tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51236731752060965262024-02-07T16:08:21.487-05:00Matthue Roth, author of My First Kafka, Never Mind the Goldbergs, and a bunch of other booksMatthue Roth writes for Google, Sesame Street, Hevria and other places. He tells stories about Hasidic Jewish punk rock kids and people who turn into giant bugs.matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.comBlogger511125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-49636421496213462482023-03-14T13:17:00.000-04:002023-09-14T13:17:16.540-04:00The Giraffe who was Made of Cheese<p>I illustrated a chapter in <a href="http://effieross.com"><i>The Rolling Eating Face and Other Stories</i></a>, a new picture book by Effie Ross. I'm really honored to have been asked, and also really pleased with the way my pictures turned out. The story itself is sublimely weird, really superbly told and that sort of explosive & expansive creativity that only happens in the desperation of bedtime, and it was a thrill to do something to nonverbally evoke that mayhem.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiyfPd1yhFYP8f75x5sRpmRQSKLnpFd8fJQ30xurUOmCrDJVBVax-ZwSq_-hNCICZvjFsBc2j2S1R_h0bB3J8PTEObFZJ--ziSpEOkGOds30z2vNEmQlNrbuzhGIA-TQx1c6maB9W75tJcctTSzvwt4b8mHlymUgYJid14NDuE_94LWYjNVIoBORWxT" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1380" data-original-width="1054" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiyfPd1yhFYP8f75x5sRpmRQSKLnpFd8fJQ30xurUOmCrDJVBVax-ZwSq_-hNCICZvjFsBc2j2S1R_h0bB3J8PTEObFZJ--ziSpEOkGOds30z2vNEmQlNrbuzhGIA-TQx1c6maB9W75tJcctTSzvwt4b8mHlymUgYJid14NDuE_94LWYjNVIoBORWxT=w305-h400" width="305" /></a></div><br /><p></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-70609390507291888192023-02-05T12:39:00.003-05:002023-02-05T12:39:19.991-05:00My favorite music (and my favorite magic), 2022 edition<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiryyHmWXwVtM9zXZYPYgj49UJnS7vW7H_nuqiH01DQcibJa8vPeFvYzMa5Slb1L4yBn-wNECS6Mjx8Ao3OcEKHy6xNZ4z_DTFc7g7DNPsiowEJGr1V_T5mU7FoAqNRconmgMHRiY8DOMrIbIW20lFCj-pVduC3Y31fmIbKhCSQbREG0_0FwWAOdhPe" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="2100" data-original-width="1500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiryyHmWXwVtM9zXZYPYgj49UJnS7vW7H_nuqiH01DQcibJa8vPeFvYzMa5Slb1L4yBn-wNECS6Mjx8Ao3OcEKHy6xNZ4z_DTFc7g7DNPsiowEJGr1V_T5mU7FoAqNRconmgMHRiY8DOMrIbIW20lFCj-pVduC3Y31fmIbKhCSQbREG0_0FwWAOdhPe=w285-h400" width="285" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Every year, my faithful sometimes-editor David Levithan conducts his <a href="http://davidmusicpoll.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-2022-david-music-poll-results.html">David Music Poll</a>, and every year I faithfully respond. Here are my picks for this year (and <a href="http://davidmusicpoll.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-2022-david-music-poll-results.html">here</a> are everyone's). Spoiler: Orville Peck made me start loving music again in a big way. Combined with my other recent obsession, Magic: the Gathering, I made a double-sided card (see above and below). I know these are the two most niche things ever to be spoken of on the internet, but maybe you'll appreciate one or both of them?</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Matthue R, Im-peck-able</h3><p>Most essential:</p><p><b>Orville Peck, Bronco</b></p><p>This came along and swept me away in veils of fringe. I liked his sparse, moody first album, but everything about every song on here perfectly glistens. It stirs you. Rarely have I felt so happy as I do listening to these gay country anthems, and that is not a sentence I ever thought I would write.</p><p><br /></p><p>Otherwise essential:</p><p><b>Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You</b></p><p>Campfire songs with a severe undercurrent of menace.</p><p><b>Taylor Swift, Midnights</b></p><p>Apologies to Miss Tay that this is no higher on my list. Zoinks, it's hard being a serious artist, especially as one is, forced to live up to one's legacy, and none the greater for it. If I were ranking just the song "Antihero," it may have placed higher, the mightiness of cramming several individually great images and motifs into 4 paltry minutes. It's not great. It's merely good. The best songs are the singles (although I love "Mastermind" [although the single cribbed line "When you fail to plan, you plan to fail" nearly ruins the spell for me]). The whole damn spiel could use an editor. Even, perhaps especially, "Antihero." It is a lesser novel by a writer I will nonetheless read everything by. But I am still here to read everything.</p><p><b>Twice, Between 1 and 2</b></p><p>My partner and I were having an argument about why I can't get into Reputation, Taylor's collection of techno (sorry, electronic dance music) thumpers, but I love Twice. Partly, I think, because these songs are both simple and constantly reinventing themselves: there's no moment of a song that is either hard to digest or understand (there's a perfectly simple hook, but there's a new one about every 5 seconds throughout each song), but also there's such a complete surrender when listening. Twice songs have 3 languages going on at once: Korean, most of which I don't understand (but I probably agree with whatever they're saying); English, most of which I do (likewise: on "Scientist," my insufficient brain hears "[Korean] [Korean] Einstein, [Korean] [Korean] Frankenstein" and, like, I get it), and the immortal and universal "fa la la la la." It's not the language of love. It's not even the language of happiness. It's the language of, I've got a song stuck in my head and you're gonna get it stuck too, and in that regard, as all others, Twice delivers.