Kissing Jewish

Ha. Haven't put a word down in weeks. And what captured my attention? No, not the West Bank abductions, the Ukraine, the Unity Government. No. Not at all. Sitting here on Shabbat with nine days left, they put a movie on TV. And furthermore, not even a new one.

"Kissing Jessica Stein" (2001) is 'a heartwarming romantic comedy' which celebrates every New York Jewish stereotype you can imagine and with an all-Jewish cast it was real, not made-up. I watched it and actually enjoyed it. Me. The little blue donkey.
Being Jewish is both a lifestyle and an art form. You get a nuance, a whisper just walking around on the Upper West Side, but this was up-close and full-frontal. Cheap shots to clever dialogue; it was all there. These people are some of the smartest, most creative individuals on the planet, full of angst, hormones, gush and delight, much of which was simply displayed like a nude, blushing portrait on the screen. The IMDB quotes page is full of slick dialogue and well-timed riposte; the Jewish sense of timing is without equal.  Couldn't help comparing to Barbra Streisand in "Meet the "Fokkers", or Woody Allen minus death wish.  Jerusalem is full of people like this and I sometimes feel lumbering, almost Neanderthal by comparison; perhaps goyim have a hard time keeping up. Jessica is Jewish, sensitive, a little neurotic and a journalist by profession but an edgy, risk-taking artist by temperament who impulsively answers a W4W ad after a series of nightmarish dating interactions. Helen is the non-Jewish director of an art gallery with the sex drive of a Lamborghini, given to random encounters with everyone and anyone, including the delivery boy. They meet and the chemistry is explosive. They make up the rules as they go along, neither having any experience of how a gay couple are supposed to behave and their courtship is both earnest, fresh and quite hilarious.
Judy is Jessica's mother - do I have to draw a diagram? Shabbat dinner is Helen's first exposure to the whole tearingly invasive self-congratulatory drama of Friday nights in a Jewish household.
I think you're supposed to be Jewish to catch all of the jokes - I was quite glad that I was able to laugh in most of the right places. I still can't work out whether the dedication "for our parents" was ironic or not.

Words Endless

It's been a while. Here I am, ashamed and guilty. I have been editing, examining and doing odd jobs like voice-overs - as well as opening algebraic mysteries to the unwilling, unenlightened and sometimes uneducable. Senior students have flown the coop - as ready as I can make them. I worry they're not ready enough; insouciance, youth and optimism make uncomfortable bedfellows sometimes. 

It takes its toll. Imagination, even here, looks plane-flat, dun-coloured, wan.

Perfectionism is a curse beyond endurance since for the last considerable time it has slyly looked over its eyes at me and told me that whatever I write won't be good enough, witty enough, funny enough. 

Of course it won't and I'm beginning not to mind. The comedic is for the others for now

and clowns are the saddest creatures on earth. Not everything can be just so, just as one might wish, special and unique, words unrolling like liquid gold across  a virgin page. 

I read a lot of bloggers' work, some of which is inspirational, much of the rest is tepid, almost like practice, flexing muscle, rehearsal without dress.

It seems strange to think so, but I am almost - but not quite - sorry for big bucks authors who have to squeeze new plots out of their familiar characters every six months, otherwise their publishers wave breach of contract suits over their heads. And, it shows. People's early, unfettered work has a breath of bravado and risk about it and as they have been ground down by the cockchafer of publishing deadlines, their original spark takes more and more tries to ignite against the sweat-dampened tinderbox of their imagination.

And yet, we do. Perhaps because we must. Like Maya Angelou's caged bird, sing we must - clipped wings or not, standing on the grave of dreams.

And then; there's this...

...but words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled Stepdame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite;
"Fool," said my muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Astrophil to Stella, Sonnet 1

Sir Philip Sidney

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Darkness at Noon

Showtime...

