What I Feel LIke Sharing

Moved to Tears

2012-01-15T08:47:00.003+02:00

Hot tears welled up behind my glasses when I heard Helene Grimaud play Mozart's 23rd piano concerto with the Israel Philharmonic on Friday morning at the Jerusalem theater. We had read an article about Grimaud in the New Yorker last month, and then we saw ads for a series of concerts here in Israel. We had never heard of her before reading the article, because we don't follow current performers of classical music so closely, but, because of the article about a fascinating and astonishingly gifted person, we decided to treat ourselves to the concert.

Friday morning at 11 is not a time we usually go to concerts. Judith cooks meals for Shabbat on Fridays, and I try to squeeze in a few more hours of work. Last Friday it was raining very hard. I am always put off balance by the rain here. Even after nearly 40 years in Israel, the country means sun, not rain to me. Friday's rain was cold and torrential, and streams ran in the streets that sloped downhill.

It was a relief to reach the lobby, and, to our astonishment, we found that it was full of round tables with yellow cloths, and middle-aged people who certainly could have lived without another piece of cake were avidly gobbling down pastries. We saw where they were giving out the food and went over to find out what was what. After all, we're also adequately fed Ashkenazis. It turned out there was a deal: 35 sheqels for coffee, cake, and the weekend newspaper. We hadn't signed up. Just as well.

We had unknowlingly entered an unfamiliar world of devotees who have been going to Friday morning concerts of the Philharmonic for years: Intermezzo. When we entered the hall, we misread the row of our seats and trespassed on the territory of a couple of regulars. Of course we moved after acknowledging out mistake. We were outsiders in a secret society.

All that background has little to do with the point. We had seats in the 2nd row, to the right of the piano, so we could see Grimaud's face but not her hands. She's a good-looking woman with an expressive face, and it was a pleasure to see the pleasure she found in the music. The tears came to my eyes because of the beauty of the sound of the orchestra and because at one moment in the first movement the soloist swept the orchestra along with her. I felt that the music had gripped them all. They were more than a group of highly trained, skilled, professional musicians. They were lovers of Mozart's music.

Recently I have been listening to more classical music after years of listening mainly to jazz. There's no point in comparing. Great music is great music, whether it's Ellington or Brahms, and I still have no patience for a lot of bombastic classical symphonies. However, I do believe that no other kind of music has yet attained the sublime heights of the greatest Western classical works.

I suspect that many people in Friday's audience, comfortable, middle-aged, affluent professionals and business people, attend concerts so that can feel good about themselves, not because they know and care a lot about the music. But who am I to judge or pretend to know who those people are? I should be glad they're willing to shell out money to keep the orchestra going. There was barely an empty seat in the hall. Collectively we had paid a great deal to hear two relatively familiar pieces.

Sometimes I wonder what Mozart would think if he could attend a concert today. He wrote the pieces we heard about 230 years ago. Could he have imagined that in Jerusalem, an Ottoman backwater in his day, a symphony orchestra based in Tel Aviv, a city that didn't exist, conducted by a visiting conductor from an Austria bereft of its empire, would perform music for complacent Jewish bourgeois? It makes me think of the Midrash about Moses who is brought forward in history to see Rabbi Akiva teach his Torah, and he can't understand a thing.

Perhaps there's a glimmer of hope here. Maybe mankind will survive for another 230 years, and people will still be playing Mozart, perhaps on instruments we cannot imagine, but there will still be an audience that attends concerts as much as an act of self-affirmation as to hear and understand the music. Even for those listeners, a moment might come when they are moved to tears by the playing of a Helene Grimaud in the year 2252, because she is playing Mozart's 23rd piano concerto as if her own fingers were writing the work, and her own years were hearing it for the first time, and a whole orchestra will be borne aloft by her playing.

Kinds of Art or Craft

2011-12-23T11:04:00.000+02:00

I write, I play music, and I make pottery.
A lot of my writing is translation, which is not a creative art, a lot of my music-making is playing the notes that other people have written, which is also, in a way, closer to a craft than to an art, and there's no question that making bowls and cups out of clay is a craft, not an art.
Of course the boundary between art and craft is fuzzy. Every art has an element of skill, or craft in it, and every craft has an expressive potential.
Writing is abstract. Sometimes I write with a pen on paper in notebooks, but the writing isn't the words in my handwriting on those specific pieces of paper. Presumably, some time or other, I might transcribe what I've written by hand, and the writing will be embodied (or disembodied) as electronic code, and then, perhaps, printed on other pieces of paper.
Music making is transitory. You play something, and it exists for the time that you play it, and in the memory of the people who heard it.
Though of course there is written music, directions to musicians that will enable them to play something, and there is recorded music. Both of those have something in common with writing, but I still think that the essence of music is unique, live performance.
In contrast to writing (or written or recorded musics), which can be endlessly duplicated and still retain its essence, each piece of pottery is unique, and pottery is solid. A cup that I made could last for another 6,000 years if it's buried in the right place!
Philosophers of aesthetics strive to figure out what these three forms of expression (along with many others like paintings, photographs, films, plays, or dances) have in common, but their ideas might not matter either to practitioners or to audiences.

The Thin Line between Tragedy and Joy

2011-12-06T22:21:00.001+02:00

Our daughter gave birth twelve minutes into last Monday, after a long, exhausting, and traumatic labor, which nearly ended in a caesarian. In earlier days of medicine, she would almost certainly have died.
We live in a very narrow zone: the thinness of the earth's crust, the thinness of the atmosphere, the small range of temperatures at which the earth can sustain the forms of life we are familiar with, and the short length of our lives. On a larger scale, let's not forget the short time that the human species has been present on the face of the earth.
Today I got a traffic ticket for not stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. I was in the right lane of a four-lane road in downtown Jerusalem, and the pedestrian was hidden from view by the car in the left lane. I didn't dispute with the policeman who gave me the ticket. I even told him I was glad they were enforcing the crosswalk law. Compared to the disaster of injuring a pedestrian, the misfortune of getting a traffic ticket is rather minor.
Only a fraction of a second saved the pedestrian from being hit by my car. Sometimes we are on the wrong side of that fraction of a second, and we are run over, or we run someone over.
We live in the illusion of stability, that what was is what will be, but life is unstable, and we have no idea what will be.

Complexity #3 - L'Histoire du Soldat

2011-10-28T08:46:00.001+02:00

For my Bar-Mitzvah, which was in 1957, I asked for a tape recorder, and several of my relatives got together and bought me a four track Revere machine. I used it a lot all during high school, playing duets with myself on the clarinet by laying down two tracks, and that kind of thing. I also recorded programs from the radio. The tape recorder came with a set of alligator clips connected to a plug, and to record from the radio all you had to do was attach the clips to the two wires that led to the speaker.
One of the pieces that I recorded was a performance of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in English. I'd never heard the piece or even heard of it before I recorded it, but I immediately fell in love with it, and I played for myself repeatedly. "Down the hot and dusty road, tramps a soldier with his load."
Last night while I was ironing my summer shirts, in preparation for putting them away for the short winter, I took out the LP that I bought when I was in college of a performance of L'Histoire du soldat in French, narrated by Jean Cocteau, with the devil played by Peter Ustinov. It had been years since I'd listened to that music, and I was immediately swept away by its brilliance, energy, and rhythms. Stravinsky attained richness of timbre by using high and low instruments with nothing in between: clarinet, bassoon, violin and bass, etc. So that a small ensemble could have, at times, almost an orchestral effect.
Could it be that such an innovative piece was composed more than 90 years ago?
And why is this a demonstration of complexity, aside from the complexity of the piece itself?
Because so much time has gone by since I first heard that music, and my experience of life and of music is so much richer now. On the other hand, I'll never have the sense of enthusiastic surprise that I felt when I was fifteen or so upon the discovery of Stravinsky and his music.
And think of the careers of Stravinsky himself, of Cocteau, of Ustinov, of the musicians who performed, of the conductor, the performance history of the piece, what it meant when first performed in 1918, right after World War I, in the throes of the Russian Revolution, and what it meant in the early 1950s, when the recording I have was made, and what it means today, after so much more music has been made and so much more history has happened.
The music, even while you listen to it, only goes so far in unifying your life. Your mind wanders, you may imagine the ballet, you may think, if only I played clarinet well enough to perform that piece. Two people listen to it, together in the same room, and they have entirely different resonances in their hearts.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life #2

2011-10-27T08:58:00.000+02:00

This morning, as often happens, I was wide awake at 5:00 am, so I got out of bed, went up to my workroom, turned on my computer, and got an hour's work done before breakfast time. Why do I wake up so early in the morning? What should I do about it?
The reasons why I wake up at that hour, which I started to call "ungodly," but in fact it is very godly, tranquil, calm, good for concentration, are probably a tangle of physiological and psychological factors, and the effort to untangle it all so that I could sleep for another hour or so, seems disproportionate. Better to accept the situation and make the best of it.
However, there's the complexity again: I am a mystery to myself. I don't know why I wake up before I want to.
Breakfast time came. I made the coffee, took in the paper, read about as much as I wanted to, but didn't eat or drink anything. I had to go get a blood test, to see whether the pills that are supposed to be lowering my cholesterol are still working, and to discover whether any other signs of decrepitude and disease are in my blood. I hate having strangers (or anyone) stick needles into my arm, and I almost put the blood test off, telling myself I was too hungry, but knowing that any day that I decided to have the test done I would be equally hungry, so why be a baby?
The laboratory at the closest clinic to our house, a pleasant twenty minute walk, begins doing tests at 7:30. I got there at 7:20 or so, took a number, and waited my turn. By the time my turn came, in about a quarter of an hour, the line was quite long. I congratulated myself on my foresight.
The two people who were waiting when I got there hadn't bothered to take numbers, which is so stupid I can't believe it. The old "system" in Israel was that you walked into a crowded waiting room, asked, "who's last?'" Then you announced that you were now last and waited tensely until your turn came, fiercely protecting your place. Routinely people would come in and announce that they had been there before and asked someone to save their place, giving you the helpless feeling that your good will was being exploited.
In the past ten or fifteen years, that chaotic situation has been remedied by the simple method of giving everyone a number. Why you would prefer constant vigilance, announcing to everyone who comes in that they're after you rather than taking a number and waiting until it's called is beyond me - another example of human complexity. Even on the simplest level, it's hard to figure other people out.
Rather than try to figure them out, I took three numbers, gave the lowest one to the woman with two children who claimed she was first and the next lowest one to the man who had told me he was last, and keeping the highest number for myself. I've decided to be more proactive in my life. Let's see where that leads.
I'm back now, with a bulky bandage on the inside of my left elbow (I just removed it), having risen at the wrong time, eaten breakfast at the wrong time, and returned to my desk at the wrong time. Just a little change in your routine, if you have a routine, can make your whole day look different. Another instance of complexity. If you jiggle your life in one place, you don't know what will be shaken somewhere else.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life in the World (#1)

2011-10-18T05:58:00.002+02:00

Last night we walked down to the Bethlehem Road, not far from our house in Jerusalem, to a street fair organized by the municipality. A sizable section of the street was closed off, many of the local stores and restaurants were open, two bands set up at intervals along the street, just far enough away from each other that you couldn't hear both at a time, unless you were standing halfway between them. At stands people sold handicrafts, food, a lot of bread (Bethlehem means, of course, "House of Bread'), and there were some street performances.
Hundreds of people strolled up and down the street, the usual variety: young couples with kids in strollers, teenagers, older couples, and even two Hasidim, a father and son, wearing huge fur straimls and the golden caftans of one of the Jerusalem sects.
We brought our dog, who didn't enjoy it all that much, but we thought he would be happier with us than left alone in the house.

***

When you think about an event like that -- planning it, the arrangements that had to be made, the security issues, publicizing it, setting it up, budgeting it -- you realize how far from simple it is. Or if you think about the street fair from the individual point of view of every person who was part of it in any way, the experience they brought to it, their situation in life at that moment, their hopes, fears, loves, hates, you realize that it wasn't a single event at all. For every person involved, it was a different event.
I was not in a good mood for the first half hour or so, for reasons that I can't entirely explain to myself, and nothing I want to go into here. Neither of the bands was playing when we first got there, but when we reached the second band, which had set up on the balcony of a building, they started to play. Judith was looking at the tablecloths on a stand on the east side of the street, and I was waiting for her with the dog on the other side of the street, close to the musicians.
Judith wanted to buy a tablecloth because today we're driving down to the moshav where our son-in-law's grandparents live, and we wanted to bring them a house present. Everyone who looked at the tablecloths or bought one had a different reason for buying one. And everyone who ignored the tablecloths completely, or decided not to buy one, had different personal tastes and needs.
Our need for the tablecloth had to do with our connection with that son-in-law and his family, which is very different from our connection with our other two sons-in-law and their families.

***

The band started to play a Beatles song: Get Back! Within half a minute, my mood changed completely. Everyone within earshot started dancing, some just quietly, for themselves, and others openly. The musicians were good. They had a strong rock and roll rhythm and they sang convincingly. They were pretty young. Most of them probably were born after the Beatles broke up and stopped performing. None of them could remember the excitement that people my age felt when that exuberant wave of creativity swept the world of popular music, when it was something new and energizing.

***

People once thought they could figure the world out, that they could find one key idea that would explain everything. If none of the current ideas was adequate, intense effort would get to the right one. Christianity was such an idea, a universal religion that explained everything. But from the very start, Christianity split up into competing sects, each with its own doctrines, each believing that it knew the ultimate secrets.

But even a simple event like the street fair on the Bethlehem Road, an event that lasted only a few hours, demonstrates the impossibility of grasping anything fully. The broader the context, the harder things are to grasp.

The Bethlehem Road was more or less a dirt track in a rural area when the British conquered Palestine during WWI. Under the British mandate, it became an affluent Arab neighborhood. In the war of 1948, the Arabs were driven out, poor Jews were settled in the neighborhood, two or more families stuffed together in a single apartment, but in the 1970s gradual gentrification took place. In the past five years or more, the street has become more lively commercially.

All that history also lay behind the street fair, as well as the contested status of Jerusalem today. And let's not forget that the fair took place during the intermediate days of the Sukkot festival, something that might have been going on for three thousand years by now.

How can we get our minds around such complexity?

Squeezing Pomegranates and Getting Old

2011-10-06T09:34:00.000+02:00

This morning I picked some pomegranates from the two thriving trees that grow in our garden, and I squeezed juice. This is my agricultural task every fall, and I enjoy it, though it's time consuming. Every year it's a race with the insects that lay their eggs in the fruit and spread rot, with the birds that come and nibble the fruit that splits open, and with the other things that I have to do.
We have a huge quantity of fruit to squeeze. So far this year I've produced about ten liters of juice. It's a bit sour and very concentrated, so we add a bit of sugar water to it to make it tastier. We always freeze a good bit of it and use it on special occasions during the year.
I could have gone on picking and squeezing for another hour or more. I tend to get into things when I do them, but I tore myself away from the task. Time to get back into the world of words!
The words have to do with acknowledging that, as I approach the age of sixty-seven, I can't think of myself as "middle-aged" anymore. I have to admit to myself that I'm an old man now, luckily a vigorous and healthy one, still able to climb up on ladders and pick fruit from high branches, still active, but old.
So I've got to squeeze the juice out of my remaining years the way I squeeze the juice out of the pomegranates. That's the germ of a poem that I might or might not write.

Work Gets in the Way of Things I Want to Do

2011-09-01T09:56:00.000+03:00

Years ago, for a college class reunion, I filled in a long and boring questionnaire, and the only question the has stuck in my mind was: What are your retirement plans?
I answered that I didn't intend to retire.
After all, I'm self-employed, I'm pretty much in control of my own time, and until I forget the languages I use, why shouldn't I keep translating? I like it fairly well, I like being paid for my efforts, and I like knowing that I'm providing a useful service for my clients.
Recently a lot of work has been coming my way, almost more than I can handle, and I'm ambivalent about it. It's flattering that people want me to work for them, and I've always been the kind of person who does his assignments before doing what he may feel like doing.
Having work that someone else has asked me to do also saves me from the dilemma of deciding what to do with my time. But I'm a bit haunted by the fear that I'll never get around to doing what I want to do, and that maybe I'll never quite figure out what it is that I want to do.
Anyway, the question of what a person wants is one that can only truly be answered in retrospect. What you wanted is what you actually did.
So if I'm taking on a lot of obligations - recently a publisher asked me to translate a 500 page book - that must be a sign that I want to do it. I could have said no. I could have said I have other plans. I could have said that I'm retiring as a translator. But I said, gee, if this important publisher wants me to translate this major book, how can I turn it down?

Working for Old Men

2011-08-30T10:02:00.000+03:00

I am working on two translation projects now: another novel by Aharon Appelfeld and a personal essay about religion by Zvi Luz. Aharon is approaching the age of eighty, and Zvi has passed it. Both men are enviably clear-minded and active, busy and engaged in life.
I'm half a generation younger than these gentlemen, much closer to old age, if I make it, than to youth. Working for vigorous older people like Appelfeld and Luz helps reconcile me to the prospect of aging and gives me hope that when I reach their age, I'll still have the energy and commitment to think hard and create.
These authors have been through a lot during their lives, and they have been pondering the serious and deep issues of the human condition for a long time. Aharon has been an author for fifty years or more, writing about the fate of individuals who are caught, tragically, in vast historical convulsions.
Zvi was a professor of literature during a long career and has devoted much thought to the connection between traditional Jewish literary sources and modern Hebrew literature. In the essay I'm working on, he seeks to clarify his ideas and set them in order.
I like working with people who old and more experienced than I am, and I sometimes wonder how much I can learn from a much younger person, which is not to say that I reject the insight and intelligence of young writers out of hand. Since I've outlived Shakespeare, as well as a host of other literary geniuses, that would mean that I should stop reading them - an absurd idea.

By Heart and by Ear

2011-08-28T08:59:00.000+03:00

I'm still digesting the experience I had of playing a 3 night gig last week. A friend of ours took this video of us playing "Softly as a Morning Sunrise," and I'm pretty satisfied with the way it sounds (not with the quality of the recording).
That's a song that I know by heart, backward and forward, and you may notice that the music stand in front of me is empty. When I soloed, I knew just where I was in the song, and I could hear the relationship between what I was playing and the tune and the chords. But most of the time, even though I know a song pretty well, I'm afraid to play it without the notes in front of me, and I know that's a deficit in my playing. It means I'm using my eyes to keep my place in the song instead of using my ears.
By now I know a lot of songs by heart, and the expression is extremely apt. My unwillingness to trust my heart, as it were, and play the songs without the written music in front of my eyes, is holding me back musically. My dependence on my eyes cuts my ears off from my heart, and my playing is intellectual rather than emotional and natural.
What's strange to me is that when I play a song that I do know well by heart, like "Embraceable You" or "It's Only a Paper Moon," if I've started to play the song from the written notes, I find it almost impossible to tear my eyes away from the music and launch myself into playing it by ear. I have to learn to trust my heart and my ears.

Another Night at the Craft Fair - the Challenge of Thinking in Music

2011-08-25T08:04:00.000+03:00

The second evening of playing went even better than the first one. I was more relaxed, but I was still playing with the intensity that comes when you play in public.
Improvising music is one of the most challenging activities I know of, and I'm not sure it gets easier as you improve at it. Obviously some aspects of it do get easier. You know the songs better, so you don't have to make an effort to remember them. You gain in confidence, so you have more control over what you're doing. You develop familiarity with chord patterns and rhythms, so you're not baffled by a half-diminished chord or a minor major seventh. But the closer you are to mastery, the more you demand of yourself.
In the beginning, when I was struggling to improvise at all, I was glad when I just managed to follow the harmonies and begin and end on time. I still get lost occasionally, but usually I know where I am in the song, and I'm working on playing interesting riffs, coherent solos that build, giving variety to my playing - so things aren't really any easier. On the contrary. It's harder for me to satisfy myself.
In some moods I think that it's too bad I came to this rather late in life. If I'd learned as many songs and known as much about jazz when I was a teenager, I'd be struggling less now. On the other hand, it's amazing that in my late sixties I can do musical things that I couldn't imagine doing ten years ago. It's important to grow at any age.
Playing a fast-moving sport like tennis, hockey, basketball, or soccer probably demands concentration of a similar kind, though, never having been much of an athlete, I'm only guessing.
What it takes is thinking in the language of music as you play, the way you think in a language as you speak.
A few years ago I took a course in musical cognition at the Hebrew University, and I got a lot out of it, though I think I barely scratched the surface. I know that there are people with high musical aptitude, the way there are people with high mathematical or verbal aptitude, who hear, retain, and imagine more than ordinary people. My own musical aptitude is high enough, I guess, for me to imagine what it would be like to have the extraordinary musical gifts of a great musician, and that's a positive thing. But when, for example, I read about Shostakovich, sitting down and writing out the score of a symphony that he'd composed in his mind, without trying anything out at the keyboard, I am infinitely humbled.
The intensity of improvising in public (not that there was ever a big crowd listening to us) for a couple of hours last night took me a little closer to the state of musical awareness that a truly gifted musician has. I could barely sleep last night. Music kept running through my head, the tunes we had played, and musical ideas of my own. The intense attention I needed while we were playing stimulated my brain.
Ordinarily I hear music without listening to it as carefully as I do when I'm playing. Maybe it's a defense mechanism: if I always listened to music that carefully, I would be overwhelmed by it, and I can't really afford to be overwhelmed by it. There are so many other demands on my life. But I welcome occasions like these, which give me a glimpse of a higher musical plane.

Am I Good Enough to Play for People?

