Remembering 9/11
Every year, to commemorate 9/11, I take my Portraits 9/11/01 off the shelf and open it at random to read some of the obituaries the New York Times collected so admirably of those who died on 9/11. Monuments are great markers of tragedy, but only obituaries provide a glimpse of the lives that were lost. As always, I am struck [...]
The Postcard Tradition
I haven’t been around because I’ve been chilling, and before I was chilling, I was traveling—days crammed with stuffing suitcases, riding taxes and buses, making it to the airport on time, threading my way through crowded duty free shops, spending hours on four square feet of airplane seat space, gazing out windows of buses, taxis, cafés and marveling at the world outside. First [...]
On Learning a New Language
Learning a new language means frantically running around in my mind snatching at the coat tails of words I might now, hoping to catch a consonant-vowel combination that hopefully means what I am trying to say and then trying to spit it out in a halfway intelligible way, while my conversation partner is patiently waiting for my hmms to turn [...]
Shuk Mahane Yehuda, Jerusalem
Any market is a feast for the eyes, and a shuk (= Middle Eastern market, pronounced "shook") is especially so. It is also a photographer's paradise. All those colors, shapes, forms and people! All that character! My son and I spent an evening strolling through Jerusalem's Shuk Mahane Yehuda, and I hope my photos will give you a little taste [...]
Jerusalem Street Library
While walking to my Ulpan (Hebrew school) in Jerusalem this morning, I passed by this street library set up in an old bus station. Of course I was immediately charmed and would have loved to stop and browse but, alas, I had to be on time for my lesson. Still, I snapped this picture and maybe, if I manage to [...]
Rejection vs. Failure
"You do your best work after your biggest disasters." Tim Robbins, as quoted in The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp I'm not sure that not finding a publisher nor an agent for my memoir manuscript constitutes my biggest disaster, but in terms of my writing it does. There's no creative project into which I [...]