Mona Lisa in Jerusalem

And finally, to celebrate Israel at 60, here is a photo of Mona Lisa gracing a shop sign in Jerusalem. It was along the Via Dolorosa, if memory serves me. Date: Spring, 1997.

Ha'aretz Reports on Israeli Independence Day

Yesterday I wrote about my memory of the Israeli Independence Day celebration we attended on the beach in Tel Aviv. The same was happening earlier today, as illustrated by these two photos from Ha'aretz. I wish I could be there:

Sixty Years of Israel

From Ha'aretz: an image to celebrate Israel's 60 years! After an evening of fireworks, they will have a day of family barbecues and national commemorations. We were there for the 50th celebration in 1998. I think there's a lot to celebrate in Israel's history, and I wish I could have been there to see the fireworks and dancing in the streets that were taking place a few hours ago.

In 1997, we went to the beach in Tel Aviv and watched the air force aerobatic troop and the navy trip of various boats along the entire coast. It's such a small country that the planes fly over it in just a few minutes. Here are some of the photos from that celebration:

A Million Years Ago

Like most enjoyable travel books, Linda Grant's The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel at first seems to be a book about one's own experience. Grant does a great job portraying the appeal of Israel and the contradictions embedded in its reality -- as definitely brought home by the photo on the cover, attributed to one of her Israeli friends/informants.

Some first impressions of Israel in her book:

• The way that Israelis react to the catastrophe of a suicide bombing or other such event.
• The surprise -- if you're Jewish-- of finding Jews in every walk of life, and of finding so many types of people.
  
• The way that an Israeli landlord deals with a plumbing emergency (including the existence of a Jewish plumber, see point 2).
• Some funny things about Israeli use of language to express their existential situation and the precariousness of their situation.
  

Indeed, these were some of our first impressions when we lived in Israel in the spring of 1998, our first-ever visit there. Our experience with the plumber who couldn't fix the back-up of bathtub water from the drain on the floor of our apartment flashed through my mind. The late-night phone calls beginning, as Grant points out, "Where are you?" -- really wanting to know that you are not in the place that's just blown up. The expectation that we, too, would call around after hearing any bad news... I was being lulled by delight in a sense of the familiar, through someone else's eyes.

As the book went on, though, it dealt more and more with the political and literary side of Israel, and I found it more surprising and deeply interesting. Grant's stay in Israel lasted four months, beginning in October of 2004, with a return visit -- to interview Gaza settlers about to be displaced -- within the next year.

Here's what really shocks me: I have been following Israeli events and politics ever since our first visit, and the times and events Grant describes seem to me to be a million years ago. Israeli history, in my view has collapsed hundreds of years into just a few, and the last few years are no exception. From beginnings in the 1950s as agricultural producer of oranges and vegetables, through an industrial revolution that lasted only maybe a decade, Israel emerged as a high-tech powerhouse. Grant's descriptions of the 2003-2004 era make me think the same compression of time occurs there politically. Her portrayal of the removal of the Gaza settlers and her individual interviews with them are vivid. Yet the return of land to the Palestinians now seems so much more remote than a few years ago. Its consequences at the time she wrote were so unknowable: as the future always is. But now we do know, and this makes the events she describes seem beyond remote.

Rather than peace, the ceding of this territory brought a horrific war with Lebanon. Rather than see the Israelis as willing to negotiate, their enemies saw the choice of giving up land as weakness. Ironically, in the context of this war, one of the very interesting literary contacts Grant described is with the writer David Grossman. From Grant's (sometime) paper, the Guardian: "As the Lebanon war raged, David Grossman, the celebrated Israeli writer, publicly urged his government to accept a ceasefire. Just days later, his soldier son was killed by one of Hizbollah's final anti-tank missiles." Grant, writing two years earlier:

"David Grossman told me, 'There is not enough reassurance in the galaxy for Israelis.' ... And so we may have to face the nightmare that the war between the two peoples cannot be concluded; there is no deal that can ever be signed that will not give way, almost at once, to the resumption of the struggle. No US administration, however even-handed, can resolve or even impose a deal over land that can neither be shared nor divided. As long as the Israelis want a Jewish country, and as long as the Palestinians want the right of return, there can be no agreement. And there is no sign whatsoever of any movement of any significance in Israel against the idea of a Jewish country." (p. 198)

Grant makes readers grasp the impasse over how to divide a contested and very small area between two sets of demands from two peoples. Today, the quest for justice and fairness that seems so unreachable seems unchanged. Her many anecdotes about the Israelis and Palestinians she met brought the conflict to life. The future is as unknowable as ever, no matter how much one tries to grasp the present.

