While I'm teaching this summer and working on bigger projects, I'll do my best to keep you posted on little things. In the meantime, here's a bit of what I've been working on:

I’ve come to stay here more and more; the hostel (like Jaffa) is a refuge from the raucous backpackers and the chintzy stops that line the tiyelet beachfront in Tel Aviv proper. Like Jaffa, the hostel is full of old charm and ardor.

There is a rooftop where the thrifty sleep for cheaper and from all angles of the roof a person can see something that holds them. Rows of workshops fill with handymen and merchants during the day, fabrics in the market stalls float in a soupy drift of air and mix in styles instead of nationalities. Beneath doorways from the Ottoman era, old silver and brass wares reflect the sunlight. Tourists and their children stroll slowly in a wonder. At night, the workshops are bundled silent, garages lock up with metal doors, and tiny cars park two wheels up onto the sidewalk. To the west, there is the sea and the ancient port and the minarets above the mosques with twisting iron ladders and the landmark Jaffa clock tower with its arching stained-glass windows, gabled green copper roof, sandstone walls and a dominating spire.

Inside the hostel, next to the rattling fridge, there is a small span of wall space with histories of the couples that met randomly at the hostel, pictures from their weddings, postcards from their honeymoons, polaroids of their children, and scribbled notes of thanks.

The private rooms are mainly vacant and couples no longer rove through the hostel in awe, cherishing their own singularity, observing the quirky tenants who almost bow and curtsy in their gushing affability. On the rooftop, the couples no longer look out onto Old Jaffa hands clasped, filing away small notations of the curious images: a woman in a window pinning bed sheets to a clothesline, a carpenter clapping a dust cloud off of his jeans.

It's true that the view so encapsulates the richness of this small place that in more normal times even the most cynical Israeli would pause on the roof of The Old Jaffa Hostel. She would let her hand come down from its rest on the railing to brush against another's palm and giving nothing more away than that she would say metukah, that it's sweet, without looking at anyone directly. In the hot wind, strands of her black hair would carry across her shoulders and she would allow it to be corrected by a brush of the foreign palm.

Today, the couple would no longer leave the roof and sail off the island into Jaffa, listening to the swearing and bargaining of the merchants and tourists. A tourist would talk a merchant down ten shekels and be pleased and then the merchant would say "but that's only two dollars’ difference" and then the merchant would win. The couple would walk past the craftsmen grunting in the act of lifting and unloading, fish caught near the harbor would stare out jealously at the couple from the ice and the sight and smell of the fish would infuse the couple’s gait with the also sense of being caught.

The whirring sound of an electric knife would turn the two heads from the street to a falafel shop and they would see a lamb's great leg spinning and roasting on the shawarma spigot. On the counter they’d see bottles of white tahini and red-hot harif and then their favorite topping, amber-colored amba, and their mouths would pucker at the imagining of the Chilbeh and pickled mango taste.

The couple would make its way down a windy stone path, its terminus at the rusty port where, in the bible, the prophet Jonah fled only to be caught. They’d see the boats christened in names of different languages and see Arab boys sliding on the moss of the pier and diving into the water in sight of the tourists’ cameras. The sun might be starting to go and an Arab fisherman would sit on the wall with his pole and string waiting to catch his dinner and past him the couple would walk, watching a child throw bits of pita bread at a pack of fighting gulls. The sea would crash into the wall and lift up a spray that would catch in the wind and speckle their faces with water. And this would be the cause of laughter.

The couple would climb down the rocks to the beach. They would see the human circus and all the tanning flesh and remain slightly away. And then they would sit together and watch and when he found he had to go, she would watch him walk away and stand with his back to her in the lessening sun and he could feel her looking while he pissed onto the rocks by the sand, the noise of which was drowned out by the tide. This would feel like something private that they had shared.

After they sat, they would walk back as it got dark and then the clock would strike eight and they knew to go home. This was how it could normally be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/health/23well.html?_r=1&em

As I sped for probably 80% of the drive from Houston to New York, I constantly had to adapt the premeditated lie I would tell if pulled over on the highway. The lies would shift from place to place.

On the first stretch from Houston to Mississippi, I left late and had to make up time. I planned to get past Jackson before sunset so I could set up at a campground for the evening. I had all my camping gear and clothes from the summer stuffed in my backseat with a large backpack; the lie was that my girlfriend had thrown me out and I was headed north.

I passed through the spread of East Texas, which goes from suburban sprawl, strips and outlets, to farms and factories, the small colleges, and the rodeo arenas, Port Arthur -- birthplace of Janis Joplin -- and then Louisiana. I-10 through Louisiana hangs above the swamp and it looks like there were cities already buried by deluge (before it became topical), the tops of trees prod out of the water like cartoon feet in the air, symbolizing the indistinct dead. I pass the highway divider upon which the slogan "9/11 was an insid job!" has been spray-painted, misspelling and all.

