Stealing Cups
The origin of my impulse to pilfer branded vessels
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Uncompensated Endorsement
A paean to what moves me
Stealing Cups
I don’t remember much from my very early life. What I do remember is joining a guild of toddler pickpockets managed by a blind Irish Catholic priest. Our headquarters were the inner workings of a giant clock above Grand Central Station. We would spend our days parting unsuspecting businessmen and captains of industry from their pocket watches, pince-nez, alligator skin billfolds, and other small valuables. I say unsuspecting because no one expects to get robbed by a toddler. But their small hands, proximity to the pockets of their victims, and vulnerability to moral manipulation make toddlers anatomically and psychologically ideal for petty theft, especially at the urging of an authority figure, like the blind priest, in my case.
At the end of each day we would dump our spoils from little canvas sacks onto an enormous mahogany table located inside the clock. Judging the quality and quantity of our bounty merely by the sound of the clattering objects falling upon the table, the blind priest would rub his tremendous hands, pat the nearest thief on his newsboy cap, and begin handling each object, one at a time. Merely by touch, and the odd bite between his gold-plated teeth, the priest would appraise the value of each article, sorting them into equal piles on the table. These he would distribute to us for our efforts. Then the priest would leave, and we toddlers would conduct a brisk trade, some preferring legal tender, others, like me, satisfied with objects of special craft and aesthetic value. Hedging against the intra-guild theft that was a consistent problem in our band, I kept my earnings in cigar boxes buried in parks around Manhattan and Brooklyn. What I didn’t realize is that a toddler’s memory is very limited, and often misplaced the boxes. Thinking of all that unclaimed treasure keeps me up at night, even now, driving me to my writing desk to revisit that peculiar period of my life in the hopes I may be struck by some revelatory memory. When I think back to it, I realize the priest always claimed the best stuff for himself, but at the time, it seemed a just and prudent system. Altogether, this was a rather exciting way of life.
I know what you’re thinking: Zander, you were never a child pickpocket. I’ve heard every appeal to reason from friends, family, colleagues, and therapists: you never lived in New York City as a child; people didn’t wear pocket watches in the mid-1990s; there was no blind priest or giant clock. Come to your senses, they plead. Fair enough. This may be a constructed memory. But why then, whenever I go under hypnosis, does my mind wander back to those halcyon days of grubby-faced Lilliputians terrorizing the foggy streets of Manhattan, filling sacks and smoking littered cigar stubs that in our tiny hands looked proportionally correct? How can I picture with perfect detail young Bif, who played the mouth harp, or street-smart Evrin, who mastered the art of stick-and-poke tattooing our chubby arms, or elder Fin, who at age 5 already seemed ancient to us? If these memories aren’t real, what is reality?
My kleptomaniacal strain persists in mysterious ways, because, as they say, the habits you make as a toddler are the hardest to break. But after many years of inculcation in the finer points of Judeo-Christian morality, I’ve mostly managed to bury these urges, like so many cigar boxes scattered beneath New York. There is one fortune, however, I simply cannot resist. And that is cups. You know, the vessels from which we drink water, lemonade, or, if you’re truly depraved, milk. It all started in 2017. I was sipping a cappuccino at Farmacia Del Cambio, an old apothecary-turned-bistro in Turin’s Piazza Carignano. My chair faced the Museo Egizio, just across the square, a famed vault of ancient Egyptian riches and artifacts. I started thinking about the audacity of those early European antiquarians who pillaged Egypt to fill Western museums with stelae, jewels, busts, sarcophagi, even entire temples, without pause or compunction. My eye wandered to the small white cappuccino cup on the table, inscribed with Farmacia’s simple sans serif wordmark in tasteful gray ink. You can see where I’m going here. Swept up by the moral inversion that justified the industrial-scale expropriation of treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb and elsewhere to (equally sepulchral) stately homes and galleries in Europe and America, I wiped away the remnants of my foamy coffee and dropped the mug into my bag.
That night, my dreams were haunted by hieroglyphic symbols, sand storms, strange chanting, and the murky vision of a mummified king guarded by dusty creatures I assume had been his favorite pets in life. From this foreboding realm I awoke, drenched in cold sweat. When I put on my glasses I saw it: a sliver of moonlight penetrated the windows of our rented apartment, illuminating, there on the desk, the cup of my transgression. What had I done? Was I as bad as Lord Elgin, who tore a horde of precious fifth-century marble sculptures from the Acropolis mount and had them shipped to England in 1803? The English can still repatriate the Elgin Marbles, but for me, it was too late to bring the cup back: we were leaving early in the morning for Lake Como. And there I’d thought my thieving days were over. How naive I had been! I didn’t sleep a wink.
