[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #010
PDF (More printable) Edition
(That is, either this is the PDF edition or that is a link to it.)
20 November, 2020
This is the tenth issue of the newsletter.
I was so tired by Friday that I thought of putting it out with just the posts. But I had enough ideas saved up to make the rest of it happen.
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Onward (shopping for grog?)!
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, November 13th, 2020
It’s donut season. They always appear around now, about a month before Hanukkah. Since our national body clock is off, what with the lockdowns, late rains, and unripe clementines, I’m surprised to see them. I get one at the bakery where I buy my challah. I do my usual Friday rounds. I get groceries at the supermarket in the Heart of the City. They’re out of chicken breasts, so I get a turkey breast. I see that they have liver on sale. I pick out a package of it. I stand in the cashier’s line behind a man with only two items. The cashier takes a long time with the customer before him. As she does, a woman repeatedly appears next to him. She hands him more and more items. He has to put some down on a display to avoid dropping them. It takes much longer to ring him up than it would have for just the original two items. Heading out of the store, I realize that I have nothing on which to cook the liver. I go into the cookware store and ask for an inexpensive grilling pan. The worker asks me a litany of questions. Price range? Size? What kind of stove? What will you be cooking? I get a pan for only a little more than I had expected, since it’s forty percent off today. The cookware here is good. It’s worth the money. I get a shawarma from my favorite shop. I sit down in the square to eat it. The shops there are all open and busy. There’s still a long line at the shoe store. My boss comes past and sees me. He’s on his way to the shoe store. I warn him about the lines. Somehow, when he gets there, no one else is waiting. He sails right in. A few minutes later, the line reappears. I wonder how he does that. The table with the jars of jam is at the front of the square again. The sign is now clearer. They cost twenty shekels apiece. I go up to get one. The teenager behind the table says that they have grape and carambola. I pick up the second one and ask again what it is. Carambola. I have no idea. I get one. It’s in a flimsier jar than what I had gotten before. By the time I get home, the lid has popped open. Carambola has oozed all over the bottom of my shopping bag. I look it up later. I know it as starfruit. It tastes much better than I remember starfruit tasting. I spend the rest of the afternoon finishing the newsletter. As I’m about to send it out, the server goes down. I make dinner: liver, spinach, and, as a dessert, challah with the starfruit jam. I upload the newsletter and put on the TV. Later, I eat the donut with some cola-flavored seltzer. The season has begun. It is good.
Saturday, November 14th, 2020
Close to twilight on a Sabbath afternoon, the city square at first seems deserted. I look and listen more closely. Across from the shoe store, two women stand talking. Each has a hand on a wheelchair. The man in the chair doesn’t appear to be listening to them. Further down, another man sits at a stone table. He sips something from a coffee cup with a plastic lid and eats something from a clear container. His phone softly plays music that I can’t identify. Two young men on a bench talk in what I think is Arabic. Two children zoom down the path in front of the stores. The girl, dressed completely in white, rides a bicycle. The boy, wearing bright colors and patterns, rides a scooter. They come to a stop at the front of the square. A pair of grownups eventually catches up with them. They all sit down in a group of chairs there. The girl gets up several times to circle the square on her bike. Each time, she goes around once, then returns and sits with the others for a few more minutes. Near the street, an older woman twists and bends, waving her hands in the air. It looks like she is doing some kind of exercises. Another woman walks through the square toward her. When they meet, they walk together, arm in arm, down the street, away from the square. Children’s voices echo from outside the Great Synagogue at the far corner. Their screeching merges with that of the invisible birds in a tree outside the Heart of the City mall. As the sun sets, more people appear. After dark, the sidewalk fills with people. Some shops open. Traffic gets busier. Buses line up at the stops. The week begins.
