Sorry I haven't posted as much as I might have the last little while. I have been playing Battalion: Nemesis a little obsessively in the evenings when I usually blog. The boys are doing well in school. Benjy is taking a lot of extra pull-out Hebrew classes which makes his days less boring and his Hebrew is flying ahead by leaps and bounds. I had a sort of weird experience the other day which I think is indicative of a frightening condition of my brain. I have lived with this oddity most of life but got such a stark example of it that it came into focus as never before. To wit, I think my imagination overpowers my other brain functions sometimes to the point that it actually makes me dumber. I hear people talk about the pliability of memory, like in witnesses to crime for example and I always think “Yeah its true. Other people do have such terrible memories.”
Ariela and I have been watching an Israeli TV show – Ad Hahatunah (Until the Wedding) -- on the computer. The excuse is that we are practising our Hebrew, though any non-Hebrew speakers out there, I'm sure you can tune in and get about 75% from context and the good looking Israeli people in their ridiculously nice homes will carry the other 25% for you. Anyway, we came across a good piece of Israeli slang the other night when the traitorous, ethereal Ayah, says to loyal and dogged Ran “ha-im atah dafuk?!” Dafuk basically means stupid so the previous example might mean “What are you? Stupid?” (It comes from the root meaning 'knock' or 'bang' so it might be translated, “Were you banged on the head as a child?!” It is especially fun for English speakers because it sounds like something Joe Pesci might say. “Da-fuk? What d'ya t'ink? You t'ink I'm da-fuk?! Fugettaboutit.”)
I felt good that I recognized the word. I decided later to look it up because I wanted to know where it came from. I was surprised to see that it was not dafuk as I had always thought but it was actually dafuch. Not a big difference but enough that it surprised me. Shortly afterwards, I mentioned this to a Hebrew speaker who said categorically that it was dafuk. But I politely stuck to my guns. After all, I had just looked it up not two days before. I had even been surprised because it was contrary to what I expected to find in the dictionary. I was convinced – I mean 100% certain, like “Yeah-That's-The-Guy-I-Saw-Him-Pull-The-Trigger” certain -- and that this Hebrew speaker was wrong. Later I went to the dictionary to check and somebody had changed the letters in the dictionary back so that now it said DAFUK!!! The point is that either there are malicious gnomes that screw around with my Hebrew-English dictionary just to make learning the language harder (a possibility I haven't ruled out) or my imagination renders the rest of my brain – the parts that control memory, good judgment, probably fine motor control as well -- it renders them, well, dafuk.
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"i owe the discovery of uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. the mirror troubled the end of a corridor in a villa on gaona street, in ramos mejia; the encyclopedia is falsely called the anglo-american cyclopedia (new york, 1917) and is a literal, but also morose, reprinting of the 1902 encyclopedia britannica. the work was produced about five years ago. bioy casares had dined with me that night, and he delayed us with a vast polemic about the construction of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or obscure things and engage in various contradictions, which would admit to a few readers - to very few readers - the divination of an atrocious or banal reality. from the remote end of the corridor, the mirror did not watch. we discovered (late at night this discovery is inevitable) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. then bioy casado remembered that one of the heresiarchs of uqbar had declared that mirrors and reproduction are abominable, because they multiply the numbers of men."
-JLB
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