=ino8 AN INNOCENT ABROAD IN PAGAN LANDS Being a Brief Account of the Author's Travels to the Frozen North, August '04 -- November '04 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ADVICE TO THE READER, IF ANY: N.B.: This essay may be less aggravating if not confusing to read #L2 (it couldn't be much more of either, Mather) #L2 if the format is reconstituted from the preset text (*.txt) back into EinsteinWriter, or any other format that allows successive block indents. To reconsitute into Einstein simply global-replace all #L with .L That will clearly display the sub-points, sub-sub-points, etc. I discuss in too much more detail on my Website www.geocities.com/sa73122a ================================================================ ---------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION: I wanted to title this, "An Innocent-a Broad in Pagan Lands" I slosh threw a few pages of Mark Twain's An Innocent Abroad each night before falling asleep -- he does point out, they say, and with no ax to grind, that the native Palestinian Peoples from whom we stole The Holy Land were not much in evidence a century ago. #L2 I mean, (from what I read, and I reckon it's pretty much so) most of them came in from the Arabian desert and up from Egypt after we got the place going again, in the late 1800's and early 1900's. #L1 Sometimes his humour seems labored, but he does have a fine ear for unconventional speech. His narrative style, the literay analog of a CONTINUO, has too much Victorian doughtiness that writers hadn't then brushed off -- the old story of USA art imitating what they took for European culture -- so Hemingway picked it up by the ears and threw it down on the ground with a big crash for all to hear and obey, except Faulkner #L2 whom Hemingway mocks in 'To Have and Have Not' #L1 I got AG a copy of Jean Auel's latest, Shelters of Stone, having bogged down about page 90 -- I reckon it's a good role model for a young woman who needs to acknowlege her strength -- and it is a clean book, and "you can't hardly get that anymore" -- #L3 I think that line was from a TV show of the 50's, Wally Cox as "Mr. Peepers" -- #L4 They're thinking of doing an adult remake of it, a hotter version tentatively titled, "Mr. Peppers". #L5 I will try to correct all typos that don't make passible if not flatulent puns. #L1 I would like to pack this essay neatly into topics, as the Swiss would do, but the topics keep running away into other topics' (junk)yards. #L2 Oh well, I wrote it, it's your problem to read it, not mine. And anyhow, my toes are cold. #L3 Bosh Benedict once said: It is the physician's responsibilty to heal, and the pateient's responsibility to be healed. [Dr. Mrs. Ruth Boshwitz Benedict, zl'b, quoted by my mother, best's I recollect ] #L4 Some Victorian turkey once wrote a book called 'Venus Observed'. I mean mazaltov, the chick can't even make love in peace without some old fart running up and saying, What you need is a Critic. #l5 (OK, so Wallace Stevens said it first, in 'Peter Quince at the Clavier' #L6 (I mean gvalt -- (Peter Quince is one of Shakespeare's Rustics, in Midsummer's Night's Dream, if I recall) #L7 like I've often said, Marilyn Strauss Lidov, zl'b, once hummed a run -- 9 notes as I recall -- as played by Schnable, and said, best's I recollect -- this was Oberlin in about '61 -- 'If I could play like that just once, I'd retire)' -- I've often said: Marilyn would say of the late Beethoven quartets -- "You can't WRITE like that -- in a tone of amazement -- Vicky Woskoff once said, 'Nobody understands Beethoven, except maybe Marilyn. Marilyn once said that maybe music could only be explained in its own terms. Well, even an atonalist can say that. But Marilyn was genuinely musical, she was no apologist for pseudo-artistic shockjocks, like curators who write catalogues for exhibits of soi-disant 'conceptual art' -- which has viritually no concepts, and less then no art. And again: I once heard Harold Rosenberg say -- this was maybe about '68, when he came to UC Santa Barbara to give a Regents' Lecture -- "'The Anxious Object' [title of his first book] is anxious because it doen't know what it is" #L4 which is 'Susannah and the Elders') So anyhow , so then Mary McCarthy goes to Venice -- the intelligensia could do that in those days -- and writes a travelogue and calls it 'Venice Observed'. #L5 Though I ain't got much call to cry poorboy -- I been to Venice too, though I wasted most of my time keeping Shabas -- I mean, that's like getting invited to an orgy and spending the evening, or whenever it is that they do it, reading the daf yomi. (A most witty digression, the relevance of which I can't now imagine.) Much less, with all the subsequent inserts, where this remark once went. Oh well. #L1 ---------------------------------------------------------------- ================================================== =============== TRANSPORT AND LODGING: It seems that trains run everywhere once an hour, and at almost every train station there is a GastHaus -- prices run about SF 60 to sleep off the ground out of the rain #L2 Much of free-market capitalism rests, not on a mutual satisfaction of needs, but of the insatiably greedy exploiting the desperation of those in critical situations. #L3 The need to drink water with one's meal, the need to relive oneself, the need to drink hot water when one is chilled -- notice how genteel society manages to exploit these needs, without acknowleging it. And the need of most to flee aloneness for fear of lonliness. #L4 For most, sex is at most a societally-incited want, not a critical need. #L1 without a private potty #L2 (and of course in the good old days it was just that -- some of them delicately glazed and decorated, for the ladies I suppose ) #L1 With a private potty, about SF 100. ---------------------------------------------------------------- For less than the price of a piece of pie, I can ride up a mountainside. ---------------------------------------------------------------- The better hotels now boast of ADSL plugs in every room. But that's no big deal. Hotels should offer customers the use of laptops with ADSL. Because most people would rather not carry their own laptop when they travel. There is the risk of lost or stolen data from losss, theft, or damage; and all the inconveniences of carrying a laptop onto an airplane, the more so with security concerns. Indeed, an airline may properly insist that it be checked through, not carried on. And it will probably reduce one's luggage allowance. --------------------------------------------------------------- I give some friends a paperback Metsudah Shabat Siddur. They could give me their car and half their house in exchange, and still be in my debt. They offer me a CD copy of the Complete Works of HIK, with a few Meg of PVK tossed in as an extra. Nearby there is Polyester Textile Baron, who makes up in patriotism what he lacks in morality. He has a Castle on the Rhine, to which only his polyester textile guests are admitted. In the good old days, a Prince would wisely have traded such a castle for that