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglDIF9_NuDeNPOXmPElYgvx-_UziqvATqbpPx1hC57H42E3mk_6e0bTbJ_U5Evo-Ke4rIbZ8elVxjsPM8cTtS1HAsVi0LAg509-_XlJLVMqvDLDlcfoNtC0-F3NyspB6FTyGganJvNilCVr6qkxDeZnek0lqn3ELUebAv9sttwikg5FGVTf14QWfuJ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="750" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglDIF9_NuDeNPOXmPElYgvx-_UziqvATqbpPx1hC57H42E3mk_6e0bTbJ_U5Evo-Ke4rIbZ8elVxjsPM8cTtS1HAsVi0LAg509-_XlJLVMqvDLDlcfoNtC0-F3NyspB6FTyGganJvNilCVr6qkxDeZnek0lqn3ELUebAv9sttwikg5FGVTf14QWfuJ=w285-h400" width="285" /></a></div><br /><p></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-18035092839496394812022-11-01T19:39:00.003-04:002022-11-01T19:39:34.342-04:00A Halloween present for you<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfreH7LpY8csK3wczWgn13oxXMSmXbAoh6Sm9IwHgxGfvOLrZTBr4FPWQro5bCGARG9_XVPl0PIRRuO_1ZEIrv5EsN4BgZJLrL771oK4bDRhYVe2CqosCNmsHVWxEWbftUiKrkeVP_lhX9sS2swSo5N-G_WEXfKRSodKZZ8dzpzGE6lyl73OeMgZmV" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="256" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfreH7LpY8csK3wczWgn13oxXMSmXbAoh6Sm9IwHgxGfvOLrZTBr4FPWQro5bCGARG9_XVPl0PIRRuO_1ZEIrv5EsN4BgZJLrL771oK4bDRhYVe2CqosCNmsHVWxEWbftUiKrkeVP_lhX9sS2swSo5N-G_WEXfKRSodKZZ8dzpzGE6lyl73OeMgZmV=w400-h400" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Art: from the prompt "</i><span style="text-align: left;"><i>your uncle wearing a creepy hat" on <a href="https://www.craiyon.com/">Craiyon</a></i></span></div><br />So, I'm up to something, maybe? I've been writing horror stories -- well, I think they're horror stories -- and I've been a little bit shy about sharing them, but, as is typical of things in horror stories, they find a way out nevertheless.<p></p><p>The literary magazine <i>The Furious Gazelle </i>had a Halloween short story contest and I submitted my story "<a href="https://thefuriousgazelle.com/2022/10/30/matthue-roth-halloween/">The Man with the Hat</a>" and I am tremendously honored that it won.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><b>The Man with the Hat</b> </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">As soon as Edie’s Uncle Sly came to visit, she wanted to kick him right back out. It was how he entered the house like he owned it, left his oversized tweed suitcase sitting directly in front of the stairs. He wore a jacket beneath his jacket—tweed, but not matching—and a tie and dark sunglasses and a collared shirt like the men at the bank. She watched his skinny form swimming in the collared shirt and thought of her father’s muscles ballooning out of his Sunday tee. Clearly, this invader was the loser.</p><p style="text-align: left;">“You must be Edie,” he said, sizing her up. “Tell my sister I’ve arrived.”</p><p style="text-align: left;">Most decrepit of all was his hat. That lopsided tweedy thing that only appeared distinguished in his mind. To its original owner, maybe, long before Edie’s uncle acquired it in whatever way he did (found it on the street? took it from the coatrack of a moldy office lobby?).</p><p style="text-align: left;">She turned to go but didn’t say anything. She thought he should at least thank her for allowing him inside.</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Here is the <a href="https://thefuriousgazelle.com/2022/10/30/matthue-roth-halloween/">whole entire thing</a>.</p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-13398198013850868242022-03-30T21:09:00.000-04:002022-03-30T21:09:03.196-04:00Praying in Strange Places, a new story<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9qUkYH666msxk7sycxa8sztTcla30-zS1-EByQxDAT1Eock6UO7D5MmW8dvIMovfm8vDiSK86TBPfTtbUNw00RQEKemE_WSuhVfcI1kIl7KLs-2Rs9ttNMCvLNnOg47NI1-aeljnZDrNylwELn7Wqxcexod7l3BmRPLhjHF5qqVjczfgnSg8OaXn/s4032/PXL_20220327_175406839.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9qUkYH666msxk7sycxa8sztTcla30-zS1-EByQxDAT1Eock6UO7D5MmW8dvIMovfm8vDiSK86TBPfTtbUNw00RQEKemE_WSuhVfcI1kIl7KLs-2Rs9ttNMCvLNnOg47NI1-aeljnZDrNylwELn7Wqxcexod7l3BmRPLhjHF5qqVjczfgnSg8OaXn/s320/PXL_20220327_175406839.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>My short story "<a href=" https://www.derailleur.press/the-rail/praying-in-strange-places-by-matthue-roth#/" target="_blank">Praying in Strange Places</a>" was published in <i>Derailleur! </i>Here's how it starts. I know, it starts with Chapter 5 and goes down to 1. Not consciously trying to be weird, just came out of my fingers that way. </p><p><br /></p><div class="paragraph" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Lato; font-size: 16px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 2em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="color: black;">5.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black;">A Hollywood backlot last week. I was there to visit a friend, who’d recently gotten a semi-regular job as a minor character on a major sitcom. Actually, she was my best friend’s girlfriend. But I was in L.A., and my friend wasn’t, and the girlfriend invited me to come to work with her. They were rehearsing, running through the same three-minute scene an infinity of times. I sat in the empty audience bleachers and watched them walk around a fake living room. I envied the ability to be able to do what they did, to rewind time again and again to make it perfect. Inside the hermetically-sealed warehouse, I got the sense the sun was going down. I went outside, to the hallway, and found a place to pray. Three steps back, three steps forward, I transformed that little area into a chamber for G-d to inhabit. I stood still and swayed back and forth.