[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #003
as if in dreams #003: A newsletter from Joseph Zitt
01 October, 2020
(Sorry this is late. We had some problems with the server.)
This is the third issue of the as if in dreams newsletter.
It looks like it will go out just under the wire, close to 2 PM Israel time on Friday. I'm settling into more of a rhythm in creating the newsletter. I make notes through the week on what I want to discuss in the On Writing and Things of Possible Interest sections. Thursday night, after getting groceries, I start to build the new newsletter from a template and the week's posts. On Friday (before and after more shopping, for a challah and related stuff), I finish, edit, and send it.
(Hmm. The editor window is telling me "We've encountered an error trying to check the links in this post." They seem to work in another Markdown checker. I'll just have to send it out and cross my fingers.)
At least my mouse is working again. The problem appears to be that the additional USB card by which it spoke to the computer is getting wonky. Once again, this ten-year-old Mac continues to be a solid workhouse. It's the stuff that I've added or attached to it that fails.
Onward (to the frog?)!
Contents
This Week's Posts
Thursday, September 24th, 2020
The shopkeeper where I pick up my packages whistles and waves at me. It takes me a moment to notice, since I’m listening to a podcast on my headphones. I cross the street to him. “Why haven't you picked up your package? It’s been waiting for two weeks.” I hadn’t been notified. “Yes, you have. You received the SMS. Package 1077.” We head to the back of the shop. He pulls it off the shelf and scans it. Nothing happens. He scans it again. He slumps into his chair and runs the scanner very slowly over the sticker. Nothing. That explains why I wasn’t notified. He types in the code. It takes him a few tries. Humans shouldn’t have to type arbitrary letters and numbers. Finally, he gets it right. “ID Code!” I recite the number then sign the screen with a finger. He shoves the package at me. I thank him. He grunts. Down the road, a man wearing tallit and tefillin sits, his legs straddling a low wall, as he says his morning prayers. When I get to work, the woman who fears elevators is standing in the lobby, waiting frantically for someone to help her. “Sir, are you taking the elevator up?” I am. “To what floor?” The fourth. “I am only going to the second.” That’s OK. We can stop there. “Thank you, sir!” The elevator arrives. Another woman is already on it. Normally, I would wait for the next one, since no more than two people should be on an elevator. The woman who is already there waves us aboard. She is going to the fifth floor. I press the buttons for the second and fourth. When we reach the second floor, I hold the door open for the fearful woman. She blesses us, singularly and together, in the masculine, feminine, and plural forms: “Be well. Be well. Be well.”
Friday, September 25th, 2020
The pharmacy is mobbed. A crowd stands behind the line, brandishing the numbers they got from the machine when they came in. An increased lockdown starts later today. The shop will remain open, but people don’t want to count on it. That's not surprising. The rules seem to change every few minutes, as the government’s Coronavirus Committee, the Ministry of Health, the Economics czars, and the full Knesset give conflicting signals. There are four pharmacists on duty, but people want them to move more quickly. A mechanized voice calls customer 132 to window number 4. Within seconds, a man near the front of the crowd yells “132? 132 isn’t here. 133? 134? Come on, it’s Friday! It’s Friday!” A voice on the overhead system finally announces “Sir, it is Friday for everyone. There is a line. Thank you.” After a while, number 148 is called. He yells “148? I48 is not here. I am 149. I need --” A much older woman comes up behind him and gently whacks him in the ankle with her cane. She shows him her number. 148. He grumbles, backs off, and hovers near the pharmacists’ windows, as if he is one of those people in American football who has to be ready to dart in any direction based on what the other team might do. 149 is called. He jumps to the next window. “One moment,” the pharmacist says. He shuffles some papers, consults with a colleague, opens and shuts the register drawer, then slowly turns to the customer. “Yes, sir, how may I assist you?” I am number 152. When I’m summoned to the window, I hand the pharmacist my number, my health provider ID card, my debit card, and the empty box of the prescription that I need refilled. He scans them as another worker reaches around him and plonks boxes of what I need onto the counter. I take them and start to wish him a good holiday. He is already shouting for the next customer. So be it. I make my way through the crowd. I have more groceries to get and a newsletter to complete. I can breathe later.
