More Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem

This year we had three children changing schools - these periods of transition cause us alot of anxieity, as I imagine they do for any chozer b'tshuva, that is, any one who has come back to Judaism. It's a time when - you imagine - the world which you've entered is judging you. And you wonder whether you're living up to their standards and expectations.

One of my sons had a particularly rough time in his last school - a combination of bad circumstances and mismatched personalities. I spent three years playing defense - trying to maintain the status quo until the next stage. Given the unhappy - but ultimately stable marriage - we decided to find a new place on our own, a yeshiva a bit unconventional and off the beaten track (such is our family).

To my surprise, a few days later, I received a call from my son's Rosh Yeshiva. This was a different voice on the phone - not the bearer of bad news, of imminent catastrophe, of predictions of a dour future. But rather, he was now telling me that my son had chosen the wrong yeshiva (a place, as he described it, for hefker boys - boys on the street): my son, he explained was much 'too stark' - serious and disciplined - for a yeshiva like that.

'Hmmm,' I thought. For the past several years, the Rosh Yeshiva had been hard-pressed to find a single encouraging word to say about him, and now - all of a sudden - he was 'stark?' He went on to recommend three other places - all of which I knew about, and two of which a person who knows my family, my son, and the institutions in question said, 'they are absolutely lo matim' - not suitable.

So how to explain? Though King Solomon says that a child should be educated according to his own path - and that each path is necessarily different and individual, the Rosh Yeshiva - so it seems to me - was more interested in the reputation of his yeshiva than the educational well-being of my son. It's not that all of a sudden my son had transformed in his eyes, but rather, he did not want alumni of his yeshiva going to the unconventional place we had chosen (and which turns out, by the way, not to be as he had described it). But money is tight, choices multiply; pressures abound: the Rosh Yeshiva was simply playing defense.

So the needs of the individual - what the Torah so much emphasizes are sacrificed. Sound familiar?

No one needs to be told of the riots in Jerusalem - brought on by the arrest of a dysfunctional woman, taken into custody by Jerusalem authorities for child abuse, likely for starving her child. So while we always maintain our skepticism about the press and the State - though it seems to me some turn on their skepticism selectively - the fate of the child is ignored, as the right-wing forces in the charedi world use the opportunity to stoke the flames of the culture wars. The parking lot has not worked to get our children into the streets; but perhaps the story of the abused charedi woman (note, the child is not under discussion) will.

Garbage bins have been burned (why burn your own garbage cans?), municipal employees attacked, police wounded. And while all the fires burn, there is not a peep - I keep on waiting - a voice of condemnation from the rational charedi leaders. But nothing. To say that there are no such authorities - as I imagine I hear some of my readers - would be false. I studied with them! and the people with whom they studied! It's their silence which is inexplicable.

Or perhaps they are also - just playing defense. Faced with the culture wars that they have not so much lost but rather mishandled or misunderstood, their defensiveness renders them silent. Or worse. In the library, yesterday, I spoke to a few of the library charedim (such I think of them, and count myself among them), and even they complained that the 'mayor is an idiot,' that 'the press is to blame,' that the municipality was guilty of 'collective punishment.' And on and on... I thought of BBC reports over the past years about Serbia - in which the citizens of a country which has committed the most egregious crimes could only think of the injuries they had suffered: 'we are the victims!'

We are not Serbians (or Palestinians) who also always sing the mantra of 'collective punishment.' We have the book, A Guide for Non-Defensive Jewish Living - it's otherwise known as the Torah; perhaps we might try to start living by it. So this is not the time for recrimination (the flip-side of defensiveness), but rather an opportunity for acknowledgement: the leaders in the charedi world have to speak up. Not only privately - 'my son would never go to such a protest,' a friend related - but in public, so everyone knows. And not only for the sake of our reputation among the eyes of others (that too), but first and foremost for ourselves. Perhaps, if one child saw a poster on the streets of Jerusalem with the name of one of the rabbis whom he holds in esteem, condemning the destruction of property and injury of person, than one less policeman - or one less child! - might be injured.

The charedi stance of claiming to speak only to its own audience -' and you see, our children don't go!' - is not only disengenous, but false. Charedim are happy to use the means of mass communication when it suits them. The embrace of billboards, newspapers and other mass forms of dissemination not only makes the current silence now more thunderous, but, even worse, has had the effect in some parts of the community of undermining one of the mitzvos upon which the Torah is built. Aseh l'cha Rav - make for yourself a Rav - presupposes a personal relationship with a rabbi, or a teacher, or a righteous person. Not a billboard or a newspaper.

