oligopistos

Speaking Truth to Stupidity

I've just read that more than a hundred expatriate Iranian intellectuals have published an open letter in the New York Review of Books condemning last month's conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran. They join a growing number of critics who are speaking out against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's latest contemptible effort to inflame the region.

Happy New Year

I'm back in Jerusalem, having spent a couple weeks in Germany with Michi.  It was a very fun trip.  Lots of good food and good conversation only slightly hampered by my abominable German.  We spent Christmas in Wiernsheim, her parents village in Baden-Württemberg, in the south of Germany.  The landscape was very pretty; the area is on the edge of the Black Forest and, had we been able to drag ourselves out of bed before 11am, we'd have gone for a trip there.

Despite our sloth, we did a lot of fun stuff.  We saw Don Giovanni in Stuttgart, a really excellent performance that left me missing the Lyric Opera in Chicago.  And we took an afternoon to visit the monastery at Maulbronn. 

Santa was good to me: Michi and her parents gave me a very cool Freitag messenger bag.  Funnily enough, she got a matching handbag from me.

For New Years, we travelled by train up the Rhine, visited her grandmother in Essen and then caught a train to Hanover.  We celebrated with Andrea, a friend of Michi's from college, her friend Enno and her roommate Steffi.  It was good to see Andrea again, especially since she'd been in Jerusalem for New Years last year, when Michi and I met.  We drank a lot and dodged fireworks and generally enjoyed ourselves.

On the way back to catch a flight in Frankfurt, we were able to stop off in Düsseldorf to catch a Francis Bacon exhibition.  Having been obsessed with Bacon from childhood, it was a real treat to see so many of his paintings in one place.  A couple were on loan from museums in Chicago, so I was even able to see some familiar works put in the context of Bacon's entire oeuvre.

The whole trip was very relaxing and I'm back in Jerusalem only slightly hampered by the head cold which is the price for our Hanover debauchery and the crap atmosphere on Alitalia.