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="paragraph" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Lato; font-size: 16px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 2em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-spacing: 0.01em;"> <span style="color: black;">The place I’d picked to pray was one of those narrow alcoves, a Cubist lump where the wall hiccupped inward for no apparent reason. The wall faced east, toward Jerusalem, and I fit neatly</span><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black;">inside. It was only after I’d gotten far enough into the prayers so that I couldn’t move--once you did your dance of the three steps, I was frozen in place until the concluding section hit--when I realized, inside my sandwich of three walls, I was literally two steps away from the men’s bathroom. I pushed it out of my mind, to keep focused on the prayers. One of the stars of the series brushed past me and into the bathroom. Our shoulders actually touched, even though the hallway wasn’t that narrow. I wasn’t sure why, if he was coming onto me, if he was drunk, if he was just clumsy like I was. I tried not to listen, but, can you close your ears, how can you willfully </span><span style="color: black;">not hear </span><span style="color: black;">something? The stream of liquid was long, unbroken, stretching to whole minutes. A strange thing: I’d long had this thought, I’d love to be an actor, except for the long periods on stage and the infrequent, time-mandated pee breaks. I’d wondered how they did it. That was how. Did you know there’s a prayer we say for going to the bathroom, thanking G-d for creating the system of openings and closings in our bodies, acknowledging that if those tubes and combines didn’t work exactly the way they did, we’d be poisoned, immobilized, unable to live? We say that prayer every time we urinate or defecate, after washing and leaving the bathroom. It was not, however, a part of the normal afternoon prayer. The prayer I was saying right now.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black;">The series star extracted himself from the bathroom, shook his hands in the air upon leaving, far enough away from his body so no loose drops were shaken onto his outfit. He gave me a long, hard look, as if he’d heard my every thought, my entire rambling eschatological intrusion into his pee break, the kind of look he probably routinely gave to paparazzi, a look that said, </span><em style="position: relative;"><span style="color: black;">Don’t you have anything better to do with your life?</span></em><span style="color: black;"> Nope. No, I thought, I do not.</span></div><div class="paragraph" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Lato; font-size: 16px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 2em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-spacing: 0.01em;">{ <a href=" https://www.derailleur.press/the-rail/praying-in-strange-places-by-matthue-roth#/">read the rest</a> }</div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-57834690137509089382022-03-09T13:32:00.002-05:002022-03-30T21:05:01.336-04:00Saturday Night with the Reverend<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHUhh0fOsxluNdcfxcJgNc-2LpC-7ZiCrL94bIcraWa8Nk3jvE4a00j9AqeAaj-y6uDBm_qoahQhTgRhHkqr15m5Gnnq7ZriF-Fpn31irWh4fBpWDTYLFIpKrlS3s2QOpobkS8jX99p81ZcEEZcUU2hOnci0LzglljUXQPJ7JWmVJ26qf-IHOAGHgZ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHUhh0fOsxluNdcfxcJgNc-2LpC-7ZiCrL94bIcraWa8Nk3jvE4a00j9AqeAaj-y6uDBm_qoahQhTgRhHkqr15m5Gnnq7ZriF-Fpn31irWh4fBpWDTYLFIpKrlS3s2QOpobkS8jX99p81ZcEEZcUU2hOnci0LzglljUXQPJ7JWmVJ26qf-IHOAGHgZ" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“G-d needs us to believe in Him,” Rev. Vince extols us, “just like you need someone to believe in you.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Just as the music drops in, he one-ups himself: “Just like I need you to believe in me,” and on the turn of a dime, he’s no longer preaching, he’s singing, he’s giving us deep-throated growls and can-you-say-hallelujahs.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We are in a biker bar called the Black Coffin, and we have been brought here by my summer landlord, Yoily, a Hasid in dress at least. Tonight, though, he is getting down with a Venus de Milo-like woman of some sort of island extraction — an island that could be any island in the world, really — just about five feet tall and at least that in diameter.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">But that doesn’t make him any less of a Hasid, in his own estimation at least. Four shots in, he’s spending most of my month’s rent on the nicest whisky in the house, and it’s loosening him up.