Interlude the second

I'm not finished with Israel yet, there is at least one more post in the works. In the meantime, I've been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's marvellous Brideshead Revisited. This book has gone through a complete cycle of affections with me: when I first discovered this novel as a student in England, I loved it and re-read it many times. For some reason, probably a slowly arising general discomfort over Waugh's often caustic wit, it drifted out of favour for a few years. I tried again in the early Eighties, and disliked it: it seemed dated and contrived, full of unloveable characters and improbable incidents. I put the book down after about fifty pages and left it for two decades.

Then I moved to Germany, and it was out of reach and forgotten until a friend brought me a box of my books (one of many from an attic in East London, where the rest hopefully still remain), which proved to contain my copy of Brideshead. I remembered my vague distaste and didn't pick it up for years, until I returned from Israel last week. I'm enjoying it again, and I think I know why.

When I first read the book, I associated with Charles Ryder, the narrator and not-exactly-hero as we met him in the initial pages: I too was freshly arrived at University, feeling exhilarated and also vaguely out of place, excited by the people I was meeting and the unknown worlds opening up to me. When I read it again in the mid-Eighties, there was no character of my then-current age and station to identify with, except perhaps the prig and bigot Brideshead himself. Reading it again now, thirty years on, I can again associate myself with Ryder, this time with the older, wiser and sadder narrator. Or perhaps I was just unfair to it the second time around.

Anyway, here's where I am right now, at a paragraph that brought a lump to my throat and a certain moisture to my eyes. (WARNING: This is a pretty serious spoiler. Those who have not yet read the book should stop reading now.)

"Poor Sebastian!" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half-in, half-out of the community, a familiar figure pottering around with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite of the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he'll disappear every month or so for two or three days, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, "Old Sebastian's on the bottle again," and then he'll come back, dishevelled and shamefaced, and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as a guide whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connexions at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Home in their student days, and remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

Indeed.

Tel Aviv miscellany, part two

Being a further round of meanderings and babblings from the southeastern shores of the Med.

Sitting today at my favourite cafe (I already have a fav. cafe, the imaginatively named Espresso Bar on Dizengoff at Ben Gurion; I have breakfast there every day and sometimes an afternoon/evening latte) it occurred to me that there are no mosquitoes in TLV. The explanation is simple given a moment's thought: their life cycle has an aquatic phase that requires pools of stagnant water, which are not common in deserts. Call it an unexpected advantage.

Thinking about being an obvious tourist, one subtle clue is the matter of facial hair. There are only two styles of facial hair to be seen in Israel: either completely clean-shaven (not even what the rest of the world would consider fashionable stubble) or else a ZZ-Top diaphram-length full set. My soul patch is even more exotic than my pale skin.

I am (pleasantly) surprised by the secularity of Tel Aviv, I was expecting something rather more like my uninformed notion of Salt Lake City or the backwoods of the Bible Belt. The overtly religious are a minority here, the great majority wear no signs of religious affiliation that I can recognize.

I wonder what percentage of tourists to Israel are Jewish? Pretty high, I'd guess. My impression is that many, perhaps most, tourists do speak Hebrew. Sitting next to a table of touristy-looking people debating local politics in German, addressing the waitress in Hebrew and English, brought this to mind. I don't know why I should be surprised, given the size and historical age of the Diaspora it does seem pretty logical. Thinking back to my flight from Munich, I would say that the great majority of passengers were Jewish, and many of them were overtly religious in the way that the locals are not. (My friends nod and tell me that TLV is not Israel, that the rest of the country views the city as a pit of depravity and temptation.)

The military is less present than I expected, although having said that I did notice a destroyer cruising a few miles off the beach and a patrol boat circling near the breakwaters and a helicopter flying up to the second airport by the harbour, while having my midday drink at a beach bar. I heard a pair of military planes fly over the city towards the Med last night, about two minutes apart, flying fast and high in the darkness. Soldiers in uniform are a common sight, the train from the airport to TLV was full of kids going home on leave (with their guns on their laps pointing casually at each other); but again there are fewer of them than I had expected.