CD. With the Cathedral of Notre Dame tossed in for good will. Briefly, HIK is for real -- honest, comprehensive I reckon, and he don't make anything more complicated than it has to be #L2 (kabala does the opposite, it veils everything in technical obscurantism, #L3 to keep out black magicians I suppose -- #L4 being evil, they are easily bored and readily distracted.) #L1 ---------------------------------------------------------------- From Ticino to Graubunden (Italaian to Romantsch / German ) the cultural orientation changes from south -- Italy, pastel painted houses with religious murals on the outside walls -- to north -- to Germany -- brown wood trim, ethically uplifting doggerel in obsolete German script on the outside walls -- Switzerland is a land of wild pagan mountain spirits: no wonder it needed the church-bells of Christianity more than the Indians of North America and as much as the dark rain-wrapped forests of Germany, in the cold rain of the Baltic Sea. Thier religion is neatness. Their one taboo is to never ask for a plastic bag. Countries on the verge of overpopulation -- Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands -- develop, of necessity, a meticulousness to their civilization. And in Netherlands and Switzerland anyhow, a gentle, whimsical sense of humour and gentleness in manners. Switzerland, being wealthy, develops "harmless games" -- harmless ways of acting-out one's need to be eccentric, to individuate onself. The Swiss orderliness is charming -- each bottle has its designated dustbin -- but it can maybe make one a bit crazy, especially if that environment encloses you. After the scrupulous harmony of Zenith, for 3 months, where even each flower is safeguarded, comes the arrogance of the mushroom rustlers, striding across sacred spaces with the 7-league boots of their continual voices, #L2 (Alev said, she came back to Zenith Campground in winter and was surprised at how small it seemed. I have not had that impression. But when one superimposes inner space upon outer space, the perceived physical space becomes much larger -- the more so in Zenith, where there are hundreds of people, each making their own mini-world -- thre is just enough physical space, with a scrupulous respect for not imposing one's own particularities upon public space, that the same public space can contain multiple private worlds -- #L3 On Rodos, I was put in a sort of holding cell for pending deportees, so crowded there was barely room to lie down, #L3 (Most of my prisonmates were Muslim -- I rather think the Greek police put me in there to get beaten up, if not killed -- on my first night, they put into the cell a huge retarded psychotic named or called George, who was yelling about Jews -- he had probably been told that there was a Jew there - - but some of my cellmates covered for me,, saying I was from Australia -- and none of my cellmates -- including Muslims from Iraq and Iran -- denounced me, though I had told them I was from the USA, and I think also indicated I was from Israel -- not precisely street-smarts, but my mind was too blown -- to close to complete ego-loss -- to enaable me even to lie, much less to role-play, which is the basic survival skill -- #L3 when I too out of it, on the beach, to give the local cop a payoff for leaving me alone -- and I suspect, for telling the local toughs to leave me alone, for 3 years -- but then it again, I suspect it was somme sort of security police or rightist vigillantes who had me beaten up on New Year's eve of the Millenium -- though I remember none of it -- and also I suspect that it was a passing Israeli with a car who rescued me and took me to the possible, and was then charged with having hit me in an accident -- I literally froze up when the cops asked me to sign the complaint form -- I could not even speak when they asked me to confirm my identity by giving my father's name, which is hidden data on a passport -- and so charges were never pressed. So what I started to say is -- we were talking of how subjective space can enlarge physical space -- although I am ordinarily a bit claustraphobic, somehow I remained calm throughout that confinement. #L4 Well, you read it here first, this was Nov. '02, and I've not quite been able to bear writing anbout it in such detail hitherto. Although I was sometimes delusional during this confinement, I have kept the facts of the matter clearly in mind against the time when I would write them down. And there remains more to say of it. I'm pretty good at distinguish my clear intutions and recollections from the less clear ones. So ok, back to whatever it is I was editing #L5 Oh heck, it ain't edditng, I don't anyting out but a few of the typos, mostly I just keep suffing more and more stuff in #L6 One should always try to be honest at least once a day #L1 dropping piles of poop with the indiffernece of those who have no intention of staying, and ignore that this is someone's home. And then the violation of the deer-shooters -- #L2 they don't even deserve the term 'hunters', they just survey the mountainside with high-power binoculars, and then go up and sit and shoot. Probably drive up too. #L3 Chicano Dave, at New Buffalo, would sometimes go out hunting, and I think even run after deer sometimes -- he also did some headlight-hunting, but had the grace -- and he had a lot of grace -- to be a bit ashamed of it. And at least we did eat the deer he shot, mostly in ceremonial occasions, and it's not as if we had roast beef more than once every few years. #L1 betraying silence with the most advanced technology to bloodily rupture the chests of the gentlest of creatures. If, like the abdominating Caananites, the Swiss lose control of their land, it will be because at last the deer tropped to the Heavenly Throne, raising their gentle eyes in silent appeal. ------------------------------------------------------------------- =================================================================ù GERMAN AND GERMANY: I find mysef speaking German -- albeit in Switzerland, not Germany -- with practically no hesitation, for thee firt time in 15 years - - for those of us not closely touched by tthe Shoah, it is not necessary to snub Germans -- I hafve done quite enough of that for all of us. I take a weekend trip to Germany, for a meditation seminar (of sorts) -- I am a bit uncomfortable when we cross the border -- the land is too flat, and the vibe too flat too -- and I'm quite relieved when we re-enter Switzerland -- somewhat the way I felt upon leaving Belarus -- and that was just leaving Belarus into Lithuania -- when I re-entered Poland I felt almost at home -- but then, I do have some friends from Poland -- In Israel, it's the oposite of England, where language is a matter of social dominance #L2 (though there's more than a bit of reverse snobbery too, cockney DJ's and all that -- England is awfully class- conscious, although, as in Greece, the lower classes look out for their own -- #L3 I experienced almost daily gestures of kindness when I was an apparent bum on Rodos -- people were continually brining me food, often