A few days ago, two men were supposed to have been executed by lethal injection within hours of each other. One of them had been Tasered for refusing to leave his cell.  It took almost an hour to find a vein which apparently collapsed during the procedure causing the victim agonising pain as he was insufficiently sedated, hence  the lethal cocktail leaked into surrounding tissue. The other, two hours from his own introduction to the grim reaper, had his appointment delayed by six months.
The Death Penalty - let's just capitalise it for a moment to emphasise the irony - is, according to Amnesty International "the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the State".
Despite considerable deliberation - what man has not thought about such things  - I am in no position to hold an opinion other than one of moral ambivalence. Indeed, I am not sure anyone else has either, compelling as both arguments surely are. The fact remains that peoples all over the world have ceremonial judicial systems, complete with strange garb and unfamiliar language which can under extreme circumstances, result in the dispensational ability of such systems to legally take life, often by quite exotic means.
So be it. If that is their stance, wish and procedure. There are deeper ethical questions to answer however. The use of chemicals is considered humane. Why then are drugs used in such a way as to expose the victim and an invited audience to a media sideshow, complete with "witnesses" and curtains as in a theatre? The victim is paraded before his audience on a cruciform trolley. He may or may not say something. There may be tears of remorse - who knows? A man may say almost anything when confronted with the inescapable removal of his soul from his body. 
The composition of the lethal cocktail has been discussed at some length, first sedative then respiratory seizure then cardiac failure. Animals are "put to sleep" in veterinary clinics daily. It would be more humane to ask a vet to do it, rather than leaving it to people who have in whatever corner of their minds, notions of retribution, social payback or political expediency. In this unfortunate case, for a state that executes people on a regular basis, all that can be said is that they're just not very good at it.
I remember as a teenager being enthralled by Arthur Koestler's  "Darkness at Noon"  whose lead character, a small time Party official in a fictionalised reconstruction of Stalin's Terror was arrested, confessed and inevitably executed, for the greater good, of course. His death was memorably described as "a shrug of eternity". If we no longer carry moral scruple, ritualised executions are no more or less than collective shrugs, clothed in ritual whose sole purpose, it seems,  is to confer legitimacy. I think it's time we all grew up.

Worlds Apart

Most of my life, man and boy, has been spent shuffling around between libraries and classrooms, optimistically hunting down scraps and titbits to add to the rambling neural labyrinths somewhere inside my head. I'm not being vain or superior, the fact is, we all do it, to a greater or lesser extent. Not the shuffling part, let me be clear, but the finding out part. It's relatively uncomplicated to amass facts, Dickensianly unconnected, and preen oneself at cocktail parties because one can pronounce the capital city of Burkina Faso correctly. It's a little bit more difficult to actually think for oneself, which is, after all, the holy grail of the educator. If my students simply outgrow me, I've done my job and led them forth with enough mental apparatus to make a difference in the world.

My alma mater 1964-1969

I was taught English literature by a master of his craft. English public schools throw up such people from time to time and one is indeed fortunate if such a one crosses one's path. He taught us, we gormless, pustular clods, to recognise type and similarity in a story. One term we were doing Lear. He asked us whether the story reminded us of anything. We sat in stupefied silence. He blew gently through his pipe and asked whether any of us had been read to as children. Hands went up, shiftily. He then asked, with sarcasm both weighty and painful whether any of us had, perhaps, come across a story about two bitchy sisters and their kind sibling who was bullied and humiliated just for being good, the story of Cinderella. Ah. When studying 'The Clerk's Tale', Chaucer's story was easily transposed into 'A Winter's Tale' where tormented wives suffered unreasonable treatment at their husbands' hands.
I was, of course, privileged beyond peradventure. Which is, I suppose, why I find myself outraged to the point of foaming homicide when a collection of rag-tag, brutal peasants in a town in northern Nigeria take it upon themselves not just to deny young girls the chance to think for themselves but have the unconscionable savagery to attempt to blame their perverted, vomitous behaviour on a tattered piece of fiction masquerading as religious literature and the halfwitted ramblings of its ignorant interpreters. These girls have become spoils of war and may even now be locked down in some disgustingly filthy hovel where their captors feel themselves entitled to use them for whatever obscene and grotesque purpose their shrivelled intellects can devise.
I do not normally find myself wishing ill upon any of my fellow-travellers on this planet. But, the head of this pernicious organisation, twitching manically and mumbling into the camera, is of a very different stripe as he threatens to sell the captive girls at the market. The video clip should be watched, disturbing as it undoubtedly is, so that the whole world sees what happens to people who have been overtaken by a dangerous religious mania. It should most especially be watched by those who seem to imagine themselves guiltless since they are only paying for the continued existence of this appalling, diabolical sect.

