1001 Irish Dance Tunes

In 1907 two Irish-American policemen in Chicago, Captain Francis O'Neill and Sergeant James O'Neill, published The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, and you can either buy a reissue of it from Walton's, or download it from the web (it's not copyrighted) and print it out and bind it yourself, which is what I did.

Every day I play a two page spread of them, eleven or twelve, occasionally putting a mark in the table of contents if I like one of them especially well. So far I've played 767 of them now on the flute. Just 234 to go. I'll probably start over again at the beginning, unless I'm totally bored with Irish music by then.

Each of the tunes is short and simple, but they're astonishingly varied and creative, and each of them has a suggestive name, like "The Straw Seat," or "Condon's Frolics," in English and Irish. Here's a link to two reels. There are obviously hours and hours of traditional Irish music on Youtube!

I'm using the tunes as reading and fingering exercises. A lot of them fall exactly in the range of fingerings that I find a bit awkward on the flute, so I'm learning to overcome that awkwardness. I can't play them quite as quickly as they're supposed to be played, but they have charm even when played too slowly.

In general I shy away from exercises. I think it's better to play real music, that was meant to be music, and practice the hard as if they were exercises. That's why the Irish dance tunes are so useful, and fun to play, unlike most exercises. I try to imagine people dancing as I play. Music is for the whole body, not just the ears.

An Unexpected Parrot

From about fifty meters away, it looked very much as if a man was pushing a toddler swing with a parrot perched on the bar. As I gazed incredulously, a tall thin jogger slowed down to ask, in American English, “Is that a parrot?” “Seems to be,” I answered.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. The winter sky was clouded over, and the light didn't appear to be coming from any particular direction. I was walking our dog, a fairly large, brown mongrel, before showering and changing clothes for the Sabbath.

The dog and I slowly approached the swings to get a better look. I said hello. The man returned my greeting. The parrot's tail was bright orange-red. Its plumage was healthy-looking, mainly gray with some black stripes. I didn't want to get too close, because I thought the dog might scare the parrot. The man gently pushing the swing was above middle height, thin, in his fifties, dressed in a greenish, military-style jacket, wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a ceramic cup, presumably of coffee.

The swings, which my grandchildren love, stand on a grassy area in the midst of carob trees, planted in regular rows at a regular distance from each other – clearly a relic of the time when my Jerusalem neighborhood was the sparsely populated edge of an Arab village.

“Why doesn't he fly away?” I asked the man in Hebrew.

“Because I clipped his wings,” he answered in an accent I couldn't place right away.

The parrot ignored the dog, and the dog ignored the parrot. The man and I began a conversation.

“He likes to swing, doesn't he?”

“He's usually in a small cage,” the man explained, “and I have to take him out every once in a while to make him happy. He gets edgy when he can't move around.”

From there we went through the obvious questions and answers, though I didn't ask him why he didn't buy a bigger cage for his pet. How old was the parrot? (Young, just a year and a half). They live a long time, don't they? (Fifty years or more, as long as a person). Did he let him loose in his house? (No, because the parrot left droppings all over the place, but they didn't small as bad as human feces). Did it talk? (A little). And so on.

As the man talked, it became clear to me that he was an Arab.

The conversation drifted onto the subject of animal intelligence. The parrot's owner thought that even the smartest animal was no smarter than a four-year-old child, because no animal could find its way home from a strange place. Though I know that isn't true, I wasn't going to express a difference of opinion. Maybe the parrot wouldn't be able to find its way home.

I wanted to ask the man about his family, where he lived, and what he did. I thought he might know who the carob tree plantation once belonged to, but he wasn't interested in that. Instead, he told me that all we ever possess is the meter and a half of ground we're buried in. The earth and the sky belong to God. Then he began to talk about fate – whether we live or die is in God's hands. He pointed up to the gray sky.

What can you do when someone talks to you like that? Just nod in agreement.

After the theological discussion was over, I told the man I hadn't wanted to get too close to the parrot, because I thought it might be afraid of the dog. No problem, said the man. He finished his coffee, discarded his cigarette butt, put the parrot on his shoulder, and approached us. The parrot, clearly fond of its owner, had no interest in the dog, and the dog didn't notice the parrot. He sniffed at the man's jeans. I was afraid he might pee on him. He's done that once or twice. The man leaned over to pat the dog: Arabs usually don't like dogs, but this man was atypical. The dog enjoyed the man's patting.

I told the man I had to get going. He wished me a good Sabbath, got into his car, an old tan Opel, and drove off with the parrot on his shoulder.

Impersonation

Because of a favorable and intriguing review in the New Yorker. "Try to Remember: Tana French's off, intimate crime fiction" by Laura Miller (October 3, 2016), and because we had recently been in Ireland, where French's books are set, I bought and read the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods (Miller was reviewing the sixth, but I decided it was best to start at the beginning). I enjoyed reading that long, intense book and ordered the second one, The Likeness, which I have just finished reading. I intend to go on and read the rest, but not immediately. Hers are books that are hard to put down, and one doesn't always want to be swept away by that kind of energy.
The Likeness is narrated by Cassie Maddox, a detective who was a major character in In the Woods. The premise of the book is entirely unlikely, but, because French is a convincing writer, I ignored the impossibility of the initial situation and plunged right in. But I can imagine a reader thinking, "Oh, go on," and setting the book aside.
This is how the plot is set in motion: a young woman is found stabbed to death in a rural area about an hour away from Dublin, and she looks so much like Cassie, that her boyfriend, a murder detective who has been called in to begin the investigation, is afraid that it's her. Strangely, though she is obviously not the victim, the young woman's name is Lexie Madison, which was the name Cassie had assumed when she was working undercover to catch drug dealers, in other words, not the name of a real person (though, if you do a web search for Lexie Madison, you will find that there actually are women with that name). And, coincidentally (obviously not coincidentally, since Tana French put in in the book), Cassie had been stabbed while working undercover.
Because there is almost no evidence, Cassie is sent undercover again, to impersonate the victim (the police pretend that she hadn't died, which they can do handily, because in any event they can't locate the victim's next of kin) and live with her housemates under a false identity, in hopes of discovering who stabbed "Lexie." At the same time, the police are trying to find out who the victim really was.
So, for nearly a month, Cassie is living with four young adults who knew Lexie intimately, trying to pass herself off as that person, whom she herself had never known. French presents her preparations for taking on the role very interestingly.
With the passage of time undercover, Cassie becomes obsessed with Lexie and envious of her freedom and courage: she dropped her entire life several times, moved from place to place, repeatedly took on new names and identities, and so attained freedom, which Cassie envies. This fluidity of identity suited "Lexie" perfectly to fit in with the four graduate students in English Literature at Trinity College, who are living together in a mansion inherited by one of them, and restoring the house bit by bit. They, too, on principle, refuse to bring up the past, the time in their lives before they met each other and banded together.
A lot of the novel's plot is not really a plot. It's about Cassie's state of mind and her relations with the two detectives who are in charge of the investigation, and in a sense the novel is about how easy and how hard it is to be someone else (and, by extension, to be oneself). Also, like any good mystery novel, French keeps us guessing about who the murderer actually was.
In the Woods, the first novel in what has turned out to be a series, was narrated by Rob Ryan, a detective who was Cassie's partner in the murder squad, and Tana French managed to project his voice successfully. Now Cassie is the narrator, and, again, Tana French has gotten deep into her invented character's soul. So, like an Elizabethan play within a play, we have impersonations within impersonations: someone (we only find out who at the end of the book) was impersonating Lexie Madison, whom Cassie once impersonated, then Cassie impersonates Lexie, and, of course, Tana French is impersonating an invented character (just as Lexie was invented).
French is very good at describing places and things, quite imaginative, and highly intelligent. Lexie's four room-mates are quirky, original characters, and French manages to make us believe in them (at least while we're reading the book). They have created a closed milieu for themselves, aloof from the other students at Trinity, distant from the villagers around the house where they live, and cut off from their families. Strikingly, the police department, as French depicts it, is a mirror image of this little group. Detectives, even in relatively peaceful Ireland, can't live normal lives because of their work: both the intense demands of solving crimes and the stress of dealing with crimes all the time. Like the student characters in The Likeness, the detectives live beyond the realm of ordinary civic life. Perhaps that's why Tana French chose to invent and explore their world.
As I said, I'm planning to read the rest of the books in the series, but I need some time to recover from this one. I just downloaded Barchester Towers.

