Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-12
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...
The concrete pillar that keeps vehicles off the pedestrian street has disappeared. A perfectly square gap in the paving bricks marks where it had been.
A small truck is backing up along the street, slowly, gingerly. A man behind it is shouting course corrections. It almost fills the width of the street. Its door handles on either side are a few centimeters from the stone walls and bushes around the houses.
It stops about halfway down the block. The man behind the truck hops on top of it and into a cup at the end of a collapsed crane. The crane opens up and gradually rises. It stops when the man is next to the lamp of a streetlight that hasn't been working.
There are no bushes where the truck has stopped. I can squeeze past it. I wave at the driver. I want to be sure that he sees me and doesn't move the truck for a moment. He waves back. I make my way past and head on to work.
The grinding roar of an airplane sounds overhead. The pitch is descending, as I suppose the plane is, but not smoothly. It drops by distinct intervals every few seconds. I wonder whether the plane is doing the same thing, dropping bit by bit. It doesn't land at the airfield nearby, but keeps going. It sounds larger than anything that could land there.
My family makes a reasonable guess at the word that I couldn't see on the graffiti a few days ago. It parodied the posters that I saw everywhere that had the picture of our prime minister and the words, "You are the head. You are to blame." They say that the whole graffiti probably said. "The Rebbe from Lubavitch is the Messiah. You are the head. You are the Name."
It's referring to God, who is often called just "the Name." (That was a running reference in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man.1.) The word for "to blame" on the original poster was ashem. The word for "the Name" is hashem. The pun works even better read aloud, since the h is often barely pronounced.
The biggest uproar online today seems to be about a small literary magazine. Guernica had published a beautiful, compassionate essay, mostly about the writer's experience helping children from across the border get to better medical care.
The magazine pulled the article after a lot of people on its staff resigned. They apparently were upset because the article failed to portray people in our country as absolutely evil.2
Fortunately, the Internet Archive has preserved the article.3 You can read it for yourself. The resignation and unpublishing suggests, unfortunately, that the ability to read is no longer a prerequisite for working at prestigious literary magazines. The former staffers seem to have swallowed whatever they have been trained to believe, like a snake gulping down a poisoned gerbil whole.
I don't catch much other news during the day. I get a few things done at work.
There's a meeting in the afternoon. After about five minutes in, I have little to no idea what people are talking about. The only comment that I'm able to make is to note a grammatical error in English on the screen of the Android app being demoed.
I forget to recharge my earbuds at work. I can't listen to the usual podcasts on the way home. I walk in relative silence, hearing the roar of traffic and the chatter of people going past.
At the end of the pedestrian street, a metal cylinder is embedded in the ground. It's shorter and fits the surroundings less well than the pillar had. It does have reflective material near the top. I guess there is that.
This leads me to wonder whether the pillar had been pulled out so the truck could come through, or whether something had knocked the pillar down and the truck took the opportunity to get on the street and fix the lamp.
I may never know, unless a human was around and had seen it happen. The cats on the street, as usual, aren't saying.
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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
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L'hitraot.