Skip to main content

An Israeli [and lizard] in Bali

Etgar Keret was one of the most prominent guest speakers at the recent Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. His attendance was made even more special as Israel and Indonesia don't have diplomatic relations - and one of his sessions saw him in discussion with Palestinian writer Suad Amiry: see previous post here on MPS.

Back in Israel, Keret writes about his time in Ubud in the on-line journal The Tablet:

"The Swiss guy with the funny hat sitting next to me on the balcony of the Indus restaurant is sweating like crazy. I can’t blame him. I’m sweating quite a bit too, and I’m supposed to be used to temperatures like this. But Bali isn’t Tel Aviv. The air here is so damp that you can actually drink it. The Swiss guy tells me that he’s between jobs now, which gives him time to travel. Not too long ago, he managed a resort hotel in the New Caledonian Islands, but he was fired. It’s a long story, he says, but he’ll be glad to tell it to me. The Turkish writer he’s been trying to hit on all night told him that she was going to the bathroom about an hour ago and still hasn’t come back. He’s already had so much to drink, he says, that if he tries to get up he’ll probably roll down the stairs, so he’s better off sitting where he is, ordering another frozen vodka, and telling me his story."

Continue reading here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more