2011-08-24T07:30:00.001+03:00

For years now I have been playing almost every week with an Israeli pianist named Ra'anan (the name, not all that common, means "fresh"). We mainly play for our own enjoyment, working on songs for quite a while, playing them in different tempi and rhythms. We have played at parties now and then, and prepared programs and played them at informal concerts. But I know that we're not all that good, compared to professional musicians. Last summer we played in a couple of restaurants, and they didn't ask us to come back. We were too loud!
Through a friend of his wife's, Ra'anan got us invited to play at the Jerusalem Craft Fair, which has been going on for the past week or so. The Craft Fair is a major event, drawing thousands of visitors, and there are four entertainment venues, including a major outdoor stage where the top singers perform. Ra'anan and I were asked to play in the most inconspicuous of those venues, in an alley that goes between artists' studios, the only part of the Craft Fair that's permanent.
We located a drummer in our age range, a retired gentleman named Moshe who has gone back to music after a career in business, and we rehearsed intensely for a couple of weeks, meeting at Moshe's house during the few hours at noon when he knows that his neighbors won't mind hearing him pound on his drums.
The rehearsals weren't all that encouraging. Ra'anan was very edgy and intense, and Moshe wasn't used to playing with us. But after a couple of weeks we were at least listening to each other. However, I recorded a couple of our sessions and didn't like what I heard. My own playing was weak and mechanical. There are so many excellent saxophone players around, why should anyone listen to me?
I became extremely nervous as the day of our performance approached. Meanwhile, our gig was extended from two nights to three, which also didn't please me. One night would have been fun, two nights became a kind of responsibility, but three nights turned the engagement into work! Rather than being enthusiastic, I was apprehensive.
We had our debut last night, and it went so much better than I expected, that I'm amazed.
We prepared about 30 songs and figured out simple arrangements for them. We mixed standards like "A Foggy Day in London Town" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me" with a few Israeli songs by Sasha Argov, Matti Caspi, and Yoni Rechter. We played for about two-and a half hours, total, and people stopped to listen to us and even applauded.It often happens that I play better for an audience than I do by myself or in private, just with other musicians. Once I'm up there on the bandstand with a horn, there's nowhere to hide, so I let myself go and play.

Our Record Player

2011-08-22T08:53:00.000+03:00

Some things drag on and on. Finding a turntable so that we could play all our old LPs was pretty low priority, and after everything was supposedly in place, we still couldn't do it. Our amplifier doesn't have an input for turntables, so we had to buy a pre-amplifier, and the one we got had a terrible hum. But yesterday, at last, I installed a new pre-amplifier, and the hum is almost inaudible. To celebrate we put on an old mono [!] LP that I have had for years: Arthur Grumiaux playing the Bach unaccompanied violin partitas.
I thought, while listening: if I were a Musician (I am a musician, but not anywhere near the level I mean when I use the term "Musician" with a capital 'M'), and I could play a work like the Bach partitas with the beauty and depth that Grumiaux brought to his performance, I don't think I'd ever want to do anything else.
I feel something similar about the Miles Davis record of "Kind of Blue." Once you've played that way, where do you have to go as a musician? I still have the LP, but I played it so much when I was young, that I doubt that it has any life in its grooves.

Fear of Dogs and Religious Faith

2011-08-17T08:46:00.000+03:00

This morning, as I often do, I took our dog Kipper, who is neither large nor ferocious, to the hill near our house that somehow got the name of Bible Hill. I let him wander around while I sit with a notebook and write about what's on my mind. I was there at about 7:15. The breeze was cool, and I had a lot to confide to the pages of my journal.
A few minutes after my arrival, a heavy Haredi woman and four large daughters lumbered up to the hill, saw the dog, and hesitated. I assured them, the dog doesn't attack, he's my dog, you have nothing to worry about. They proceeded, and, indeed, the dog had no interest in them. He never got closer than fifty meters, though he did look in their direction.
Before they had gone a third of the way on top of the hill, fear overwhelmed the girls, and they retreated, leaving the hill and its wonderful view of the Old City to us.
I was sorry that my dog spoiled their little outing, but I'm not responsible for their irrational fear of dogs.
On the way home, I thought of what I should have said to them: "Do you think that God will let you be attacked by a dog? Don't you have faith that He will protect you? You obviously only believe in a God who punishes, not one who protects." But by the time I thought of that, the women and her daughters had left Bible Hill, and so had Kipper and I.

Incendies - Important Film

2011-08-14T08:31:00.003+03:00

Last night we went to see Incendies at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and were deeply moved. Viewers who don't live in the Middle East would definitely get involved in the human (melo)drama of Canadian twins of Lebanese descent who discover the tragic truth about their origins. For people living very close to Lebanon - indeed I spent four or five months in Lebanon during the 1980s as an Israeli soldier - the film has more than human interest. I'm not sure whether an uninformed viewer would know the difference between Christian and Muslim Arabs, between Lebanese nationalists and Palestinian refugees, and so on. But my wife and I and everyone else in the Israeli audience did.
The film ends up by expressing the hope that love can overcome the painful past and the hatred that motivated so much killing. That might be possible in Canada, but it didn't seem as if the Lebanese Christian women, whom the young heroine met in her search for her family's past, were ready for reconciliation.
Seeing the brutality of the civil war in Lebanon on the screen, I wondered how the people of that country can bear the burden of the past, how they can avoid harboring deep resentment, that could only break out in violence whenever public order breaks down again.
Certainly a film like that doesn't leave me very hopeful about the possibility of reaching a stable and long-lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm afraid there's too much bad blood in our past.
But the issue of "bad blood" is not only a problem here in Israel-Palestine. The world is sodden with bad blood in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Iraq, in Algeria, in so many places that it's pointless to try to mention them. Just think how long it has taken to overcome the rift between north and south in the United States. After 150 years, has the wound truly healed? Reconciliation is no easy project.

Prayer for the Sick - Hard to be Happy

2011-08-12T08:40:00.003+03:00

During the Shabbat morning service, we recite a prayer for the sick, a paradoxical prayer, in some ways, because on Shabbat you aren't actually supposed to ask God for anything. In typical Jewish fashion, we make a rule that is hard to obey (don't ask God for favors on days of rest) and then find a way of doing it anyhow.
In many synagogues, the rabbi or cantor reads a long list of people whose names were given to him earlier, and in other synagogues people come up to the prayer leader and whisper the name to him, so that he can say it out loud. This is a rather boring custom, and in our synagogue a woman recites a general prayer for the sick, and individuals silently recall the people whom they want to bless.
I have a lengthening list of people whose names I say to myself (I don't think anyone else is listening in on my thoughts) during that prayer. The list is shortened occasionally, when one of them passes away.
I remember Kathy G., who has been battling with Parkinson's disease for a decade or more, Andrea P. and Jean-Claude J., who both have multiple sclerosis, Philip H., who has such serious cancer that he doesn't know whether he will live for another year or just another month or two, and Eli S., who has been suffering from schizophrenia for at least twenty years. Now my wife reports that her friend Ziva is very ill with leukemia.
As we head for our late sixties, more and more of our friends and relatives are going to get sick and die, until it's our turn. So, although there are wonderful moments of joy in our life, on the balance, we can't say that we're happy.
Rejecting the moments of joy because the overall picture is so bleak would be like not turning on the heat in the winter, because it's so cold anyway.
Recently we saw a documentary about Jean-Claude, an avant-garde musician who has come to that through rock and roll and jazz. He suffers from his disease, and yet he manages to salvage moments of joy. The film is full of those moments, mainly when he's playing the bass. He accepts both the pain and the pleasure. He has no choice about the pain. It comes with his degenerative disease.
"Courage" is the wrong word for his attitude.
You could look through the thesaurus for a long time before you found the right one.

Down to the Bone - an Upsetting Film

2011-08-09T13:37:00.002+03:00

If you ever want a clear demonstration of how drugs can ruin a person's life, this film is it. The main protagonists of this film are working class white drug addicts living in rural New York state, not stereotype people of color living in urban slums. As a result, the middle-class white viewer can't say to herself: it's not an issue that affects my kind of people.
Since I believe that the criminalization of drug abuse is a policy disaster, making the problem much worse that it would be if cocaine and narcotics were legal, but controlled somehow (I don't pretend to have a clear idea of the correct policy), this movie was a challenge to me. However, without making an issue of it, the movie also shows that some people can indulge in occasional, casual drug use without becoming dependent (at least in the case of cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol), while others become addicted. So I would say that addiction is the problem, not drugs per se.
I still believe that if the money that is currently spent on enforcement, plus the money that would be generated in tax revenue if selling drugs were legal, were spent on rehabilitation of the minority of drug users who become addicts, drugs would do less harm to society than they do today. But I know that drugs are far from benign.

Trivial Junk?

2011-08-08T09:03:00.000+03:00

That's the stuff I wouldn't even want to share with myself!

Writing in Pen and Ink

2011-08-08T08:55:00.003+03:00

A couple of years ago I threw away years and years of journals that I had been keeping, and I'm glad that I did it. Recently, though, I've begun writing in notebooks again, using a fountain pen. The act of writing satisfies me. I enjoy filling up the pages.
Will I ever read what I'm writing? I doubt it.
Will anyone ever be interested enough in me to read it?
Who cares.
The value of the writing is in the writing, even getting a bunch of trivial junk out of my mind by putting it down on paper.
Occasionally the germ of a poem has emerged on the pages of my notebook, or ideas that could be developed, if I had the urge to develop them.
What about a book called: "How to Expect the Unexpected?"
I rather assume that no one in the world is reading the stuff I put in this blog. It's kind of like keeping a journal and leaving the drawer unlocked, half hoping that someone will snoop around in it, but being careful not to put anything too revealing about other people into it.

Fingertips - a Surprising Discovery

2011-08-07T09:47:00.003+03:00

My pottery teacher keeps telling me to use the tips of my fingers to control the clay, and not the flat pads, and I am making an effort to do that.
That effort led me to discover that I also use the pads of my fingers for typing on the computer keyboard, as I am now, and for playing saxophone. So I'm trying to change that, too, because using the tips rather than the pads gives you more control and sensitivity, but it's hard to unlearn a lifetime habit.
It makes me wonder why I developed that habit in the first place.
Very often, changing something very small, like consciously using your fingertips to type (which means curving your fingers rather than keeping your hands flat), can be the key to changing something bigger. Who knows where increased sensitivity and control of one's fingers can lead?

"Radical Judaism"

2011-07-23T23:09:00.002+03:00

I first met Rabbi Arthur Green in the fall of 1969, at Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Mass. Since then he has gone on to be a leading academic in the field of Jewish Studies as well as a religious leader: first the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Philadelphia, and, recently, the founder and head of a new rabbinical seminary in the Boston area. Nevertheless, I first met him as "Art," and I can't think of him as Rabbi Green or Professor Green. Though we share a last name, we are not relatives.
In 2010 Yale University Press published Radical Judaism, which grew out of the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures, which Art gave in 2006. The book was of deep interest to me for personal reasons - my acquaintance with Art and my admiration for him - and because I have been negotiating and renegotiating my own relation to Judaism throughout my life.
Unlike Art, who made a profession of his personal struggle with the demands of Judaism, I moved to Israel, partially so that I could think about other things and take Judaism naturally - which has turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would.
Radical Judaism is a theological statement by a scholar and thinker who has done the serious work that I never put my mind and heart to. It is a bold and honest book, totally without sanctimonious posing, an effort, as he says toward the end, "to rethink our most foundational concepts - God, Torah, and Israel and Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, and to ask how they might work in the context of what we really believe in our age."
My own difficulty with Judaism has been reconciling a strong emotional commitment to being Jewish with an equally strong (or even stronger) inability to believe in God. I enjoy participating in prayer, and I don't believe a single word. From his writing, it is clear that Art doesn't "believe" the words of the prayers either, though he makes them stand for what he does believe in, something I can't do, because I haven't figured out what I believe in and don't ever expect to.
Art's way of remaining religious is what he calls "mystical panentheism," the belief that God is inseparable from the universe, not exterior to it as a creator, but identical with it, permeating it, and that the Whole, as it were, is greater than the sum of its parts, or, that we have within us a holy place that is connected with the holiness of the entire universe. He also admits that his belief is not one that can be demonstrated philosophically, claiming that theology is more akin to poetry than to rational thought.
I'm not sure I can follow Art all the way in that direction, but I am more sure than ever that pretending to "believe" is no way of living as a Jew.

Footnote, the Movie - For a Local Audience?

2011-07-19T07:33:00.003+03:00

If the new Israeli movie, "Footnote," comes your way, you should see it, though seeing it here in Jerusalem is unlike seeing it anywhere else in the world. The movie is about a closed world within a closed world: the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University. But it's about a huge subject: the relations between fathers and sons.
The film obviously means a great deal more for someone who lives here, and who could more or less identify every location in the film, and who knows people very much like the characters in the film, than it could for someone abroad, who doesn't speak Hebrew, who doesn't have the slightest idea what the Jerusalem Talmud is or why anyone cares about its text.
But I think that most successful works of art address a local audience first, and, if they're good, a broader audience can eavesdrop on the local conversation. At the recent Jerusalem film festival, we saw movies from Albania, India, Israel, and Greece. I know virtually nothing about Albania and very little about India, but those local films, about local people, with personal problems, were accessible to me and meaningful to me. Obviously I didn't have the flash of recognition that a local audience would have had upon seeing a familiar landmark, but I could identify.
The best art, I maintain, is intimacy overheard. That's why an intense group of creative people, living close to one another, can stimulate great work: the poet writes first for the poets around him, the painter paints first for his painter friends, the novelists critique each other's manuscripts. That personal interest in the work going on in the group creates a potential interest for the audience.

A Pessimistic Vision

2011-05-31T13:43:00.002+03:00

Sometimes the people in the world, especially the decision-makers and activists, seem like automatic toys that keep moving in exactly the same direction until they bump into something, fall over a precipice, or their battery runs out. Especially here in Jerusalem, people follow their own agendas, come what may, no matter what the consequence, no matter what the facts may be.

Pottery: It's Been Three Years

2011-05-30T18:14:00.002+03:00

I went to my weekly pottery lesson this morning, and it occurred to me while I was there that I started just three years ago. I enjoy it so much, that I can't help wishing that I had begun long ago, that I hadn't dropped the pottery class I was taking at Greenwich House because I was the only boy in it, that I didn't get deep into pottery when I was a young man, instead of following an academic, literary, intellectual path that hasn't really taken me anywhere I actually wanted to go.
Of course the wise part of my mind dismisses those fantasies out of hand. Not only that, instead of lamenting, "Why did I get to it so late?" it says: "Isn't it wonderful that a man in his sixties could have begun a totally new activity and gotten involved in it?" I might discover other wonderful activities before I get sick and die!
Anyway, could anyone, looking back at his or her life from the middle of its seventh decade, say,"The path I took was right for me; I am just where I hoped to be when I began"? Wouldn't that be rather dull? I knew just where I wanted to go, I found the right road, and I got there. Where are the surprises?
My skill in pottery is definitely increasing, and I'm actually pleased with some of the things I've made - though, as always, the maker is more aware of the flaws and shortcomings than anyone else. I'm improving at making the clay do what I want it to do - though I'm far from consistent, which doesn't actually displease me. Sometimes the fun lies in exploiting an error, in turning a project that was supposed to have been a jug into a bowl.
From the start I had the attitude that I wasn't trying to produce perfect pottery. You can buy perfect factory made dishes and vases in any department store. A handmade pot should look handmade. Also, in decorating the pots, I know my limits as a painter. If I tried to do dainty flowers and birds, they would just look silly.
Finally, I keep reminding myself that the whole point is that I'm doing it for fun, for the pleasure of doing it - not a trivial kind of pleasure, but the deep pleasure of molding useful and sometimes handsome vessels with my hands, the sense of communication I have with all the people who have made pots for thousands of years.

Mark Strand

2011-04-28T11:06:00.004+03:00

I always feel slightly guilty about writing poetry while I am not an enthusiastic reader of poetry. On our last trip to America, three months ago by now, I went into a huge bookstore in a shopping center near our daughter's house, and browsed through the poetry section. Compared to the number of books about achieving salvation through better orgasms, there were relatively few books of poetry. I ended up picking out four, including David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh and New Selected Poems by Mark Strand.
I have only begun to browse through that rich volume, and I expect to stay with it for a while. I am enjoying the way Strand brings out the strangeness of experience and his almost plain, almost clear language: "Nothing will tell you/ where you are./ Each moment is a place/ you've never been."
Last week my friends' twenty-year-old son died in a diving accident, a meaningless and devastating stroke of terrible misfortune. I have a good idea how heavy the burden of grief will be for them, year after year. Such tragedies make it impossible to find meaning in life, just as they make it imperative to do so. Poetry dwells in the chasm between impossibility and necessity.
In a poem of my own I wrote:

The Company of Misery, March 2011

I watched a dying hedgehog stagger on short legs.

Troubled by that sick animal, whose pain
Was nothing to the pain of Japan at that moment –
Earth heaving like water,
Water pounding harder than rock.

Japan is distant,
The hedgehog is right here at my feet,
Too feeble to flee.

I could no more help the being near me
Than the people dying far away.

Does Anyone Need Five Saxophones?

2011-04-07T09:24:00.005+03:00

Aspiring amateurs (who can afford it) invest in equipment. Maybe Mr. X takes boring pictures, but he has six cameras and seventeen lenses and a gadget bag full of filters and a closet full of tripods and lights. So I have five saxophones, two clarinets, four or five recorders, and a bunch of ethnic instruments.
Of the five saxophones, I mainly play two: the baritone and the alto. I play the baritone in a big band, and I practice on it a lot, because I'm not exactly the strongest player in the band, and I have to keep my level up. I've been playing alto because it's in the same key as the baritone, so if I learn a song on one instrument, I can play it easily on the other, without transposing it again. I bought an inexpensive soprano about a year ago, and I play it on and off. My tenor has been in the hands of an instrument repairman for ages - that's another story. The fifth saxophone is an old C Melody saxophone that's sort of for sale, but no one in his or her her right mind would buy it, so I plan to take it back from the shop where it's been on sale, and maybe I'll try to overhaul it myself. If I do, I'll also invest (finally) in a C melody mouthpiece rather than use a tenor mouthpiece.
As for the clarinets, one of them is a metal G clarinet that I bought in Turkey, and I can barely play it. The key system is an old-fashioned one, even older than the Albert system that German clarinetists use, and the finger holes are so far apart that I have to stretch my fingers to play it. The other clarinet is an ordinary French wooden clarinet that I bought used a few years ago, and I play it now and then - I'm always surprised that I can play clarinet at all, but that was my main instrument 50 years ago, and your fingers don't forget.
Oh yes, I almost forgot my EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer with 100 built in sounds. I've been playing it fairly regularly with my wife (who plays piano) and our friend, a flautist. We play trios, from early baroque through classical. If I tried to play the trios on a saxophone or clarinet, I'd have to transpose, and, since we're mainly sight-reading, I couldn't really play well enough. With the EWI I don't have to transpose. It has flute-like and oboe-like sounds that fit in pretty well with piano and flute. I can even play a cello part on the EWI (it has a 7 octave range!), though reading bass clef is hard for me. Oddly, I can read bass clef easily on the piano, but not on an instrument that usually uses treble clef. When the cello part is written in tenor clef, I really lose it.
For quite a while my strategy was to concentrate on the baritone, to decide that was my main instrument and to work on it. But when I pick up another horn, I find I enjoy playing that one too, so I'm thinking of adopting a different strategy: going from horn to horn every day that I practice. Two days ago I played clarinet, yesterday I played the soprano, and today I plan to play the alto or the baritone.
Even though a saxophone is a saxophone, as Gertrude Stein ought to have said, there is a big expressive difference between the soprano and the baritone - obviously - and each of the horns offers something different to the musician.
I find that playing the EWI is essentially different from playing my acoustic instruments, probably because neither the sound nor the pitch depend on my embouchure. There's something abstract about playing it, and I conceptualize the music differently.
I certainly don't need five saxophones and an assortment of other instruments, but if I had to sell all but one of them, I don't know how I'd choose.

Technicalities - the Craft in any Art

2011-01-28T16:03:00.004+02:00

Every art has its component of craft: the skill and knowledge about the materials and equipment that you use. As a serious amateur musician, I'm always trying to improve my technique, my sound, and my grasp of music. When we visit the United States -- we just returned from a twelve day visit to our children and grandchildren -- I often order are saxophone reeds, and much more occasionally saxophone mouthpieces (because they're quite expensive and tricky - you have to try them to know whether they're any good for you) on the Internet, because it's expensive and inconvenient to have them sent to us here in Israel, and there is a huge variety available on the web that no local music shop can afford to carry.
Maybe as much as ten years ago, I bought a beautiful looking metal mouthpiece for my baritone saxophone. It has a very live tone, but I've never managed to master it, to play in tune with it, to control the dynamics, to keep the tone consistent, and that frustrates me.
Theorizing that the reeds I was using with that mouthpiece were too hard, this time I bought a box of five rather soft reeds. For anyone who doesn't play a reed instrument, I should explain: the bottom line is, the harder the reed, the harder you have to blow, and the more pressure you have to exert with your lips. The advantage of a hard reed is in the solidity and intensity of the tone, and the disadvantage of playing on a soft reed is that your tone can sound flaccid, and you lose projection and volume.
Mouthpieces are the other end of the equation. The wider the tip opening (the distance between the end of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece), the harder you have to work to get a sound out of the instrument. But if the tip opening is too narrow, your sound is choked, it's hard to play loudly, with projection, and sometimes you can even stifle the sound by squeezing the reed and mouthpiece together with your lips and blocking the air completely.
All of this is highly individual. There is no single good combination that works for everyone. In the reed-player jargon, the combination of instrument, mouthpiece, and reed is called a setup. If you go to one of the hundreds of saxophone sites on the web, you'll see descriptions of the setups that various famous musicians use. The (ridiculous) idea is that if I played on exactly the same brand of saxophone, with exactly the same kind of mouthpiece and reed as Sonny Rollins, I, too, would be able to play as well as he does.
The prudent approach would be to find a setup that works for you and stick with it. But musicians are, quite properly, never entirely satisfied with their sound. Just recently someone sent me the link to an interview about practicing with the late Michael Brecker, where he talks about trying new equipment. So I have approval for my restlessness. In the same vein, my late musical guru, Arnie Lawrence, often said that you shouldn't keep doing what you already do well. The only way to advance in your art is to keep trying new things and taking the risk of sounding bad for a while (if you're a musician).
This notion isn't limited to the craft and art of playing a musical instrument. If you're a poet, and you always write blank verse, try rhyming for a change. If you're a painter who specializes in watercolors, try acrylics or oils or printmaking.
Does art begin where the technicalities leave off? Perhaps, but without mastering the technicalities, one never leaps out into artistry.