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Not that he needed any loosening. I remember once in a lecture being told by a rabbi that we wear the clothes we wear, black pants white shirt, as a sort of uniform, to keep us in line and to keep us from acting immodest or unbecoming. When you look like a Jew, you act like a Jew. For Yoily, who goes to the dance clubs almost every night, these clothes free him from any sort of social norm or expectation. Those clothes, that hair, he’s basically an alien. People assume he’s either a dangerous sex pervert or a kid who’s run away, Amish-style, for a single strange night in the town, looking for a crazy adventure in that American Graffiti vein, or maybe just in that The Hangover vein, he’ll have a dance, do some drugs, have a ’70s-music-filled-montage, have a half-awake conversation with a girl whom in a different state of consciousness he might have shared a kiss or something more, rolled into bed at 5:00 in the morning only to awake a few hours later, a little tired and beleaguered but ready to lapse back into his normal life.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">But, no: This is Yoily. He’s never gonna wake up.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">He dances harder. The woman gives a loud whoop, so showy and flamboyant it feels like she’s faking, but so fake it’s real. Yoily whoops back, even louder, even realer, and he grabs a piece of her stomach. I turn away, embarrassed to be a part of it, embarrassed to be there at all.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">**</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">It’s been a cool night, a hot night. One of those wild summers in Brooklyn where by day the sidewalks are hot enough to give you first-degree burns and you find yourself checking with strangers on the street if they’ve had enough water. At midnight the air is still bubbling over 100. The people in the bar are sweating and thirsty, it makes them drink more, which makes them wilder still.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Rev. Vince feels it. He feeds off it, hungry for energy. He bangs the keys twice as hard, forcing the drummer to play twice as fast. The band can barely keep up.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The audience is having no problem, though. Our feet can stomp in time with whatever Rev. Vince plays. We need him as much as he needs us.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Tonight he plays fierce, sharp staccato chords at the high end and low end of his organ, one song after another. Then finally, he breaks so fast the rest of his band is thrown off track. The bass is still shaking, the unwilling bassist having struck one note after the rest of the band pulled to a stop, and the string trembles with the weight of every ear in the room.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Then he speaks. His voice is the only thing in our ears, the only sound in the universe.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“How you all doin’ tonight?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The answer is a single lusty many-voiced yell.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“I can feel the L-rd here, can you feel Him?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Harder cheers, louder cheers. Hands in the air, we are pouring ourselves into him.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“We gotta praise His name, give Him whatever we have! If you got spirit, give Him some spirit. If you got happiness, you got to share that happiness. Even if you got money, you gotta spread it around. You go on and tell me, is anybody here rich?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">A lone bro whistles from the back. A few heads turn toward us, to the Jews, but nobody says anything. In the rest of the bar it is utterly silent, except for the Rev.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Hey friends, I’m not pokin’ fun at anyone. There’s no need to be ashamed. Whatever you are, that’s the way the L-rd made you. And the L-rd’s got gifts for all of us. Some of us are smart. Some are wise. Some are physically gifted — gifted in the face or the body,” he reaches down, hands cupping the overhanging bottom curvature of his own stomach to jiggle his own, and here the band starts to play again, soft, like the very instruments are whispering, “others are skilled with their words, or their charm, or even their music.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">His hands sink to the keys of the organ, and he jumps back in, and his voice climbs ever louder.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“So friends, what I’m askin’ is, who’s ready to accept G-d’s gifts? Who wants to be rich?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“<em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">I DO!</em>” shrills a voice next to me, and two white-sleeved arms shoot in the air and it’s Yoily, throwing his head back, tossing his beard into the air, shrieking with wild abandon.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The music tumbles back into full force and Yoily starts to dance, and then so does everyone else, and in the moment it’s forgotten by all concerned. Only it’s not forgotten by Yoily, who was a good deal less drunk that night than I’d thought, or maybe he’d just never stopped being drunk, because Wednesday next the big lottery winner gets called, enough cash to never work another day in your life, and not only has Yoily actually had the forethought to buy a lottery ticket, he’s got all six matching numbers.