Lag

I hope people find the blog now that it’s hidden from the URL. I’ve tried to make it pretty obvious.

Lag B’Omer is today. Last night I set up shop with some friends and a mangal (small bbq grill) out in one of the public parks; we dropped the ball on massive accumulation of wood, so hanging out with some coals, some veggie burgers, potatoes (wrapped and thrown in the coals) and s’mores seemed like the next best option. The fun was much less about building our own puny fire than gawking at the blazes constructed around us, anyway. It’s amazing how much wood some of these 5 and 6 year old kids were schlepping to their infernos; I guess one gets stronger and more motivated to work when one has a good cause, and for a kid that age, there is no better cause in the world than getting to build and play with a gigantic fire. And then, of course, there was the one kid (maybe aged 7 or so) eagerly schlepping two IKEA wooden chairs towards one of the big bonfires. One suspects that his parents are going to be a bit dismayed when they realize what happened.

I’ve had “Aish, aish, midurah, tachtonim shel bachura!”* stuck in my head for about three days straight. It’s pretty annoying, actually.

*Fire, fire, campfire, underpants of a girl! No, it doesn’t mean anything, but building a midurah is key to this holiday. And bachura/girl rhymes with that, so of course, you know…lingerie. It’s even stupider when I try to explain it.

New URL–Please Update Your Bookmarks!

As part of the new design, this site’s going to have an actual homepage now. Which means that the blog has a new URL. Please update any and every bookmark you have to the blog to: danyaruttenberg.net/category/blog/. A lot less sexy, I know, but I promise, it’ll be worth it.

The blog’s (and the site’s) summer wardrobe will be unveiled soon!

Clearing Out

Well, I just picked up my boxes for the lift (ie communal renting of a boat to take stuff back to America for much less than shipping by air.) I ordered, uh, a lot of boxes because I plan to ship everything that I can possibly live without until December–the lift should arrive in August, but sometimes there are strikes and delays. This primarily includes the 140 lbs of books and journals* I schlepped here last June, plus some other books–not too many, actually–that I’ve acquired over the last year and a half, and sweaters and other winter-related objects. I’m sure I’ll find all sorts of other stuff to throw in as well, since my intention is to fly home with the bare minimum.

Nonetheless, as I’ve begun to fill a box or two, it becomes clear to me that I have grossly, grossly overestimated the number of boxes I’ll need. As it should be–we only pay for the ones we ship. It’s nice to see that I don’t have nearly as much STUFF here as I had feared.

In the meantime, it’s kind of fun to fill book boxes. It’s sort of like a game of Tetris.

*I suspect that many of the old journals are going to be disposed of when I move again in a year, once the book-with-memoir-elements I have written is typeset and ready to roll, but I’m not sure about that so back they go. In any case, you don’t recycle source texts until the fact-checker has done her work, so I gotta keep ‘em now anyway.

Inch By Inch

Revisions continue apace. I’ve gotten to the point with the mss where I’m having trouble telling if the stuff I’m adding and changing is to its benefit–it’s like staring at one thing too long, or saying, “purple purple purple” over and over again until it just sounds like meaningless babble. Today I have to work on writing a proper Introduction, and then there’ll be a few days away from the mss, and hopefully I’ll be able to read the thing intelligently and have some thoughts on what’s been done or what needs to be done.

The other project for about now is finding this thing a name. It has a working title, but I don’t think that it gets to keep it for the long haul. I sort of feel like one of those parents who can’t decide on a name for their child in the hospital and suddenly the kid is almost thirteen and s/he still doesn’t have a name. Usually this is a pretty easy part for me, but it’s just not coming this time. All the good titles are taken already, or so it seems from my current vantage. You think anyone would notice if I called my book The Autobiography of Malcolm X? It’d sell pretty well, huh?

Sigh. Something will come, because we can’t publish this book under the title, “This Book Project Thingo That I’ve Been Working On.”