The Old Country, as it were

2011-01-16T13:46:00.002+02:00

So here we are at our daughter's temporary home in Rockville, MD, making up for grandchild deprivation. Every time we visit the United States, the country where we grew up, I feel odder and odder about being here. We are out of touch, even though we read the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and we follow US news on the web, and we have dozens of friends and relatives with whom we remain in contact.
But what is Rockville, MD to us? Our daughter and her family are returning to Israel this summer, and the apartment they've been living in has a temporary feel to it - hardly any pictures on the wall, hardly any investment in the place beyond the utilitarian. Compared to their house in Israel, which is decorated and cared for, this place seems a bit like a motel room they've been camping out in.
Our son, by contrast, has settled in here in the United States. He attended university and law school, and, after working for a big firm for 6 years, he's gotten a job with the US government. He and his partner have bought a charming house in an area in DC called Friendship Heights, and they've been working steadily at making it their home.
But the Washington area was never my home, and I only know my way around here tentatively. But it's a city of tourists and transients. No one really expects you to know where you're going.
The season doesn't help me feel at home here: winter. We don't really have winters in Israel, not winters with days and days below freezing, not winter with snow permanently on the ground, not winter with cold, dry winds, not winter that makes the landscape bare and abstract.
The whole point, of course, is to be with the grandchildren, to be in their company, to hear their voices, to enjoy their energy, to watch them move with the grace and enthusiasm of healthy children, and to be thankful that they are healthy children whose parents make sure they are stimulated and enriched, without being controlling.
We're going to go to a modest ski resort in Pennsylvania with the family today. I don't imagine I'll see a lot of them! I'm not sure how much fun a sexaganarian non-skier will have up there, but I'm going along for the ride.

Time

2010-12-31T08:08:00.002+02:00

Years ago I attended a Buddhist retreat, which was meant to be a silent retreat, but because I had volunteered to work in the kitchen, I was not bound to silence, and I exploited my freedom to speak to engage in conversation with one of the teachers. In one of his dharma talks he made the classic Buddhist argument that only the present exists: the past is only an idea, and the future is obviously even more just an idea. The purpose of this conception of time is evident: if the cause of our unhappiness in life is that we cling to ideas, then freeing ourselves of the burden of the past and concern for the future is clearly a way out of our unhappiness. During our conversations, I argued with the teacher, saying that our ability to beat out a regular rhythm is proof that the present is connected with the past and future in our very experience of time.
In the past two weeks or so, I have been working on my sense of time in music. I was shown that my failure to anchor myself in rhythm was my biggest failing as a musician in the big band. I share this weakness with many other members of the band, it turns out, and that's why we don't play tight.
This insight into my weakness came from a rehearsal during which the wind players in the band played without the rhythm section. Our conductor, Eli Benacot, turned on a metronome, which gave an extremely loud beat, but the band kept drifting away from it. He told us that this is what was happening to us when we play with the rhythm section. We generally slow up, and instead of pushing us back up to speed, the rhythm section slows up with us.
Eli explained that the major difference between the kind of music we play - jazz, Latin, and rock - and classical music is what musicians call the groove, the underlying beat that keeps going all the time: swing, funk, samba, bossa, whatever. As if we didn't know that! He told us that he once spent hours and hours playing with a metronome until he had internalized the beat.
During the break I asked Eli how we should practice with the metronome, and he had a very clear method. The main point is being able to shift back and fourth from accenting the first and third beat in 4/4 time (which is the way Western classical music works) to accenting the second and fourth beat, which is the way that jazz and jazz-related music works, something like the difference between "DAdaDAda" (trochees) and "daDAdaDA" (iambs). Eli said that it was something like learning to ride a bicycle (an analogy people use for all kinds of things): suddenly you find that you can do it.
Following Eli's exposition, not only have I been practicing with a metronome, I've also been walking around beating time as I walk (which, by the way, is an excellent form of meditation, because if your mind is entirely on the rhythm, there's no room in it for other thoughts). Yesterday evening, on the way to my pottery class (centering clay is another things people compare to riding a bicycle), I suddenly found that I was able to shift easily between trochees (DAdaDAda) and iambs (daDAdaDA) as I counted off eighth notes while I strode along. So, have I learned to ride the bicycle of rhythm? Only time will tell.
By the way, of course, all this is far from new to me. I've been playing music, including jazz, for quite a few years, so it isn't as if I had to start from nowhere. Eli gave me a way to reconceptualize and improve my sense of musical time, and I hope that it helps me to play better.

A New Way of Writing

2010-12-24T08:08:00.002+02:00

Several mornings in the week, I take the dog to a place where I can let him wander about without danger, and I sit down on a rock or a low stone wall and write in a big fat notebook I bought in CVS or Staples on a trip to America. The dog wanders around, comes back to check on me every now and then, and finally loses patience and starts nudging me with his nose: enough writing, take me home.
I have been attending a poetry workshop for the past year or so. I began attending with a lot of misgivings and have become a convert. The teacher, Jennie Feldman, is a fine poet herself and an excellent, low key discussion leader. Gently she guides us in the direction she wants. The group, mainly women (of course), is otherwise quite diverse, in taste, in literary experience, and in goals. Parenthetically, in my musical activities, I am involved almost exclusively with men, but in my ceramics and poetry groups, I'm almost exclusively with women.
But when I write in the notebook in the morning, I don't try to write poems, though sometimes a poem does grow out of what I write. Nevertheless, I do write in separate lines, as if I were writing poetry.
When you write a phrase on one line,
And the next one on the next line,
You can see your sentences take shape,
Because, after all, it's the shape
Of your sentences
(Metaphorcially, of course)
That makes your writing what it is,
And it helps with word choice too,
Because you can see and hear the words better,
When they're sitting in broken lines.
And it's easier to revise your work.
As for writing in the notebook, my guiding ideas are twofold: first, making a moment in the day to write is a way of taking the thoughts that otherwise flit through my mind and disappear and making them sit still for a moment, so I can examine them; and, second, catching the thoughts on paper ought to give me raw material for more consequential writing later in the day, or later in my life.

Koan

2010-12-14T07:49:00.002+02:00

On Saturday night we ran into a friend who posed us this paradox: can God create a knot that He cannot untie?
On Sunday we visited a friend, an excellent painter, in her studio, and she showed us a book of koans that inspired her work.
Then I thought of a paradox of my own.
Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion, a mental construct. When you reach enlightenment, not a likely occurrence, you'll understand that about your "self."
So, if the self is an illusion, how can art be based on self-expression?
Or perhaps the illusion that we are ourselves is so powerful that it enables the illusion that is art.

A Brief Trip to Turkey - Cognitive Dissonance

2010-11-04T13:34:00.003+02:00

Relations between Turkey and Israel have been deteriorating since the ascent of a Muslim political party, and the loss to Israel is immense.

I have been to Turkey five times now: once on a tour arranged by the archaeology department of the Hebrew University, once at the beginning of an overland trip from Istanbul to Tashkent with Dragoman Tours, once on the way from Macedonia to Romania with some friends, once on a weekend deal to the resort of Antalia, and now we met some friends in Istanbul, flew to Izmir, and saw some of the ancient Greek sites of the Aegean coast. Every time I have gone to Turkey, I have liked the country and its people more.

You can't exactly say that the Turks have a benign reputation. The Ottoman Empire was a dangerous rival to the kingdoms of Europe for centuries, halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Romantic support for the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule did not exactly make Europeans love the Turks, and the slaughter of the Armenians during World War I is a crime against humanity that the Turks haven't yet wrestled with, as far as I know. "Midnight Express" also made Turkey look very bad. When I was in college, back in the 1960s, almost no one wanted to go there.

On our first visit to Turkey we were dyed in the wool hellenophiles and prepared to dislike the Turks, but we couldn't. They were friendly and helpful, pleasant and hospitable. So much so that I find it absolutely impossible to fit what I know about Turkey - brutal suppression of the Kurds, illegal invasion and occupation of Cyprus, repression of civil rights and dissent - with my uniformly pleasant experiences there.

I am aware that, aside from reading a couple of books by Pamuk and seeing a few good Turkish films, I see Turkey very much from the outside, and I understand little of what I see. Use of the Roman alphabet makes the signs legible for us but unintelligible.

That was one of Ataturk's major reforms. He sought to make Turkey into a modern, secular state and only succeeded partially. We were there on October 29, Turkish Independence Day. The streets were full of flags and huge pictures of Ataturk. But the present government does not, I gather, wish to follow through with the program he mapped out.

Being in Turkey gave me a useful perspective and insight into the big picture of recent world history. During the twentieth century many nations achieved independence and were forced to invent or reinvent themselves, and many of these new self-definitions have proven to be false or inappropriate, ignoring too much of the historical heritage, denying the presence of minorities, and adopting institutions that did not grow up from within their culture but were imitations of those of the West. The results were catastrophic.

Indeed, the rise of fascism in much of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century shows that Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (to name just a few) had as much trouble defining themselves for the twentieth century as Egypt, Turkey, India, and China are having in their effort to redefine and redesign themselves today.

In Turkey I am more or less impartial, not an Armenian or a Greek with a historical grudge, not a Kurd who wants independence, but an observer coming from a country with its own deep problems of conflict and self-definition. The outside observer sees problems with clarity that derives from ignorance of the details and complexities. Can one bring that perspective back home and apply it to the issues one faces there?

Identity Stuff

2010-10-24T17:31:00.000+02:00

When I was young I went to synagogue to reinforce my Jewish identity, never because God meant anything to me. Then, when I first came to Israel, still rather young, I thought: Here you don’t need a synagogue to be a Jew. But later on, still a total unbeliever, I wanted to be Jewish actively, not just by default, so I became an unbelieving orthodox Jew. But after many years of that, I realized that wasn’t who I am either. So now I’m a floating Jew, not quite by default, certainly not orthodox, no believer in God, not capable even of imagining belief in God (which is all it ever is anyway). But those ceremonies mean something to me. Maybe defining that “something” would explain who I am as Jewish person.

Everybody has to be something. But we are wrong if we think of “something” as one thing that can summarize and encompass a whole. For everyone is necessarily many things. Some of what we are is virtually inescapable. Some of what we are is accepted without question. Some of what we are is intentionally chosen. Sometimes we intentionally choose what society wants to impose on us in any event - “society” taken in the broadest possible sense – and some of us intentionally reject what society tries to impose on us. Our lives are spun out between objective and subjective constrains. Are we free? Did we choose to become what we have become?

I wanted at one time for the word “Jew” to define me most completely. But that didn’t work out. So I tried the adjective “Jewish” and called myself a “Jewish man.” But I wasn’t so much deciding who I am as putting myself into categories. “Jewish” cuts me off from almost everyone else in the world, those who are not Jewish, and it places me in a category that appears to be much clearer than it is, because the boundary between people who are Jewish and those who are not is a fuzzier boundary than many people on either side of it would care to admit.

“Man” is a huge category, distinguishing me from sentient beings who are not human and from human beings who are not mature males of the species. Though, on closer scrutiny, we see that the boundaries between men and boys and that between men and transgender people are fuzzy in their own way.

I am this, and I am that. I am sometimes this and sometimes that. I was once that, and now I am this. In the future I might be neither this nor that – and I certainly will be nothing at all some day.

Sometimes, like right now, I think about issues. Does that make me a thinker? Sometimes I write poems. Does that make me a poet? I do many different things: I play saxophone, I translate from Hebrew to English, I walk my dog, I make ceramics, I go to the movies, read books, listen to music, attend religious services, have intercourse with my wife, have sexual fantasies about other women, sign petitions, go to an occasional protest demonstration, eat, drink, piss, shit, fart, sleep, dream... The list is not endless, because my life is not endless (or beginningless), but it is very long and varied. Just now, as I looked at what I wrote, I thought of many activities I’d left out. But my point was to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

No matter how long the list might be, one knows that some of the items on it are expressive of who feels that one is, while others are not. Not everyone who plays an instrument is a musician. Perhaps the test is negative: if you stopped playing your instrument, would you lose so much of what you feel yourself to be that you would no longer be yourself?

Surprising Myself Pleasantly for a Change

2010-10-12T10:10:00.002+02:00

When I began throwing pots on the wheel, it sometimes took me forever to center the clay, and I often lost patience and went ahead and tried to make a pot, even though it wasn't centered. The results were sometimes interesting, but I didn't have much control over them. Recently I've improved, so that I can almost always center a smallish hunk of clay quite quickly. In fact, I'm often surprised to find that I've succeeded and can hardly believe that I've done it. The next steps are to learn to center larger hunks of clay, and, of course, to keep the pot centered all the way through the making of it.

Similarly, when I began trying to improvise, it was very hard for me to stay together with the rhythm section and reach the end of the piece the same time they did. I used to get lost all the time. Now I pretty much know where I am. I hear the accompaniment better, I keep the song in my inner ear more consistently, and I can plan my improvisation better (like increasing the number of moves you can plan in a chess game). But I'm still surprised to discover I haven't gotten lost.

I've got a long way to go both in pottery and in music, but it's nice to see that there's been some progress: I've achieved more control over the process.

However, there's a danger in that, too, because too much control stifles creativity. It all depends on where you apply the control. You want to master a craft, so that the material does what you want it to do, but you also wanted to liberate your imagination, so that you can want to do interesting things. Sometimes less skillful artists manage to be more creative than the masters, to compensate for their shortage of skill.

Suspicion of Language

2010-10-11T12:33:00.001+02:00

Words make misunderstanding possible.
Maybe they make understanding impossible.
You can never get to the bottom of an utterance.

"The American" starring George Clooney

2010-10-07T08:18:00.002+02:00

I'll start by admitting that I enjoyed it.

Clooney is a fine actor, the scenery was beautiful, and so were the two main actresses. However, the plots of some movies, if you poke at them, fall apart completely, and "The American" is that kind of film.

Just one example: about halfway through the film someone (a Swede) arrives in the photogenic Italian mountain village where Jack, the Clooney character, is laying low. There is a gun fight, an innocent bystander is killed, and Clooney eventually shoots the Swede. Now, if such a thing happened in "real life" in a tranquil Italian village, the police would undoubtedly swarm all over it the following day, and they would obviously question the mysterious and reticent American "photographer" who had taken up residence there. But two people are killed in the village, a local citizen and a Swedish assassin, and the police take no apparent notice.

However, I'm more interested in the metaplot, as it were.

In the first 5 minutes of the movie, gunmen first as Jack, but he kills both of them, as well as a Swedish woman he had been sleeping with in an isolated cabin in the snowy woods. The audience, naturally sympathetic to the character played by the star, assumes that she had betrayed Jack to the killers, but later on he admits that she was "a friend," not implicated in betrayal, and we have to figure out by ourselves why he killed her.

Throughout the movie Jack is apparently tormented by this crime, though he never comes out and says so. That, of course, is the film's saving grace: Clooney manages to convey the turmoil of Jack's conscience in silent tension and reticent conversations with a kindly priest.

I immediately realized that Jack had to die at the end of the film. That's an iron-clad rule of films of this genre. A problematic hero, who murders someone at the beginning of a movie, has to be killed at the end. A happy ever after would violate the conventions of this kind of thriller.

However, think of how interesting the movie would have been if Jack had not been fatally wounded in the final gun fight, if he had managed to run away with Clara, the redeemed prostitute (another unbearable cliche), and they had found some safe haven, married, and started a family. Each would have borne a terrible secret into his or her new life: Jack's violent past as a hired killer and his guilt as a murderer, and Clara's past as a prostitute! Suppose the movie were narrated from the point of view of a child of theirs, a young adult, who suddenly figures out that her parents' life story just doesn't fit together and tries to find out the truth.

That would be a movie worth seeing.

Bible Hill: Digging into the Past

2010-09-29T09:59:00.004+02:00

This is a picture of the remains of a search for remains: a square left by archaeologists, which, over the years, has become a kind of archaeological remnant of its own.
I don't know why there haven't been extensive excavations on Bible Hill. Perhaps the test squares failed to indicate the presence of important remains, or perhaps the Department of Antiquities lacked the resources to do a full excavation.
It's hard to imagine that a hill in such a prominent location remained undeveloped over the thousands of years of human settlement in Jerusalem. On the other hand, it's also hard to understand why it remained undeveloped in the 60 odd years of the existence of the State of Israel. Maybe there's a problem of ownership.
Property rights in Jerusalem are often difficult to sort out (I say this in the light of a very recent Supreme Court decision denying the rights of Palestinians to the houses in East Jerusalem where they have been living for decades, because the land was owned by Jews before 1948 - a clear instance of a huge disparity between law and justice).
Archaeology also raises the question of how much the past should own the present. Does the presence of something ancient necessarily trump the claims of living people? If the point of archaeology is gathering evidence about the past, once the evidence has been gathered, why not clear away the ancient debris, especially if it's not something particularly beautiful or impressive?
Archaeology can be a metaphor for our attitudes toward our personal past. Some people turn incidents in their past into monuments, and others sweep their past away and move on. I don't think this is the result of voluntary decisions. Some of us can't stop worshiping our past. We can't clear our ancestors' bones out of our living room altars, while others can't relate to those dusty urns at all. There is danger in remembering too much and in forgetting too much.

On Improvisation, Another Interest

2010-09-28T09:22:00.005+02:00

Years ago, when I first began attending the workshops given by the late Arnie Lawrence, I told him that my goal was to learn to improvise. At the time, I thought it was a kind of technique that you could learn, and, in a sense, it is, but not in the way I thought it was.
On the one hand, improvisation isn't all that mysterious or difficult. Every time you open your mouth and utter a sentence, you're essentially improvising. When you're learning to speak a foreign language, it often takes a long time before you can produce new grammatical sentences in that language -- improvise in it -- and improvisation in music is very similar in that respect. You have to learn the musical language that you're improvising in before you can do it.
My goal was to improvise in the language of jazz, and it has taken me ten years or more of steady work to reach the point where I am beginning to feel confident in my ability to do it.
Earlier in the process, when it came my turn to improvise, I often felt like someone who has dived into murky water with his eyes closed, hoping to come up in a certain place, but never sure whether he'd reached it or not until after his head broke the surface and he could look around again.
Or else I felt as if the music were zooming past me at such a pace that I could never catch it.
The next step was playing relatively mechanically, repeating similar patterns over and over again, because it was hard enough to say to myself, "This is an A Major Seventh chord, and I can play certain notes over it," so I couldn't be in much control over which notes I played or how I played them, as long as they weren't wildly inappropriate to an A Major Seventh chord (though, in fact, if you play it in the right spirit, you can play any note over any chord).
I'm still more or less at that stage, but I'm getting better at choosing the notes and avoiding repetitive patterns (at least I think I'm improving at that). Improvisation involves a paradoxical combination of control and freedom. The best times in playing a solo are when you suddenly find yourself playing something that surprises even you, when you suddenly think of playing some notes that you've never practiced and never thought of before.
It's very much like what can happen in writing: an unplanned thought occurs to you - and it's the most important thought of all.

Complaints

2010-09-27T08:59:00.004+02:00

This is the way the old and disused Jerusalem railway station looks from the western edge of Bible Hill. The neglect of this venerable and beautiful monument is, at least metaphorically, criminal. About half a year ago, somebody set a fire in the upper floor. You can see the stains left by the smoke over the windows. The official response to this arson was to place some police barriers (which soon fell down) and warnings that the building was now "dangerous," meaning that it might fall down onto passers by.
The railroad station is not the only derelict public structure nearby. Obviously real estate developers have their eye on it, but until someone decides what to do and receives permission to do it, the building sits in neglect.
A few years ago somebody commissioned murals on metal panels that were placed over the doors and windows, pictures the evoked the building's past as a center of transportation between Jerusalem and Jaffo during the mandate period. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century by the Ottomans. The railroad connection between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coast changed the character of the city.
I am upset by the neglect of this lovely building, which has so much potential, and, on a larger scale, I am upset because this kind of thoughtless neglect is typical of life here in Israel. Why isn't anyone taking on the mission of saving the railroad station and turning it into an attractive cultural and commercial center?

Bible Hill - An Explanation

2010-09-26T19:36:00.007+02:00

Two or three times a week I take a short walk with Kipper, our dog, to a place that the Jerusalem Municipality has decided to call "Bible Hill." Aside from putting a couple of signs up, informing the public that it is an urban nature preserve, the city has done nothing in particular to change it form the way it has been for as long as I remember: a low hill rising up between the disused railway station to the west and the Mount Zion hotel, to the east. The Scottish Church, which appears in the photograph here, is to the north, and to the south is a recently refurbished stucco building that once housed part of the government printing office.
On the lower east slope the remains of an ancient quarry are visible. Between the church and the recently built Begin Center are ancient burial caves. Some impressive archaeological discoveries have been made there, but for now no one is digging.
I go there with a notebook and try to jot down ideas while Kipper runs around, but he foils me. When I sit down quietly, he comes and sits down restlessly next to me, sticks his nose in the notebook, and demands that I walk around with him. So I decided to bring my camera as well as my notebook.

Sitting on a Half-Demolished Stone Wall

2010-09-26T19:26:00.006+02:00

Here I am on a hilltop

In the center of Jerusalem,

Vacant for no discernible reason.

My mongrel is roaming free –

No cars here to kill him,

Plenty of things to sniff at.

Trivial questions distract me.

I don’t even know what kind of building

This wall once belonged to.

What am I trying to capture or figure out?

There might have been a message once, but

I was young, and the young

Don’t know how to listen. They only hear

Words they’ve already said to themselves.

So I probably got the message wrong

Or misremember: Maybe no one told me,

“Life is supposed to be fun.”

Now I think they were saying:

"Life isn’t supposed to be anything

Specific, just what it turns out to be."

