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.
Daily Yin
For my first test of the day as 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 then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.
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.
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.
f all goes well I should be seeing the Jam soon and bringing her here to Britain. From Davide’s email:
[His dog] Bianca and [my dog] Jam have this friendly rivalry which is really funny, they chase each other and generally are jealous of my attention. The Jam is nice and slim and she is really loved here. They call her ‘gemma’ which means gem. Her friends are Rudy who lives here too and Tobias, the dog next door which is Bianca’s boyfriend. Cortona has more yanks and brits than italians, shame we have a bus at six so not much chance to wine and dine the girls.
These last few months were an opportunity, being without a dog for the first time in a decade, to take advantage and travel, but we’ve been pretty hunkered down.
Last night I dreamed of Maddie and Jam with me while I was in Baghdad with a friend exploring. It was a bit bombed out and felt dangerous but I was pleased to be there taking in the mood. I boarded a taxi but after a block managed to explain to the driver that I had to get out. Maddie and Jam had run alongside the cab on the pavement and were waiting for me there.
There is, obviously, a strong connection between our knowledge in our dreams and our knowledge when awake. To enable us to dream about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes to be true. Past tricks in my dreams to enable me to dream of Maddie have been that it’s actually Jam, not Maddie, who’s no longer with us, and so this stays true to the knowledge that there’s been a loss, and yet it lets me bask in Maddie’s presence. In this Baghdad dream a potion can be poured on things that brings them back to life—and I believed. I knew that in the past Maddie had died and so now that she was alive again I was to appreciate it. These are the complicated tales we spin every night about our past and present loves, places, obsessions. And not only humans do it—all mammals do it.
The number of dreams we have of past ones must pale in comparison to the number we have about our current companions. All those years that I had both Maddie and Jam: it was absolutely central to my identity, to my concept of myself, that I had two dogs with whom I went places. And so every night they were in my dreams one way or another, and if they weren’t with me, then as a dog owner I had to have an explanation, a rationale in my dream, for where they were. Of course, I suppose you can often just forget them, be in a setting or a period in life where you simply haven’t met these companions, but if something does remind you of them, an explanation must be drummed up quick, and it’s got to reassure and seem true within the looser ways of dream logic just as it does when waking. Dreams is like living twice, as the great movie song goes.
I say to myself as I stand up out of the chair to go upstairs (sudden shifts in position seem to hark me back to her) that Maddie’s gone and she’s not coming back. It’s strange that I put it that way, because death is less being gone than having disintegrated. Is being gone a metaphor or merely a euphemism? It seems to be both. It’s a metaphor in that it seems more real and appropriate to the situation to think of her bobbing away at sea, always getting further away from me here safely on land, as this distance seems to best represents the feeling that each day I am further and further away from her timewise (perhaps this is a bit of a universal metaphor, which explains the power of the scene on the raft when parting from Wilson in Bob Zemeckis’ Castaway). And yet it was I who buried her, so I know exactly where her remains lie, though I don’t really think of that place so much. To be sure, it’s some consolation knowing there’s a place where they lie—it’s easy to feel the importance to us of placing our dead somewhere—but it’s generally not where my mind goes when I think of her, not at the moment anyway. Maybe that’s her particular situation: she’s not buried where she spent her life.
As I walk around town here I think about how nice it will be doing it with the Jam. I don’t really imagine how it would be with Maddie, who seems more an attitude, a poise within than a walking companion here without. When I do think about her here, it seems a perfect match, the Victorian buildings giving stolidity and shape to the vivaciousness and color. Jam meanwhile will enjoy chasing seagulls and being reunited with me (I choose my order with care).
How does the passage of time make it easier? I suppose it’s the adaptation to a new situation, the reshaping of your thoughts and habits. When you do remember, or when your mind glances back with a shard of memory to a particular place, as mine just has—the little fountain in front of the big theatre on Shderot Yerushalayim in Jaffa, Maddie and I on our way home on Raziel St from a long walk in south Tel Aviv—then the loss returns, and even as you don’t feel it as acutely as you might have once, you know that you should, and that deadening of the affects also hurts, though in a more abstracted way. In other words, you don’t just live twice, you lose twice.
In Rome our landlords lived within the same complex, a couple in their early seventies. On their mantlepiece is a picture of them from what must be the very early sixties, when they were about thirty. It was black and white, they were on the beach with a toddler and a beautiful black dog. Now the couple is borderline doddery, yet they looked so fabulous in that photo. And what of the dog? Long gone, obviously, possibly even before your parrymaker was born. And yet what joys they must have had with that dog, on the very fabulous day of that photo, and for years before and after. And what can she say when a stranger stands and admires the photo? What she did say was, “Yes, we were very young.”
This deadening of the affects: is it an integral part of getting older, a change in the hardwiring of the brain, or do some of us never fall into it? On a wee walk today I sat and fed a seagull some of my sandwich. Tossed it in the air and the seagull caught it in its mouth, like I used to do with Maddie. They’re quite impressive creatures, seagulls, Finding Nemo notwithstanding. He wasn’t saying, “Mine. Mine. Mine,” but, “Okay Mr Human, I would indeed like some more of that lovely tuna sandwich of yours, and isn’t this an interesting meeting between the species?” That was nice, and I’ve never done it before, but if I’d done it when younger it would have been more than nice, it would have been pretty darn cool. Walking back, I caught a waft of a street smell from childhood. That was also nice. But the couple of minutes between those two moments? Not much, just some mental huff and puff: I look like a dwarf in this cheap jacket—Walking in the rain without a cap sucks when you’re wearing glasses—Should I get a haircut or not?
I was going to write that the old things don’t move me any more, but that’s not really true: I got a kick out of seeing The Rocky Horror Show, though to contradict myself again, I’m not sure if it was the work that moved me or the memory of just how long—twenty years—I’ve been enjoying it in one setting or another.
I was also going to write my appreciation of Lileks’ Bleat today: ah, how he shows us how it can be done, how repetition and punctuation can create funniness by creating rhythm and timing:
In the old days (oh, jeez, here he goes) a man could just drive the car into the bay, ask for an oil change, and he would get an oil change. They would change his oil. Oil; changed. That’s it.
And he gives his reviews of the two TV shows that people who don’t watch TV seem to be watching:
I’m one of 17 people who still enjoy “Lost,” simply because it still fills my need for entertainment on Wednesday at 11:35 PM, or whenever I finish this thing. I could be persuaded to dislike it, but not because someone says something on the internets. Talk to me in three years when Windom Earle uses bees to spread the black oil. As for “24” – well, turning Jack Bauer into a rogue agent who plans a suicide bombing is not exactly what we tune in to see. It’s just been a mess – forced, joyless, cynically sadistic and empty of the virtues it once suggested, if only by implication.
I think he’s being joyless about Lost. It’s bloody awesome, and if he likes it he should explain why. But don’t you love his “Oil; changed.”? We are so sophisticated these days that a semi-colon, a dot and a mark, can satisfy us immensely.
∞
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