[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #006
as if in dreams #006: A newsletter from Joseph Zitt
PDF (More printable) Edition
23 October, 2020
Hi, all. This is the sixth issue of the newsletter.
I'm continuing to work on the PDF version. Some things that I'm trying to do are simple. Some are more of a challenge.
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 of each email, as well as a link to unsubscribe. (Hmm. Viewing the source, I can't quite figure out the unsubscribe link to copy and paste it. But it's at the end of the emails.))
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! (under the log?)
Contents
This Week's Posts
Friday, October 16th, 2020
I see a man with a black mask on my way to the nearest supermarket. I suddenly realize that I’ve forgotten mine. The supermarket is only a block away by then. I continue walking toward it. When I get there, a guard scans my temperature. I apologize for not having a mask and ask if they have them. She holds up her hand in a crossing guard’s “stop” gesture. “Wait here.” She walks to a bin a few meters away. The overhead speakers blast an announcement. “Attention. The lady with the blue mask in the wine aisle. Your mask must cover your nose. Yes, you. I know you heard me. Your mask must cover your nose.” The guard returns with a small package of masks. She opens it. I pull one mask out and put it on. She hands the package to me. “You will have to buy these, of course.” Of course. Online ads have suggested that the supermarket has been spruced up and renovated. I can’t see any difference. It’s still cramped and scruffy. I manage to find what I need: white cheese, persimmons, frozen fruit, chicken thighs, Sabbath wine, and paper towels. The overhead system announces that credit card purchases should go to aisle 4. I do. I start to unload my shopping bag. The cashier stops me and points to my left. “He’s next.” A man with a white beard and black coat is slowly going through the pomegranates, holding each one up to his right eye as if he were examining a diamond. This will take some time. I move to the next aisle. When that cashier’s done ringing me up, she tries to upsell me a half dozen items arrayed at the end of the counter. She’s good at it, but I don’t need any of the things that I can recognize. I put my purchases back in my shopping bag and head out. At the door, I thank the guard. She grunts and continues to stare at her phone.
Saturday, October 17th, 2020
A rocking chair sits alone on the concrete slab where the neighborhood dumps its trash. It’s pale grey and small, not one of the formidable dark wood chairs that might dominate a sitting room but an unimposing object that people might place next to a crib. It still looks usable. I go over to the slab and sit down. The chair doesn’t collapse under me, which is a good sign. I fit into it well, although its back doesn’t come up very far. The padding is comfortable. At one spot, the cloth has torn and pulled back, revealing foam rubber. I think I could fix that. I continue on my walk, wondering how I would use it. Three kitchen chairs sit, abandoned, in the city square. Green cloth covers the seats and backs. At some spots it has turned white. Bent metal tubing forms their frames. They could do well there, at least until the rains come, but I can see how someone might want to replace them. I head past the square to the ice cream shop on the main street. Its door is open, though blocked by chairs. It should only be doing deliveries, but I see people standing nearby with cones. I ask in Hebrew if it’s possible to get a cup of ice cream, but I hear myself saying “ice cream” in English. The worker replies in English. “Yes, but I’m busy, so you will have to wait for five or six minutes.” OK. After a while, she returns to the door. I get a cup of gelato, flavored with hazelnut and cheesecake. It’s in a to-go container, much larger than the usual cup. I take it back to the square. Up near the main street, I think I see the usual caregivers and wheelchairs. Looking more closely, I see that I’m wrong. Teenagers have gathered with bicycles. Their wheels line up closely enough that they look like they are connected. Nearby, a tiny girl chases after pigeons. I have never seen a child that young run so quickly. On the way home, I pass a hybrid vehicle that I have never seen before. The back half of a bicycle, with a more comfortable seat, is connected to a stroller. The handlebars form the stroller's top bar. It works well. Close to home, I sit on the rocking chair again. It’s comfortable, though the arms are a bit low. I try to picture it in my apartment. I can’t see where it would be useful. Someone else could probably use it. I leave it behind.