The lie becomes I'm trying to catch up with someone who is showing me the way to go when I-10 splits to I-12. It makes me feel harmless enough.

These are the longest days of the year but when I reach Mississippi the sun is starting to go and I am not going to pass Jackson before sundown. I pull off where I see a sign for a campground and I drive into a place I don't belong. Inside the camp, I find a sign directing me to the tan double-wide where I ask the proprietor, a woman whose disdain at the sight of me and a volvo sedan could not be more firmly entrenched in her eyes, if the campground was for tents or just RVs. She sends me away. I've just been rejected from the trailer park.

I know I'm going to have to stay in Jackson but I'm speeding. My lie is that driving in the dark makes me nervous and if I could just go a little faster, I'd make it to Jackson before nightfall. This lie makes me seem just pathetic enough.

The radio stations are all a jumble of fuzzy noises and preaching and I've plugged my laptop into the tape deck for music. I'm at the will of the random function. The music goes from Woody Gutherie to Chopin, one of his nocturnes, I couldn't tell you which, and at first it embarrasses me. But now I'm speeding down one certain stretch of the road and there are no longer the columns of tall birches flanking the roadside. My whole line of sight is finally clear, the tableau of farms and fields, not dire and functioning like East Texas, but clear, like Elysium, the sun tanking and covering the dirt with a flaxen polish.

I'm speeding more deliberately. The road has cleared of cars. I cut through the back-lit plains and I think, for once, about telling the truth when the trooper pulls me over.

I tell him that I don't have a job (like his) where I wake up and it's my duty to protect other people; I have no wife and no children who depend on me. Speeding down this highway while it's cleared of cars, cutting down a grade while the nocturne plays, while the sun sets is the one moment I have that day to feel powerful. Could you understand that?

I break out of the hypothetical conversation with myself. The nocturne is dwindling away, the higher notes and the sun past the bank of the hills. No one has pulled me over and in Jackson, I capitulate, spend the night in a hotel.

My big sister left valuable commentary to my characteristically overwritten previous post. I thought it deserved it's own space. :o)

It is important (well, maybe not important, but mildly relevant) to note that in VA, the paper targets that have human shapes are illegal. Up here, we shoot rabbits and deer--but not people. That would be wrong. That might encourage some to think that guns are for more than hunting. That might encourage some to think that hunting is not for food, but for sport. That might encourage some to think that sport is about competing with your own mind and thoughts as well as the minds and thoughts of others. That might encourage people to shoot other people.

If I can joke about being able to walk into a sporting goods store in Houston, Texas, and walk out with ammunition for all kinds of guns then I have no choice but to talk about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Right?

I did joke about buying boxes of bullets on a Saturday afternoon. I was with a group of people (a wedding party, truth be told) buying ammo and they didn't check our IDs, they didn't ask questions; I'm don't think they are allowed to do either.

Are these two things connected? Not directly. Is yesterday's shooting some kind of clarion incident highlighting the need for gun control? No, it's really not.

But here's the rub. We went to a shooting range in south Houston where people were lined up firing automatic weapons, shotguns, handguns, rifles. We shot through a few hundred rounds on a .45 handgun, a 9 millimeter glock, and a 12 gauge shotgun. There were paper targets for us to shoot at, ones that were circles within circles and bulls-eyes, others resembled human figures with point distributions for the deadliest spots to fire on a figure representing the human body.

The guys at the range were comparing gun laws in their respective states, one man bragging that gun laws in Virginia were even more lax than they were in Texas. Another talked painfully about how he singlehandedly dispersed a riot following Hurricane Ike in Houston by firing at a group of violent looters. He was then easily acquitted by a jury. They explain how guns keep us safe because more righteous citizens are able to stop criminals and murderers from committing harm.

And one of the paper targets was a bandit with a ten-gallon hat and his pistols drawn, clearly the enemy. But what if your enemy wasn't doing harm by robbing a bank, what if, in your worldview, your enemy controlled the banks and fabricated a historical genocide to control a country's political agenda? Clearly, if you believe your enemy is doing you harm then you must act against him. Right?

Meanwhile, our President is at Buchenwald, talking about how his great uncle helped liberate the camp (laud the man, a hero of Eisenhower's army), and about how both Obama and his uncle will never forget it what either saw at the camp, and then Elie Wiesel is quoting Camus' The Plague to expound on the possibility of human dignity after a tragedy, an existential sickness (his WWII allegory).

Does it feel possible? Human dignity? That's not the question either. No one is asking questions even while you shop for ammunition.

