BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

I hadn't lived in NYC a full year when Mark David Chapman ended the life of one of my Upper West Side neighbors - John Lennon. This year I celebrated living in NYC 30 years... more than 1/2 my adult life. This year, Lennon is gone 29 years. My Favorite Lennon Song: by Kyle Anderson Today is the anniversary of the murder of rock legend John Lennon, who was killed outside his apartment building just before 11 p.m. via five gun shots. The killer, Mark David Chapman, had been stalking Lennon for months and even had contact with him earlier in the day (Lennon signed a copy of Double Fantasy for the guy who would take his life only hours later). Chapman's motives remain unclear to this day (the film Chapter 27, starring 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto as Chapman, didn't offer many suggestions), but he remains incarcerated in a state prison in New York and has been denied parole five times, often because of campaigns lead by Lennon's widow Yoko Ono. Lennon's legacy ...

(excerpts from the above titled book) by Susan Sontag In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas , her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, "the educated class," a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is "some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting" that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated read: privileged, well-off-woman like her know of war? Can her recoil from its allure be l...

AM I JUST A FIGMENT OF SOMEONE'S IMAGINATION? Found this interesting because I understood this questioner's plight. I know what it is to be just "someone's imaginary object." Four years ago I learned what it was to be just words on a computer monitor, to be clicked on & off by someone who refused see me as a human being with feelings. For that person, I was a thing, an "it." But I didn't realize they felt that way until it was too late. Once he was done with me he wanted me to stay gone - and was angry when I proved to be sentient and tangible. My favorite movies, the Matrix series, also touch on this feeling of different realities and what is real and what isn't? However, we are from Hashem's imagination but we are far from "figments." We are his children and He is our loving parent. And children never go "poof" to loving parents. By Tzvi Freeman Ever since I was a small child hooked on The Cartoon Channel, I...