hot dishes -- #L4 though at the time I think I was trying to do some sort of pennance, and starve myself into submitting to normalcy -- #L5 tho unfortunately I have quite a strong will, which I could not break by going without food or drink -- if only because there are many kind-hearted Greeks even in the heart of a tourist town, and I could never say no to a free ham sandwich -- they do eat a lot of it on Greece -- though I did somehow manage to get through a few Pesach's without too many averot -- I mean, a Jew who shoots the Prime Minister during Pesach will still go to heaven if he doesn't eat a cupcake -- #L4 and could not bring myself to the point of walking back to the room I had rented and admitting I'd made an ass of myelf -- #L5 oh well. #L6 And you wonder why I hate Vonnegut. #L1 -- in Israel, no-one stands on language use; there is an eagerness to understand, even intuit, one's meaning; gesture and expession play a large part. And so too with the polyglot flock I run in ("Ici on parle Polyglot", as Mme Soulam would say at the Old Synagog in Rodos). I don't hear grammatic mistakes or inexact words. But many Swiss seem to wait for you to come to them with the right word, and will barely acknowlege having understood you until you do. And I think I've brushed against anti-Amercain prejudice -- an odd feeling since I've never defined myself as American, least of all when I lived in the USA ("I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" sang George M. Cohan. I mean, if we hadn't invented Americanism when we came to Hollywood, the goyim would never have know what it was. They'd still be drinking green Guiness and throwing rotten tomatoes at George Bush Jr. when he stood up and said, #L2 like his Daddy before him [ in the middle of the first debate with Dukakis, Papa George burst out most plaintively in response to some question of fact, "I want to be President." Upon seeing and hearing that on TV, I concluded that nobody in their right mind could ever vote for him. And in light of the recent election, I'm sure I was right, and Junior too and double that. I guess Kerry spoke with conscious irony when he concluded in a concession statement, "G_d save the USA.". #L1 'Vote for me because I want to be President.' But so, after the Bush Jr. elephant_in_a_china_shop act -- and what a destructive bunch of smirking softmores -- it is harder to lord it over Germans. ----------------------------------------------------------------- GNOMES TROLLS AND WATCHMAKERS: The first time I returned to Switzerland, I got off the train in Lugano, with enough luggage for a boatload of refugees. I put it all in and on one of those luggage carts, and followed the signs to the track that my train was expected to run on and run on I do too but anywho, that path took me onto an escalator -- so I held the luggage-cart as level as I could. A Swiss said, just let the front of it rest on the lower step. I explained, in some panic, I can't, it's heavily loaded and will roll down to the bottom. He indicated a set of gravity-drop wheels on the rear set of rolling wheels, designed to lock onto the descending moving staircase. Oh, I said, Tres Suisse. Oddly, the Swiss have not discovered the Israeli inside-door safety lock -- an invention, like the Uzi, of astounding simple ingenuitzy. But they have someing of similarly Copernican re_conceptualization, the variable_height_detatchable_shower_holder (I'm sure there a word for it in Germman, how could there not be) that is, the hand-held shower rests in a holder that is mounted with adjustable grip on a top_to_bottom (so_to_speak) rod. Speaking of which, we atavists of the Middle East are still waiting for Western civilization to discover the -- I don't quite know how to cicumlocute this topic [ which disquisition on the Spritzer is continued below under the rubic -- Caveat Tabbycat -- of Poo-poo ] ================================================================ "HEUREUX, QUI A FAITES UN BON VOYAGE ... " Vacationing in Switzerland, overwhelmed at first by the water and greenery, I find I miss things from Israel. The abundance of fruit juoices available almost "for free" at street kiosks. The simple decency of placing toilet and shower in seperate cubicles. Communication across language-barriers with a glance or gesture. I pick some watercress. Delicious. At Modi„in , Meira grows green grapes, small but sweet. Alifa grows Muscat grapes, I tihnk -- the lpurpose ones, strting to turn to riasins -- I pick and eat them, one at a time -- all are good, but some are special, each one different. Here I buy some apricots at the Co-op Mini-Super-Market; but they are tasteless. Outside the Mahane Yehuda, I bought a cup of fresh-pressed carrot juice for less than a dollar. Here I have found tolerable red wines, but have not yet found a memorable one. (I don't even know if there is a good Merlot. ) Under SF 10 is a bargain. In Israel I could get a tolerable red wine (Ashkelon), for under $3, supposedly good wines like Hermon red for under $10, and really good wines, Baron's maybe, for about twice that. They do have a fine variety of alcoholic herbal beverages -- apertifs (like Sherry) but presumably herbal-based, not wine- based. There are also a range of Italian non-alcoholic apertifs, but these don't list their ingredients, so I fear they ain't natural. As for herbal soft drinks -- eg the original coca-cola, sasparella, root beer -- those seem to have gone out with the 19th century. Though I'm told that Tamarindo, Tamar-Ind-O, dates , Tamarim, of India ) and Qat (a stimulant like the real Cocoa ) are available as drinks in the Mahane Yehuda. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It is a bit of a relief to be away from the Modi'in minyan. A good ba'al tfilah should be neutral as running water, and simply carry the minyan: onee does not usually want a vehilce, other than Balak's donkey, to modify one's trip. But many stop off on the astral plane, fancying that they have already arrived at their mystic destination. #L2 (And so Yehuda, already enmeshed in supersittion ("lest he dies like his brothers") stepped aside to offer his seed to what he thought a k'disha -- a holy hooker, a Caananite "temple prostitute" -- no wonder we almost got the wrong Messiach -- and so said truly as well as nobly, 'She is more rightous than I.') #L1 Others romanticize, or simplify. Tunes -- nusach, I think they call it -- must be used very carefully. #L2 (What R. Shlomo did is very simple; it's what he didn't do that's complex. #L3 Like Leary said in Psychedelic Prayers, his adaptation as an LSD-tripper's guide of the Tao te Ching: 'When the guide is good, they say, 'We did it all ourself'.) #L1 When tunes are used for prayers, they can block out, jam the prayers. #L2 The baal tfillah can't just take any R. Shlomo tune and sing any passage in the siddur to it, mostly that don't work, or so it seems to me -- but too, there's a real generation gap here -- the difference between zikr and fikr -- the young may need to sing while the old folks need to be silent --like RSC often said -- 'What do we know -- what