

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Steven Vincent, 1955-2005

Lots to Do

Thanks for visiting and making this JMK's most fruitful week yet, with over 500 visits and counting! For a part-time blogger who doesn't Photoshop, barely knows HTML, and only recently marked 100 days throwing himself into this new media, I'll take it!  Thanks again for being a part of it.  More and better material to come. Promise.

Offline affairs are pressing, so there's no new material today. Heading into the weekend, then, please feel free to tool around the archives.  A few suggestions:

* My review in May of the preview of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is being confirmed now by the pros. (Shoving ten pounds of Vietnam War history into a five-pound parable of coming-of-age and lost-innocence made his Platoon one of the most powerful movie experiences I ever had. So I know Stone's got storytelling powers; what's to be seen is how he treats, or mistreats, history while telling this story.)
* Here's my stab at "talking to a liberal" (by choice).
* For late-night demon-wrestling, there's a whole lot of versifying (others as well as my own), plus other litterateuring, goin' on under the category, "Poesy".
* And don't forget my advice on which tool to pick out to deal with Hezbollah, "Home Improvement - Zionist Style."

Have a great weekend.
Shabbat shalom.

Chores

Hi, thanks for stopping by!

Am taking care of chores off-line today. (For example, after the past week, getting more more than 5 hours of sleep in one night is a chore that can't be put off any longer.)

For breaking updates and analysis on the war defensive counter-attack, pick a link, any link, at J-Blogosphere.

Thanks again for stopping by.

Where I Was Born

That's New York Hospital -- the gray complex directly beneath the black plane, right -- photographed Memorial Day of this year.

(Source: LGF)

JMK's Second Home

On July 4th my browser's homepage, Townhall.com -- already a premier online clearinghouse for conservative opinion and news -- debuted a new format which clearly is nothing short of a major news and media innovation. In addition to the usual roundup of op-eds and news items, it is now a multimedia center with opinions, podcasts, radio broadcasts, news and reviews, interactive in ways you can't imagine.

TH's staff obviously put their heads together and said, "We've got to get our readership involved. We've got to tap the talented bloggers that are already out there, and we've got to attract and develop new talent. We've got to reinforce the ties between professional opinion-makers and the responsible, news-hungry citizens who turn to them every day."

My favorite new feature is that TH now hosts blogs completely free of charge. TH provides the templates and the domain; you pick your unique name, your columns and color scheme, and your areas of interest. So from now on, JMK will post timely news commentary at its new Townhall.com blog:  http://jeremayakovka.townhall.com/Default.aspx.  More colorful, personal, and quirky material will continue to appear here. As necessary, I'll cross-post and cross-reference between them.

Townhall.com is definitely "in it to win it" in America's culture and political wars. Aren't you?

Hello Again

This weekend I'll be journeying offline, and will post again next week. I'm returning to a place from which I've been away so long that it sometimes feels I've never been there at all. (The horror, the horror.)

So if you're reading this now then I thank you in temporary absentia for your interest.  Please have a look around: there is discussion of this week's killing in Iraq of terrorist villain Zarqawi; there is poetry, both original and borrowed; there are a couple of all-pic posts; a couple of anti-Communist posts; and a couple of YouTube video diversions.  And there's even more, which you'll have to find out on your own.

JMK will be back with new material in a few days.

Where Are Your Principles?

Here are some of mine:
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Private persons are entitled to respect for their privacy regardless of their activities online. This includes respect for the non-public nature of their personal contact information, the inviolability of their homes, and the safety of their families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted. The separateness of private persons’ professional lives should also be respected as much as is reasonable.

Public figures are entitled to respect for the non-public nature of their personal, non-professional contact information, and their privacy with regard to their homes and families. No information which might lead others to invade these spaces should be posted.

Persons seeking anonymity or pseudonymity online should have their wishes in this regard respected as much as is reasonable. Exceptions include cases of criminal, misleading, or intentionally disruptive behavior.

Violations of these principles should be met with a lack of positive publicity and traffic.
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Along with dozens, soon to be hundreds, of other individuals, I just signed on to them at Online Integrity. It's a simple step the blogosphere is undertaking to regulate itself.  In part because of harassment like this.
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So, where are your principles?

An Honorable Mention

The other day that voice of righteous sanity in LA-LA land, screenwriter and novelist Robert Avrech, paid us the honor of mentioning our recent debut on his own blog, the award-winning, babke-munching, and heart-wrenching Seraphic Secret.

"Whether it's true or not," Robert writes of Jeremayakovka, "I take full credit for its creation."  That's fine by me.  Also true is that anyone who opens himself to Seraphic Secret will come away changed in some way.  Not just me -- or she, or she -- but anyone with a heart. For there are no cowardly lions at Seraphic Secret. Quite the contrary.

Reading Robert's blog I sense answers to questions I first recall hearing in the arthouse hit Wings of Desire (which in the 1980s I saw three times in one week at the now-defunct Bleecker Street Cinema): "Where are my heroes? Where are you, my children?"

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With that in mind, I've set out at Jeremayakovka to do for others what Seraphic Secret does for me: to make us all more courageous and more gentle readers. 

"Fame . . . that public destruction of one in the process of becoming . . . ."

Gentle Reader:

Thus many years ago a poet recorded in his notebook , counseling himself, his immediate readers, and those curious few out of posterity who, eventually and inevitably, would fold pages out of that notebook into their own.   

Thus with faint trepidation but firmer determination now I step out of the cage . . . and into the arena.