16 Days with No Music

Sixteen days to go, that is -- out of a total of 21. During the Three Weeks, we're not supposed to listen to music...leading people like me to drive ourselves insane. This is about when I usually reach my breaking point. For a perpetual headphone-head like me, who likes to walk around with a soundtrack to everything, it's hard to just give up my iTunes -- let alone, the 15 CDs that I always carry around, because I am Old School like that.

Finding something good to listen to during the Three Weeks: How not to get 'Lost'

Here's a few of the tricks I've worked up.

* The Lost Rewatch.
Listening to TV shows is fun! Especially when you're in a forlorn cubicle and the only other sounds would be Manhattan commuters damning each other to eternal purgatory with their horns. Nothing beats a fight scene with no words -- where, for 5 entire minutes, you hear a whiz, then a boom, then the sounds of someone clubbing someone else's brains in. How do you know who won? If they're still speaking at the end. The first four seasons are free to watch (or listen to) on the Lost website.

* Archive.org.
We can't stop praising this site. Books, old radio shows, and even TV and Smashing Pumpkins concerts are all up here, for free. But we're not concerned with any of that -- not for another 16 days, anyway. The Naropa Poetry Institute just provided a massive portion of their archives, which includes Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti lecturing and reading poetry. And there's also (ahem) a few Jewish spoken-word shows by me.

* Authors Talk about Cool Stuff
I can't tell you why, but Neil Gaiman's 7-minute speech from the PEN World Voices convention is really, really beautiful. Something to do with talking about the Chronicles of Narnia and not being able to go home again, I guess.

* AM Radio
I used to hate listening to talk radio. Everyone was either rabid right wing or rabid left wing. Even supposedly funny people like Rush Limbaugh, whose views I couldn't take seriously from the start, stopped being funny when you started realizing how many people were listening to him, regarding him with UTTER SERIOUSNESS AND DEVOTION. I had a friend (uh, acquaintance) (actually, we almost got suspended for beating each other's lights out) who literally took notes during Michael Savage.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered the joy of AM radio. By far, my favorite was Coast to Coast with Art Bell, who invited every manner of supernatural nut, and a bunch of people who actually did know things, onto the show. He'd talk for hours about UFO abductions, telekinesis, paranormal phenomena and the Yeti -- and every moment was a window into the life of someone I'd never have otherwise known about.

There are several other worthwhile non-musical radio shows that you have to check out -- the two essentials are Car Talk and, of course, A Prairie Home Companion -- both available free online, both new episodes and a 14-year archive.

Yiddish 2.0

It's weird and somewhat scary to realize that you can put a cap on the number of Yiddish books ever published -- and, by most reckonings (for the secular world, anyway), the number of Yiddish books that will ever be published. But that's exactly what the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library says in its introductory statement: "Over ten thousand Yiddish texts, estimated as over 1/2 of all the published works in Yiddish, are now online" -- and the implicit notion is, there aren't going to be that many more Yiddish works published.

This by no means diminishes the excellent, massive, and spotlessly-presented Yiddish library on Archive.org, which came online a few weeks ago -- one of the most unbelievably selfless and thorough nonprofits on the Web. They've been collating every single website since 1996 and keeping track of them (so, if you ever wanted to see your first-ever freshman-year I-just-learned-HTML site, you can), and they also have a massive Live Music Archive with tens of thousands of concerts.

In a way, perusing their archive feels kind of like looking at a time-capsule after the end of the world: It's a perfect fossil record of the Web at any point in time. Michael Chabon, while talking about the impetus to write his Yiddish Policemen's Union, spoke of finding a Yiddish travel phrasebook with translations like "How much is a ticket to Lublin?" and instructions for ordering in restuarants...like a key to a lost world. If the world was no more, and all that remained were the echoes of the Internet bouncing off distant quasars (I know that isn't how it really works), Archive.org would be the container with every nuanced bit of what we are contained inside, from badly-scrawled blogs to even worse-scrawled CNN and MSNBC reports, and all the beauty that they contain.

The Spielberg Archive is kind of like that, only using Yiddish books instead of websites. Der Purim-Ber is a children's book, as far as I can tell, narrated by the bear itself. A Shṭeṭele in Poyln is a travelogue of the author's trip to his hometown of Ciechanowiec -- which, like Chabon's idea, no longer exists.

This, of course, doesn't include the hundreds of new Yiddish books being published every year, almost exclusively by religious Yiddish publishers, for the Haredi public...one of which my daughter is currently chewing on at this very moment. I don't speak Yiddish, but we can both read it. It's kind of the exact opposite of this archive -- I certainly didn't grow up with this language, but in the place where I live now, it's almost certain that she'll learn it in school, and it will almost undoubtedly come in handy at some point.