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Now, there’s such a thing as coincidence in this world. G-d stopped sending us prophets, and there’s no longer a Temple to bring the holy offerings, so we got to make do with what we do. G-d’s Hand is still at it, but in a concealed way, and you don’t often see miracles granted as obvious as Yoily.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Right away he stopped going out at night. Started wearing his black hat again, never being seen without a jacket, or outside the neighborhood, or in bars, Least of all a bar where a licensed minister plays organ every Tuesday night.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Once I passed him on the street, asked him about it. He scowled and couldn’t say Rev. Vince’s name without spitting. “That goy?” he said. “All he wants to do is turn Yidden into sinners, one forbidden dance at a time.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">But on Shabbos I wound up at his house — since the lottery, he’d given himself to buying tons of food from the store, paying a shiksa to prepare it all, and inviting over whatever single or divorced or displaced men to feast with a good hot lunch. He’d had too much to drink, or not enough. And he threw a sweaty arm around me and told me why he’d stopped following the rest of us to Rev. Vince.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“I’d be back there in a second if I hadn’t won,” he said to me, his voice warm and cavelike in my ear. “What he did was, he took away the uncertainty. If all you need to do to believe is to get handed a miracle, what good does it do? I wouldn’t have to believe on my own, I wouldn’t have to shout and cheer and scream like an animal, I wouldn’t dance with the fat shiksas because I’d know that G-d was right there, ready to throw a lightning bolt in my face. The second you don’t need to believe anymore, what are you? You’re an angel. You’re a robot. All you do is G-d’s work, because there’s nothing else you can do.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">He says more, but I don’t hear it, because he unfixes his arm from my shoulders and slinks off, still talking. I don’t need to hear it. I don’t want to. I’ve still got my Saturday night dances, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">The Rev. Vince is loosely, but not entirely, modeled after Reverend Vince Anderson & the Love Choir. You should think of it as fan fiction. You can find out about the real one <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rev-Vince-Anderson-and-his-Love-Choir-74494194069/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">here</a> and listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vince+anderson+love+choir" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">here</a> and, whoa!, he has live shows every Monday night <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UnionPool1/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">here</a>. We should go.</em></p><p></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-26175297967295333882022-02-17T10:13:00.000-05:002022-02-17T10:13:00.165-05:00Write On!: Sometimes I’m Too Jewish, Sometimes I’m Not Jewish Enough<p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/x-men-title-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="800" height="383" src="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/x-men-title-1.jpg" width="800" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I want to believe that I’m the sum of all my experiences, that every time I pick up a pen and launch into a story I’m giving it everything that I have —</span></p><ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 1em 1em; padding: 0px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the books I’ve read and the movie I watched on the plane here,</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the Jewish food my parents raised me on and the watered-down secular Jewish culture they gave me,</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the first time Eddie Torres kicked my ass walking home after school in sixth grade and the twenty times he did it after that,</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the time I became an Orthodox Jew when I was 20 years old</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">and the time I started hooking up with a Catholic-raised pagan sex worker 3 years into it,</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the prayers I said this morning, including the entire story of the Binding of Isaac and his almost-attempted murder by his father Abraham, which we say every day, although I’m still not 100% sure why we say that and not, say, the story of Bilaam beating his ass,</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the archery lesson I took my Hasidic girls-school daughter to last night</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">and us reading </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dracula</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> on the way home, her request</span></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">as the people next to us stared.