More Parries
December 2008
Stop Yesterday
Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.
October 2008
Ebullience, Please
A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.
September 2008
History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama
McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.
Encounter at Wetherspoone’s
As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
August 2008
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1
Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.
July 2008
Suddenly Seymour
Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.
June 2008
Another End of Times
With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.
Dead Till Eilenspiegel
Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.
All So Simple
First, there is a general moode and desire to write.
March 2008
Why AAPL
Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.
Clash of the Midgets
My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.
January 2008
Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach
Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.
Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach
Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.
Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak
The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.
I Do Like Mondays
First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out then putting them in the rubbish before swilling out the remains under the tap. The sound is just the same as baristas make in cafes.
The Small Adventures - Part 2
There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there alone on my travels.
December 2007
The Small Adventures
Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.
Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision
Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy
Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.
October 2007
A Restoration and Return
There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.
This Trip’s Last Day
I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.
September 2007
The Big and Easy
The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.
Flightblogging
With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
August 2007
A Drop in Time
To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.
Sauna Losing Heat
Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.
A Ride to Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.
July 2007
Busy, Busy City
There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.
First Time in this House All Day
One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.
The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels
The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.
June 2007
Only the Rustle in the Trees
We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.
A Rash Appointment
I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?
A Cabaret Old Chum
It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.
Fatahland and Hamastan
Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.
Squelching in a Bath of Me
I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.
Stars, Stripes and Superlatives
Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.
May 2007
Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD
Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.
My City to Your City
A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.
Shite on Brighton
“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”
From DisneyWorld to Watford
I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.
Back in Black
Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.
April 2007
Wetherspoones and Raisins
No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.
The Meaning Addiction
I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.
Short Stuff
Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.
pon awakening, the bedroom here is far from the best I’ve had. One writes this because last time in “Wetherspoones and Raisins” I chronicled the day’s two outings from the house. But these were merely the two brief yang bits of the day. What of the yin, the not-being-out that comprised the rest of the day? As usual, it seemed too mundane to bother thinking over, an unsculpted routine that nonetheless is what constitutes the majority of waking life. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans and all that. Since we have to move out of this house in a month’s time, it will be all-change once again, or at least, the milieu will change, and with it many details that will be lost if I don’t get them down while they are still what I do every morning, noon and night.
There are so many artifacts that carry through from previous times. My bicycle. Since getting it tuned it runs a dream and I’m using it more and am shocked a little each time that this constant remains from previous eras and yet so much else has changed. I can’t remember the specific moment, can’t remember where I was when I had the thought, probably Florentin in south Tel Aviv, but I remember walking with the bike, a light touch on the saddle as I enjoyed letting the front wheel balance, and Maddie or both Maddie and Jam alongside me, and thinking, this is all a man requires, or at least, all I require. The bike I still have, as right as rain as when I rode it on my magic commute from Tel Aviv to Hod Hasharon and back when it was new, and yet Maddie is gone. It’s a twinge each time. How come I have the bike still but no more is the psychic constellation of which it was an integral yet slightly outer-circle part? It’s a combination of pleasure and guilt, looking at the bike now. Interestingly, I didn’t have that feeling before I got it back from the shop all tuned up. Now it’s alive again.
On television I saw a promo for a programme about short people. One of the subjects said there are advantages to being short. I could only name one: comfort on airplanes. But I see one other: the geometry of one’s bicycle is awfully cute. At Even Sapir in the Judean Hills I found a great spot to store the bike. Guess where the bike is, I asked my Mum on the telephone. And she bloody guessed. Stuck vertically in the space between the fridge and the kitchen cabinets, she said after a beat. How does she do that?
She’s here in town right now with my sister, and my Dad’s coming tomorrow. Coincidentally, it’s also my birthday. 37. All three are fine. It will be the first time the four of us have been together on motherland British soil since March 1981. It could also conceivably be the last. The overwhelmingness puts me in anaesthetized mode, so it’s a good day to take a breath and review the yin wafts of current hereness.
So. The bedroom is far from the best. First, the window is a piece of crap. It’s always closed at night, because it’s difficult to open, and because in the morning the noise is horrendous from the truck beneath the window doing whatever it does at Wagamama’s service entrance. I prefer sleeping with an open window no matter the temperature outside. This is another piece of wisdom gleaned from the first half of Moby Dick. It’s no fun being warm in bed if there isn’t one little bit, probably the nose, that can feel the cold.
So that’s always a bit of a disappointment of a morning. I can’t check the sky out first thing. The bedroom in Rome had a spectacular window—see ‘Good Morning and Angels’ over at sister site ixPix (squint and you might see the angels populating the window)—though I didn’t like that bedroom with its hideous fitted cupboards and light fitting. And of course, upon arising I either say it aloud as a mild lament or, even worse, forget to say the joyous phrase I’ve been saying for years: “Good morning to doggies,” though for most of the last 20 months it’s been the rather less happy “Good morning to a doggies.” Today at Waterstone’s I pointed out to my sister Emeline the difference between the opening first sentence of Kipling’s Jungle Book (full text) and an abridged version.
It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.
You feel what it’s like to be a dog waking up—in fact it’s likely you feel the tips of dogs’ paws in comfort for the first time in literature. Emeline was impressed.
Remembrance of Maddie and Jamfulness over, I then enjoy the rough dark wooden floorboards of the bedroom, and anoint my feet with the thick green slippers from the SMA supermarket in Italy. I look at them every day but nonetheless had to look at them again now to see what’s actually written on them. ACTION. You’d think one would remember, if only for the irony of having it embossed on slippers.
After rising it’s time for the morning struggle to not check emails/newsfeeds/news websites/site updates first thing. Reflection or output please, before input! More often than not I lose the battle while the kettle is boiling. Occasionally I wonder at the superbness of the black MacBook that is my external nerve center. I love the pill/lozenge finish, all rounded corners. I love the graphicalness of the interface, such as the bouncing applications as they open. I love the keyboard, how low a profile the keys are: chiclets that work. I love the fact that as well as being the most gorgeous interface ever, it’s also a Unix machine, a real computer in the tradition of computers.
For my first test of the day as a day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard perhaps this little habit will reform their minds.
More often than not, and despite knowing it’s not really what my body needs or wants, the first thing I ingest is black tea of one kind or another with milk. Occasionally I’ll head over to Starbucks instead and have a latte. There was a time I’d go all the way to Red Roaster because the coffee is better, but there’s no wifi and it’s far. And I’ll be honest: I stopped going after we went to one of their music nights, for which we paid £5 to enter, and the music was cruelly awful. I felt a pathetic idiot for being there. It made me think the place is froufrou and pretentious at least as much as it is solidly good. Actually, I need to start going again.
Well, from there the day dissolves and I fall inside the computer either working or procrastinating working. That needs to stop, doesn’t it? If one works on a computer, one needs to not use the computer when taking a break from working. Otherwise the days, weeks, months and even years leave little trace.
∞
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Back in Black