In the name of a perverted form of da'as Torah - the right and single and only Torah perspective - the processes of mesora, of creative inheritance, are are thrown by the way side. Here is the irony: modern forms of communication (though certainly, I admit, not the most up to date) are employed by the right-wing fringes in their all-or-nothing fight against modernity. And without a tempered - and public - voice of a Jewish world committed to Torah, the ideological distortion of Torah will prevail. So eliciting that part of us - we are all potential fundamentalists, Freud wrote - which craving only authority, renounces the and freedom upon which mesora is also based.

It's in the culture of billboards and newspapers - where single voices of Torah manufactured by the courtyards - chatzerot - of poster makers and newspaper editors - squelch out any voice of difference of multiplicity. It's in this environment, that charedi boys fill the streets on hot July afternoons - hurling rocks and bottles. And it's in this envirnoment, that school principals - also on the defensive - think more about institutional reputations than the children under their charge.

Steppin' Up

When the people of Israel need a new leader, G-d turns to Moses and says: 'Take Joshua bin Nun.' The word take or קח - kach - does not mean, as we might understand, a physical action. But, as Rashi explains 'a taking' with and through words. There is no forceful recruitment; Moses is to convince Joshua. This is a lesson for spouses, parents and teachers - when we want to effect change we do so not with force, but whatever 'taking' there is to be done is with language. Discourse, not force, but also a discourse - not 'you'd better!' - of rationality.

Sometimes a single world, like 'kach,' in the Torah clues us in on a dramatic situation. With Moses and Joshua, there must have been a conversation. It's easy to imagine that Joshua did not want the leadership thrust upon him - 'I'm sitting and learning well; leave me alone!' So Moses - all of this in the word קח - has to convince his reluctant charge to take on the mantle of leadership.

In the Haftorah from the book of Jeremiah, there is a similar conversation recorded - this time between G-d and the author of the work that bears his name: 'Before you were born, I sanctified you, and chose you to be a prophet to the nations.' To which the prophet-to-be responds: 'Nothing doing G-d; I'm "young," a child. Go find someone else.' And G-d responds in turn, 'don't tell me about your "youth"; it's time to step up.'

Pinchos provides the counter image to Joshua and Jeremiah: he is also youthful. But the generation of the desert has reached a crossroads. Though Bilam was not able to curse Israel, Balak, the leader of the Midianites, has one more strategy: entice them with the women of Midian (including his own daughter!). The way the chassidic Ishbitzer's Mei Ha'Shloach reads the story, Zimri, a prince, is a tzaddik, a righteous person. But he is overwhelmed by desire for the Midianite princess Cuzbi - and loses himself. Notwithstanding his righteousness and his scrupulous attempts to guard himself from temptation, he is overwhelmed and succumbs. Through a magnetic attraction which he mistakes for love, Zimri gives into a desire that overcomes his ability to see and choose. He has a legal status of someone in onus; he is under duress. Or in more contemporary terms - I wonder whether the Ishbitzer would agree - he is subject to psychic energies he cannot master. He thought she was his beschert, writes the Ishbitzer, but in actuality she is activating a lustful desire which he cannot withstand. He hears the soundtrack from Love Story - but there's a different kind of music playing.

In this scenario, as the sages recount it, even Moses is unable to act, as Zimri taunts him: 'you also were involved with a foreign woman; your Tzipporah is also a Midianite, a convert.' And the further barb: 'So spare me your hypocrisy!' When the people of Israel look to their leader for guidance, he is forgetful - he does not know the law! Whatever small pangs of guilt made Moses silent and forgetful with guilt (there must have been something to Zimri's attribution), the people of Israel are left abandoned to tears. Overwhelmed by emotions - a mixture of desire, guilt and fear - the people of Israel are vulnerable to the relentless temptations of the Midianite King.

At that moment, the whole generation is dysfunctional - yet Pinchos sees, and acts. Pinchos steps up.