do we really know.' So too with the reader's repetition of the amidah. Only the greatest composers could set somethinng like the k'dusha. I mean, this is the Roman Catholic Sanctus, and that's pretty high music -- but does the Faure Sanctus, or even the Sanctus in the Bach B-Minor Mass, take you where you can get in the Bet Knesset -- or maybe better, on the lawn outside it, during the Kdusha of the Reader's Amidah -- (One who learns of Judaism from the Christians might as well learn wine-tasting from an Ishmaelite. Henry Kissinger said of Anthony Lewis: He gets everything wrong. Well, so do the Christians who tell the whole world, even us if we eavesdrop, what Judaism is, or (as they would have it) was. The Shabat minyan has been largely given to the teenagers; excellent training and a noble gesture of trust, but the result feels like a football game, though less spiritual. #L3 Lately (summer '04) a tune has been introduced appropriate for discharing one's marital obligation, but not otherwise Shabasdik. #L2 On Friday nights I would stand outside the Bet Knesset -- which us usually not too crowded with a weekday minyan, but gets a bit packed on Shabat with up to a few hundred -- I do think that the 4 Amud rule applies: one should be able to twirl with arms outstreteched -- #L3 which may be the origin of the whirling dervishes -- safeguarding one's personal space, #L4 which is maybe the space, or basic space, or minimal space -- I don't know -- for one's aura. #L5 ( Though I must say that I never heard PVK, nor anyone else, say, at a meditation class, leave each person enough space for their aura. And indeed, PVK would sometimes say, the light of your aura can strike the stars. So I guess, to use a metaphor that PVK often used, auras intermingle without interfering which each other, like the radio waves from 100 radio stations intermingle in the atmosphere on the way to my Walkman. ) #L3 [ And this may be the American-ism, quoted by Mark Twain in Innocents, 'room to swing a cat'.] #L2 Recall too that in the whilring zikr, one does not move from one's spot, but merely whirls about it. As if one were defining and defending one's personal space, the space of one's aura. #L1 I was playing shomer, tho that was a good excuse too. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ================================================================ù _________________________________________________________________ SNAPSHOTS: Those turf-chomping lug-soles turn out to be most impractical, for they pick up pebbles, which slip when one walks on rocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------ A group of hikers come off the well-marked trail network, and get on a bus going up the mountain, when they want to go down it to the railroad network. Networks of trail, of rail, and of highway link every settlement in Switzerland. But roads are only for autos, often there is no shoulder on which a man can walk. So unlike the USA, it can be quite dangerous to walk on a highway, in many places one is trapped between a retaining wall and a cliff, with no place to escape oncoming vehicles. "A place for everything, and everything in its place." One wonders that the Swiss don't all go mad, emigrate to Israel, or hecome watch-makers. ---------------------------------------------------------------- She has married -- a bit unusual nowadays, except for anachornistic Yehudim -- and speaks proudly of 'my husband'. A great acquisition no doubt, but a bit like adding a baby elephant to one's Manhattan apartment. ---------------------------------------------------------------- ===============================================================ù ----------------------------------------------------------------- HIGH HOLIDAYS IN LUGANO: Lugano, like Jerusalem, is a once-beautiful city ruined by autos. (Athens is an old city -- how small cities were in the good old days -- ruined by auto-enabled urban sprawl. ) Manhattan is not ruined by autos, it was born that way. It's necessary merely to ban autos and replace the streets with moving walkways. Lugano should immediately ban all autos from its waterfront Boulevard, and then tear down everything built since about 1900. ------------------------------------------------------------- Ashkenazi Hebrew, which is what the Swiss Jews, almost all from the Swiss-Deutsch cantons, speak, sure does have its dipthongs. I'm told that Swiss-Deutsch is very close to Yiddish, they both branched off from Alt-Hoch--Deutsch. Toward the end of the holidaz some of the salmon and tuna seemed to have become a bit tired of sitting out for a few hours each morning waiting for their consciousness to be raised. -------------------------------------------------- ================================================================= FOOD AND DRINK OF THE HEATHANS: Appenzeller (Apes' Basement) advertises itself indifferently #L2 ( At Chaverat Shalom, Betsy Cohen once announced on behalf of a choral group, "Zamir needs men", to which Dvorah replied, "So do I, but I don't advertise.") #L1 as an apertif #L2 (eg, very dry sherry is an apertif -- but it should be quite dry; Dry Sack is already too sweet) #L1 or a digestif ) #L2 the qoung woman from Portugal, who is the brains, if any, behind the Restorante at Camperio -- #L3 when the Osteria Centrale davka closes for the winter, Camperio may be the only place that even attempts to serve anything better than Instant Swiss Cuisine -- 5 kinds of pasta, 10 kinds of pig, 3 veals that couldn't get away fast enough, the last unextinct deer rabbit or late-to-bed groundhog (collectively termed 'Wilde'), an overpriced slice of slightly tangy Alpekasse, and Minestrone, composed of sliced leftover vegetables with grated Parmegan cheese #L2 points out that port, which she has made a pont of stocking, is a digestif -- #L3 but port is really an after-dinner drink, not a digestif, a digestif cannot be as but , I should say, not as sweeet as Bristol Cream -- #L4 I was told by the staff of Cave Atlantique in Harvard Square in the 70s, that Brown sherry -- which sweeter than Bristol Cream -- is excellent with Stilton cheese -- tho I have yet to grok (Heinlein's term) that -- #L5 well, sharp Vermont chedddar cheese is excellent with natural apple cider -- #L1 Prices at Swiss restaurantes -- and for hikers it's either that or a pemican bar in the snow -- range from high to outrageous -- SF 12 for a plate of spaghetti with tomatoe sauce,upon which one discreetly sprinkles the entire bowl of grated parmegean cheese, of course), SF 2 or more for a cup of tea (gauche to ask for a refill of hot water, tho you can make 3 or 4 cups with one teabag) -- one pays really for the hot water and tthe opportuity to visit the privy without, at best, feeling like an embezeller #L2 ("We get our eats fsrom platinum teats; we pee through a tap without a handle / and we inhale the atmosstale / through a tube as bent as a Dutchman's candle" (a translation, original not printed, in Evergreen Review, the green-cover "'Pataphysical Edition", ca. 1956, from Alfred Jarry's Pere Ubu ) #L1 --------------------------------------------------------------- I