I am short on charity for the leader of Boko Haram, despite clear evidence of his mental unravelling. He stands for every twisted inversion of everything I have spent my life promoting and were he to be captured, and were I in charge of his sentencing, I would ensure that he lived long and had ample opportunity to listen to the howling voices in his head. Without interruption from his fellows. For an awfully long time.

Hammers and Plowshares

Kids in the Park

Sometimes, life just tumbles over on itself, accelerating like a poorly made snowball down a bumpy hill. A few months ago, I was enjoying retirement and trying not to feel guilty for "forgetting" to mow the lawn or wondering when I might find the time to hoover the bottom of the swimming pool. Then, here I came, tossed like a pebble into the clash of cultural Titans which is daily life on this little spit of land jutting precariously into the West Bank like an unwelcome drunk at the wedding. 

Girls on Jaffa Street

Friction wears down the surfaces, however, much as John Kerry must have felt over the months of negotiating between two implacable opponents, one of whom would just prefer to be left alone, and the other wants them dead. Since I last spent an extended period of time here, the wall - the offensive rock to both sides - has been extended so that it becomes more difficult for Palestinian youth, fuelled by Friday rhetoric, to hurl Molotov cocktails over it - and the icon of dissent on which Western liberals so profusely scrawl their ill-conceived messages likening the 'occupation' to Nazism - an irony there - or, worse, apartheid. John Kerry's aside, however much the Administration now back-pedals, gained traction among the twittering classes. The effect has been to isolate. East Jerusalem, mostly grubby and poor, was always foreign and is more so now. The West Bank broods even more darkly, cementing its cultural identities with increasingly grim-faced determination with plasterwork of brittle, mutinous resentment.
Abbas, the survivor (whatever is he still doing in charge?),  has signed agreements with the hounds in Gaza, who, as soon as they gain a toehold, will elect their own in the West Bank, when "currently diluted for political reasons", some of their original Articles of Covenant may well find a ready and willingly gullible audience. 
I am tired. Tired of dissecting out the lies. Tired of defending in the face of the tidal waves of misanthropic fiction in the media. Tired of defending America when she seems less and less competent to conduct a diplomatically civilised game of what is becoming more and more like chance rather than skill. How the Israelis must feel about the behaviour of their long-time ally is beyond understanding. Long ago, they must have realised that bleating to the foreigners won't get the job done.
Yesterday was Yom Hazikaron, or Memorial Day for victims of war and terror. A week ago it was Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, and today is Independence Day. The juxtaposition of these three events is not without significance. The last commandment of Torah, post 1945, has been, unofficially, "never again" and, perhaps more trenchant, "never stand by". As the tiny, fledgling nation was birthed, architects of its destruction threw themselves at it from all sides, determined that it should never come to maturity. The scale of the invasion in 1948 was astonishing, their response little short of miraculous. They fought with the tenacity of survival, threw their enemies back and had the Jordanians not broken faith, the indigenous Palestinians from over the border would have had their homeland almost seventy years ago. The Israelis have long memories and there was much to celebrate last night, at least on their side of the fence. The Arabs remember this as 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe'.  The question is no longer 'who's to blame?' but 'can Nakba and Independence co-exist in the same space?' They are like conjoined Siamese twins, trumping each other with aces of victimhood.  In the moment, however, the Jaffa Street celebrations overrode any darker considerations.

Google's offering this year - a bit subdued, I think

It was good to mingle as the crowds gathered, for a party that went on all night. Teenagers with shaving foam mercifully restricted their targeting to each other. Gigantic inflatable plastic hammers emblazoned with blue and white were carried by young children who amused themselves by hitting each other with them, the irony of which reminded me of Isaiah 2:4. I flitted like a wraith, unnoticed amidst the optimism and celebration, simultaneously at home and a stranger. 