Though we are not called by G-d, sometimes we have a sense of a mission that calls us - of the need to step up. But like the prophets, we find our reasons to avoid it. And they are always good reasons - or seem so. 'I'm not ready.' 'I'm too young!' Or there are other kinds of avoidance (of these there are is never a shortage): The poet John Milton felt washed up at twenty-three, verging on despair, and giving up. But feeling belated, as Milton did, or too young, are equivalent ways of cheering ourselves up - subconsciously justifying inactivity.

'There must be someone else!' - the youthful prophets protest. To Joshua and Jeremiah, G-d says: 'there are certainly ambitious men who will step into your shoes; but I want you!' We are not prophets, but sometimes the clarity of a vision - for change, for tikkun - may call us. We will likely not be called upon our nation, but maybe by our families, our schools, our workplaces. For we will be privy to a vision which no one else sees, or is dissuaded from seeing, or is simply afraid to see.

So when, those around us are under duress - because of fear or guilt or whatever - we should not give up to the weaker part of ourselves, or ambitious men. We have to step up.

Internet Filters - To Be or Not to Be?

Your child returns from school or yeshiva one night with a surprise: a new computer.

So that's what happened to me: my sixteen year old came back the other night with a new MSI netbook (had he consulted me he would have bought the Asus). Such computers are designed for internet access, but strangely this one didn't pick up the wireless connection from the several routers in my building. (If you think charedim don't use the internet, take a netbook in your car, and drive through a charedi neighborhood, and see how many signals you pick up!). Since sixteen year olds know everything, he didn't acknowledge that he didn't know how to fix it - so we speculated that it must broken. Since the settings were all in Hebrew, I didn't know either.

It suited my purposes - I bided my time. Planned, travelled to, and return from London - 'I'm busy; I'll get to it! I will!' To be sure, upon my return, he wanted it to work. So I finally did the legwork - went to my personal computer guru in the library who did the equivalent of flicking a switch - pressed the fn key together with f9 - and, what do you know?: it wasn't broken after all.

Now many of my charedi friends - I use the term even though I dislike the sociological designation - may be sitting with jaws dropped in disbelief: 'why did you fix it?', or perhaps even more incredulously: 'you didn't take it away from him?!' Other charedim - in different neighborhoods, and probably not my friends - might exclaim more forcefully, as once appeared on the billboards in Jerusalem and B'nei Brak: 'the internet is a cancer!; you let a cancer in the house?'

I didn't think in those terms - though it did pass through my mind that I had the equivalent of a loaded weapon in my hands, and there was my son calling, asking about his computer - 'I need it abba!' 'Now!' So what to do?

So I installed an internet flilter. In the process of doing so, in front of the Arnon Windows at the National library, some of my modern orthodox and secular friends - those horrible designations again - wondered: 'what are you doing?' The same incredulity, but from a different place: 'we live in the world, and your son has to learn how to make choices.' And: 'adulthood is about facing challenges, and yet restraining from those things we know to be wrong.' They might have easily as quoted Milton's Areopagitica:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

So if trial is by what is contrary - give him the computer and let him learn to choose: 'Reason,' as Milton says, 'is but choice.'

Part of me agreed. A therapist friend told me of a clinical situation where a client with an internet addiction advised - 'every time you have thoughts of the internet, have a container of hot sauce handy, and dip into it and stick some in your mouth.' Pavlov for humans!

In another case, the therapist advised the client to make out a check for one thousand shekels to a good, but not great cause - let's say 'save the whales' - and to leave it signed in the therapist's drawer. If the client were to go back to his addiction, the therapist explained, he would dutifully submit the check to the charity. But as it turned out, the client didn't play the game - he just didn't tell the truth: 'Ani lo freier, he is reported to have said; 'I'm not a sucker.' In the continuation of the story, the therapist now clearly playing the role as big brother - the authority figure - sent his expert to put the appropriate filters on the computer. But notwithstanding, the client's desire - on some level, after all he chose to see the therapist - to beat his addiction, he found an equally competent expert, on some other pretext or other, to have the filter removed.

This is certainly not a model of psychic wholeness - where an external authority is battled (and usually outsmarted) by the irrepressible and always resilient powers of desire. Reason is choice. Not the threat of external punishment, or the presence of external controls - which ultimately attest to a psyche at war. So back to Milton: we don't after all take filters into daily life - we have to rely upon our ability to choose.