have yet to find a Swiss wine worth the effort of risking a hernia in pulling out the cork -- Merlot seeems to be a wannabe Beaujolais (I think Gal-Or pointed that out to me). But the Appertif-digestifs are excellent, and the herbal, pear, and plum schnapps are tasty, sanpaper the palate. ------------------------------------------------------------------ All the better restaurants seem to be advertising Wilde -- wild game -- dead deer and the like -- I want to add a note on the chalkboard advertising "Drunken Hunter in Whiskey Sauce" Restaurants should not be allowed to serve wild game. One can justify -- barely -- permitting residents of the land to hunt wild animals for their own food -- if they need to do to survive -- but then one or two deer should be sufficient for the winter. But to allow them to do so for money -- to sell to restaurants to feed to the jaded rich -- #L2 I was once in the Louvre. A Japanese chap came rushing up, asking where to find the Mona Lisa (who incicidentally is much better-looking than her pictures). I wanted to ask him: Do you want to look at it, or eat it. The Japanese deem it a mark of great cultural sophistication delicately to eat endangered species. #L3 (Oliphant may be an SOB, but he's great with a followup line.) In the USA we just wipe 'em all out to build new roads for our SUV's. #L4 We're Bushies and Proud of It. #L5 I mean, if I get many more anti-American snubs & snickers, I'm going to start wearing those Discount Store Hong Kong socks with the USA flag on the stocks. 'We're Americans. Everybody loves us. And if they don't, we nuke 'em.' #L4 Although personally, I intend to hide under the bed for the next four years, #L5 and if anyone comes by and asks, I'll say I'm from Alpha Centauri. #L6 Or at least Massachusetts, #L7 I doubt they'll know the difference. #L1 I pass a hunter in the wood. He smells of alcohol at 20 feet, and carries a very powerful gun. Semi-automatic I guess. I mean, you never know when you might get ambushed by a herd or two of deer -- I have never seen anyone in Isrel drunk with a weapon. #L2 (But it did happened once. That was on Purim: the results were, as I have written in a letter printd in the Jlem Post, a lasting shame to our people. But how could someone with a weapon have been allowed, even on Purim, to get drunk. Apparenly no-one saw him drink, nor drunken. ) #L1 --------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- "I CAN'T SAY I'M PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN, BUT SOMETIMES I'M GLAD OF IT" (An older Afro-American man, quoted by Ciel, best's I recollect) 3 Nov '04, 5:29 -- listing to ABC radio coverage of the election, maybe via Armed Forces radio -- about 4 minutes of commericals for every two minutes of coverage -- ABC is right wing of course -- they sued David Bedein for running exposes of their anti-Israel bias during the 1988 intifada -- Bedein hung in there, and the case was dismissed a year of so later -- Anyhow, the ABC radio is so gung ho on everything, so 'hale fellow well met', 'by gosh and by jingo' that about 10 minutes of it and I figure I've had enough of the USA for another few years -- everything simplified, rah-rah, and phony -- It won't do anymore to say you're from the USA, so I say I'm from Massachusetts -- and try to add that we've been fighting the Bush's for decades. I also sometimes add that I live now in Israel, and in acknowlegement receive a moment of polite dead silence -- well, they might have assumed that I'm a missionary or some such , tho I don't quite look the part -- tho I don't quite fit the standard image of an American either -- everyone expects some sort of mid-Western or Texan twang -- Anyhow -- the Swiss may now view us Americans -- and I have never before considered myself an American, least of all when I lived in the USA -- as barbarians, but at least we don't smoke in restaurants. Nor in railway cars, not that we have many of them. ----------------------------------------------------------------- CAVEAT TABBYCAT: COLLECTED REFLECTIONS ON HOW TO DO POO-POO IN CIVILIZATION FOLLOW (When I go back to more suitable Drawing-Room Topics, I will so signify by writing '%%%%FLUSHED%%%%' , so those of delicate sensibility should now click Modify/Find etc.) So anyhow, that, like almost everything else nowadays in these politically correctd times, calls for an Apology or an Apologia or an Omlette or whatever, so here it is, Instant Apologia #23: #L3 INSTANT APOLOGIA #23B: OK, I wrote it somewhere, but here again is my apologia for all this poopoo talk: So anyhow, there I was in the unlocked but all_but_closed psychiatric ward of Mass General Hospital, at the age of 30, having broken down after a winter in an Adobe room at New Buffalo, about 7000 feet, and cold enough so that when you piss on the shady side of the house it don't melt until spring. I'd had the flu, and then tried. without anyone joining in to back me up, to shout away a bunch of hustlers who were trying to take over the commune. I almost suceeded. They did leave after I broke down, I like to think that it was from shame at my martyrdom or some such. But maybe they just ran out of pot. The evil weed indeed, in some situations. Meanwhile I was breaking up with a woman I'd said I would marry -- I freaked out when she said she might take LSD with someone else -- Leary once said, that is the only ground for divorce -- he had a magnificent sense of irony -- So this supervising psychiatrist -- #L4 who acted as if anyone as traumatized as me could barely speak , much less speak up, for himself, and must also be unable to comprehend, much less feel, whatever witty remarks were bounced off him -- #L3 says to the Encounter Group or Support Group or whatever it was supposed to be -- #L4 this was a very progressive facility, their basic approach was, don't get subtle, just "pick up your bed and walk" -- #L5 a useful line, if like Jesus you can banish evil spirits who have taken possession -- #L6 rather a useful metaphor, if not more -- #L3 so he glances over at me and then remarks to his colleagus and possibly the rest of the group, in 30 years this one will be preoccupied with the state of his bowels. Well, if he took me to be an obsessive personality, he might have done his bit for daily diagnosis by asking what sort of circumstances could have driven an obsessive personality to a nervous breakdown. So that was the Bullfinch Wing of Mass General Hospital. My mother, subsequently reflecting up the experience, was wont to term it Bullshit Hospital. Anyhow, they finally gave me an anti-depressant -- being rather a religious purist, i dropped the first one down the toilet -- #L4 I mean, on my religous path we chewed peyote (under the full moon or some such) and were strongly admonished not to have anything to do with drugs -- #L3 a black attendant saw me do so, and hinted that I should do his work for him, remarking, theatrically, 'gosh, am I tired' -- such was my karmic retribution for not having joined SDS I guess -- I mumbled something like, maybe tomorrow -- #L4 my survival instincts