Sunday, November 15th, 2020
Someone else is ordering when I walk into the burger joint. That’s good. I have time to grab a Hebrew menu and remind myself how to say “mushroom burger.” When the customer before me is done, I tell them what I want, in Hebrew this time. I’ve pre-loaded everything that I would have to say into my memory. I have to ask the cashier to repeat himself on a couple of things. He’s drowned out by Hall and Oates blasting overhead. I stand outside while I wait. After a few moments, a worker calls to me and asks if I’d like the regular bun or the vegan bun. He asks it in English. Either he knows me from before, or my accent is that obvious. I step back outside. Apparently the rules against eating outside at restaurants are honored loosely. There are no chairs on the patio, but a few tall tables remain, rooted into the ground. They aren’t moving anywhere. While stuff had been stacked on them before, they’re clear now. Three men are standing at them, talking and eating. Their take-out orders have only traveled a couple of meters from the counter. A family sits cross-legged with their dog on the astroturf at the pizza shop next door, eating their own burgers and fries. My order is ready quickly. I head out of the shop. I’m wearing a baseball cap and a rain jacket. I had heard a thunderstorm when I woke up this morning, though the rain stopped by the time I got outside. It’s too warm now with this jacket, and the cap gets in the way of my glasses when I try to wear them along with my earbuds and mask. I regret wearing them. I wander home, listening to podcasts. Right when I get inside and close the door, the rain starts up again.
Monday, November 16th, 2020
Our office runs on coffee and cookies. Right after I sit down this morning, my direct boss puts two cookies on my desk. As I head out, the big boss is also handing out cookies. I decline, but he insists. When I take one, he says that I should take more, “to eat on the road.” I eat one right away, and put the other in my pocket. I think of eating it as I walk home, but my mask would get in the way. I meet with both bosses earlier in the day. That usually involves more obligatory cookies, but this time, they have put what they call American peanuts in a bowl on the desk. Apparently, “American” means that they are dry roasted. The usual peanuts available in the nut and grain stores here aren’t. My bosses grab them from the bowl by the handful. I take one at a time. We each have cups of simple coffee. To make it, we just put a spoonful of Turkish-ground coffee in our cups and pour hot water right in. The direct boss has a good espresso machine in his office. We’re welcome to use it, but it’s more of a complex ritual than what we usually do. Others in the office drink the simple coffee with a lot of milk. One worker, now gone, insisted on a complex process, filling the cup with boiling water, dumping it, filling it part way again, adding the grounds, filling it the rest of the way with milk, then putting the whole thing in the microwave. At least I think that’s how it worked. I would get lost trying to follow the pattern. At home, I drink cold brew. I only have to make it up once a week or so. I don’t have cookies in my apartment. If I did, they wouldn’t last long.
Tuesday, November 17th, 2020
I feel something squishy as I put my hand down on the kitchen counter in the dark. I can’t identify it by touch. I cross the room and turn on the light. Looking back, I see what I felt. A large slug has come in overnight and climbed up onto the counter. It curls up as I watch. They don’t like being touched. I wonder what to do about it. If it were to stay on the counter, it would probably be injured as I make breakfast. I don’t have much room to maneuver. I detach a paper towel from the roll and pick the slug up with it, as gently as I can, rolling it off the counter’s edge until it drops into a pocket I’ve made in the towel. I carry it outside and place it on the step. From its color, I wonder if I might be mistaken. It could be a segment of a plum. But i haven’t had any plums in the kitchen in months. And it’s moving, very slowly. As usual, it takes me awhile to make breakfast and get dressed. When I head back outside, the slug is gone. I worry that a cat or something might have gotten it. Looking closely, I see a slim shimmer of slime leading from where I had put the slug down into the grass at the steps’ edge. I am relieved. As far as I can tell, the slug is free.
Wednesday, November 18th, 2020
Early in the day, a coworker and I try to decode some cryptic handwritten notes for a PowerPoint presentation. We eventually have to ask the person who wrote them. We can tell from the alphabet that they’re probably in English. What we read as “INGRID” means that the image below it should be in red. “FB LATKE” means “isolate.” We cram to get the project done by the 4 PM deadline. By midday we learn that the matter is moot. Due to a constellation of issues, the invitations for the online event never went out. We’ll try it again for tomorrow. I spend much of the day trying to integrate images from screenshots and videos made on several different quirky systems. I try to work through things methodically. Others bounce around within the project, going off on new tangents before reaching the end of anything. By the end of the day, I’m exhausted. I get a falafel and a donut at the Heart of the City and eat them at a table in the square. The weather is perfect. Three little boys run after one another not far from me. One trips and keels over. His palms hit the pavement. He flips upside down, walks on his hands for a few steps, then kicks his legs into the air and lands back on his feet. A large white dog blocks my exit from the square. It’s friendly, as is the human with it. I drop my hands. It sniffs them. I pass the test. It lets me go home.
