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This is my new blog post. Bubbale is no longer with us, which is very sad. I miss the little guy terribly.
I've applied to multiple Comparative Literature and other Interdisciplinary Programs, and managed to get into none of the ones in the States. Hebrew U will get back to me in a month. I'm working on applying for Israeli citizenship just in case. I feel like I'm not doing much useful in New York right now and could really use a change of pace, especially a program that will train me in Arabic and bring my Hebrew hopefully up to Native level (I can go on and on in Hebrew, but still need more vocabulary!). Also I've become so interested in the recent (by historical standards) history of the Middle East, specifically Jerusalem and surrounding area, and where better to study all this than in the city itself (coincidentally I put together a poetry collection under the name "The City Itself" about Jerusalem and entered it in a contest.)... Also Hebrew U seems to have a creative writing program in English as of late which sounds fantastic... I hope i get in. It was just over ten years ago that Hebrew U gave me a scholarship for a summer course and introduced me to Jerusalem for the first time. Of course by the end of the summer I was in love with the city and knew that I must come back on every possible occasion...
I've been busy with work - Israel Trip logistics are finally done. Then there was the Shabbaton (we had dinner, lunch & speakers for two days for 400 some people). Lots of activity at work. I'm just now catching up on everything else.
Bonnie had her annual check up and was judged to be in good health. Bubba seems to be well too. I need to change the cardboard on the floor in the rabbit area soon, but everything else is clean and in good supply.
I attended and taught a class on gender and Jewishness at the NUJLS conference. I've been writing dramatic criticism & ushering & reading scripts. I was in a Valentine's Day performance at a Jewish Senior center with Times Square Playwrights & am also having TSP do weekly readings of my new play. The new play is ostensibly about the time I visited Gaza City as a tourist, but has already veered away from the non-fiction piece I was intending and become something not entirely, but at least somewhat different. "That's the news, you want the weather? Sit anywhere but the first three rows." (As they say in "Splash!"
A picture of me on the Auckland harbor. I went to New Zealand for my cousin's wedding & saw relatives. Then I traveled all over the South Island, to exotic locales such as Picton, Christchurch, Timaru, Dunedin and Invercargill. I'm half New Zealander on my dad's side, but hadn't been there for some fifteen years. It was great to be back. I got to look around the cities and walk a lot. I went shopping and got Maori jewelry for everyone. I got to do bone carving and make my own pendant out of bone. I saw a Maori cultural performance at the Auckland Museum. I spent Sukkot at the Christchurch Hebrew Congregation (such an incongruous name!). I went to the Cadbury factory in Dunedin. Unfortunately the picture of me next to the giant bunny didn't turn out! I spent Yom Kippur asleep because I had terrible jet lag after a million hours of subways and busses and flights and airports from Brooklyn to Auckland and then to Havelock North (near Hastings) where the cousins live.
I just found a website in French that explains the geneology of the Lys side of the family, who were apparently from France, but Protestant, and faced persecution from the Catholic majority, so they immigrated to England, and have since ended up in New Zealand and other places. My wandering family! My grandfather was born in India, where his father was the Anglican minister for the British population in or near Calcutta (i.e. they were not missionaries, but clergy for the British). After he served in the first World War, my grandfather, known as Max, took advantage of a British government opportunity to settle in New Zealand, where he became a sheep farmer. My dad likes to remind us that he was born on a farm.
Yesterday I finally made it to a meeting of the Armenian/Greek/Assyrian folkdance meetup group. I danced for three hours. It was great. I could recognize a lot of the steps from all my years of Israeli folkdance. There were steps like the depka, a Lebanese step, which probably was the basis of the debka step in Israeli folkdance. An oud player came at the end and we looked at a laptop file of a filmed music performance from the 80s with some amazing Middle Eastern / Armenian music. I really want to learn to play the oud (a many stringed Arabic / Turkish guitar type instrument). I saw someone in the film playing a G Clarinet, which made Middle Eastern music sort of sounds that I would never have associated with a Clarinet. Fascinating stuff. (I think I really overuse the word fascinating. Must find a better word or more variety of words).
The Israel Trip that the Synagogue is planning is driving me insane. Multiply a million details by 250 people or 60 families and you get a state of total chaos. I think I could be an events planner after this and find it relaxing! I've started making myself an ongoing to do list just so I can remember everything that needs to be done. I make myself take lunch breaks and get out of the building and I make myself go home on time.
