Dove's Eye View

Traveling

Brooklyn - Beirut - Mieh-Mieh.

Brooklyn seen from lower Manhattan.

Whenever I go to New York, I walk to this waterfront with a copy of Whitman's poems, I read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" aloud while looking at the East River, and I cry. Look for me weeping on Friday morning at Columbia Heights.

American University of Beirut Museum

Mieh-Mieh, Sidon, Lebanon.

I leave today for the long journey home. Posting will be light or non-existent until I reach the internet cafe in Mieh-Mieh. Until then, be well...

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not:
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
...
I loved well those cities;
I loved well the stately and rapid river;
The men and women I saw were all near to me;
Others the same—others who look back on me, because I look’d forward to them;
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

6

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

Lazy Environmentalist: Garden Dept.

Lynnette Evans of the SF Chronicle posts on The lazy person's guide to the fall garden.

I've practiced this sort of gardening for years. Don't rake the leaves off the flower beds - that's mulch. Etc.

But when I get back from my Lebanon trip I really want to pull the dead tree leaves out of my native plants in the front yard - the orange sticky monkey flower and carex Berkeley. Fallen leaves can go UNDER the plants but they look terrible IN the plants.

Blood Relations

Hedgebrook Essay #1: describe your work and what impact you wish to have on your audience.

I wrote that my fiction about Lebanon and sectarian conflict is meant in part to reveal American fears of the Other and the fatal consequences of unchecked violence.

Then I started in on myth, ancestor stories, saints' tales, the voices of the dead. What did that reviewer say about Louise Erdrich? Because it applies to my work. Oh yes, Google is my friend:

Claire Massud writes in Blood Relations - The New York Review of Books:

...there is no such thing as "magical realism." There are, instead, culturally specific experiences of the real which, when rendered in fiction, produce different results.

So if you read my novel draft and wonder why there are miraculously blossoming olive branches, and dead people talking, and voices in the subway tunnels of New York, well, see Massud on Louise Erdrich. Simply a culturally specific experience of the real - one which I'm trying to reclaim amidst the insane "rationality" of this modern world.

Explain to me why a world in which saints heal babies is more crazy than this one where we destroy countries in order to save them from dictatorship, and give hundreds of billions to bankers to rescue them from their greedy mistakes.

Store Food for a Crisis

I emailed my neighborhood list yesterday, reminding them to keep two weeks worth of food stored for emergencies. People in Houston right now are looking at bare supermarket shelves and shortages. The New York Times reports that the Red Cross and the government say they can't handle a really big crisis. We are on our own, folks.

So many people emailed me about this privately that I decided to blog it.

Your cash may lose value or get swallowed up in the bank these days. Why not invest a part of it in items you will use and may need desperately in a crisis?

Food storage 101 from Sharon Astyk
Food storage 102 - "Two weeks is not enough!"
Her weekly "baby step" storage and emergency preparedness posts, here and here.

Stock up on water, too. Consider getting a 55 gallon food grade water barrel.

Consider what tools and implements you might need in a long term crisis. Gardening tools. Bicycles. Flashlights. Camp stove. Solar oven for when the municipal power and gas are out.

Look, you buy insurance on your property and your life which you hope you never use. Buy this stuff as insurance and you can use it anyway. Learn to cook out of your pantry and you've reduced your food bills, acquired a skill, and maybe added healthier meals to your rotation. Meanwhile, you have emergency supplies to fend off hurricanes, power outages, transportation stoppages, and sudden unemployment.

Do we have all these items stored? No. We add them as we get to it. But we have enough food for a bunch of indigent relatives and neighbors to get fed for quite some time...

Randa Jarrar Reads In SF Tonight!

Randa Jarrar reads at Books Inc..

Friday, September 19, 2008 7:00 PM
Books Inc.
Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94102

Hear excerpts from her debut novel, the critically acclaimed A Map of Home.

I'll be there with menfolks in tow, barring mishap or other family emergency.

Randa is a friend in real life whom I met through the internet. She blogs at Rockslinga; we sat on a panel together in 2005 in New York City at the Radius of Arab Writers, Inc. conference. She is a talented, many-times published translator and fiction writer who made a mark in Arab-American literature from a very tender age. She's still a young thing and she's done so much! Yay, Randa.

Dream Homes: Lost and Found

"Everything is transitory. We can lose everything in an instant, and we do lose everything in an instant. We have to find home in ourselves," says Joyce Zonana. "That's really the theme of the book."