were pretty blunted, of course, otherwise I would have frozen on a mesa, as I nearly did, rather than let myself be taken to that "hell, in a handbasket", as I was -- #L3 -- and he said, 'I'LL be here tomorrow', emphasiying the I , -- so anyhow, then or the next time, I swallowed the other anti-depressant, which gave me enough encouragement that I walked out the door, and left me with enough presence of mind to flatten myself against a wall when someone came after me, after which I walked back to the places that had been home for me in Cambridge -- tho with that damned tranquilizer I could not feel them, usually something very restorative for me -- Well, my survival reflexes were still of some use, but that's another story. --------------------------------------------------------- -------- INSTANT APOLOGIA #23A Ok, so I found the earlier draft of the preeceding passge, and here it is, and maybe it has a few witty quips that I missed, but I'll barely skim it, much less do an edit and consolidation: : I was sitting in the barely open psychiatric ward at Mass General in Boston -- it was considered very progressive, because their treatment was essentially , don't tell us your troubles, "pick up your bed and walk" -- which is an excellent thing to say if, like Jesus, you have the power to dispell demons, NEW NOTES, but is otherwise just a lift yourself up by your bootstraps approach -- so anyhow, the head shrink or whatever -- his first question to me, and I think his only one, was, "Why do you think you need a SHRINK " -- the word emphasized as if to say, and why do you now want to pay good money to have your mind -- or soul maybe, I don't think they much distinguish -- though it's primarily the emotions that have run wild and fallen into a hole to hide -- "blunted affect" they call it -- NUMNUTS. I mean, I had just single-handed tried to fight off a takeover of New Buffalo commune, and lost my women in the fight, and been sitting in a 1-room adobe through a Taos winter after a pretty thorough case of flu, living on beans and whole wheat bread, and also just gone through a major infection -- got mad and stabbed myself on the upper leg with with a little serrated vegetable knife or some such, when my woman said the might take LSD with the Town Drunk -- not that he didn't have a good heart, which she must have seen, being a great- hearted full-figured woman who loved children and cakes -- and I had failed to actualize, or even realize, whatever promise might have led her to drop her own dreams and live with me -- and then follow me from Santa Barbara to that cold commune, even after I had taken advantage of a temporary hiatus to catch the clap again -- well, we did remain friends -- belatedlly, as is usually the case for a romantic, I rather idolized her - - though she would not come back to me -- and I'm told she spoke well of me in subsequent years -- and instead of R&R they decide I need psychiatry -- So this pudgy clown says to the assembled Encounter Group or whatever they called it then -- when he's old he'll be preoccupied with the condition of his bowels. Like, if you're so deep in a breakdown that you can barely speak, let alone speak up for yourself, they think you can't hear or comprehend either, much less have feelings left that can be hurt -- He might at least have asked himself, if this is an obsessive personality, what could have driven it to a breakdown -- I supose they assumed, hippies are as carefree as birds -- but we were Type A hippies, we built Neew Buffalo from bare earth, and when it burned down, we rebuilt it -- living on corn and beans and whole wheat bread, with a bit of chili and beer -- oh, and one winter a dead horse that had been killed on the highway and we -- #L4 they as a matter of fact, I was back in grad school in Santa Barabar at the time, eating Reuven sandwiches at the campus deli, and dried roasted pumpkin seeds in tamari sauce and the like from the health food store -- we each have our path in life #L3 got it for free -- I mean, poopoo from heaven -- so when I returned I found it often served for supper -- actually not all that tasty, and it always had a few fine-ground bits of the windshield in whatever portion you were served -- and here in Switzerland they eat horses from choice -- with a picture of a trio of happy horse, pig, and cow on the front of the discretely recessed butcher shop -- I mean, pagans in ruffles -- Like, yesterday I decided, ok, I've kept the faith in Switzerland since I got here in '88, not yet eaten local meat -- I don't mean meat which is forbidden in the bible, I mean beef that did not get a kosher schecht -- and anyhow the temperature's gone below freezing and apt to stay there, and I might do a bit of hiking, and maybe something in my body needs a bit of beefing up, and I've already argued that the requirement that meat be prepared only by Jews, like the same requirement for wine, is arbitrary or a best a fence and anyhow I'm bored with minestrone twice a day -- So anyhow I walk into the Restaurante -- there's a new crew there, hard or at least exploitable workers maybe, but I don't think they have a heart between the bunch of them -- They sitting down and eating the daily special -- same special today as it was yesterday, but that's maybe because I was the only customer -- and I say, what's the Piatta di Giorno, is it beef, and they communicate eventually that it's horse, wouldn't I like some -- I mean, that's practically canibalism, except that the horse is smarter, and has a soul. (Ok ok, Swift said it first, in Gulliver's travels, Nu so sue me.) I had really pushed Susie into buying a horse at New Buffalo -- maybe I paid for it -- as a romantic 20-year- old, or whatever she was -- not much older than that when we met -- she had wanted a horse, or said she did, and I did want to do something for having more or less swept her up -- I mean, I have never really chased women, except for the ones I drove away, I more or less took whatever came along, and then fell in love -- or into habit, or both -- So also I bullied her into getting am M.A. in Teacher's Ed at UCSB, after she had given up her chance and dream of going to Hong Kong for a year -- didn't tell me until after she'd done it, but I think Wienpahl never forgave me -- sent me down the wrong track when I asked his advice on the Ph.D program -- one could take a test on the reading list immediately, or sit through about 2 more years of classes and then get an automatic Ph.D, just had to write a dissertaion, which I could have done as fast as I can type -- So anyhow, this was after I had come back to New Buffalo, and it could only have been the energy of youth that carried me through after all that I had gone through -- this was 1970 -- and some idiots tied a tire to the horse's leg, so it wouldn't roam around and go into the cornfield -- so the horse ran and broke her leg -- so they went out to shoot her -- and juust as they were walking out to shoot her , her foal, Meagan , as Susie as called her, gave a great whinny and ran over to nurse from her -- then they chased the foal away