The Great America Some Voters Yearn For

Because I read RoddyDoyle's novel, “The Dead Republic,” in which John Ford appears as a significant, fictionalized character, I became more interested in John Ford than in Doyle's novel (a disappointment). I watched“Directed by John Ford,” a tribute to him by Peter Bogdanovich, made in 1971, which explains why other important movie directors admired Ford so much. My curiosity was aroused even further, so I decided to download one of his movies and see why people like Scorcese and Spielberg thought so highly of him.

I chose “The ManWho Shot Liberty Valence” mainly because I have always liked Jimmy Stewart (a fellow graduate of Princeton, after all) as much as I have disliked John Wayne.

Some movies made in 1962 (when I graduated high school) are extremely dated, and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is a prime example. The characters lack depth. The plot is stupid. The moral issues are clichés. The scenery and the sets are patently artificial. But I watched it to the end and enjoyed it – possibly because it made me realize how much things have changed in the ensuing years. I also wanted to see how ridiculous John Wayne and Any Devine could get, as well as the exaggerated drunks – funny alcoholics.

John Wayne plays a soft-hearted tough guy, and Jimmy Stewart plays a brave wimp, whose successful political career is based on his fame as the man who killed Liberty Valence, Lee Marvin. The bad guy is a mild villain compared to sadists I have seen on the screen in the past decades. But you can tell that Marvin was having fun playing him, whereas Jimmy Stewart seemed mildly embarrassed throughout film, and John Wayne didn't even try to act. The female lead, Vera Miles, was told twice by John Wayne that she looked pretty when she was mad, and she didn't even shoot him.

The explicit political message is democratic: people are created equal (even John Wayne's loyal, black hired man), and citizens can successfully mobilize, vote, and defeat powerful and unscrupulous special interests (farmers against cattle ranchers). Nor is the West lily-white. In a brief, unbelievable schoolroom scene, the brightest pupil is a Mexican-American girl, and, later, John Wayne almost forces the bartender to serve his African-American sidekick (played by Woody Strode).

However, if I got it right, the implicit political message verges on fascistic: you'd better have a gun, a real man risks his life (Jimmy Stewart confronts Lee Marvin, who is a far superior gunman), and political success is based on a lie (John Wayne really killed Lee Marvin). The West is where men can (and have to) be men.

If you missed “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” back in 1962, don't bother watching it now. However, I did see why directors admire Ford's directing, the way he used scenery, the way he managed crowd scenes, and the way he got actors to seem natural even in preposterous situations. He clearly had a deep grasp of what the cinema is and can be. He also had a naïve idea about American greatness that leads only to the political nightmare we are living in now.

The Unfortunately Named Mr. Trollope

After reading a bunch of modern stuff I decided to download a classic to my tablet, and I've been reading The Warden, the first of the five - oops, six - Barchester chronicles. Being the kind of reader I am, I might end up reading all six.

Trollope is a droll writer. Look at this description of breakfast at the home of Dr. Grantly, a thoroughly negative character (so far):

The breakfast-service on the table was ... costly and equally plain; the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour. ... The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand, and the bread-basket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons. The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread, home-made bread and bakers' bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread; and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins, and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by the bye, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi.

Whoa! Who is Trollope kidding? Could any family of seven (two parents, three boys, two girls) put away so much food at a sitting? It makes the breakfast buffets at Israeli hotels look skimpy. And look at the delightful verb, "frizzling." 

It's a pleasure to read such a judgmental narrator: "the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour" - Trollope doesn't object to luxury, just to bad taste, carried to extremes: "the bread-basket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons." (I've made some platters and bowls like that in my pottery class!)

True, the characters are not developed to any significant psychological depth, but the character of the narrator is vivid and engaging. 

I recommend it, not that it needs my recommendation.

Archduke

On the afternoon of November 28, I heard Beethoven's Archduke Trio performed by Revital Hachamov, piano, Lavard Skou Larsen, violin, and Ramon Jaffe, cello. I was thrilled by the performance and found myself thinking that this piece of music was one of the major monuments of Western Culture, and how unique that culture is, in that a piece of music could be even considered as one of its major achievements.

The concert was part of the wonderful "Etnachta" series, free concerts at the Jerusalem Theater almost every Monday afternoon, usually with superb musicians and great variety. We try to get to them as often as we can.

At this concert, I saw an acquaintance of mine in the audience, a Swiss man of roughly my age, who is very devoted to classical music, but I didn't have an opportunity to speak with him until the following Saturday morning at synagogue. I had a brief conversation with him then and told him how much I loved the performance of the Archduke Trio.

With his somewhat ponderous manner and German accent, he told me he actually hadn't liked that performance so much. You could tell, he said, that the musicians weren't used to playing with each other, and for a piece like that, you need an ensemble who play together regularly.

Essentially I agree with him. Artists who have gotten to know each other very well and who have discussed the interpretation of the music they play certainly achieve a higher level of performance than musicians who are brought together for a single occasion. However, I hadn't felt any lack of communication among the members of the trio that afternoon.

Besides that, I don't object to imperfection in a performance (possibly because I have listened to hours and hours of jazz over the years). At this concert, all three of the musicians were superb and totally familiar with the music, which they had probably played dozens of times with other ensembles. Since they were performing together more or less for the first time, they had to listen very carefully to each other, maybe more carefully than musicians who are used to playing together regularly. Because of their unfamiliarity with one another, they might have been surprised now and then, if one of them did something with the phrasing or dynamics that they weren't expecting, and they had to respond to this unexpected feature. So in a way they were creating an interpretation of the piece as they went, and that's exciting.

When you come down to it, I'd rather hear a live performance with some rough edges than a polished CD of a piece, with all the glitches edited out. Any live musical performance entails a degree of risk, and that's what makes it live.