Performance is Reality (or vice versa)

2010-09-01T14:25:00.003+03:00

Yesterday evening I played jazz with my friend Ra'anan, a pianist, at a restaurant in Jerusalem. I played baritone sax. I like to compare the baritone to a big, friendly dog. It's so big, it doesn't have to be aggressive to make its presence felt. But it's a heavy, clumsy instrument, and playing it standing up takes a lot of strength.
We performed about ten songs, a mix of standards, blues, and Latin. Ra'anan and I have been playing together for years, and we have performed in public a few times, but maybe now we've reached a new stage, when we'll be performing a lot more.
My concentration on the music is considerably more intense when I'm performing in public, even if the audience is mainly people who aren't really listening very carefully. I am inside the music in a way I can never be when I'm just listening to music. If I were a better listener, I would also be a better player.
Bringing your art, whatever it is, outside, putting it in front of other people, gives it a quality it can never have when it's only private. In theory or aspiration, I always try to play so that every note I play counts and matters (or, for that matter, so that every word I write matters). But of course that's something I can rarely achieve. When I play for other people, my intention is more powerful. At the end of the evening, I am both exhausted and exhilarated.

Our Wonderful Rabbis

2010-08-30T18:14:00.002+03:00

In a recent sermon, the "spiritual leader" of the Sefardi Torah Guardians, a large and powerful factor in Israeli politics, called upon God to kill the Palestinians in general and Abu Mazen in particular. Another rabbi has written a book that explains when, according to Jewish law, it is permissible to kill non-Jews.
While it is certainly troubling that among Israel's rabbis there are thinkers who rival the mullahs of Iran in their benighted extremism, it is almost more troubling to see the solidarity of much of the orthodox religious establishment in support of these disgusting figures.

If Clothes Make the Man, I'm in Trouble

2010-08-29T09:35:00.002+03:00

When my elder daughter got married thirteen years ago, I bought a light brown, three piece suit in honor of the wedding - and I wore it. The wedding was in August, but it was outdoors, and the suit wasn't too heavy.
Since then I don't think I've worn the suit twice. The men in Israel who regularly wear suits are the ultra-orthodox, and the rest of us mainly dress casually. A shirt with buttons is pretty formal by Israeli standards.
When my younger daughter decided to get married, I planned to wear the same suit. I checked, and sure enough, I could still get into it. It needed pressing, but it still looked fine. So on my list of things to do before the wedding was to purchase a new dress shirt that would go well with the suit. I ended up buying one for 219 shekels, which is about $57, and I NEVER have paid that much for a shirt before. My idea of an expensive shirt is one that costs about half that amount. (You can guess where I buy my clothes!) But I figured that for my daughter's wedding, I could splurge for once in my life. Anyway, we were spending so much money, that $57 for a shirt was negligible.
In the end, I didn't wear the suit, but I did wear the shirt. Israel was plagued with an extreme heatwave this month, and if I'd worn a three piece wool suit, I would have been carried away from the wedding on a stretcher with an infusion sticking in my arm.
This morning I ironed the shirt, trying to persuade myself that the quality of the cloth and the tailoring justified its high price, which led me to think about why I hate to pay a lot of money for clothes. Is it just because I'm cheap? I don't think so. I'm not cheap about everything.
As for ironing my own shirts, I don't mind it. Every few weeks I have an ironing marathon and take care of a pile of my shirts, and while I'm doing it, my mind wanders all over the place - some pleasant thoughts and some less pleasant.
Among the unpleasant thoughts arose the memory of a British acquaintance of ours named Robert, a large, rich, extravagantly homosexual writer of sorts, who committed suicide by jumping out of his window a few years ago. Robert discovered a Christian Arab chef named Bassam who needed extra money and was willing to clean houses, and he recommended him to us. Bassam worked in our house a couple of times. He was a diligent, polite man, clearly much too intelligent and refined to be cleaning houses, and after a week or two he stopped doing it.
Robert, in recommending Bassam, also praised his skill in ironing shirts, and he immediately realized that he'd said the wrong thing to me. Just as I don't wear expensive clothes, I would never pay someone to come to my house and iron my shirts. But Robert was a wealthy man. I don't imagine that he had a single shirt that cost less than $57. But his life wasn't worth anything to him.

I Wonder About Poetry

2010-08-20T09:24:00.002+03:00

In the past six months or so, I have been participating in a poetry workshop led by Jennie Feldman, a British poet who lives in Israel. She is a fine teacher, creating a supportive atmosphere in the group, heightening out appreciation of our own poems and those she brings in by recognized poets (she calls them published poems).
It's been valuable for me. Because of the group, I have written a bunch of poems, and because of the critiques and responses both to my poems and to the others, I've become a better reader of poetry.
However, in fact, I am not a reader of poetry. Occasionally I'll buy a book of poems, occasionally I'll skim through it and read something. But I would say that poetry accounts for maybe 2% of my total reading.
So why should I write the kind of thing that I'm not interested in reading?
One reason I don't read much poetry is that so much of what pretends to be poetry is simply dreadful. You have to wade through a long, long low tide before you get to the deep water. To illustrate:
Recently I was asked to be a judge in a poetry contest. There have been about forty entries so far, of which thirty could be dismissed immediately as (a) not poetry, (b) not written in literate English, and (c) not on the topic of the contest. I had a similar experience as the editor of a volume of a literary journal.
On the other hand, I do read the poems that appear in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, to which we subscribe. But some of them don't speak to me at all. I can see in some objective way that they are well wrought poems, but they aren't about things that interest me. I'm particularly suspicious of nature poems. I have picked a lot of figs this month, and I thought that someone else might write a poem about that. But harnessing nature to your poetry is cheating, in a way. It's like sprinting on one of those conveyor belts they have in airports.

The Only Soprano Sax in Town

2010-08-10T15:08:00.000+03:00

When we went to Cyprus a couple of months ago, I brought along the new soprano sax that I bought, a very inexpensive (and consequently not terribly good) instrument, which has the advantage of being light, small, and, if it's damaged or lost, not a big risk.
I don't like to go without playing at least every other day, if not more often. I've invested a lot of effort in getting as good as I am, and I'm struggling to maintain my level as well as improve. But it's not only the compulsive side of me: I enjoy making music. When I travel, I usually don't bring printed music with me, so I play what I remember by ear, I play various exercises, and I improvise. This time I brought my portable computer with me, and I have some pdf files of Realbooks on it, so when I couldn't remember a song, I could look it up.
We were staying in a pension in a tiny village in the Trodos Mountains, and when I played, the sound carried all over. Usually I don't like to impose my practising on everyone else in the vicinity, but people kept telling me that it sounded nice, so I was undeterred.
So there I am, in the bedroom, in between phrases.
Sometimes I think there's an inverse relation between the amount of equipment a person owns and the level of his or her skill. The worse you are as a photographer, the more cameras, lenses, and accessories you acquire. The worse you are as a musician, the more instruments you own.
Of course, like a lot of clever statements, that one isn't true.
Some excellent photographers own dozens of cameras, piles of lenses, and so on, and some excellent reed players might own every kind of woodwinde imaginable. There are different kinds of artists: the ones who keep working in one medium, in one way, forever, finding creativity in depth and concentration, and the ones who take up one medium after another. It's a question of personality, of course, and also one of searching. Sonny Rollins, for example, found the tenor saxophone, and that was enough for everything he wanted to express. But a player like Yusef Lateef used the oboe and other instruments, always looking for the instrument that would play the music he wanted to play.
Anyway, in the end, it's not the instrument, but the music!

Progress (in Pottery)

2010-08-06T08:32:00.003+03:00

I made the hand-washing cup on the right about a year ago, and I brought home the one on the left just yesterday.
The older one has a kind of childish charm to it, but it's heavy, the handles are clumsy, and the drawing on it is crude.
The recent one is a lot bigger and more gracefully shaped. I wasn't able to make large pots at the time that I made the first one. The glaze came out pretty well, the handles are neater, and, while I expect that in a few years, if I keep doing pottery, I'll see it as crude and clumsy, the flaws in it are more apparent to a potter than to an ordinary person.
I imagine I'll reach an age when all my systems will be in decline, but, fortunately, I'm not there yet. I'm still engaged in things that I can get better at.
For now, I'm less concerned with the things that I make in my weekly pottery class than with gaining skill and mastery. I'd like to make large pots, but, though I'm improving, I still can't keep the clay centered well enough to do it consistently. For the sake of discipline, I spent the last five or six sessions making nothing but mugs. Some of them came out decently, but I still am not able to produce a form that I have in mind in advance, and to produce the same form consistently, time after time.
I could rationalize (and I do), saying that it's more creative and spontaneous to work the way I do, but higher creativity comes from mastery of technique, and higher spontaneity comes from the ability to do what you set out to do.
Still (here's the rationalization): I know, from writing and music, as well as from pottery, that the best moments are the ones when you surprise yourself, when you write something you hadn't thought of before, when you play a solo that is better than you thought you could play, and when you see and feel something in the clay that you didn't know was there.
By the way, for anyone who might read this and isn't familiar with Jewish ritual, the hand-washing cups are used before meals, with a blessing for washing hands, before one recites the blessing over bread.

My Schizophenic Friend

2010-08-03T15:06:00.004+03:00

I have known the man I'll call Mannie here for about fifteen years, and in the past five or six years, since we have been driving to a weekly activity - about forty-five minutes each way - I've got to know him very well, and, despite his severe mental illness, I can call him a friend.
Mannie is a large, slow-moving, gentle man in his forties. The drugs the psychiatrists have been giving him have made him quite fat - though sometimes he loses weight, because he has hallucinations about his food and can't eat anything.
It took Mannie years to trust me enough to admit that his illness was mental, and by now he often bares his soul to me, and I don't really know what to do with his confidence. I'm not a psychiatrist, and I'm never sure what I should be telling Mannie.
Mannie sometimes complains that he feels as if he's drunk, but without the pleasure of being tipsy. He hears voices that tell him to do all kinds of things: mainly to protect people about whom he's worried. He worries in particular about one close friend, who has stood by him for years. Mannie has often said to me, "I'm very worried about Arnold. I think I should park my car in front of his house all night and make sure nothing bad happens to him." Mannie thinks that the police or some other "bad people" will come at night to murder Arnold, and he can stop them.
He has similar fantasies about hospitals. The other day he told me that he had seen an elderly man dressed in blue and white, and he stopped his car to ask the man if he could help him. The man said he was going to Hadassah Hospital. Mannie offered to give him a ride, but the man said he would take a cab. Mannie decided to drive to the hospital himself, so that he could protect the stranger dressed in blue and white. He apparently spent a few hours wandering around the hospital, protecting the patients.
Just recently he told me that he was sure that some very evil people were doing bad things to him, making him ill, but that God had given him the strength to withstand it.
A few years ago, when the news was coming out about the accusations against Moshe Katsav, Israel's former president, I made the mistake of mentioning the case to Mannie. It was clear to me at the time that, where there's smoke, there's fire. Katsav would not have been indicted for sexual misconduct if there was nothing at all behind the accusations - whether or not he will ultimately be found guilty.
It was an error for me to raise the subject, not because Mannie was an ardent fan of Moshe Katsav's, but because Mannie believes he forced a woman to have sex with him in Eilat, years and years ago. He construes the most innocent remark, such as, "Mannie, did you bring your music stand?" as an accusation: "Mannie, you raped that woman in Eilat."
Mannie is a sweet, kind man, considerate, helpful, and even humorous, when his illness will allow him. His suffering is entirely incomprehensible - to him and to anyone who has never experienced something like it.
Sometimes Mannie calls me for advice, and I try to tell him: "It's only your illness talking." Maybe if he could begin to dismiss the voices that tell him that the people he loves are in danger, he could manage his life better. But from the way he speaks of them, it's clear that those voices have more strength and presence than anything I could tell him. Though he often seems to call me because he wants me to tell him not to go and guard Arnold.
Other times I tell him, "Mannie, it's normal to be worried about people. Everybody's worried about the people they love." Or, "Mannie, it's true, there really are a lot of bad people in the world, but here in Jerusalem we're well protected by the police and the army." He isn't entirely out of touch with what I think of as reality, and I try to appeal to that.
However, Mannie gets messages from the signs of buses and billboards, or from the way people in the street look at him. I sometimes try to say, "Mannie, we all feel that something could be a sign of bad luck or good luck." I also asked him, "Do you ever see signs that are encouraging?" He loves lights, the sight of a town from a distance, and he admitted that sometimes he gets a good feeling from them.
There's not much anybody can do for Mannie, beyond being patient and friendly. He's been in and out of mental hospitals very often, and the doctors haven't been able to find a drug that will control his psychosis. My contacts with him leave me feeling very troubled. I'm relieved that I can leave him behind and go back to my own life. But it's terribly sad to see a big, strong man crippled by the chemistry of his brain.

2010-08-03T15:06:00.001+03:00

My Notebook

2010-05-24T08:29:00.000+03:00

I don't always remember to keep my notebook with me, and I don't always remember to write things down in it, and I seldom think of paging through it to see what I wrote.

Passover Thoughts - Two Months Late or Ten Months Early

2010-05-24T08:12:00.005+03:00

Before our Seder, I went over the story of the Exodus with my grandchildren, and that made me realize that the telling, rather than the Exodus itself, is the main experience. Since all of the Israelites who actually left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea died in the desert, the ones who actually entered the land had only heard about the experience.

You don't have to believe in miracles, in divine intervention in history, or even that the story of the Exodus might be based on some kernel of historical truth to appreciate the power of telling the story. One wonders: why did the ancestors of the Jewish people tell this story about themselves? Why did they want to "remember" that they were once slaves? And why did they locate the story of their redemption in the past?

We (whoever "we" are - everyone who identifies with the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, perhaps) certainly didn't manage to stay redeemed. The Bible says it's our fault: we lapsed into sin and idolatry. A cynic might say: what can you expect? That's human nature. But a religious person can't accept human nature (which may be why I can't honestly call myself a religious person). Religious life is a life of yearning, yearning for the restoration of past perfection, yearning for the realization of future redemption. And also yearning for another kind of human nature.

Ritual is the effort to create a temporary state of redemption in the here and now. Every once in a while that works for me.

If Something Happened, it had to Happen

2010-04-27T09:17:00.002+03:00

By definition.
If it didn't have to happen, it wouldn't have happened.
Everything that happened up to this very moment was inevitable.
Otherwise we would have avoided it.
So is free will an illusion?
I think so - but an inevitable one!

Importance

2010-04-27T09:12:00.002+03:00

Importance is relative, not absolute.
Something is important to me only because I believe that it is important to me.
Something that is important to someone else may be (and probably is) of no importance at all to me, and vice versa.
Art has the capacity of making something that was important to the artist important to the audience of his or her art.
Most things that we think are (or will be) important to us turn out to be quite unimportant, in retrospect.

Mistakes and Errors

2010-04-27T09:05:00.002+03:00

In an op. ed. piece by a cognitive scientist I once was exposed to the distinction between mistakes and errors.
A mistake is when you step on the accelerator rather than the brake.
An error is believing that accelerators are brakes.
Why do people persist in error?
Because they have too much invested in it to let it go.
We unconsciously believe that we will be unhappy if we abandon the error, but we don't realize that the error is the cause of our unhappiness.
We think that if we abandon the error, our lives will be empty, but we don't realize that the error merely masks the emptiness of our lives and prevents us from living meaningfully.

Two Recent Poems

2010-01-19T10:55:00.001+02:00

If only! If only!
That impotent chorus!

On a hike I learned
The wisdom of looking back:
Dry boulders, water-worn pebbles.

Hard footing
Sun, sweat, thirst

“Look back,
“It’s a different landscape
“from below.”

Yes, that’s where I made a wrong turn
Didn’t see there were two paths.

Anyway, they all meet at the Dead Sea

The Bed I Share

I’ve dreamt a lot in it
Embraced a woman
Whose bed it equally is
But when I lie
Sleepless and dreamless
Long before dawn
And listen to her deep breathing
She is as much a stranger
With her imponderable life
As that young man
Reading a book
At the table over there in the corner

Nothing has to be mine
Just as I needn’t have been at all

Horns

2009-11-05T08:03:00.002+02:00

Sometimes I think that amateurs acquire equipment in inverse proportion to their skill. A mediocre amateur photographer might have a dozen cameras. An unskilled aspirant to gourmet cookery might clutter his kitchen with expensive pots, pans, knives, and other paraphernalia.
So it is that I own four saxophones and two clarinets, as well as an electronic wind instrument, plus a bunch of ethnic instruments, drums, and recorders. If I were really good, I would own, let's say, one saxophone and a back up horn, or a B flat and an A clarinet, and that would be enough.
There are of course experts who also collect the tools of their trade. I remember reading that Eric Clapton has a massive number of guitars, and I have heard that the virtuoso, versatile reed player James Carter owns an impressive array of instruments. So owning too many instruments isn't necessarily an indication that one isn't a skilled player.
My main instrument is now the baritone saxophone, a huge, heavy, clumsy instrument, which is such a pain in the ass to bring to places where I am expected to play, that I wonder how I ever got involved with it.
Gerry Mulligan was the first musician I ever heard of who played the baritone sax, but I wasn't a fan of his when I was first getting enthusiastic about jazz, back in the late fifties when most of the gods of jazz were still alive. Sonny Rollins and his tenor were what swept me off my feet.
Many years later, in Israel, a few years after I took up music again, and I had acquired a brand new Yanagisawa tenor, a friend of mine invited me to play a couple of times with a saxophone quartet that needed to include a second tenor on a couple of pieces, and I met up with a real live bari player. I was distinctly uninterested in the instrument and wondered why anyone would choose to play one.
However, in the late 1980s I was playing tenor saxophone in a short-lived amateur bigband, and there was no baritone player, and at the same time I heard of a musician who had decided to sell his baritone, so I decided to buy it. I overpaid for his mediocre quality Italian horn (a Grassi), but I got to like playing the instrument, and a few years later I decided to treat myself to a really excellent baritone (a Selmer Super-Action 80, for those who are involved in that sort of thing). My father had died, and I was sad. I needed something new in my life to perk me up, and he left me some money, so I could afford the instrument (good baritone saxophones are not cheap). And, it turns out, not-s0-good baritone saxophones are hard to sell. I was stuck with that Grasssi for quite a while.
As I mentioned, I own a bunch of other instruments, including a decent alto saxophone (Selmer Mark VII) and a classic vintage Conn tenor (my wonderfully generous cousins Lewis and Ellen gave it to me when Ellen's father grew too demented to play anymore), as well as a decent clarinet (my second clarinet is a Turkish metal G clarinet that is more of a novelty than an instrument that I can play), and I feel that I owe it to the instruments to play them now and then. What's a sadder object than a musical instrument that no one plays?
Individual musicians have their own personalities, which are expressed in their playing, and every instrument has its own personality. Not only does every type of instrument have a personality (trombones versus violas, let's say), but each individual acoustic instrument has a special character. So what comes out is always a blend: the musician's personality expressed through the instrument's personality. For example, Eric Dolphy, who played alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet, was always Eric Dolphy, but each instrument enabled him to express a different aspect of his protean musicality.
To step down from the Elysian Fields, where Eric Dolphy is still playing, I hope, recently I have been playing clarinet a little more frequently than in the past, and it's taking me a while to feel comfortable on the instrument, and I don't yet have a clarinet me. The lowest note on the B flat clarinet is a concert D below middle C, and the lowest note on the baritone sax is almost an octave below that. The clarinet is an agile instrument, the baritone sax is kind of elephantine. Their expressive potential is different.
The problem is that it's so much easier for me to play sax than clarinet, that I tend to avoid the challenge and settle back into the place where I feel comfortable. My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say that you shouldn't keep doing what you're already good at, if you want to progress. That's something to keep in mind.

Pottery Fantsy - Pottery Reality

2009-10-27T12:48:00.002+02:00

I have installed a well-equipped pottery studio in the back room of our house, which we call the "blue room." I have a wheel, a kiln (outside in a shelter), work tables, shelves, tools for working and decorating clay, engobes, glazes - the works. I have essentially quit working as a translator and editor and given up writing projects and ambitions. My main activity in life is now producing attractive, mainly useful forms. Every day I get up and work in the studio, on a variety of projects, both throwing on the wheel and hand-building. I sell the work that I make at moderate prices, and I am not aiming at producing perfect pieces - just pleasing ones.
I travel to ceramic supply shops, to the studios of other potters, to exhibitions.
I read about making pottery and experiment with techniques - gradually.
I take on projects - in order to learn - sets of things - exploring forms.

Suppose I had gotten bitten by the pottery bug back when I was in high school. Would I have been happy as a potter? That's a stupid question, of course. Stupid because I can't go back in time, and stupid because, had I been the kind of kid who was swept up into a craft like pottery, I would have been a totally different person, because I wasn't that kind of kid. So then I'm asking, would that other person have been a happy man? Or, perhaps, I'm asking: would I rather have been that kind of person?

Running (?) Again - at my age?

2009-10-06T16:38:00.005+02:00

I swore to myself that I would keep jogging until I turned sixty, even though I was suffering from chronic tendinitis , but after I took that "last" run, I stopped. That was four years ago. I'm coming up on my sixty-fifth birthday, and every time I see somebody jogging, I feel envious. So the other day, I decided I would start jogging again, very gradually and very slowly.

Having a vigorous young dog to walk is clearly another incentive. I used to jog with our two dogs in the Peace Forest, not far from our house. I'd let them off the leash, and we'd have a good time. But one of the two dogs is dead, and the other old one is so lame she can barely walk around the block. But our new, young dog needs a lot of exercise, and so does this aging human. After only 5 jogs, I can already feel the positive effect.

The first 3 times I only jogged for 6 minutes, but yesterday I got it up to 15 minutes, and today to 20 minutes. My muscles seem to remember what it was like to run, though they are still weak. But today, when I started my slow jog, I could feel my body asking for it, telling me, where have you been? I'm trying very hard to avoid injuring myself, to avoid overdoing it. When I jogged regularly, I never tried for speed. I took the advice of that great book, Running and Being, and tried for LSD: Long Slow Distances. The only one I'm competing with is me. If I manage to keep jogging for twenty minutes three or four times a week, that will be fine.

As for the dog, he sticks close to me but takes ten steps for every one of mine, zigzagging around, smelling things, dropping back, racing to catch up, running to the side, observing.

Fasting and Belief

2009-09-29T09:33:00.004+02:00

Last night, after the Yom Kippur fast, we ate dinner with some friends, one of whom, a man in of seventy, has recently converted to Judaism. He admits that it was an odd thing to do. He married an orthodox Jewish woman, who was there with him. They both said that people ask them, at your age, why did you bother to marry? After all, you're not going to have children. Bill, the convert, usually responds, "Really?" After all, they're both very young looking.