and shot the horse -- well, they were going to somehow put it up for eating, it would have kept the whole commune for a long time, but I freaked out a bit, and argued and pleaded and all but cried, so they relented and gave it a Christian burial -- dug a big pit with the tractor -- somehow I hadn't envisioned that -- I don't know that Susie cared on that matter, but I was still pretty headstrong -- in the next year or so I became something of a defacto leader of the commune, even if still half-crazy -- which was not necessarily a liability in the hippie days of northern New Mexico #L2 Well, that was my apologia for all the poo-poo apercus, but still, it is an aspect of incarnation, and nobody nowadays faults you for talking about sex, however unrealistically ---- I admire Madonna because she found a new way to sell sex. After 50,000 years, or even 3000 if you think the world began in Egypt, that ain't easy. -------------------------------------------------------------- ---- SEX IN SWITZERLAND: ( CAVEAT TABBYCAT ) Speaking of other things usually done with one's usually private parts: A few notes on sex in the north: This section ends with "%%%THANK YOU MA'AM%%%": To skip this section, Click Modify / Find / %%%THANK etc. A man can scArcely glimpse the holiness of women. If (as theat turkey Heidegger ponderously said, or so I read somewhere) life is lived in the shadow of death ("the tragic sense of life" as Unanumo said, more simply) then, at least for ??the again??, one finds pleasure spring up as a flower amidst, if not pain, discomfort. So with procreation, and that was the Fall. Woman know that there is no time to waste on 'guilt'trips'. Quite briefly, since I'm almost up to the 65K EinsteinWriter filesize limit: Swiss newstands offer a collection of hundreds of magazines, so close packed you can barely glimpse the titles, almost all of which are for junkmags -- a bit of T&A, jackoff mags for lonely lads -- tho Switzerland is not as blatant as Germany, where public pubi are listed on the offical tourist maps -- Late at night, after the kiddies are safely abed, a few TV stations offer comeons for telephone sex, as if to say to all the the euphemistically termed GastArbeiters or anyhow Traveling Salemen alone in hotel rooms -- do it to yourself, not to our daughters. I mean, Orwell said it first. A TV siren intones , to my shoebox EinzelZimmer in Frankfurt, "kommt zu mir" -- I had never though of 'come' as a transitive verb, merely as a noun -- but of course in the good old days of the USA 60s, procreation was not the aim, but a hazardous byproduct of sex -- Israel , especially but by no means only the frum community, takes procreation as the aim and pleasure as a sometime by-product -- I mean, this pursuit of happiness bit, if you take it as a serious obligation, can drive one to a nervous breakdown if not cigarette smoking -- In Frankfurt even the tourist maps are framed with ads for whorehouses -- the Germans apparently regard that as a simple matter of physical fitness, for the customers that is, not the throwaway ladies from impoverished lands. Ah, globalism. Even Blick, a straightforward Zurich tabloid, carries neat classified ads for sex at approximately a hundred dollars a half-hour. Maybe they have something similar in the Israel tabloids, but in the Israel I live in, folks are much too busy making babies to have time for sex. Sex is a human right -- as is the right, but physical and economic, to be free from unwanted sexual contact -- but acting out psychologic traumas as sexual perversion -- and I reckon most homosexual behavior is of socio- and psychologic source, not biologic -- is not a human right, much less a human necesity. %%%THANK YOU MA'AM%%% But intermittend poopoo talk continues until FLUSH'D -------------------------------------------------------------- --- No doubt we Americans (I have never felt like one anywhere else, including the USA) are crude barbarians (the Bushie's that is, those perpetual smarmy sophmores acting out comic- book fantasies and waiting for Mommy to pick up the mess before Daddy getrs home) but at least we stopped smoking in restaurants. Here they set aside a few tables, maybe in a back room by the privy, and call it a no-smoking seciton. I walk up through a light snow-flurry from Olivone to Camperio, a climb of about 300 or 400 meters. I am breathing so deep I can barely speak. Walk into the Restorante. Someone is smoking. Order and walk out. If I was breathing normally I could defend against it, by brething shallow and maybe subconsciously closing off most of my lungs, but now my lungs are completly open. #L3 We used to run indoor track in the Boston Armoury, when I was in high school. Of course in a competition you find yourself running a whole order of magnitude harder than you did in practice. So this was the laste 1950's, and all the coaches would be smoking, there were maybe fifty high school teams at the meet. So on the bus ride back, we competitors would all be coughing out the smoke we had inhaled from the coaches, all the way back to the High School locker room. Just before I left the USA for Israel, this was after a breakdown in 1984, I ran a road race of about 5 miles in Jamaica Plain, just to prove I wasn't physically useless. I remember how much the auto exhaust bit into my lungs, as we ran past cars. #L2 A sign on the door says: 'Buenvenuti fumateri e non- fumateri. Toleranya e convivenia. GastroSuisse.' So I have been adjudged intolerant and unconvivial. Well -- tolerance and conviviality do have borders, eg self-preservation. The deer, or bear, should not be tolerant of the hunter, nor the prisoner empathize unduly with the motivations of the members of the firing squad. Co-existence too has its limits -- "a gentleman might just as well / pity the lonely cancer cell" (sa). Nor need one demand conviviality from the victim of a gang-bang. But evil denies its victims even an acknowlegement of their victimhood. So the Roman soldiers, lacking even the decency to hate, mocked Jesus as he hung helpless on the cross. And that's the Bushies. "Damned smiling villain" as Hamlet said, dumbfounded that evil lacks the chivalry to declare itself as such. So for all his professions of Christianity, George Bush Jr. is pretty much an anti-Christ. I mean, this is a guy who startd on his career throwing teenagers in jail, and then had the chutzpah to come up with the slogan, "No child left behind." And signed off on who knows how many Texas executions. #L3 Kayla Thorpe was one of the last he let be killed, before he became President. They might have forgiven her for stabbing a man to death, but not for having had an orgasm as she did it. In prison she became a Christian -- a real Christian, from all accounts. Well, "My sister will a ministering angel be while thou liest screaming down below." (Hamlet) But her name should not be forgotten, and the crimes for which she died -- the crimes of George Bush & Co., not a minor murder -- should be redressed. #L2 And "Back in the US of A", to update a Beattles ong -- we stopped requiring payment to do poo-poo in a public