So why did I go with the filter? Because, though I know my son wants to be on the internet for the right reasons (e-mailing his grandparents, googling the six day war and cars), he may - unwittingly - become immersed in the wrong things. Were that to happen then the ability to choose - something of underestimated difficulty - may never develop. As a fellow blogger put it: 'we are always trying to calibrate external restraints to our child's ability to choose.' So to be sure, the filter - the external restraint - can't be the endgame or goal. But it might create enough space - in the meantime - for a curious and developing young person to learn how to choose as he becomes an adult.

What would you do?

Denzel Washington, Fantasy and Second Chances

So last weekend, while the world was indulging in an orgy of Michael Jackson music videos and mp3s, I was flying back from London and watching part of a mini-film festival featuring Denzel Washington - 'my man!' as he calls Russel Crowe in American Gangster - that a friend had prepared for me. In one of the films - ok, movies - Deja Vu, Denzel works for Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms - and gets to wear one of those cool ATF jackets - as he investigates a deadly terrorist explosion on a New Orleans pleasure-ferry.

In the improbable plot, Denzel joins up with a small group of geeky fellow investigators who equipped with lots of consoles and flat screens - and they claim at first cameras - provide unlimited footage from any vantage place to any place exactly four days and seven hours prior to their present (complicated I know). As it turns out - Denzel figures it out - it's not sophisticated satellite technology and cameras, but a tres cool machine that allows them to see back into the past, as it is happening - and to focus on the beautiful young woman around whom the ferry-interigue revolves. All of this is explained by the very Jewish looking scientist, played by the very Jewish actor Adam Goldberg, who folds a piece of paper in half to demonstrate how time or space - or something - fold into each other, allowing for their high-tech voyeurism. All of this while Goldberg proclaims - just in case the matinee crowd may think all of this metaphysical hocus-pocus might involve some kind of heresy - that he believes in God.

The hoaky premise comes off better than it sounds - though predictably, things go wrong, and Denzel volunteers against Goldberg's protests to go back into the past - in his underwear (such are the limits of the technology) to make things right. Denzel does all this with elegant aplomb: the ferry does not explode into a million pieces; the girl who dropped her raggedy-anne doll into the Missisisippi is not blown to smithereens, and Denzel walks off into the sunset with his dream girl whose autopsy he had attended just days earlier, or, actually, in the weird metaphysics of this film, days later.

So I wondered: what is so resonant about Deja Vu, especially its ending? The Denzel who investigates the disaster that happened - complaining of lost loves and unspecified personal traumas - goes back into the past and averts disaster, and dying in the process, leaves the way for Denzel of the present - the do-over, deja-vu Denzel. This Denzel - unscathed, innocent - and unknowing of the traumatic future that he will not have to live, shows up on the scene to interview the woman who just saw him die and who, as it happens, is already in love with him. Talk about fantasies.

Deja Vu elicits the fantasy of second chances, of this time, getting it right. Christopher Bollas, the psychoanalyst, tells of patients, survivors of trauma and abuse, who cultivate relationships - more often co-dependencies - psychically designed to replicate the relationships that were the source of trauma. For Bollas, sado-masochist relationships are the extreme on this continuum of imagined antidotes to the already experienced trauma. The implicit wish in each of these cases - of finding a way of repeating the relationship that caused all of the pain - is always the same: 'I will do it again; but this time I will survive it.'

This is the fantasy that Denzel elicits and fulfills - this time he survives! What makes the film even more effecting is that the 'do-over' Denzel provides just the slightest hint - even though it's impossible, he's never met the girl with whom he drives off - that he knows he's doing it again. The movie delivers - with the help of Denzel's wry knowing smile - the pleasure of getting to do it over again, and this time getting it right. So the life that had been characterized by loss and trauma, the errors and mistakes that could have been averted, are averted.

Our sages tell us that 'jealousy' is one of the things that takes us 'out of the world.' We acknowledge if we are either pushed or honest (or both) to be jealous of others - but sometimes we live as if we are jealous of ourselves, of the person we might have been if we had only done things differently. If we had gone to a different school, or taken a different job, or moved to a different city, or just said a different - this time the right - thing! When such events tower in our minds as irrevocable catastrophes, the life-changing events which leave us without hope, then we are most susceptible to that jealousy that keep us living in the past, and repeating it in the present - hoping that this time we will survive. Jealous of the person who we might have been - the person who emerges unscathed and smiling - we make ourselves vulnerable to repetition, the stagnation and lamentation over what we were not able to become. This is the jealousy where we remain in fantasy - the fantasy of the 'if only....'

