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There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake . . . -- Maurice Blanchot
About Me
- Monica
- Studio City, California, United States
- I am a writer, storyteller, and former professor (UCLA, Pepperdine, LMU, Purdue) with expertise in representations of trauma, multi-ethnic literatures, Christianity and Judaism, immigrant narratives, and Critical Theory (I'm a graduate of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory). I love to create stories. I adore books, wine, traveling, and shoes. I wrote a book called THE MIDRASHIC IMPULSE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSE TO TRAUMA and have published pieces in Newsweek, The New Republic, The Jewish Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, and other places.
Places I Visit
- Monica Osborne at The Jewish Journal
- StrangledSleep on TWITTER
- Jewcy
- A Novel Blog
- Both Wearing Black Masks
- Hebrew Language Detective
- Postcards from Bedlam
- EV Comics
- Fido the Yak
- Fractal Ontology
- Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic
- Jewish and Other Media Links
- Jewschool
- Luke Ford
- Mxrk
- North American Levinas Society
- On Being Impermissible
- Rhetoricat.Com
- Side-effects
- Perverse Egalitarianism
- A Chair and Two Apples
- SOMA
- That Celestial Thought
- Third Guy Ducks
- Trauma and Philosophy
- Wishydig
- Perverse Egalitarianism
Posts
3 comments:
I loved this so much that I missed lunch today to watch... but I'm not convinced that that isn't Maureen Dowd just off screen to the right, even though the gentlemen/scholars keep referring to the voice as "Monica."
:)
Anyway, awesome.
Wait I have to say more, because I just loved this dialogue... almost up there with one of Plato's.
Monica, you do sound suspiciously like a Christian who doesn't know she's a Christian (I risk saying this even knowing how "Imperialist" it is of me and how awfully much it violates my obligation to listen to the other [or whatever!]). That whole part about doing whatever your heart dictates... isn't that just lifted from Paul who says in the New Testament that thew law is written on the hearts of those who have never encountered it? And that rigamarole about "Loving your neighbor?" That's so Jesus.
Here's what I mean: I completely sympathize with your impulse to "turn and turn" and to "stay grey" and never reduce yourself to an either/or mentality. But I think you might have mistaken, at some point in your past, the "Christianity-you-were-raised-in" for "Christianity." It seems a fairly blatant mischaracterization of Christianity to describe it as an "either/or" system, despite the follies of its practitioners.
But what religion hasn't been, at times, embarrassingly reduced to a too-easy either/or-ish kind of multiple-choice thinking? After all, not everybody can get a Ph.D. in thinking. In fact, wasn't "The Law" probably put together to face just such a dumbed-down situation? "Okay people, you want it written in stone?"
I'm gambling that we were close enough friends in graduate school (remember Steve & Jess's Party Room?) that you'll let me get away with this playful reproach for the sake of a little more dialogue--or should we call it "a little more turning, turning?"
Cheers!
Casey--you say, "But I think you might have mistaken, at some point in your past, the "Christianity-you-were-raised-in" for "Christianity." It seems a fairly blatant mischaracterization of Christianity to describe it as an "either/or" system, despite the follies of its practitioners."
This is quite interesting to me; I am very open to being proven wrong here, believe me. Contrary to what it sounds like, I'm constantly on a mission to redeem Christianity.
And about this "Love your neighbor" stuff sounding just like Jesus--It's totally Jesus! I think Jesus rocks, but you have to know that when Jesus said that he was reading Torah! This whole Jesus figure is precisely (ironically)where Jews and Christians can intersect, where we realize that they are supposed to be doing the same thing.
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