Saturday, September 26th, 2020
Outside my basement window, my landlord is watering plants. Or maybe it’s his son. The sandals, olive-skinned legs, and khaki shorts could belong to either of them. As I look up and out, I see a cluster of fresh dates that I had left on the window sill a week or so ago. I had hoped that they would ripen more quickly in the sun. They haven’t. I reach up and take them down. I’m surprised at what I see. While the dates in the direct sun hadn’t ripened, the ones in their shadow had. Perhaps, rather than light, the dates need darkness. Some of the dates on my kitchen table had ripened, too, but I hadn’t noticed if they’d been in more or less light than those that hadn’t. The ripe dates that haven’t fallen off the branch on their own come off easily. The fruit is so soft that it leaves the seeds behind, still attached to the branch by the stem. The ones that I try are as sweet as those from a week ago. I leave the rest in a loose pile on the kitchen table. I think of stepping outside to check how hot and humid it is out there. I know that it won’t rain. I hear someone sweeping my steps, removing the remnants of other fruit that has splattered down from the trees. I choose to remain invisible. I won’t get outside at all today. In the new lockdown, the Sabbath cafe is closed. I stay in and handle things at home. Tomorrow I should have half a day’s work. I might see and speak to people then.
Sunday, September 27th, 2020
The boss sends a group text overnight. In the automated English translation, the genders of some nouns and people get scrambled. A reference to “coronavirus” becomes “coronary heart disease.” With some work, the meaning comes through. Another programmer on the team probably has the virus. His partner has been ill and has tested positive. The programmer has lost his sense of smell. He shares a cube with the other coworker who has the virus. They sit with their backs to each other, somewhat over a meter apart, but that may not have been enough. He’s also friendly, but we don’t talk much or work closely together. He sometimes comes to my cube for a moment to ask how to phrase something on an interface in English. Only two other people are in the office when I come in today. It’s a half-day, stuck between the Sabbath and a holiday, so few people show up. I could have taken a vacation day, since we have a lot of them. When I asked the boss last week, he answered in circles. I think I was supposed to pick up on something that was not being said, which was either that I should come in or that I shouldn’t. I don’t know what he meant. I work for a few hours, then run into the supermarket downstairs just before it closes. In the cashier’s line, I get stuck behind someone buying a lot of bottles of different kinds of beer. A voice overhead wishes for us all to be sealed in the book of life for the new year, and tells us to check out and go home. As I walk away, the bus that I often ride passes me. Due to the new lockdown, I didn’t think that it would be running today. Oh, well. It’s not like I’m in a hurry to get home.
Monday, September 28th, 2020
The city sits silently. It was full of bicycles last year and the year before. On this one day of the year, there are no cars, trucks, or motorcycles. People can walk down the center of the street if they want to. Most keep to the sidewalks. At intersections, even those walking on the asphalt obey the traffic lights. It's hot. Air conditioners drip on me as I walk in the shadows. They’re a relief. All the shops are closed, even the 24/7 market and the small sweets shop where men sit every other day of the year, drinking Turkish coffee and chatting in what sounds like Arabic. The glass door of a bistro bar has been smashed in. It looks like an accident. The few people who walk past shake their heads and walk on. I don’t think anything has been taken. The police or owners may do something after dark, when the holiday ends. In the city square, a cadre of young girls rolls past me on scooters, wearing pink crash helmets. Other than them, I only see one or two children on each block. I sit and try to write on my phone. I have to change locations every few minutes. The flies quickly find me and regroup. At the bus stop at the center of town, moving text on an electric sign announces that buses will start running again at 9 PM. The fan inside the sign is shockingly loud. I’d never heard it before. A poster hastily pasted on several storefronts shows a picture of the Prime Minister and two large words: "The lockdown is because of me." An asterisk beside the words leads to a smaller word at the bottom: "satire." The doors to the Grand Synagogue are open. A few men pray inside, in the afternoon gap between services. More may gather toward dusk, indoors or outside. Or they may not. I've lost track of the rules. I'm not going to sit here much longer to find out. There are too many flies.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
We don’t do the afternoon prayers today. We try to gather for them, but there are too few of us. A third programmer now has the virus. He’s already been off in isolation for a while. His cube is in the same row as the others, across the aisle from mine, but much farther away, behind a glass wall. The boss is now allowing anyone who wants to work from home to do so, as long as they fill out timesheets. Several more workers are now staying home. The boss gathers those who are in the office to an informal meeting. Each of us sits or stands in a different cube. He tells us what is going on. I understand most of it. We have a meeting online later for everyone to say what they’re doing. I understand almost none of it. The usual guest appears at ten minutes to two and comes around to gather us for the afternoon prayers. Several of us wait at the receptionist’s desk. People call the other usual guests. None are available. Of the needed ten men, we only have seven or eight. We disperse. The rhythm of my afternoon is thrown off. Late in the day, I get a message from the post office that a package for me from Amazon has arrived in this country and will reach me soon. Moments later, I get a message from Amazon that the shipment has failed and that they will reimburse me for it. I don’t know if it is or isn’t on its way anymore. Both may continue to be true, at least until someone opens the box.
