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Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Ides, Schmides--Beware March 15!

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 10:29 AM ET

Hi Er and Jen,

Today is the 15th of March, and as a classicist I feel compelled to note that on this very day, 2044 years ago (if memory serves), Julius Caesar was assassinated as he made his way onto the Senate floor. OK, OK, he himself wasn't necessarily the nicest of men, and certainly had a rather disorganized personal life (the poet Catullus said, "He was a man to every woman and a woman to every man"), and it's true that he was planning to abolish the Roman Republic and make himself king, a Ross Perot-ish maneuver which did nothing to endear him to the more democratically minded of his fellow trattoria-habitués; but still, it isn't very nice to have all your closest friends stab you repeatedly (before breakfast). Anyway, I know this will sound impossibly nerdy, but I always find that the Ides of March has a creepy, somewhat unnerving quality: I find it is a day for mild paranoia and strange coincidences.

Indeed, it occurs to me that, quite amazingly, all of the themes we've mentioned thus far in our e-mails, and which seem to have captivated the minds of many right-thinking and morally upright readers, were, in fact, present in one way or another in the very pleasant morning I've had thus far: Monica Lewinsky was just giving me a blow job, and I took advantage of the fact that my hands were free to shoot a bichon frisé in the foot.

Actually it looks like a fine morning here on the Upper West Side. It is probably less fine for those who owned biotech stocks, since I read in the Times that both the Dow and the Nasdaq (a name to me that always looks vaguely Arabic; perhaps Bush will change it to "Nasdack" after his election?) went to hell yesterday afternoon after Clinton and Blair revealed that they didn't think the blueprint for the human genome should be owned by corporations--a rather naive observation, I couldn't help noting, given that everything else is owned by corporations, including Clinton and Blair themselves. I personally have found that one of the great advantages of not owning much of anything (stocks, real estate, money itself) is that it gives you an oddly relaxing sense of pure spectatorship when it comes to about 80 percent of American culture over the past 10 years. Just think of how much time you save by skipping the business section of the Times, which to me often has all the relevance of hieroglyphic transmissions from a lost civilization. ("The Afterlife of a Powerful Chief," is, in fact, the headline in today's biz section: For a second, before I realized what it was about, there passed before my eyes the fleeting image of an immense, Egyptian-style funeral of some CEO, complete with corporate secretaries being slaughtered in the grave after the ceremony to protect their Master in the afterlife.)

Once, reaching for the salmon-pink New York Observer at a newsstand, I accidentally took the almost-the-same-shade-of-pink Financial Times, and practically burst into tears on the downtown 1 train when I realized what I'd done.

If it's OK with you guys, I'd prefer to skip Politics and Religion and Gayness today (I'm already regretting the Catullus citation, and my agent just called to say that Julius Caesar's press rep called in a total frizz) and talk about movies. I'm inspired to do so by 1) what Andrew and Matthew [our other brothers] tell me is a terrifying amount of flames (heh) and death-threat hate postings we've gotten thus far, which have made the rest of our family fear for our safety; and, far more worryingly, 2) my usual Oscars-is-next-week-practically-and-I-still-don't-have-a-plan dilemma. Also, as I just told Eric on the phone (God, that feels like cheating), there's a hilarious review of William Goldman's Hollywood-screenwriter-insider-memoir in The New Yorker that came yesterday. Have you guys seen it? Any votes for the upcoming awards? Preliminarily, all I'll say is that it looks like Miramax is once again trying to beat us into submission re The Cider House Rules, a clichéd, dull and ordinary flick that will no doubt get a zillion awards due to nothing but relentless, grinding advertising on the studio's part--what I now think of as the Judi Dench treatment. (I loved and admired her for having the good taste to be thoroughly embarrassed when she won for her 12-minute stint in Shakespeare in Love). But then, I still haven't gotten over the fact that L. A. Confidential didn't win Best Picture, so I'm hardly a good judge of these things.

Remember I have to head to Princeton later today so I'm probably gonna sign off around 3-ish to catch a train.

yours with creepy, Ides-ish love,
Dan

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Ides, Schmides--Beware March 15!

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 10:29 AM ET
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Eric Mendelsohn is the writer/director of the film Judy Berlin, currently in theaters and starring Madeline Kahn, Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Mendelsohn is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer, a lecturer in classics at Princeton University, and the author of The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (click here to buy it). Jennifer Mendelsohn is Slate's Washington, D.C.-based "Keeping Tabs" columnist.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Don't the Mendelsohns remind you of J.D.Salinger's Glass family of precocious children?