Looking on the Bright Side

Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours with two of my grandchildren, a boy going on five and an impossibly cute girl, who is two. We were at the First Station, a public space created where you once could take the train to Tel Aviv. We had a pretty good time and managed to keep busy. The boy got to drive a little electric car for 20 minutes, we heard some teen-age musicians play rock 'n roll, we ate some french fries, and I even bought them some ice cream. But he was not content. Instead of saying to himself, "Wow, I got to drive the electric car!" or "Hey, I got some good french fries!" he kept thinking about the things he hadn't gotten to do.
He appears to have inherited this negative trait from his mother, who inherited it from me, and I guess I got it from my mother, and her parents, back into the obscurity  of the Pale of Settlement. I have a streak of negativity, which smacks of ingratitude.
Recently, after studying with a brilliant and demanding flute teacher for four years, during which I went from barely being able to get a sound of the flute, to a fairly decent level, I realized that I wasn't progressing with him anymore and decided to stop lessons for a while.
It's not easy for me to break things off. I develop a strong feeling of obligation toward people I'm associated with, and I feel slightly guilty for quitting on him.
My first impulse (negativity) is to list the reasons why the lessons weren't helping me as much as they used to. Instead, however, I'd like to express gratitude for what I learned from him.
First and foremost, he taught me to look for a focused sound, which means that he forced me to listen very carefully to myself. I did not come to the flute without musical experience. I am a pretty good saxophone player, but I wouldn't have had the same kind of patience to try improve my sound on the saxophone. Starting a new instrument meant that there was noticeable improvement from day to day. My practice on the flute was rewarded. Not surprisingly, my sound on the saxophone also improved, because I was working so hard on correct breath support, and I was listening better to myself.
Second, he taught me to aim at playing with ease. In his philosophy of musicanship (and he has a strong and well-worked out approach to music), musicians should never make themselves suffer. It's preferable to try produce a note and fail than to try too hard to produce the note and force it out. Playing with excessive physical effort makes you tired, it strains your body, and it distracts you from the music.
Third, he taught me two important criteria for musicality, one of which I knew, but tended to lose sight of. That criterion is movement and rest. Notes are either destinations or movement toward destinations. When you move toward a destination, you should know what it is, and your playing should sound as if it's going there. Then, when you get to the destination, you should enjoy being there, feel as if you've accomplished something, gotten somewhere, attained satisfaction (even when you quickly move on). The second criterion is connected to the first one. The listeners (obviously including the player) should understand what the music is doing, starting on the micro-level of the movement of individual notes in phrases.
That means, when you're learning a piece, you should understand where the notes in it are going and, once you've mastered it, convey that understanding.
Fourth, he forced me to develop a vibrato (which is still developing). I found his concentration on vibrato obsessive, but in the end I was convinced that vibrato is one of the most important ways a musician can play expressively, and I began to listen to the vibrato in other musicians: singers, cellists, and wind players.
Fifth, because he was so demanding, he made me demanding of myself, and I practice flute almost compulsively, every day, only for an hour or so (I'm aware that there's a macho school of musicianship that claims that, if you're not playing three hours a day, you're hardly  playing at all). If I had practiced clarinet as regularly and effectively when I was an adolescent, I would have reached a level that I can only dream of at this stage in my life. Playing the flute has become a kind of anchor in my life, a form of meditation, an exercise in patience, attentiveness, and self-motivation - and a striving for musical expression.
Nevertheless, I started experiencing a degree of frustration during my lessons, a feeling that I wasn't taking possession of my own musicality, that it was time for me to strike out on my own. But this is only because my teacher empowered me.
So, as I try to keep improving, I want to use the strength that I was taught how to develop, and to be grateful for it.

Current Events

I heard the huge weekend edition of Haaretz land at my front door at 5:15, like an assignment in the ongoing course called "Current Events," in which I have been enrolled since I was in junior high school, way back in the 1950s, when I was made to believe (as I still do) that it was a citizen's duty to be well informed about his or her locality, country, and world.
A great deal has gone wrong since the end of World War II, when I was born, but the main thing, which everyone was afraid would go wrong, didn't happen. The US and the USSR didn't destroy each other and the whole world with nuclear weapons. Instead, humanity is rapidly destroying the world by increasing in population beyond the ability of the earth to sustain us: despoiling natural resources, causing animals to go extinct, filling the atmosphere with CO2 and other gases, fouling the oceans, over-fishing, and throwing off the balance of nature. And we are still threatened by nuclear war, which will just hasten what seems to be an inevitable end.
I still skim through the paper, and I wouldn't dream of cancelling my subscription to the printed Hebrew edition of Haaretz, because I still do believe that responsible, objective, investigative journalism is one of the few remaining protections that citizens have against abuses of power. But I can't say that I get any pleasure from knowing about endless corruption, mismanagement, violence, crime, obstinate stupidity, and boundless cupidity. The press hasn't proven to be the powerful bulwark against wrongdoing that we perennially hope it will be.
Now we citizens of Israel are learning that our Prime Minister wants to spend billions of euros on three more submarines, which he believes that Israel needs in order to deter Iran from sending nuclear missiles against us, and, incidentally, some of his close friends stand to make fortunes from the deal. We're back in the 1950s. The United States, Russia, and China still have nuclear arsenals and still, apparently, are prepared to use them to hasten the destruction of human life on the earth. And now the huge and powerful nations have been joined be less powerful countries like North Korea, India,  Pakistan, and, of course, little Israel -- soon to be joined by others.
Why are people willing to spend so much money on "defense" -- I have to put the word in quotation marks -- and so little on ending poverty, ignorance, disease, and making the world habitable again? The question is a boring cliche by now, but if no one answers it, and no one figures out how to change direction, it will be less fun to read the newspaper every day, until we're all dead, and the newspapers are extinct, too.
I was awake when the paper came, and it was boring to lie in bed, so at 5:30 I got up and took the paper in. But instead of beginning to read that heavy  bundle of paper, I turned on my computer at 5:30 and wrote this blog entry. Now it's past six, and I might as well make the coffee, unwrap the paper, and see what new misdeeds have been done in the past 24 hours.
I am not hopeful.

Ireland in Print

In honor of, as it were, our trip to Ireland in September, I read (and still plan to read) some contemporary Irish fiction. I started with The Gathering by Anne Enright, which won the Booker Prize in 2007, and nevertheless I couldn't stand it, mainly because the first-person narrator was a person in whose company I didn't want to spend as much time as it took to read the novel. But the book appeared to be a realistic portrayal of modern Irish society - post-Catholic, post-colonial struggle, and relentlessly cold and alienated. Why did it win the Booker Prize? Because the British enjoy nasty people.

Then I read fine collection of short stories by Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex, with an eloquent and appreciative introduction by Julian Barnes. O'Connor, unlike Enright, projects an affable authorial presence. He is a master of description and an insightful portraitist, aware of his characters' weaknesses, not bashful about presenting them, but still very fond of them. Although O'Connor died more than fifty years ago, his fiction isn't dated, though the Ireland he depicts is long in the past.

After that I read a trilogy by Roddy Doyle, The Last Roundup, starring Henry Smart, born in 1900, a child of the Dublin slums, taking him through the revolution against the English, to America, and then back to post-WWII Ireland (improbably, to say the least, to 2010). Doyle writes in the realist tradition. Everything about the settings of the books is realistic, but almost nothing about the action of the characters. Henry was a political assassin as a teenager and remains fairly dishonest and occasionally violent throughout his fictional life, yet he remains sympathetic - perhaps because he is more like a folklore hero than a realistically intended character, and none of his exploits seems real. In truly realistic fiction he would have died at the end of the first volume. Doyle puts historical characters into his books, like Louis Armstrong and John Ford - and I wasn't convinced by that touch either. Nevertheless, the books have a good bit of energy, and I didn't stop reading till I got to the last page of the third volume.

I also bought The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien, which I expected to be a detective novel and turned out to be a wildly surrealistic riff, totally off the wall. My wife only managed to read about a third of it before being so confused that she gave up, but I pushed through the whole book (it's not long, though it feels that way) and, on balance, I'm glad I read it.

The unnamed narrator of the book somehow (we find out how in the end) wanders out of our familiar world into a strange and often beautiful countryside and is detained by two enormous policemen, who mainly talk double-talk: "The finding of the pump is a fortunate clue that may assist us in our mission of private detection and smart policework. Put it in your pocket and hide it because it is possible that we are watched and followed and dogged by a member of the gang."

There are frequent, highly poetical descriptions of the landscape, as well as detailed descriptions of impossible things: 

"He went over then to the dresser and took small articles like dry batteries out of a drawer and also an instrument like a prongs and glass barrels with wires inside them and other cruder articles resembling the hurricane lamps utilized the Country Council."

The two policemen are obsessed with bicycles, which, in this strange world, are animate and half-human (and humans are half-bicycles). This is not the world as we know it, but is realism what we want? Yes, because when a book is so weirdly non-realistic like The Third Policeman, we are fully disoriented.

 "A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world," he said, "and it cannot be unravelled by the human snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have." "But dogs are very poor riders on bicycles," MacCruiskeen said, presenting the other side of the comparison.

But if fiction is too realistic, it can be very depressing, because life, as one of O'Brien's characters says, is not always fun: 

"Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain patterns of it in his head, by the hokey he takes to his bed and dies! ... It is a queer contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap. Life?"

We lose ourselves in fiction (of course including films and plays) to get away from life, but also to figure it out. Fiction takes us a couple of steps out of our lives, so we can turn around and view them from a new perspective. The Third Policeman took me a lot farther than I am used to being taken, into a kind of prolonged dream, which was funny at times and often deeply unsettling. (Samuel Beckett is an Irish relative in spirit to Flann O'Brien.)

