[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #004
9 October, 2020
This is the fourth issue of the newsletter.
It’s becoming a regular process. When I see that happen, the challenge is figuring out how to make it efficient without becoming a chore. In situations that involve text processing, I try to automate what I can. I spent several hours this week trying to automate one aspect of it that still isn’t quite right. But, as the Internet claims that Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin or Dr. Frankenstein said, I now know a whole lot of things that won’t work.
I’ve started reading more newsletters myself. I wonder if someone will do a newsletter that summarizes all the other newsletters. The ultimate version, as E. B. White suggested, might be “IRTNOG”.
Sorry about the delay last week. Something clogged up the sending mechanism on the server. I let the developer know, and we think we know what happened. I won’t do that thing in this issue. We’ll see how it goes. The plan is for it to go out early Friday morning in the States (2 PM Israel time), so those who might want to print it out to read over the Sabbath can do so.
As always, please pass on the newsletter to anyone that might enjoy it. If someone passed this on to you and you like it, please subscribe! (There should be a link to do so at the end, as well as a link to unsubscribe.)
I’d love to hear any comments you might have on the newsletter and how it might be better. You can find me via email, Twitter, and Facebook.
Onward! (past the dogs?)
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, October 2nd, 2020
The line for the new bakery stretches down the block, past the entrance to the Heart of the City mall. Red stripes mark the pavement every two meters. People should be standing at them, not between them. In practice, they stand about half as far apart. That’s better than the clustering I see elsewhere. A man with a cane sits on a bench nearby. Every few minutes, he walks up to another man in the line to ensure that he is keeping his spot. Everyone understands this. It’s OK. A woman walks up to the guard. He knows her. She isn’t trying to barge in, but wants to know if the bakery has a particular item in stock. The guard asks how many she wants and says that he’ll check. He goes inside. She goes to the end of the line. He returns and waves a plastic bag with baked goods in the air. He has found what she wants and is holding them for her. A car with a gaudily-decorated trailer moves slowly down the street, blasting music for the holiday that starts tonight. A little boy in line dances to the sound. The usual chabadnicks aren’t at the mall entrance. They gather there on Fridays to try to convince men to put on tefillin and to show them how. Getting that close to strangers isn’t possible during the lockdown. I finally get to the front of the line. A mic stand next to the guard holds a scanning thermometer. Each customer has to wave a hand in front of it. I do. I pass. I enter. I already have a challah from the bakery around the corner. I get large and small pitas and a loaf of sandwich bread here, as well as a coffee granita to go. I sit in the city square on a bench away from other people, take down my mask, and drink the granita slowly. I don’t want to get a brain freeze. Several meters from me, a shabbily dressed man bangs away at a single chord on an acoustic guitar and shouts words that I can’t understand. After a while, he pauses, takes a recorder from his pocket and plays a beautiful, complicated melody, full of unexpected turns and melismas. When he reaches the end, he jams the recorder into a different pocket and goes back to banging the guitar and shouting. The city billboard near us has a new sign. Tonight’s holiday usually features people going around to visit one another. The sign acknowledges that, using the classic terminology, but says we’re not to do it this year. To fight the virus, to preserve the rules, to preserve life, this year we will just stay home.
Saturday, October 3rd, 2020
A young mother runs in exaggerated slow motion across the grassy plot where women do Tai Chi. A toddler tries to follow her. Few other people are outside here. I’ve waited until late afternoon to head out of my apartment. It isn’t too hot. I’m OK in my long-sleeved t-shirt. I head down to the city square to see if my Chromebook can find open WiFi. My connection is OK at home at the moment, but I like to have options. I only see a few people between my house and the square, mostly accompanying dogs. I hear a few families along the way, hidden behind high stone walls. The square itself is busier. Parents sit and watch their children roam around on bicycles. Older people sit at small stone tables and talk. Three white-haired men around a backgammon board share a thermos, espresso mugs, and a can of Raid. My phone app claims to find several open WiFi signals here. My Chromebook sees none of them. Apparently the local cafes shut their signals down when they’re closed. A woman walks past with a large Israeli flag. I don’t know why. It’s a national holiday, but between the Sabbath and the lockdown, there’s no sign of it. Two more people walk by with handmade placards that I can’t read. A man carries another flag past me, a blank field of black or dark blue. I follow them. At the front of the square, where the caregivers have their dance parties, a dozen masked people, properly distanced, stand quietly along the curb with flags and signs. Cars honk their horns rhythmically as they pass. The only sign that I can read says “There is a Future.” That’s the name of a political party. I can’t recall which one. Night falls. The crowd thins. Buses start to roll by. I still have a lot to do before work tomorrow. I wander home.
