[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #009
PDF (More printable) Edition
(That is, either this is the PDF edition or that is a link to it.)
13 November, 2020
This is the ninth issue of the newsletter.
The issue is late. The server has had some problems. But here it is.
I noticed a few days ago that, if you’re reading this in your email, the links are obfuscated, so you can’t tell where you’re going without actually clicking. This could be an issue if following a link might unexpectedly use up one of a limited number of reads on a paywalled page, or if it led to a site to which you might not want to give clicks. I’ve been talking with the developer about this. It’s getting interesting.
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Onward (wheeling the cogs?)!
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, November 6th, 2020
I finally get to see my family for a little while at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. Their lockdown has lightened up a bit. The workers have set up tables outside. Residents can schedule to get together with their families. I get there right when my family is coming out the door, headed to a table. I meet them there. I haven’t seen some of them in months. We talk about what’s been happening, the US election, my disappointing vacation, and the cascade of problems caused when their ceiling leaked. Depending on how quickly that can be repaired, they may have to move to another apartment there. They had just rearranged their small space, fitting things in with millimeters to spare. Moving all that will be difficult. The roar of small planes from the nearby airfield halts conversation every few minutes. After half an hour, they have to head back inside. I walk home through the usual park. A few dogs and their people wander about. Someone whom I don’t recognize, with a mask and a child’s bicycle, says hello to me. I say hello back. I see him a few minutes later, heading into my yard. It’s my landlord. I rarely see him with his mask on. I head inside and get to work on my newsletter. I pause to mark my calendar. I’ll see my family again at the same place and time next week, assuming that nothing further goes awry.
Saturday, November 7th, 2020
I’m awake at 7 AM. I don’t know why. Today I should sleep late. I have a list of things that I want to get done. I check the news and my mail. I make breakfast. I set up my computer so I can record another track of my 75 minute piece. Just as I’m about to start, the power goes out. I check if it’s just my computer. Nope. It’s the entire neighborhood. I go back to bed. When I wake up later, I have lost the momentum that I had. I catch up on some tasks and make my lunches for the week. I’ve been watching US election news compulsively. I put on some music instead while I cook. When I check my computer again, I see that I have missed the moment when the race has been called. I don’t feel exuberant so much as relieved. Of course, a lot of wrenches can be thrown in the path of history in the next two months. I flip between networks online. They all are saying the same things. Eventually, I pull myself away. The mundane returns. I still have to get ready for work tomorrow and pull my clothes together. After the elections, the laundry.
Sunday, November 8th, 2020
When I get to work, people greet me with “Mazal Tov” and pepper me with questions about the election. The big question, of course, is whether the new guy will be good for this country. I think so, but people mean different things by that. I haven’t missed much in my week off. I talk with my direct boss and show him how to use some software he needs. I get back to work, doing what I, apparently, do best: going through a lot of text on screens, following a careful path to reach all of them, and fixing the English. On my way home, I find the dance party in the city square in full swing. Someone has hooked up speakers to a phone. They boom out a bass-heavy cover of “Stand by Me” in mixed Hebrew and English. Purple and green lights flash with the rhythm. The street-facing shops are open again. A long line of modestly-dressed women stretches into the square from a shoe store. Under the new rules, no more than four customers can be in a shop at one time. Four boys in black and white, with their tzitzit flapping, use the chairs and tables on the square as a jungle gym. I stop into the burger joint to get my usual order. Three older boys in green soccer uniforms talk to the workers, showing them something on their phones. I think they may be intentionally trying to confuse the grownups. Neither the boss nor the cashier that I’ve gotten to know are there. I start to try to order in Hebrew. I forget how to say “mushroom.” The worker from whom I’m ordering calls over another one with better English. “We’ll have to put it in a bag to go, but you are welcome to sit here while you wait.” I do. They fill my order quickly. I head out, passing the three boys, who are rough-housing on the astroturf outside the pizza joint next door. I pause, put on yet another election post-mortem podcast, and wander home.