Bill noted that it was the first time in his life that he had fasted, gone without food or water for 25 hours. I was a bit surprised, because I can't count the number of times I've fasted. It's almost normal for me.

The purpose of the fast is to keep the message of Yom Kippur in mind: God judges us between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when we have ten days to repent and change our ways, and He delivers our sentence on Yom Kippur, when our fate is decided (actually, there's supposed to be a grace period until the end of Sukkot). If we repent for our sins now, we won't die this year. Otherwise, our fate is sealed.

Did any of the six of us around the table last night, all of whom had attended the long Yom Kippur services and fasted, take that message literally? I doubt it. I know that my wife and I don't believe it, because we discussed it.

So why do we bother?

Solidarity, for one. Jews have been fasting on Yom Kippur for a couple of thousand years, and for many otherwise completely unaffiliated Jews, fasting on Yom Kippur is still a sign on their part that they feel an allegiance to the Jewish people. The Marranos in Spain used to fast on Yom Kippur for the same reason. It's the kind of religious observance you can practice without people noticing it.

Okay, but why sit through and participate in the long and repetitive liturgy? Why pound your chest endlessly, confessing to an alphabetical list of sins? Why get to your knees at certain points in the service? Why not just stay home, fast, and listen to music or read a book?

The best answer, for me, is one that a learned friend of mine proposed: "Spiritual Theater." I know that, like an actor, I am speaking with a kind of sincerity when I recite the prayers. But what am I acting out?

First, I'm responding to the terrible uncertainty of life. I looked around the packed synagogue while we were reciting one of the central prayers, "Unetane Tokef" (Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness), and I realized that, without doubt, some of the people present in the room will not be alive next year at this time. Perhaps I myself won't be. Maybe I don't believe specifically that by observing the Sabbath more meticulously, I will avoid that fate. In fact, I don't think that anything I might do will be helpful, except exerting caution, watching my health, and so on. But I know that, as carefully as I drive, a car could veer into my lane and cause my death, just to name one of the many reasons why I might not make it through the year.

Second, I'm responding to the need to repent - maybe not in the orthodox Jewish sense of trying to observe more of the commandments more scrupulously - but certainly in the sense of trying to be a better person. It's easy to avoid examining one's life. The High Holidays push you in that direction.

Third, let's not forget solidarity. After all, publicly observing Yom Kippur as part of a community is much more powerful than privately observing it. Part of my identity is that I am the kind of Jew who attends religious services quite frequently, setting aside the issue of belief.

Fourth, the High Holiday liturgy is very beautiful. Even though it is too long and repetitive, there are some aesthetic high points, some great poetry, some dramatic moments in the service, some beautiful music in the hymns we sing. It has a lot of emotional depth and power. Not only is it "Spiritual Theater," it's good theater, and theater of a unique sort, in which the spectators are also actors.

Last, it's therapeutic. Yom Kippur brought up many deep and disturbing memories in me, memories of people I had disappointed, relationships I hadn't done justice to, personal failures of various kinds. I barely slept at all on the night of Yom Kippur. I felt that my life was shattering. But over the day the pieces fell together again - I hope not in the same way. Because self-improvement is a process of dismantling, sometimes painful and frightening, and reconstruction, often challenging and uncertain, with some of the bad pieces left out and the whole structure different from what it was.

Read Out Loud in British English

2009-09-12T21:02:00.002+03:00

A while back I had a little story accepted by a creative British organization called The Liars' League. Every month they hold an evening at which actors read short stories that have won their contest, and they also post the stories and the MP3s on their web site. I've attached the MP3 to a video and I'm uploading it here.

The pictures aren't really connected to the words. I found out that the only way to upload an audio file is to use Windows Move Maker to make the audio file into a sound track, and then you can stick whatever picture you like on it.

It was very amusing to me to hear my work enunciated very carefully in British English. It was also amusing to me to hear the audience's reaction: it took them a while to figure out that it was supposed to be funny. Probably because of the deadpan delivery. I wish I could have been there in person. Next trip to London!

Being Away and Coming Back - Awareness of Change

2009-09-07T11:17:00.006+03:00

I just spent a bit more than three weeks in the United States, in the suburbs of the capital, and once again I had to deal with the intense and contradictory feelings of familiarity and strangeness. It's the country where I grew up, where I speak the native language like a native, but so much has changed in the 36 years that I've lived away from North America. Frequent visits and keeping up with the media - seeing American films and TV shows, reading American books and magazines - all that is not the same as living there.
On my last day in Washington, DC, I went into a Borders book store for the first time (!) and bought a couple of books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, who may be a bit too glib for some people's taste, but he's definitely very smart and insightful. I read the book within a couple of days, on the plane home and in bed when jet lag gave me insomnia.
I was especially taken by the chapter on context: if you change the context in which people act, you can change their behavior. I began to wonder (and I am far from coming up with any answer) how it would be possible to change the context here in the conflicted Middle East so that the epidemic of violence would tip and an epidemic of non-violence might begin.
Long ago I was involved in Tai Chi, where, as in many Asian martial arts, the theory is that you can defeat your opponent not by overpowering him but by using his strength against him. The sub-title of Gladwell's book is something like: how a small change can make a big difference. The peace movement doesn't have the power to make big changes, but if it makes the right small changes in people's attitudes, in the context of behavior, they could lead to a big change. Up to now, the Israeli peace movement has been largely ineffective in changing attitudes. Obviously it's been doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing be?
So what's the connection between my opening paragraph about the strangeness of being in America for me and the rest of it, about the Tipping Point and changing the context of behavior? For me, the strangest (and most wonderful) thing about America was the visible change in racial relations. Over and over again I saw mixed groups of black, white, and Hispanic people walking in the street, sitting at tables in restaurants, passing each other on the street, in the most natural way.
When I was growing up, even in multi-racial New York City, it would have been very rare to see people of different races mingling. Something has tipped in America with respect to race, and the election of a man with an African father as President is a symptom of the change, not a cause of it.
I'm not so naive as to think that discrimination is gone, or that people of darker color aren't disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and badly educated compared to people of lighter color, but the open, unselfconscious mingling shows that some of the fear and hostility that had marked race relations in the America I grew up in has abated. Black people are no longer invisible in the United States.
So couldn't the same thing happen between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine?

A Challenge

2009-08-17T02:40:00.002+03:00

My cousin N. H. an accomplished, professional printmaker with an international reputation, a woman who has devoted her life to art, as an artist and as a teacher of art, challenged me in a phone call, in response to the blog entry about the Jerusalem Craft Fair. What exactly did I mean when I put down the man who was trying to make a living as a potter? (I didn't mean to put him down. I have a lot of respect for his skill. I know how hard it is to do the kind of work that he does. It's just that if I did have his high level of skill, I don't think I would use it to make 100 mugs all the same, etc.).

I respect N.'s responses enormously, because she's thought about these things, taught about them, and also lived them. She's a fine artist, not a craftswoman. But printmaking has a lot of craft to it, a lot of technique, a lot of process. As she pointed out to me in the phone call, my profession - I am a translator - is also a kind of craft, and I have spent years and years trying to get better at it - even when the task at hand is a routine, even boring, I try to do the best job I can, to use all my skills. So how is that different from the potter who applies all his skill and experience to producing a series of mugs, jugs, bowls, and so on?

I guess it has to do with the level of creativity involved in the task. If I'm translating a carefully written work of literature, a work that embodies creativity, then I need creativity, too. The same goes for making pots.

There were 3 other ceramicists showing their wares at the fair, whose work I respected more than that of the man I mentioned. All three were prolific - they had a lot of ware for sale - but they were also more creative, more experimental, and they made fewer examples of each type of their work. It's very challenging not only to start off every day, making things, but also to make new things and new types of things every day, to master new processes. I'm still at the beginning stage in pottery, where the basic techniques are challenging: centering a pot, building it up, getting it thin and light, controlling the shape. But I can already see that meeting the early challenges only brings you face to face with new ones.

2009-08-06T09:09:00.000+03:00

This planter is pretty big. I made it last summer, so when I say that I like it, I'm not being blinded by partiality. If I still like it after a year, then maybe I'm right.
I like the size of it. When my skills enable me, I intend to do a lot of big pieces. I like the presence of a large piece. With handbuilding, I can actually make things quite large, but on the wheel, I can't control the clay yet.
I like the surface. I purposely left the coils visible. I could have rubbed the surface with a damp sponge until it was completely smooth - I've done that - but I wanted it to have a crude, organic feeling, as if it had grown, not been made. I never intended to glaze or decorate the surface.
I also like the usefulness of the vessel. Strictly speaking, it's not useful. It's decorative. But when you make a planter, you're making something in the service of the plant.
I'm not ready emotionally to produce something that I would point at and say: this is a Sculpture. Just as it's hard for me to put some lines of my writing in front of someone and proclaim that they're a Poem. Perhaps if I didn't use capital letters, I'd be more comfortable with the idea. But I believe that Art deserves capital letters.
When you make things like flowerpots or bowls, even vases intended for flowers, you're making something that should be decorative, pretty, but not something that makes a statement, like a self-proclaimed work of art. Though of course it does make a statement - under its breath.
Notoriously, the question, "What is art?" has been answered in many ways during the history of Western culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, the existence of the category, "Art," is far from a cultural universal, and the notion that a painting, a poem, a sonata, and a play are all works of art, and, in that sense, have something in common, is rather odd, when you think of the extreme differences among the things that we regard as art.
So if I sat down in front of a lump of clay and said to myself, "I intend to create a Work of Art out of this lump of clay," I would probably inhibit myself so severely, that I would never touch the clay. But I do intend to produce works that partake of art.

One of a Kind (two of them)

2009-08-05T09:14:00.001+03:00

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the annual summer craft fair in Jerusalem. It is held in the Sultan's Pool, an ancient reservoir in the valley beneath the Turkish walls of the Old City, a setting of the kind not too many cities can offer. I'm very familiar with the place. When I had two active dogs, I used to bring them down there frequently, because they could run about freely without being hit by cars. Now I have only one, elderly dog, who's too arthritic for long walks, so I don't walk about the Sultan's Pool anymore.
As familiar with the place as I am, I found it hard to orient myself, because it was dark, and because of the booths that had been put up all over the place, and because it was packed with people.
The fair always attracts thousands of visitors, because in addition to booths selling crafts from all over the world (Korea, Uzbekistan, Morocco, India - you name it), the work of Israeli craftspeople, and a nice selection of fast foods, there are performances every night by major local pop stars.
After sharing some food - a spicy chorizo wrapped in dough, and a container of Chinese style chicken and mushrooms on white rice - we looked for the Israeli crafts booths. We went the wrong way first and walked past all the international displays, which were generally attractive, but there was nothing new for us there. Three Andean musicians (I don't know whether they were from Peru or Ecuador) were performing on a stage as roamed about - the full tones of pan pipes. The Israeli crafts turned out to be on the far side of the food court, so we had to shove our way through the gathering crowd. First there were some displays by store owners from the Old City, Palestinian merchants selling the kind of thing you can buy there: Hebron glass, embroidery and jewelry, brass trays. Then we finally got to the booths displaying things that the people selling them had actually made by themslves. Most of it had no appeal at all for us, but there were four or five ceramicists whose work was on a high level. If our house weren't entirely flooded with my own work, we would have been tempted to buy.
I was interested in comparing my workmanship to that of professionals (I have a long way to go), in getting ideas, and also in imagining what it would be like to be a professional potter. If you can afford it, it's probably better to be an amateur (the same goes for music, photography, and writing). One tall, slightly aloof man had a large stock of well-made, useful objects, ranging in size from small custard dishes to imposing bowls and tall pitchers and vases. But how interesting could it be for him to make a hundred mugs, all more or less the same? To make a living at pottery, even if you're bohemian and settle for a low income, you need to take in a couple of thousand dollars a month. That's a lot of mugs!
I can see trying that, for the discipline, to demonstrate and develop control - but I'd much rather produce unique things, like the two clumsy animal forms I've posted here. They're meant to look as if they'd been dug up from some chalcolithic site, Canaanite pagan cult objects. I've made three more of them, but I haven't fired them yet. I don't have to sell them or to try to make the kind of things people will buy. I'm free to have fun with forms that appeal to me.
Yes, I aspire to acquire more skill and improve my work (in pottery as in music), and I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't think I was improving, but I have to careful to trim my aspirations so that my creative work will serve me, and not the opposite.
I don't mean to sound egotistical here. There's a difference between serving oneself by buying expensive things for oneself or indulging oneself in other ways, and serving oneself by meditating, hiking, playing music with friends, or engaging in a craft or art.

Two Planters

2009-08-04T09:21:00.000+03:00

I made the foot on the right last summer. An elderly ceramacist who wasn't using her studio during the summer graciously allowed me to work there. For a month or so I used her wheel, practicing. But I made an error that prevented me from firing and glazing all the pots that I made: I mixed together different kinds of clay, so that it wasn't possible to know what temperature the pieces should be fired at when it came time to glaze them.
To glaze pots, you have to fire them twice. The first firing is at a relatively low temperature, but the second one is generally at a higher one, and clay that is meant to be fired at a low temperature will melt if it's fired at too high a temperature, and that will ruin the kiln it's fired in. So I had a few dozen bowls and cups that I couldn't fire and glaze.
I recycled all of the clay, smashing the pots, throwing the shards into a bucket of water, and dissolving the clay. There was something spiritually useful in that act, a reminder not to be too fond of what I'd made.
So I had a lot of clay that couldn't be glazed. I decided to use it to make things that don't have to be glazed: planters. I made three of them in the form of feet, and that was fun.
I made the flower pot on the right more recently. I bought a book about alternative firing methods - I'm not ready to invest in a sophisticated, electric kiln - and had an iron worker make me a barrel-kiln (which is generally not used for first firings, but rather for second firings, to give pieces special surfaces and colors).
I cleared a space for myself in a spare room of our house and started hand-building. A lot of the pots that I made and fired in the barrel-kiln collapsed and exploded during the firing, and some of them were extremely fragile - they hadn't been at a high enough heat long enough. But some of them came out interesting, and I planted a succulent in one of them.

An Earlier Effort

2009-08-04T09:02:00.001+03:00

This bowl is one of the first I took home.
The excitement of taking work home from my pottery class brought me back to elementary school days.
Technically, this bowl is a mess. It's lopsided and extremely heavy.
But everybody loves it.
There's something happy and playful about it.
Ruth, our artist friend, said that you could see how involved I was in the joy of making something, and she was right about that joy.
Handling the wet clay, manipulating it on the wheel so that suddenly and miraculously a vessel emerges from a lump - if you haven't experienced it, you're missing something.
By now I've progressed, technically. The bowls that I make are generally lighter and thinner, more symmetrical. I have more control over what I'm doing. This bowl was more or less what happened to emerge from efforts to keep the clay centered and pull it up. Today I'm still somewhat of a victim of chance, or, rather, of my own lack of skill, and I can't consistently produce the shape that I want to produce. The clay often rebels and refuses to go where I want it to. But I'm a lot closer to controlling the process. And that means that I'll probably never produce a jolly, clumsy piece like this again.
As I gain in skill, I'll have to find a way to retain the spontaneity and joy that I found in my first months of struggling with the wheel.
The form of bowls fascinates me - perhaps because I am a male working on such a female form. I like to make things that are useful, and you can't have too many bowls in your china cabinet. But I also like the pure shape of bowls, their sculptural quality.

Making Forms

2009-08-04T08:42:00.000+03:00

It's not quite round, and it's a bit heavier than it ought to be, but it's a nice size - a small cup with no handle - and the color came out well (I use the glazes supplied by my teacher in her studio; I haven't begun getting involved in the art and science of glazing).
During the first year, after I started to get the hang of centering lumps of clay on the wheel, I tried to make large pots, and they came out heavy and clumsy - but expressive. My teacher didn't discourage me. She let me make my own mistakes.
After a while I told her how frustrated I was feeling, and she advised me to keep working on smaller pieces of clay until I was centering them easily and building them up without making them lurch out of shape in the process.
I decided to take her advice, and since then I've been working on relatively modest projects: cups and small bowls. I've been trying to make them thinner and lighter, more symmetrical. I want to master this craft, and I realize that, doing it only once a week for a couple of hours, it'll take me much longer to do it than I initially expected.
Still, I'm not aiming for technical perfection. That aim would just frustrate me and take the fun out of pottery. Factories turn out thousands and thousands of perfect pieces of pottery. I don't want what I do to look as if it was produced by a factory. Handmade things should look and feel handmade - skillful, but not perfect. I want to produce mainly things that are more than decorative - pieces that people can eat and drink out of - but I do want what I do to be expressive.
It would be easy to regret that I can so late to pottery, since I enjoy it so much. If only I'd begun at the age of 23 instead of the age of 63, I would be a master now (possibly - or I would have burned out and gone on to something else). But I hope that the maturity I've gained doing a lot of other things over the years, and my general aesthetic background, can give a depth to my work. Because I do take it seriously. There's no point doing something that you don't take seriously.

Follow Up - A Strange Princeton Reunion

2009-07-22T11:25:00.002+03:00

Recently I met my Haredi fellow alumnus of Princeton in a modest coffee shop on the fringes of the Haredi neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and we had a lively conversation for an hour or so. He is clearly a highly intelligent man, well educated in secular studies and fully a master of rabbinical literature. He is also very open about himself and has not shut himself off from the world beyond his own extremely religious community. I enjoyed meeting him and talking with him, and I felt that despite the huge gap between our world views, we could be friends.
I doubt that anyone who had known either of us while we were students at Princeton (he graduated high school the year that I graduated college, so we were never there at the same time) could have predicted that either of us we would end up living in Israel and getting seriously involved in Judaism. People's paths in life are unpredictable, which gives us a feeling that what happens to us is not inevitable, but I find myself more and more believing in fate: that which happens in the world had to happen.
You can find out more about the man by reading his blog.
My wife and I, although we took up a fairly orthodox life style after we moved Israel, were never tempted to go the Haredi route, even though she is related to a huge clan of Hasidic Jews. Why would one be drawn in that direction?

Belief: God chose the Jews and told them how to behave, and the Haredim have it right.
Conviction that Haredi Judaism is the only authentic Judaism.
Admiration for Haredi teachers and leaders: the desire to emulate them.
The desire to live a sanctified life.
Alienation from earlier life interests.
Intellectual interest: the Talmud is fascinating, and if you're a studious person, it's easy to become immersed in Talmud study, especially because it's sanctioned by your community.

But we were always put off by the restrictions that Haredim take upon themselves, by loyalty to values that conflict with Haredi values.

Dialogue of the Deaf

2009-07-01T11:50:00.002+03:00

A Web-Based Dialogue
One of the Internet social networks got me connected with a fellow alumnus of Princeton who has become an ultra-orthodox rabbi. Here's part of our dialogue:

I mentioned to him:
I got "religious" for a while too (I'm not sure why you put it in quotes) - but I'm getting more and more turned off by orthodox Judaism - though we still attend shabbat services and keep kosher and stuff -

He responded:
Well, I know why I put religious in quotation marks. It's because I really hadn't become all that religious at the time. Since then, I've gone the whole way, meaning that I am a twice ordained ultra-orthodox rabbi. Probably, if you have any issues with orthodox Judaism, it's because of the orthodox Jews. Religious life is dreadfully politicized in this country.

I answered:
I respect your decision to go all the way with Judaism, but I couldn't do it. I tried. I lived in a very orthoprax way for a long time, but in the end, it isn't because of orthodox Jews that I'm turning away from orthodoxy (though I have to admit that they are a strong factor in my emotional attitudes toward orthodoxy) but because I have never subscribed to the theological beliefs that underlie halakhah.

He replied:
I am, of course, curious as to what you meant by "because I have never subscribed to the theological beliefs that underlie halakhah." What are they?

My answer to him was:

I think you're pretending to naive. Wouldn't you say that unless one subscribes to a list of beliefs something like the following, there is no good reason - beyond individual existential choice, a kind of absurd assertion - to observe the Halakhah?

1- there is a God
2 - that God chose Abraham and his progeny
3- that God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, revealed Himself on Mount Sinai, and entered into a covenant with them, demanding that they keep a set of laws, which He dictated.
4- there is an unbroken chain of tradition from Mount Sinai to the present, by virtue of which rabbis interpret the Halakhah authoritatively.
Aren't there also a lot of other beliefs about the connection between reward and punishment in the world to come and observance of the commandments in this world?

His reply, which, I think, has put an end to the conversation was:
Of course, but I never imagined that you had an issue with that part.

The moral:
I can imagine (sort of) what it would be to subscribe to the beliefs I outlined, but he can't (or perhaps can no longer) imagine what it would be like not to subscribe to those beliefs. Religion may not close the mind, but sometimes it fills it up so completely that there's no room there for anything else.

My Daughter's Graduation Ceremony

2009-06-14T11:32:00.003+03:00

The Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, Professor Boaz Shamir, spoke about what he had learned as a student, and about what he hoped the graduating students had learned. He mentioned five things: learning to think, learning to learn, learning about a field, developing (or beginning to develop) a world view, and knowing oneself better.
Since our daughter was living with us for two of the three years of her studies, we could see that on every front, she was achieving those five things, and it was a privilege and pleasure for us as parents to see her develop.
The Dean's words prompted me to look back at what I took away from my own undergraduate education. It seems to me that on the first four of the five counts, I did well at Princeton. But I don't think I knew myself much better at the end. I asked Judith whether she would say that her four years at Wellesley gave her self-knowledge, and she laughed.
We were both twenty-one when we graduated, and Hannah, our daughter, is twenty-five, because, like most Israelis, she served in the army for two years and also did a lot of travelling before beginning her studies. It isn't possible for twenty-one year olds to know themselves as well as twenty-five year olds, and it probably isn't possible for universities to attempt intentionally to provide students with self-knowledge. But it would probably be a good idea if beginning students were told that one of their major tasks in the coming years would be to increase their self-knowledge -- whether they're studying physics or finance.