Some of the press has been commenting on a video filmed by Max Blumenthal, the genius political commentator who went around the most touristy stretch of bars and nightlife in Jerusalem to coerce some drunk American yeshiva kids and recent Western emigres to tell us their drunken opinions on Barack Obama's upcoming Cairo speech and their general political insights on the Middle East. The final product is, of course, a ridiculous collection of racist, narrow-minded, moronic ramblings.

There is no defense for this. I am sure if they hadn't been screaming into a microphone at a bar in front of their friends the answers would have been a little more cogent, a little more restrained, but more than likely conveying the similar sentiments and purviews...as ridiculous as they were.

So to Max Blumenthal...if all it takes is a video camera to make a demographic look atrocious, then I offer this:

I'm not sure I've ever said this, but...I think the Huffington Post is right on this one. This really isn't journalism.

Found this article only mere hours before shuffling off to my big sister's wedding.

While greater stability is on the march in Iraq these days, it seems that spurned Iraqi men have resorted to using IEDs [improvisational explosive devices] to exhibit their despair at being spurned by Iraqi women (or often, the families of Iraqi women). They call them "love IEDs" and Iraqi men, formerly of the insurgent variety, plant them close to the houses of their unrequited loves.

After we finish exporting democracy to Iraq, I think the U.S. should focus next on some emo.

Not that this website has ever actually intended to serve a practical function, but...for my relatives who asked for a copy of my d'var torah from my sister's aufruf today, I offer it here:

For those of you who were paying attention to the Hebrew in this week’s Torah portion, you’ll know that we have reached the part of the biblical madness where a number of rules are spelled out for us. How we observe Passover, how after seven years we forgive all loans and free our slaves, and how we offer an offering of our crops to God.

My favorite rule -- which is the one my mother chanted so harmoniously a few moments ago -- is about how we are to exalt our first born. As the little brother it doesn’t give me comfort to know that my mother picked those specific verses, but I suppose it’s really not my place to kvetch about it.

But you know what, I’ve decided I am going to kvetch about it. The one solace I might have had in the text here is that it says the first born male is the one who is supposed to be exalted. Anyone who knows my family is well aware that those rules don’t apply in the Chandler household. So what I am left with: the d’rash at the auf ruf at a time on Saturday morning when I’d normally still be asleep. Well, here goes.

So for the past seven weeks Jews have been counting down the time from our exodus in Egypt to the moment where we received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai on the holiday of Shavuot. These seven weeks represent a time in the Jewish calendar where couples are not supposed to marry; the idea is that we are supposed to be rejoicing in our freedom. Now were the sages being clever by telling us to rejoice in our freedom during the same period in which we are not supposed to marry? That’s a sermon I am not allowed to give right now.

The better reason that Jews are not supposed to marry during these seven weeks is because traditionally we are supposed to be focused on the harvest. And so, for all of us: local Houstonians or those of you from out of town who are surprised to find that even in Texas we are not tilling the fields of an actual harvest I ask a question. What is our contemporary harvest?

Over the past few hours I’ve heard the endless sounds of the contemporary harvest; the song of my big sister chanting her Torah portion carrying across the house, my mother snipping every bit of fat off of a twenty pound brisket in the kitchen sink. The sights of the harvest are there too: a seamstress shortening my sister’s wedding dress, the rearranging of the refrigerator to make room for trays of cupcakes baked by the mother of the groom.

These are certainly dimensions of the harvest, but they are not the harvest itself. The harvest is something less tangible, something more symbolic. It is not the work of one parent exalting a first born child (as the Torah says to do) or a person doing his or her craft, but rather the efforts of a community to exalt a couple who are united in love, a couple who are the product of the very harvest, and a couple who will turn the earth to yield a future crop and keep the community vibrant.

Weddings are the manifestations of the harvest and they are the apex of our goodwill. The women who came over to the house to labor over cakes or write names on place cards, the rabbi who called in to check on the bride and groom, the men who moved the tables and chairs and built the altar. We are all invested because our bride and groom hold up a mirror and reflect the world that created them. That’s the harvest to me. Thank you all for being a part of it.

No more with the twisting
hoops and rivulets of 1994/95,
repeats of binary refrain:
clutch city and the dream
shake, the return of the
glide and the kiss
of death.

It's on to what? Baseball
or summer knolls, concrete piers
to race down, gaze out on the Hudson
and that verdure,
God-made gaffers
lifting the watertops.

I look in myself for the worst
devolution: my tongue and its
cues to spout on, my knees collapse,
my mind gets soft like
batter (up).

I'm paring down these chubby
stanzas, line by line until they
become something useful like
an exigency.

