nudes ascending a couch no. 2 (after Duchamp)

nudes ascending a couch no. 2 (after Duchamp)
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I think I may need to retitle this picture - it is attracting the wrong kind of traffic to my Flickr account.
The boys, after the bath last night, running wild, like the futurist dream they are.
I watched Waltzing with Bashir last night. It is excellent - just excellent. And I read the graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat, by Joann Sfar, about a cat in a re-imagined early 20th century Algeria - self-described as "nocturnal, unpredictable, and deeply ethical." And I'm reading Alice Munro for my class. My student described the impact of her stories as a "maka yevesha" which means, roughly, a dry bruise - a harsh blow deliberately placed so it will not show a mark. The term comes from army interrogations.

ben in school

ben in school
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took pictures at Ben's school this week, at the teacher's request, in preparation for this big grade 1 bash where the kids all get their first prayerbooks. So they sent all the children out to me, one by one in the little courtyard under the palm tree, to be photographed, and then when Ben's class was done they kept on sending me more kids - the other grade 1 group, the special needs kids - until I had taken about 200 pictures (the girls were much better at posing). I took my memory card to the photo shop at Hebrew University the next day and it was empty. I was shocked - so shook up I wasn't even sure that I could teach. It wasn't only the waste of all this work, and the prospect of humiliating myself, it was the epistemological shock of something gone that I was certain was there. Kind of like what happened to the stock market this year.

But when I got home and put the photos in the camera they all reappeared. Now if only my stocks would do that.

ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Roadrunner before shabbat. On his way home Jeremy asked Benjamin if he'd like to play Magic with him and Benjamin said, yes, but I'd like to spend some time with Imma first, I didn't get much time with her yesterday.

chalil

chalil
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

On the bus on the way from the market I sat across from a man who said his name was Chalil (flute). He took out his recorder and played a few notes - he said it was a shabbat song. Before he got off the bus he played it again and some people near the front applauded.

cider

cider
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the market today the cheese store was having a tasting of cider from Normandy - two kinds made of apples and one of pears. I ate cheese off the grand knife and tried two of the ciders before stumbling around the rest of the market. It was ten in the morning. I bought a plate of cheeses, a bottle of the cider, jerusalem and potato kugels, passionfruit cheesecake and chocolate rugelach, black olives and olives with lemons, humus and pesto.

lev strawberry

lev strawberry
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Strawberry season! We ate over a kilo yesterday, and I'm hoping to go back to the market for more. The strawberry merchants at the market have a song they sing to attract customers: Tut sadeh, tut sadeh, gam gadol vegam yafeh (strawberries, strawberries, large and lovely).
Other news: Jeremy had a birthday yesterday. We went to see a Scots antique dealer who claims to be descended from the khazars and has an incredible shop in meah shearim, heaps of second temple coins on the table, statues and vases everywhere. He showed us parchment that he claimed was from the Raibid (medieval Jewish scholar) and amuletic bowls and coins and fetishes. We walked into the old city, met a Bedouin who faked a Texan accent , and showed us the stairs up to the linked patchwork of the roofs of the old city (Jerusalem - divided in its people, united in its roofs). We went out for supper and walked home and then I watched the inaugural speech - so happy birthday Jeremy and happy Presidency Obama (for weeks Jer's been saying - I want a black president for my birthday.)

orit

orit
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Orit was here last week--we haven't had a chance to hang out, without children, for years.

ben's picture: milchama

ben's picture: milchama
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I haven't been posting much, mostly because of the war, which made the chronicling of everyday life here seem vulgar. The truth is that life in Jerusalem has been completely normal for us, except that it has been shadowed by this awful conflict. They had a child psychologist over at Ben's school to talk about the war - some of the fathers were called up on reserve duty - and they told the children to draw a picture of war. Benjamin has been mostly oblivious to it - we don't talk about it in front of him, and his limited Hebrew protects him too (though his Hebrew is getting much better). So instead of drawing something that spoke more specifically to the conflict he drew this giant mythic bird with two human passengers, one holding a giant Israeli flag - a picture more informed by Harry Potter than by Gaza. Then he erased the word "milchama" (war) though you can kind of still read it on top of the picture, since it isn't really a picture about the war. And this made me grateful that he is protected from knowing about war, and very sad for the children who have been learning about war, first-hand, the past few weeks.
So there is a ceasefire now, and perhaps it will hold, and perhaps it will not. Perhaps to children here war will one day be something abstract and mythic, like it is to Benjamin. I've been listening to a song version of Yehuda Amichai's poem - I want to die in my own bed - which is the deliberately anti-heroic cry of a poet and soldier who fought in WWII and in Israel's War of Independence, and I'm wishing people of the region ordinary joys and ordinary tragedies.

