Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech: On Learning Hebrew in Israel

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

by Letitia Trent

As our plane arrived in Israel’s airspace, I listened to Pimsleur’s Hebrew lessons on my headphones, which go over the same phrases in half-hours of repetition, the accent-less audio-guide voice followed by the native speakers, who respond to his commands (Tell her you do not speak Hebrew. Ask her how she is doing today. Say “let’s go to my place”). I practiced the way the female voice’s inflection went up at the end of certain phrases, such as beseder (OK or Good).

I had tried to study ahead of our scheduled move to Tel Aviv. In Burlington, Vermont, my husband Zach and I had weekly basic Hebrew lessons from an Israeli man studying in Burlington. He was young, with messy black hair, but had a courtly, polite, and serious demeanor that belied everything I’d read about Israeli youth from the Let’s Go Israel! travel book.  He photocopied Hebrew words and phrases transliterated into English for us and insisted that we had to study. We tried to please him, but usually had lost the worksheets or neglected to study them at each meeting. We met once a week, which wasn’t enough for anything to stick. By the time we boarded the plane, after a month of visiting family in Oklahoma and Arkansas, we’d forgotten everything. Pimsleur didn’t help. By the end of the flight, I knew how to say “I don’t speak Hebrew”, “I don’t understand Hebrew”, and “Do you speak English?” It would have taken another five or six hours of listening to get past the words for hotel, the taxi, and the bills and down to something substantial. By the time we landed at Ben Gurion, we had no Hebrew but assertions about how we cannot speak it.

#

Although I’ve never been particularly quick when it comes to subjects like Math or Science, I’ve excelled in language since Elementary school. My memories of school are punctuated with sudden realizations that what others seemed to struggle with—reading, vocabulary, comprehension—came easy to me. I can remember a whole section of read-and-respond comprehension questions in a standardized test where we had to read a dry, boring history text and then respond to questions about the meanings of sections. I finished the test and set down my test booklet. I noticed, then, that everybody else was still working—most still reading the text. This wasn’t a source of pride, but curiosity: how could something so essential to me, language, be so difficult for everyone else? My inner life from the ages of eight to seventeen came almost exclusively from books. I was shy and physically isolated from other people my age (I lived in the woods, by highways, and didn’t own a car until I got married), and so I learned about people who were not me from books.  I didn’t understand what everyone else had inside of their heads, if it wasn’t books.

Before moving  to Tel Aviv, I’d imagined that my primary discomfort would be in speaking to people, but this is not the case. About 85 % of people in Israel speak English, and even more in Tel Aviv. The problem isn’t speaking to people so much as grasping the general tone of a place based on the signs, the advertisements, what people choose to put on chalkboards outside of bars and restaurants.  Now, the world around me is encoded in chunky Hebrew letters which carry messages that I don’t understand.  A billboard by the sea, featuring a picture of a boy smiling, his hands folded school-picture style on the table before him and with a paragraph of block-text to his right, baffles. Is this billboard an advertisement, a warning, or a public service announcement?

I can recognize letters and some words, but for the first time in over twenty years, I have to try to read. I sound out Hebrew words painfully, like a child. The feeling brings me back to elementary school, when I hated speaking out loud in class so much that I flatly refused to read aloud, so I was eventually put into remedial reading classes, where we practiced sounding out words slowly, hunched over our desks with our fingers under each letter. The remedial reading room gave me sympathy for those who couldn’t read well. It was embarrassing to be stuck on a hard combination of letters, like the word thought, it’s unmercifully illogical “ou” and “ght” combinations, which sound nothing like the individual sounds of those words.

After almost four months of Israel, as soon as someone comes up to me speaking Hebrew, every bit of Hebrew I’ve learned falls out of my head. I get tongue-tied, afraid that I’m wasting somebody’s time and end up saying the only words that come to me: Anglit (English), I say, apologetically, Slicha, Slicha (sorry/excuse me), Ani rac medeberette anglit (I only speak English).

#

In our neighborhood, the old city of Jaffa, or Yafo, as it’s pronounced in Israel, Arab shops and restaurants outnumber Jewish ones. At first, I tried to speak in Arabic to the Arab shop owners and Hebrew to the Jewish ones. In almost every shop in Yafo (above the cash register, usually) you’ll find some indication of the religion of the shop owner. In Arab shops, you’ll often find fancy Arabic calligraphy or a Tree of the Prophets of Islam. In Jewish shops, you’ll often find a chamsa (hand-shaped good-luck charm).

I heard from Zach that one of his friends, a non-Israeli who speaks Hebrew fluently, found that some Arabs find it offensive for Hebrew speakers to try to speak Arabic. Though Israel officially has two languages—Hebrew and Arabic—Hebrew is the spoken language of the country, and in my experience, few Jews are fluent in Arabic. Many Arab-Israelis, though they know and speak Hebrew, speak Arabic with each other (you hear it in the streets of Yafo, coming from clouds of perfumed smoke at nargilla bars or groups of young men at coffee shops). The language is one way to retain Arab culture in a country dominated by Judaism and Jewish culture.

My Israeli friend D, though, told me that it isn’t so clear cut. The problem isn’t just Hebrew and Arabic: it’s any dominant language confronted with a more marginalized one.  Of course, you can speak any language with a heart of condescension, with a sense of ridiculous pride that you’ve spent ten minutes on the internet looking up the correct words for hello and goodbye. This can happen anywhere.

Anything done with kindness will be understood as kindness, she told me. I am still not sure.