My next Irish venture is going to be a real detective novel. Let's see how that goes.

Remembering Rabin and Trying to Forget Trump

Last night I attended an in-progress performance of  "November," a small-scale opera with words by Myra Noveck and music by Danny Paller (both friends of mine). I even made a small contribution to the performance by playing an 8 measure overture on tenor sax.
For those of us who lived through the period leading up to and following the assassination, this opera stirred up painful memories. I was at the demonstration where Rabin was shot. I even saw his car drive away and remember thinking how happy and satisfied he must feel, after the triumphant support he had received. Of course, I hadn't the slightest idea that he was mortally wounded and being rushed to the hospital.
Fortunately, no one was assassinated in the US presidential campaign, but for me, Hilary Clinton's defeat appears to be a tragic moment in modern political history, the beginning of a downward spiral. People who share my views were hoping that Hilary would win convincingly and bring in at least a democratic majority in the Senate, progressive justices on the Supreme Court, and so on. No need to elaborate.
I have read that Trump plans to appoint a "scientist" who denies climate change as head of the Environmental Protection Commission. Isn't that a little like the South African president who denied that AIDS was a STD?
Myra Noveck presented the opera about Rabin as part of the historical debate: great men versus great forces. Would the Bolsheviks have won without Lenin? Would the Nazis have risen without Hitler? Would the British have given up without Churchill? Would the extreme right have won in the US without Trump? Would we have come to a peace agreement with the Palestinians with Rabin and without Yigal Amir?
Obviously these hypothetical questions remain hypothetical. We had Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Trump, and Amir. What's done can't be undone.
Nonetheless, I believe in what I call Reality, for want of a better word. Untenable situations do not, in the long run, abide. Whether or not the head of the EPC believes in climate change, the glaciers will keep melting, the sea will keep rising, the summers will keep growing longer, diseases will keep spreading, the deserts will expand, and, probably, we won't be able to do a thing about it -- and we wouldn't even if Elizabeth Kolbert were the head of the EPC.
Maybe when all of Florida and half of Manhattan are  under water, and half the islands in the Pacific have been wiped off the map, when droughts and famines have made today's refugee crisis look like a traffic jam in rush hour, people will start doing the right thing.

The Flood is no Longer After Me

People really don't know what horrible French aristocrat said, "Après moi le déluge" - the flood will come after me - Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour - and whether it was said (if it was said) in despair - after me, the flood will come, I'm the only one holding back the waters - or in cynicism - the flood is coming after me, and I don't give a damn, because I'll be dead anyway.
Soon I'll be seventy-two. Leonard Cohen just died at 82, and no one thinks he died young. So do I have another ten years? Who knows?
When I'm in a particularly gloomy mood, I wonder which of my friends will attend my funeral, and which of their funerals I will attend.
When I read disastrous predictions about rising sea-levels and all the other attendant disasters of climate change, I comfort myself, egotistically, by thinking that I'll probably be dead by the time the catastrophic scenario plays out, though I'm not at all happy to think that my children and grandchildren will be around to suffer.
But the election of Donald Trump tells me that the deluge is already here.
I have lived to see the fatal malfunction of American democracy, probably a harbinger of the breakdown of democracy all over the world.
One of my favorite Jewish benedictions is the "shehekhianu" - thank you, God, for keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to this time. But can any sober person thank God for getting us to this time, when a dangerously unqualified man is about to assume leadership of the most powerful country in human history?
So, the tidal wave has broken upon our shores.
The flood has come.
Is there any reason to think the waters will recede?

Disheartened

The final US election results were available in Israel early on Wednesday morning. When I woke up, I expected and hoped for a landslide in favor of Hilary Clinton, and the end of Donald Trump's political existence. Maybe that's what took place in an alternative universe.
The pundits are already busy with predictions and analyses, but they are irrelevant to the way I take the result personally: Hilary Clinton's defeat was the defeat of some of my deepest values.

***

I am no stranger to political alienation.
I grew up in a liberal democratic environment, and the Eisenhower years, as well as McCarthyism, were good training for a future of discontent.
After a brief flareup of hope, when Kennedy was elected -- hope that was tragically extinguished when he was assassinated -- my alienation grew. My decision to move to Israel in 1973 was motivated half by positive Jewish identification and half by that negative political alienation. Nixon was president, the end of the Vietnam War didn't appear to be in sight, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered.

***

Here in Israel, my political alienation might be even more extreme that it was back in the US, because I care so much about what happens. We are approaching the anniversary of the Rabin assassination, and the parties that fomented the hatred leading to that assassination have been ruling the country.
I don't want to be alienated. I want to be proud of my government and to believe that it has the best interests of all the citizens in mind. I'd even be pleased if I believed that the government and I agreed on what was in our collective best interest -- which I don't.
My only ray of hope regarding America is the thought that the winner-take-all system in the US makes the half of the people who voted against Trump invisible. But they are not going to go away.
I'm not sure I see a similar ray of hope here in Israel.
Here, too, many of my most deeply held values are brutally rejected by the people who govern the country.

Time Change, a Nightmare, the American Elections

In the few days since we set the clock back, I have been disoriented. I almost always know, pretty accurately, what time it is. I often check myself, saying, "It must be four-thirty now," and then I look at my watch and see that I wasn't far off. But now the clock on my computer is telling me that it's ten after five, and my sense of time is telling me that it's ten after six, and, until we set the clock back, I would have been out of bed by this hour. The coffee would be made, and I would be reading Haaretz in Hebrew, getting angry at another awful thing that my government has done or wants to do.

***

I woke up at half-past four in the morning out of a dream of disorientation. I was waiting for  the bus to my pottery class, close to downtown Jerusalem, but instead of waiting where I usually wait, on the Hebron Road, a very busy, wide street with heavy traffic, I was waiting on a quiet side street. A long time passed, and the bus didn't come. I was thinking of calling up my teacher and telling her that I was going to be late, because I am an obsessively punctual person and usually come early to the class, which is not always convenient for my teacher.
Actually, two days ago, when I was really waiting for the bus to my class, it came later than I expected, and I was afraid I would be late.
In my dream, after waiting for an inordinate amount of time, I took a  closer look at the bus stop  and saw that the bus I needed didn't pass by there at all, so I started walking, looking for the bus number I needed. Suddenly I was in a strange city, which I knew was Paris, but I didn't know where I was in "Paris," where I had to go, or how to get there. I asked a man in the street, who was extremely pleasant and anxious to set me on the right path. He had a little slip of paper in his hand, maybe with the address of my pottery class, and he kept squinting up at the street signs.
I realized that he didn't know how to get there either, so I gave up on trying to get to the class and left the man, the strange city, and the dream -- I woke up.
I often have Lost in a Strange City dreams, nightmares, really, where I take the wrong bus and can't figure out where it has taken me or how to get where I want to go.

***

A week from tomorrow the world will know who has won the elections in the United States, and I imagine I won't sleep very well from now till then. Most of my friends agree with me politically and support Hilary Clinton, but I have a couple of friends, men whom I like, who detest Hilary. One of them sent in an absentee ballot for Trump, and the other, for the first time, has decided not to vote at all.
I cannot explain the chasm between my way of thinking and theirs.