Sunday, October 4th, 2020
The cafe at the entrance to our building has roped off the benches on its patio. People, despite the lockdown, sat and ate there last week. Not anymore. The cafe’s only supposed to be doing deliveries, but the doors are still open for takeout. No one’s staying there to eat. Whoever decides these things must have figured that this compromise works. In the building’s atrium, there’s now a sukkah, the thatch-roofed hut used in this week’s holiday. People are bringing food down and eating in it. That’s apparently OK. It’s a small space. The top, at least, is open to the air. And everyone who enters the building must wear a mask, so there’s at least some sense that those who go through to the atrium will follow the rules. I only see two sukkot on the way to work today, one in a yard and one on a balcony. In other years, I’ve seen far more. We still only have about half the usual workforce in the office. No one even tries to gather a group for the afternoon prayers. I go to the front, open the office doors, and straighten the prayer books, but no one else comes by, either from within the office or outside. After work, I stop into the supermarket. Some of the fall fruits are in, right on schedule. But the clementines and pomelas are still green, and the persimmons are small and hard. It’s too early to buy them. I get shelled almonds and several kinds of cheese. When I emerge, I see that the next bus isn’t for half an hour. I walk home.
Monday, October 5th, 2020
My family can’t get at some things downtown. The House of a Hundred Grandmothers is back under an even stricter lockdown than the rest of the country. They ask me to run some errands for them. I leave work early. Other people leave early, too, a little before me, so I’m not all that inspired to stick around. The buses stop running now at around 8 PM. I want to be sure to catch those that I need. The bus from work to downtown winds past the college, as usual, before I get off at the Heart of the City. I run my errands then hop another bus at the same stop. It’s the line that used to run past my house. I’m told that it will do so again, if they ever finish fixing the road. At least I’m not surprised now when it takes the long way around. I get off at a large intersection about three blocks from where I’m going. I call my family to say that I’m almost there. I think of cutting across a lot on the way, but it’s dark. There’s no danger from people, but I might trip over something. The street that I walk down is quiet. Its sidewalk took so long to be renovated last year that, long afterward, I instinctively duck around where the barriers had been. In the small park just outside the House, a tall woman in black workout clothes jumps rope. I cross the street. By the time that I get to where she was, she is gone. Pairs of people sit on benches in the park and talk. Streetlights in the distance outline them as silhouettes. Just outside the House, two women in wheelchairs laugh and talk loudly in what might be Romanian. I stand on the sidewalk near the lobby. Inside, the guard at the desk appears not to see me. An exhausted woman rolls a large basket on wheels up to him. She reaches in, puts a meal in a clear plastic box on his desk, then heads down the hall. A relative appears on the other side of the window. I hand him what I’ve picked up for them. He hands me a bag with a book that they had set aside for me. We talk briefly. Neither of us has much going on. He returns to their apartment. I put my headphones back on, start up a podcast, and walk across the dimly lit park toward my house.
Tuesday, October 6th, 2020
The streetlight on the walkway past the kindergartens is out. On my way to work, that’s OK. When I walk home, it’s a problem. The path has two sets of stairs, one with about six steps, one with something like four. The flat part of the walk is safe. It gets enough light from nearby apartments and the moon. The steps, in the dark, spawn illusions. Both sets of steps lead downward on my path toward home. Each uses two different kinds of paving. They look about the same as the shadows and the pale moonlight. I move carefully as I approach the first set. I tend to anticipate the stairs too early. I step forward, expecting my foot to meet the ground a few inches lower than it does. I’m wrong. My foot hits the paving stone too soon. If I didn’t prepare myself for this possibility, I would stumble. I’m ready. I know that I might make this mistake. When I do reach the first step, my foot finally landing lower than it had, I reach out to my left. There’s a metal banister, invisible in the darkness, about as high as my elbow. I find it and hold on. I step down again, then further down. I never remember the exact number of steps. I make a matching mistake at the bottom. My foot hits the paving stone where I expect a few inches more of air. I wobble slightly, then straighten up. I head for the second staircase, a few meters ahead. The banister on this one is too low for me to reach while walking. The canopy of trees is thinner here. A little more light splatters onto the stones. I can just about make out the edges of the steps. I walk as carefully as I did before. As often as not, I also guess the start of the steps wrong here. I stumble, but I know how to recover. Without a banister, I have to rely on memory and what inner balance I retain. I feel as if I’m on a tightrope at the circus, performing for the cats and birds. Another step, then three or four or five more, and I’m back on solid ground. I stand tall and walk more confidently. Here, of course, where there is no more danger, the streetlights are working just fine.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2020
The boss emerges from his office. He bellows, “We have ten. Let’s go!” Most of the men in the office come out of their cubes and head down to the hallway for the afternoon prayers. We have a couple of more people now. One of the programmers with the virus has officially recovered and returned. The boss’s son, who had been away for a couple of weeks, is back. We meet in the hallway. Before starting, we count again. Only nine of us are there. One worker, who has filled in before, has decided not to today. That’s OK. There’s no pressure. People get on their phones and try to reach the usual guests elsewhere in the building. The insurance agent, the building manager, and the dentist all are away. A few other people have shown up on occasion, but we don’t know who they are. We stand around for a while. One of us circles through the office to be sure that we haven’t missed anyone. We haven’t. Someone remembers that, a couple of weeks ago, a guy with a yarmulke came through. He told us that he worked in a new office down the hall. The worker standing nearest to that office heads over to ask. It works. He emerges with the new person. The boss makes sure to get his name and phone number. He switches his phone to the liturgy app and faces forward. The prayers begin.
