Tel Aviv Diary - November 29, 2012 - Karen Alkalay-Gut
The 29th of November, the day Israel was confirm in the UN, has now given the Palestinians the opportunity to correct the mistake they made in 1947 when they rejected the UN's resolution. A big day! The "Poets for Israel" movement was also established today, and although it appeared to be a very right wing organization I decided to attend and even speak. I think poets - by dealing with the details of life and the land - can speak much more to the problems of politics than the politicians with their agendas can. I hope I had some impact. The project I offered them was an electronic map of Israel with poems about each place the mouse could hit. It was based on the idea that every stone, every well in his country has a story, a history, and a future, and poets should turn to their love of this land istead of fighting about it. It was also meant to counter the devisivenness of the speeches before me.
Hanoch Levin's "popper" opened this afternoon - what a play! Great dialogue, great actors, divine directing. If you go, though, don't look at the titles in English. They're pretty stupid and don't let the brilliance and the amazing comedy of the play come through. Levin starts with a silly event, and blows it up to the story of our lives. From a woman picking her nose to a tragedy.
November 30, 2012 THERE HAS TO BE A WAY TO CHANGE THIS GOVERNMENT, to change our way of thinking about the problems we face. A few years ago Ezi quit the Labor party for both of us. We were fed up with Barak. And immediately after I felt it was not right to opt out, that one should always be as involved as possible, that it's the responsibility of living in a democracy. But I didn't go back to the Labor party. And now I want to join something, anything, that will help move the country in a different direction.
December 1, 2012 Want to hear my poetry in Italian?
Download here
It's like a real winner - second on the list of poetry audiobooks this week.
December 2, 2012 It looks like the latest Katz is not going to be born tonight. We spent the afternoon on the boulevard watching Orit's belly as the contractions slowed and faded away. But the afternoon was not a total loss - there wasn't a moment when the people of Tel Aviv did not fascinate me - from the anonymous to the famous everyone passes you by as you sit in a cafe on the boulevard. Often the people are wildly outrageous, dressed like parodies of fashion plates, demonstratively eccentric, each one completely different from the other. But then they stop and talk, and the conversation often as simple and middle-class as any conersation you could have around the world. The rockets of the week before have been forgotten, and extreme reactions of our government in the past week to the Palestinian action in the UN are ignored. Ah, Tel Aviv, that wonderful bubble, bigger and rounder that Orit's belly any day.
Hila Ruach and Panic Ensemble. What do you think?