The local corvids are the same slim-bodied grey and black crows that I first noticed in Russia. The local pigeons are very pretty, reddish and beige-grey. Sparrows abound, of course. Haven't seen any rats yet, though I am told they are also common. (Eh, it's a city. What do you want already?)

Interlude

I forgot to mention a few utterly trivial points about the journey here. I got upgraded to business class again for the second leg of the trip, from Munich to Tel Aviv; as I said before, it's very nice but I would not pay for it. Why me? who knows. Perhaps because I'm a fairly frequent flyer and travelling alone?

The security inspection in Stuttgart confiscated my shaving cream, first time that I've ever had anything taken away. In fairness they did offer me the alternative of checking my bag (i.e. not carrying it on), which would have let me keep the stuff; they would have tagged it with a huge great big label and I would have given it to the gate personnel and received it again on the "finger" in TLV. I didn't know that system and thought they meant that I had to go back to the checkin, wait in line, give them the bag, then fight my way through security once more — which had already taken nearly an hour the first time I did it. Ah well, live and learn. (The reason I didn't give it up to the baggage handlers in the first place is that it contained my laptop, and I felt no need to expose them to the temptation to steal or break it.)

Security did allow me to keep my toothpaste and aftershave, but I had to take them from the plastic bag that they were in and put them in a specific and special 1-Litre Transparent Resealable Plastic Bag, which by an astounding coincidence was available from a vending machine right there. In a package of two, though you are only allowed to take one such bag on board. The bureaucratic mind at work is a thing of wonder.

Oh, by the way and on the subject of security, here's an important Public Service Announcement. If you have a connecting flight, e.g. Stuttgart to Munich to Tel Aviv, do NOT purchase anything even vaguely liquid-ish at your first airport! There is a chance that it will be confiscated at the second airport's security check, even though the goods are obviously bonded and sealed and clearly purchased in the airport, behind the first security check. The duty-free shops all know that this will happen but most of them don't warn you, which in my considered opinion borders on fraud.

Ah, it's sunset, the [forgotten which denomination] are out in their speaker vans calling us to prayer. Israel is very far south, and so sunset is early and rapid: pitch-darkness comes barely an hour after you notice that the clouds are getting red.

I bit the bullet and bought shampoo (400 ml), shower-gel type soap (200ml) and a package of razors to throw away. The latter are utter shit: "Life" brand twin-bladed disposable razors* in a packet of 5 for €2.50. The blades are rough and scratchy, it's like shaving with a handful of broken glass. Avoid. The former are good enough products, but obviously far too large. I will not be able to take them back with me, unless I check my bag and risk losing my laptop. Why do the hygienic article makers not produce small sizes for travellers? Perhaps they prefer for us to buy a huge bottle which gets confiscated? I guess our loss is their shareholders' win. Bah.

And another thing. I'm sure I speak for 99.3% of men when I say that we do NOT want to have to examine an entire stock-island-gondola-thing of shampoo, five shelves high and 150cm long, to find something to wash our damned hair with. Perhaps women appreciate being able to choose between low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly straw-blonde hair and low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly wheat-blonde hair, but we just get utterly pissed off by the needless complication. I have been known to leave stores empty-handed and enraged, refusing to play this insulting game of too many fake choices. And it's not just shampoo either: when I was a kid, you bought Crest toothpaste or you bought Colgate toothpaste. Now there are over 40 varieties of Crest alone**. Ridiculous!

Attention makers of shampoo for men: Want to drive your competition out of business within a single month? Produce a yellow package with clear black writing that says

This is shampoo.
It will make your hair clean.

No alternatives, no variations, no phony pseudo-distinctions that are (we suspect) either unfounded or based on differences so minute as to lie within the bounds of experimental error; just one single simple product. We would queue up — nay, we would fight each other — to buy that.

* Google bomb, hoping maybe to save someone else from buying them.

