May 14, 2017
it's taking a while but i'm much better. Family, friends, and art today. The end of the evening was at the Hertzlia Museum where they were opening a bunch of exhibits, including one that has a little painting we lent them. It was a great place to meet artsy people, even though I was ready to throw in the towel, started dreaming about my pillow, in the middle. I'll have to go back and see the exhibit for real. when i'm awake.
the museum though was too big to go unnoticed. it has been too long since i've been there - it's to three times the size i remember. very modern, very local. very interesting.
A long hard day ended with a play - "Just to Love" - which is essentially about Israeli culture before the '67 war and just after the '73 war. It's a musical and it ends with a song for peace. Very different than the minister of culture would like. and pretty cool.
May 15, 2017
Rehearsal tonight for the play about clothes - wardrobe. i am pretty amazed at how wise the actors are. but that is not unusual = i'm often amazed at how wise young people are around here.
May 17, 3017
I erased yesterday apparently. It was a great day - and i don't know if i can reconstruct it. It ended at midnight and now at 6:30 a.m. i'm on my way to a 50th reunion of technion graduates. so an update can only happen tonight.
May 16, 2017
Spent the day at the Technion. It meant getting up at 6 for gym after a late night with the actresses using my poems for a play. they are much better playwrights than i am and their production of "wardrobe" is going to be great. It was so exciting to hear them that i couldn't fall asleep. And then up at six.
But I couldn't miss Ezi's 50th reunion at the Technion, which was dignified, exciting, and extremely enlightening, concluding with a wonderful talk about some of the high tech and low tech ways that are coming to us soon. the talk was technical enough to engage the hall full of engineers and exciting enough to engage their wives.
But we wives had the best of times - it turned out at least 4 four of us are descendants of families from the same area of Lithuania, and we knew secrets of the local kitchen no one else knows. We went over the details of how to really make gefilte fish, what to do with checken feet, and how to describe distant relatives. Ah, for a chunk of brown bread smeared with shmaltz...
Most also knew how to cook persale, chickory, and other local Arab vegetables and could compare the roots and herbs of the old country. I haven't had a more pleasant conversation in years. The university has really been a prison for me.
May 17, 2017
Habima in the afternoon - full of children, photographers, a bride and groom and bridesmaids, flowers, classical music, tourists, pigeons. the idyll is almost complete.
Just before that I was cleaning up at home with the tv on in the background; the Americans. Violent and heartless. It took me a few episodes to get hardened to it. Just like I am getting hardened to the doings of Donald Trump. He isn't doing anything I didn't expect. And one gets used to expecting him to do crazy dangerous things.
The one thing I can never take for granted is the quiet and peace of Tel Aviv.
May 18, 2017
Should have gone to the evening for Nurit Zarchi last night. i should be going to the event for poetry in yiddish, hebrew and rumanian this evening. i should be going to a million things but i'm finished. literature is wearing me down. I got up at 6 to do tests and ran to the health clinic with my sample, ran back, and began working. it's all the most banal of pobiz but it keeps me off the street..
But should I be allowed to stay off the streets? I mean yesterday I met with a colleague who warned me that reading the papers can result in high blood pressure, heart failure, and stroke. This is meant to be funny but i got to thinking about all my colleagues who have been ignoring the news. They are still making theories about the world and where it's going and all that. I really don't believe intellectuals and scholars have the right to cut themselves off from day to day reality.
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