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Rain [Nov. 1st, 2009|10:42 pm]
Strong winds all day, rushing inland off the cold, hammer-blue Mediterranean. Cracking thunderstorms again tonight. Oh God, bring us more of it. Bring us rain.
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Some rain [Oct. 31st, 2009|07:46 pm]
The rains have come at last, though late and small.  Those who live in places where water problems are abstract may be interested to hear what it is like in a place where they are very real.  About as real as a fine, equivalent to approximately 600 US dollars, for going over the city allowance of eleven cubic meters per month, per dwelling.  In February the limit will  drop to nine cubic meters per month.  The rain we had over the weekend spoiled the hike I was planning, and it probably won't cause the water restrictions to be lifted, but it was much appreciated and fell in about the right place.  At least the fish in the Sea of Galilee won't die this year.
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Friday evening [Oct. 3rd, 2009|05:07 pm]
Blogging is hell but I guess I'll try it again.  I have no professional success to discuss, and precious little store of entertaining daily events  to write about.  They happen now and again, but it would seem that to write here, publicly, about them would do not more than point out how small and ordinary my life is, how trivial and uninteresting my aspirations.  

For example, I have learned not to go down to the Russian grocery store on Friday afternoon.  It's a long hike down the mountain.  I went because I was down there anyway for a haircut, and thought I might jog across the Hadar to the Russian store and pick up some dark chocolate.  The place stays open later than most stores and was packed with people doing weekend shopping. I pushed my way through the aisles, past the hanging cheese and the butcher chopping a rack of lamb, to the corner where they sell the candy, insecticide and garbage bags.  With two bars of 85% Lindt chocolate I shoved my way back to the registers,  under racks of flowers in cellophane, Turkish cigarettes, Mylar balloons, lozenges and whatnot.

Got in line behind a couple with a full shopping cart, but it looked like mostly big bags of stuff so I figured they would check out quickly.  It was not to be.  They had squirreled all sorts of heterogeneous small items deep into the bags, apparently in hope that the register lady--a stocky Russian woman with an immense freckled neck and no discernible sense of humor--would miss a few items.  She did not, she was wise to that sort of trick.  She opened every bag and rummaged every item: cans of bug spray, links of hard pepper sausage in waxed paper, hair gel, beer, baskets of plums and grapes, milk, mayonnaise, some big cut of meat, packs of frozen spinach things marked with a faux-Italian brand name, vine leaves, carrots, motor oil, chewing gum--all went one by one under my eyes as I, and the wine-bottle-clutching guy behind me, shared our silent misery and our feet grew numb on the concrete floor.

Then the couple buying all that stuff started to argue about their items: the guy had seen the brand of mayo they were getting, didn't like that brand, thought they were going to get the other brand which was cheaper.  Delay, while he went off among the aisles and found the cheaper brand.  Several more incidents of this, all saturated with muttered dialogue under the hard unfeeling eyes of the Russian clerk.  Then out came the big shabby dog-eared bundle of  coupons, with more discussion: no that's not the right brand of lighter fluid, this is for a different quantity of tinned beef.  Somehow the coupons got entered into the electronic register.  Then it turned out that they wanted to pay in some kind of crazy way, using a few bills in cash and the code number off of a book of commercial checks that was almost used up.  I guess the code identified a bank account.  More argument, and debate.  The clerk entered the code into her machine and it came up insufficient funds.  More discussion, and a hunt for extra cash. 