** Really. I counted them in the Duane Reade near Columbus Circle.

Tel Aviv: first impressions

… and we all know how often these are false and/or incomplete. Google tells me I have an hour before I have to walk to Savtadotty's weekly soup salon, so I will jot down my thoughts without any pretense at putting them into a sensible framework.

It is really odd being in a place where I cannot read the alphabet. This was brought home when I was texting with Savtadotty, trying to describe where I was. How to tell someone the name of a cafe, when you cannot even begin to pronounce that name let alone repeat the letters that your keyboard doesn't possess? Fortunately, all service-industry people speak at least one European language. I am obviously foreign here, twice I have been addressed in English before I had spoken a word. (My pale-as-the-belly-of-a-dead-fish skin might just be a clue.)

This is a marvellously exciting and active city, I haven't seen this much bustle anywhere but midtown Manhattan. I was quite lucky to get a hotel right in the middle of downtown. (My first impression of the hotel was deeply negative, but I am coming to terms with it. Is it acceptable? eh, sure. Would I recommend it? no.)

Pedestrians and drivers are impatient, pushing and honking at the slightest perceived delay, but they are also surprisingly law-abiding. Almost nobody jaywalks, and absolutely nobody crosses a street in the middle of the block rather than at a corner.

Very dry air, at first surprising given the presence of the sea less than six hundred metres away as the crow flies; but then again, this is the Middle East, and just a few kilometres in the other direction is what I would not hesitate to call "desert."

Rules about societality and communication are subtly and not-so-subtly different to Europe. Israelis love their cellphones, you see people cycling along with a phone jammed between cheek and shoulder. It's common and apparently accepted for two people to sit together at a cafe, both talking on their cellphones and occasionally speaking to each other. Internet access seems paradoxically to be both omnipresent and difficult, one often sees people standing on the street or in malls* with their laptops precariously balanced on one splayed hand, doing e-mail or some such thing. Why don't they sit in a cafe or do it at home? A mystery.

I sat outdoors last night at a cafe in Dizengoff, eating an endive and avocado salad with sweetish lime dressing and carraway/cumin/seasalt/whole-wheat bread, and did an hour or so of peoplewatching. There was a nearly-all-male celebration (birthday party?) happening indoors at the cafe, at a pair of very long tables; since smoking appears to be prohibited in every cafe I've seen (coincidence or a general ban?) the guests kept walking out to the curb in half-dozens, to stand and smoke. One of them spoke for a good dozen minutes to the male of a couple who were sitting near me — without either of them acknowledging the female other half in any way! He stood right beside her, his thigh nearly rubbing her elbow (Israelis don't seem to need much social space), and did not even glance at her. She played along, apparently content to be silent and still all that time. What to make of this? In Germany, for me to speak to a friend for so long without introducing you, would be understood as an insult.

There seems to be little consumption of alcohol here. I asked in the cafe for a local beer, and was told that they didn't have any (ambiguous: is there no local beer, or do they not stock it?)**, and looking around the only alcohol I could see was the champagne that the celebrants were consuming (they typically drank one glass and then switched to cola or water). The club-type place across the street, next to the walk-in botox clinic that was open for business at 10:30 pm, was probably serving alcohol, but I didn't bother to go and find out.

Weather is marvellous, high twenties (mid-eighties to the Americans) and clear skies.

Time to go. Shabbat shalom, my dears — and fancy my being in Israel to say that!

* I went to the Dizengoff Center to look for the Friday food court thingy that Lisa wrote about in her Tel Aviv City Guide (great book, I would recommend it even if she weren't a friend.)

** Savtadotty pointed out that this was probably a misunderstanding, as there are several breweries in Israel: the waiter probably thought I wanted a particular brand of beer named "Local."

Down to the wire, again

Ask me why I am in the office still, 10 hours before I have to leave home for the airport, with my suitcase unpacked and my clothes unwashed and my kitchen uncleaned? On second thoughts, don't.