In the movies, trauma is averted, 'deja-vu Denzel' shows up at the site of an averted catastrophe to fall in love again with the woman whom he has already loved and lost. This Denzel avoids trauma and loss. If only. But in real life - not the movies - the challenge, as our sages tell us, is to acknowledge loss, and to move on. Instead of pursuing the repetitions - of which the jealousy of the hypothetical selves we might have been is the symptom - we move into a present, where there's the acknowledgment of missed opportunities, even loss, but also the possibility of creativity and transformation.

In Hollywood, you get second chances; in real life, as our sages tell us, you have to deal.

Of Fundamentalists, Jokes, and Rabbis

Hang around with pulpit rabbis long enough, and you know it's summer time when talk starts about having to work on sermons for the yomim noraim - the high holidays. Having just returned from my visit to London where I stayed with the Belovskis of Golders Green, I knew I would encounter a variation on the theme. So I asked my host, Rabbi Harvey Belovski, 'have you prepared your high holiday jokes yet?' 'The congregants only remember two things,' he quipped to me last summer - 'the length of the t'kia gedola of the shofar on Rosh Hoshana and the rabbi's jokes.' So in late June, he had already begun working on his jokes.

But 'seriously' - as an old comedian might would say - Rav Harvey's sermons are memorable, and the kehilla at Dunstan Road one of the most engaged congregations I've encountered - so what did the Rabbi mean about the importance of preparing jokes? Of course, he was joking.

The ability to joke - a sense of humor - may be just what the leaders of this generation require, and some of them lack. In a book which recounts Freud's last days, Mark Edmundson writes of the model of the leader without a sense of humor - and that is, of course, the fascist dictator. Such a leader sees what he wants and takes it. Monolithic and humorless without doubts, he has no inner conflicts or complexity. Or rather, he may have them, but he represses them, and presents the false image of a unified personality.

For Freud, the foil to the fascist dictator is none other than Moses - the figure who even in Freud's idiosyncratic (and perverse!) rendering of his life and times, emerges as the ideal leader. In Freud's reading, Moses is the 'hero of sublimation' - he achieves his authority not by being 'self-willed and appetitive,' but by 'rechanneling his human impulses and teaching others to do the same.' Moses does not, as our sages tell us, give the Torah to angels whose obedience would be merely robotic - but to man who faces conflict, challenge, and can raise himself to the level of genuine service.

For Freud, such a personality, the ideal leader, is not averse to making a joke, for jokes 'show awareness that there is more than one simple reality to take into account.' Jokes 'testify to there being contending forces at play in the world, contending interpretations of experience.' Genuine leaders are complex because their own appreciation of the complexity of the world is reflected in their psyche. And what characterizes such leaders - often - is that they know how to tell a good joke.

Korach is the dictator of the desert -no laughs from him. He fixates on his singular desires and one truth. He is the model of the one who engages in dispute for his own sake and interest - not for truth or community or G-d. You can tell a culture by the way it conceives of disputes. Agreements are easy; disagreement hard. Hillel and Shammai, in contrast to Korach, engage in disputes which reveals the complexity of the world. They understand that to understand G-d's creation and revelation, one needs to nurture an ability to see things from more than one perspective. As G-d says of the disputes between Hillel and Shammai - 'both these and these are the words of the living G-d.' Both of the perspectives are 'beloved by G-d,' says the Maharal, because they both elicit something true about Torah and the world. Korach inhabits a simple monochrome world; Hillel and Shammai one of difference and complexity.

In the sometimes grinding seriousness and defensivenes of contemporary Jewish life, however, even if we are studying the disputes of Hillel and Shammai and their descendants - who, let's face it, have long known how to tell jokes - we forget that it's complexity that defines the Jewish experience since Sinai. Or, the ability to acknowledge, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, that 'implicit in the expression of every experience, are other kinds of experience which are possible.'

To the extent that we forget that complexity we become more like Korach and those in the past century who have followed in his path - in horrifying ways. We are all, as Freud points out, fundamentalists and fascists - at least potentially. For Freud, jokes and irony - acknowledging complexity and providing a space for creativity and renewed commitment - is the antidote for such a tendency. For us, part of the solution may be finding a rabbi who knows how to tell a good joke.

By the way, did you hear the one about...?