The couple seemed completely oblivious to the people around them, beside them, all watching.  The Russian clerk was distracted by the clerk in the next aisle, who had a customer wanting to buy a 10-pack of cigarettes that didn't come up on the machine.  She spoke the code number: apparently our clerk was experienced and something of an oracle in this store.  Meanwhile the husband and wife engaged in tedious argument, and I knew what was going to happen.  They started pulling things out of their purchased items, asking the clerk to un-ring them, and un-ring the coupons, which required multiple swipes of a magnetic card and the entering of more code numbers.  Out came the hair gel, the big cut of meat, the potatoes, the toilet paper, the funny looking spinach things with the Italian brand name, all set on the floor, on the candy racks, among the flowers and balloons.  Now ring it up again.  The clerk did.  Insufficient funds.  Three times this happened.  I watched it all, experiencing the slow swell of gratification that comes from knowing one is obstinately sticking through some miserable experience.  I did not run and try one of the other lines: I know how this works.  I'd have fallen behind another such couple.  The guy behind me, who was eyeing his wine bottle and pretty obviously thinking the predictable thing, seemed to share my opinion.  Then the Russian sphinx brought a halt to everything, wrenched a three-meter long strip of paper tape out of the register, threw it on the ground, and told the couple to take their basket full of stuff back into the store and return when they had the money to pay for something.  She took my cash with a sorrowful laugh, and I wished her the best of good evenings.
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Dead things [Aug. 31st, 2009|05:14 am]
It's 5:00 in the morning and I've been up for three hours (still jet-lagged as I will be for several days, but so be it).  That being unavoidable,  I have spent some time brooding about the novel I am writing and other matters. 

First, a brief digression about family differences.  Practically every time he sees me, my brother gives me his practical advice for living: "Whatever you do, just have fun."  He has told me this so many times that I am perhaps justified in taking it as some kind of standard rule of practice.  I have never understood what he meant.  It is completely opaque to me.  For me there is no fun.  There are things that need to be done and things that don't.  I take my pick: sometimes I can't bear to do something that needs to be done so I avoid it and content myself with something easier that doesn't, but "fun" enters into it so rarely that it hardly counts.  A therapist would probably say this is an older-brother-younger-brother personality difference, but I don't give two figs what any therapist thinks.  I'm not criticizing anyone, just remarking on it.  Of course I sometimes do enjoy activities or good company but these are always, in my experience, brief deviations from the base-line norm which is that life is to be endured not enjoyed, in recognition that the opportunities to fail, to be shamed, and to die greatly outnumber those to win and to live. The only definition of success that makes sense to me is: to endure with grace and resignation, with gratitude for having had the opportunity to live at all, and to do good work right up to the very end, and then say goodbye without regret.

I have been thinking quite a bit about my book.  After putting together a few hundred pages of scattered and unsatisfying draft, I found that attempting to "just write it out" did not work.  My ideas became confused and I lost the thread of it and could not continue.  To address that I spent the last month writing a detailed synopsis of the story, not quite complete but to the point where I can see the shape of the narrative arc.  The result was not encouraging.  Summarizing all my ideas made it clear to me that the concept is much too complex and at the same time too vague, the characters' motives and decisions are not clear, and there are a number of stylistic features that seem right to me but will most likely confuse or irritate any reader who does not already know what I am getting at. Fiction is really about telling stories, and the first thing people want, in a story, is the feeling that they know what kind of thing they are reading.  Once they trust the writer they are mostly happy to be led in strange directions, but if they feel confused at the start they will show no patience.  I have spent five years on that project, which is far too long to spend on any project, and it is going nowhere.  It is not fun.   John Steinbeck once wrote that the great tragedy of being a writer is that you have to spend so much of your life among dead things.  Tonight I know what he meant. 

Well, it was a learning experience. That is what I am in this for: to learn how to do it--because certainly there is precious little other compensation.  I am therefore going to spend the next few months working on shorter pieces and practicing simpler stories.  I plan to write a series of 22 shorter pieces that will help me polish some basic skills.  I may reveal my reasons for choosing that number at a later time, but for now I leave it at that.  My goal is to finish one piece per week, which is going to be a big job as I am naturally one of those fastidious types who go slowly.  I want to thank all those who have had faith in me so far.  I haven't done much to reward that faith.  But we will see what the future brings.
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Back from Texas [Aug. 28th, 2009|10:49 pm]
I spent most of the last 3 weeks in various parts of Texas, visiting family and attending the Society of American Archivists' annual meeting.  My dad kindly lent me his car so I drove myself from Houston to Austin for the meeting.  It was enjoyable and informative and I saw some people I'd missed for a while, but on the other hand one is tempted to wonder what effect the information resources on the Web have had upon such meetings and conferences. 