The Case of Joshua Redman

2009-06-08T10:36:00.002+03:00

I don't really mean to use such a gifted person as a "case."
He had a choice: to pursue a career in law or to give himself a chance to become a great musician.
Another African-American, in an earlier time, Paul Robeson, faced the same choice and, in fact, attended Columbia Law School. Then, confronted by blatant racism in the law office where he was working, he developed exploited his talent as a singer and actor.
But Joshua Redman reached maturity in a new era, with a lot less racism, and, with his intellectual gifts, he could well have been in line to be the second African-American president, after Barack Obama. It must have been a very difficult choice for Redman: Yale Law School and the road to political and economic power and a solid social position or the tenor saxophone and the risks of a career in music. I honor his courage for taking the risky path, and, having heard him play recently, I am grateful to him for making that choice.
I have read about other very talented young people who chose the piano over medical school or a career in mathematics over a career as a violinist. I also read about a man who was a successful ballet dancer until he reached his forties and then started college as a freshman. Of course a dancer, like an athlete, knows that his career will end with his youth, and, if he is prudent, he will plan for the future. But usually the options we are offered are mutually exclusive, which makes the choice among them agonizing. How can a person of twenty-two begin to imagine what his or her life will be like in another couple of decades?
At my age, my options are more restricted than they ever were, from one point of view. After all, how much can I do even if I am granted another twenty years of decent health? But they are also less restricted than before: I've esssentially done what was expected of a man from my background; there's no point in regretting what I might have achieved and failed to attain; what's done is done. There's less risk now in deciding to put all my chips on a number and letting the ball stop where it will.

Potting Progress

2009-05-27T12:20:00.002+03:00

More than a year has gone by since I first sat at a potter's wheel with a lump of clay in front of me and tried to center it. By now I can center smallish balls of clay pretty consistently. At first, if I managed to create a vessel of any shape, I was pleased with it. In the past few months I've begun to make stricter demands of myself. I want the vessels to remain centered from start to finish. I want them to have thin walls, so they won't be too heavy. And of course I want them to look graceful.

I've also become more concerned with decoration and finish, less willing to accept whatever happens. Perhaps I've become less playful and spontaneous, and pottery isn't quite as much fun. But I still love the feel of the clay in my hands, the challenge of getting it centered and making it take the shape I want to give it, and it's still fun to get to the class and find a couple of newly fired pieces that I can take home.

Do I have a long term goal?
I'm not sure.
Is making a lot of bowls, cups, plates, and pitchers a long term goal?
For the moment I'm deeply involved in the process, not concerned with the outcome. And I have to remember that I'm doing it for fun!

As with music, the farther I progress, the more possibilities for progress become visible. It's like climbing a mountain: when you get to the top of a foothill, you see the peak that was hidden behind it.

Sometimes I let myself fantasize: I'm going to quit my paying work and devote myself to pottery. I'll open a studio with a store in the front and sell my own work and the work of other (better) ceramicists on commission. More realistically, I imagine buying a good electric kiln and a wheel of my own. But in fact, meanwhile, the two and a half hours a week I spend at pottery lessons is about all the time I can spare for that right now. I have set aside a space in a spare room where I can do some hand building, but in the past few weeks, I haven't even had time for that. I wouldn't take the step of equipping a studio unless I were sure I'd be using it almost every day. Maybe it wouldn't be fun anymore.

A Writer's Statement

2009-03-24T08:54:00.002+02:00

This is the statement that I prepared for a reading sponsored by IAWE, the Israeli Association of Writers in English, which was held in Tel Aviv in February.

Why We Must Keep Writing

Despite the Inadequacy of Language and Our Skill in Using It

During the past few years, I’ve been increasingly aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience.

Let me illustrate by evoking two scenes from my recent life.

On a Friday night a few weeks ago, a friend of mine from college, an extremely austere and quiet professor of Chinese who has been dividing his time between Princeton and the Hebrew University for the past fifteen years or more, brought another classmate of ours, as effusive and ebullient as the professor is withdrawn, to our home. Though we had been friends in college, I hadn’t seen this other man since we graduated in 1966. I knew that he was born in 1943 on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where his mother was hiding, and that he and his parents survived and got to New York in the early 1950s. I also recalled that they had scratched out a living selling brassieres on the Lower East Side. That much I remembered about my friend – but I knew next to nothing about what had happened to him since then.

For about an hour and a half, with frenetic energy, which came in part from the excitement of seeing an old friend after so many years, he spoke to us about his life. It was like a private stand-up performance – and I realize that I don’t possess the literary skills to convey the scene, which was hilarious, with deep tragic dimensions, and heightened by the coincidence that at that Sabbath meal we happened to have volunteered to host two Christian visitors from Michigan, kind, intelligent people – but absolutely bland compared to the brilliant, entertaining, energetic man who had dropped in on us! If they were hoping for exposure to authentic Jewish people, they sure got some.

Then last Shabbat, my wife and I participated in the Bat-Mitzvah celebration of my second cousin’s husband’s grand-daughter – the kind of tenuous family connection that somehow can matter here in Israel. During a small luncheon for family and close friends, I noted the huge variety of people assembled there: from a demented retired Conservative rabbi to a Korean convert to Judaism, and I realized how much literary skill it would take just to convey everyone’s background – forget about a plot!

My third lesson in the inadequacy of language is painful. Quite a few of you know me personally, so you know that I suffered a tragic loss last year, when my twenty-eight year old son Asher fell to his death while hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. During the past year, almost all of the personal writing that I’ve done has been connected with this loss. I kept a blog about it to share my feelings and experiences with our friends. But of course the words came nowhere close to expressing what I was feeling – and still feel.

I had number of reasons for writing about our loss in the public form of a blog. It was a way to make my writing available to family and friends without imposing on them by sending them individual emails, for example, which they may have felt required to read. With the blog, if they didn’t want to read, they didn’t have to. And if a stranger somehow stumbled on the blog and benefited by sharing my feelings, that would please me, though I have no idea how many strangers actually logged onto it and read it. I wasn’t even tempted to put a guest counting widget on the blog, because I didn’t want to get caught up in wondering whether or not I had an audience, or in feeling disappointed if I wasn’t reaching more than a handful of readers. If my wife and children read it, and some other people close to me, that was enough. Nevertheless, it was important for me to make it at least semi-public, and that’s a point I’ll return to.

I managed to attain a degree of self-revelation in the blog, and it has had some unexpected and heartwarming personal consequences. For example, a few weeks ago a Hebrew author whom I admire and once interviewed for the Jerusalem Post found me on the Internet and got in touch with me by email. She was looking for a translator and wanted to know if I was still in that business. She’s been abroad for the past ten years, so we’ve been out of contact.

I decided to tell her about what had happened in our family by referring her to my blog. (I don’t do that with everybody I am in contact with: it depends on how personal I feel about them.) This writer is a clinical psychologist, and, as she told me in an intense correspondence, she also lost a child – her first one, a son who died of an illness when he was six. She encouraged me to write – not the blog, but fiction. Writing should be my way of coping with grief. With the blog, that has been the case – but as to writing fiction ... I don’t know. I’m not ready yet.

I began by saying that life has made be acutely aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience – but I should add that life has made me equally aware of the marvelous ability of language to stimulate the imagination and thus enlarge our experience. And that is why we should keep on writing, even if we’re not as successful at it as we could wish.

I engage in two main expressive activities aside from writing: music and ceramics. I have been an active amateur musician for many years, and I’ve kept up with that almost obsessively during this year of bereavement. By contrast, pottery is new for me. Last spring, spontaneously, without brooding about it or planning it, I looked for ceramics classes on the Web, found one within walking distance of my house, enrolled, and have been happily messing about with clay ever since. For my psychological health, I knew it would be useful to do something new, something not laden with memories of my son (although he was a very talented artist), and something non-verbal – as music is non-verbal. And I was right.

If I’m suspicious of language and glad to spend time in non-verbal activities, that’s because I’ve always been excessively verbal. Silence troubles me. My working hours consist mainly in translating Hebrew to English and occasionally editing English, so words are always reverberating in my head, and I’m constantly involved in the technicalities of writing. It’s also a craft I’ve come to know a good deal about, so I’d like to move toward a conclusion by being bluntly honest with this group about our writing.

I think it’s safe to say that no one in this room, no contributor to ARC, is ever going to be recognized as a major writer, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone by saying that. It’s even safer to say that none of us is going to get rich and/or famous by writing. If we go on writing, it’s because the activity of writing is important to us, not because what we write is important to a large outside audience, waiting breathlessly for our next magnum opus.

However, though we don’t have a large outside audience, we do have a small inside community, and our writing lives and matters in that community – essentially the people in this room and the people outside it whose lives we touch.

There are many bad reasons for writing, mainly connected with excessive egotism. But there are also a lot of good reasons for it, even if one can’t approach the level of the writers one admires (here I speak for myself). After all, I’m not terribly surprised or upset that I can’t play tenor saxophone as well as a professional who started off with more talent than I have and has devoted his or her whole life to music. I don’t expect ever to be more than a decent amateur player, but I do appreciate great musicians because I know how hard it is to play at their level. As for my pottery, I’m not aiming to exhibit in the next biennale or to sell my work in the lovely shops in Nahalat Shiv’a. But my friends seem to be pleased when I bring a misshapen little bowl as a house present when I come for dinner. So, I also don’t kick myself for not being as successful (both in terms of gaining recognition and in terms of mastery of the art) a writer as Bellow, Updike, Nabokov, or Borges – or some of the people I have translated, like Appelfeld and Agnon. Trying makes me appreciate their greatness and their devotion to the art.

Aware that I am not a great or important literary artist, I still want to share my words, to get them out into the world, because publishing gives our work reality, just as playing music for an audience makes it count in a way that it doesn’t have when you’re only playing by yourself in your room. The imaginative depth I spoke of before can exist in isolation, but it’s stronger when it’s shared. Our task as Israeli writers in English is to create a public space for our writing, a public space tolerant of our shortcomings, patient with our limitations, and appreciative of what we do achieve. We should all be grateful to one another for providing enough of a public to make our writing live.

Technique and Creativity

2008-08-24T11:11:00.003+03:00

I see it in all three of the areas of creativity in which I'm active: writing, music, and now pottery (from poetry to pottery).

Without technique, one's creativity is limited.
True, children are endlessly creative and boldly imaginative, but the limits of what a child can do are evident.

However: the effort to acquire technique often stifles creativity.
The young writer becomes aware of the need to write correctly and stifles her imagination.
The young musician strives to control her instrument and stifles her expressivity.
The young potter concentrates so hard on producing centered, symmetrical, and light pieces that she loses the drive for originality and spontaneity.

For the mature artist, technique and creativity feed into one another. One enhances one's technique in order to create things that were beyond one, and one's enhanced technique spurs one's imagination for further creativity.

When I took up music again after more or less giving up on it while I was in college, I studied for two or three years with Stephen Horenstein, a brilliant composer and virtuoso saxophone player - who became and has remained a good friend. At the time, Steve said that if someone were just playing his instrument without being creative at it, there was no point to it. That was the first time I'd heard that from a music teacher. Up till then the challenge had been to play the notes correctly.
I wasn't ready for Steve's message then and, while I kept on playing saxophone, never really extended myself creatively at it.
About fifteen years down the line I acquired a musical guru of sorts: Arnie Lawrence. Perhaps because I was ready for it, I let Arnie push me hard in the creative direction.

Have I become a creative musician? A creative person?
These are the wrong questions.
I am more creative than I was and more appreciative of creativity when I encounter it.
That's already a lot.

Getting into Pottery

2008-08-24T11:00:00.002+03:00

I am ordinarily slow to come to decisions, but the decision to start taking pottery lessons was quick and virtually instinctive.
When I was a child of ten or so, my mother enrolled me in a pottery class at Greenwich House, near our home in Greenwich Village, New York City. I was too young to walk to Greenwich House on my own, because I would have had to cross Sixth Avenue by myself, so she took me there. We walked downtown along Washington Square West, where we lived, then to the west on Fourth Street, probably a ten minute walk. It would have taken too much of her time for my mother to leave me, go home, and then come back to get me, so she enrolled in an adult class.
I enjoyed pottery, but after a year or two, all the other boys in the class dropped out, and, I being too young to see the advantage of being alone with a room full of girls, dropped out, too. Meanwhile, my mother remained an avid amateur ceramicist throughout most of the following years.
The idea of taking up the craft as an adult never occurred to me until a few months ago.
I looked up pottery classes on the Internet and spotted one that seemed appropriate from every point of view - it was within walking distance from my house in Jerusalem, the price was not too high, and the hours were extremely flexible. I called up the teacher right away, arranged to go to see her setup, and within a day or two I was sitting at one of her wheels, struggling to center a rapidly turning lump of clay.
Hadas, my teacher is a tall, thin young woman, and her studio is in two front rooms of a small rented apartment in an extremely expensive neighborhood. She has four wheels, a kiln in a shed outside her door, and the clay, firing, and glazes are included in the price of the class. The downside of the flexibility she offers us in scheduling our sessions is that she constantly has to juggle us from one slot to another. Because my time is pretty much in my own control, I have attended classes on various days, at various hours, and so met many of her students. They are mainly women, but now I don't mind that.
Hadas' teaching method is low key and unintrusive. She lets us work on our own and waits for us to ask her how to do things. That suits me perfectly.
I think I would have been happy as a potter. If I'd stuck at it as an adolescent, I'm sure I would have gotten more and more deeply involved in it, maybe gone on into it. But who knows? There were so many external pressures on me at the time, pressure to excel academically, pressure to get into a fine university and qualify for some prestigious kind of work, that I wasn't ever in touch with what I wanted. I can't imagine that I would have considered going to art school and majoring in ceramics in the face of all that pressure, for I had completely internalized the values it came from. I thought that art school was for people who weren't good at other, more important things.
Now, however, as I approach my mid-sixties, having done all the things I was supposed to do, more or less -- received a BA from a prestigious university, earned a doctorate at another prestigious university, worked for decades as a translator (in other words, I put my intellectual gifts to some kind of use), raised a family, and so on -- I feel as if pottery is the artistic medium I have been searching for all my life.
I always wanted to be some kind of artist, but never got it together to become one. Since I'm very verbal, I thought I ought to be a writer, that if I had an artistic medium, it would be words. Indeed, I have had some modest success as a writer and translator, but I never felt delight in what I wrote. I also have some visual skills, and I was seriously involved in photography for a few years, but there, too, I didn't find that I was taking pictures that anyone else couldn't have taken. When I was doing photography, it was more a way of running away from my disaffection with graduate work than involvement in the thing itself.
I am also a serious amateur musician. I play saxophone and clarinet and even went back to university to study musicology half time for three years. I love hearing and playing music, but I'll never be seriously good at it. Not that I mind. I'm not ambitious as a musician. I'm glad to have opportunities to play, and I enjoy it. It's refreshing to do something without being ambitious about it. Perhaps ambition is what took the pleasure out of writing for me - but let's not go into that for the moment.

Smashing all my Pots

2008-08-03T17:47:00.002+03:00

As I may have mentioned, a supremely generous woman has been allowing me to use her pottery studio a few times a week for the past three months or so, and I produced thirty or forty vessels on her wheel. I was planning to ask her to fire them. Then I was planning to bring them to the studio where I take lessons to glaze them and fire them again.
When I asked Hadas, my teacher, whether that would be possible, she told me that I had made an irreparable error: I mixed different kinds of clay that have to be fired at different temperatures. So she can't fire them for me.
It is true that if I had my own kiln and my own glazes, I could have glazed and fired them all at a low temperature, but I'm far from there. So the only thing I could do was smash them all and soak them in water to reclaim the clay - which remains clay that I won't be able to glaze, though I can fire it.
Early this morning I went down to the studio and broke up almost all the vessels I had thrown over the past three months. I put them in a tub of water to turn them back into raw clay, which I've decided to use for projects that don't need glazing. Maybe I'll make a bunch of flower pots, for example, and some sculptures. This morning I started in that direction. But I'm prepared to smash all that in a month or two.
Oddly enough, I have absolutely no regrets about any of the pots that I destroyed. My standards have been going up as my skill has increased, and I didn't see much point in firing and glazing a bunch of heavy, lopsided, clumsy pieces.
Many teachers of pottery impose stringent discipline on beginners, making them smash every pot that isn't centered. Hadas, the teacher I've been going to, is more laissez faire, and she's right. Sometimes clumsy pots have a charm of their own. Why discourage people when they're doing pottery for the fun of it?

Intelligent Design

2008-07-22T15:59:00.002+03:00

What about Stupid Design?
It is argued, for example, that something as complicated as the vertebrate eye could never have evolved by chance, without a guiding intelligence.
But why design eyes that weaken as we age, that are subject to blindness and disease, and that are limited the way ours are?
For that matter, why would an intelligent designer give us teeth that rot and gums that recede?
There's so much palpably wrong with the little piece of the universe where we live, that one might go so far as positing an absent-minded designer with occasional flashes of intelligence and a nasty tendency to play practical jokes.

Wishes and Fulfillment

2008-07-22T15:34:00.002+03:00

You have probably been exposed to the New Age fad of visualizing Success. The first step toward achieving what you want is to visualize it, one is told. And visualizing it becomes a guarantee of achieving It - jobs, money, the perfect spouse.
At my age, some of the things desired by people in their thirties, who are launching themselves into life, don't seem relevant. I'm more modest in my ambitions: maintaining decent health, living to see my grandchildren reach maturity, making good use of the time allotted to me.
A friend of mine fantasizes about travel, about renting a barge and floating down the canals of Europe, about buying a camper and roaming about the North American continent, and in fact he did something a lot of people imagine doing but never get together: he and a couple of friends, men in their late sixties, bought huge motorcycles in California and zigzagged across the US and Canada for a few months.
My fantasies are more about staying put than about traveling.
One recent fantasy that I'm living with is to install a pottery studio in our home and devote much more time to ceramics - my latest passion - than I am doing at present. I'm halfway there, in fact, because an acquaintance of mine, an accomplished ceramicist, is allowing me to use her studio two days a week.
Another fantasy is to create a music studio, with sound equipment, and to play and write music. I imagine writing arrangements for the big band I play in.
Another fantasy is to get a regular gig in a pub with my pianist friend and play standards. I'm too shy to move forward on this, but it's certainly possible.
And I entertain fantasies about importing musical instruments and opening a woodwind store. This is not a serious idea!
Interestingly, I don't have fantasies about writing a hugely successful novel or anything else connected with writing and literature, though that has been my main occupation all my life.

Four Kinds of Playing: Number One

2008-06-11T12:04:00.001+03:00

I'm not going to write about all four right away, and I'm not sure there really are four. In any case, I'll start with straight classical playing, the kind that I was trained in until I gave up the clarinet when I was in college and wasn't good enough to get into the university orchestra. At the time, the only kind of musician I could imagine being was a classical musician.

Recently we hosted a concert in our home. A friend of ours is a classical singer. She had prepared a recital of Lieder with an excellent accompanist and asked if we would be volunteer our living room and grand piano. We agreed. Indeed, we have had quite a few chamber music concerts in our living room, and our piano has been played by some superb musicians. (I always feel that when a master plays an instrument, the instrument absorbs some of the mastery.) I thought, though, that it would be only fair to ask a small favor in return, so I prevailed upon the pianist to accompany me in a short piece, “Danse,” by Darius Milhaud for alto saxophone and piano. You can hear a fine performance (not by me) of that sweet piece on this website: http://www.dcmusicaviva.org/recordings/documents/dance.mp3

Playing a piece like that demands, first of all, precision. You have to play all the notes exactly the way the composer wrote them, in time, in tune, articulated the way it's indicated on the printed page, with the correct dynamics. The challenge for the musician is to play as accurately as possible and, at the same time, to play the piece expressively, not mechanically.

Last year Judith and I attended a Scarlatti and Bach marathon, which was part or the Israel Festival. Six young pianists took turns playing, and we were enthralled not only by the excellence of their performances but also by the palpable differences in their approach – even though they were all playing the notes “as written.” It was a great lesson in interpretation.

My performance went okay. I was nervous and came in wrong a couple of times, but the accompanist never blinked and stuck right with me, and I don't think anyone in the audience noticed. If I had had more time to rehearse with him and develop a musical rapport, it wouldn't have happened. I enjoyed myself, but only so much. My conclusion was: I don't want to spend time and energy in preparing a recital of classical saxophone pieces (and imposing it on my friends), My self-image as a musician has changed.

Private Adventures

2008-06-11T12:02:00.000+03:00

I spend quite a few hours every day in my exiguous home office, facing my computer screen, with a Hebrew book open on my left, rewriting the author's words in English. Usually I translate literature, which is stylistically difficult, or academic material, which can be conceptually difficult. Even when a job is fairly simple, I have to concentrate hard on it – if only to avoid skipping a line or a sentence, which has been known to happen. It's tiring. It can be very demanding. I'm constantly making decisions about individual words, about the shape of phrases, about the structure of sentences. And it's lonely: I make those decisions by myself – although later the authors often respond to my work, making corrections and offering suggestions.

Some of my more polite friends occasionally ask me what I'm working on, and sometimes, when I'm enthusiastic about a job, I'll tell them more than they really want to know. However, I'm deeply aware that my work entails intense, private experiences, which, paradoxically, because it's all about communication, is almost impossible to communicate. There's nothing outwardly dramatic about it. I'm not driving a car very fast, thrashing through a jungle, arresting violent criminals, or engineering billion dollar buyouts. There's also very little at stake – even if I get a sentence in a novel completely wrong, no one's going to suffer very much from my error. But I care deeply about getting the right word or expression, about making a sentence read well, about conveying the author's voice and ideas.

In the end, the locus of human experience is in the heart, not out in the world, and the essence of civilization is caring infinitely about things that don't have many practical consequences.

Summer Jazz School

2008-06-11T12:00:00.000+03:00

An Intense Week at the Dordogne Jazz School

In the winter of 2004-5, I did a web search for “jazz summer school” and up came the Dordogne Jazz School, run by English musicians in a dilapidated medieval castle in a hamlet called Monteton in the rural countryside near Bergerac. It sounded very attractive, and I had some correspondence with the director, but I didn't manage to get well enough organized to sign up that winter. The following year I resolved to do it, and by December I had reserved a place. I made plane reservations in the early spring and even thought ahead to reserve a hotel room in Bordeaux for the days before and after the jazz school. As I geared up mentally and musically for a week of jazz, the war started here in Israel – making me rather less enthusiastic for the pleasures of life, including making music.