Wednesday, September 30th, 2020
One of the teams at work is having an online meeting. Most of the people are calling in from home. A few are here. I hear two of the ones in the office twice: first, through the open air as they speak, then, about a half-second later, through their speakers as the sound is carried to others in the chat. One, when interrupting, repeats a word incessantly until he finds a way in. His rate of repetition is about the same as the speakers’ delay. When he repeats himself, the word ping-pongs back and forth across the space for several seconds. The office is about half-empty, with the same workers as yesterday. The usual guest tries to gather us for the afternoon prayers. Even with two additional visitors, the dentist from downstairs and a friend of his, we’re still one short. We disperse. On the way home, I see more cars than I did last night. I don’t recall what level of traffic was normal before the lockdown. On the city square, a worker drags a child’s coin-operated ride, shaped like a Minion, away from the front of the cafe with the mystery sandwiches. He unlocks the gate in front of the toy store two doors down, rolls the ride inside, then locks the gate again and heads back to finish closing down the cafe. A few blocks closer to home, I see a handwritten sign from a lemonade stand, taped to the gate of an apartment house: three shekels for one cup, five shekels for two, and ten shekels for five. It’s hot enough that I would have been tempted, had I gotten there before dark.
Thursday, October 1st, 2020
My cellphone rings while I’m at work. I don’t know who it is. The same number called me six times on Tuesday while I was in the shower, as well as once yesterday. I finally answer. It isn’t spam. It’s the delivery guy with the package from Amazon. He speaks in rapid Hebrew. I struggle to respond. Words that I otherwise know disappear under pressure: gate, office, mailbox. He finally says “Hey, don’t panic, man, I can do English.” That’s a relief. I talk him through where to leave the package. The house is a custom-built side-by-side duplex with two nearly identical gates. I ask him to drop the package behind the fence, below the mailbox. I know the contents aren’t fragile. “OK, by the green mailbox?” I have no idea if our mailbox is green. I have a terrible memory for colors. He leaves the package. When I get home, it isn’t there. I use the flashlight on my phone to see better in the dark. Nothing. And the mailbox isn’t green. I decide not to worry for another day or so. In the morning, when I head out to work, it’s on the steps to my door. My guess is that the delivery guy dropped it at the other gate. The folks there probably saw it and brought it to my landlord (their brother in law) who put it there for me. It all works out. Maybe when I get home I’ll be awake enough to open it.
On writing as if in dreams
Writing these posts takes me roughly an hour each day. They wouldn't seem to need that much work, but they do.
I usually write the post when I get home. Sometimes, I write it during lunch at work or while waiting for something to compile. I almost always do it in a Google Doc. The editor is good, and I can easily shift between computers or work on it on my tablet or phone.
I then set it aside. Later in the evening, usually somewhere around 9 PM, I give it another pass. Quite often, something in each sentence could be better. I tighten the text, squeezing unneeded words out of sentences and eliminating those sentences that don't need to be there at all. I'll sometimes add things, but not as often.
I set myself a deadline of posting before midnight each day. (This came from my mother's noticing that, in the first book, things that must have happened on Fridays were in Saturday posts.) Since I'm a night owl, I usually get to this at about 11:45 PM. I work in the Google Doc, with the same process as the second pass. I also read the post aloud, often catching things that got past me when I had read it silently.
I then copy and paste it into a Facebook post. I read it closely there, too. I often find that putting a text in a different color scheme and typeface, as happens when the post moves from the Google Doc to Facebook, reveals errors and areas for improvement that I hadn't noticed before.
When it's ready, I hit "Post", usually just before midnight.
Even then, I'll reread it. I'll also give it another look in the morning. I will often make very small tweaks, usually just fixing a misspelling or spotting a repeated or missing word. At that point, and not before, I consider it done.
I try to copy the post onto the website later the same day, but often don't. On Thursday nights, I finally make sure that everything is online there, then copy and paste it into the newsletter.