***

Since I live far away from America, and I don't watch television, my exposure to the campaign has been limited and more or less under my own control. I can read the articles in the paper if I feel like it, and I can watch the clips on my computer, if I feel like it. And I seldom feel like it. Nothing that has happened since the very beginning of the presidential campaign has changed the way I intended to and finally did vote.
It's hard for me to imagine someone who can't make up their mind, someone with no clear political leaning, someone who can be convinced to vote one way or another by a political campaign. But there are millions of them out there, and they are going to determine the outcome of the election and, to be dramatic, the fate of the world. Perhaps declaring oneself undecided is a way of feeling powerful. I certainly don't believe the public opinion polls that are published every minute or so. Hilary's lead doesn't make me confident. I won't rest easy until she has actually won - and even then the contest will be far from over.
I am fearful, because American power is so important, and the outcome of this election matters not only to America, but to the whole world. I am worried because so many citizens of the United States support Trump. He's too old and not ideological enough to start a true fascist movement, but he's shown the potential for it, and a younger demagogue will undoubtedly seize the opportunity his campaign has revealed. The huge pool of Trump supporters will not evaporate after he loses the election, and, if he wins, it will inundate the entire country.
In my working life, I am editing the translation from German of a biography of Werner Scholem, the elder brother of the eminent scholar of Kabbalah, Geshom Scholem. Werner was a devout Communist, a prominent leftist politician in his day, and he was murdered by the Nazis. I've reached 1933 in the book, the year that Hitler came to power, and the events are harrowing. Within weeks the German legal system was hijacked and placed in the service of the Nazi dictatorship.
The rightist government in Israel is also trying to pass anti-democratic laws, and a lot of citizens support the idea.
The next American president will nominate Supreme Court Justices, who will decide what is legal in the United States for decades. Reactionary judges will create a reactionary legal system. The prospect is horrifying - at least to me.

***

Is this connected to my dream?
I think so.
We are all waiting for a bus to take us somewhere, but it won't come, and we'll never get there.

I Finally got around to Reading Turgenev

We found a nice bookshop in Kilkenny, where the saleswomen knew about books, and I asked whether they had a section of Irish fiction. I looked over it and bought a novel by Roddy Doyle, one by Flann O'Brien, and a volume of short stories  by Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex.
I decided to read the stories first.
I remembered reading O'Connor when I was young, and he published regularly in The New Yorker, and I wasn't disappointed. On the contrary, I was blown away.
I liked everything: his vivid descriptions, his empathetic but objective characterization, his wry sense of humor, his understated plots, and his insightful depiction of Ireland - the way it was more than sixty years ago, when he was alive and writing.
Julian Barnes, one of the best contemporary writers in English that I know of, contributed the introduction to the book, which is available on-line. Of course, he mentioned Chekhov as a major influence on O'Connor. But he said that Turgenev was an even greater influence. O'Connor, whose real name was Michael Francis O'Donovan, taught himself Gaelic (he wasn't a native speaker of the language) and, when he was in prison for a year during the civil war between the IRA and those supporting the treaty with England, he wrote an essay about Turgenev in Irish, which was, in fact, his first published work.
So, after finishing Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry (which I liked less than O'Connor, but I have bought the sequel and intend to read it), and after reading a book called How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill, which is informative but written with far too much razzle-dazzle, I decided to fill a hole in my literary education and downloaded a free copy of Fathers and Sons to my tablet.
I just finished reading it last night and felt like saying to Turgenev, "Where have you been all my life?"
But maybe it's good to save some great books for your old age.
I just had an email exchange with Gail Hareven about D. H. Lawrence. I'm translating a novel of Gail's, and Lady Chatterley's Lover comes up in it. I said it had been ages since I read that book, and she said, yes, Lawrence is an author you should read before you're twenty (and not after that). We agreed that Turgenev is ageless.
For me, at least, fiction (including movies and TV series) only works if you can believe in the characters and care about them. The people in Fathers and Sons, mainly provincial, minor Russian nobility, could hardly be more different from the people I know and have known in my life, but, through Turgenev, I understood them, cared about them, and enjoyed hearing about them.
For a while I wasn't reading very much fiction. I've read a huge number of novels, stories, and plays in my life, and I'm sometimes jaded. But when a book really grabs me, the way Turgenev's novel grabbed me, or O'Connor's stories grabbed me, or an old book by Anita Brookner, Family and Friends, which I read recently, involved and fascinated me, I remember how important literature has been for me.
Gail Hareven's narrator and protagonist in the novel I'm translating, called Ani Leona (I am Leona) in Hebrew, is a girl who looks to books to understand life, and, as Gail told me in conversation, for certain kinds of people, books raise us. We are whom we read when we were young.

Fortunately I have Almost no Experience in Emergency Rooms

If you're not bleeding to death, you have to stand in line at the reception window and check into the Emergency Room at Sha'arei Tsedeq Hospital. The entrance is bright, high-ceilinged, and well-maintained. A wall on the left lists the major donors and displays a large photograph of Dr. David Applebaum, who was killed in a terrorist suicide bombing in 2003.
At first it wasn't clear where we had to go, but to our right we saw a short line in front of plate glass partitions, and two women sat behind the glass, asked people questions, and filled out forms. We joined the short line, which advanced  fast enough, and we moved on to the waiting room, step two.
That room was somewhat crowded and a bit dark. Quite a few of the people in the room were Arabs, attending the relatives they had brought to the emergency room. We sat and waited there for a long time, until we were called for triage, step three.
While we were waiting for triage, we saw a few patients wheeled in from ambulances, and some of the people waiting for admission were in terrible shape, suffering and frightened. Luckily, we were able to be calm and wait stoically. My wife was not in pain.
In the triage room, a nurse went through all the usual questions, took a blood sample, put a needle in my wife's arm, and sent us on to the emergency room itself, a huge space with curtained examination rooms down the sides.
We were told to wait in front of room number eight. By then I lost track of time, drifting in and out of a doze. We had arrived at the hospital at 11:30 or so, and it wasn't till after 2 in the morning when a doctor finally examined my wife.
The major psychological difficulty, after the fear and pain, is uncertainty: how long will you have to wait? what will be the outcome? what's the procedure? The people who work in the emergency room know just what to do and where to go. The patients are lost.
Hospitals impress and depress me. The emergency room was clean - a young Arab man constantly and efficiently swept and mopped, moving from place to place and restoring order and spraying against germs - and there was no shortage of equipment. A huge amount of money has been invested in equipping and maintaining that emergency room, and you have to feel grateful to the philanthropists who gave so generously - though part of me thinks that hospitals should be equipped only by the state and not be dependent on donations.
But hospitals also  depress me because just looking at the directory reminds me of how many systems in my body might break down and need attention: bronchoscopy, medical genetics, neurological diagnosis, allergy and imunology, and so on. In case one needs reminding, hospitals
I admire medical professionals and know that I could never be one. I can't imagine sticking needles into people, cutting them open with scalpels, dealing with burns and wounds, treating cancer and degenerative diseases that leave no hope for the patient. How is it that some people know they can do that kind of thing, and others know they can't at all?

