Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-10-05
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...
Sorry I haven't written much recently. Not much has been going on. A lot has been going on.
I've been living in the House of a Hundred Grandmothers for about a month now. I have my tiny apartment (30 square meters, about 300 square feet) close to set up. Most of the books are on shelves. Only four or five cardboard boxes remain. I have set up a ridiculously small music and video studio at one end.
Living here is good. I like getting together with people in the dining hall for almost all the meals. We're served a lot of food, and I like most of it. (I doubt that I will ever come to like okra, in any form.) I was afraid that I was putting on weight, but my dietitian says that I've lost some. Apparently we're eating healthy stuff, and having a steady eating schedule (breakfast at 7:30, lunch at 12:30, supper at 6:30) helps.
The war continues, but it hasn't affected things much. We were summoned to our shelters once, a few days ago. I went to the big shelter in the basement, but I could have just stepped out into my hallway, which is equally well-protected. We were back in our rooms in less than an hour.
I've been working on an odd project: based, to some extent, on a challenge from my tutor, I've been writing pop songs in Hebrew each week. I'm working on the eleventh of what I think will be twelve now. It's tricky. While I can do some types of academic serialism or improvisation structures in my sleep, writing songs is hard. I have no internalized sense of harmony or song structure, so I have to keep banging out chords on the keyboard until I find ones that I like.
I do intend to get back to the film project soon. One issue unlocked a few nights ago, as I was dozing off watching a Merce Cunnngham video. The very first footage that I shot, many years ago, could fit a section that wasn't quite working.
And there should be news on the book front very soon. I had actually thought that it would be months ago, but there have been weird production challenges.
I had thought that I'd be writing a lot more of these posts since I moved in here, but it hasn't worked out that way. A big difference: walking around downtown during the initial months of the pandemic and of the war, it was easy to take a relatively distanced view of what I was seeing, viewing those whom I happened to encounter as characters. Now that I'm (as Tom Bickley would put it) "living in community," I find myself less open to writing about the folks here.
Rather than abstracted people in (always true) stories, they're the neighbors who I eat my meals with, encounter in the hallways, see in synagogue on the few occasions when I go, help where appropriate (as I'm among the youngest and physically healthiest of the residents), and are helped by when my own issues occasionally leave me upset and confused. They're more real and complex than I could describe in a post, and my views of them keep changing.
I also try to work from the assumption that the people about whom I write will, quickly or eventually, read what I write about them. I wouldn't want to say things about them that I wouldn't say to their face (assuming that we would share a language, which we sometimes don't).
So my creative energies have shifted to other media.
I will say that I think I'm about as happy here as I have been in any situation in which I've lived. After a month here, that's a good start.
Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.
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.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
L'hitraot.