That's a lot of work. But if I do it right, it looks like I just note things down as they happen.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I'm watching
One of my favorite writers about film is the mysterious, pseudonymous Film Crit Hulk. He isn't all that mysterious, since a bit of searching reveals who he apparently is, but it doesn't matter. You probably wouldn't have heard of him anyway. When he got his start, many years ago, he would really work the Hulk part of his persona, writing long essays in ALL CAPS. He's let go of that now, and writes, still at length, detailed looks at films and TV and, particularly, how emotions work within them.
He also makes videos. About a week ago, he released an hour-long deep dive into one of the best movies of the past couple of years, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.
His Why SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE Works - A Scene-By-Scene Breakdown is what the title says. He breaks down the film, sequence by sequence, showing the relationships between scenes and characters and how the films recognizes and plays with expectations. It introduces a new lead character, Miles Morales, and shows his origin and how he grows to be a Spider-Man. He's aided (mostly) by a crew of other Spider-folks who pop in from other universes, making for what could be a really complicated story. Hulk shows us how the film keeps us from getting too confused and how it gets us to care about the characters. There's a lot of nuance involved, and Hulk picks up on and brings it out in his explanation.
The movie is now high on my rewatch list. (And I'll be following along with the screenplay).
One thing I'm hearing
I've been a fan of radio theater for a long time. When I was a kid, I ran across my father's copy of Thirteen by Corwin, a great collection of scripts by the acknowledged master of the medium, Norman Corwin. I would go to bed with a transistor radio under my pillow so I could listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater on Sunday nights.
One of the finest writers of radio drama (as well as several other media) is J. Michael Straczynski. He's better known as the creator of TV shows such as Babylon 5 and Sense8, comics including Spider-Man and Midnight Nation, and his recent best-selling autobiography Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood.
Back in 2000, the SciFi Channel launched a radio series, Seeing Ear Theater. JMS (as Straczynski is known to those who don't want to worry constantly about spelling his name right) did a set of radio dramas City of Dreams. They're now up on YouTube. I've been listening to them again. So should you.
A side story: In 2001, JMS wrote one of the greatest comics of all time, an issue of Amazing Spider-Man that placed the hero on-site on 9/11. (Here's a video about the issue.) For a class project in 2013, I converted the comic into a radio play. I sent the recording to JMS. He sent back a note critiquing the piece, showing that he really did listen to it. That meant a lot.
One thing I'm reading
Tim O'Reilly, the person behind all those O'Reilly books that took up programmers' bookshelves in years gone by (and possibly even now, though they may have moved completely online) published an excellent essay in May (which feels like millennia ago), "Welcome to the 21st Century: How To Plan For The Post-Covid Future".
The idea is that as we try to plan for the future, we have no idea which way things are going to go, especially in the long term. He says that we're at a turning point as big as World War I, which is, he says, when the 20th Century really got started.
He keys in on the ideas of robustness and resilience. Whatever we do has to take into account multiple possible futures, so if what we're thinking will happen doesn't, we're still set up for several other things that might. It has resonance with some of the saner ideas of Preppers, who set up stashes of necessities that can serve them well no matter what happens.
(Here's a good talk on complexity and resilience in the context of both massive computer datacenters and improvised music, presented by the inimitable Matthew Ross Davis.)
One more thing
Today is my favorite day of each month: #bandcampfriday.
I buy almost all my music from Bandcamp. I even have some of my own albums up there for free download (though you can also pay something for them if you'd like).
Bandcamp is focused on supporting the artists. A far larger amount of the money spent there goes to the labels and artists than it does from other online shops or streaming services.
On the first Friday of each month, Bandcamp passes all of the proceeds on to the artists without taking a cut for themselves. They, working with artists and labels, have special releases, many of which specifically benefits artists struggling with the coronavirus and its economic impact. That's just about everyone whose income is comes from music. For many artists, income depends on live performance, which has now almost completely disappeared.
One item, available today only, is Good Music to Avert the Collapse of American Democracy, Volume 2. It's an all-new compilation to benefit voting rights in the USA. Of the 77 tracks, the artists that I recognize include David Byrne, Pearl Jam, Feist, Fleet Foxes, and Tenacious D.
Check all this out and buy what you like.
(BTW, to avoid just throwing my paycheck at them, I set myself a hard spending limit there each month. It takes time to whittle my selections down to that amount, but it's worth it and fun. Think of it as going to a record store and being limited to the cash in your wallet.)
Colophon
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Here’s an archive of past newletters.
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See you next week!