Lev shadow

Lev shadow
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

wildpeace

wildpeace
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

"Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace."
Wildpeace by Yehuda Amicha. trans. Chana Bloch.

janus-faced Ben/Lev

IMG_8256
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

desert sunset

desert sunset
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The drive down to Eilat from Jerusalem is spectacular. The dead sea gives way to ten thousand different kinds of desert, and you can see the mountains of Jordan in the distance. After a certain point, all that grows is Acacia trees, and there are stretches that look like savanna. The road is also a little dangerous - it twists and turns, can get washed out in wadis, and is, most significantly, frequented by Israeli drivers.

timna

timna
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I think my lens was really murky at this point, which explain the blurriness of this picture. We stopped at Timna on the way back up to Jerusalem. There are prehistoric painting and huge canyons and caverns, and it goes on and on. We didn't use our coupons for the paddleboating on the artificial lake, or the coloured sand in bottles, but we did get a little lost in the desert without any water and had maybe fifteen minutes of mild concern before spotting the road again. Then our car wouldn't start.

petra me

petra me
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Here I am in the Siq. I practiced my Arabic a little bit, and all the Jordanians we met were very friendly and helpful, though my attempt to bargain was a miserable failure (I think I actually ending up paying more than when we'd started bargaining).

bedouin cell phone

bedouin cell phone
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

And here is the thing I did not expect: Petra isn't a dead city. Not really. It seemed like many of the bedouin working there lived there, at least part time - there were children playing in the ruins as if it was their front yard, and I think perhaps it is. This bedouin family had lit a fire, but the matriarch in the lovely embroidered robes is talking on a cell phone. Jeremy peeked into a cave high up and saw bedding, clothing. And years ago our friend Marina told us she'd looked into a cave and seen two boys wrestling, only they weren't wrestling.

petra

petra
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This may give you a bit of a sense of the scale of the place. All thoe holes in the rocks are caves, and there are some spectacular funerary facades as well.

petra

petra
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Here is a full view of the necropolis. There were a lot of tourists, although fewer when we came then when we left. I think a lot of groups tramp through the Siq, look at the necropolis for twenty minutes, then turn right back around, which is a shame because there is so much more beyond it.

boy petra

boy petra
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

There are no cars in Petra, but there are these funny jitneys, covered with ornate and faded brocades, and these fantastic drivers looking like 13 year old Captain Jack Sparrows, with kohl on their eyes and elaborate headdresses. This boy raced his jitney up and down the siq, whistling like a bird -we must have seen him five or six times.

petra

petra
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I always thought that this was all of Petra but the city goes on and on. In three hours, walking hard, we saw a fraction of it. Maybe we should have taken a donkey and a bedouin guide, like this guy we met on the bus who went with a boy who called himself "Eagle." But there was something wonderful about discovering it on foot and on our own though we were a little stunned and confused. It felt like landing on Mars.

petra

petra
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is the picture everyone has seen of Petra, but it's hard to resist it. You hike about twenty of thirty minutes through the siq, a long narrow gorge of sandstone and spectacular in itself, and then you come on the necropolis. Man, those Nabateans sure knew how to carve a city for the dead.

ein gedi

ein gedi
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Me and Jeremy went away together this week, for three nights, the first time we've gone on vacation together without children for six and a half years. We'd been planning it for a long time, and my mother had offered to watch the boys while she is visiting. The day before we left, the airstrikes on Gaza started. It felt gauche, vacationing while rockets fell in Southern Israel and bombs fell in Gaza--when we decided to go ahead we had to decide to screen it out a bit, though at night we watched the news. And I suppose terrible things are always happening in the world, but this feels a little close - Lucretious says cries of death and cries of birth sound out in the same night. Maybe we need a bit of Lucretian ataraxia to get through all this. I remember years ago meeting an Australian woman in India who had just been surfing in Sri Lanka. "Isn't there a civil war going on?" I asked and she said, in her broad nasal accent, "Yes, but the civil war's in the North, and the surfing's in the South". So, the war is in the Southwest here, and the diving and snorkelling and New Years celebrations are in the far South-East, and in the centre all the restaurants and cafes are open and busy, and people are buying challot and flowers for shabbat. Right now it feels like this may be over quickly - I am hoping for a ceasefire soon. I wonder, though, if anything will have changed.

I took this picture while me and Jeremy were hiking in Ein Gedi. He slid into this little waterfall and I was worried he'd bump his head. We saw ibexes and hyraxes and lots of lovely little birds.