</span></li></ul><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">But there’s a problem inherent within that. Stories are microcosms. Salman Rushdie says that, every time you tell a story, at the same moment there’s a million other stories you’re choosing not to tell. If I decide to write, say, a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DRX3N0U/tag=matthue0a-20&linkId=c06d87381ce7ba05c5c800b460e41f5f" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank">memoir about hooking up with my pagan ex-girlfriend</a>, I’m not telling you the story of when I first became Orthodox, or going to secular Hebrew School as a kid, or how my wife and I celebrated Shabbos when we were dating, or how there’s a white nationalist guy sitting next to me on the plane right now and how I feel as someone who looks like me, with a beard, payos, tzitzis.*</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">When we write stories, we start at a point. Maybe it’s an idea. For me, it’s usually an image — it might not be the image the story starts with, but it’s an image that I know will come up.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The point is, it’s a point. As storytellers, we take that point and move it along an axis, we tell it, we create a line, and the line goes on as far as our story does, ad infinitum if we want it to. And I know I have suddenly started talking about math in front of a bunch of writers, but bear with me — for every point in the universe, there’s an infinite series of lines that can be drawn from it. If you start here {POINT IN THE AIR}, you can go this way {GESTURE IN ONE DIRECTION}, this way {POINT IN ANOTHER DIRECTION}, or this way. That’s the direction we choose to go with a story.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">My first novel, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Never-Mind-Goldbergs-Matthue-Roth/dp/0439691885/tag=matthue0a-20" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank"><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Never Mind the Goldbergs</i></a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, started with an image of a girl wearing three stacked, ripped skirts — a miniskirt, a knee-length skirt, a long gypsy skirt, all of them crowned with punk-rock patches — and she’s standing on a Hollywood set, and a non-Jewish wardrobe person is trying to tell her what clothes Orthodox people are supposed to wear. It’s a pretty clearly Jewish image, right? Pretty much every direction you’d take that in is has to embrace the Jewish angle, or at least include it at some point.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I wrote this other novel, </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Manhattan Beach. </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It hasn’t been published (yet?). Here’s how I first conjured it: imagine the movie </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Goonies,</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> where four kids find a map leading to buried pirate treasure beneath their hometown — and, of course, obstacles that keep rogue treasure hunters away — except that, in my vision, the kids are 80-year-old men.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">This story didn’t have to be Jewish. Except that, in some way, it did. In the original movie, the kids’ homes were being foreclosed upon; in my remake, it was the synagogue where all the old men hung out all day. I told the story in ten chapters, one for each of the men left who made the synagogue’s minyan: the mentally-disabled caretaker, the celebrity skin-care doctor with the subway ads, the old gay guy who never got a chance to come out because he was a teenager during the Holocaust, and instead he lived alone in a forest stealing from Nazis.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I don’t have to make these stories Jewish. That quality, the Jewishness of it — the religious stuff, the Holocaust stuff, the one-off references to the texture of matzoh and the passing inclusion of an </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">oy</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> — they’re a part of the story, sometimes even a fundament of the particular story I’m trying to tell. But they’re just some of the tools in my toolbox, a few of the memories in the knapsack of my mind. At some point, I was on a hot streak of writing</span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;"> really really </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jewish poems, one about my vegetarianism and the profundity of meat in my grandmother’s house, another about my gay Orthodox friends and my non-Jewish girlfriend, and then I wrote a poem about my teeth.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Again with the microcosmos. We defamilarize the familiar, describing a watermelon as if no one in your audience has ever tasted watermelon before, and at the same time we create comfort in the unknown, describing the experience of descending into a ritual bath so it’s as close to the reader’s heart as if they dunk in a mikvah every morning. I don’t write much poetry anymore but I love it, it’s the aesthetic and intellectual challenge of writing a new novel every time you sit down with a new page. We rev up our microscopes and we go on full blast. Sometimes that’s looking at a ritual bath. Sometimes it’s my teeth.