Monday, November 9th, 2020
When I get home, I see that there has been another power failure. It hasn’t even rained today. My computer has rebooted, but the programs that had been running have stopped. My file server is up and OK, though it had been down for a little while. Flashing digits on my electric clock tell me that the power came back on six hours and eleven minutes ago. That corresponds to when I couldn’t get at the files on the home server from work. I poked at it while waiting for processes to run, during another day of fixing the English on screens. Some of it needs more than a proofreading. I have to make a plan for it. That will involve some other people. It looks like what I’m editing had a stone soup evolution. It started small. People, without consistent planning, added content and features as they thought of them. As usual, I may be the first person to go through everything, page by page, in order. What I’m finding would work better as soup than as screens. I think I know what I’ll be doing for quite a while. At home, I reset my clock and restart my computer. The TV has to reboot, too. Everything is working, but this is definitely the week to get that uninterruptible power supply.
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020
Several trees on the way to work are missing limbs. Last week’s storms didn’t do it, at least directly. Each was cleanly amputated. The city’s trimmers must have been at work while I was gone. Some trees had doubled trunks. Which trunk was removed looks arbitrary now, The choice might be clearer if I were to see both together again. Branches are piled on the sidewalk. Most are gathered neatly, though some are scattered. On the street where I get my packages, the claw of a trash truck tries to pick up piles of branches and other debris. It has trouble getting a grip on them. It lifts what it can grab. Much of what it gets falls out. A workman with a broom sweeps what has landed into a neater stack. It tries again. I cross the street to avoid walking under it, then cross back a half-block further down. I can only cross the next street from this side. A temporary fence has blocked the sidewalk on the other side beyond the intersection for as long as I have been walking to my office. Halfway to work, rain starts to fall. At first, it’s just a few drops at a time. The sound when they hit the sidewalk blends with the noise of distant construction. About a block from work, it begins to fall much faster. I hold my shoulder bag over my head. I’m wearing a dark shirt and jeans. They won’t show how drenched I am.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020
A young woman rushes up to me as I enter the supermarket. She waves a six pack of paper towels in the air and asks me a question in rapid-fire Hebrew. I have no idea what she is saying. I tell her I didn’t understand. She repeats the question, almost identically. This time I catch the words for “telephone number.” I think she might be saying that if I give the store my phone number, I’ll get a free pack of paper towels. I did the rewards card spiel often enough in my retail days that I recognize the cadence. I tell her again that I didn’t understand. She glares at me, says “I have to say this a third time?” and repeats it verbatim, at the same speed. I finally wave my hands and squeeze past her. I’m only getting a few things. I look at the clementines, but they’ll still green, quite late in the season. Maybe it’s because the rain took so long to get started. I get persimmons instead. When I get home, I put them down on the kitchen table, right next to another bagful of persimmons that I had picked up yesterday. Oh, well. I sit down at my computer and immediately make a purchase online. I had researched it for hours last night, but delayed getting it until now. I tend to do that with expensive things. Yesterday and today are a sort of unofficial shopping holiday here, where the online shops gang up and offer discounts. I understand that in years past, it was an inducement to get people to shop online. This year, everyone already does. I look for some more bargains, but don’t find anything. I’m told that the selection and deals aren’t nearly as good as before. I add a note to the order form for my purchase asking them to deliver it to my office, if they’re delivering it during the work week. I try putting my message through the online translator, but it keeps timing out. I end up pasting it into the form in English. Someone there should understand. I sit back with a burger, a persimmon, and my TV. Time to wind down.