Later in the trip we sat outside a pizzeria in the town of Salò, overlooking Lake Garda. By this time the sting of shame I felt about the Farmacia cup had dulled, and I was having a grand time. We ordered a round of espressos and basked in the sun. I dozed off for a moment, and when I opened my eyes, a perfect green espresso cup had been placed on the table in front of me. My heart sank. I was powerless to resist. I quickly downed the coffee and, after looking over my shoulder, hid the cup in my pocket. One stolen cup is forgiven, but two is a trend. Was this to be my lot in life? Bounding from one café to the next in search of my next subject?
I’m afraid that all these years later, little has changed. But I am not an indiscriminate criminal: I have developed an advanced aesthetic calculus by which potential acquisitions are scrutinized and qualified. First, I never steal a cup if I can buy it. I came by my beloved prize from the State Farmers Market Restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina by legal means. Second, I never steal an ugly cup. Typography, color, weight, quality, thermal efficiency: these factors are all taken under advisement. Third, if there is a high risk of exposure and therefore public humiliation, I’ll pass, though not without regret. Of course, in this line of work there will always be a degree of risk. For that reason I’ve made a habit of carrying a pocketful of marbles whenever I visit a restaurant or café, in case I need to create an obstacle for my pursuers if my cover is blown, the waitstaff is alerted, and a foot chase ensues.
Why confess this in a public newsletter? All those beautiful cups were burning a hole in my pantry, and sending pictures of the mugs holding today’s newspaper to Zagat felt too on the nose. I expect this will make me Public Enemy #1, what with El Chapo behind bars and Qasem Soleimani assassinated by a drone strike in 2020. When I am sent to a supermax prison for my crimes, the commissary will find itself a few mugs short soon after my arrival. Lacking the requisite political orientation and physical strength to join a white nationalist gang (my faith also prohibits tattoos), nor the managerial skills to conduct a complex criminal enterprise from behind bars, I’ll need a striking mug collection in my cell to impress my fellow inmates. It’s either that, reciting Henny Youngman routines, or making naughty pencil sketches.
Maybe I’ll spend my days writing a strained autobiographical defense of my crimes, complete with a labored deconstruction of the entire idea of “property,” like Alexander Berkman did after trying to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in 1892. When I’m released, however, I’ll dedicate my life to helping the next generation avoid my cruel fate. I’ll travel from preschool to preschool telling my story, and describing the social dynamics of supermax prisons in vivid detail, to assembled toddlers, a “scared straight” approach to undermine the allure of the pickpocketing life. It’s the least I can do to atone.
Stumbling Through the Western Canon
A reflection on Harold Bloom’s iconic list
Ethics of the Fathers
The university student lives and dies by the syllabus. But after graduating, most of us abandon orderly guides to reading, watching, and listening in lieu of a more ad-hoc approach to learning. With their definitive lists, uniform design systems, and air of authority, brands like Everyman’s Library, Criterion Collection, Penguin Classics, NYRB Classics, Smithsonian Folkways, and Masterclass satisfy the recovering academic’s need for continuing education. And yet, there’s something different about a syllabus curated by a single, exceptional individual. Martin Luther King Jr.’s handwritten one from his 1962 seminar on Social Philosophy at Morehouse College is a sublime example, and an interesting document to revisit at a moment when curriculum design has become the most heated front in the American culture war, and a pivotal issue in our elections. With the Classics in particular under renewed assault by those leveling the historically dubious accusation that the discipline itself perpetuates white supremacy, it’s worth pointing out that our greatest prophet of racial reconciliation chose Plato and Aristotle to crown his course.
The debate over who should read what is not new. When he published The Western Canon, his controversial survey of “the books and schools of the ages,” in 1994, literary critic and professor Harold Bloom knew it would be received as an act of war by those he labeled “Idealists,” or the “School of Resentment.” By their hand, he claimed, “aesthetic and most intellectual standards [were] being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice.” To widen the canon, he argued, is to destroy it, because by their very nature canons are exclusive and by extension, exclusionary. His Western one is limited by certain “severely artistic criteria,” the degree to which works warrant re-reading, their quality of translation into English, and, somewhat improbably, “weirdness,” or sheer inventiveness.
