Someone at Apple is keeping close tabs on the Tel Aviv music club scene, because now that Yael Naim is too well known to be a novel find the latest iTunes television commercial seems to be playing music by Onili, a female vocalist who force-feeds disco enough wit and intelligence to make it fun (a neat trick). 

My daughters and I like this song.

But I really like HaBanot Nechama, who will be at Radio City Music Hall tomorrow for a big Israel 60 birthday bash. 

The first literary take on the Obama-Wright incident that hit me was that it was an update of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Falstaff relationship, except that while Prince Hal realized he had to cut Falstaff loose if he was to take the top political job of king, Obama did not immediately realize he had to do the same to Wright. But then I had a brainstorm. It was a replay of Philip Roth’s short story, “Defender of the Faith.” Roth’s story shows how ethnic solidarity between two men — in this case, a Jewish army sergeant and a private — is cynically cultivated and nourished by the latter, who softens up the tough sergeant with sentimental appeals to shared Jewish concerns and qualities of heart. Only after repeated betrayals of his trust does the sergeant — slowly, reluctantly, and then ruthlessly — refuse to go on being a patsy for the manipulative and vicious Private Grossbart. 

After suffering another humiliation at the hands of the hard-boiled and hardheaded guys who surround him, one of Saul Bellow’s characters (was it Charlie Citrine of Humboldt’s Gift?) reviews his earnest, comical, muddled attempt to think clearly. It doesn’t go too well. And his witty complaint is that after all his reading and studying, would it be so terrible if he turned a small mental profit?

Ha ha!

The blogosphere is already home to millions trying to leverage their intellectual assets to make a quick insight, so one more blog shouldn’t unduly dilute shareholder value or signal to shortsellers that we’ve reached a market top. That’s a weak defense, but I’m feeling defensive. I can’t help seeing the similarity between blogging and the incessant letter writing that is the hallmark of Moses Herzog’s mental breakdown in Bellow’s Herzog. (Yes, I’ve been marinated, pickled, mithradated — as Bellow put it in a reference to King Mithradates’ steady ingestion of poison to nullify its effects — in Bellow’s novels, stories, essays, plays, interviews, travel pieces, etc. OK, so I may have overdone it. But for years I was like a mirror image of Kafka’s Hunger Artist. He had no appetite for anything, and I had no appetite for anything else. Bellow offered me all my daily essential minerals and vitamins. Now I snack on him between meals.) But, to finish this up, if blogging is like Herzog’s letters then it’s also a kind of do-it-yourself therapy. After enough letters, Herzog recovered. Then he shut up.