Thursday, November 19th, 2020
The doctor has more energy than I do, this early in the morning. “So you haven’t been here since, when, January?” That was when I had what we thought was a heart thing. “Or maybe it wasn’t your heart. We don’t know for sure. You didn’t do your stress test. I’ll authorize you for one again.” I have been staying away from medical things since the virus landed. I have some issues and questions to catch up on. A virus test? “Are you having symptoms? We’re only doing them for people who need them.” A flu shot? “You can schedule — wait, I have them right here. I’ll just do it now.” My ears? I’d had an earache last week in my right ear, and some hearing loss in it since then. She looks into them. “Weird. You say your hearing loss is on the right? It looks fine. Your left eardrum looks odd, though. You should see an E.N.T.” I already have an appointment for next Wednesday with one. “Anything else?” Well, the joint of my left big toe sometimes hurts when I walk. Some of my family has gout. Should I worry about that? “Does it hurt when you touch it lightly? No? Then it isn’t gout. Though you would be an excellent candidate for it.” That’s all the questions. She renews my prescriptions and writes me up for some other tests. “OK, bye. Oh – hang around in the waiting area for about fifteen minutes. See if where you got the flu shot starts to hurt. If not, you can go. Set up a phone appointment after you get the tests. Bye.” I sit in the waiting room for a while. Nothing happens. I continue on to work.
On writing as if in dreams
A discussion with Seth Godin in Brian Koppelman’s podcast The Moment had some ideas about the form of a blog, and what to include or not to. About ten minutes before the end, Godin talks about what he doesn’t do with his blog; no links, no fancy formatting, no embedded media, and, in his case, no comments. (I find comments work well on the Facebook page, and would like to find ways to have comments on the newsletter.)
Other forms work well for other people. The other daily writer whom I follow religiously, no more commas period, always includes photos. Others specifically blog links to other sides. (The medium, after all started out as the “weblog” which was specifically for that.)
But these parameters I’ve set for myself are working so far.
(I don’t know either Brian Koppelman or Seth Godin in person, but Seth gave a gracious blurb for my book 19th Nervous Breakdown, which I hope to bring back into print, and included me in his book Who’s Who on the Internet, so far back in the dust of time that I can’t find any mentions of it online anymore. Maybe it’s in a time capsule somewhere.)
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
I keep thinking about The Queen’s Gambit. I’ve watched and read several excellent follow-up pieces online this week. The 92nd Street Y had a splendid panel discussion of the show with the writer/director, several of the actors, and Jodie Foster, who is one of the best moderators that I’ve seen for these things. She brings her experience as a director and actor, as well as a keen intelligence and vigor that is the match of any of the characters, to the task.
There have also been pieces about the show, dissecting the sets, wardrobe, casting, and, most of all, the chess aspects. There’s a lot to dig into for people interested in any of this. My favorite podcast, Scriptnotes, interviewed writer/director Scott Frank, looking at a few pages of the script (which they linked to from the show page) and breaking down how they work as screenwriting. And the US. Chess Federation has posted a package of relevant interviews.
Like The West Wing, The Queen’s Gambit gives the feeling of being in a room with extremely smart and, for the most part, well-meaning people. One downside to its being a limited series is that we won’t get to spend another season with them. But we can rewatch it and the related materials.