Jerusalem Snapshot: The Unexpected

I had a late evening yesterday - so decided to take a taxi back home.

As the cab pulled to the curb, I felt two ten shekel pieces and one five in my pocket - 'twenty-five shekels?' The driver made a face: 'it's at least 35.' 'Let's do the meter,' I responded. Best way not to be a freier, loosely translated as sucker - go with the meter.

'Anyway,' the cab driver confided, 'I've been riding around for an hour for this fare.' Whatever ambivalence I felt about my failed attempt at a deal abated - 'good I thought, let him at least have a decent start to his day' (the fare, in the end, was 29 NIS).

I never went to a proper ulpan to learn Hebrew - so I have an abiding sense of gratitude to Jerusalem cabdrivers whom I credit with my Hebrew. I learned French - oddly enough - not from the French teacher in Avignon during the summer of 1982 who taught Sartre's Huis Clos, but from the 12 year old girl with Down's Syndrome, of the family with whom I was staying.

So after the initial snarling, the driver turned more cordial: my 'ma shlom'cha' - how are you? - broke the ice. Since I'm travelling to London in a couple of days - and early in the morning - I thought I might ask him to drive me to the airport. The cost is about 225 NIS which is a big fare in a bad economy. His car, a mercedes, was clean and safe - so I was considering it.

We waited on line for the light to turn into my neighborhood - Bayit Vegan. There's a separate traffic light for the straight-ahead traffic, and another for the left-turn lane. We were behind a motorcycle: when the straight-ahead light changed, the motorcyle started forward; though the left-turn signal was still red. Because of the construction for the long-awaited light-rail on Hertzl, it's a long wide turn. My driver turned to me and said with alarm - 'he's passing the light!' He even honked twice; but the motorcyclist did not hear, or did not heed his warning. The motorcycle proceeded slowly, but determinedly along the arc of the turn; I saw the oncoming traffic. The cars coming down from the other side of Hertzl were accelerating. We both looked, watching for the unfolding of the inevitable: the loud crunch of the impact sent the motorcyclist flying into the air - the motorcycle was shattered to pieces. I gasped.

'Ata roeh?' 'You see?,' said my driver. I'm sure he was equally horrified, but he gave the appearence of calm. 'She killed him' - he said of the driver of the Mazda that had smashed into him. A crowd gathered. Miraculously, the man was stirrng. That was my first thought - he's alive.

Then I saw the woman standing by the side of her car. 'We should stop,' I said - 'he ran the light; it; it wasn't her fault!' 'No, it wasn't,' he agreed.' So let's stop,' I said - 'we have to tell the police what we saw.'

I was imagining the horror of the woman who struck the man. She had done nothing wrong, and suddenly out of nowhere, this.

'I have seen dozens of accidents,' my driver said. 'If you call - leave it,' he advised - 'you'll be dragged in for hearing. It's a tircha - a tremendous pain.'

I arrived home, called the police to tell my story. It turns out - my daughters were returning from the Jerusalem forest from the pool about an hour later - and the police were still there. The motorcyclyist had - miraculously - survived the crash, but the consensus was that the woman had run the light - after all, 'look what she had done!'

I called the police again - 'are you writing this down? Will you please tell the women who was driving the car that I saw?' I thought of course of the injured man, but also the loneliness of the woman not knowing, perhaps thinking that it was her fault, the suffering of the burden imposed on her by circumstances she had never considered. And then imagined what her her husband might be saying to her - no matter the strength of her convictions.

I don't know what lesson to learn from this, but I decided - sometimes one has an unexpected insight into the soul of someone, even a stranger - to find a different driver to take me to the airport.

OMT and the New Technologies

Yesterday, a graduate student of mine committed the horrendous (and unforgivable) faux-pas of asking whether I had written my dissertation on a typewriter. I answered: 'yes, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on papyrus; you can see it - with the Magna Carta - at the British Museum.' Truth be told, I wrote my thesis on a portable (so-called) Leading Edge which weighed-in at twenty pounds, and had a memory - someone correct me if I'm wrong - of 20mb.

So I thought this would be an appropriate time to once again announce OMT's presence on twitter, and the latest development, my own facebook page.

Discussions of the virtues of the new technologies are, I've already gathered, symptomatic, of ignorance of their potential.

So I'm all in - hope to see you there!

(I had hoped to have a couple of nice clean facebook and twitter 'buttons' available here; but... I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet.)