I found a hotel-type place for €10 a night less than the local hostel (Google knows everything); even got a bulk discount: book four nights, pay for three. It'll either be an undiscovered gem or a disaster. Wait and see.

This time tomorrow, I'll be having dinner in Israel. Wow.

Dear Israeli readers, my e-mail address is at the left and I will be checking it as often as circumstances allow. I would love to meet you all.

A little thought experiment

Step one. Imagine an unemployed high-school dropout, hanging out on a street corner with a dirty shirt and a dopey look; maybe he's a bit dysfunctional, or maybe he just had some bad luck. Now imagine him crafting and carrying out a plan to get a young girl alone, and then drugging and raping her. Imagine that she's a very young girl, several years under the age of consent for that place and time. Do you approve? Do you find this acceptable morally, ethically, socially or legally?*

Step two: Imagine that the paedophile rapist isn't a highschool dropout, but an educated and articulate man. Would you feel that his status entitles him to rape underage girls?**

Step three: Imagine that he's not unemployed, but that he has a socially-respected job and is in fact quite famous. Does that now make his behaviour acceptable?***

* For the record: No, I don't.

** No.

*** No.

My opinions, your mileage may vary — but frankly if it did I'd be hellishly disappointed in you.

Awake

Woke at 5:15 from a strange dream, waiting now for hot chocolate to cook. I left my working glasses in the office last night, so forgive the typoes.

I was in SL, talking about unhappiness with Beta (from the wedding party). I decided to visit them at their RL home, which was not suburban Milwaukee but a cottage rear the river Thames in the village where AH lived. Beta was in the garden, sitting under trees at the end of an ancient, crumbling red-brick wall (not sure where Noctis was in the logic of the dream). We talked for a while there, then the scene changed and we were walking down curving streets of north London, near Highgate Cemetery, talking about a book that zie had written; then we were back indoors and zie showed me hir latest rejection letter: a YouTube-type video by e-mail from a school principal. I replied that it was wonderful that zie had written a book at all, and not to be worried about rejections. I told Beta about my father and the realities of the publishing business, and somehow the dream changed to farming! I was a self-aware cow, walking around a farm talking to other animals and looking at the new barn being built to replace one that had blown down in a storm. The place where it had stood was occupied by the house my favourite cousin grew up in, which was now painted yellow and in use as a Portuguese restaurant (yes, in the midst of the farm); by this point I was in my human body again. The owner was possibly a disguised AH since there was a dog that held my hand tightly and pulled on it to get me to play, and the other people (guests?) reminded me of his friends after Pat died.

Speaking of books, I am 200 pages into my second reading of Infinite Jest, and am both appalled and amused to realize how much I missed the first time. IJ really does need to be read twice, at least, to understand it. The thing is full of clues and hints about what is going on, but these can only be recognized as such by someone who already knows the story. Fascinating. I'm enjoying it even more this time around. Highly recommended to patient readers with a lot of time on their hands.

Booked

I booked flights to (and indeed from) Tel Aviv today, for a long week in three weeks' time. Tooth be damned. I'm feeling very brave and adventurous, and also tired as hell having just got home from work at 00:48.

Broken

I broke a molar two days ago, while eating a carraway seed roll. A piece of tooth the size of a small pea broke off, and is now lying on my kitchen windowsill. I'm not quite sure why I put it there, I do know that it can't just be glued back in place, but throwing it out felt wrong. (As far as I can reconstruct the events, a seed got wedged between teeth and acted as a tiny crowbar when I bit down.) It doesn't hurt, which makes me vaguely uneasy even as I am thankful.

At this point, I have to interrupt myself to give some backstory. We have two more weeks to get the tender documents written and published, and are working insanely long and hard at it. Last week set a kind of sad record: 67.5 hours at work. That amount of concentrated effort doesn't just wash off during the twelve-minute walk home downhill, not even when I see an urban fox trotting down the empty street before me at 1 a.m. as has happened twice now. Even at 2 a.m. it takes me at least an hour of tea and/or yoghurt and/or reading, to relax enough to be able to go to bed. I haven't been in Second Life in a week, I find that too strenuous after working so long and hard.