Some conferences are for information and some just for fun: I recall one time I attended a software quality assurance conference in an Orlando, Florida hotel that was, on the same weekend, hosting the annual convention of the Floor Tile Manufacturers Association.  The computer people spent all three days head-down in conference rooms learning about work, while the Floor Tile Manufacturers checked in and went right to Disney World for the duration of the weekend (this may partly explain why the floor tile business seems to have largely shifted to China during recent years).  In any case, I think the Archivists' meeting was originally more along the lines of the "Information Conference," but the Web resources have taken most of the steam out of that.  I did pick up some interesting information about the job market, which is poor.

After the conference, dad and I briefly visited northern Minnesota, a cool green country along the coast of Lake Superior.  It was a beautiful and surprisingly memorable visit, though not much happened.  Dad set up his camera and took photos while I had some long day hikes on the trails that wind through the green hills nearby.  The forest was quiet and peaceful, with streams that fell crashing into deep black pools among red stones.  The lake, which I had never seen before, is astonishing: a single lake that contains more than ten percent of all the fresh water in the world.  It is the "Gitche-Gumee" of Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha." 

And oh my goodness, people in Minnesota are FAT!!!  I come from Houston and I thought I knew a thing or two about fat people--and on top of that I'm not exactly skinny myself--but I was like Tinkerbell beside some of the beef-and-wheat fed burghers of the upper Midwest.  In a not-unrelated development, they make fine pies in northern Minnesota.  We ate dessert every evening at a restaurant called The Pie Place, blessed with a peculiar roadside sign showing a confusing picture  of a little bear apparently fishing for a larger bear, using a pie on a string for bait.  We asked about this mysterious image but the lady in charge became somewhat flustered, said she was so happy we had asked and then gave us a hesitant and not-convincing explanation.  As we were returning to our motel I persisted in my assertions that the sign actually referred to some obscure North Shore legend, but we were not able to deduce what it might be.  The food at the Pie Place was undistinguished but the pies were excellent, with lots of fruit.   So all in all it was a good vacation.  I returned yesterday to Israel after an uneventful flight on exceedingly cramped airplanes.  I believe Air France has narrowed the width of their seats to save money.  Minnesotans be warned: don't even think about flying tourist on Air France!
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Carpets II, and such [May. 3rd, 2009|06:21 pm]
Those of you who were on pins and needles waiting for the outcome of the great rug cleaning extravaganza will be happy to know that the third time appears to have been the charm and the thing smells--if not "like unto the rose" at lest not like unto a moldy sock.  It actually feels lighter as well--though I find that hard to believe. That was the small rug.  Will I ever have the courage to tackle the big one?  

The outcome was nearly spoiled by the weather, which has clouded up and threatened rain all day, a few speckles coming down now and then.  I went to work feeling anxious about a meeting with one of my staff, who had indicated last week that she had something personal and work-related to discuss.  All weekend long I worried myself into an early grave imagining the worst--various sorts of worst, among them all the criticisms that I would have made about myself and my performance here during the last year.  Of course it turned out that I can imagine far worse things than anyone else: even the least thing I had expected it to be was far beyond the reality.  The meeting went well and there were no serious issues. 

Mohandas Ghandi is reported to have said something to the effect that anyone who truly believes in God ought to be ashamed for worrying about anything. I understand Ghandi's point to be that when we achieve a reasonably clear understanding of our own true nature and consequently of our path of service in the world, we find that along with that comes a pretty good idea of what is, and is not, in our power to control. We find that more (about ourselves) is under our control than we thought, and what is not under our control interests us less--in the sense of "Fear God, and God will give you knowledge."  True strength produces calm, confidence and joy.  It is in fact weakness--or perceived weakness in regard to someone who we see as otherwise much like ourselves, that generates aggression, belligerance and hostility.

