Is that it is hot. To hot to think, to write, to do anything productive. (Even read, which is a problem since I earn a significant part of my minuscule income from reading)
This also presupposes the obviously disputable fact that this blog is productive. Like any other public outpouring of random ramblings, it quite clearly cannot be deemed to so, but it does clear the mind from time to time and allows me to concentrate on more pressing things, so that helps a little.
Mrs Goy - or the Feminist Mrs Goy, as I've taken to calling her - observed the other day that with Tzipi's triumph in the Kadima primaries, Israel now has a woman at the head of each of the three arms of Government -
Dalia Itzik is the Speaker of the Knesset, and
Dorit Beinisch at the Supreme Court.
I'm guessing she thinks that this is a good thing.
I didn't have the heart to point out that, in any case, Tricky Udi is still loitering in the corridors of power, resignation or not. I tell you, they'll have to cart the man away in chains.
Mr Mofaz, whom I blogged about
previously, seemed on the verge of tears when he conceded victory to Tzipi. He apparently wants to 'take time out from Politics'. If that is anything like Mr Barak's 'lost weekend' away from the political scene, I imagine that he'll be back in five years or so, well connected, newly minted and itching to cause mischief. If I were Mrs Mofaz, I'd watch out...
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I had lunch with my father in law last Friday, in a nice family restaurant in
Ramat Aviv Gimmel. Tucked in a corner, apparently eating, conversing with a companion and chatting on his mobile all at the same time, was
Abraham Hirschson. Mr Hirschson was Minister of Finance until not very long ago, when he was obliged to
resign after being accused of all sorts of naughtiness involving money belonging to the National Workers Labour Federation (don't these people ever learn:
never fuck with trade union money), and a charity involved with holocaust survivors from Poland. He resigned from office last July, and recently the Attorney General announced that he was to be formally charged with ' breach of trust, aggravated fraud, theft, forgery of corporate documents and money laundering'. A bit of a mouthful that.
He has an elegantly sculpted beard and sideburns arrangement, somewhat at odds with the old denim and polo shirt he was sporting. Me, I've never trusted men with kempt beards (nor women neither, come to think of it). I was briefly tempted to ask him whether his lunch was being paid for by the
Histradut, the general trade union body, but thought better of it. Stones and glasshouses and all that...
Funny, when Mr Hirschson started to get into difficulties, people accused Tricky Udi of being exceptionally naive for appointing someone with antecedents as crooked as Hirschson to the post. Little did we know then...
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Completely non-Goy related: Two of my favourite writers, the novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the music critic
Alex Ross, have just been awarded
MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grants. The lucky bastards. Congratulations to both.
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One writer whom I believe came very close to genius,
David Foster Wallace died last week, at the age of 46. As a fiction writer, his output was sometimes uneven, but his observational journalism was, in my opinion, unparalleled. His capacity to place an event, no matter how apparently banal and trite, within its precise, informed social context is unmatched. His facility for words, and experimentation with form, syntax and the accepted rules of grammatical expression defy description.
I mention all this because he wrote an interesting, engaging and honest profile of John McCain, (MK I), for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1999, I think. Given McCain's transformation from the straight talker who abjured the dirty political tricks of his then rival, George W. Bush, to...well, a classic pol, really, it seemed apt that the New York Review of Books decided to
republish Wallace's profile, slightly elongated, in book form a couple of months ago.
Israel and Israelis are obsessed with November's election - the phrase, 'but will it be good for the Jews' never seemed so apt - and although I am by no means an Obama groupie (at least, not any more, as the Feminist Mrs Goy reminds me), I think that any Israeli with dual American nationality contemplating voting for McCain would do well to read this account of what he once was first, and then decide whether they prefer the old him, the new him, or are simply confused by a man who has mutated so grotesquely, almost overnight.
Rest in peace, DFW
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