Language is personal, political, and what we use to wound and show superiority. My native language is a bully, and the language I’m learning is tied to the concept of Zionism, which I imagine that most Arab-Israelis resent. I don’t know how my intended kindness translates.

#

Our Ulpan teacher, Chava, holds up her hands as we stumble over the Hebrew letters.

Hebrew is simple, she says. Hebrew is not a problem.

She’s right. Hebrew, unlike most languages I’ve tried to learn, is very regular and is indeed not much of a problem outside of the different alphabet, pronunciation, and maddening lack of vowels. Hebrew is so regular because its spoken form was largely constructed, with modern words added to the lexicon. Hebrew, after the diaspora in 70CE, remained primarily in written form through religious texts. When early Zionist leaders such as Ben Yehuda set about systematizing, modernizing, and creating the new/ancient language of Hebrew, they understand why it was so important: a culture must have its own language. Taking a common European language wouldn’t have worked: Israel had to reach back farther.

It’s astonishing to think about how new spoken Hebrew is. In 1881, when Ben Yehuda moved to Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew with his family, he was probably the only Jew in Palestine speaking Hebrew exclusively in the home. Now, a little over a hundred years later, an entire nation speaks it, and the language has grown from its roots into its own, strange creature.

The difficulty arises in Ulpan class of exactly how to teach Hebrew. Do you teach schoolbook Hebrew or Hebrew the way it is spoken, which is often in an extremely contracted form with frequent intrusions of other languages, such as Yiddish, German, and Arabic? For example, while standing in the line at the bank or grocery store in Israel, if you don’t move quite quickly enough, you might hear yalla, yalla, usually from an elderly man or woman at the back of the line. Yalla is an Arabic word. Once, in a taxi on our way back from a party, we heard the taxi driver explain to a passenger in the front seat—a Transylvanian woman working in Israel—that the word yalla was not actually a Hebrew word.

We took it from the Arabs, he explained. It means move.

#

As an American, I have the benefit and the curse of not having to pay much attention to my culture, my language, my identity. I do not have to fight to hold onto it, to make sure my language doesn’t die or my rituals are preserved—the US is ubiquitous, and knowing English is (unfortunately—but that’s a whole other essay) considered a necessity for success in most countries. My language is the language on T-shirts and products from Shanghai to Paris. Israel, a country just over 60 years old, had to create fluency in a relatively short period of time in order to unify a culturally and linguistically diverse citizenship. The Ulpan system was created as an easy, quick way to teach immigrants Hebrew, and it seems to work: though it doesn’t make people immediately fluent, it does provide an “in” to the culture that isn’t always offered in other countries.

My Ulpan class isn’t traditional. No olim chadashim (new immigrants), and Zach and I are probably the oldest people in the class. The majority of us are non-Jewish. We consist of three Chinese students, four Americans, and half-dozen Polish students who seem to have an uncanny ability to pick up the language but don’t seem to recognize the Jewish religious songs that Chava sings, which makes me think they didn’t get the basics of Hebrew through a synagogue. I’m not sure if they’ve studied before (Zach’s theory) or if their young, elastic brains make it easy for them to learn another language compared to my older, less flexible brain (my theory).

The Polish students speak Polish to each other and English to Chava. They turn to each other sometimes and speak perfectly easy, fluent Polish, and it makes me wonder at fluency at all: how do we all learn to navigate our native language so easily? I wish that I had access to their language, too. Compared to Polish, I have a good start in Hebrew. I know over 25 verbs. I can request to go to the bathroom, ask for food, and tell somebody that I want to shop or speak or walk. I know nothing about Polish. There are so many languages I will never know, books I will never read in their original languages, and people I will never know as deeply as a native speaker of their language could. There simply isn’t enough time to understand more than a few languages in one lifetime.

#

In my opinion, the saddest Bible story is of the Tower of Babel. Once, there was a universal language that everybody spoke, and we all understood each other. Since we all understood each other, we could organize, and soon, people began to build larger towns and higher buildings, which angered God:

And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

Note here what the problem really is: it’s the fact that humans, when they understand each other, can work together, which creates so much promise that even God is jealous

I’ve been studying Hebrew for two months, and I’m amazed at what I still cannot say. I can’t explain in Hebrew why studying languages ultimately depresses me, though I need and love to do it and could never live in a country without at least trying to understand the language(s) spoken there.  I can’t explain in Hebrew why I am a writer, why I don’t miss the United States, or why I don’t know where I’ll live after we’ve left here and why am happy about that fact. I can’t say anything important yet—but compared to Russian, German, Cherokee, Swedish, Icelandic, Japanese, and on and on, I can make due. Making due, at least when it comes to language, never feels like enough.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLYSON KWETT

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Two A.M.
by Allyson Kwett

But there’s no darkness, at least
No Country Darkness
No Fords on Highway One
No tires packing salt into pavement
No dim headlights shining back off yellow signs

But the glow is the same
                          Toxic orange
And the same weeping strings
             Cries of smoke and whiskey
Leech through headphones
Leech into the sky

Yellow streetlights and
Endlessly blinking neon
Bounces off slick wet pavement

             And the bay
Is white and yellow
With Atlantis sunk
Office buildings and sky-rise apartments
Bleeding to the shore

No stars, no moon
Under a ceiling of burnt fog
And the porch light is off
But still I wonder

Wonder if the smoldering ash
Faint red glow and
Release of gray smoke and flesh
Covers the stratus and cosmos of night
Behind sheets of melancholy

Fighting to bleed through the edges
With violent ferocity


Allyson Kwett is a San Francisco Bay Area native currently completing her BA in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys parlour games, trivia, crosswords, and cucumber-flavored soft drinks, and abhors people who say “for all intensive purposes”.