The End of a Good Day

Last night, at about eleven, I was thinking of writing a blog about what a great day I had had.
As usual, I practiced flute for an hour or more in the morning. Beginning my day that way is a form of meditation for me. I spend about half an hour with warm-up exercises - long tones, vibrato, scales, overtones - and then I play music. Recently I've been working on Telemann's canonic sonatas for two flutes. They're not terrifically difficult, but they're interesting. I read through a couple of them every morning, going over the hard parts, and enjoying the music.
Then I spent three hours in Aviv Malcom's pottery studio. I was a bit frustrated, because at first I wasn't managing to do what I intended to do, but I still enjoyed it, and in the end I did manage to produce a couple of the wide, shallow bowls I was trying to make.
Even when I fail to do what I set out to do, pottery is rewarding. It's another form of meditation, though I only do it once a week. It keeps me away from words, from pointless thoughts, and negative emotions. I focus on the physical task, the feel of the clay, the motion of the wheel. I also enjoy the company of the others at the lesson, usually women young enough to be my daughters or granddaughters.
Starting the week with a few hours using my hands to make something solid and real is a great anchor in reality.
In the afternoon I managed to finish revising a long and interesting chapter in a translation I've been working on, a biographical study of the great scholar of Kabbalism, Gershom Scholem. The author, an Israeli scholar named Noam Zadoff, who teaches at the University of Indiana, is learned and intelligent, and the issues he raises about Scholem's ambivalent attitudes toward European culture are of interest to me.
Scholem was definitely a gigantic intellect, someone who managed to move a highly specialized field of scholarship into the realm of general interest. He was also a very complex individual, as Zadoff shows perceptively. I hope his book is widely read when we finally finish with it.
Then in the evening I played saxophone trios with two of my friends, and I found myself playing to my own satisfaction. In the past year, I've been playing better, because I've been playing with better musicians, and I'm taking myself more seriously as a musician.
Then I came home, and my wife and I watched an episode of Shtissel, a fine Israeli TV series about the Haredi community in Jerusalem. So, at about eleven, after all those satisfying activities, before going to sleep - I was kind of wound up and not ready for bed - I was planning to review my day and express gratitude that I have been blessed to be able to engage in them.
Just then, my wife came into my study and told me that she had to go to the emergency room because of an alarming condition that had arisen.
So, I got dressed again, and we set out for Sha'arei Tsedeq Hospital.
Both of us were nervous and frightened.
Of course there was virtually no traffic at 11:30 at night, and there were plenty of places in the hospital parking lot.
We spent the next 3 hours mainly waiting. Since my wife's condition wasn't a life-threatening emergency, just something that needed prompt attention, we had to wait a long time before she was admitted.
I don't recommend spending time in an emergency room as recreation. You see a lot of very sick and frightened people. Every now and then an ambulance arrives and a gurney is rushed in with someone groaning on it.
The staff was calm and orderly, although many of the patients were demanding.
Exhaustion and boredom set it, and I fell asleep for a while while we were waiting. I had brought a book to read, but of course I was too tired and nervous to openit.
We expected that my wife would be admitted to the hospital, which would mean that she would spend the night on a bed in the already crowded corridors of the emergency room, and we wouldn't know about her condition until sometime the following day. Fortunately, at about 2:30 am, the doctor who examined her, a very tired man, determined that, in fact, there was no need for hospitalization, the symptom that had concerned us was less severe than we thought, and we could go home.
My major fear, as we drove back through the deserted streets, was that I'd fall asleep at the wheel and crash the car - but I forced myself to remain alert, and we got home safely.
We collapsed into bed at 3 in the morning.
Not such a perfect day after all.

South with Herodotus #5 (and a few movies)

Although many passages in Herodotus are tedious, the book on the whole is entertaining. Herodotus loves exaggeration and drama, as in the little story told in Book Four about Macedonian youths who disguised themselves as women and stabbed Persian banqueters to death.
He was endlessly curious about everything and everybody, and enjoyed what we might call multi-culturalism today. Also, though he was clearly on the Greek side against the Persians and proud of Greek success, he made no effort to disguise Greek duplicity, self-interest, cowardice (on occasion), and greed.
At one meal, while I was at the saxophone retreat in Wildacres, I sat next to a fine tenor saxophone player named Kevin Muse, whom I took to be about 19, part of the contingent of ambitious young musicians. Kevin was on my left, and on my right was a Greek-American physician closer to my age named Tom Koinis. Kevin said something in passing about the ancient Greeks' satirizing doctors, so I said, "Have you read Aristophanes?"
This proved to be a ridiculous question.
I assumed that Kevin might have read Aristophanes in a survey course in Western culture or something like as an undergraduate music major, but it turned out that he is an astonishingly young looking man of 43 and a professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. So much for my ability to size people up.
Kevin told me that it's thought that Herodotus recited portions of his book as entertainment at banquets, which gave me a better feeling for what I was reading.
When I got home, my wife lent me a copy of Herodotean Inquiries by the eminent classicist, Seth Benardete, and I have to admit that I haven't done more than open it and skim pages here and there.
I think I have had enough of Herodotus.
I confess that my interest was shallow and satisfied when I got to p. 599.
Meanwhile, we saw 7 movies at the Jerusalem Film Festival, one excellent one, Death in Sarajevo, one awful Turkish movie called The Album, and only one other that I'm sorry I saw: an Icelandic coming-of-age movie called Sparrows.
The Turkish movie portrayed people so vulgar, so shallow, so selfish, that you aren't surprised by the vindictive measures being taken by the government now, against so many hundreds of people that you can only assume they had extensive lists of political enemies to dispose of at the first opportunity. The events in Turkey now, the coup and the repression following its defeat, will inevitably leave an open wound in a society that already had its share of open wounds.
As for the lesson of Death in Sarajevo: like the race issue in the United States, and the specific history of slavery in the South, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here where I live, the tangled grudges and resentments of what was once Yugoslavia will never sort themselves out into a peaceful solution.
Eventually, the conflict may become irrelevant to people, but this will take a very long time. Individuals are trapped in historical events too big to resist or grasp, and they are left with bitter emotions.
Herodotus has little or nothing to say about the thousands of soldiers killed in the wars he describes, the extras in the grand battle scenes, or the women who are part of the spoils of war. For the the warriors, military aggression was mainly an opportunity to get a share of plunder. For the women, it was just a nightmare. Post-traumatic stress was probably the norm back then.
Today we do care about the extras on the set. So that's progress of a sort.

South with Herodotus, #4

The incessant wars in Herodotus were motivated not only by the personal ambition of leaders and the grudges they bore, but, perhaps more importantly, by the quest for plunder:
 So Aristagoras went to Sardis and told Artaphernes that Naxos was an island of no great size, but a fair land and fertile, lying near Ionia, and containing much treasure and a vast number of slaves. "Make war then upon this land (he said) and reinstate the exiles; for if thou wilt do this, first of all, I have very rich gifts in store for thee (besides the cost of the armament, which it is fair that we who are the authors of the war should pay); and, secondly, thou wilt bring under the power of the king not only Naxos but the other islands which depend on it, as Paros, Andros, and all the rest of the Cyclades. And when thou hast gained these, thou mayeshe mentionst easily go on against Euboea, which is a large and wealthy island not less in size than Cyprus, and very easy to bring under. A hundred ships were quite enough to subdue the whole."
It's hard to escape the feeling that, whatever monuments you may see as you tour the world, they were all erected with money plundered in one way or another from foreign conquests and exploitation, domestic oppression, and slavery.
I only spent a morning in the old part of Charleston on this trip, and  it was much more splendid that I remembered it. Until the Civil War, Charleston was a major center of commerce, a wealthy, cosmopolitan, and impressive city, and all its prosperity was based on slavery. I gather from the information on the Internet that Charleston is no reemerging. The old, historic area (South of Broad) is one of the most beautiful urban places I've been in. And the historical buildings, so beautifully restored and maintained, probably all owe their glory to wealth based on slavery.
History seemed to be more present in what I saw of the South, probably because so many of the issues remain unresolved: the contrast between gentility and cruelty, the sophistication of the wealthy Charleston elite, who traveled in Europe and brought works of art and furnishings home with them, and the ferocity of those who went to Africa to bring back slaves.
History is what Charleston sells to tourists.
I took a water taxi across the harbor after my morning in Charleston, to meet my cousin Beth, so we could leave for North Carolina. The ride was pleasant and breezy, enjoyable. My destination was Patriot's Point, where a decommissioned aircraft carrier,  submarine, and destroyer are anchored as tourist attractions (Charleston is long on tourist attractions), along with hundreds of pleasure boats. The water taxi sailed right under the shadow of the aircraft carrier, the USS Yorktown, built in 1943 at a cost of 68-78 million 1942 dollars, a billion or more of today's dollars. As we approached the huge ship, I was aghast thinking about the amount of money it must have cost to build it (I estimated about a fifth of its actual cost), and for what: to kill people so they wouldn't kill us. Herodotus would feel right at home, if he could somehow realize that the enormous vessel floating at Patriot's Point was a descendant of the Greek, Persian, and Phoenician war ships that figure in his book.
As aircraft carriers go, the Yorktown is tiny, roughly a third of the displacement and a fourth of the cost. As a monumental waste of money, it doesn't have to be any bigger than it is.