Writer and professor of English Joyce Zonana befriended me through the internet and sent me her new memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina...

I felt such kinship with this book. Zonana was born in Cairo, to a Sephardic Jewish family; her mother lived not far from the apartment where I lived during my first marriage to a native Cairene; Zonana's family left Egypt and moved to Brooklyn, where she grew up; she moved around the South in her adulthood, finally making a long term home and career in New Orleans, only to lose it all in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Zonana landed in a studio close to my last apartment in New York.

Joyce's story is not like mine at all, but we share two neighborhoods of two great cities, as well as other common interests and sensibilities. The story of her Arab Jewish family and their odyssey from Cairo to the Americas is richly told, full of drama and poignancy and vivid sensory experience. The back of the book features her family recipes! A writer after my own heart.

Today as I was musing on why I don't feel panic about the latest financial crisis, Joyce sent me this link via instant messenger. The above quote jumped out at me.

Like Joyce, I have seen how one can lose everything in an instant. My father's family lost their homes and our ancestral village in one terrible day in 1985. I lost a breast and my feeling of corporeal invincibility in 2004. I lost my father in two short months of 2006, while Israeli bombs rained down upon the land he could not reach. Two cousins died in their prime that year, suddenly and without warning. In 2007 with my new diagnosis of cancer, I lost a great deal more: My hair again. My physical strength and vigor. My timeline for my future.

And yet in losing we always find... new life, new ways of looking at life. Those of us who lose our homes can find new homes. Sometimes we are lucky and we can return to our old homes, clean out the mud, patch over the bullet holes, repaint, renew. Yet nothing is ever what it had been - not the reconstructed breast, not the reconstructed house, not the city neighborhood, which has changed in the years you have lived away.

Sometimes we think we are unlucky and have to make new lives while grieving homes, or cities, or bodies lost to us seemingly for good. And yet this moment is always the only moment we have, and this city, this home, this body is the only one we are in right now.

I learned over the last year that in time I need to finish grieving the past, finish grieving the losses of the past, even of the recent past. One grieves and then one looks around and notices: I am breathing. The sun is shining (or it's raining, or foggy, or snowing). I have a place to live, thank God, and a bed to sleep in, and my body is still alive, changed though it may be.

Yes, we must find home in ourselves - in some changeless self that is not body, not home, not city, not tribe or professional attainment or bank balance. All those things are of the world, and they all pass. There is some essential spirit, or source, or prime reality which remains. You may call it what you like, but names and words and ideas don't encompass it. I have sometimes found that home, and wherever I go, whatever happens around me, I cannot be moved from it, even when I think the world is falling apart.

You can always make dinner

For a while this blog had a tag line, beneath the "signs of hope" slogan: "When there's no hope left, you can always make dinner."

I took it off because there's always hope. AND you can always make dinner.

When the markets crash and you're wondering what to do, you can make a frugal dinner. Ericka Lutz, writer and neighbor who blogs at Red Room, posted a recipe today for Root Ragout. She's mourning the death of David Foster Wallace, 46.

I'm celebrating the last week of chemo side effects, so nothing can knock me off my jaunty perch - today. However if you are feeling scared about money, you can always browse the Frugal Food category and make a penny-pinching meal. I think I'm making lentil soup tonight, the basic, not the Internet's Most Famous Red Lentil Soup.

Here's a sketchy recipe for Chicken with Olives and Escarole, adapted from Lorna Sass (Pressure Cooker recipes). It's tasty and has just enough little luxuries in it that the wolf will slink away from your door.

1 large chopped onion
1/2 c. white wine
1/2 c. chicken broth
6 mashed anchovies
1 cup green or mixed Italian olives
1.5 pounds escarole, chopped
3 cups marinara sauce
3 pounds chicken parts, skinned
Red pepper flakes
salt and pepper

Saute onion in the pressure cooker, add white wine and cook it down.

Add chicken broth, anchovies, olives, escarole, marinara sauce, and chicken parts. Shake in some red pepper flakes.

Lock down the pressure cooker according to your manual's instructions, cook 9 minutes for chicken parts. Bring pressure down safely and open. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve over pasta or polenta, or use crusty bread to sop up juices.