Sunday, October 18th, 2020
Workers swarm behind the counter at the burger joint. It’s the first night of the lighter lockdown, so they can do takeout. Over a dozen buns are arrayed on a countertop, with burgers in various states of completion. Most have lettuce and tomato, but they offer a lot of other elements. Many have hummus and tahini. Some get fried eggs, but only as the very last thing put on them before the bun is closed. The boss is taking rapidfire orders on the phone at the register. My usual cashier, who is slicing buns, sees me come in. “Hi! How are you?” I’m doing OK. They’re going crazy. The boss looks over to me. “You want takeaway?” I do. “We have a lot of orders. It might be maybe twenty five minutes. Is that OK?” I’m in no hurry. I order my usual mushroom burger, sweet potato fries, and diet soda. “Give me your phone number. I call you when it is ready.” I pay and take the customer receipt. There’s a bench outside the medical center across the walkway. I sit down, put my headphones back on, and continue listening to a symposium on radical Jewish poetry. People and animals wander by. Many of the men carry bags from the burger joint and pizzas from the place next door. They drop the bags into containers on powered bikes and scooters and zoom off. Teenage girls in cut-off shorts walk in pairs, each staring at her phone. A dog, off leash, trots by. Every so often, it stops and waits for a man walking with a cane to get nearer, though he never catches up. Cats dash across the street. Many double back abruptly when traffic comes around the bend. About half an hour later, I wander back to the burger joint and wait outside. After a few minutes, the boss sees me and calls my name. “We’re sorry. Your order is not yet ready. This has been the busiest night that we have seen. Can you wait another ten minutes? Can I give you something to drink, a soda or ice tea, for free while you wait?” Thanks. I stand outside with a soda. Just as I finish it, he calls my name again and holds up a bag. “Here you are. Thank you very very much for your patience.” No problem. I take the bag and head home. Along the way, I pick up a foot rest from the trash heap. It’s dusty, but otherwise it’ll be perfect for in front of my TV.
Monday, October 19th, 2020
Our newest worker comes around the corner from the elevator. A crowd of us are standing in the hallway outside of the office. “Has something happened?” It’s the afternoon prayers. We get together every day just before 2 PM. “But we have a conference call at 2 PM!” It’ll work out. “Only for the men, right?” I nod. She heads into the office. Her back is to me, but I can feel her rolling her eyes. A dozen of us gather more quickly than usual. All three of the programmers who had had the virus have returned. Several others who have been working from home are in today. As we wait, one of the workers and one of the guests talk loudly in the back. The boss drowns them out by bellowing the first line of the opening psalm. During the silent prayer, a little girl emerges from the restroom. She runs up the hall, barefoot, then sees us each standing still quietly or bobbing back and forth. She wanders up to several of us and stares, as if she were in a sculpture garden or a grove of murmuring trees. Few others notice her. Our eyes meet. I smile at her through my mask. She smiles back, then runs to the office next to ours. The prayers end quickly. The guests head to the elevators. Most of the rest of us head back into the office for the 2 PM conference call.
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
A man nearly collides with me on a narrow sidewalk. He’s looking down -- not at a phone, but at a small painting that he has picked up from a trash heap. He moves and tilts it to catch the light from street lamps as he walks. As I wait for a traffic light down the road, I look back to where he was. He is gone. The painting rests on a bench, facing out. A few blocks further on, I get another omelette sandwich at the new bakery. They are priced at twenty shekels, but a worker, without prompting, sells it to me for ten. The bakery is about to close for the night, so I guess he figures that selling it to me cheap is better than throwing it out. I flash back to when I would travel from Delaware to Philadelphia every other weekend, some twenty-five years ago. I would hang out in the bakery at the railroad station until the last train arrived. When they closed, they would give the remaining unsold goods away to whoever was around. Across from the new bakery, the much smaller storefront where it had been has been gutted. Piles of trash lean against stripped drywall and punctuate the cement floor. I wonder what will go in there. I don’t expect anything new to show up until after the lockdowns end. I sit in the city square and eat the sandwich. The usual crowd of caregivers and elders gradually leaves. A young man at the next table plays show tunes from the speaker on his phone. He finishes his falafel, attaches his phone to his bicycle, and heads off. The voice of Barbara Streisand echoes and fades as he rides away.