Or perhaps a row in the diadems of
my secret life, all of which suggest
a pledge to insincerity.

Arouse the panic in me or tether my feet
in the pageantry of the underwhelmed.

Or find me a new hobby.

It's likely to arouse suspicion when, days before you are set to watch a 74-year-old poet/deity perform in concert on his first tour in fifteen years, ticketmaster sends you an e-mail explaining that there is no opening act and that Leonard Cohen will be taking the stage promptly at 7:30. Adjust your plans accordingly. It isn't unnatural to wonder if, as if in antithesis to the spirit of his body of work, everyone is going to be home and in bed by 10:00.

At the expense of whatever "credibility" I may have as a critic, I am just going to say from the outset that the Leonard Cohen spectacle to which I just bore witness was one of the greater privileges of my life. No hyperbole. Indeed, we were not in bed by 10:00, around then Mr. Cohen was just starting his third and final encore which he would finish with his 25th or so song of the night and then a very moving benediction to the crowd. Yes, I received a semi-personal blessing from Leonard Cohen himself and I have had more goodwill in my veins in the past few hours than I can reasonably recall.

Accounts of the spectacle: It was cold and raining for most of the night and those uncovered on the lawn of the venue standing for hours under umbrellas in the Maryland night. Listeners pulling partners up for Take This Waltz and making the space to dance.

Mr. Cohen introduced his nine person band to the crowd twice with full flourished descriptions like "our irrepressible shepherd" for the bassist, "our impeccable timekeeper" for the drummer, "maestro of the instruments of wind" for the sax player (he also introduced the technicians who handled the instruments, the lighting, and the sound and thanked the caterers, truckers, and again, all of us). He was backed most of the night by this sizable entourage of world class musicians (harp, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, banduria, harmonica, electric bass, keyboards, steel pedal guitar, upright bass, others) and three women who sang beside him.

But the real religion came when Mr. Cohen sang a stripped down and haunting Suzanne. While it was written 42 years ago, it was still sung with all resonant tinges of blind piety.

Suzanne takes your hand now
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
She shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

By the time these last stunning verses arrived in Cohen's whispering baritone, there was a woman in the row behind me who was sobbing aloud and amazingly, it didn't seem to strike anyone as strange in the moment or even after. Following the execution, probably the fourth of a dozen or so standing ovations of the night, this one early in the second set.

If it's a poet's charge to curate the topography of timely suffering then there seems no better arbiter for it than Mr. Cohen who (it was revealed a few years ago) had the vast majority of his retirement fund stolen by a longtime associate while he was living in a monastery. His solution: go back on tour.

Right before the end of his 65-minute first set, when Mr. Cohen doffed his fedora and finally said a formal hello to the crowd, I think it hit home that we were seeing this man in all his mythical corporeality and he received the kind of standing ovation that people normally reserve for the end of a performance that's really earned it. He gave the love right back.

We're so privileged to gather like this, with so much of the world plunged in chaos and suffering.

He then read a few lines of the poem Anthem before performing a moving rendition of the relevant and epic song:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

He recited lines from his poetry a number of times during the night, one (A Thousand Kisses Deep) that went on for at least two minutes to a doting audience. He could have stopped reading his poems years ago, but he read them expertly, like a poet should, with a delicate touch and the attentive press of syllables like water smoothing over a stone.

The crowd laughed at many of the sharp lyrics that typify his work ("I haven't been this happy since the end of World War II") as if it was the first time they had heard the joke. When he dramatically announced "democracy is coming to the USA," the crowd shouted as if the Cold War had just ended again. And when Mr. Cohen played up his dirty old man act for the gleefully perverse I'm Your Man , the women still swooned.

Each time he left the stage, he frolicked off of it in bounces. He kneeled like a supplicant and serenader during the appropriate songs. He never really seemed frail and had his caustic, self-effacing wit in full form ("you're very kind" he said to the cheering crowd after he finished playing the keyboard for the first time during the extremely simple arrangement that concludes Tower of Song). The only point in the show that stank of the Elvis-in-Vegas decay was his performance of Hallelujah where he subbed in a hammy "I didn't come all the way to Merriweather just to fool ya." But even this is excused because Mr. Cohen knows well that the song is no longer his.

What still is his: the command over a moment and the ken of an agile performer. In the first set, while singing the lyrical litany that makes up Who By Fire, a song about the vast and arbitrary number of ways a person can be lost ("who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate"), beyond him the sound of the rain on the pavilion tent ("who in the merry merry month of May") pattered down loudly and noticeably. The water had its own sonic effect, sliding off the side of the tent beneath where the revival was taking place and dripping audibly on the pavement. All the while as the water was trying to get in, Mr. Cohen kept going, convincing us of anything.