Newsflash: Winning the Amichai prize

Sometime in 2008 my friend Pavel from Ashan Hazman (Note, link in Hebrew, it's a really cool bookshop + Pub + Bar + Rock concert place in Beer Sheva), told me that the poet Mois Benarroch was trying for years to publish a poetry book, but no publisher wanted to take it.

I said I'd be glad to do it. I like the guy's poetry, and I thought that it was turned down by other publishers for spurious reasons.

Like anything else in publishing, it took a longer time than we thought, and it ended up costing more money (though compared to the two books I published just before that, it was relatively cheap).

We ended up publishing it in late 2010, the cover designed by yours truly (I did not do the painting, and I think the cover design is pretty awful...)

We never sold too many copies, but never mind, the guy deserved to be published.

Then earlier this week it was announced officially that the book won the Yehuda Amichai prize for poetry in 2012. I was ecstatic. this one will go down in history. Though I have to wander if that also means it's going to sell better...

PS. just to show you that this did not go to my head, I promise to go back to windows 95 games next week. (Al, sorry for the delay, I hope you understand...)

Windows 95

In September 1995 I moved back to Haifa after my BA studies at the Hebrew university. At the time I also split with my girlfriend after we have been together for something like seven years on and off. This meant that I had way too much time on my hands, which is always a dangerous thing.

So one of the things I did with my time was get a computer. It was really expansive compared to today's computers, and (something like 2000$), but it was also really powerful. I was a Pentium 90 MHz!

At first I only had windows 3.1 (my alert readers know how I had it...), but then pretty soon I 'obtained' windows 95.

What wonderful software did I run on it?

For that, dear readers, you will have to wait until the next week.

Word for Windows

When I told you about doing the booklets for Noam, I was not telling the whole truth. The whole truth is that we had to print out all of the booklets on a windows computer before we could do the graphic design in Kibbutz Hannaton.

So we had everything in Word for windows 2.0 the Hebrew version (back in the day they had to make a Hebrew version for every word processor, apparently now they don't, at least not for Microsoft word...)

It was a terrible piece of software. It got stuck even on very small files, and our files were not so small (though we did split every booklet to at least four files, which meant we had something like 24 files to print). for some reason, even though the files were only something like 20 pages each, it would not print more than about five at a time...

We did it all on Friday, and just finished in time for Shabbat...

That was 1994.

As these things go, we had to do a complete rewrite of the booklets by 1995, and print them out again. This time it was really easy. Everyone (the writers, the designers, me, the printers...) had Hebrew Word for Windows 5.0 (I'm not saying they were all legal copies...)

But we had no problems at all. We could do nifty graphic design (Columns, pictures...) and we could print 20 page files no problem.

That's when we finally switched to Windows, and didn't have to go to Kibbutz Hannaton to print...

Windows 3.1

Back in 1993, Israel has started the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, and me and my girlfriend moved to a new apartment. These were heady exciting days...

1993 was second year university (the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) for both of us, and during the first year we both lived in the dorms, she with a friend (female), and me with five roommates (all male). This was also fun, but second year we wanted to really try being a couple. 

I hope I won't sound really weird by saying that one of the advantages was that we had her computer. I can only justify this by saying we needed a computer for our studies (me sort of, she really), and that we both worked on it for our jobs (informal Jewish education, we sort of worked together).

Anyway, in the 1990s Israel was known as the one diskette country. That meant the Microsoft for example sold one copy of each piece of software. I just 'obtained' a copy of Microsoft windows 3.1 (from the office we worked in...) and installed it on our (hers really) computer.

What can I say. It was a good operating system. You can see for yourselves in the picture above...