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020
Another day made of words: in the morning, a worker asks for a better word for “accompany,” as in “Our staff will accompany you in installing the product.” Assist? “Yes. Assist. That is the word. Assist.” In the afternoon, someone wants to know if the screen should say that a line can have “many” or “several” asterisks in it. Multiple? “OK.” Someone else asks if “subset” means “substitute.” I hold my hands in the air, facing each other. Here’s a set of things. I bring my right hand closer to my left. I chop the air, swipe imagined objects away with the back of my right hand, then move the hand back to where I had chopped. I move my hands, and the objects that would be between them, closer to him. These are a subset. “OK, got it.” At the end of the day, the boss and I talk about the American election. I tell him what I’ve heard about the odds of each candidate winning. He doesn’t know the English word “odds.” I tell him that it’s the ratio of the probability of one outcome over another. He understands that. We talk about gambling and the stock market. I tell him how I used to walk down an alley off Wall Street at lunchtime when I worked there, through a throng of men in suits, all getting stoned. He asks if they were just smoking marijuana. Well, that’s all that I could smell there. That and aftershave. He hollers for another worker to stop what he’s doing and come to his office. He announces, officially, that he will now tell a joke. It’s a long intricate story about a Yiddish speaking parrot, with a punchline referring to probability. It’s quite funny. We laugh. “And now I know that I will remember the word ‘odds.’”
Thursday, October 22nd, 2020
The butcher sits outside the supermarket with his thermos and cigarette. His break is between 4:30 and 5. I see him when I go downstairs for a yogurt and an apple. A couple of plastic containers rest beside him on the stone planter. A plastic bag from the supermarket is at his feet. I can’t see what is in any of them. A teenager with ostentatious headphones rolls past us on a scooter. He sings Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” off-key. He may have cranked the headphones so loud that he can’t hear his own voice. Inside the supermarket, I translate for the customer ahead of me. She only speaks English. Fortunately, I know the Hebrew phrases she needs. “Another bag, please?” And I can translate what the cashier is saying. “This is a half-shekel piece, not five shekels. Do you have another five shekels?” She does. She takes a while to get organized and head out after she’s paid. As the cashier rings me up, I shift to the head of the line, past the plastic barrier. The cashier scrubs her hands with alcohol gel as I stand there. My purchases are out of reach. She sees this and slides them over to me. She only touches the yogurt with a fingernail. She picks the apple up by its stem. As I head out, the butcher finishes his break and stands. His apron is faintly stained. That’s why he wears it. The rest of his clothes are pristine.
On writing as if in dreams
I tend to be compulsive about readability. One aspect of this project goes against that to some extent.
Each post is one long paragraph. I could break most of them into multiple paragraphs, but I've resisted doing so. In many of them, the images flow, sentence to sentence. Each sentence connects with both the previous and the next, though not in the same way. That's another way in which I think of these as dreams: the most interesting aspect of my own dreams, at least, is their smooth disconinuity. Each event connects with what happened before and after it, though there may be no connection to what preceded or followed those events.
Using the single paragraphs might be a poetic affectation. Still, I have done it consistently for the posts so far, and it makes processing them in making the newsletters and books easier. So I think I'll stick with it.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I'm watching
I'm a big fan of Aaron Sorkin, even when he's at his most problematic. I haven't seen everything he's done (and haven't yet caught up with his The Trial of the Chicago 7), but I love to wallow in his writing. I'm also a fan of theater for TV, seeing how productions use the possibilities and limitations of the stage.
Sorkin and his team recently redid an episode of The West Wing for HBO max in a stage performance at the Orpheum theater as "A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote." The surviving original cast reunited for the performance, along with the original director, Thomas Schlamme, and composer, W.G. "Snuffy" Walden. (Seeing an ensemble play the theme music live on stage was one of several tear-inducing moments.)
They did a brilliant job of reshaping the episode for the televised stage. Minimal sets and lighting were enough to give a sense of place (along with an off-stage reader, seen at the top of each act, reciting the opening locations and descriptions). Seeing the actors playing the same roles many years later worked. I wondered if I could believe Josh Lyman with a white beard. I did.
In lieu of commercials, interludes between the acts had an array of celebrities (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michelle Obama, Samuel L. Jackson) telling the audience about the importance of voting. If what the series showed was a fantasy of what democracy can bring about, it at least gave hope for something better than the current reality.