potty, in the early 60s I think, Some Supreme Court ruling or some such came down that there had to be at least one free cubicle or hemisphere -- I suppose it was recognized that this too is an inalienable human right -- #L3 tho I must say, (and as a matter of fact I think it did, a few paragraphs back) some segments of some societies do tend to use the basic human 'need' if not quite 'inalienable right' to poop as as means of social control, or repression -- #L4 in some prison situations, for instance -- including Israel, sad to say -- well, that's indecent -- #L5 tho wrapping one's waist in gelegenite and driving old nails through a random selection of autobus passengers ain't precisely decent neither -- #L6 One wants to say, War for a Righteous Cause is inherently so holy that the end purifies the means -- Assuming, of course, that you ain't mistaken about the holiness of your Crusade -- Facisim is a shortcut to purity -- but of course "you can't get there from here", that road takes you, not to houri paradise, but right on off the cliff and down to hell. Cha-cha Cha, as Shrager would say -- or Vonnegut's "so it goes" #L2 In Switzerland, the railroad stations usually require a half- franc for all stalls, so once must remember to carry a few half-franc coins at all times -- shiessengeld, as it is called -- as, in Israel, once should carry a pack of tissues. Speaking of which, we atavists of the Middle East are still waiting for Western civilizatin to discover the -- I don't quite know how to cirumlocute this one -- after__poo_poo__bottom_spritzer. Some sort of disposable variant thereof should be designable for public washrooms. Meanwhile, one carries a plastic bottle. Hereabout toilet cubicles often include a sink. Oh well: One more poopoo story: A restaurant sign says: those using the facilities "ohne consumation" will please pay 1/2 franc to the lady at the bar. After discarding two improper interpretatons, the inference of which is left as as an exercise for the reader, I concluced that this meant: 'without consuming food nor drink'. (The restaurant is on the border of Graubunden, which is Romantsch not German speaking.) A simple coin-box would have done. For who above the age of 5 will freely go to the matron and say -- I did Number 1 ( 1/2 franc) or 'I did No. 2' (Termed in the USA, pee-pee and poo-poo respectively, although the Germans of Hamburg deem the former term too crude, and use only the word 'pinkle' (assonant, pardon the expression, with tinkle, another USA euphemism, for all you George Bush fans. %%%FLUSHED%%% I mean, how can a being so constituted trouble heaven with all our high-faulting air. Anyone with a drop of humility would first collapse in laughter. "Yet THOU hast made him but little lower than the angels." As for smoking in trains -- about half of each car is marked as a smoking section, so one finds most passengers packed into the non-smoking section, and an overflow in the smoking section. In the good old days, in the USA, there was one Smoking Car, to which gentlemen might retire. I say, do that on Swiss trains -- and if a large number are packed in, they can save money on cigarettes, just inhale. And anyone so addicted to whatever they put in cigarettes -- I fear tobacco is the least of it -- that they have to smoke even during a restaurante meal, is in bad shape. The Indians smoke tobacco only ceremonially -- and it's the purest tobacco they can get -- Bull Durham, which is the sweepings from the leaves, before the additives are added -- In the good old days, gentlemen retired for a smoke as they did for a cognac -- With all their hi-tech, train toilets, unlike ship toilets, are still essentially just a hole in the floor, rather than a vacuum-sealed holding tank. When I first came to Rodos, in 1988, the ferryboats and I think cruise ships would unload their accumulated poopoo & pipi in in the Harbour, but a few years later they forbad that, having special trucks to pump it out and carry it away, and now the water of Rodos is indeed very clean -- and I think so with all the Greek islands, and maybe all of Greece, but I don't know -- unlike Israel, which continues to sometimes dump sewage into the sea -- The Mediterranean is of course, if not a dead sea, then the equivalent of a feeble old man on a cane -- and feels it, it's not that envigorating to sit on a Mediterranean shore, unlike sitting by the Atlantic -- So anyhow, the newstands have a half-dozen lads mags in the upper left, then about a hundred versions of the Ladies Home Journal, #L3 how to embroider antimasscarars while waiting for your husband to come home from the office and also buy ventilated lingerie mags, and about 50 Bikers mags -- #L4 motorcycles are quite popular in Switzerland, the riders look loutish -- I mean, they must pay hundreds for those loutish leather outfits -- but are all perfectly proper suburbanites when they dismount, but then, I don't suppose Switzerland has an urban lower class -- #L3 and a few computer mags -- but scarcely anything to read except the Herald Tribune and Le Monde -- I've never seen The New Yorker (tho it is now on Israel newstands in Steinmatsky's), nor Harpers or the The Atlantic, if those are still printed (and those also ain't in Israel) -- nor The New Republic, which used to havve some of the most insightful and honest political commentary, and maybe still does -- I found a copy of the International Edition of the Jerusalem Post in davka Zernez -- something to read while watching for wild antelope, I suppose -- but have seen it nowhere else, not that I get around that much. I suppose the image of Israel comes mostly from TV, maybe mostly from CNN, and it ain't like adulatory -- I mean, "Yanks Invade Normandy Beaches, 100 civilians feared killed" --------------------- #L1 ======================================================= ==== ==== THE RELIGION OF NEATNESS: The Swiss passion for order -- a pedestrian in a cross-walk is treated like a visiting demi-god who has just beamed down -- all vehicles stop for him and wait until he has deigned to pass -- but outside the cross-walk he is treated like a game animal in season, "fair game" ------------------------------------------------------------------ OBSERVATIONS THAT I MIGHT JUST AS WELL HAVE MADE STAYING AT HOME AND EATING YOGURT WHILE COUNTING THE ANTS-PER-SECOND ON MY KITCHEN SINK: The Internet is so like a pinballl game, I am amazed that nobody has added flippers. ----------------------------------------------------------- COLLECTED CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE REMARKS: When a Greek builds an outhouse, he makes two seats: first class and second class. -------------------------------------------------------------- MISCELLANEOUS ADVICE FOR FOREIGN TRAVELLERS: The culturally sensitive German Hostess will not say to her departing American dinner guests, "Gute Fahrt." ======================================================= === sa, Campra, 9 Nov '04 -- 26 Cheshvan -- 27 Ramadan -- cold clear day -- and I wasted all of it rewriting this -- ======================================================= ===