Book of Days: asher553

The trouble with wanting to go someplace better is, you don't.

I have the lovely 2008 Aya Korem cover of this song in my collection (as part of "'Avodah 'Ivrit"). Here's the Eran Tzur 1993 original, in all its Goth glory.



Wikipedia (English auto-translation from the Hebrew)
The poem is written in the first person and describes the narrator 's suicide , as it is said at the beginning of the poem: "On the evening of the second day / I devoured my soul". The continuation of the first stanza describes the suicide method, similar to the one used by the writer Virginia Woolf when she committed suicide in 1941.

--

NEW MOON IN NOVEMBER
(rough translation by asher63)

On a new moon in November, I set my soul free,
put rocks inside my pockets, and walked into the sea.

My soul begged for mercy in the currents of a stream
A wooded lake and goldfish around me in my dream

My day of grief is my day of joy
My day of joy is my day of grief

Who will save a blind man in the sea?
My soul begged for mercy, but it was all a dream.

Deeper and deeper in the darkness my soul fell
And found its resting place in the seventh pit of hell

the forest of the desperate, they tore their souls and turned into trees
wild animals dwelling in their branches and leaves

My day of grief is my day of joy
My day of joy is my day of grief

Toni Morrison's sixth novel, 'Jazz', contains a passing reference to "the eyes of black Jews, brimful of pity for everyone not themselves" on p. 8. I had not known there was a black Jewish community in 1920s Harlem, but you learn something new every day.

The Times of Israel:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/yiddisher-black-cantors-from-100-years-ago-rediscovered-thanks-to-rare-recording/

"While some Black cantors broke out as cantorial soloists and stars of the Yiddish stage, others mainly served as congregational cantors. They did this in Black synagogues in Harlem, which sprung up in the first decades of the 20th century as Blacks moved northward to escape the Jim Crow South.

Harlem was initially a primarily Jewish neighborhood, so the Black newcomers came into regular contact with their Jewish neighbors. This, together with rising Zionism-inspired Black nationalism, led some Blacks (who were rejected by the Jewish religious establishment) to form their own congregations in which they practiced Jewish rituals and used the Hebrew and Yiddish languages. ..."

"I won't ask anything of you, if you'll just be here again tomorrow."

I woke up with this song in my brain, so now you get to hear it too.

I've got several boxes full of old CDs and DVDs, all of which I keep meaning to watch or listen to "someday". Last night I decided to give one of those DVDs a go (a production of a Shakespeare play that I'd had for maybe 5 or 6 years) and I put it in the DVD player. A few minutes into the play, the faces of the actors dissolved into blocks of pixels as if they had all been placed under the witness protection program. Soon thereafter, the disc stopped playing entirely.

Disc rot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot] It's the same problem I'd been having with many of my DVDs and audio CDs. Meanwhile, my old vinyl records - some of them inherited from my parents - still play, for the most part, pretty well.

Sony gave us the CD back in the early 1980s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc] and I can remember the extravagant promises that were made about the digital compact disc's durability and longevity. Now I'm wondering if it's time to just cut my losses and toss all my old optical media in the dumpster.

I can watch videos and listen to music on streaming digital media and downloads now. Of course, the continued viability of those media depends on the survival of the technological infrastructure that they inhabit: successive generations of computers, mobile devices, music players, and so on.

I'll confess I have a certain sentimental nostalgia for vinyl - but my reasons for keeping up my vinyl collection are pragmatic. I want a record that'll damn sure play 10 or 20 years from now. I don't know that about my digital tracks, and I certainly don't know it about my CDs, but I know it about my vinyls.

And as for Sony - the folks who brought us the compact disc in the first place - what are they up to these days?

Well ...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534854280/sony-will-start-making-vinyl-records-again-in-japan-after-nearly-30-year-hiatus

The tables have turned ... at 33 1/3 rpm.

You know how you can hear a song 100 times and not really pay attention, and then on the 101st time it suddenly grabs you? That's this song for me right now. The name of the band (Devek) means glue, and I'm glued to this tune.

I'll try to work up a translation of the lyrics later.