Thursday, October 8th, 2020
The man in front of me at the supermarket has a Whole Foods bag. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one. I think of commenting on it, but he’s wearing one of those deadened stares that says “I’m on an important secret mission and if I notice anyone other than myself, the fate of life itself could be at risk.” Ok, then. The supermarket is crowded. It usually is on Thursdays. People shop to prepare for the weekend. I would have skipped it tonight, but I needed to get chicken. There are other butcher shops closer to me, but I’m more comfortable here. The fall fruit still isn’t quite ready. I hold off on it. I get more peanut butter. While waiting in line, I check the bus schedule on my phone. The next one isn’t for half an hour. I could walk home faster than that, but I’m tired. I appreciate the chance to sit quietly for a while and not have to do anything. We’re in the midst of yet another heat wave, but the sun has set and the air has cooled. As I wait at the bus stop, a stream of joggers flows past me. So does an array of dogs, mostly with people. One, off leash, wanders over and sniffs my hands. He gets the information that he needs. He wanders on. I think of counting the dogs that go past. I don’t. Just sitting here and watching is enough.
On writing as if in dreams
On some days, I know that I’ll experience something in particular that will be worth writing about. On others, I start with no idea. Especially as the lockdown limits where I can go, I worry that the day will be pretty much exactly the same as the previous day, and nothing will happen. But the end of the day, something always does.
Usually, it’s a single small detail. On Thursday, for example, I saw a man with a particular shopping bag after work. That gave me, at least, an idea of a first sentence.
From there, it’s a matter of focusing in on the memory. (That is, if I’m not writing in real-time, as I did on Saturday in the city square.) What else could I remember about that man? What happened beforehand or afterwards? I recalled that I took the bus. Why? Did I see anything else while waiting for the bus or on the way home?
I remembered the joggers going past. Then I remembered the dogs, and the one dog that came over. I remembered what I thought and did right after that. It was enough.
I think of this project as, in a sense, two-dimensional. Things happen linearly, day after day. But there are often recurring themes. I’ve had the image of someone sticking a pin through the book and somehow hitting, say, all the mentions of the House of a Hundred Grandmothers.
The project website has a search engine. That’s what it’s for. It also helps my memory. I may go back to it later today. I wonder what else I’ve written about dogs.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
Netflix has a new, brief series, Song Exploder. It’s an adaptation of a podcast of which I was vaguely aware. Checking my phone, I see that I had subscribed to the podcast but never gotten around to listening to it.
The concept of the series is simple: on each episode, they examine how one popular song was made. They get access to the multitrack tapes and can isolate the individual instruments and combinations of them. They interview the musicians and get both the story of how the song came together and an analysis of how it works. For TV, they get the musicians together, when possible, in the studios where they worked and recreate the process.
The TV series has four episodes in this first season: Alicia Keys on “Three Hour Drive,” Lin-Manuel Miranda on “Wait for It,” R.E.M. on “Losing My Religion,” and Ty Dolla $ign on “L.A.”
The host of the series, Hrishikesh Hirway, is a composer himself. He knows how to go into a song and figure out how it functions. He has great ears and can dig out parts and musical relationships that the musicians might have forgotten. He understands how the musicians work, and brings it out in conversation.
At the end of each episode, they play the song in its entirety, so we can hear the result. It’s worth it. And in the TV version, they make a new video for the song, often featuring the lyrics.
I watched the whole series in one evening. I’m now listening to the podcast. I understand that they have done close to two hundred weekly episodes. I’m listening first to familiar material. Most of the episodes are about songs by artists whose names I’ve heard but whose music I don’t know. I have a lot of catching up to do.
One thing I’m hearing
I’m on a Morton Feldman binge. Again.
I’m working on a long piece for a small ensemble, though not as long as some of his epic works. I’m not composing in the way that he did (he wrote out every bit of excruciatingly detailed scores; I have a page of materials and a few pages of instructions), but I’m working in the same sonic space.