Editor’s Note: Allyson Kwett has a nice handle on the use of sound in poetry. Moments like “No tires packing salt into pavement” hit the ear in the same way the mind’s eye pictures the tires packing salt into the ground. Beginning the poem mid-moment, “But there’s no darkness, at least,” we as readers experience the poem as a scene carved from time. We are dropped in, a world opens up for us, we inhabit it in all its detail, and we exit “with violent ferocity.” It is a quick and intense experience, alive with images and sound along the way.

Participatory Budgeting: Sharing Power Over Public Resources

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

By Mira Luna

Photo by Alan Cleaver on Flickr

With city governments now declaring bankruptcy and cutting vital services, local officials may be wise to take the lead from Brazil and get their constituents directly involved in tough budgetary decisions. Politicians can be pressured to fund bank bailouts over health care by their campaign contributors, but their constituents won’t.

Long before the global finance crisis, residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil were having trouble getting essential services from their government. The city was bankrupt and residents were lacking proper sewage, clean water, and other necessary infrastructure due to rampant corruption. In order to more equitably and efficiently distribute scarce public funds, Porto Alegre became the first town to formally adopt a process called participatory budgeting. This process allows its residents to directly decide how public funds will be spent though open deliberation in budget assemblies and voting. Since 1989, when the program started, city-wide participation in budgetary decision-making increased from 1,000 to over 50,000, while doubling the town’s access to many essential services.

Now over 1200 local governments across the world use participatory budgeting, including most municipalities in Brazil, several other Latin American countries, Europe, and a smattering of towns in Canada, Africa, and Asia. Peru, the U.K. and the Dominican Republic have national participatory budgeting laws that apply to all their local governments, and the UN acknowledges participatory budgeting as a core component of good democratic governance.

Yet this process remained largely unheard of in the U.S. until last year when it sprouted up in an unlikely place, Chicago’s 49th Ward, a community which speaks over 80 different languages within two square miles. Last year, residents of the ward, invited by their city representative Joe Moore, made proposals and voted on its $1.3 million discretionary budget for capital infrastructure. At a series of neighborhood assemblies, residents brainstormed project ideas and selected representatives who would transform those ideas into concrete proposals. Representatives split into six thematic issue committees to spend four months meeting with experts, conducting research, and developing budget proposals before the big vote. As Moore wrote in a letter to his constituents, it “exceeded even my wildest dreams. It was more than an election. It was a community celebration and an affirmation that people will participate in the civic affairs of their community if given real power to make real decisions.” Now some candidates in Chicago’s other wards are running on a participatory budgeting platform.

Participatory budgeting as a model usually allows residents to propose, discuss, and vote on public spending projects. It is frequently initiated to address resource inequalities, as well as corruption in the budget allocation process and lack of transparency and accountability. It can also have the potent side effect of creating a more engaged and empowered citizenry through a taste of direct democracy.

Most participatory budgeting processes involve these steps:

-A government and/or nonprofit develops the 1st year participatory budgeting process.

-The government approves the amount of the budget to be turned over to the voters.

-Neighborhood assemblies are organized and meet to determine budget categories (public safety, education, health, environment, sanitation, etc.) and who will be making project proposals to the community, either on a city-wide or district/neighborhood basis.

-Proposals are developed in collaboration with nonprofits, technical experts and government officials.

-Proposals are presented, publicized, discussed and voted on by everyone eligible in the community (usually more inclusive criteria for voting than electoral voting).

-The process is refined to achieve greater budget inclusion, transparency, diversity, participation, and quality of proposals.

There are wide variations on this process, and each community defines its own rules, which may be more or less participatory. Where corruption is high and civic participation is low, participatory budgeting should start with small initiatives and work towards greater transparency and accountability as the process develops. Comparing the most with the least successful participatory budgeting projects, a well developed participatory budgeting organization with adequate structure and rules is imperative to residents’ willingness to participate and trust in the process. Loosely developed participatory budgeting programs that simply provide a rubber stamp to corrupt local government or cheat the process can be even more disempowering.

In most cities, residents are allowed to decide on no more than 20% of the budget, and often it is only the discretionary portion of the budget (non-necessities) that is voted on. This limits the damage of uninformed mistakes, but the public may actually become more informed and make wise decisions about services that their lives depend on. As the community becomes more involved and the process refined, additional portions of the budgets may be included. A larger pot can encourage more participation. One town in Brazil puts 100% of its budget up for public discussion and vote after positive experiences.

While participatory budgeting can cost cash-strapped municipalities extra money to hold assemblies, publicize, vote and add staff to deal with the requests, residents often end up more motivated to fulfill their tax obligations, because they feel their money is better spent with less money going to pork barrel projects. Some participatory budgeting processes have also led to increased local employment through local hiring prioritization as selected projects are implemented, improving the overall local economy.

Another side effect of a good participatory budgeting process is greater social harmony. Government officials can less be blamed for corruption, and unequal allocation, and so community-government relations may be improved. And as residents of all walks of life come together to listen to each others’ needs and be heard in a fair venue, trust, understanding, and collective wisdom may blossom. The process is not about winning, but as a one participant mentioned, “It’s more about being happy for someone else to be able to live a better life.”