--Patti

(To reply, click here.)

[Eagle80 was of the opinion that the Mendelsohns were in fact The Sopranos of the literati. Stacy Grover asked How did so much cleverness end up in one family? and this brought the Missing Mendelsohn brothers to The Fray: Andrew said I often wonder that myself. And you haven't even heard from the rest of us yet!
And Matthew responded:]
I have to agree with my brother Andrew. I've been feeling like Zeppo Marx all week. I think Slate should host a Breakfast Table with the forgotten Mendelsohn brothers. Jennifer, Eric and Daniel can host a discussion about gay culture while Andrew and myself discuss biotech stocks. You'll learn more with them but you'll make more with us.

(To reply--or to follow the thread in more detail--click here.)


Thursday's entry: As for Jennifer and marriage, I believe she is the star of an upcoming Fox special called, Who wants to Marry A Mendelsohn? Should be good.

--Bill Watrous

(To reply, click here.)

[If you want to read the marriage proposal for Jennifer (and her response) click here. Yet another member of the Mendelsohn family, Jay, entered The Fray here. Marriage proposal for Dan is here. Sorry, Eric, no proposal, but lots of Fraygrants did like your film and one of them liked your photo.

But there were also Fray readers who wanted to discuss serious issues, or at least give a short, thrilling history of religion down the ages:]

Typical drivel from the pseudo-intellectual phenoms. Here's some of my drivel. Let's see: there were 12 tribes waiting for the Messiah, He comes, they kill kill him because he wanted to give Caesar what was Caesar's, they wanted power, all he wanted was your faith and devotion to a Greater Good. The various churches spring up, (no-one mentions the Orthodox Churches and the atrocities they committed), Popes are killed, moved to France, etc., they offer forgiveness of sins for money, and kill, all for power using the popular religion of the time. Then we have Protestantism, (no one mentions the 2.5 million Catholics Cromwell killed and the killing that has gone on since then in Ireland) Let's leave for the New World, Puritan brothers, so that we the church leaders can have the power over every bit of your life (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Pat Buchanan, et al) Oh yeah, you're a witch, die! (You also had a piece of land I wanted...)I am going to skip a century or two now... lets see Joseph Smith, ex-con, sees an angel called Baloney, no Maloney, no, Moroni... yeah that's the one. Yeah, Yeah, that's my wife...Morgan Fairchild...all 11 of them...God told me I could, I swear!

Well enough of this. People are the problem, not God, not Jesus, no matter what religion, faith, creed.

--St Pat

(To reply, click here.)


Is it possible that the pope's "doctrinal rigidity" and "gestures of expansive humanity" [Monday's entry] are of a piece? As I understand John Paul II's thinking, the humanity Mendelsohn admires arises almost entirely from the pope's dogmatic beliefs about God, man's nature, and the consequent requirements for living a good life. Liberals (and I don't intend that as a lazy epithet) should consider the possibility that the "humanity" they praise must rest either on certain irreducible truths or on a collection of insubstantial, albeit attractive, sentiments.

--Michael Pollard

(To reply, click here.)


Many have decried the pope's apology as a political ploy. I doubt it, if only for the reason that if it were, he would have vaguely referred to the Crusades and Inquisition as "youthful indiscretions" of a church that is now much more mature and therefore knows better as a result of the important lessons it has learned.

G Wiz

(To reply, click here.)


1. Gays (yawn). How over. How '90s.
2. Catholics. "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."

--P.J.O'Connell

(To reply, click here.)


To P.J.O'Connell: Let's jump back in time to 1960...
Negros (yawn). How over. How 50's.
2. Jews. "Just ignore them and they'll go away."
It ain't over by a long shot!

--Dave

(To reply, click here.)


I'm glad Eric Mendelsohn cleared up the confusion over Beauty and the Beast. But I'm still not sure which Psycho he had in mind. Perkins or Vaughn? Or Christian Bale? I hope he clears this up before the Breakfast Table is wiped clear of bagel crumbs, the dishes go in the dishwasher, and he goes off to film The Magnificent Mendelsohns.

And, by the way, the poet Catullus [see Wednesday's entry] was really the Matt Drudge --or maybe Fray contributor--of his times. How low can you get?

--Eagle80

(To reply, click here.)

[The Catulluses of the modern age also discussed dogs, names, the Oscars, The Sopranos and many other Breakfast Table topics in The Fray this week.]

(3/17)

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