Anyway, having learned my lesson with the meeting, I managed to keep my mind off the impending rain and off my rug lying out on the back terrace--a helpless victim to anything that might come down from on high.  All day the weather was strange: dark sky, light hot wind, the sea a rough leaden color overlain by a peculiar yellowish mist that became thicker and thicker toward the western horizon as if that really were the edge of the world and the ocean out there were boiling.  Cargo ships clustered together on the dull water far out away from the shore--perhaps waiting for something--I don't know.  Dark birds croaked in the trees (of course they do that every day). The mountains of Lebanon looked as though they had been chiseled out of rusty metal, and threads of white lightning were striking among their peaks as I hurried home.  The carpet was still dry, and smelled--if not entirely like unto the rose...
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Carpets [May. 2nd, 2009|11:57 am]
Today I washed my rug for the third time. I have two rugs in my apartment, both of which were here when I moved in (and had been here for many years before that).  They are old machine-made imitation "Persian" carpets, I believe a blend of synthetic and natural fibers, and were solid with decades of accumulated dirt and grease.  My first attempt involved a carpet cleaning machine that I borrowed with considerable difficulty and hassle. 

Results were mixed.  The machine was heavy and so loud in my small apartment that I was driven to wearing my stereo headphones and wrapping the cord around my neck while I worked. Lots of dirt came out of the rugs but when all was done and dry they still reeked with an exceedingly unpleasant musty odor.  So yesterday I took the smaller of the two out on the back patio and washed it with hose, bucket and brush, scraping out a lot more dirt, long black hairs and other unpalatable debris.  Then I let it bake and dry in the sun.  The result: an exceedingly unpleasant musty odor.  This morning I tried again, with very hot water and triple strength commercial carpet cleaning soap.  More gobs of brown filth came out.  Now it is drying again but I do not anticipate success.  The truth is that both of these rugs need to be rolled up, taken to a shop and run through a machine that vibrates them and drives hot soapy water--or dry cleaning fluid or some darn thing--through them.  I do not know where such a business can be found, or how to communicate with it.  I will let the thing dry thoroughly and then give it a sniff, and proceed from there.  Sometimes there is just no alternative to doing things the right way.
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Wrestling with demons [Apr. 2nd, 2009|10:09 pm]
For some time I have become more and more certain that something in the way I live my life has gone wrong.  I don't want to make more of this than it's worth: other people use their blogs to complain about work and life and this is no more serious than that.  But upon longer and deeper reflection it becomes increasingly clear to me that something is wrong, and my suspicions about the cause--or at least the triggering mechanism--of what is wrong are circling around the word "Internet."

Regular access to the Internet is bad for my health.  I must admit that I can't stay away from it, when it is on and available all the time.  I have a Netvibes account that links to several hundred feeds, many of them journalism or comment sites that, in turn, aggregate feeds from many additional sources.  I read tons and tons of essays, junk and "comment" online and flick through thousands of Flickr pictures, remembering nothing of it five minutes later, while books on my shelf that I felt are so important that I hauled them halfway around the world go unread, and my own work goes unwritten.  

I don't have writer's block: I just have a bad case of Internet.  I do not actually believe that I could fully unplug myself from the 'Net.  Living overseas as I do, there are too many things that it makes easy, which would be extremely time consuming and annoying to do otherwise.  But some kind of solution must be found.

It probably starts with no Internet after 12:00 p.m.  Yes, that's the sad fact of it--as simple as that.  You all know how those kind of resolutions go: fifteen minutes after we make them some terrible test comes up: a sudden panicky need to file taxes, a tormenting word one can't quite recall, the desperately urgent compulsion to hear some old pop song.  Those kinds of demons inevitably spring into view whenever we act so bold as to make a change in life.  But unless I change, this behavior, certain things I want to accomplish in the time I have left to me will not happen.  Little things like this, done day after day, can kill us--or if not killing us, can lead us into a state where we drag out our lives from point to point, and retreat at last beneath the "couch of earth" for good, never lifting our heads from the slumber of inattention.