Participatory budgeting is not just for city-wide budgets, some nonprofit agencies are adopting it, too. Toronto Community Housing has given its capital budget ($9 million currently) up to its tenants since 2001. Tenants are encouraged to propose ideas for improving their community and democratically decide their priorities. The top ideas are pitched at voting events, where tenants from different buildings come together to listen to each other and view display boards that each buildings creates as part of their proposal. Using “dot-mocracy”, every building selects a delegate who gets sticker dots with which they vote for the best ideas. Listening to active tenants talk about their experience, you get the impression that this is a fun community bonding event and less of a democratic chore. Many of them being marginalized and low income, this is also one of the more empowering things they’ve done.

In New York, City Representative Joe Moore from Chicago is promoting the idea of participatory budgeting to universities such as CUNY (City University of New York), as they experience cuts from decreased public funding. Even in good times, budgets are often a source of conflict between college administrations and students. Students might be less frustrated and dissatisfied with their education if there was more transparency and they had some say over how their tuition is being spent, increasing student retention.

Think about how participatory budgeting could democratize your world. How can you incorporate participatory budgeting into your government, university, business, nonprofit, community, or family? If we put our heads and our hearts together, we just might make better decisions that our collective future depends on.

For more information see the Participatory Budgeting Project website.

This article was first posted on Shareable.net

Writers on the Writing Life: Steven Gillis

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Cover of Steven Gillis's 2010 novel out from Black Lawrence Press

I miss teaching.  If I could find the time in my days, I would return in a heartbeat to Eastern Michigan University.  Not that this is possible with all the other irons my fire is heating, and with my wife’s threat to leave me if I take on one more freaking thing!  And true, too, even when I had my gig as a writing professor, I was operating outside the norm; able to pick the time I taught and the one class I would teach a semester to upper level writing students.  I didnt have to commit to a full-time course load, didnt have to participate in the administrative bullshit that can suck the soul right out of an already stressed writer working a heavy teaching schedule while trying to squeeze out time to actually do their own writing.

Most of my writer friends who have gigs as professors or lecturers at a University find the job has a combination of cool and cruel to it.  They enjoy being able to spend their working hours invested in the near and dear of literature and writing, but the grind of the long hours and trying to impart their knowledge to students who – most at least – wont ever demonstrate any appreciable skills as “real”  writers has an exhausting effect.  You can’t teach writing.  I have heard that phrase tossed about so many times that before I began to teach I almost believed it.    The fact of the matter is the claim simply isnt true.   You can teach writing.  You can’t give someone talent.  But you can teach someone the process of writing and improve what skills they have.  And isnt this what teaching is all about?  Not to make rock stars out of the tone deaf, but to share what you know and help those who sincerely want to improve.  The best experiences I had as a teacher were working with my less gifted students who nonetheless truly wanted to learn how to write.

As I have now been a writer going on – Christ – 40 years, I also found what I love most about teaching is the ability to explain the process and get students to understand there’s no such thing as a muse, what there is to writing is a blue collar roll up your sleeves and just do it attitude that Nike be damned existed well before the running shoe.
When I first started writing, I had the passion but was otherwise clueless about the process.  Leaving talent out of the equation for the moment, it is most often the lack of experience that undermines a well intended would-be writer.  When a young writer has a bad day, their immediate reaction is to question their abilities, to think they must suck and what the hell what the hell what the HELL!! It is only after staying the course as a writer that we begin to learn that the process doesn’t ever change, that having a rough day – or week or month – doesnt mean one cant write it means you are a writer experiencing the inescapable torture.   The only thing important is doing the work.  Daily.  Where I used to go crazy with insecurity, I am now totally calm about the process, know a rough day is still a productive day, that the key is just working the page.

This is what I tried to convey to my students, how writing is a freakin discipline, that you have to work hard.  There is never – and I mean never – a day when I finish writing that I am not completely physically and mentally exhausted.  If anyone has the misfortune of trying to deal with me in the hour after I finish my writing day, well lets just say its not pretty.  Writing is hard.  It takes a focus like none other.  You cant write if you are distracted, the application of one’s efforts have to be total. And you can’t write if you aren’t willing to commit.

An older and quite successful writer once told me it takes 10 years of writing shit before one even begins to know what they are doing.  Well, as much as I didnt want to believe this at the start of my career, I can surely attest to this now.  So, how to convey this to a classroom full of young and eager students who think they are top dog and ready to  publish.  What I did in my class, which cut against the grain and shocked the hell out my students each and every new semester, was to tell them instead of writing 5 stories during our term together, we were going to write one story each and rewrite it at least 5 times.
“WHAT?”  was the response.  “Rewrite?  What the hell is that?”  They all just wanted to crank and move on to something new.   I held my ground.  Class after class.  And class after class, always, within 3 weeks these students who had never rewritten a story before, had never put themselves back into a work, began to groove on the idea of actually reworking a story.  At the end of every semester, always, these initially dubious students thanked me for showing them what is the essence of all good writing – the rewrite.