I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep that night, between worry about the tooth and residual stress from overwork. I lay in bed half-awake, my mind whirling in a strange paranoiac-critical state that I would not hesitate to describe as delusional if it had happened while I was awake and functional*. I found myself in conversation with the dentist, in affect not "imagining" the meeting so much as remembering something that hadn't happened yet. She said that the tooth was irreparable and must be removed, and suggested an implant.

I asked her whether it was worth all that bother and expense, "given that I am not going to be alive much longer."

Well.

That shook me awake, really awake. I was so disturbed that I considered getting up again and going online to talk to some friends who I knew (hoped) would be there. I talked myself down from the horror, telling myself it was just a moment of madness caused by overwork and exhaustion (true enough), and managed to go to sleep after a half-hour of reading.

Where the hell did that idea come from? On the one hand, I never thought that I would ever live to be as old as I am now (not that I expected to die, I just didn't think I would age), and I have certainly always lived as though life and youthful strength would be infinitely available; on the other hand, I was told by a reputedly infallible reader of tea-leaves in Boston that I would live to be 88. (She also said that I would be successful and happy but not rich, which so far is running 100%.)

And now, the punchline. Once this set of documents is finished, we'll have a few weeks' off. I was thinking about a trip to Israel, and had got as far as mailing some friends to pick dates and places. Right now, it looks like I will be giving my holiday fund to the dentist instead. Damn.


* Ignoring for the moment that one definition of being awake and functional is not being in a delusional state.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

… is upon us once again. Chestnuts and acorns rain down like hailstones these days as I walk up that last steep stretch of hillside to work (though only by daylight: they don't fall as I walk home at night, interestingly). The heating is on in the office already, because it's cold and damp (a) at that altitude and (b) on the edge of the forest; at home I'm going to hold out for the rest of the month, or until Saturday.

What have I been up to? Mostly work, with a small amount of play. The office is swallowing my life right now, I'm working over 50 hours every week. And it's strenuous work too, lots of thinking. Some evenings when I get home, I am too tired even to read e-mail. This will continue until mid-October, then there will be a downward shifting of gears. The reason is this: the project is on a flat and sandy site beside a lake, the basement is below ground-water level. We need to have the basement floors and walls built and waterproofed before the level rises to its annual high in May, and that means that the construction company will need to start digging on January 2, and that means that we need to get the bulk of the tender documents written and the bids collected and a construction company chosen during November.

Building below the water level is unexpectedly exciting. We are spending entire days in meetings with hydrological engineers and concrete specialists.

I finished Infinite Jest, and after a pause of three weeks (and several other books) have started reading it again. I'll write about IJ some other time, it'll take longer than I have available now (writing in my pyjamas before work), but let me say this about that. IJ is in many places a frustrating and annoying book, nowhere more so than at the end. The diffference between reading a book and listening to a storyteller, is that the reader has physical clues that the tale is about to end ("only 20 more pages"). The reader of IJ holds on to the great big brick of a thing, feeling the immense weight of known story in his left hand and the rapidly dwindling sheaf of unread pages in his right, and thinks "How on earth can all of these loose ends be tied up in the remaining N pages?" Well, dear reader, they aren't. IJ doesn't have an ending, it just stops. This grates, dear readers: it feels like is the author is cheating us, perhaps even mocking our expectations. But then, after a week or so of being annoyed, an interesting thing happened: I found myself reconsidering whether the loose ends had perhaps been tied up after all.

IJ is not written consecutively, event after event, week after week, in the manner of a police procedural: it moves chapter-length in jump-cuts forwards and back across several decades. Perhaps, I thought to myself, the answers are in there somewhere. So I started reading it again, as a surprisingly large number of people apparently do. I'll let you know.

Time to go. I hope you are all well and happy, my dears.