Yesterday I walked from Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge to Canal Street because the trains were not running from Brooklyn and I was trying to get to work. When I woke up yesterday it was sunny & really hot, and when I went to sleep at two a.m the night before it was just sprinkling, so I don't know how the subways managed to get flooded in the few hours I was asleep, but they did.
Other than walking for an hour to the next borough, I've been working at the Synagogue (mainly on an upcoming trip to Israel), volunteering to read scripts for a theater (I've read almost ten in the past few weeks), and submitting my play to the Yale Drama Series. I also started a writer's group to keep me motivated with my writing. I've been ushering for theaters, as a way of getting involved and seeing shows for free. And I ended up leading a synagogue tour to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. (My boss' flight back from Israel was postponed due to a workers' strike, or a threatened strike, in any case).
I just saw the new film "Becoming Jane" which I really enjoyed, and I read and saw the new "Harry Potter" book and film, which I also enjoyed. Now I'll have to write up a review or critical theory about all of them. I've been reading & watching all the books & films from the synagogue library, too - it has an extensive collection. I loved Dara Horn's second novel. I met her once at a Yiddish conference and didn't realize who she was until later. She was scheduled to talk at the Hadassah convention, but I happened to be scheduled for a thousand other things during that time slot. Yesterday I finished reading the novel that Amos Gitai's film "Alila" was based on - "Returning Lost Loves" by Yehoshua Kenaz. I feel like I should read it in Hebrew now.
Here is my latest update.
I have had a crazy couple of months - I lost confidence in the program I was in and took leave of absence. Then I was going to start a similar program in archiving through the library school at Queens College (City University of New York), but there was a delay with my transcript from Vista & Laney College, and CUNY has some administrative issues (or else they're just slow), so that didn't really work out.
I finally got accepted to the library school for the fall, and was going to take a summer class, but then they didn't have any financial aid for me. I think I'm already not so impressed with CUNY. I'm also planning to tell NYU that I'm not coming back.
In the semester I had off, I've been working full time as an Education Assistant (I help the Education Director) at a major Synagogue on the Upper East Side (Park Avenue Synagogue), which I'm enjoying. One of my friends sort of got me the job, and I share an office with her, which is really fun (Dina Mann is awesome!!!).
I also joined a writing group and wrote a full length play (typically for me, it's about audience / reception theory and includes an entire Yiddish wedding). I've been sending it out to different theaters, mostly in California and New York, to see if anyone is interested in staging it.
I was thinking about applying to Playwriting MFA programs, but when I was looking into those, I found this program in the Yale Drama Department that sounds amazing. It's a MFA & Doctor of Fine Arts in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism. They train you to work as the Artistic or Literary Director for a theater, or to be a Drama Critic for a newspaper or magazine, or to be a Professor of Drama (or related fields).
I'm really hoping I can get in, maybe for the next academic year (Fall a year from now). It just sounds fun and I like the idea of having a Fine Arts doctorate. I think it might be useful if I ever teach Jewish Studies on the university level, because I think that sort of field, which used to be Literature and History only, is starting to open up and recruit people from other areas of the humanities.
Anyway, that's my academic goal for the moment. I'm still living in the same place in Brooklyn, with the bunnies. Or at least one of the bunnies I brought from Berkeley, Bubba. He has a new spouse, Bonnie, who looks a lot like his first spouse, Bella, only in miniature.
The people I adopted Bonnie from (they rescue abandoned or endangered rabbits) came by two weeks ago and installed an air conditioner for us so the bunnies wouldn't get too hot over the summer. It was fantastic! - one of them gave us an air conditioner that she doesn't use.
My roommate says the bunnies are better hooked up than we are. My roommates both moved out last month - one got married & the other went back to Berkeley to be closer to her family. I have two new roommates. They're both really laid back, we all get along and hang out a lot. One is getting a teaching credential, the other works at a non-profit. My other roommates moved out before the lease ended, so they found the new roommates. It worked out really well, and we've just signed a new lease together.