That the art to writing is in the rewriting is, for me, a given – now.  Along with understanding the process of writing, these two rules are invaluable.  (The third rule would be to read read read and READ.  The fourth to drink, but I digress.)    Everything in life evolves and changes, requires a rewrite and a knowledge of what is going on.  Relationships change, how we keep our love life going.  I have been married 17 years and  the totality of my relationship with my wife has evolved in 1,000 different ways since we were 17 years younger.  What is the same about me is no doubt my extremes have become more understandable – at least to me if not my wife – my settling into the routine of what I need to achieve in my personal and professional life.  Everything is a process.    Everyday a writer must apply his/herself to the challenge and run the risk of writing shit, of exhausting one’s self physically and emotionally and intellectually.  The same as we do with any worthwhile relationship.  What is essential to whatever it is we want to do is hanging tough.  With writing – and in life – the process doesnt necessarily get easier but it becomes more readily understood the longer we stay the course. An old dog of a writer knows how to get through bad days, knows not to panic in the face of a rough stretch.  As said, in this way the experience one gathers as they commit to the process of writing is much the same as the process of maturing in our everyday life. Understand the effort, know not every day will be a success.  Be aware that not everything goes smoothly and most things require a rewrite.  This is what I’ve come to learn and is the best advise I can give.

Steven Gillis is the author of Walter Falls, The Weight of Nothing, Giraffes, Temporary People, and, most recently The Consequence of Skating (October 2010). His stories, articles, and book reviews have appeared in over four dozen journals, and his books have been finalists for the Independent Publishers Book of the Year Award and the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year. A three-year member of the Ann Arbor Book Festival Board of Directors, and a finalist for the 2007 Ann Arbor News Citizen of the Year, Steve taught writing at Eastern Michigan University and founded 826michigan in 2003.  Steve is the co-founder of Dzanc Books  www.dzancbooks.org along with Dan Wickett.  All proceeds from Steve’s writing go to help support Dzanc Books. Contact: steve@dzancbooks.org

Andreas Economakis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine
photo by Andreas Economakis

THE SEE-THROUGH CAT

by Andreas Economakis

Last night I had a strange dream about cats. I was with my family somewhere by a lake. As we walked the small dirt path between the woods and the water, we came across a cat with her litter of tiny kittens. Delighted, I knelt down and started to pet the little ones. One of the kittens was so excited he was bouncing around like a plastic ball. He bounced himself right into the lake. Miaowing and splashing about, he struggled to stay afloat. Panicked, I started to get undressed, ready to jump in and save the drowning kitten. A moment later, while I was pulling off my socks, an elderly woman waded into the lake and swam out to the struggling kitten. The white-haired woman, who looked a lot like my estranged mom, grabbed the kitten and threw him up to me. I grabbed the little wet one, happy that he was safe. At that exact moment, another cat came walking down the path. This cat was amazing. He was completely see-through, made of clear glass. The little kittens chased his glass tail as he ambled by. I turned to my daughter to see if she’d noticed how awesome this cat was. That’s when I woke up. My cat Rufus was massaging my belly, hoping to wake me up so that I could feed him. I pet him and he rumbled a purr in response. I better get another cat soon. I think Rufus needs company. I can see right through him on this one.

For Rufus, who recently went missing after 15 years of unswerving companionship.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JESSE LOREN

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CONSIDER ICARUS
by Jesse Loren

Consider Icarus as a woman pasting wings on
Testing her harness and the snugness over breasts
And think of that flawless moment before the yawn
When she tires of waiting for the rest.

Think of her there above obelisk and spruce
Coasting above the small men scything down below
Her latched bindings slip and become loose
Her internal timing races and then slows.

She is circling above the town picking out the strong
Glancing to the corners of every lawn
A trickle of blood spills out between thighs
The blind sun melts wax into her eyes

Consider Icarus as a woman pasting wings on
Consider the tedious boredom of kite string and tumbling down.



Jesse Loren is originally from East Los Angeles and is currently rooted near Davis, California with her family and chickens. Her poetry can be found in Exquisite Corpse, Yawp, New Virginia Review, and Screamin’ Meme, her first book of collected poems. Ms. Loren co-edited two anthologies of poetry; Mourning Sickness, a collection about miscarriage and infant death, and Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront, a collection of homefront tales spanning from WWII to the present. Loren is a graduate of UC Irvine, and MFA graduate of UNO, and is a frequent columnist at iPinion.


Editor’s Note: Typically I don’t go in for rhymed poetry, but when Ms. Loren sent me poems for consideration for As It Ought To Be, this poem struck a chord with me. In Judaism the term “midrash” is used to describe a story that is created by opening up an existing story. With this poem Loren creates a midrash of sorts – opening up the story of Icarus to allow for another new tale. The tale of Icarus as a woman, a story that has feminist undertones, that explores the trials and tribulations of being a woman under the lens of a beloved mythological tale. This poem is clear and imagistic, and takes us on a journey on the wings of one who both has the opportunity to fly, and learns what it is to fall.

Want to hear more by Jesse Loren?
Buy Screamin Meme at Amazon.com
Jesse Loren’s Blogspot
Exquisite Corpse

DITCH THE CAR by Lezlie Mayers

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You can’t live in Los Angeles without a car. I mean, that’s what a lot of people say. It’s not true, but many L.A. residents believe it. Of course these are the same people who constantly gripe about gridlocked traffic, aggressive drivers, and scarcity of parking. Parked vehicles are routinely towed from streets where the multitude of cautionary parking signs practically requires a law degree to successfully navigate. Some LA residents act surprised when I tell them a clean subway runs under downtown LA that stretches north through the Hollywood Hills to Burbank, and reaches south all the way down to Long Beach. Above ground, buses operate frequently on every major street. In fact, out of any major U.S. city, the relatively flat terrain and temperate weather here couldn’t be more ideal for bike riding.