I was a bit apprehensive and imagined the school would be populated by ambitious, young, talented musicians, who would be too stuck up to play with me, or, alternatively, with rank beginners from whom I could not learn very much. However, I assumed that I would be playing a lot, and that would be valuable.

The trip there was not fun. My flight left Ben-Gurion airport after midnight on Sunday, July 30 and, I arrived in Charles De Gaulle airport with an hour or so to get to the Air France window and get a boarding pass for the connecting flight to Bordeaux. The line was so long and slow moving that I almost missed the plane. To top things off, when I got to Bordeaux, I found that Air France had abandoned my suitcase in Paris.

My hotel in Bordeaux was very easy go get to from the airport, and the people at the reception desk were pleasant. I had arrived before check-in time, but my room was ready, and they had no objection to my going in and resting for a while. Although I was exhausted, after resting for a while, I went out and spent a very pleasant day in Bordeaux, which is an impressive city, full of grand eighteenth century buildings, next to a very wide river, but with a historic center small enough to walk around easily. Since it was Sunday in the holiday season, there were very few people in the streets.

As promised, my suitcase was brought to the hotel in the late afternoon. The people at the hotel said it happened all the time. On Monday morning I packed and then took the long walk from my hotel to the railroad station, because I love wandering around towns, and bought a ticket for the 13:35 train to Bergerac. I slowly made my way back to the hotel and checked out at about eleven. There is a tramway that goes directly from where my hotel was, a big park with the strange name of Quinconces, to the railroad station. I have since discovered that “quinconce” refers to an arrangement like the five on a die or a domino: a square with four dots in the corners and one in the center, which is the way the trees are planted in that park. I had a cup of coffee, got on the tram, and had time to eat a salade niçoise in a decent restaurant across form the station (and to have my first of many glasses of red wine) before my train left.

The train to Bergerac goes through wine country, past places like St. Emilion known for their vintages. Upon arrival in Bergerac, I followed instructions and crossed the street to a café to wait to be picked up by Simon, the summer school's driver and trouble-shooter, an English expat who seems to enjoy life. At the café a tall, balding young man saw that I was carrying a sax case and figured out that I was also headed for the school. His name was Christophe, he's a pianist, and he works half-time in computers and half-time as a volunteer political activist for a small socialist party in Paris. It turned out he was our token Frenchman in the course, though we had a French-speaking Swiss engineer as well.

Christophe and I had a beer together, and he called Simon on his cell phone once he figured out the number from the way it was printed out on the email I had received – my Hebrew oriented computer had reversed the order of the numbers. The drive to Monteton was unexpectedly long, partially because we stopped at the the small local airport to pick up Mike, another pianist, but Simon was entertaining, as was Christophe.

I was still uncertain how things would turn out musically. We pulled into the castle and took out our luggage, but our rooms weren't ready yet, and we didn't know whom we'd be rooming with. In fact, no one in charge seemed to be around to deal with us. We hung around and chatted, about twenty of us, in a pleasant area between a dilapidated stone tower, a terrace with tables set up for dinner, and a low, nondescript building. After a while, some people gathered at the bandstand and started jamming. There was a British bass player named Rick, with a thatch of graying blond hair, and a drummer. Christophe sat down at the keyboard, and I took out my alto. What the hell, I said to myself, why be bashful? After all, I had paid the airfare and tuition to play. I can't remember what tunes we played, but we hit it off fairly well. Other people took out their horns, and we kept going for quite a while. When you think about it, which I have done a lot, it's rather amazing that people who have never met can start making music almost immediately.

Dorian Lockett, a bass player who, with his wife, Andrea Vicari, a pianist, run the school, eventually showed up, and we were gradually settled in our rooms. Andrea's parents have a house nearby, and their two children stayed with their grandparents. Her brother Scott, a drummer, was also around helping out and playing. Dorian more or less takes care of the administrative stuff, and Andrea is in charge of the musical program. I was placed with two other guys in a long, narrow, extremely basic room, with an adjoining bathroom that was even more basic. I'm not complaining. The beds were clean and comfortable, there was hot water for showers, and my roommates were considerate.

I had registered as a vegetarian to avoid problems with kashrut, and at dinner that was no problem – nor was it ever. The restaurant staff was extremely thoughtful and friendly. The food was generally fine, never very ambitious, but always satisfying, with plenty of salad, as much wine as you could drink at lunch and supper, and fresh bread home baked from organic whole wheat flour. They served great cheese after every meal, of course. There was also a bar where you could buy coffee, soft-drinks, beer, wine, or whiskey.

Look how far I've gotten, and I've barely begun to describe the musical activities. Dorian sent us a .pdf file before the school began, with the schedule, which I printed out and looked at, but it didn't really mean much to me. On Tuesday morning we started off in earnest, and I began to see how much care had been put into planning things. We were placed in two different groups, which met at different times, of course. One was known as a workshop group – each one had about a quarter of the forty participants, selected by instrument. My group, in memory of the confusion of the first evening, was known as the Bed-Hunters. (Another group was known as the Jazz Worriers – to give you an idea of the humor of the place.) Each workshop group met for two hours or so every morning and prepared a piece for performance that evening. We also had three slightly larger ensembles, a Mingus group, a Soul group, and a Salsa group (which I chose, because I'm pretty weak on Latin rhythms). Those groups prepared performances for the final evening of the school, except for the Salsa group. We played three pieces for dancing at a Salsa evening on Friday. We also had instrumental sessions with the teachers, master-classes, and improvisation lessons.

We had classes from ten to one and then from four to six, and organized jam sessions and performances till eight, when we had supper. After supper sometimes our teachers played for us, once a French group that was sharing the facilities with us gave a concert, and so on. There were disorganized jam sessions until the wee hours of the morning. I stayed up till one-thirty or so one night, but I didn't get much out of that part of the program.

We had four main teachers: two saxophone players, Julian Siegel and Ingrid Laubrock; one trumpeter, Chris Batchelor; and one guitarist, Phil Robson. Andrea worked with the pianists. They are all fine musicians and excellent teachers. Chris was especially articulate, and, since he directed the Salsa band, I was exposed to him a lot.

Julian was the first teacher I was exposed to, in a workshop for the advanced saxophone players (it was up to us to decide what level was right for us). He's a tall man with a soft face and a lot of black hair. He speaks quietly, almost bashfully, and in his class he emphasized sound production in the lower register of the horn: the most basic stuff is also the most advanced. That afternoon he also led my workshop group and taught us the song “Sweet Georgia Bright” by ear, going over it patiently, phrase by phrase, chord by chord, till we'd got it. Like all the other teachers, he was terrifically encouraging, telling us we were doing great all the time.

My biggest obstacle to improvising with assurance is my tendency to get lost in the form (or my fear that I'll get lost). I tend to compensate by gluing myself to the lead-sheet, using my eyes instead of my ears, so it was very useful to me to learn something strictly by ear, without the safety net of written music.

Chris Batchelor, a strong and imaginative trumpet player and a very articulate teacher, addressed a lot of the musical issues that concern me at the moment in a way that I could grasp immediately. He led our workshop group the next day and taught us a simple, amusing New Orleans inspired Bill Frisell piece called “In Deep,” also by ear. He also gave a master class demonstration that day, about breaking out of the patterns of jazz standards by changing phrasing, by playing the chord progressions out of phase, and other fairly technical matters. That mainly drove home for me how firmly you have to have a piece in your mind, in order to improvise against the structure and not confuse yourself.

But I don't want to go on about the specific things I learned, things that I want to work on and use now that I'm back home. The main point is that by the end of the week, a lot of us were sounding pretty good, playing confidently with a full tone, and enjoying ourselves. People who had never met had formed ensembles and were playing together nicely. Andrea and her brother Scott supervised the early evening jam sessions and made certain that no one got up on stage and monopolized the action, and the atmosphere among us was uniformly generous. People always applauded your solos, even if you got lost and sounded like shit.

What may be surprising is that there are enough people like me, mainly middle-aged amateurs, who are serious about our music to populate a school like this. The other thing, of course, is that this was a demonstration that jazz has convincingly become a world music – you don't have to be American or African-American to love it or play it creditably. At our final concert, on Sunday night, August 6, our performance groups played: the Mingus band, the Salsa band, and the Soul band. The Mingus band started off with “Better Get Hit in the Soul,” a lively evocation of black evangelical churches. There they were, about twelve white Europeans playing the blackest of black music with enthusiastic respect. And then another twelve northern Europeans played Cuban music with love and abandon.

I've always looked at my musical activity, at least in one sense, as something that takes me places – and indeed it has.

Review of an Agnon Novel

2008-06-11T11:57:00.001+03:00

Once I was a professional book reviewer.
Here's a review that appeared on a good web site:
National Yiddish Book Center - A Simple Story by S.Y. Agnon

All the Things You Are - an Appreciative Analysis

2008-06-11T11:54:00.000+03:00

All the Things You Are

in Praise of a Song

This song has been played so many times that people take the elegance of its construction for granted. When you learn to play the melody, you appreciate the logic of it, the way it descends from the first A flat down to a B natural in the fifteenth measure, leaps up to a D natural, again descends to a G sharp, which metamorphoses into an A flat and begins a descent again, a descent which is interrupted with some upward leaps, until it finally settles on an A flat, the basic tonality of the song, at the end. It's deceptively simple, deceptive because the descents move through some surprising notes that don't belong to the key in which the song is written.

Harmonically, it is very sophisticated. It starts off by establishing the key of A flat major in the first four measures, with an absolutely ordinary sequence of chords, VI⁷-II⁷-V⁷-I, which one typically finds at the end of a classical piece. In the next four measures, it takes us to a surprising place harmonically with a daring transposition that sheds four flats in three measures, by moving from D flat major (a chord appearing in the key of A flat with no accidentals) to G⁷(a chord that sheds two of the flats of A flat, the B flat and the D flat), which resolves to C major.

Then it jumps back to a key much closer to the original key of A flat major, when the C major chord turns into a C minor chord, and we have a repetition of the initial chord series (VI⁷-II⁷-V⁷-I) but in the key of E flat, the dominant of A flat – so after the digression to the unrelated key of C major, we have returned to a harmonic movement typical of classical movement: modulation to the dominant. However, instead of staying in that key, in a sequence of chords identical to that of measures five to eight, but transposed up a fifth, we modulate to the entirely unrelated key of G major, exactly one half tone below the initial key of A flat major, which means that in the space of sixteen measures, the song has moved almost as far as possible from the originally key. (If you lay out the twelve possible keys in the diatonic scale in the order of the cycle of fifths, you get:

Ab – Db – Gb (F#) - B – E – A – D – G – C – F – Bb – Eb- Ab

So the keys of either A or D would actually be farther away from A flat than the key of G, but it's still a very bold modulation.)

The third eight measures of the piece, the bridge, begins by establishing the key of G major with chord progression typical of classical harmony: II – V⁷ – I. Then, however, the second half of the bridge jumps to an unexpected key: E major. The chord progression that Jerome Kern (assuming that the chords that appear above are the ones he wrote) put in is A minor, B seven, E major. The A minor seems to be repeating the chord progression of the first four measures of the bridge, but instead of being II in the key of G major, it becomes IV in the key of E major, since the following chord is a B seven. In fake books that reflect the way jazz musicians have reharmonized the song, an F sharp half diminished chord is substituted for the A minor (the chords have almost the same notes, F#, A, C, E and A, C, E, G respectively), so you have what jazz musicians call a two-five to E – except ordinarily the half diminished chord ordinarily indicates a minor key, and this progression leads to a E major. The last chord of the bridge, on the twenty-fourth measure, is A flat augmented (Ab, C, E) – a chord that can be also be thought of as C augmented and E augmented, because it's made of three equal intervals, major thirds. Harmonically, augmented chords don't fit into any ordinary diatonic scale (except the melodic and harmonic minor scales, which are not, strictly speaking, ordinary), and composers use them to shift keys almost any way they want to. Here, if you think of the chord as a C augmented chord, it can be used to move the harmony back to F minor, which is where the piece began.

The last part of the song repeats some of the material from the first part but expands on it, and, unlike the first part, it finally lands squarely in its home tonality: A flat major. The chords in the first five measures of this section are the same as those of the first five measures of the piece, but instead of jumping to an unexpected G⁷ chord after the Db⁷, the way Kern wrote it, it stays in the tonal territory of Db, the sub-dominant of Ab major and ends with a classical cadence: Bb min⁷ - Eb⁷ – Ab. Those measures are reharmonized in various ways in different fake books that I have seen, to make the final cadence stronger.

Another way of thinking about the harmonies here would be to say that the song can't decide, at first, whether it's in Ab or C. The first eight bars end on C, the second eight bars end on the dominant of C, G, and the bridge starts off in G. The bridge ends in the key of E major, which is exactly halfway between C and Ab, and the final chord of the bridge is that augmented chord which fits both into the key of C (C,E) and of Ab (Ab,C). In the last twelve bars (in the printed version I appended at the beginning, the final bar of the piece is missing), the song makes up its mind. If the last part of the song were a simple reprise of the first eight bars, which is very common in the type of song known as “standards,” to which “All the Things You Are” definitely belongs, it would in fact end in the key of C. However, the second to last four bars, which correspond to bars five through eight, and on a d diminished chord, as Kern as harmonized it. (In some fake books this appears as a B diminished chord, which is made up of exactly the same notes, with a different bass.) From there Kern puts us squarely in the key of Ab major, although the second to last melody notes, F, G, could actually be heard as the seventh and root of G⁷, resolving into C major rather than Ab!

2008-06-09T20:42:00.000+03:00

Here's another essay of mine that's on the web:
Konch Magazine

But it's archived in an obscure way there, so I'm copying it in here.

From the Schizophrenia of American Racism (the Frying Pan) to the Paranoia of the Middle East (the Fire)

by Jeffrey M. Green

On the photographic paper under the enlarger my white face was black and their black faces were white. If we exposed the print so that the features of their faces were clear and distinct, my face would be so underexposed that I would look like a featureless ghost, and if we exposed it properly for my face, theirs would come out like bottomless shadows. So I explained the technique of dodging to them. After we exposed the print long enough for their faces, I waved my fingers over them to shield them from the light while I continued the exposure long enough to expose my face properly. My students thought this was a riot. Not only had photography reversed black and white for them, but it had made my white face into a problem that had to be solved. They joked with me about it, and for that moment I had gained their trust, in the darkroom, where we were all invisible.

This incident took place in the summer of 1968. I was a twenty-three year old graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and I had come to Charleston, South Carolina to teach in an Upward Bound program. I had no illusions about the enormous gap of privilege that separated me from my students, but in the safe and nurturing atmosphere of that program, which was run by some self-assured and impressive southern black educators, I was accepted by my students, who probably had never had a white teacher before. We learned a lot from each other. During that summer it often happened that I would be the only white person in a crowd of African-Americans, and I sometimes forgot how conspicuous I was. Once we took our students to the University of South Carolina at Columbia for a meeting of all the Upward Bound programs, and while I was standing with my students, I happened to catch the suspicious gazes of students from another group. Suddenly I sensed the hostility toward white people that black high school students in the south felt but rarely could express openly. You might recall, though, that there was extensive rioting in Charleston a year afterward. Hostility can't be bottled up forever.

Here's the schizophrenia. During the week I lived in a boarding house in a black neighborhood of Charleston. My landlords, the Brevards, were an elderly, proper couple. Mr. Brevard was a retired railroad chef, and occasionally he would cook gourmet meals for me and my roommate, a student from Bombay who was studying at Carnegie Tech. But I spent the weekends with my fellow Jews. A relative of mine had married a doctor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and I visited them several times. Also, before going down to Charleston, I had received the names of several members of the local Jewish community, who were extremely hospitable to me and approved of what I was doing. So I sometimes found myself switching from the Brevards, clean and comfortable but somewhat rundown home to air-conditioned ranch houses in Charleston's affluent suburbs. One of the Jewish families that I came to know in Charleston had a forty-foot racing sloop, and they often took me out for sails. So there I was, with one foot in the poverty program and another foot on a yacht. I went to the African Methodist Episcopal church with the Brevards to see what that was like, and I went to the elegant Reform synagogue in Charleston with my Zoroastrian roommate.

My schizophrenic experience in Charleston was, in essence, no different from what I had known for most of my life. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and went to a progressive private school, the Little Red School House, where we were taught not to be prejudiced. In elementary school we studied about Mexico, India, and China, and also what was then called Negro History. How many other fifth graders in the US at that time were taught about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian rebellion against France? We sang spirituals in music class, and, in fact, our music teacher was a charismatic black woman, Charity Bailey. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was very unusual for a class consisting mainly of middle-class white pupils to have a black school- teacher, but at the time I thought it was entirely natural. Charity (we called our teachers by their first names) was an amazingly gifted teacher and handled her blackness with admirable poise.

I went on from the Little Red School House to its upper school, the Elisabeth Irwin high school (where Angela Davis was a year ahead of me). The political commitment to integration and civil rights was even stronger there. We sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing"along with the "Star Spangled Banner," and we regularly spent Saturday mornings picketing the Woolworths on Fifth Avenue near Fortieth Street, because the lunch counters in southern Woolworths were segregated. But at the same time, Elisabeth Irwin found it hard to recruit African-American students. The tuition was kept as low as possible, and scholarships were made available, but not that many black people could afford to send their children to private schools, and those that could were not interested in a leftist, progressive school like ours. So the integration in my school was more token integration than the real thing, despite our ideals.

Outside of school, my life was just as segregated as any other middle class white American,s. My parents had no African-American friends. I never played with black children or went out with black girls. And I was under tremendous pressure to get into a "good college. Only one of my classmates had the courage of his political convictions and attended City College, where there was some likelihood of studying with a significant number of people of color. Looking back on it, I see how abnormal it was to be in favor of civil rights, against segregation, and so on, and also to protect my white middle class privilege with vigorous tenacity.

In 1969, while I was partway through my graduate program, I had the opportunity of teaching English in a southern Negro college. I was offered a job at Tuskegee and also at a college in Houston, Texas, but I chickened out. I opted to remain in the safe environment of Harvard and

finish my doctorate (which has proven to be a virtually worthless credential, since I did not become an academic). I can,t complain. If I,d gone off to teach at Tuskegee, I would never have met the woman I married, and our marriage has been very rewarding. But my life would certainly have had a very different shape.

For one, I probably would not have moved to Israel in 1973.

To some degree, the decision to move here was an effort to escape American racism, to escape the burden of being white in a society that oppresses people who aren,t white. I heeded the cry of Huey Newton (I think it was he who said it): "If you,re not part of the solution, then you,re part of the problem. I was unable or unwilling to make my whole life over to become part of the solution, so I decided to evade the problem by moving away from it. How naive I was! Instead of being privileged by my skin color, in Israel I am privileged both by being Jewish (with respect to Palestinian Arabs) and by being of Ashkenazic (European) origin (with respect to Jews from North Africa and the Middle East). Also, as if to compound the irony, during the past ten years or so I have become increasingly interested in jazz, and that interest has led me to read extensively about issues of race and African-American culture. So not only have I not escaped American race issues, I have found myself in a violent stew of ethnic conflict in which I am no less compromised by the unearned, accidental privilege of my Ashkenazic Jewish birth than I was as a white-skinned citizen of the United States.

For someone who grew up in the racial society of America, it is difficult not to see the social problems of Israel in the same light. That is my point of reference, but it is not necessarily a useful one. The crimes committed against Africans during the slave trade and under colonialism, and to African Americans under slavery and since then, are not at all the same as the suffering undergone by the Palestinians as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Which is not to deny that very deep scars have been left on Palestinian souls. Conversely, being here in the Middle East has changed my view of the issue of race in the United States. Despite my white skin and European features, I don,t look all that different from many Arabs and Oriental Jews. Although they tend to be darker than I am, some of them are just as light, even blond. The main difference between me and them is cultural. Seeing this, now, has shown me what I had been blind to as a liberal, white American in the fifties and sixties. I tended to discount the cultural difference between me and African-Americans. I failed to realize that African-American culture was really a culture, and I didn,t understand why there had to be Black Studies departments at universities. I wanted desperately to regard American Negroes as white people who happened to have dark skins. That,s how I viewed civil rights. Since "they are the same as "we are, "they deserve the same rights. I hadn,t fully grasped the notion that "they deserved full civil rights even if "they weren,t the same as "we were. Moreover, now that I think of it, it was odd that I, as a Jew, thought of myself as part of the white American collective, while at the same time I insisted that Jews should both enjoy full American citizenship and also preserve certain distinctive religious and cultural traits. We Jews are often accused of being clannish, and I felt

we had every right to be that way if we wanted to.

As an American who grew up committed to civil rights, I am sensitive to the prejudice and discrimination practiced in Israel against Oriental Jews and Palestinians, and as a person who has lived in the cultural stew of the Middle East for nearly thirty years, I have become sensitive to the cultural aspects of discrimination against African-Americans in the United States. As an American troubled by the unearned privilege of having white skin, I suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. As an Israeli, surrounded by real enemies, many of whom have every intention of killing me and my family, I run the risk of suffering from paranoia. I can,t assume that Palestinians will stop hating Israeli Jews if we start treating them fairly. I still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being a privileged person who doesn,t believe in that kind of privilege, but I also have to protect myself. And it,s never clear how real the threat can be. I have joined groups of Israeli peace activists on visits to Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and I have felt safe and welcome. But I also was within sight of one of the suicide bus bombings that took place in Jerusalem in 1996. If my car had been stopped a couple of hundred feet closer to the traffic light, I could have been injured. If I had sent my son to the Central Bus Station by bus that morning instead of driving him, he might have been killed in that explosion.

I have used the words "schizophrenia and "paranoia loosely here. I,m not a clinical psychologist, and I don,t really claim that these situations have made me mentally ill. But sometimes I feel as if what stands between me and the mental illnesses that go by those names is insensitivity. Not only is my skin white, it is thick. If all of us were fully sensitive to the contradictions between the values we profess and the values we actually live by, we might all go mad. Or else we might change the world.