Gardens

Yes, she has a graphic

I googled and found an image of the troubled Mona Lisa that shows a grapic. Also, from CNN I learned that the Mona Lisa is "a luxury cruise liner that went into service in 1966."

UPDATE: this is evidently a really badly run ship. In 2004 the New York Times reported on the problems with tourists in Venice. Paolo Costa, Mayor of Venice, has a "nightmare vision ... that one of the many ocean liners that sail through Venice every year will eventually go prow-first onto St. Mark's Square. Earlier this month, that nearly happened when a 655-foot-long cruise ship named the Mona Lisa beached in the fog in a muddy channel off the square." (See Venice Journal; To Venetians' Sorrow, the Sightseers Come in Battalions)

Mona Lisa SOS

From the BBC: A German-owned cruise ship named the Mona Lisa, en route from the Polish port of Gdansk to the Latvian capital Riga, hit a sandbank. Its passengers are being evacuated. I can't see from this photo that it has any graphics of its namesake. Hat tip to my friend Sheila.

Enigmatic searches

From April, 2005 -- Mona Lisa search engine?

Jocondomedley

Yes, more Mona Lisa twists today. I think the coloring page is the worst one I've ever seen.

The Unity of a Single Face: NOT

A really bad idea is sometimes too tempting to be rejected. Years ago, in the early days of computer morphing, someone in a Scientific American article claimed to prove that Mona Lisa was a self-portrait by morphing it together with a well-known picture of an old man.

Now we know that a morpher can put any two faces together with computer tricks. But even then we knew that the old man's portrait had been discovered in the 19th century, and only wishful thinking had attributed it to Leonardo, much less as a self portrait. Well, that's an earlier story of self-deception about Mona Lisa and all the legends about the painting. All of which make life interesting.

Wild Flowers and Garden Flowers, April

Mona Lisa in Paris

Pictures taken during my years and years of Jocondological research.

In the Garden (Blooming Very Late)

Are Postcards Endangered?

A recent article in the Guardian -- In our age of privacy the postcard is an endangered, subversive species -- begins with the following paragraph:

"I was sad to hear this week that a campaign had been launched to save the postcard, because I love sending and getting postcards, and campaigns to save dying social institutions tend to be launched when the institutions are all but dead to the herd already. Announcing a 'campaign to save the...' acts like an invisible tag, announcing to society at large that the Great British whatever-it-is is crippled, stale, beginning to stink, and that the rest of us had best keep clear if we want to avoid being tainted with the pheromones of lameness."

I love postcards. One aspect of my postcard love is in my collection of Mona Lisa postcards. Here are two photos of me shopping for Mona Lisa postcards. The first photo is in Paris, the second in Vinci, Italy, native town of Leonardo:



My mother collected postcards. She taught us that whenever we traveled, we should send cards to friends and relatives, and she also instructed her relatives to send postcards to whatever children in the family were currently maintaining collections. For years, I sent cards from every vacation, and in all kinds of resorts, exciting cities, and tiny villages, I eagerly sought out the "tourniquets" -- yes, in French there's a word for those rotating postcard holders in tourist locations.

My sister and I still sort of maintain that tradition, but we are flagging. After all, with blogging and email available from all kinds of foreign locations and with the incredible slowness of postcard arrival, web communication lets me share the experience of my travel in real time, while postcards often arrive weeks after the trip is long finished.

The article about the coming demise of the postcard concludes:

"Getting one is so rare now that you never quite know what the reaction of the recipient will be. Irritation, perhaps, at the implied rebuke to their own lack of manual correspondence; a sense of weariness at the prospect of being dragged into a mutual obligation to exchange holiday postcards for at least a year; or irrepressible excitement, and an urge to reply immediately to the sender with the news that the postcard has arrived. By email, naturally."

Amen.

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