Thursday, November 12th, 2020
I’ve passed this pizza place on the city square hundreds of times. Tonight, I want a calzone. I walk in and order one. The man behind the counter answers me in English. “Just pizza. I make you any kind, or you can get from the slices here.” The loudspeaker to my left is blasting aggressive rap. It isn’t too loud. I can understand him. I get prefab slices, one of tomato and onion and one of pineapple and cheese. “This will be few minutes.” He scoops each slice up on a large spatula, opens one of the four ovens, and puts it in. I step back. The next customer wants a pineapple slice with no added cheese. The worker picks the little blocks of cheese off of a slice with his gloved hands. He tosses it into the oven next to mine. A woman comes in with a small blonde girl in a pink tracksuit. The mother picks up a full pizza that she had ordered. She turns and sees the girl dancing to the music. She starts to say something to her, and then doesn’t. I stand and wait. The scents take me back to the best pizza I ever had. It was thirty four years ago. The pizza place had a large stone oven outdoors, near an old bus station. It was just a slice of cheese pizza with spices, but it was magnificent. I recall being told that the pizza place had been bombed some years later. The old bus station itself is gone now. After a few minutes, I hear the pizza oven clank open. The worker scoops out my slices and puts them in a box, with thin cardboard between them and a bag with packets of spices. I pay him and head home. The mother and girl walk several meters in front of me, hand in hand. The girl continues to dance as she walks, well after the music has faded away. They turn the corner at the hummus joint and disappear.
On writing as if in dreams
I hear many of the posts in my head as I read them. (I also often read them out loud before I post them, too. It catches problems that just reading by eye can miss.)
Their voice in my head is kind of odd. It’s very much as if I’m watching a film with a voiceover, showing scenes related to what it says, with significant pauses between the sentences. I imagine it as rather like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It might even sound better in French.
I don’t have the visual images here, of course, just the text. The images need to form in the readers’ heads. I sometime wonder what they see as they read it. Since the project started up again as a daily practice, I’ve been describing a fairly limited world, seeing similar things over and over, adding details each time. A whole lot of information is piling up. Still, I suspect each reader has a very different internal picture of what I’m describing, as would be true of any work made of words. If we had the technology, it would be interesting to grab snapshots of these images from the readers’ minds and edit them together. It would either look beautiful or like the result of a surfeit of mushrooms.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
A surprising number of my friends and the pundits that I read are all watching the same show: The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. It’s a drama about the life of a chess prodigy. I binged all seven episodes in two nights.
I used to be fascinated by chess. I studied it a lot in high school, but never got good at it. I was the worst player on the chess team. I think I was seeing the game too abstractly. I find competition kind of odd and alien, so I couldn’t get all that interested in winning.
The show handles the chess aspects well. A few experts have piped up with articles about things that it gets wrong, but they admit that there aren’t many of them, and most are excusable for the sake of drama. Two experts oversaw the chess aspects. I understand that the games that you see the people playing and discussing are actually taken from classic matches in the past.
The cast is exceptional. I don’t think I’d seen any of them before. I knew of Marielle Heller, who plays the protagonist’s adopted mother, as a screenwriter and director, but didn’t know that she acted, too. The show is consistently well made, from the writing and directing (both by screenwriting legend Scott Frank) to the cinematography, score, editing, effects, and costumes, which capture the looks and sounds of the 1960s beautifully.
Now that it’s over, I find myself wondering about the ambiguous ending. I know what I hope would happen next, at least.
The show has no bad guys. Most of the characters, either at first or eventually, are there to help one another. It highlights how communal this apparently solitary and combative pursuit can be.
It’s based on a book by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Man who Fell to Earth. That figures. Each involves a hyper-intelligent character whose career is threatened by alcoholism and the inability of their peers to understand them. The way it plays out in The Queen’s Gambit, however, is eventually warmer and more hopeful than it is in the other work. I look forward to reading the novel sometime, and to watching the series again.
One thing I’m hearing
On the latest Bandcamp Friday, I ran across an album I’d been trying to find for a while: Cold Blue (an original anthology) from one of my favorite record labels, Cold Blue Music.
The label is the home of music that has grown from West Coast Minimalism. It was there from the start, with records in the early 80s by artists such as Barney Childs, Daniel Lentz, Peter Garland, and its founder, Jim Fox. The original, vinyl release of the anthology from 1984 also included such New Sounds all-stars as Ingram Marshall, Michael Byron, Harold Budd, and James Tenney. The label came back in 2000 with an ongoing array of new releases, including music by a wider array of artists, such as John Luther Adams.