South with Herodotus - #3

I didn't hear from a single Trump supporter during my entire trip to the United States, though Trump will most likely win in South Carolina and has a good chance of winning in North Carolina. That only means that I didn't talk to a lot of strangers beyond asking directions or ordering a meal in a restaurant.
For a reader of Herodotus, Trump is nothing new. The Histories are full of ambitious and cynical men, motivated mainly by self-interest and greed. Indeed, the cruel violence and amorality of the world  he describes are appalling. Here, in a passage chosen essentially at random, is the way the Scythians purportedly put false soothsayers to death:

The mode of their execution is the following: a waggon is loaded with brushwood, and oxen are harnessed to it; the soothsayers, with their feet tied together, their hands bound behind their backs, and their mouths gagged, are thrust into the midst of the brushwood; finally the wood is set alight, and the oxen, being startled, are made to rush off with the waggon. It often happens that the oxen and the soothsayers are both consumed together, but sometimes the pole of the waggon is burnt through, and the oxen escape with a scorching.

Clearly Herodotus delights in describing the ritual cruelty of the Scythians, but cruelty in war is the order of the day:

The Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians, who had got into their hands many more than the Phocaeans from among the crews of the forty vessels that were destroyed, landed their captives upon the coast after the fight, and stoned them all to death.

Warefare is constant in the world Herodotus describes, often for the personal ambition of kings, and equally because of remembered slights, insults, and dirty tricks. Women are seldom more than chattels, taken whenever a man in power pleases. There seems to be very little of what we call morality, though occasionally people give wise speeches:

Amasis to Polycrates thus sayeth: It is a pleasure to hear of a friend and ally prospering, but thy exceeding prosperity does not cause me joy, forasmuch as I know that the gods are envious. My wish for myself and for those whom I love is to be now successful, and now to meet with a check; thus passing through life amid alternate good and ill, rather than with perpetual good fortune. For never yet did I hear tell of any one succeeding in all his undertakings, who did not meet with calamity at last, and come to utter ruin.

Herodotus seldom expresses approval or disapproval of  the people he describes and their actions. He is clearly a Greek patriot, proud of the Greek victory over the Persians, but he doesn't make the Persians out to be such awful people.

He is not a writer with illusions about human nature.

South with Herodotus #2

The Bible is quite interested in genealogy:
Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's handmaid, bare unto Abraham: And these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, according to their generations: the firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth; and Kedar, and Adbeel, and Mibsam, And Mishma, and Dumah, and Massa, Hadar, and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah: These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names, by their towns, and by their castles; twelve princes according to their nations. (Gen. 25:12-16)
Herodotus shares that interest:

There was a certain king of Sardis, Candaules by name, whom the Greeks called Myrsilus. He was a descendant of Alcaeus, son of Hercules. The first king of this dynasty was Agron, son of Ninus, grandson of Belus, and great-grandson of Alcaeus; Candaules, son of Myrsus, was the last. The kings who reigned before Agron sprang from Lydus, son of Atys, from whom the people of the land, called
previously Meonians, received the name of Lydians. The Heraclides, descended from Hercules and the slave-girl of Jardanus, having been entrusted by these princes with the management of affairs, obtained the kingdom by an oracle. Their rule endured for two and twenty generations of men, a space of five hundred and five years; during the whole of which period, from Agron to Candaules, the crown descended in the direct line from father to son. (Herodotus, Book 1)

The modern reader wonders why the Bible bothers telling us the names and lineage of people who are at best tangential to the story, just as she wonders why Herodotus keeps telling us who was descended from whom and what contest they won at the games. These details seem pointless to us - which is just the point. Ancient literature came into being in a society radically different from ours. Read correctly, it takes us there.

But what is the correct way of reading ancient literature? Does it really take us into antiquity?

I suggest reading these books like a time traveler. 

If you could land a time capsule in fifth century BCE Greece, you wouldn't be quite sure of what you were seeing when you stepped out. You would have to observe cautiously and avoid jumping to conclusions. You would need a reliable informant to explain things. But how could you find one? And how could you know if he was reliable? It would be a little like a reporter asking his taxi driver to explain things to him while on the way to a new foreign assignment.

Reading Herodotus I had to be doubly cautious, because I was reading him in translation, and I depended on the translator's ability to decipher the text and render his understanding. Is de Selincourt a reliable informant? 

What exactly did the passage I just quoted, about Candaules, Hercules, and the rest mean to Herodotus' audience? Why were they interested? 

What it was for them cannot be what it is for us. Our interest in Herodotus as a key to understanding ancient Greek culture is obviously foreign to the interest of Herodotus' contemporaries - since they probably assumed they understood their own culture perfectly well.

I was set down in South Carolina, not a place as foreign to me as ancient Greece, but I couldn't always understand what I was seeing. I spent a summer in Charleston in the summer of 1968, teaching African-American high school students in an Upward Bound program, but I remembered very little of the city, and things have changed significantly since then.

Fortunately, I did have a reliable informant, my second cousin Beth Keyserling, who put me up at her house, introduced me to her daughters, and briefed me extensively.

Going South with Herodotus - #1

I was looking for a book to bring with me on my rather long trip to America and settled on the first Greek historian, Herodotus, whom I had never read. We had an old Penguin Classics paperback edition in our library, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. The book itself was more than fifty years old. My wife bought it in Athens when she was there on a Fulbright in 1968-69, and the translation probably dates to the 1930s.
I'm not quite sure why I chose to read Herodotus after all these years of ignorance, but it was the right choice: a long, slow, irrelevant, and fascinating read. In a rambling way, he tells the story of the Greeks' repulsion of the Persian invasion, led by Xerxes, in 480 BCE, with fascinating and lurid descriptions of the customs and beliefs of many of the peoples of the Ancient Near East.
I went to America primarily to receive a prize for translating Aharon Appelfeld's book for younger readers, published by 7 Stories Press under the title, "Adam and Thomas." As I have told people innumerable times by now, the main reason I decided to attend the American Jewish Libraries conference was its location: Charleston, where I have cousins. Indeed, as I have frequently boasted, my second cousin Billy Keyserling, is the mayor of Beaufort, a town on the coast south of Charleston.
Since the prize money covered half of my air-fare, and the publisher promised to cover the other half, I decided to go. I planned to start my trip with a visit to my son and his family in Washington, DC and then I would go down to Charleston, visit Billy and his brother and sister, and then return home. Then, serendipitously, when looking for more information about thmme New Century Saxophone Quartet, a fine ensemble, I discovered that, just a few days after the convention in Charleston, there would be a week-long "saxophone retreat" at Wildacres, in the improbably (to my ears, at any rate) named town of Little Switzerland, North Carolina, which didn't sound impossibly distant from Charleston. The retreat, an annual event, was to be led by a stellar tenor saxophone player, Jim Houlik. So I decided to extend my stay in the US by a week, which certainly ought to have given me time to finish Herodotus. But in fact I only finished yesterday evening, a week after my return to Israel.
If I had read Herodotus as a student, like most people who have read him, I would not have read him with the historical books of the Bible in the back of my mind.  I also would not have read him with fifty years of intervening life experience. The stories of Saul, David, Solomon, and the various kings of Judah and Israel mainly concern sinning against God, being punished, obeying God, and being rewarded. The stories Herodotus tells have a lot to do with following the cryptic instructions of oracles, but almost nothing to do with right action in obedience to divine law. 
Herotodus is curious about everybody in the world who comes to his attention (interestingly, we descendants of the ancient Israelites, who think we were so important, do not even rate a mention in his narrative). The Bible is narrowly focused on the Twelve Tribes descended from Jacob, and troubles to mention only their enemies. Herotodus displays a great deal of geographical knowledge (some of it quite fanciful). The Bible is barely interested in any place other than the Land of Israel. The Biblical narrator is anonymous and impersonal. Herotodus' personality comes out in his writing. In Book One, for example, he writes: "The customs which I know the Persians to observe are the following: they have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly. This comes, I think, from their not believing the gods to have the same nature with men, as the Greeks imagine." The Biblical narrator would never speak for himself that way, and he would never think to compare his religion with another, except to condemn idol worship.

