4 May 2007 (16 Iyar 5767)
After I stopped reading novels in my mid-thirties, movies have become the source of experiencing the lives of other people in various cultures in different times. I allow myself to watch one movie every week, mostly on Thursday evening, when I can relax as I do not have to work on the following day and it is not Sabbath yet.
Although I do read reviews by critics, whom I consider parasites in essense who live on the original works by others, in order to see the plots, I do not care about what they have to say, as their reviews are written mostly from the viewpoint of "art, which interests me like last year's snow. Nor do I care about whether the movies I am going to watch received any awards. Actually, some of the worst movies I watched in recent years are those which won Academy Awards.
The only criterion I have in classifying movies as good subjectively is whether I can enjoy watching them and feel like watching them again. By "enjoy watching them" I mean whether I can empathize with the main character(s). I can say the same thing about novels I liked. In order to empathize with them, the depiction must be realistic. For this reason I have never liked those movies (and novels) about some fantasy world (e.g., The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter etc.) though they seem to be very popular. Nor can I appreciate those with "deeper" allegorical meanings (e.g., some works by Akira Kurosawa, Piero Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, etc.), though they are highly acclaimed by "connoisseurs".
I have to, however, make one exception to my preference for realistic movies depicting the lives of ordinary people. As a person whose innate language is cynicism I adore those movies with cynical sense of humor, even though they may not be realistic. For example, I have been a big fan of, e.g, Marx Brothers (especially Groucho Marx), Woody Allen, and recently Sacha Baron Cohen, all of whom "happen" to be Jewish.
11 May 2007 (23 Iyar 5767)
One of the most pleasant surprises I (re)experienced during my three-week stay in Japan this February is that I saw no one honking his or her horn at other drivers. On the other hand, I see so many people here in Israel honking at other drivers impatiently if the latter do not move off the moment the traffic lights turn green. This is a sufficient reason for me not to drive in this country; I often become so impatient with this barbaric behavior of impatient drivers that I feel like grabbing them by the hand to stop them from honking noisily.
The noise of their horns is of course annoying, but what bothers me more is their egocentricity. I have never driven a car, but I imagine that not every one can move off immediately. Why can't they be more considerate? I have met so many considerate and hospitable people here, but some of them seem to be transformed into barbarians who only follow their egocentric instinct once they find themselves at the steering wheel.
I also wonder what use they make of the few seconds they save by honking at other drivers and urging or forcing them to move off immediately. I fear that the time saved this way might be wasted by themselves or by others in hospital. I would not be surprised to read a report that this annoying custom contributes to the increase of traffic accidents. Those who cannot help honking all the time are constantly impatient, and those who are warned by them become no less impatient.
Bad customs die hard, especially once they become so rampant. It also infects victims, who in turn start doing harm to other innocent people, as someone who was a victim of domestic violence makes new victims. Other egocentric customs that annoy me here include mobile phone conversations in public and littering on the street. Unfortunately, I am very pessimistic about the possibility of eradicating them only through our bona fide efforts.
18 May 2007 (1 Sivan 5767)
When I was still teaching at Japanese universities, I used to ask my students every year whether they read newspapers and/or listened to news broadcasts on TV or on the radio every day. I remember being surprised to find every time anew that few of them did and bothered by their apathy toward politics.
One of the strongest memories I have from the boyhood I sent at my parents' is a daily quarrel I and my sister had with my father over which TV program to watch. Back then TV sets were still quite expensive in Japan, and each family had only one set. Unlike today's fathers in Japan, he was very dictatorial for better or for worse. There was one kind of TV programs that were holy for him: news programs at seven in the morning, twelve noon and seven in the evening. He never allowed us to watch other programs during these hours. In retrospect, I have to thank him for this discipline, as I have come to take an interest in current issues. Strangely, he never talked about politics with us children in spite of his addiction to news, and I remember being surprised to find that we shared the same political views nonetheless when we started to discuss on politics several years ago for the first time. Now I check about ten news websites regularly, including Ha'aretz, Jerusalem Post, Sankei, Iza, Yomiuri, Akita Sakigake, Kobe, Japan Times, CNN International, BBC News International, and International Herald Tribune, and listen to some online news broadcasts mainly in Hebrew, Japanese and English from time to time.
Today's learners of foreign languages are in a very enviable position compared to what I had when I learned, for example, English and Hebrew, as they can read many newspapers and newsmagazines and listen to news broadcasts online in various languages for free. When I studied English and Hebrew, I still had to pay money for this. One of the things I did for improving my proficiency in these languages was to immerse myself in them by reading and listening to them massively without consulting dictionaries so often. The most suitable materials I could think of were naturally newspapers, newsmagazines and news broadcasts.
When I started to subscribe to Newsweek at the eleventh grade (later I switched to Time) and listen to some famous American news station on the radio, I could understand less than ten percent, but I forced myself to continue to read the magazine and listen to the station as much as possible, as I was and still am convinced that massive reading and listening are among the best ways of improving our passive knowledge of languages we are studying, which in turn will also lay a solid foundation for developing our active knowledge of these languages. Of course, their interesting contents dealing with current topics helped me persevere in this self-imposed Sisyphean labor.
Things were much more difficult with Hebrew. Unlike English, for which there are easily available newspapers and newsmagazines at an affordable price, one could not and cannot expect to find them in Hebrew in Japan. A few years after I began to learn Hebrew, I started to subscribe to the weekly edition of Ha'aretz. It was a hard nut to crack both in quantity (a sheer number of pages) and in quality (sophisticated language), especially because I taught myself the language. I do not think I could read read more than ten percent of the material every week and understand more than ten percent of what was written. But the very fact that I received the newspaper every week from Israel helped me keep up my morale. With broadcasts I was less successful, simply because the short waves of the programs of Voice of Israel were too weak to reach Japan.
When I look back and compare those times with my present situation, I cannot help wondering at the fact that I can read, e.g., Time and Ha'aretz comfortably. In a sense I was lucky in that we did not have online newspapers and broadcasts back then, as I could concentrate in a small number of good things. Now netizens in general and learners of foreign languages in particular have too many choices, which may also be liable to make them less thirsty for information and knowledge. Paradoxically, it is probably for this reason that learners' proficiency in languages is not necessarily higher now than in the pre-Internet era.
25 May 2007 (8 Sivan 5767)
Soon after I started living in Jerusalem this time in August 2004, a special symbiotic relationship grew up between me and someone here whom I had known for years but not so well. It was symbiotic in that we confided to each other almost every day, often hours on end, about what happened in our respective daily lives and what we thought and felt about it, often asking for each other's advice. It was not until this relationship was severed last summer mostly due to my stupidity that I realized how precious this daily confiding had been to me (and hopefully to the other side) not only for the intellectual pleasure and merit I found in it but in helping keep my (or probably our) mental health.
Since then, I was unable to find any similar relationship with anyone else, until this old relationship was renewed this week thanks to the initiative of the other side, though not on the same basis as before. I cannot explain psychologically why I and probably many others feel relieved by confiding to people close to us, even when they do nothing but listen to us, but the fact remains that I do feel so. Not everything I confide is joyful or bothering in particular, and in many occasions I simply tell banalities in my daily life, but I still feel the same effect of psychic healing by doing so.
I may be wrong, but the Catholic sacrament of Penance and psychoanalysis seem to be religiously and clinically institutionalized forms respectively, at least partially, of confiding to spouses, other family members or close friends privately, though the followers of these tenets may not admit that this is a covert aim certain people aspire to achieve unconsciously or even instinctively.