I love the apartment, with its decorative ceilings and polished wood floors. The land lady refurbished it right before I moved in two years ago. It's also really airy and has a lot of space for a brownstone type of building - we each have our own rooms and two fairly large common areas and the kitchen. The location is great too, right near Prospect Park and subway stops.
My cousin from New Zealand is getting married in New Zealand in September, so I might be in Berkeley for a few days some time around then. If you're around, I would love to see you if you live around there.
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LynleyShimat L.
Moving Image Archivist
718-916-8015
lynley.shimat@gmail.com
http://lynleyshimat.weebly.com/
I had a few days off this week for the Jewish Holiday of Shavuot & for Memorial Day, so I spent one of them taking a trip to Yale. It was so cute! I've never been there before, and it struck me as looking like a miniature version of Oxford & Cambridge - lots of little castle type buildings, and the Art History building has a bridge over the street that looks a little like the Bridge of Sighs. It's a fairly small campus, and it looks like the town has grown a bit around it - all sorts of little healthy restaurants, very California like.
I went to talk to the Drama Department to get information about their M.F.A. and D.F.A in Dramaturgy - kind of a one stop shop for Drama critics, theater managers, theater researchers, and artistic directors for theaters. The Drama Department has several buildings, so it took me a few tries to locate the right office, but everyone was very friendly and I got a fairly detailed description of the program from the program administrator. I may think about applying (not sure I want to leave New York though!).
My other main reason for being there was that in 1998 the Yale Libraries Rare Books Collection acquired the papers of Polish Dramatist (Author, Theorist, Playwright, etc) Witold Gombrowicz, who I studied intensively at Berkeley. I went to the Beinecke Library, where the collections are housed - terribly ugly building from the outside, but has a really interesting internal structure which shows the book shelves (open only to the librarians & archivists) in a glass column right in the center of the building. The Gombrowicz collection was fairly sizeable - apparently his wife, who was very young when they were married, has done a thorough job of collecting materials and information about him, which the library bought in 1998 and had donated in a second section several years later.
I was able to listen to sound recordings of him speaking as part of a French radio broadcast series about his work several years ago. I just think it is so fantastic to be able to hear the voice of my favorite author who died several years before I was born. I'm not sure what I expected him to sound like, but even though he didn't sound quite like I expected, I could still tell right away it was him the minute I heard it.
It was on a cd (the original tapes are kept in the archive), and there were no markings other than on the case, so I had to listen for a while to the program (in French!) to figure out what was going on. It was also odd to hear him speak French, when I'm so used to reading him in English translation or thinking of his work being in Polish. He did actually speak Polish, French, Spanish and various other things out of necessity, I suppose. I also got to watch segments from several Polish television adaptations of his works, which have never been released in the United States. At some point I would like to go back to the archive, as it has so much material. I spent four hours there yesterday and was only getting started!
It was really a nice day as well - sunny and warm out, and very pleasant to walk around the campus. It looked as though graduations were taking place - all sorts of chairs set up in the common grassy areas near the dormitories (which look like something out of Harry Potter stories!) and UPS stations set up all over the place for students to mail their belongings home (apparently they kick everyone out for the summer quite promptly!).
One of the New York City transit lines (MTA Metro-North) runs to New Haven, so it was not very expensive and a fairly quick trip from New York (2 hours or so). I had a very pleasant time taking a trip there for the day. I ended up walking from the Union station (the railway/bus depot) to the campus, which was not very far away. I had heard before that there were some dangerous or run down areas of New Haven, but I didn't see any. Maybe they've cleaned it up recently.
Hope you're all doing well. Just wanted to share my trip with you.
Love, me
"Pay attention to the difference between the two words: shalom, shalom." - Dan Pagis, "A Lesson In Hebrew Grammar."
"I saw a shadow touch a shadow's hand." - Simon & Garfunkel, "Bleeker Street"
"We have long ago forgotten in our literature such shocking events ... as Witold Gombrowicz's novel FERDYDURKE. What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent, a new and revolutionary form and method of novel and finally a fundamental discovery, an annexation of a new field of spiritual phenomena, a masterless and no man's field, where only an irresponsible joke, a pun and a nonsense play around", wrote Bruno Schulz in his review of the book.
Just then Lynley realized that with all this space, she really had nothing to say. Bubba, on the other hand, was resting from his earlier exertions with moving his house around and planning new adventures.
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