Heredotus is mainly famous, or notorious, for his sensational accounts of the customs of various foreign peoples. Here is a typical example: "The Magi are a very peculiar race, different entirely from the Egyptian priests, and indeed from all other men whatsoever. The Egyptian priests make it a point of religion not to kill any live animals except those which they offer in sacrifice. The Magi, on the contrary, kill animals of all kinds with their own hands, excepting dogs and men. They even seem to take a delight in the employment, and kill, as readily as they do other animals, ants and snakes, and such like flying or creeping things. However, since this has always been their custom, let them keep to it. I return to my former narrative."

Perhaps, in imitation of Herodotus, I should describe the ways of the American South, the drawl, the friendliness, the slow pace, and the deeply contested history. In a way, the South begins in Washington, but it wasn't until I reached Charleston that I was truly immersed in the region. The immersion was slow, since I spent my first two days there in a Marriott hotel, which might have been almost anywhere, the way an airport is a neutral space.

I did, however, venture out of the Marriott for a couple of meals, since the American Jewish Libraries, an impecunious organization, were only treating me to one dinner: I had some flounder in a the Marina Variety Store, a fish restaurant, which proved to be farther from the hotel than I had been led to believe, and grits for lunch at the Hominy Grill the following day (the waitresses sported tee-shirts proclaiming, "Grits are Good for You"). Usually I feel odd eating alone in restaurants, but I rather enjoyed the experience this time.

This trip was taking me pretty far away from Israel and Judaism, but I decided to avoid meat and seafood, to keep an approximation of kashrut.

Does the Right Hand Know what it's Doing?

The fingers of my right hand stiffen with tension when I play the flute, and this is, to say the least, deleterious to my playing. When I first began playing the flute, my left hand bothered me because of the unaccustomed hand position. I was getting cramps in my left hand, but after a few months they went away. Now it's my right hand, partly because you use your right pinkie to steady the flute, and partly because the fingering is slightly different from that of the saxophone, which I'm used to, and I have to concentrate. And there are deeper psychological reasons, which, possibly makes the problem of  interest to people who don't play the flute.
I discovered something that is interesting even to people who don't try to play fast sixteenth notes on a wind instrument by making an effort to relax my right hand all the time, both to improve my flute playing and because I'm also feeling some pain in my hand and forearm when I use the computer and manipulate the mouse, and pain is something one tries to get rid of.
Making an effort to relax is rather paradoxical, and my main method has been, first of all, to notice the tension in my hand rather than ignore it. Just noticing that I'm pressing the keys on the flute as well as on the computer keyboard too hard is a start toward not pressing them too hard. I have found that dealing with that tension in my hand has also improved my tone on the flute, and my playing sounds more musical (the clicking of my keyboard remains as unmusical as ever, but I type better when I relax my fingers).
I believe that tension in one's dominant hand has to do with the desire of the dominant hemisphere of brain to keep everything under control. Write something with a pen or pencil, or draw a picture, and check on whether you are pressing the writing instrument harder on the paper than you need to in order to leave a mark. Try to write or draw using as little pressure as possible. I bet your writing, both the handwriting itself and the content of your writing, as well as your drawing, will be freer and more imaginative if you lighten up the pressure of the pen.
I believe the pressure in my right hand when I play the flute is connected with anxiety. I'm still not sure that the flute will, in the words of my teacher, Raanan Eylon, cooperate with me, so I try too hard to force it to cooperate. I blow too hard and grip the instrument too hard, and the flute resists rather than cooperating. If one is confident, one doesn't have to make too much of an effort to do what one wants to do, and one's confidence is rewarded by success.

Getting Published

A short story of mine was published on the Jewish Fiction web site, so I'm spreading the news so that more than a handful of people will know about it and possibly read it.
A long time ago I thought I ought to be a writer of fiction, although that isn't really where my skills as a writer lie, which is probably why I never committed myself to that kind of literary career. But I have published a couple of stories that I don't want to disown.
It doesn't particularly matter to me when I see that only a dozen or more people look at this blog. I guess I lack the conviction that what I write is IMPORTANT. It means something to me when I write it, and that's enough.
The story is about my ambivalence with respect to Jewish observance.
I often think that it's something like playing a role as an actor. You have to believe in it while you're doing it, but when you step off stage, you have to remember it's only a role.
The truly religiously observant never step off stage. The truly atheistic won't even try to learn their lines.
Anyway, I reread the story a few hours ago, and it's not bad, and the other stories on the web site are also interesting. So I hope you read and enjoy them.

Art and Morality - A Huge Topic

About two weeks ago the literary editor of Haaretz stupidly wrote a column justifying the predatory sexual activity of a popular Israeli singer, saying that artists must have freedom to indulge their desires, even if some women are hurt by it, in order to create. The columnist was roundly, nay savagely criticized for his remarks, and the following week he wrote a contrite column, announcing that he would no longer be writing any columns - thus putting an end to what had turned out to be a rather provocative career, even before he said that artists had a right to indulge their instincts, a right denied to ordinary mortals.
Obviously, he said the wrong thing in the wrong way.
In our society, we do not agree that anyone's status entitles them to act criminally - not artists, athletes, religious leaders, wealthy people, or politicians. We also don't condone immoral (but not criminal) behavior on the part of prominent people: telling lies, betraying friendship, exploiting influence, excessive egotism, and the like. We also tend not to accept the excuses of people who abuse drugs and alcohol and claim that it sustains their art.
But what about the case the columnist was writing about? Apparently a certain popular singer was exploiting the sex appeal of his popularity to have sex with as many female fans as he could - not minors. He isn't accused of raping the women or abusing them, though he is accused of hurting their feelings, leaving them with the feeling of having been used (I gather).
A lot of male performers with strong sexual appetites - athletes, actors, musicians, preachers - apparently find it easy to persuade women to gratify those appetites. Assuming that they are not betraying a spouse's trust, assuming that the women who have sex with them are consenting adults, and assuming that the women are not dependent on the performer in some way (like an aspiring actress sleeping with a director in hopes of getting a part in his movie), do these men have a moral obligation to abstain?
We may not admire that kind of behavior, and we may think the less, for example, of Jean-Paul Sartre because of his alleged sexual predations (but less, of course, than we condemn Heidegger's Nazism), but our judgment of that behavior ought to be no different than our judgment of similar behavior on the part of a person of no intellectual or artistic attainment.
But what about art that is or could be thought of as immoral? An artist whose personal behavior is otherwise exemplary might produce work that encourages violence, crime, or racism, for example. "I'm not advocating rape," he might say, "but my creative freedom requires me to write about rape as if I were a rapist."
In a sense, artistic expression is also behavior, and behavior is subject to moral judgment, but we do allow (and even expect) artists to stretch the limits of conventional morality in their art. So, are we forced to agree that we permit artists to behave immorally?

Is this Something One Should Eat?

The hostel where we were staying in Tokyo, which we highly recommend, was not far from the food market, a long, narrow alley packed with neat, clean, attractive stores, some of which sold things to eat, presumably, which we could not identify. In general we found the food in Japan delicious. Even very simple restaurants served well-cooked dishes. However, very few of them had English menus, and, since we avoid certain foods, just pointing at a picture on the menu wasn't so helpful. But the food market gave us a better idea of what people actually bring home and eat.
Here's one of those unhelpful (for us) menus:

Some of the stuff was easy to identify, like snacks:

And dozens of kinds of pickles:

Though it wasn't easy for us to tell just what had been pickled.
Everywhere we went we saw stores displaying sweets that sometimes seemed to be intended more as gifts than as something to be eaten:

There was plenty of street food at the market, like these deep-fried dumplings (which we sampled):

And some mysterious things:

There was plenty of seafood:

And they love tiny fish:

As for noodles, there was an infinite choice:

A fine take-out delicatessen:

And even ordinary fruits and vegetables were displayed like crown jewels:

So, if you get to Kyoto, don't miss the market!