Some of the advantages to ditching the car, even for one day a week, aside from the obvious beneficial environmental and economic factors: you will interact with life in the city in a more intimate way than you ever could in the insulated bubble of a leased Beemer. Old ladies in Koreatown will smile at you toothlessly and simulate flexing their muscles as you lift your bike onto the bus rack. You’ll cruise down fragrant Hollywood tree-lined streets on cool nights. Your right bike handle gets caught in a bush but as you fall two strangers catch you and laugh. The people-watching on the subway is stellar, and the skyscrapers tower overhead on the long escalator ride up from the underground into the sunlight downtown. If you’re pissed off you can pedal fast and hard, blaring music into one ear. Walking with friends to get cupcakes in Larchmont makes you feel like a kid again. And when you ride a bike you arrive at every destination feeling slightly invigorated. Okay, maybe a little sweaty.

I’m not going to lie, it’s not all cupcakes and meet-cutes, especially if you’re a woman. You’ll meet men who make helpful offers like, “Girl, I’ll teach you how to ride that bike.” I literally had two different men, one young, one old, say this to me within an hour of each other. I don’t know what it means exactly, but I’ve got my suspicions. My bicycle seat was stolen after I left the bike locked to a street sign for 20 minutes to run an errand. A few weeks ago, I grabbed the last vacant seat on the bus only to discover that my seatmate was sniffing an unidentified substance out of his hand. And like driving, bike riding on city streets is not without its dangers. Our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, on his first bike ride out in years, was recently hit by a cab and dislocated his elbow. Thankfully, he wore a helmet that morning. This unfortunate accident thrust bicycle safety concerns into the spotlight, and concrete steps have been taken by local government to more aggressively expand LA’s bike lanes over the next decade.

Ultimately, walking, biking, and commuting by public transport reduces pollution, increases physical health, saves money, and leaves you open to fully experience the people and locations that embody a city. There’s a certain life-enhancing vulnerability in talking to strangers and launching off of cracks in sidewalks. This is not to say that I won’t ever own another car. The siren call of heated leather seats is not lost on me. For now though, life is good and interesting without them.

PLACE by John Dunn

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Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the maple, alder, elm and cherry trees with which the town abounds are songs of desire, and only the almonds of ancient Palestine can awaken the hungry pores more quickly.

-Edward Dalhberg, from Because I Was Flesh

The place to which I first belonged, which belonged to me then in flesh and belongs to me now in memory – memory visual, aural, tactile – was a 165-acre Hudson Valley farm. On the east bank of the river, just north of the village of Croton-on-Hudson, itself some forty miles north of New York City, overlooking the river from the crest of what seemed such a great hill to me then, the farm was no longer worked, but it was kept well.

Willard Brinton, a Quaker from Philadelphia, an engineer by training, owned the property with his wife. We had moved to a house that abutted the farm when I was four years old. Not long after I met two brothers, Mike and Geoff Sutherland – one older, one younger than me. They lived on the farm itself with their parents, who had bought a house from “old man Brinton”, as he was called behind his back. We became explorers and scouts, walking the property’s bounds, exploring hay ricks and caves, skirting the lake where, with our fathers, we would fish while our mothers sat on the steps of the cabin that fronted the lake and drank cheap sherry. We flushed a giant one early fall evening and went running to our fathers to tell them. Having encountered giants themselves when they were young, they did not discount our story, but instead went off in search of him. He was gone by the time we returned.

Ever restless, old man Brinton was always having something done on the property. One of the greatest of his works was a series of cascading ponds, formed by building a series of small dams on the stream that ran through the property and down into the Hudson. One was fitted with a diving board. There we swam, trying hard to jump on each other as we ran off the board. One day we spotted a huge snapping turtle in one of the upper ponds. “Big Mike”, my friends’ father, was able to lift it from the edge of a pond into a 55-gallon barrel filled with water. I don’t know why it deserved such confinement. We knew it could be dangerous to us, but his pond was not where we swam.

From the house where I lived, I could walk through the woods down to the railroad tracks that ran along the Hudson. Today’s parents would not think of letting their children do what we were allowed to do: cross those tracks to get to the river bank. But my father had grown up in New York City and my mother, an Englishwoman, had survived the Blitz in wartime London, so what harm could come to us? The tracks were a source of coal that fell from the steam engines’ coal cars and a source of the odd equipment – shovels, lanterns, mysterious tools and pieces of metal – that fell from the trains. One day my friend Geoff and I were standing on the river bank when a huge fish broke the water’s surface: its back seemed to go on forever. We ran screaming from the bank, flew across the tracks with no regard for what might be coming and fled through the woods back up to the house. Only years later did I realize that it was a sturgeon, probably one of the last of the very old ones that would migrate up the river.

We moved not long before I turned eight. My mother was expecting another child and the house which we rented was too small for four of us. So we found a house in the village itself. Was I now to live east of Eden? I don’t remember ever feeling that way. Before I had ridden the school bus, now I could walk to school. Having walked the metes and bounds of Brinton’s farm, having made it my own, I could now walk the village. Before the dangers were hayricks that could collapse, or mud that could suck you in if you weren’t careful. Now I needed to watch out for yard dogs off their leads and, worse, bullies whose prey I could become.

But the dangers were minor compared to what lay before me now. I could be sent on errands, walking and later riding my bike into the village center from the knoll where we lived. I had friends in every direction. Best of all I could walk to the library.