Links to my writing in "Zeek"

2008-06-09T20:35:00.003+03:00

Zeek | In Vincoli | Jeffrey M. Green
Zeek | Shiatsu | Jeffrey Green

Doing Listening - Sonny Rollins, "The Stopper"

2008-06-08T09:44:00.000+03:00

As much as I love music, I don't often listen to it with full attention. I hear it. I have music playing in the background while I work. But I don't listen to it. Even worse, I don't regard sitting down, putting on a disk, and listening carefully to it as doing anything. Sometimes I'll play a disk while I iron shirts or wash dishes or while I'm driving. But my behavior indicates that I don't value listening to music as an activity in its own right. I am the kind of person who always feels that he should be busy with something – a lot of things count, like reading a book or a magazine, doing some chore – but for some reason, listening to music doesn't count for me. Why not?

It ought to. After all, I am a dedicated amateur saxophone player and I usually practice for at least an hour a day, except on the two or three days a week when I play with groups. Playing music on an instrument seems to be “doing something.” For three years I took university courses in musicology. Listening to music for my courses was “doing something.” For that matter, attending a concert also enjoys the status of “doing something.” I would never think of bringing a book to a concert and reading it, even if there were enough light to do that. So why is it that when I hear a live orchestra play a Brahms symphony in a concert hall, I listen attentively, but if I put a disk of that Brahms symphony on the stereo in my living room, I will reach for a book or magazine to read instead of closing my eyes and giving my full attention to the music? If I had the score to follow while the disk was playing, I would be pleased to do that, and it would also count as “doing something.” Anyway, that's my hangup.

If I were a better listener, I would be a better musician. It's obvious that I've taught myself to ignore music when it interferes with work I'm doing, a book I'm reading, or a tricky exit from a highway (the latter is a highly adaptive lapse of musical attention). Music isn't upward in my consciousness. I'm not talking about finding that my attention has wandered from the music while I'm at a concert. I'm talking about hearing music without listening to it, about relegating it to the background.

When I said that I would be a better musician if I were a better listener, I was thinking mainly about my efforts to play jazz and improvise, but it also goes for playing classical music or any music from written notes – alone, but more importantly when playing with other people. For many years I played alto saxophone in a community wind band. To play properly in a large ensemble like that, as many as thirty-five musicians in our case, you have to watch the conductor all the time, you have to read your notes, and you have to hear what the other musicians are doing so you'll stay in tune, stay in tempo, and match the dynamics and phrasing of the band. Usually that doesn't happen, which is why community wind bands can sound so dreadful – aside from the trite music they play. Recently I've been playing baritone saxophone in a big band, and that's even harder, because the rhythms are tricky and the playing is much more intense. If you don't listen to what the rhythm section is playing – the bass, the drums, the piano, and the guitar – you can't stay together with the band. And if each musician fails to listen to what the other saxophones, trombones, and trumpets are playing, the ensemble playing will be an ensemble in name only.

Listening is even more crucial and difficult when you're trying to improvise. You have to hear the song you're playing in you mind, including the harmonies, you have to hear what you're playing, and you have to hear what the rhythm section is playing. If you're playing with a good rhythm section, they will respond to you and vice versa. That means that everybody has to be listening to everybody else. You also have to listen to the other soloists when you're not playing, so that you'll know where to come in when they stop playing, or so that you can add a response to what they're playing, if that's the right thing to do. Or to be inspired by a great solo that might just be happening in front of you.

The only reason why it's possible to do this is the relative simplicity of most of the songs that jazz musicians improvise on. They tend to be thirty-two measures long, divided up into four eight-measure sections, three of which are essentially identical. The rhythm section (drum set, bass, guitar and/or piano) has the responsibility of maintaining that form, and if you're a good listener, you can tell where you are in the song by hearing the chords the rhythm section is playing. Though I've been improving steadily, I'm far from mastering the listening and playing skills you need to be a good improviser, and I usually find myself playing with rhythm sections on my own level – which means they get lost – so I have to know where they should be, even if they aren't actually there.

So how can I improve my listening? Here's my project. I'm going to pick a relatively short jazz piece that I really like – say a five-minute piece featuring by Sonny Rollins, one of my favorite musicians – and I'm going to listen to it systematically. First I'm going to play it and get a general impression. Then I'll focus on the drums, the bass, and the piano in turn. Finally, I'm going to listen to the horns – and I'm going to report on what I hear.

But wait a minute. What's this obsession with “doing something”? It's a superego trip, no question about that. The compulsion to feel that I'm doing something is a legacy from my Lithuanian Jewish forbears in combination with the American work-ethic that I imbibed while growing up. “Don't waste time” was the major imperative. There's a book out, which I haven't read, called Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, by a Jewish-Buddhist teacher with a sense of humor named Sylvia Boorstein. (She also wrote, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist, which I did read.) I've attended several Buddhist silent meditation retreats, where “sitting there” is valued as “doing something,” and, in fact, it truly is doing something very powerful.

Like most people, I imagine, I waste a lot of time looking for keys and glasses, playing stupid games on the computer, waiting on lines, at traffic lights, and in other situations where precious time just seeps out onto the floor like coffee from a cracked cup. It makes me feel either guilty for spending my time pointlessly or angry because I am constrained to do something pointless. Then I try to use the wisdom I heard from a teacher at the first meditation retreat I attended. She said, “Suppose you do have to wait for twenty minutes on line at the post office. You're still with yourself.” She was right. Sometimes I deal with my own impatience by observing it and that of the other people on line. That's always instructive. Anyway, then I'm “doing something.” I'm observing human behavior, including my own.

The compulsion not to waste time is related with a pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction with myself, the constant obligation to improve myself (another legacy from Jewish Lithuania). So, I wonder about my project of listening carefully to a single jazz piece (at this very moment Sonny Rollins is playing “Just Friends” in the background) until I've really heard as much as I can of what all the musicians are doing separately and together on it. Is it just another obsessive self-improvement project, like remembering to put moisturizing lotion on my feet every morning, a sop to my superego? It certainly won't earn money for me, and that is definitely another criterion for “doing something”: if I'm paid for it, it counts.

At the 2006 international film festival in Jerusalem I saw a film called “The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema,” which was essentially a two hour interview with Slavoj Žižek, an energetic, engaging, and provocative philosopher, psychoanalyst, and cultural critic. In that interview, among a million other things, he spoke of the superego as a demonic presence in the psyche, which was something that I'd never grasped before. As Žižek pointed out, the superego can never be satisfied. It's always posing new demands (I always thought of the superego as a benign supervisor, telling me to do the right thing – which shows how much insight I have into myself!). So, thanks to Žižek, I recognize the voice in me, that's always telling me to “do something” as a demonic presence, not a rational call to organize my life better, to channel my emotions and instincts, to be good to myself (and others).

Perhaps I should be satisfied with the way I hear music now. I enjoy it.

But that's not true. The better I listen to music, the more I enjoy it. If I actually do this listening project and hear a piece a dozen or more times, taking note of what each of the musicians is doing, I'm sure it'll carry over to my less directed listening.

Choosing the Piece – Session One

I have been thinking about this project for months, and I have kept putting off the choice of the piece to work with – my analyst, if I had one, would tell me this was a sign of resistance, that this benign project is threatening to me in some way. The piece has to be short enough to be manageable – I'm not going to listen to a twenty-minute piece for as many times as it takes to hear it all – and it has to be great – if I'm going to devote time to this, the piece has to warrant it. But it also has to be fairly traditional, with a recognizable form and harmonic progression. Right now I'm leaning toward the pieces on a Sonny Rollins compilation called Airegin.

I finally settle on a tune called The Stopper, written by Rollins and originally released in an album called Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet, recorded by Prestige in 1951, when Sonny Rollins was just twenty-one years old and already an unbelievably brilliant, creative musician. On my first listening, I just try to get a general impression. I identify the instruments being played: tenor saxophone, vibraphone, piano, bass, and drums. I notice the tempo (rather fast but not blazing), and I see that the piece is based on the interplay between a quick melody, introduced by the saxophone, and a slower, syncopated, four note break played by the bass and the vibraphone (and maybe by the piano and drums, too – I have to check that out), which comes in frequently. I also notice that it is organized the way jazz performances for small ensembles are usually organized: the theme is introduced, the players improvise on the theme in turn, and then the theme is played again. The saxophone plays the theme and the first solo. Then the vibraphone plays a shorter solo, and finally the pianist solos before the theme is played for the last time. Finally, I cannot help noticing what is essentially the main point: Sonny Rollins' astounding virtuosity on his instrument, matched by both the vibraphone player (Milt Jackson) and the pianist (John Lewis).

The second time around, I decide to try to count out the length of the theme and, if I can, the length of the solos. Generally people talk about “choruses” in this context. A chorus is one full cycle in the piece, initially the melody from beginning to end, and then the improvisations, which are usually the same length as the melody or multiples of that length. I have to stop the playback after the first chorus, because I'm not sure whether there's an introduction before the song begins or whether they just leap right into the melody. In fact, after repeated listenings, I still am not sure I can hear where the first chorus begins and ends, and I am sorely tempted to look up the written music – but I resist that temptation. This exercise is about listening. (Anyway, later on, when I did succumb to the temptation, I couldn't find “The Stopper” in any of the numerous fakebooks I own).

Obviously the name of the piece, “The Stopper,” has something to do with the difficulty I'm having in hearing how it's structured: it stops and starts in surprising places. I'll give it one more listen before I call it a day.

At last I think I'm hearing it right: I'm quite sure it's a twelve-bar blues.

The vast majority of jazz songs are either twelve-bar blues or thirty-two bar standards. When I use the word “bar,” I'm referring to the graphic convention of dividing lines of written music with vertical lines, bar-lines. I must apologize for mentioning such elementary things, but often, when I try to write an explanation of something I know, I find I really don't know it all that well – I can't explain it clearly. So I'll try to explain this to myself. The other word we use for what the bar lines signifies is “measure.” Between every pair of bar lines in written music is a measure, which may contain any number of beats, from one to twelve or more. In most music I know of (with the exception of Gregorian chants) the written measure truly measures something – it makes sense to divide pieces up into measures, and the listener hears the division, even though melodies and phrases usually don't fit into them all that neatly. Gavottes, for example, a common baroque genre, always begin in the middle of the first measure.

So when I talk about a twelve-bar blues form or a thirty-two bar standard form, this generally refers to the number of (usually) four-beat measures there are in the whole tune. To figure out the form of “The Stopper,” I listened to it, counted out four beats, and marked the measures on my fingers. It didn't exactly sound like a blues to me when I was trying to parse it, so I tried to fit it into a thirty-two bar pattern first, and it wouldn't go. I would count as far as twenty-four measures, and then it started over again.

I began to feel frustrated. Why am I having so much trouble in the very first, the simplest stage? The listener encounters two problems in trying to hear the structure of any piece: (1) identifying the meter (two, three, four, or six beats per measure, usually) and (2) hearing what beat the piece starts on. In “The Stopper” the musicians play fast, and it's hard for me to decide whether to think of the basic beat as a quarter note (four beats to a measure) or a half note (two beats to a measure). I'm almost ashamed as I admit this – this sort of thing should be absolutely obvious on the first hearing, but it isn't always for me. That's why I'm doing this exercise with myself.

Session Two - Drummer

Although the form of the piece still eludes me – I'm not quite sure what's happening right at the beginning of it, and that throws me off until Sonny Rollins launches into his first solo – I decide to go on and do what I had planned to do, not get stuck. So I listen to the drummer, Kenny Clarke, of whom it says, on the web site called “Drummerworld”:

“[He] was a highly influential if subtle drummer who helped to define bebop drumming. He was the first to shift the time-keeping rhythm from the bass drum to the ride cymbal.” This means that instead of a steady thump-thump on every beat of the measure, or on the second and fourth beat, you hear a much more subtle, lighter “chang-changa-chang,” with a lot of hissing. It also means that the bass drum, operated by the drummer's foot, is now free to accentuate beats that the drummer wants to hit hard, giving him a lot more flexibility to vary the rhythm and make it more complex.

Why start with the drummer? Partly because I'm not in the habit of listening carefully to drummers, even though I know how important they are. I've played with reasonably good drummers and mediocre drummers, and I know that a good drummer can put your playing over the top, and a bad one can screw you up. The drummer does so much more than keep time, but if he doesn't do that, he can't do all the rest. He may not set the tempo, but he's got to keep it. He plays what are called “kicks,” accentuating places in the melody or filling in when the soloist is holding a long note. Mainly he gives energy and drive to the other musicians, pushing the music along. When the music is slow, he keeps it from falling asleep, and when it's a complex, active Latin polyrhythm, he's the busiest person in the ensemble. In fact drummers are always amazingly active, and I can't imagine how they keep going. Their job demands great physical stamina, speed, and incredible coordination along with fine musicianship. To appreciate the role of drumming in jazz, you don't have to get into the importance of the drum in African culture and the fact that plantation owners deprived their slaves of drums, to prevent them from communicating over long distances, but you do have to remember that rhythm is essential to African-American music, the father and mother of the now international and multi-racial genre known as jazz.

I listen to the piece twice, trying to hear what Clarke was doing, which isn't always easy, because he plays softly, and much of the time the other instruments drown out his sound – which doesn't mean that the other musicians aren't hearing him. He is definitely hearing them, and his drumming always supports what they do. There is a repeated pattern of accented notes in the piece. The drums reinforce the accents, and the rest of the time, when the musicians are playing fast passages, the ride cymbal whizzes along under them, not with separate beats so much as a shimmer of rhythm, like a wave they're riding, with occasional quick smacks on the snare drum. You hear him most strongly when he's most needed, under the piano solo that comes before Sonny Rollins plays the melody again at the end. He doesn't get to play a solo on this tune. After listening to Kenny Clarke here, I find myself paying much more attention to the drummers when I listen to other things during the day.

Session Three – Bass

The double bass plays a role in jazz quite different from the role it plays in a symphony orchestra, where it is typically bowed and reinforces the cellos. In jazz it's usually plucked, and it's one of the three pillars of what's known as the rhythm section – which, in fact, could also be called the harmony section. In early jazz recordings you won't hear a string bass for that very reason: the recording techniques weren't adequate to catch their sound. So you'll hear tubas. Today they're usually amplified, so you can really hear them, and sometimes musicians play bass guitars – but to my ear there's nothing like the acoustic sound of a bass viol.

Percy Heath, the bass player of the Modern Jazz Quartet, doesn't do anything that sounds very special in “The Stopper” – he just plays in fine synchronization with Kenny Clark's drumming, emphasizing the slow notes when “The Stopper” stops and then steaming along with rapid eighth notes, laying down the harmonic structure of the piece while keeping the rhythm going. This performance many not sound special, but Heath's technique is superb. He maintains the energy level and keeps the music together. The term usually used for what he does here is “walking,” but in “The Stopper” it's a lot more like trotting.

The exercise of listening to the music and concentrating on the two least conspicuous performers (in this case), the drummer and the bass player, who don't take solos here and whose playing is mainly supportive of the other musicians, creating the musical texture on which the melodies are embroidered is not easy. My attention is constantly seized by the more dominant musicians, who play melodies. But when I force myself to hear the bass, I hear what the melodists are building on.

Session Three – Piano

Technically, the piano is a percussion instrument: felt hammers hit the keys to make them sound. Thus the piano belongs in the rhythm section of a jazz ensemble. Of course the piano is also one of the most versatile musical instruments ever invented, and that versatility is fully expressed in work of outstanding jazz pianists, including John Lewis. In “The Stopper,” Lewis stays mainly in the background. He contributes to accenting the four note theme that keeps recurring in the piece, playing along with the vibraphone, bass, and drums, and in the passages of fast runs played by the two other soloists, he plays short, soft, syncopated chords – no arpeggios, runs, or ornamentation. Then, after the tenor sax and vibraphone have soloed, the piano plays a short solo, just one twelve-measure chorus – showing what it can do when it feels like it.

I have played in ensembles with a lot of amateur pianists, and they have an almost universal problem when it comes to playing by ear with other musicians: they play too much. When a pianist plays alone, she has to do everything, providing melody, harmony, rhythm, and ornamentation. When the pianist who's used to doing that faces the task of accompanying a soloist in an ensemble where there are already musicians playing the bass line and the rhythm, she doesn't know what to do, and she duplicates what's already being done, making the background heavy and crowded, not leaving the soloist room. But John Lewis, who could play any way he wanted, full or spare, loud or soft, with virtuosity or simplicity, doesn't play a single superfluous note here. His chords guide the listeners' ears – including the soloists' ears – only occasionally standing out with some big and dissonant sound, usually signaling what is known as the “turnaround,” the end of the twelve-bar structure, which, instead of resolving in a cadence, throws the melody back to the beginning.

Meanwhile, after listening to it a dozen times or more, concentrating on the background, I've finally figured out the form of the piece, the connection of the recurring theme made up of four slow notes and the intervening fast sections – it's definitely in the form of a blues, and the four note theme appears both at the beginning and the end of the twelve-measure form.

Because I have some experience as a musician and have taken classes in ear training, it isn't too hard for me to recognize the four note theme as a pattern very common in the movement of bass notes – in both jazz and classical music – one, six, two, five. By playing another instrument along with the record, I quickly figure out that these notes are Bb, G, C, and F. In the first two measures, each note is given two beats: Bb, G; C,F. Then in the next two measures, each note gets one beat, and the pattern is repeated: Bb, G, C,F; Bb, G, C, F. Importantly, those four notes, which themselves are quite ordinary and repeated any number of times, are mainly not played directly on the beat, so instead of creating a static, boring, predictable pattern, they give energy and drive to the piece. As I said, in other jazz standards, those notes are usually given to low instruments to play, and the listener mainly hears the chords and melodies built on top of them – but in “The Stopper” they are so prominent that it's hard to decide whether they, in fact, are the tune, and what Sonny Rollins plays is ornamentation.

Session Four – Vibraphone (and Saxophone)

In the long career of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the vibraphone, played by Milt Jackson, was the main melodic instrument. Here Jackson defers to the guest artist, the young Sonny Rollins – of course back in 1951, Milt Jackson was also no old man. Here he starts off by playing the one-six-two-four theme with the rhythm section. The twelve bar blues is divided into three four bar sections, as one would expect. In the first two of these, the long notes alternate with swift runs by the saxophone, and in the ninth and tenth measures the saxophone takes off, playing short, fast phrases, which are echoed by the vibraphone. In the eleventh measure, the four note theme reappears, and in the twelfth and final measure of the melody, the saxophone plays a phrase that leads back to the beginning of the piece, since the melody is repeated. After they play the melody through again, Sonny Rollins launches into three choruses of improvisation, during the first of which the rhythm section, including the vibraphone, play the four note theme again as a background to the solo.

Rollins is playing the tenor saxophone about as fast as it is humanly possible to play, and in one or two places, it sounds to me as if his fabulous technique comes close to failing him. Not only is he playing great music, he's also challenging the soloist to follow him: can you keep up with me? After Rollins, Jackson plays a two chorus solo, showing that he can keep up with ease, and then some. He uses some of the melodic ideas that appeared in the saxophone solo, with consummate finesse, and then he and Rollins lay out for the chorus while the piano solos, before the quintet plays the melody again, like the first time, and conclude the piece.

The solos are mainly in fast eighth notes, and they go by too quickly for my ear to catch the individual notes – I mainly hear contours, which is probably what most people hear, rising, falling, and twisting melodic lines. To hear the individual notes of the solos, I use Audacity, a free sound-editing program that I have downloaded. The program enables you to listen to the music at the same pitch, but twice as slowly (or even slower). Though it makes the sound of the saxophone ragged and raspy, it lets you hear what Sonny Rollins is doing during his solos, as well as everything that's going on behind him, and it makes me wonder how they could all think so fast musically. If I listen to his solo often enough, played at half speed, there's some possibility that I might learn to play it (slowly) and be able to write down the notes. I've never done the highly recommended exercise of transcribing solos – maybe this is the time.

The Moral

By now I'm hearing more detail in “The Stopper” every time I play it for myself. It took considerable patience to get there, but I surprised myself. At first I was frustrated. I heard much less than I thought I should be hearing, and I kept wishing I had the written notes – because I'm used to that. But I've clearly hit on a method of listening that works for me, one that I can recommend. It's certainly time intensive. “The Stopper” lasts just three seconds shy of three minutes, and I've probably spent more than two hours listening to it. The issue is: How does one spend so much time listening to one piece without getting bored with it? At a jazz school I attended, I had the good fortune of encountering Chris Batchelor, a British trumpet player, who talked about the huge amount of “information” you can get out of just listening, for example, to what the bass drum is doing in a given piece, if the drummer is good. The more such information you hear when you listen to music, the more exciting the music gets.

Jazz solos like those by Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, and John Lewis in “The Stopper” give us a chance to hear spontaneous musical creativity. Playing like that is a risky activity, because a lot can go wrong, and you never know exactly what's going to happen. Listening to music like this when it's been recorded, and you can hear it as many times as you want to, is very different from listening to it live, when it's gone as soon as it's over. In this case the musicians were playing in a recording session, knowing that they could discard performances they didn't like, and some of the spontaneity of live jazz improvisation was lost – they must have planned the order and number of solos and decided exactly how they would begin and end it. I doubt very much, however, that the music was ever written down. All the musicians knew the standard chord progression of the blues, and the phrases that Rollins plays would be easy for a man with a phenomenal musical memory like his to play by ear.

As for the piece being a blues, as I said, I doubt that many listeners, hearing it for the first time, would hear it as a blues. It certainly doesn't have the haunting kind of melody we associate with a blues. In that sense, it's like several Charlie Parker tunes (such as “Billie's Bounce,” “Chi Chi,” or “Au Pivave”), which could be interpreted as self-conscious, modernist commentary on the blues form – using it to do something new and different, difficult and sophisticated. Rollins' playing especially, with the shimmering cymbal underneath it, driving it forward, sounds aggressively brilliant: listen to me! He's a young man with great, infectious energy, already at the top of his ability, commanding attention with bravura. He may be playing a blues, but he definitely doesn't have them!