In any case it's making it hard for me to get enough sleep.  So good night.
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A stone house [Mar. 31st, 2009|09:32 pm]
If I ever have the resources to build my house just the way I want it, I would build it out of stone: strong, fixed, immovable.  It would be nearly square, a little wider than it is tall and a little taller than it is thick, with two storeys.  The roof would be of slate stone, with a pitch appropriate to the climate, set off by a small classical moulding.  There would be two windows flanking the door, and three on the second storey front, two on each storey on the sides, and three each on the back.  The windows would be classically shaped, taller than wide and not too large, with carved stone frames and multi-paned windows with wooden mullions.  Such a building would weather the storms of time.  It would be a valuable thing to hand down to the next generation (whoever that may be), and defensible in a pinch.  And it would be a clean house, as orderly and neatly swept as a Japanese shrine.

Chances are that I will never have the combination of energy, resources and determination to build a stone house.  I'm more likely to drift from place to place during all the downhill slope of my life--as I did on the uphill slope--and end up living on social security, in a trailer parked on a highway median in some poor desolate sunbelt town like Raton, New Mexico, with bean cans and take-out boxes littering the floor.  I'll walk on linoleum over thin plywood, and have walls of sheet aluminum and paper mache with pictures cut from old calendars hanging on them.  It'll be sort of sad, really.

But perhaps, despite all that, I might start now with the home I have--as poor as it is, as ordinary and ugly as it is--sweeping it to make it clean and putting it in order.  Perhaps I might begin to make a few plans about where I might build, and how.  Just in case the chance should arise, against all odds, to have a stone house, and a family in it. 
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Every act of life [Mar. 7th, 2009|06:52 am]
The Baha'i fasting time has begun, when we neither eat nor drink from sunrise to sunset for a period of 19 days, and are supposed to meditate upon our lives, what we're doing here and what changes we might make to do it better.  People who fast for religious reasons often feel under some obligation to explain why we do it: whether it has some medical virtue, or whether it makes those of us who are in comfortable circumstances more aware of the sufferings of the poor, or whether willing endurance of hardship helps us develop self discipline.  And various answers could be framed along all those lines.  But in fact the purpose of fasting, as of all our activities during this short and-often-inconvenient life, should be detachment from the material world (one might say escape from the traps that are set for us in the material world) and attraction to the source of reality which is mirrored in the things of this world, but not contained by any of them.  Because we ourselves are an eternal source, reflected for a time in a material body which must, in the course of years, break down and go back to the earth. 

In the past--and to some extent still today--spiritually minded people sought refuge from (what they called) the world by living in cloistered communities. In some cases they punished their bodies, believing that the body is evil and the source of sin.  We are not asked to do that today; austerities that insult or damage our bodies and minds are not acceptable.  The things of the world are not evil, in fact they are good things, because all creation is good.  But they have their place, and they should not be allowed to rule over us.  Choosing to abstain from some basic material need for a while can remind us that we are able to do so, which is helpful. The things we possess do not possess us. Growing plants turn their leaves toward the sun--the source of their nourishment--by compulsion: they don't have the choice to turn away.  But humans have the power to choose whether to turn ourselves toward the source of our being, or to turn away from it and allow something unworthy to rule us.  From the day we were born, our physical bodies have been running their course toward eventual reunion with the earth, but the greater part of us can never die in the earth, because it was never contained by the earth to begin with.  Every act of life may be seen as an opportunity to approach that greater part.
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update [Jan. 24th, 2009|02:19 pm]
I have three stories to finish and send out this week.  Making better progress on the novel & plan to finish it this year.   Received some wonderful holiday cards from various friends.  Hope you all are doing well.
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