The library was housed on the second floor – no, I think it was the third – of the Municipal Building, an otherwise undistinguished three-story pile of brick that housed the village and the town offices, the police department and the local justice court. Tall-ceiling’ed, the walls lined with shelves, the shelves supplemented by free-standing bookcases that thrust out into the room like Manhattan piers, the library was presided over by a stern-faced woman who wore tweed suits and sensible shoes. The deference of children to adults was a given then, in the mid-Fifties and, as the librarian, she was to be treated with especial respect. Her’s was the final word on behavior: if she threw you out, there was no appeal. Rumor had it that several children had died under her stern gaze, but we never found their bodies and suspected that she encouraged this belief to keep us under control.

I needed no control in the library. It was the world made large for me.  I could walk into the books on the shelves and inhabit them, living inside the worlds they contained for as long as I liked. Then, as now, I would return home laden with books. I would haul them up to my room and only then discover which ones I really wanted to read. Looking now at my online library record, I see that I have out far more books than I can read in the time I have them. At least back then the librarian would look at my record and inform me that I had hit the limit and would have to bring some back before I took out any more.

Layers of place accreted over the years. Later, in high school, I discovered a passion for biology and would roam the woods and paths of my village. Heavily developed now – I no longer live there, but visit occasionally – then there were still large parcels of undeveloped land. They were not posted or, if they were, we paid no attention. My chief prey were the bullfrogs that inhabited a particular pond and swamp. I would return home covered with muck and reeking of swamp odor and would be directed to the back of the house where I stripped naked,  hosed myself off and, wrapped in an old towel reserved for the purpose, ran upstairs to take a shower before dinner.

All places have limits which we must sometimes cross and I crossed the limits of mine when, during Vietnam, I went into the Air Force. Returning “home” in 1968, I realized that it was not home any more and, anyways, I had planned to live in New York City. Which I did for several years, then moved overseas for a year. Only when I came back and then only when I moved upriver about twenty miles, did I begin to replant myself.

Perhaps it was then that I began to develop some wisdom and realize that, like a river, life tears at the banks of our lives, constantly reshaping them. Mine had been reshaped – by the war (though I was fortunate and did not serve in Vietnam), by life overseas and the attendant collapse of my first marriage – and I knew that I needed to stay in one place for a while. Which I have, thirty-five years, thirty of them in the same house. Which stands just one block back from the Hudson River, closer than I was to it when we first moved to Croton in 1950.

Can a river be a place? It can, but you have to step back to see it, to see how the river shapes the land as much as the land has shaped the river. To understand, as I did one bright morning, that I live not only on a river’s banks but on the coastline, because all the way up to Albany the Hudson River is, in fact, a tidal estuary, filling and emptying twice every day. It is the place where we launch our yellow kayak – a beamy little boat reminiscent of HMS MINNOW, Rat’s boat in THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. We paddle out and then turn around to see the land from the river’s point of view.

Will I die here? I don’t know. I have tried living away from here and it does not work. Place is not simply a location, longitude and latitude. It is a wave from a car window, a “hello” yelled across the street, a joke shared over breakfast, a moment of silence for a friend suddenly dead by his own hand. The texture of the hand rail that you’ve gripped thousands of times, the sound that your tires make running over a particular stretch of road, reminding you that you’re coming up to a dangerous curve. It is, in the end, a vast web that runs wide and deep. Like the spider’s work, it can be repaired, but only up to a point. It requires diligence and hard work to be maintained.

Without it, though, we are dead long before we die.

The Typewriter

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Royal Typewriter, circa 1950s. Photo credit: mrtypewriter.tripod.com.

The Typewriter
By John Unger Zussman

A year after I’d lost him, I taught myself to touch-type. I relished our old Royal, his old Royal. I loved how the keys plunked and the typebars clattered, how the letters appeared neatly on the line, one after the other. I reveled in the ping of the bell and the thwack of the carriage return. By the time I finished the lessons, it was not the typewriter’s music I craved but its lyrics: a powerful word, a deft sentence, a paragraph that leaves you breathless.

Although I knew my father had written, I didn’t expect the thick envelope of manuscripts my mother presented me when I turned forty. From it spilled war stories and postwar stories, war poems and love poems, the first chapter of a novel. He’d dreamed of a life as a writer and, judging by his professors’ comments, showed promise. Then he joined my grandfather’s warehouse business so he could marry her and have me. He packed those pages away, planning, I suppose, to return to them when the business got to its feet and we kids could make our own way to school.

My manager and my writing mentor want me to write something commercial instead of another passion project. I see their point. But I conjure the smoky late-night staccato of my father at the Royal. No. I don’t think so.

◊

Today’s post is the third of three in tribute to my father, Myron “Mickey” Unger, who would have turned 85 in August. In September, I posted a reaction to an old baby picture of me in a stroller, laughing, with my parents on either side. Last month, fifty years after his death, I continued the story with a poignant essay on life and parenthood that my father wrote in the ’50s, called “Upon Reaching the Age of Three.”

I am grateful for your interest and comments. It is comforting to know that my father’s words, even now, can move those who didn’t even know him.

Copyright © 2010, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

French Connection

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Two recent novels by French-speaking authors blend close psychological analysis with free-flowing lyricism to tell deceptively simple love stories. One of those books, In the Train, by Christian Oster, was released by Object Press this year. Object Press, out of Toronto, is an indie press established in 2008 and with only two titles to its name so far. But if In the Train is any indication, they are off to a promising start.

