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Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Jennifer Mendelsohn

Pennies, Mussels, and Violent Dreams

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 12:00 PM ET

Good morning guys.

I totally forgot about the Ides of March, but my life has been chock-full of mild paranoia and strange coincidences of late. I realized this morning that I forgot to share my horoscope (which is Eric's, too, actually) for yesterday: "You are on the precipice of added recognition, fame, and fortune. People talk and write about you--Aries and Libra persons play instrumental roles." Now, Daniel, you're an Aries. And people have been talking and writing about me (in "The Fray")--OK, they've been vilifying me--but that counts, doesn't it? I also found it strange that after watching Sunday night's Sopranos, which ended quite violently, I had a terrible dream that a friend was killed in a gangland hit, and I was being accused of his murder. I woke in a start, terribly distressed, and called him first thing Monday morning to make sure he was OK, and he laughed at me ... until lunch time, when he got into a car accident and totaled his car. (He's sore, but OK.) Coincidence? You be the judge.

I'm not sure either of you knows this, but I am incredibly superstitious, a trait that I'm well aware is better suited to some kerchief-headed woman from the old country than a professional woman in her 30s living in a major metropolitan city. Right now, I can spy at least one penny on my bedroom floor that I refuse to pick up because the tails side is up. I realize this is quite ridiculous, but the only time I've ever broken the rule (I distinctly remember saying to myself, "This is so silly! Just pick up the damn penny!"), something disastrous happened that very afternoon, thereby forging an unshakably visceral link between the two for me. I suppose this is somewhat akin to the phenomenon whereby you eat a food that makes you sick, and then avoid it like the plague for years afterwards. Do you remember that fabulous Atul Gawande New Yorker piece about nausea and vomiting that explained all that? I am still rather wary of mussels for that reason. What's even funnier is that after being up all night, violently ill from bad mussels, I had to spend the entire next day with the band Hanson for a story I was writing. Despite the fact that I was still green to the gills, I swigged an entire bottle of Pepto in the car on the way over and tried my best to be perky, just like Ike, Zac, and Taylor. Did my distress come through in the resulting story? You be the judge.

The Oscar race this year leaves me quite cold. In fact, I am plugging Judy Berlin as a write-in candidate. (I stole that joke, btw, from our brother Matt, who called me during the Westminster Dog Show to announce that their golden retriever, Cooper, had won on the write-in vote.) Of the nominated best films, I have seen only The Sixth Sense and American Beauty. The former I enjoyed immensely, but not enough to make me think it's Best Picture material, and the latter I couldn't watch without noticing at every turn how, in its smugness about suburbia, it is an almost perfect inverse to Eric's film, a fact noted by many critics as well. Of the nominated performers, I'm rooting intensely for Hilary Swank, if only because her nomination proves to me that one can still do fine work in a small film and get recognized. (Read: You don't have to be bankrolled by the Weinstein brothers.) But my movie tastes have long been out of synch with the Academy. Titanic, Best Picture? Did the voters see the same movie I did? The one where Leonardo DiCaprio's character, in trying to sound all smart while discussing a painting, says, "I love his use of color" without even a smidgen of irony? Oh, never mind. The last movie I absolutely adored (besides Judy, that is) was probably Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies.

OK: My last thought has nothing to do with anything, but I just have to say something about it. There is an absolutely perfect piece in the new Harper's by Meghan Daum called "Music Is My Bag," in which she talks about the perils of being a teen-age music geek. In the lede, she describes a "fifteen-year-old boy with the early traces of a mustache who hangs out in the band room after school playing the opening bars of a Billy Joel song on the piano, and who, in an unsuccessful attempt at a personal style, wears a fedora hat and a scarf decorated with a black-and-white design of a piano keyboard." Lord have mercy, didn't we all know this boy? Who among our friends didn't have a fedora period in high school? And Daniel, if I remember correctly, weren't you what they called a "choir fag" at Kennedy High? I of course, was the female version of him, with my cello-playing, All State orchestra, music-camp-every-summer past; I'm not sure, but I think I might have actually had the telltale "Music Is My Bag" tote that we all schlepped circa 1982. Are there still kids like this? I also couldn't help but notice that Daum is the one who wrote the New Yorker piece about the impossibility of surviving as a freelancer in New York; her Harper's byline says she now lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. Will that be the next move for any of us?

Love,
Jennifer

P.S.: In another bit of kismet, I see there's a story on the wire about a California serial killer who was denied the right to have a sweat-lodge ceremony before his execution; he claimed he needed it to properly atone.

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Jennifer Mendelsohn

Pennies, Mussels, and Violent Dreams

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 12:00 PM 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)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Topic A: Obama's Speech
| Pundits and diplomats respond.
Robinson: Sunshine in BerlinToles: Obama the UniterTelnaes: Meanwhile, McCain
PLUS » Stumped: Bring Back Bill Clinton