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Maybe because I am Orthodox, a word which here means that there are 613 rules in the Torah — some explicit and some obscure, from permitted foods to the correct way to tie your shoelaces — a lot of those minutiae tend to be Jewish in nature. Because I am human, or punk rock, or a boy, or relatively obsessed with the X-Men, a lot of them don’t. One way or another, you will probably be able to find something Jewish about most of what I write. The fact that I wrote my teeth poem on Shabbos morning, walking the bumpy San Francisco hills to shul — I had to keep repeating it to myself over and over again the whole day, till sunset when I could actually commit it to paper — might make it more Jewish now that you know that.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">But it’s not going to show up on the page when you read it, and every story I write definitely does not pass muster as a Jewish story. PJ Library, an amazing organization that buys literally millions of picture books each year to send out free to children, has yet to accept anything I’ve written. I literally got two editorial notes back from them two months in a row, “This is too Jewish” and “this isn’t Jewish enough.”</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The same thing could probably be said about myself. And yet, for all the good the PJ Library organization does, both for Jewish pedagogy and for the literary community, most of their books kinda suck. The characters are flat. They always do what they’re supposed to do, except when they make a mistake and learn a lesson from it. They are stuck in the eternal cycle of literature that exists explicitly to teach children a lesson, and because of that, they don’t stay in that cycle long. Most of those books, my kids read once and leave near the recycle bin, thinking perhaps that they’re like their weekly newsletters from school.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">This might sound like a call to arms to end the canon of Jewish novels, but it’s actually a plea for the opposite. I’ve been dying to write a Jewish novel. Not because I think it might finally get me published as an adult novelist, although that would be very cool, but because I want to have something to read that resonates with me in that very specific way. As authors, we are so fond of taking our characters and systematically deconstructing them, putting them into precarious situations and risking their lives, their morals, and their emotional health. As readers, though, we read because we are isolated and alienated from the world and we want to find a connection, see inside somebody else’s head and say </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">it’s really not so different from our own.</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> And most of the time we’re looking for a bare emotional connection, another nerd as nerdy as us or someone heartbroken or full of heart or yearning to be in another place. But as much as sometimes I need to read about one of Sartre’s displaced journeymen or Winterson’s sexually diaphanous adventurers, I would love to see, or to create, someone who looks like me on a page.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">And I’m trying. Yesterday, I was trying to explain why I loved </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lolita </i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">and was deeply troubled by it — aside from the usual reasons — and I blurted out, “He could’ve written about anything in the world, why did he write about </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">that?</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">” The first time someone I knew read </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Goldbergs,</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> it was a woman at my synagogue, and she told me she’d read it in the same way she might have told me that she saw me buying opiates on the corner.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Did you read the whole thing? I asked her. No, she said — she stopped right after the Orthodox protagonist hooked up with her costar. “But that’s right before she starts making everything better!” I expostulated (although it isn’t that simple). “I’d just had enough,” she told me, and that was that.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I have a friend who started calling up Jewish Hollywood writers and actors, trying to convince them to put Orthodox Jews on their shows. “Nothing crazy,” she told them, “just a minor character who happens to wear a yarmulke or runs out to shul.” But that’s the opposite of what I want. I want to make stories where everything a character does matters, and where who those characters </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">are</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> — their history, their relationship with G-d, even their anxiety about their teeth — isn’t just a way of telling a shocking and efficient story, but a way of giving people (and by people, I mean myself) something to love. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">This was delivered last week as part of a symposium on <a href="https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/event_detail/12856" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank">Jewish Writing vs. Writing by Jews</a>, chaired by <a href="http://hevria.com/author/goldagoldbloom/" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank">Goldie Goldbloom</a>, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Still image from </em>X-Men: Days of Future Past<em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">, as if you didn’t know.