“Night” was published in 1960. I think a lot of people don’t understand how hard it was for people to talk about the Holocaust because now we’re inundated with Holocaust narratives in everything from Hollywood movies to children’s books and video games. But the cultural trauma and the collective silence surrounding the Holocaust was very, very real. My dad was born in the Bronx in the 50s and he remembers the weird status of the Shoah: everyone had been touched by it but no one really felt like they “owned” it. People whispered about it but no one talked about it. You would sometimes walk into a shop or laundromat and everyone working there had a number tattoo.
Wiesel was sneered at by a certain type of academic for being a conventional writer and by portions of the left for being a Zionist. In either case, we were to understand that he was a “bad” survivor unlike the “interesting” survivors who wrote more avant-garde prose (Paul Celan, etc) or the “righteous” survivors who did not advocate for the state of Israel. We were to understand that Wiesel was “bad” because he paved the way for insipid Holocaust romances like Schindler’s List and contributed to a general cultural sense that Jews were aggrieved victims (which like…..they were).
It’s true that Wiesel believed he was a victim, that he was willing to tell and retell the story of what happened to him, and that he understood “Never again” not only as a generic slogan of humanitarian goodwill but as a promise to the Jewish people. I think that was extremely important for Jews like my grandfather, who fled Europe, to hear, although it may be hard for us to have the historical perspective to understand why that is. It’s also hard to imagine that we’d have the language and reference points to talk about genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, etc, without his work and the work of other survivors.
Anyway, rest in piece, Elie. Your memory will be a blessing.
Iain (“an ex-physicist currently working as a data scientist”) scraped Dark Lyrics and built a dataset of lyrics to 222,623 songs by 7,364 metal bands, then used traditional natural language processing techniques to analyze them.
Iain’s post is a good tour through the natural language processor’s toolkit – Bag of Words Bayesian filtering, log-likelihood ratio, term frequency -Inverse document frequency, cosine distance, etc. The output of the analysis is sometimes fun and interesting, but the value here is mostly as a good primer on how the different techniques work and when you might use them.
The 401 is where they weed out the weak. You don’t drive on the 401 to get somewhere. You do it for the challenge. You do it to test your abilities like some Uchiha clan shit. Rush hour 401 is the breaking point between heaven and earth. Are you going to descend into a Lovecraftian hell or reach Nirvana? You will double the size of your biceps death-gripping your steering wheel. There is no time for rest or pulling off over into an exit. Bodily functions shut down. Cars on the side of the road and crashes closing lanes are a constant reminder that you are driving the razor’s edge. Death is mere seconds away at any given moment. They’re always doing construction but nothing is ever finished. It’s a constant roadblock for the hell of it. This is the Dark Souls 2 of Canadian driving. git good or get out
And that’s just normal mode. Have fun in the six-month long Ontario winter and enter some top-tier level of highway driving.
EVO2015. EVO2018.
I heard that babies are born on the 401, grow up on the 401, and take over for their parents as driver of the family car on the 401
What the fuck.
I live right by the 401 i never knew it was so weird i just thought all highways were like that
The Rabbinical Assembly, made up of 1,700 rabbis, stated that all those who identify as transgender will be identified with the name, gender and pronoun of their choosing, and those will be used when they are called to recite the Torah and the denomination will implement full recognition and accommodation for transgender people within the religious institution. Three Christian denominations have also spoken out in support of trans rights.
