Observing Holidays without Exclusion, including this Mother’s Day

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PT & SylviaI don’t like when holidays became all but compulsory to observe. With religious holidays it’s particularly unwelcome, but even secular celebrations can get that way, carrying the weight of oppressive tyranny by a majority group. It’s like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on prayer, basically overlooking that in that case, the public meetings in Rome, NY, began with prayers of one dominant faith, over and over again, for years. The plaintiffs documented an almost total monopoly ely Christian benedictions, yet the majority of justices voted to allow these regular observances, as if the exclusivity didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have been seen as contrary to the US constitution.


It was the above tweet by Mona Eltahawy that got me thinking about all this, even as I’ve been enjoying memories of my own mother and my whole family, today. Eltahawy’s an outspoken Egyptian-American feminist I admire, about whom I first wrote in 2011, when she was beaten and mistreated by Egyptian security officials. I approve of her affirmation that a person who isn’t a parent is not a lesser person. Also, let’s remember that many of our holidays are promoted and brought to us by the greeting card industry, the chocolatiers, the florists (in NYC, the cost of flowers is higher on holidays). Those businesses are entitled to make a living, too, but sometimes it all just get to be too much.

With that slightly misanthropic sentiment out of the way, I want to say happy Mother’s Day to all who observe it, and note how grateful we are to our mothers, those who came before and those in our midst still, improving the lives of their children and so many people around them.  Here are pictures of all, or nearly all, the mothers in my life, along with other relations. Included in these pictures are my late mother Sylvia Turner (1921-2006), who married Earl (1918-1994); Sylvia’s father, Louis Shiff (1901-94); Earl’s sister, my Aunt Francis (1922-2009); Sylvia and Earl’s eldest child, my sister Pamela, mother of Ben and Emma; Sylvia and Earl’s middle child, my late brother Joel (1951-2009); me with my mother Sylvia; and Kyle Gallup, my wife and mother of our son, Ewan Munro Turner, a baby in 1996.

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Indie Musical Instrument Store Flourishing 100s of Miles from a Big City

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I was delighted to see this article in the New Hampshire Union-Leader, reporting on Northern Lights, in Littleton, NH, where my singer-songwriter son Ewan Turner has gotten one of his favorite guitars, a Fender acoustic. The store was founded by Dan and Moochco Salomon, two friends and classmates from Franconia College, where we all went to school in the 1970s. It’s a good-news article by John Koziol emphasizing how the couple have managed, since 1978, to make the store in to a destination for musicians and avid players. They carry keyboards, drums, and other instruments, and really specialize with a fabulous guitar selection, with instrument prices that range from $100 to $95,000, the latter for a 1957 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. They operate from a rustic wooden building they own that was erected in 1833, on Main Street of one of the most livable small towns in the eastern U.S., roughly equidistant from Boston, Portland, ME, Burlington, VT, and Montreal, Quebec. They carry many fine guitar brands, including Martin, Taylor and Santa Cruz, which has only sixty authorized dealers in the whole country, and benefit from what Koziol reports is, “according to the April 2014 issue of Music Trades magazine…a ‘golden age’ for acoustic guitars with the market for acoustics costing more than $1,500 up 40 percent in 2013 over 2012.” I would add it seems to me a phenomenon similar to that which is fueling the renewal of vinyl’s popularity as a format for recorded sound.

I’m very happy that this store operated by my friends Dan and Moochco is doing well, thirty-six years after they first opened their doors. It reminds me that yesterday, May 4th, was the thirty-sixth anniversary of the opening of Undercover Books, the indie bookstore chain that I operated from 1978-85 with my sibling and parents, and which still ran as an online book ordering service until my brother Joel’s death in 2009. Congrats to Dan and Moochco, I hope to see them at Northern Lights sometime soon! Meantime, I invite you to see a picture of them in this screenshot from the article, and read it all via this link. Northern Lights

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Possible Photo of Lincoln’s Funeral Procession Prompts Personal Reflections of a Missing Friend

