Barak Bassman

@DrFrancisYoung Yes annoying

Are other authors getting spammed with lots of individually tailored emails about their books (albeit verbose, florid and sycophantic and thus obviously AI-generated)?

Call me a radical, but NO. We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.

The thing is you can say it's good all day long but over my dead body will I sign on to this future. I don't care what sort of remnant of a remnant I have to belong to....

@mikra_namani An amazing book—the way it captures the voice and rhythm of Ancient Rome

After Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, and Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, my other favorite all-roads-lead-back-to-Rome fictional memoirs is this epistolary jewel

@BradWilcoxIFS I married my wife at 25 and only wished I could have married her sooner.

Parents of Young Adults Should Be Supportive of 20something Marriage Too many parents of today's young adults "hold that your 20s are for getting your career launched, “figuring out who you are,” and having fun. Enough of the navel-gazing identity quests. Not only is fun overrated, fun is far more likely to materialize when you’re with friends and family, not when you’re alone, online, at work, meeting up with strangers, stressed by overwork, or on a packed airplane for the next seven hours. “Fun” like that is overrated. How have we been so misled for so long?" @RegnerusMark ifstudies.org/blog/twenty-so…

How to deal with AI slop as an author? Disengage. Don’t read anything written by AI: No summaries. No overviews. No slop articles. UNPLUG. Read books written by real people. Write. Reread the best books written by real people. Memorize the outstanding lines. Keep writing.

The Mermaid ~ 1910 ~ Howard Pyle (American painter, 1853-1911)

For several weeks, the Library has been reorganizing the Strashun Rabbinic collection. Items in this collection have periodically been misshelved due to the complexity of its call number system: each book is labeled with a double vov, a number, and another Hebrew letter or two; usually, there is then another number and a date. You can see the ease with which one might accidentally misplace an item. One of the joys of this cleanup effort—beyond the satisfaction of seeing everything beautifully arranged!—has been finding misshelved items and having the opportunity to examine them closely. Items have included siddurim dating as far back as 1771 and a miniature set of the Babylonian Talmud. Equally fascinating are volumes from the 18th and 19th centuries stamped with personal names and annotated by the original readers. Each book we open emphasizes the fact that this collection contains not only sacred texts, but sacred history. Photo: Title page from Volume I of En Ya'akov: me'asef le-khol agadot u-midrashim ha-mefuzarim be-khol ha-shishah sedarim 'im p. Rashi ve-Tosafot ve-hidushe ha-Ramban. Vilna: Bi-defus Sh. Y. Fin ve-A. Ts. Rozenkrants, 1869-1874. Strashun Rabbinic Collection, YIVO Library.

@DrFrancisYoung The dark fantasy novellas I write are deeply tinged with Jewish history folklore and mysticism especially from premodern Eastern Europe

But I am intrigued by novelists from minority religions (and not just Islam) allowing their faith to inspire their writing - more of this, definitely

A very interesting piece by Leila Aboulela in the latest @Soc_of_Authors magazine reflecting on the challenges of writing religious fiction in the 21st century

Not agreeing with the first line - after all, who wrote those books and shouldn't hese writers get fair payment for their efforts?

'The Mermaid' (1910) Howard Pyle (1853-1911)

Teahouse - Yotsuya Arakicho, by Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1935

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I was meant to be a soulful, sensitive man who spent his days writing strange tales that only a handful of people truly understood.

I’ve been to Church countless times. There’s never been armed security. I’ve never gone to any Jewish event, temple or school without armed guards there. Can you imagine what it’s like to live like that? Can you imagine how exhausted it makes you?

I see a future where people realize this is depraved and stupid.

@AdneSadeh The university library will have it and may be able to send you a copy

Ugh. I desperately want to get a copy of Dan Ben-Amos 1967 Indiana Univ. dissertation “Narrative Forms in the Haggadah: Structural Analysis.” I think ProQuest has it because they bought University Microfilms International who had it. Sigh. Anyone have ProQuest access?

Many writers will write "to market" because being a writer is more important than what they write. If I can't write what I want to write, the way I want to write it, then I'd rather not write at all.

@Celestemarcus3 You should really try to get Adina Hoffman to write for Liberties (she was co editor at Ibis Editions)

@Celestemarcus3 Ibis Editions in. Jerusalem issued an English translation eve earlier. The loss of Ibis Editions for translations of Hebrew and Arabic literature of the Levant has been awful (and even some Greek and Ladino).

Must read, as ever @NathanThrall