We would assume, per the name, they must also possess that elusive quality of being Western, an idea we’ve been forced to revisit of late as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has galvanized “the West” to an extent unseen since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In general, I’m partial to the definition put forward by Stephen Kotkin, a scholar of Stalin, in a recent interview with The New Yorker. Kotkin asserts the West is “a series of institutions and values,” and not “a geographical place.” This concept of cultural rather than terrestrial or racial affiliation is itself deeply rooted in Western thought. In his Panegyricus, an appeal for pan-Hellenic unity against Persian invasion penned approximately 380 BC, the orator and educator Isocrates stated:
Athens has so far outrun the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her disciples are the masters of the rest, and it is due to her that the word Greek is not so much a term of birth as of mentality, and is applied to a common culture rather than a common descent.
In other words, to be Greek is partake of Greek culture, not parentage, a radical idea in his time and ours.
By Isocratean logic, what is Western culture? Kotkin cites the “rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted.” Is this what Bloom meant by Western? No. These noble institutions and values are irrelevant to the critical reader of the Canon because, as Bloom explains: “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.” Gleaning a coherent cultural profile from a list of some 3,000 books spanning thousands of years is a fool’s errand, and even if that fool succeeded, few would dispute that it’d suck to live in a world designed around the social code of Dostoevsky, the political code of Plato, or the moral code of Dante. I sometimes wonder if Bloom included “Western” solely to bait his detractors, those for whom the term meant patriarchy (not pluralism), colonialism (not conscience), and domination (not democracy).
The debate about whether or not to continue teaching and reading the Western Canon is a distraction, at best. For one thing, we need not choose between reading the Canon and exploring beyond it. In fact, thriving in a globalized, culturally porous world demands we do just that. Of deeper import are the ways these particular works inform our species’ most enlightened methods of reasoning and judging aesthetic quality: informing not what, but how to think. Their capacity to “augment one’s own growing inner self,” as Bloom says, alone justifies their central presence in our public and personal lives. When we decommission it from political and cultural combat, as we can and should, the Canon becomes a map for all of us to explore our place in the cosmos, oriented by the great (but not always good) minds of our collective past — a universal inheritance that knows no borders.
If I were a sultan, or immortal, I’d spend every day in bespoke pajamas by Fox Brothers, drinking diner coffee, reclining in a shearling Eames chair, reading my way through an infinite library in a well-lit but spartan study some would describe as “asylum chic.” As I am not immortal and not (yet) a sultan (facts that fill me with dread), Bloom’s list helps me make the most of what limited time I have to read at the margins of my working life. Appealing to my sense of order, the Canon is segmented into five “ages”: The Theocratic (i.e., The Bible and The Mahabharata), Aristocratic (i.e., The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales), Democratic (i.e., Leaves of Grass and War and Peace), and Chaotic (i.e., Invisible Cities and the selected poems of Federico Garcìa Lorca). Bloom, a famously prolific reader, absolves us from even attempting to finish this tower of complex works, suggesting we regard the Canon as “the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written,” and not “a list of books for required study.” Throw a dart at the Canon, and you will not miss.
After stumbling upon Bloom’s list while studying at his alma mater, I started working through it at the pace of an inchworm on valium, including one torturous summer slogging through the endless incantations of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. (I still can’t tell you the first thing about embalming.) During the pandemic, I affirmed my rights to skip any truly boring text and disregard chronological order, thereby liberating myself to approach the Canon through the lens of leisure. Now, when the workday is done and I want to rest my eyes after hours of staring into the abominable pixel-box, I sharpen a pencil (I favor the Tombow 8900 HB) and spend between thirty minutes and an hour meandering through and marking up texts like Hesiod’s Works and Days, Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom, or, most recently, Pirke Avot. In this ongoing segment I call “Stumbling Through the Western Canon,” I’ll be sharing my personal reflections on the texts and ideas I encounter, with the soft focus of a lay reader. I will undoubtedly, repeatedly, fall on my face, but this whole Buzzcut enterprise might just as well be titled “Zander Abranowicz Bites Off More Than He Can Chew,” or, as the Dutch say, “Puts Too Much Hay On His Pitchfork,” which would also be my name if I were a Sioux warrior.
Pirke Avot, Hebrew for “Ethics of the Fathers,” is a collection of Tweet-length sayings by the “Sages” (reverently capitalized), learned Jewish judges of first century Judea. Their quotations were collected around 200 CE by Yehudah haNasi, who undertook the monumental task of anthologizing the Mishnah, a set of postbiblical oral laws that include the scholarly reflections on morality and behavior known as Pirke Avot. Together with the Gemara (extensive commentaries on the Mishnah), these texts served to reconstruct ancient Judaism, which had centered around the Torah, for the “modern” world of the Sages. They also ushered in the age of Classical Judaism, or Rabbinic Judaism, a vibrant chapter in the evolution of the faith defined by teachers like Hillel and Akiva, both of whom stand out from the Pirke Avot for the sensitivity and timelessness of their reflections. Here’s an example by Akiva in Avot 3:19.