Noye's Fludde

What a lot of twitter, mutter and blog there's been about "Noah". After all, it's a long way from the fifteenth century Chester Mystery Cycle of plays and even further from the Britten opera in which I was once cast, improbably, as the Voice of God. Church leaders have been sounding off about extra-biblical Nephilim, flawed angelology and Big Bang pastiches about Creation. People taking liberties with the historical Tubal-Cain, mangy, lizard-eating stowaway as he is portrayed - Ray Winstone’s South London gangster accent and all - and all kinds of incestuously lascivious unspoken backstories about Noah's sons' wives - or lack of them.

The Ark looks like a gigantic floating wardrobe, as improbably buoyant as this Seine river boat, into which the pachyderms and reptiles lumber, swarm and slither in their multitudes, settling into their prearranged spaces as if by orchestral direction, obediently sleeping, anesthetized with a smoke-wreathed censer, as birds swirl satisfyingly inwards.

Aronofsky's Noah seems to have become disturbed, apparently by the depravity of the rest of his species, so much so that he obsesses on the idea that humanity should not survive. This isn't the first time he's gotten away with stellar portrayals of tortured souls - 'The Wrestler' (2010) almost brought Mickey Rourke back from the dead. In this new incarnation, Noah believes that the Creator must be using his family just to save the animal kingdom and then mankind will simply fade into extinction – a rather second-rate Day Six attempt at the best of the best. If his son's wife has a baby girl, Noah announces that he will take that life to prevent the human race from continuing. Later, with Noah's knife raised over twin daughters, suddenly the myths get busted and there are two of them, Noah and Abraham, conflicted and close to losing reason. No wonder he turned to drink.

It’s fictional. It’s a movie. References to Gnostic thinking, whispers of Kabbala notwithstanding, it’s just Hollywood and it will no more bring people closer to God than the next incarnation of X-men. The Icelandic landscapes are satisfyingly primitive and the special effects remarkable. We briefly wonder where all the wood is going to come from in a barren volcanic wasteland until the miraculous growth of a forest, the “fountains of the great deep” explosively funnel water upwards as the deluge pours down, but the best

characterization is a wily old Anthony Hopkins, suitably wizened by great age, as Noah’s grandfather Methuselah, with magical powers, a fondness for berries and a nice touch in fertility. Six (or maybe even seven) out of ten.

Giving Too Much

Illustration from 'The Man Who Gave Too Much'

Even or perhaps especially in churches, there are rituals. They have no material significance, mostly, except for the fact that we all dutifully follow them. One such is the insistence of my local chaplaincy to use the  word "trespasses" instead of "sins" in the Lord's Prayer. 
When I was a child, trespassing meant hopping over the gate on to Farmer So-and-So's land and shooting his birds and was vastly different to sins. You went to hell for those. Or so my imagination told me.
Childhood. What marvellous, fertile ground in which thorns, briars and good seed have an equal chance of successful germination. A friend whom I have never met, but I know, has written a book, one of several as it happens but this one is for children. She is an Oxford English graduate - not one of those whose faces have been screwed and desiccated by criticism of others - instead her use of words is honest, wide-eyed and lyrical, sometimes breathtakingly so. Which is why I say I know her, meaning I respond to her writing with delight as one curious human being to another, almost as a child might.

Which is fortunate, since Anita Mathias' new book "Francesco, Artist of Florence" or 'The Man Who Gave Too Much' is a small, poignant testament to goodness. It is "good seed". It takes good people to create other good people and Francesco the Florentine, always selling his beautifully inlaid work at ridiculously low prices, is a good, good man. He has no head for business, he justifies his knockdown prices by all kinds of emotional acrobatics, and worries that his wife will scold him for not making enough money. This little book is about forgiveness, not least in learning how to forgive ourselves. For this reason, children of a certain age, full of misdemeanor and transgression, unless their fundamental goodness is established early and they learn that "forgiveness of trespasses" carries with it a completeness and totality that extends even to their own follies and mistakes, often fail later to practise the delicate but necessary art of forgiving themselves.
This book is a small, beautifully illustrated tool in the hands of an artful, imaginative parent. It should be read aloud to children, talked about, prayed with.
Anita is a master of awe and wonder. The illustrations perfectly complement a little story with the same captivating prose as "The Little Prince" and will be the kind of book that will remain on a child's shelf, like a favorite stuffed toy, and when they are grown , they will read it again to a new, wide-eyed and curious little person.