Here's the trailer. If you can get at the show, see it.
One thing I'm hearing
When the top management of the bookstore where I worked would be demand that we play a particular album overhead, we would cringe. Their choices were consistently bad, usually highly produced pablum. Singularly awful moments would jump out and cause customers to interrupt their shopping trance and stare at the speakers. This was most common in the ramp-up to Christmas, but it could happen at any time.
When they demanded that we play John Mellencamp's Trouble No More in 2003, we expected more of the same. It was a covers album by a former rock star who hadn't had a hit in a decade or so. We hadn't heard any publicity about it. It was destined to be bad. We put it on because we had to.
The record was great. Mellencamp and his band, recording in a throwback studio, had put down mostly-acoustic versions of surprising songs. I only knew one of them from before. Each had sharp arrangement and committed performances. Most of all, it was fun. We loved it. Customers liked it. Many bought it, though not enough to make it a significant hit (though it did top the Billboard Blues charts).
Mellencamp and his band played the album live, along with some of his own older songs, at Town Hall in New York City, in July of 2003. An album of that concert came out in 2014. It's even better than the studio album. There's a real camaradeire among the players, and the tunes are even more lively. My favorite track is probably his version of Al Green's "Teardrops Will Fall," but it's all good.
The album, John Mellencamp Performs Trouble No More Live at Town Hall is still in print and available from the usual places (except Bandcamp, since it's on a major label). Here's a YouTube playlist of the whole thing. And here's an excellect documentary, filmed by a team from Indiana University, about the making of the studio album.
One thing I'm reading
You would think that I would have found a book named Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture almost immediately. It stayed under my radar for ten years, until I stumbled across a mention of it in an article on a related event that was linked from something else entirely on Tablet.
I'm only a little of the way into it though I listened to a podcast about it and the symposiem from 2004 that led to its creation.
The book has the expected superstars of experimental poetry (keeping in mind the fish/pond ratio), including Charles Bernstein, Norman Fischer, Benjamin Friedlander, Marjorie Perloff, and Jerome Rothenberg. It feels, in a sense like a flashback to hanging out on the POETICS listserv in the mid-nineties.
What I get from what I've read and heard so far brings out, once again, the differences between Israeli and American Judaism (put another way, between Yahadut and Yiddishkeit). It posits exile and alienation as key aspects of the Jewish experience. That had seemed to be so in the Diaspora. Here in Israel, it isn't. The writers seem alienated from both any sense of religion other than the ironic, as well as much connection to Israel. Tellingly, the writers in the symposium at least who had visited Israel had a much clearer sense of what is happening here and its possibilities, rather than the media-born negatively that's trendy in academe (as it was back when the symposium and book happened).
I'll be devouring more of the book in upcoming weeks.
One more thing
I don't really have a comfortable place to read, especially considering the number of books that I buy. I used to do a lot of my reading in coffeeshops, both free-standing and within bookstores. They don't really have those here. The idea of a shop functioning as a public living room never caught on. I'm told that home life is too important.
There doesn't seem to be a strong an idea of the Third Place here, where people gather with others in mostly unorganized ways, away from home and work. There are bars in some areas, and I suppose synagogues serve that purpose for some. But the coffeeshops are either windows of places with minimal seating or more formal cafes, designed for dining. You're not likely to find comfy upholstered furniture in them. Starbucks quickly failed here.
At home, I don't have a big comfortable chair to lounge in. When I do sit where I can, I don't have the right combination of lighting and a place to hold a book that is both comfortable and at a distance that works with my multifocal glasses.
I have found, however, a comforable way to read PDFs. My TV screen is large and clear enough that PDFs of standard sized books (6"x9") are quite legible, even counting the footnotes. I use the Solid Explorer app on my Android TV to go into my Dropbox. It displays PDF files properly. I still need my glasses. I can see the text without them, but it's just at the edge of legibility.
Now that I have a footrest that works with my TV chair, I can read those adequately. It's not as good as a big upholstered chair with a proper reading light, but it's a start. Someday I'll have to convince myself to actually buy good furniture.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line.)
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