Make my heart sing.

Q: What does it take to make me burst into tears at work?

A: The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

I could be critical. I could start second-guessing what the rest of the movie is going to be like, and whether the Wild Things will have the same voices that they did in my head as a child (they won't) or that I give them when I read out loud to my daughter (probably not). Somewhere in my head right now, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of Maurice Sendak, and whether he would have expected the film version to be anything like his book (no) and whether he would be happy anyway (I really, really believe yes).

But at this very moment in time, I don't care. I just want to run out of here and not stop till I get to the ocean.

Open Mic - A Cry for Help

After much confusion and venue-switching, tomorrow night's Open Mic is safe -- we're doing it at Sacred Chow in the West Village, right near Washington Square Park. Free, of course, and the best kosher sangrias in New York City (and otherworldly food, too). And the estimable Danny Raphael as a feature, just in from London...tomorrow at 7:30. Please, spread the word.

Oh, Excellent.

At the out-of-control and totally uncouth forty-author-signing yesterday at Books of Wonder, it seemed like everyone had a story -- the people who hadn't written books most of all. There was the woman who gave me the MMORPG-type business card and told me that her just-finished novel was like a girl version of the Goonies -- total booklust on that front. And Michael Northrop, who was lurking like a fan, even though his first book is coming out in 2 weeks, and it's going to be bigger than Twilight. And then the awesome punk-rock girl who stormed up to me to announce that she went to an Orthodox day school and we probably had the same history -- and I was like, no, I just wish I had your history. (Which I actually don't. I'm pretty alright having gone to a school which has been fictionalized as North Shore High, and became religious when I did -- but it still would've been fun, I think.

And then there's Hayley Anne Perkins, who was walking around with a beautiful oversized dictionary yesterday (American Heritage, I think) and asking everyone to sign on their favorite word. She very courteously listed them on her site, right after a poem called "Ned Vizzini Stole My Pen" -- but here are a few of my favorites:

SOMETHING (BECAUSE “SOMETHING IS GOOD”) - Billy Merrell
CRASH - Blake Nelson
BONVIVANT - Micol Ostow
SNEAK - Lisa Ann Sandell
SLUICE - Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Adrienne replied "oh, sluice!" after not even a second's pause, as if it was the most matter-of-fact thing that could ever occur to anyone. Because every time you say it, it sounds like you're pronouncing it wrong. Go check out the whole unexpurgated list, though -- if only to read that fun poem.

Sometimes Even I Write about Meat

This week on G-dcast: how to grill an animal in the Temple.

Rachel Kohl Finegold, the exemplary ritual director of our old synagogue in Chicago, was totally great about jumping in to launch this episode. As a matter of fact, she (shomer-negiah) strongarmed me at Alan and Miriam's wedding and was like "what's the G-dcast emergency, huh? How many weeks do I have to do this?" We hadn't found anyone for Vayikra. She and her husband, Rebbetzin Avi, started pelting me with pitches right then and there. Usually, it takes us *weeks* to get to pitch level.

But: boom.

(and i know which lines you will probably think come straight from me and my wacky radical vegetarian-separatist mentality. well, you're WRONG. and, may i point out that rachel is a proud meat-eater....?)

Rupert Murdoch Dreams

Last night, I had dinner with Ronald Lauder and some other folks who tackled a lot of different political, philosophical, and theological questions -- most of which can be summed up pretty simply: Why does everyone hate Israel?

And then this morning, I woke up to Rupert Murdoch saying the same thing:

"I am curious: Why do we never hear calls for Hamas leaders to be charged with war crimes? ... Whether Israel is ever found guilty of any war crime hardly matters. Hamas gets a propaganda win simply by having the charge made often and loudly enough."

Weirdly, his editorial in the Jerusalem Post takes a bit of a stand-uppy beginning -- "Let me set the record straight: I live in New York. I have a wife who craves Chinese food. And people I trust tell me I practically invented the word 'chutzpah'" -- and then segues directly, and intelligently, into an impassioned and fairly creative analysis of Israel's (failed) PR battle. He reiterates several points -- "If you are committed to Israel's destruction, and if you believe that dead Palestinians help you score a propaganda victory, you do things like launch rockets from a Palestinian schoolyard. This ensures that when the Israelis do respond, it will likely lead to the death of an innocent Palestinian - no matter how many precautions Israeli soldiers take" -- but this editorial succeeds so profoundly because of two things:

1. These are facts that, in the past, have primarily been said by Israeli strategists to other Israeli strategists, like shipwreck victims screaming into the wind.
2. It's Rupert Murdoch saying it. Dammit, he's Australian. People listen to him.

The International Herald-Tribune also featured a prominent article on Israeli rebranding -- or it was touted that way, anyway. The text actually ended up spending most of the article talking about Avigdor Lieberman, the allegedly racist head of the Israel Beitenu party (and prospective appointee to be foreign minister) before turning to these sage words -- which have some pretty hot "duh" action, and which most of us could probably recite in our sleep:

"When we show Sderot, others also see Gaza," said Ido Aharoni, head of a rebranding team at the Foreign Ministry. "Everything is twinned when seen through the conflict. The country needs to position itself as an attractive personality, to make outsiders see it in all its reality. Instead, we are focusing on crisis management. And that is never going to get us where we need to go over the long term."

What will work for the long term? G*d knows, probably not Rupert Murdoch. But he's headed in the right direction, at least.

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.