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When I had my bookstore, Undercover Books, we stocked and sold a majestic photography book called The Face of Lincoln, which collected every known photograph of Lincoln. It came out in 1979. Face of LincolnA few years later, I gave it as a wedding present to my Franconia College classmate and close friend Robert Henry Adams, who after college in New Hampshire had moved back to his hometown of Chicago where he became a dealer in rare books, prints, and fine art. The third member of our troika of friendship was Karl Petrovich, a dear friend to both of us. A few years after that, by which time I had moved to NYC, Rob gave me an original Lincoln photograph by Alexander Gardner, a contemporary of Matthew Brady. Sadly, Rob died in 2001, a dear friend whom I still miss all the time. Karl died a few months after Rob, early in 2002.Lincoln by Gardner

I thought of Rob yesterday when I heard CBC As It Happens’ interview with a US archivist who believes that a fellow staffer of his recently discovered a photograph of Lincoln’s funeral procession as it passed in front of Grace Church at Broadway and 10th Street in Manhattan, near where Matthew Brady had his photographic studio. It’s a segment that would’ve fascinated him, and he would have had an educated opinion about whether these pictures do show the Lincoln funeral. You may listen to the story about the discovery via this link. Along with pictures of The Face of Lincoln and the Lincoln photo Rob gave me here are some more shots: of Rob himself, with me; Karl Petrovich; his wife Sandra Adams; his sons, Jesse and Sam; and my wife Kyle Gallup. Cross-posted on Honourary Canadian.

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#FridayReads, March 14–Jan Wong’s Memoir of Depression, “Out of the Blue”

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Out of the Blue


Triggered by a death threat targeting her for a story she wrote, Wong–a career reporter–does a superb job investigating and striving to understand her own illness.

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Toboggan Days with Noah

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The above picture with my dog Noah patiently waiting for me as I prepared to slide down a hill was taken during an outing for students of the School on Magnolia, the alternative high school I attended in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1970s. In those days, my hair was sort of like that of NBA star Anderson Varejao, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Anderson VarejaoThe second picture here was taken by my late brother Joel, in the living room of the home we grew up in, in the suburb of Shaker Heights, a few years after the wintry picture.  Noah

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Judith Butler, Once More a Target of Critics Who Would Silence Her

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Readers here may recall I’ve written and shared about literary scholar and contemporary philosopher Judith Butler, a frequent target of criticism by right-wing conservative Jewish commentators, owing to positions of hers such as support for the boycott/divest/sanction (BDS) movement with regard to Israel. Some people in this debate–like Peter Beinart in his book The Crisis of Zionism–support boycotting only those goods that come from the Occupied Territories, not all of Israel. That’s my position, too. I’m not certain where Butler lands on that point–but regardless, unlike her opponents, I fully support her right to freely express herself and be heard, in all realms–political, critical and aesthetic.

All this comes up again because of a new instance of the Jewish establishment trying to banish her voice from the communal conversation. In the current episode, Philip Weiss writes in a blog post headed, “Jewish community commits intellectual suicide before our eyes,” that Butler had been asked to participate in a March 6 discussion of Franz Kafka at NYC’s Jewish Museum, but the invitation was withdrawn, owing to what Weiss believes was ‘pressure from donors.’ Weiss writes, “One critic said, ‘The hosting of [BDS] advocate Judith Butler by The Jewish Museum is a slap in the face to every Jew,’ Richard Allen, head of JCC Watch, told JNS.org.” This, all about a discussion of Kafka, with no direct relevance to Israel.

In the same vein of craven submission to angry types, the museum also recently canceled a panel that was to discuss John Judis’s important new book Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Many Jews on the right are nowadays inflamed by discussions like these, and many organizations, whether or not they share the same conservative ideology, succumb to threats and pressure.

This is all kind of personal to me. Judith Butler and I grew up in the same Jewish community in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where her father, known to all his patients as “Danny,” was a friendly family dentist. He looked after the teeth of all five Turners. He resembled Jack Paar, but nicer looking. Judith’s sister Diane was in my same year in school, where we knew each other. She moved to NY at around the same time I did, as part of a modern dance company, and we continued to see each other in the city from time to time. I occasionally heard from Diane about her sister, Judith, already then a professor, and a rising star in academia. She is an honorable person and a serious scholar. She should not be castigated or exiled for what I know to be an honest expression of belief, arrived at through careful deliberation and the weighing of difficult moral choices. As an example of her thoughtfulness, I submit this transcript of a talk she gave last February at Brooklyn College. It is well worth reading, and all in her own words.

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