What a truly excellent idea. Last week, a group of 31 Israeli authors and poets took over writing the Hebrew daily paper Haaretz, producing sonnets summing up the weather forecast and a reassuring take on the stock market summary. (Weirdly, they weren't given the chance to tackle the sports pages.)
"Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place," wrote author Avri Herling. "Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points … The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg and tomato dish] shop raised his prices again …"
Roni Somek cheered up the weather page with his poem Summer Sonnet ("Summer is the pencil / that is least sharp / in the seasons' pencil case"), while Eshkol Nevo was (perhaps mistakenly) given the TV review, starting his piece "I didn't watch TV yesterday".
A moving, angry article by Adam Resurrected author Yoram Kaniuk saw the 79-year-old visiting a cancer ward (he has cancer himself). "Last week I saw a man whose hand had been amputated lovingly wiping the sweat from his wife's brow, and bringing her water, and she, the poor woman, is dying. A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less," Kaniuk wrote.
AB Yehoshua asked "Why do we insist on a 'Jewish' state?", Etgar Keret interviewed Israel's defence minister Ehud Barak and David Grossman took the front page with a report on the night he spent at a Jerusalem children's drug rehabilitation centre.
"I could not fall asleep during the night I spent at Magal. I was overwhelmed by the troubled life stories. I was moved by the young people I met, by the delicate and tender way in which, for the large part, they treated each other," Grossman wrote. "I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands – stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity – still exist."
The experiment seems to have gone well – editor Dov Alfon tells Forward there were dozens of calls of praise, and that it was "a humility lesson for journalists". "Thirty-one writers decided, what are the real events of the day?" he said. "What is really important in
their eyes? They wrote about it, and our priorities as journalists were suddenly shaken by this."
I'm wondering how much chance we might have of persuading the Guardian to do this - and if so, who we'd want writing the paper for the day. Nick Hornby on sports, maybe, with Lionel Shriver contributing to Wimbledon coverage? Richard Dawkins heading up the science coverage? Thoughts, please!