Leila for Vice President

Leila for Vice President
Originally uploaded by bedouina

Cindy Sherman has spent thirty years making herself up and photographing herself as different characters; her photos are in all the major contemporary art museums. Her project is about how fluid image and self are - how we can change ourselves using costume and the camera.

Chemotherapy has changed my looks so radically in the last four years that I have begun to play Cindy Sherman a little. I looked very much the same from age 12 to age 42, and then suddenly lost my hair and eyebrows; hair grew back silver and I refused to dye it; got cancer again and have been in chemo for nearly a year.

Me at 40, two years before first round of chemo.

My wigs have made me look different, because I have not tried to replicate my long voluminous locks of yore, nor did I choose to go with curly silver hair similar to what I had last year - too granny-looking. For the first time in my life I have styled hair, thanks to wig technology.

Several times during chemo I have gotten out the camera and photographed myself, sometimes with no wig, other times with wig, turban, or head scarf. I was never interested in self-portraits before, but now the possibilities for changing my looks fascinate me; and I also document effects of surgery and drugs on my body. No, I won't share the gory details.

Today an article online about Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live inspired me to try to get the Sarah Palin look myself. My old wig has the bangs, but it doesn't have the updo volume. And I really need false eyelashes to get that VPILF mojo going. I had been wanting an Amy Winehouse wig (Tried to make me go to chemo, but I say NO, NO, NO). Now I really have an excuse. Gov. Palin for Halloween.

These pictures were taken with my Nikon held up with one hand - hence the awkward angles and poses.

I'm going to get a makeup consultant. I wanna be a MILF. Instead I look like a very serious academic. Don't I look like a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies with tenure at a top university? That's probably the career I was supposed to have had I not been an ADD-afflicted boho artist.

The Atom Spy, My Dad, and Me

For First Time, Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits Spying for Soviets - NYTimes.com.

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

1969: Elias Abu-Saba teaches Existentialism at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, as pro bono community service. Befriends Morton Sobell.
Helen Sobell, Morton's first wife, stays with Abu-Saba family in Lewisburg overnight during her visits to Morton.
Morton is released from prison.
Abu-Saba family drive to New York City and celebrate Sobell's release at a dim sum parlor in Chinatown.

1977: Abu-Saba family visits New York City. Morton Sobell comes for lunch with host family and Abu-Sabas. Leila, 15, asks Sobell about the Equal Rights Amendment. Sobell answers that the Communist Party of America is against the ERA because under communism there is no sex discrimination. Therefore to fight for the ERA is unnecessary, since he is fighting for communism.

The conversation turns to the Rosenbergs and Sobell's imprisonment by the U.S. Government for atom-bomb spying. Leila's brother, 12, asks Sobell directly: "Did you do it?"

Sobell refuses to answer the question. Brother presses. Sobell dodges.
Leila Abu-Saba concludes that Morton Sobell may actually be guilty, even though her father says the US Government persecuted an innocent man. She also decides she is never, ever going to be a Communist.

If you ever wonder why I walk the middle of the road and refuse to be counted among the true believers in any cause, look at this story. Such an episode might have made a neo-conservative out of some people of my generation but I don't go for opposite extremes, either. Life is complicated and nobody is a total hero, nor is any cause or movement totally just and pure.

My good wishes to Sobell, who is 91 and frail, for his peace of mind and reconciliation of contradictions in the winter of his life. I hope we live long enough to hear Dick Cheney confess his sins. In the scheme of things I believe Richard Cheney caused more harm and loss of life than Morton Sobell ever did.

Thomas' Gate

Where you'll find me in Damascus insha'allah: Bab Tuma, the quarter where Saul stayed after he was blinded on the road and became the apostle Paul. We're going to a boutique hotel in an old Damascene house, complete with its own Turkish bath.

Through the wonders of Facebook I've learned of the television craze transfixing the Arab world this month: Bab al-Hara 3 - the third year of a month-long historical soap opera set in a fictional neighborhood of Damascus in the early 20th century. They run the series every night during Ramadan, and it's popular among Arab Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Several of my young cousins mentioned it on Facebook so I looked it up. You can even see clips of previous series on YouTube.

The series depicts a fictional quarter of Damascus with all its characters and dramas, perhaps in the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz' novel, Midaq Alley. (Harat al-Midaq). Maybe I'll reread Midaq Alley for a little refresher. I also have a memoir of a woman who grew up in Damascus, and a biography of Asmahan, the famous Syrian/Druze singer (who made her career in Egypt).