All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted. With goodness the world is judged, and all is according to the preponderance of deeds.
Beneath Akiva’s brief saying is a hidden tension between the Stoic premise of a cosmos ordered by natural laws, and a certain Jewish ambiguity around the relationship between divine providence and free will. As a Jewish philhellene, these cross-cultural dynamics are of great interest to me. Pirke Avot is rife with them, since Alexander’s conquest of the Levant in 332 BCE and the subsequent “Hellenization” of Judea created a rich syncretism of Judaism and Greek philosophy that permeates Classical Jewish texts. Exploring the contact between these two traditions helps me understand how my faith and my fascination with all things Greek are entirely compatible, natural, and related. For some reason, this comforts me. I suppose we all seek unity in identity.
Pirke Avot is also colored by tragedy. The vibrant interlude from which it emerged was terminated by the expulsion of the Jews by the Roman emperor Hadrian (of “that wall” fame) in the wake of the disastrous Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 CE, after which my ancestors would wander the deserts of Europe, Africa, and beyond for nearly 2,000 years, waiting until the dawn of Zionism in the late 1800s to return to the land of milk and honey.
Pirke Avot answers, or at least wrestles with, questions that have long eluded me: the Jewish stance on the afterlife (ambiguous); divine providence (also ambiguous); reincarnation (traditionally rejected but accepted by medieval Jewish mystics and Hasidim); sin (real, but moderated by the belief that humans are not born corrupt); gossip (to be avoided); monasticism (undesirable, as the goal of life should be commitment, not detachment); asceticism (rare, but existent in early Judaism); work (good, but also a punishment for Adam’s sin); vengeance (prohibited by the Torah); politeness (good, until it comprises clarity); mysticism (misguided, because the world is a gift, not an illusion); and learning (celebrated as the essence of life and the reason for Jewish survival). Hillel surfaces a number of these issues in Avot 2:5.
Do not separate yourself from community. Do not trust yourself until the day of your death. Do not judge your comrade until you have come into his place. Do not say a thing that should not be heard, for in the end it will be heard. Do not say “When I am free, I will study”; perhaps you will never be free.
The history surrounding Pirke Avot also points to the vulnerability of knowledge amidst chaos, a theme I explored in “Our Lady of Latter-day Libraries,” featured in the first edition of this newsletter. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a prominent rabbi who opposed the Jewish Zealots that waged war on the more powerful Rome, was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin, taking advantage of the Jewish law that burials must take place within 24 hours of death, outside city walls. Having passed safely through the Zealot lines, Ben Zakkai located the Roman emperor and general Vespasian. Knowing Ben Zakkai opposed the Zealots, Vespasian asked what he could do for the aged rabbi. Understanding that Jerusalem faced imminent destruction, Ben Zakkai spoke: “Give me Yavneh [a city on the southern coastal plain of Judea] and its sages.” In other words, instead of treasure, he asked for a place to study, knowing his students could preserve Jewish education even if their sacred city was leveled. Decades after, in the aftermath of the disastrous Bar Kochba Revolt, crushed in the worst mass murder of Jews until the Holocaust, Akiva rushed to establish a new academy in the Galilee, saving the Jewish faith and Hebrew tongue from a real threat of disappearance. These anecdotes reveal the fragility of intergenerational knowledge. The survival of ideas and traditions always depends on ordinary people making the extraordinary choice of wisdom over wealth or wellbeing.
On a lighter note, as in all ancient texts, Pirke Avot includes some sayings that by modern ears sound irredeemably bizarre, such as this head-scratcher by Rabbi Elazar Hisma in Avot 3:23.
The reckoning of bird sacrifices and the onset of a woman’s unclean period — these, these are the body of Torah Law; The calculations of heavenly cycles and geometry are side dishes for wisdom.
From the puzzling to the obsolete to the transcendent, Pirke Avot was a delight to dip into, bite by bite, night after night. As with so much of the Western Canon, I found myself handling these words like glowing threads to the past, bearing ideas to sustain the soul of humankind thousands of years since their recording. I’ll leave you with this beauty by Rabbi Ben Azzai, in Avot 4:3.
Despise no man and dismiss no thing; for there is no man who does not have his hour, and no thing that does not have its place.
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
In Jewish myth the shamir was a miraculous worm that could split stones, used by King Solomon to build his First Temple so as to eliminate the need for iron: the substance of the sword.