Oster’s novel is small, not quite 150 sparsely printed pages, and the story it tells is a modest one. Frank, nondescript in every aspect except his tendency to overanalyze and his habit of seeking out women on train platforms, meets Anne, a woman carrying a large bag at the Paris station. He offers to hold the bag for her and thus their romance begins. Anne is cautious at first, but Frank insinuates himself into her heart through a series of maneuvers ranging from half-gestures to outright stalking – or what would amount to stalking if we weren’t charmed by Frank’s voice and thus made to trust his motives.

I’ve not read another novel by Oster so I can’t say if this voice is his or one cleverly adopted for Frank. But whether he’s chosen the perfect character for his style or created the perfect style for his character, it’s a match. Comma-heavy, this style involves long sentences, full of clarifications, elaborations, asides, and disclaimers – many of them seemingly unnecessary; and yet they charm us while drawing us closer to Frank, and so, I think, are essential.

Here is Frank analyzing Anne’s reaction after he offers to hold her bag:

She looked tempted by my offer, although still undecided. Then she looked at me and thought that, at worst, I was interested in her, not her bag, and she handed it to me… I took the bag, thinking this woman was actually pretty relaxed, with men, unless she was doing everything possible to be left in peace, but I wasn’t sure this was the best way to go about it, with a man. But with me, I don’t know.

There are plenty of phrases here that an insensitive editor might remove, but to do so would be to miss the point. And besides, there’s enough meat in the story that we don’t get sick of this style. Not only is there Frank’s questionable behavior as he knocks on every door of the hotel to which he has followed Anne – is this gesture romantic or creepy, and more importantly, how will Anne see it? – but there is another man, a successful and interesting author who uses Anne as a plaything. When Anne first takes off her robe for Frank, in her hotel room while waiting for the author to return, we are not sure whether her behavior is the result of genuine attraction or revenge on a man who has hurt her. We go on questioning her sincerity throughout the story: even when she does succumb to Frank’s love, we can’t help but feel she’s settling.

The overly explanatory style doesn’t always suit Oster’s purposes perfectly. The bag in the aforementioned passage comes to symbolize many things – an obstacle to Frank and Anne being fully united; the weight of their separate pasts; the burden of love – but Frank makes all these meanings explicit to us, and in doing so, they lose some of the impact they might have had were we allowed to figure them out on our own.

All in all though, this is a strong novel in the European mode – if I might be allowed such a generalization. European novels tend to privilege abstraction and the explicit elaboration of thought and feeling, while American novels approach these things obliquely, through gesture, dialogue, loaded description and telling action. Both are useful and worthy methods, but it’s books like this that give rise to the lie at the heart of the worst American fiction: that we do not elaborate our feelings and thoughts to ourselves; that we are acting, not thinking, beings and that we approach our consciousnesses indirectly.

Running Away, by Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is roughly the same size and scope as In the Train. Released in 2009 by Dalkey Archive Press, it tells the story of an unnamed narrator who, on business trip to Shanghai, becomes involved with a mysterious woman named Li Qi. What follows is a whirlwind, dreamlike romance.

Like In the Train, much of this book takes place on the move – in trains, yes, but also on planes; and there is even a high-speed chase by motorcycle. As in In the Train, the romance is complicated by a third party – in this case, the narrator’s business partner, Zhang Xiangzhi, who has an ambiguous, probably romantic, relationship with Li Qi. And like In the Train, the story is told in the observant, lyrical voice of its first-person narrator. But while In the Train roots us in Frank’s head, Running Away focuses more on the physical world, providing lengthy descriptions of Shanghai, Beijing, and the Mediterranean.

At places, this book reads like the best travel writing. Here are the narrator and Li Qi after they first meet at a Shanghai art gallery:

Sound checks could be heard from the warehouse, and sharp bursts of Chinese heavy metal…filled the calm surroundings of the summer night, causing glass panes to vibrate and sending grasshoppers flying in the warmth of the air. It became difficult to hear one other on the bench and I moved closer to her…

Compare this to Frank’s meeting with Anne. In that passage, the focus is entirely on the two characters – just look at how many times the words “she” and “I” are used; and then notice how comparatively empty of pronouns the passage from Running Away is.

While it is nice to have a visceral experience of teeming China, Toussaint’s descriptive gifts often push us away when we should be drawn closer. Just as we become interested in the menacing, yet oddly passive love triangle (Zhang seems to know what’s going on between the narrator and Li Qi and yet doesn’t seem angry about it) we are dowsed in lyricism that gives a poetic lift to a situation that, psychologically, can’t support it. Where Oster uses lyricism to extract his characters’ motivations, Toussaint trains it on the outer world. And so the trio who races via motorcycle through the streets of Beijing could be anybody at all, the nice tension between them dropping away into mere action:

We turned off the freeway to escape our pursuers, braking to take an off- ramp, but the sirens kept following us, seeming to multiply in space, coming from everywhere at once, as when a number of police cars converge on the scene of an accident at high speed…

There’s a reason high-speed chases aren’t thought of as literary. Running Away does provide a deepening context to the passage: the narrator is “running away” from a previous romance; and the chase, his constant movement between countries, and his quick plunge into the arms of another woman all reflect that. However, Toussaint misses opportunities to complicate this idea, or I should say that the natural limitations of his style – its tendency toward superficial, poetic effect – prevent him from realizing these opportunities. It is when this book, yes, runs away from the very things that make it most European that it loses us, too.