One thing I’m hearing
Brian Eno has put out this third – or fourth or fifth – compilation of film music, Film Music 1976-2020. It’s a bit hard to keep track. His first, 1978’s Music for Films, had music that he suggested for films, but that hadn’t appeared in any of them yet. (Eventually, all of it did.) There was a similar, less-known follow-up, called variously More Music for Films or Music for Films Vol. 2 in 1983. (I had forgotten about it until I looked at my music collection a few days ago.) And 1988’s Music for Films III also had tracks by other related artists.
There have also been soundtrack albums for individual films, often not bearing the name of the film. Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks had music from one of my favorite movies, For All Mankind. For Spinner, Eno handed off his track from Derek Jarman’s film Glitterbug for Jah Wobble to complete.
But Film Music 1976-2020 takes a look at his whole career so far. For the Eno completist (like me) much of the music will be familiar. Along with tracks from his previous soundtrack and collection albums, it includes music that had been scattered on other records, such as his cover of “You Don’t Miss Your Water” from Married to the Mob and the “Prophecy Theme” from David Lynch’s Dune.
Eno is best known for his ambient music, sound that hangs in the atmosphere, “as ignorable as it is interesting.” He also, especially early on, did some great rock albums, and has produced albums for others, including U2 and David Bowie. Much of this album is somewhere between them. Many of the instrumental tracks grab the attention more than the ambient work, and the few vocals are more atmospheric than they are foregrounded songs. In “Under,” which appeared in the movie Cool World as well as on his vocal album Another Day on Earth, the voices are layered so that you have to dig into them to hear what they are saying.
I don’t think this is the first album that I would hand to someone new to Eno. My choice for that would still be Another Green World. But it might be the second or third. It’s a varied, rewarding listen, and gives a view of some excellent work that might otherwise slip between the cracks.
One thing I’m reading
A pair of articles in the past few weeks focus on the collapse of civilizations, and whether ours is coming due.
In The Atlantic‘s “The Historian Who Sees the Future,” (paywalled, but at the moment, the Google WebCache has it here), Graeme Wood profiles Peter Turchin. He started out studying patterns in the lifecycles of the populations of other life forms. What he sees for humans isn’t promising. He has created a massive database of historical information, and uses it to look at the future.
> The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions … In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies … “We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more … At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
In the New York Times‘s “How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?” (paywalled, but also available here), Ben Ehrenreich profiles Joseph Tainter, the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies. (The link is to a PDF of the complete book.)
Tainter connects the fall of civilizations with their rise in complexity:
> Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into “small, petty states,” often in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and populations decline sharply. “The world,” Tainter writes, “perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.”
When some societies collapsed in the past, while it was catastrophic for the upper classes, the rest of the people often wandered away to someplace safer. That might not be possible today:
> “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” … The coronavirus pandemic, Tainter says, “raises the overall cost, clearly, of being the society that we are.” When factories in China closed, just-in-time delivery faltered. As Tainter puts it, products “were not manufactured just in time, they were not shipped just in time and they were not available where needed just in time.” … A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
The article does look to other writers and scientists who are not quite so grim.
> Some institutions are certainly collapsing right now, [Native American scholar Michael V.] Wilcox says, but “collapses happen all the time.” This is not to diminish the suffering they cause or the rage they should occasion, only to suggest that the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present… The cities of Palenque and Tikal may lie in ruins in the jungle, a steady source of tourist dollars, but Maya communities still populate the region, and their languages, far from dead, can be heard these days in the immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles and other American cities too.
One more thing
I’ve finally gotten something technological working well.
One advantage of the Plex media player that I use is that it can stream audio and video to specified other people. We successfully tested that this week.
Our local family is effectively, as we have noticed, one household in four apartments. My family in the House of the Hundred Grandmothers has been able to connect to and stream media from what is, in effect, our local cloud. The search capabilities are good, and it means that we don’t have to run around with flash drives to play music for one another. It does, however, depend on our occasionally flaky internet connections, especially during the rainy season.
As I’m a librarian at heart (or at least my own idealized concept of one), I have always built my media collection with an eye to being able to share it with family and others close to me. This is finally happening.
It’s just a small step in what I’m doing, but it’s a dream coming to pass. We’ll see what else this makes possible.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line!)
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