The instruments in Feldman’s later works tend to seem independent, each working through a series of repetitive bits that may or may not connect to what the others are doing. And I do mean “working.” The sense I get in the long late works is not the usual image of people expressing something emotional but one of skilled craftsmen doing their tasks. I’m often reminded of seeing a row of people shining shoes outside of Grand Central Station, or of a coordinated team in a restaurant kitchen.
Feldman’s music went through changes over the years. His early works, from when he befriended and studied with John Cage, used indeterminate notation, telling a performer to play in high, medium, or low ranges without specifying more. He soon went back to specific notation (though some had said that he was, effectively, filling in the blanks of what had been indeterminate). He did some wonderful scores that moved among colors and moments that fit together in inscrutable ways.
My favorite Feldman recording is from this period: “Rothko Chapel.” This recording is the first of his music that I heard, late at night in the ’80s on New Sounds (I think). I had never heard anything like it. Clouds of choral chords hang in the air, sometime changing, sometimes not; percussion snippets circle and stop; a soprano sings a wordless two or three note motif. Toward the end, a viola plays a plaintive melody that he wrote as a teenager. Then the clouds return and end. It’s hard to convey how it sounds. Listen to that video. (One of my favorite experiences, back in the early ’90s, was sitting in the Rothko Chapek in Houston, listening to the piece on my Walkman.)
Later on, he wrote long, repetitive works that could last for hours. They bore some resemblance to minimalism, but not the driven, pulsing work that Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Julius Eastman were doing. The work was made up of soft gestures that would repeat for a while then go on to something else, or change slightly, then maybe come back. They would play with memory so that listeners would have a hard time recalling if they’ve heard what’s happening before. The opening moments of his 1983 work “Clarinet and String Quartet” (his later works were often named for the instruments involved) start with a repeated brief phrase, perhaps a second long, before the instruments’ parts slide subtly against one another for a while.
I’ve been listening recently to his “For Philip Guston” for flute, percussion, and piano. I have three recordings of it, each of which fill four CDs. I can’t imagine sitting through a concert of any of these long works. Playing them seems like a superhuman task. They might reward intense, close attention, but I find myself wandering in and out of them, much as one might notice a piece of art in a room now and again. Here’s the recording by the California Ear Unit. It’s four hours long. Enjoy.
One thing I’m reading
I’ve been reading a lot about the virus and the pandemic. It’s all over the media, and my family has been sharing links over WhatsApp. Some pieces are better than others. There’s a lot of doubletalk and misinformation going around, coming both from the most central people in media and government and from those who will grab onto any contrarian meme that they find, acting as if someone who is “controversial” is necessarily right. I recently had to unfriend a former mentor who was spewing dangerous nonsense about the virus being a hoax by “big pharma” created, for profit, by Anthony Fauci. sigh.
This piece from The Atlantic, “This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic”, however, is quite good. It’s by Zeynep Tufekci, whose writing, in various media, I’ve been following for years. I just got her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, which I hope to read soon, as I whittle down my ever-growing stack of unread media.
The big idea of the piece is this: working from the now-famous R0 variable, which shows the average number of people to whom an person spreads the virus, isn’t enough. A lot of people with the virus don’t infect anyone else – but a few people infect a lot of others. This actually makes some kinds of contact tracing and prediction easier and more accurate, in ways that Tufekci explains in lucid detail in the article.
The takeaway: in this as in so many other ways, reality is lumpy. Simple averages probably won’t tell you what you need to know.
One more thing
Last week, I told a relative that I’d been feeling listless, with a sort of general malaise and insomnia. She said that l was suffering from a case of living in this world right now.
A few days later, a friend posted a link to the private Irreligious Mysticism Facebook group to an article that nailed much of the feeling: “Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now.” The word sort of means “not caring,” but it’s more complex than mere apathy. The article traces the term back through early monasteries. As the author, Jonathan L. Zecher, writes:
> [A]cedia arose directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic life necessitates. These conditions generate a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. Together these make up the paradoxical emotion of acedia.
My friend who posted it said, “In my experience nothing breaks it up but work. Coffee and stimulants don’t do any good. Self-indulgence (eating, watching) and/or reading won’t drive it off. It’s a bear. And it’s not a sin. It’s just a state. Nobody does this on purpose.” (Since it’s a private group, I’m not saying wrote it, but will attribute it later if the person says it’s OK.)
And yes, work does seem to help. It’s one reason that I’ve been writing and posting the daily items for the past seven months or so. Even more than the day job, it gives me a task to accomplish. One of the most important aspects is that I know that people are expecting and reading them.
So I thank all of you who are reading, liking, and commenting on the posts and the newsletters for helping to keep me on track.
Colophon
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