The sound is, for the most part, experimental but not harsh. A lot of it is tonal and accessible. If we had had any in the record store where I worked, I would eagerly have played it overhead. Some of it is pattern-based, where you can easily hear and describe what’s happening. Other music is more cryptic and atmospheric. For the most part, it tends to be laid back, more inviting than challenging.
In addition to the anthology, I recently got the new album Lines Made By Walking by John Luther Adams, performed by the JACK String Quartet. (You always have to specify the composer’s middle name, to distinguish him from the slightly better known John (Coolidge) Adams, slightly less well known John D.S. Adams, utterly irrelevant John Quincy Adams, and that other president John WhateverItWas Adams. The JACK String Quartet was named from the initials of its original players; the lineup has changed, but the name stuck.)
The music on it, as with much of Adams’s other music, is rapturously beautiful. The title piece is made up of overlapping arpeggios on the various instruments, covering differing ranges and at different speeds. The music shimmers as if heard in a mirage. You can pretty much tell what it’s doing and where it’s going, but the changes are never quite what you’d expect. The other work, “untouched” shimmers in a different way. All of the music is played on open strings or harmonics. The long tones whistle and mesh, inspired by the way that the wind blows in a tundra.
Give these a listen. (You can hear music from each album at the links in this note.) If you like what you hear, odds are that you will like much of the rest of what the label does.
One thing I’m reading
Ligaya Mishan’s article “In the Arctic, Reindeer Are Sustenance and a Sacred Presence” takes a long look at the indigenous communities in the Arctic.
> “If one of the precepts of sustainability is wasting as little as possible, few animals have been honored so completely, and for so long, as the reindeer… Like the whale to the Inuit and the buffalo to the Lakota, the animal is at once everyday fact and sacred presence — not symbolically so, but in the sense that the sacred is immanent in all things, manifest in the world, in the land and the people of it.”
The detail and clarity of the writing is wonderful. It shows a world that I hadn’t known and leads me to want to know more.
(The link above, to the New York Times, is behind a paywall. The article also appears here in Reindeer Herding magazine, which I never seem to have noticed on any of the magazine racks that I’ve shopped or shelved.)
One more thing
I’m continuing to set up my media center / studio at home. I’ve moved all of my music and video onto a NAS (a separate dedicated machine, consisting almost entirely of a CPU, drives for the media, and network connections), managed by the Plex software. I’m really pleased with Plex. I had tried it years ago, found it to be kind of a mess, and moved over to Kodi. Looking again, I see that it’s a better solution for me now. While Kodi does a lot of its management of information on the clients (the TV, the computer that’s actually playing the media, and the like), Plex runs it on the server (in this case, the NAS) and only streams what you see and hear to the client. That means that the client has to work less hard. Since my TV has a beautiful screen but a kind of weak computer, it makes sense to push the thinking onto the NAS.
Plex’s interface is beautiful. It also has a good sense of what I’m trying to do and what I might do next. It connects well to my phone and other devices. (Some of the features require the Plex Pass, which costs five dollars a month. I can handle that.) I can use it to play my media at work as well as at home, as long as the Internet connections at each are running (not a sure thing). And, while there’s less choice than there is for Kodi, there’s also less to mess around with and to break.
I almost always prefer open source systems. Kodi is open source, and good for what it does. Plex is not, but there’s a good team behind it. I’m happy to leave the driving to them.
The NAS itself is causing me problems, though. Although I didn’t realize it when I got it, it’s a somewhat old design and at the edge of obsolescence. The company who makes it just rolled out a new release of the operating system, and it’s causing headaches around the world. One thread that I’m following on the support page has over two hundred complaints. It’s also impossible to roll back to the previous release.
The manufacturer pushed it out too quickly, without enough of a look at how it would work on the low-end hardware. They finally admitted to someone on the thread that they had been dealing with a lot of hacks against the previous operating system, and had to do a major overhaul to address those. I’ve never used the networking features that required the fix. Those of us who haven’t would have been better off staying with the previous operating system. But, now that we’ve upgraded, there’s no going back.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line!)
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