When Myra Clark-Siegel, wife of Israeli Consulate General David Siegel, packed their things for their Los Angeles mission, she sacrificed a few items. But she couldn’t leave behind her children’s favorite books, no matter that they weighed down the suitcases.
What would it take for you to disown your child? I know that for most everyone this is a hypothetical question, but please indulge me:
The Arrowsmith Program uses cognitive exercises designed to strengthen the underlying brain functions responsible for learning disabilities. While new to the United States, the program has been offered in private schools in Canada for 30 years, among others by the Toronto Catholic District School Board.
Last Thursday night at LACMA, I was treated to a reading of my own works by the very talented and beautiful actress Bahar Soumekh, and by UC Irvine professor Nasrin Rahimieh. Outside the Bing Theater, rain poured in sheets, and traffic on Wilshire was at a standstill because all the lights had been blown out by the wind and — this being Los Angeles where even the mildest winter storm is dealt with like Armageddon — I was rather astonished that anyone had shown up at all.
For Walt Whitman, the Civil War was about the body. The crime of the Confederacy, Whitman believed, was treating blacks as nothing but flesh, selling them and buying them like pieces of meat. Whitman\’s revelation, which he had for the first time at a New Orleans slave auction, was that body and mind are inseparable. To whip a man\’s body was to whip a man\’s soul.
Jonah Lehrer\’s book, \”Proust Was a Neuroscientist,\” is based on a misunderstanding. Nonetheless, it is engaging, informed, wide ranging and altogether worth reading. At times it has the whip-smart feel of the best term paper you\’ve ever read; if only one could adjust the thesis a bit, it would settle in to what is its real nature — a provocative meditation, not a genuine discovery.
Historically, rabbis have proclaimed that in order to study kabbalah, one has to be a learned Jewish man older than of 40. So imagine how surprised those rabbis would be today if they could peruse a modern bookstore: There are now a plethora of tomes on the subject, making kabbalah available to the layperson — male, female, Jew and non-Jew — the dummy and idiot alike (which is it better to be?).
Breathe.
Yes, take a breath.
\”One, long deliberate breath that you feel from the very beginning of it until the end of it. Try it, really. You can do it with your eyes open. You can do it while reading these instructions. Do you notice that you can feel your body, and especially your chest expanding and relaxing to accommodate the air flowing in and out, without stopping reading?\”
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