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.
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.
t would probably fall under Leon Kass’s critique of pathetic modern men maintaining their adolescences and even childhoods into early middle age, and even my best friend thinks it’s sad, an indictment, that I had so tied up my identity with my dog Maddie, who died 18 months ago today at the age of 8.5. I think I have two schizophrenic senses of my soul, both of which, as I prepare to describe them, are patently daft, but they hold sway over me nonetheless. I suppose they can be summarized easily: that I am lucky and blessed; and that I am unlucky and cursed. Having Madlaine Barbra as my dog was by a wide margin my longest, richest, widest streak of feeling the former. Right now, emptied by her absence and through the pastures of ghastliness and sorrow at her passing, I can also newly feel genuine grace and gratitude to have been elevated by her.
Yes, she was a mangy mutt and stank, but she was also among the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen, and I’m pleased to report I was daily, if not minutely aware that I possessed a living superlative. I fear I will inevitably lose the imprint of the pattern of her personality, as memories sink unturned-over into oblivion. What a combination she was of cosmic calm and flightiness, of sighing ennui and jolliness. Dogs are maligned as being fawners and flatterers, but she was neither. Sure, she’d use her paw, eyebrows and voice to sway me if she wanted a treat, but she did not sham. She liked her distance and solitude, but also liked to stay connected. I loved how she’d gradually get as far away from things as possible, just to increase her own sense of personal space. Eventually, at my place at Even Sapir, she would sit at the bottom of the yard, sometimes joined by Jam, overlooking the entire valley below, and my guilt for cooping them up for hours every day back in Tel Aviv while I worked in an office 9-5 was replaced by even a touch of loving envy at her tranquility, that she could sit out there for hours, drinking in the quiet afternoon surroundings of the birds and the bees, whereas I could only join her there for a few minutes at a time before needing the stimulation of the internet once again back in the house. She didn’t follow me back in, trotting later into the house when she felt like it.
I can hear now the sudden quick lapping of the metal water bowl out on the porch as she’d refill quickly. Yes, it was her rhythms that I loved so much, so mercurial and so languid.
How I loved the stretching of the tie between us, maybe best illustrated by me rollerblading around the Tel Aviv streets while she ran alongside parallel on the pavement, and the glimpses we took of each other in the gaps between the parked cars. I knew at the time what a delight this was, but I was unable to fully appreciate just how rare and special it was. I would never have tried it in another city, certainly not here in Britain, where a big dog bounding unleashed along the pavement would certainly invite a busybody to call the police. This never happened in Tel Aviv and our rollerblading came to feel like a normal activity. I remember one evening in north Tel Aviv, me rolling noisily along, she bounding along silently, when a woman came out of an apartment block and said the word, “malach”—angel. Did she mean me? Maddie?
It was my greed, my dissatisfaction and desire for more, my desire to get out of Israel that led to the disaster that happened with her in Rome. I had a very bad and queasy feeling leaving Israel, but how to know when and whether to trust such feelings? I also had queasy feelings moving out to Even Sapir as well, and it turned out to be an altogether too brief golden age.
And so I am inevitably led to my other exaggerated view of my soul, that of the perennially sat upon. Things had become so warm and wonderful that it was bound to all come crashing down, and primarily because of me. One need not be a great king to have a fatal flaw that reverses one’s life, brings one from high to low. The power of tragedy is that it is not really about kings but about you in the audience, you who invariably ruins his own blessings by not appreciating them properly and fully while he has them, leading to his losing them.
When Maddie went I wailed at my fate: A double blow: what has been my main fount of joy will instead become my main haunting. And indeed, it has. Not only have I lost the delight of her presence, but I have acquired the sadness and wreckage of her absence. I look now at a photo of her and think that that is me, that without being alongside her there is no me, and yet she is no longer, so I cannot be alongside her anymore.
Indeed, we must unravel our identities from those who have passed, and I have often imagined a thick cluster of computer wires slowly furling back into my belly. But to have any honor for ourselves we must also refuse this unraveling of ties, else what were the ties really? Is grief then related to a sense of honor? We can forget and move on but we choose not to. It is a delicate balancing act, not losing yourself neither to lamentation nor to expediency.
I had forewarnings. Back in Jaffa on a walk an old geezer shouted down to me from his balcony, asking me about the dogs. He said they were lovely but he could never have any more dogs because it was just too terrible when they died. Barak and Noga, who had been Maddie and Jam’s dogsitters and second home, had lost their dog at six years old, and the ones they had when I knew them, though they were happy and tightly bonded, were not the first.
Maybe there is, as usual, more here, lovelinesses to tie together despite the horror. I have written and stared at the half sentence: “If I could love the world as I loved you, Maddie…” Almost all Maddie’s life was lived in Israel, so perhaps due to that, Israel will in time come to finally drown out other competing internal voices whispering in a gentle way, “home”.
So once again, my dear Maddie, goodbye.
∞