</em><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"> </em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">_______________<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px;">* – Yep, that part was true. I wrote that line really quickly, then scrolled my computer screen up to hide it.</span> </p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-698044676762869012022-02-09T09:10:00.023-05:002022-02-09T09:10:00.180-05:00Write On!: How to Write for Yourself<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixwZtA06N-LKXPh3z-5-CDR37Ze0Y2yFwYP9ba5RuldjnXKz3Ro_gCcY_aa2Du-L9jupu64b3I5ak0hpWXyluv9I_ZmBEU029cxBm3VEC6nEo2nOv0FTHNYDQ14eFXt4qsVbJ-_Xb2B6jsOFyHx-aA3WOJo5gIfFsi8v-O52bpbAx9QTvvM0mXYn9v" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixwZtA06N-LKXPh3z-5-CDR37Ze0Y2yFwYP9ba5RuldjnXKz3Ro_gCcY_aa2Du-L9jupu64b3I5ak0hpWXyluv9I_ZmBEU029cxBm3VEC6nEo2nOv0FTHNYDQ14eFXt4qsVbJ-_Xb2B6jsOFyHx-aA3WOJo5gIfFsi8v-O52bpbAx9QTvvM0mXYn9v" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><i> Every blade of grass has a story to tell</i></div><div>— Darshan, “Animate My Anatomy”</div><div><br /></div><div>Hey! I'm just taking some questions from the ol' email inbox. Ready? Set? To corrupt Montell Jordan, this is how we go.</div><h3 style="text-align: left;">How do you become a professional author?</h3><div>Poverty is the secret weapon of the writer.</div><div><br /></div><div>I’m not saying that being poor is a good thing, because it’s not. It sucks. (And I realize that I just contradicted the wisdom of Fiddler on the Roof, which is only slightly more sacrilegious than doubting the authenticity of the Bible. It’s okay. Let’s keep going.) And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get paid well from your writing — thank G-d, there are ways to do it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I’m saying, have a job that isn’t writing — at least, that isn’t writing what you deeply and passionately want to write, that comes straight out of your heart and keeps all that passion and fire and rawness and fragility intact.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because if that’s what you want to write, it’s a good thing to tell yourself, I’m not doing this to make money.</div><div><br /></div><div>And keep repeating it to yourself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Repeat it when you don’t believe in yourself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Repeat it when you don’t believe in your characters, and so instead of making decisions you open yourself up to them and let them take the story in whatever crazy way it wants to go.</div><div><br /></div><div>Repeat it when you don’t even know what the characters want, so you kill one of them in a freak thunderstorm. (It’s ok! Do it! If your brain is telling you to — and this is in writing, not in real life, mind you — then there might be a reason. You can come back later, after you’re finished writing, and figure out the reason, and what it Means for the Rest of the Story. Or you’ll realize that maybe you needed to keep her alive for the rest of the story. Don’t worry! By that point, you’re already at the end, and you have a complete story written, so you can pretty much do whatever you want.) (Also, if you’re curious about where I got this idea from, skip to the end of this essay.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Repeat it when there’s one really obvious way you could take this story — it’s your first day of school, you’re so nervous you don’t know what to do, you’re gonna get beat up and teased and eventually win the science fair, but really you just want to write about the cookies you stopped to grab at your grandma’s house on the way home.</div><div><br /></div><div>There’s a power to writing that comes from its powerlessness. Even more so with poetry. Nobody reads anything these days, and especially nobody reads fictional stories or poems, so you don’t have to feel bound by them. You never have to be the poet who only writes rhymed poems about storms and pain — that is, unless you really want to be; the only one holding you there is you. Today it’s not raining and you’re the only person who caught sight of a rainbow before it disappeared. Why not write about that? Go for it. Nobody’s looking. And even if they are — well, hey, then you’ve got a reader.</div><div><br /></div><div>We’re surrounded by stories. Literally — they’re everywhere. At one point, I remember asking David Levithan — my editor at Scholastic, who edits a crazy number of books and puts out one or two of his own every year — if he’s ever afraid of running out of ideas for stories. He said, I’m more afraid of having so many ideas for stories that some of the best ones fall through the cracks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Every idea can make a good story. Just honor it and let it do its thing.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">At what point in the writing process do you involve an agent or a publisher? Do you let them know as soon as you have a good idea, and get their… go-ahead? Their blessing? I don’t know what you’d call it. Or do you attempt to write a full, complete draft of whatever it is and then start shopping it around?</h3><div>Okay, fine. Let’s talk publishing. EVEN THOUGH I just spent the past 400 words or so telling you why you shouldn’t think about that.</div><div><br /></div><div>I’m going to first paraphrase Joshua Henkin, my writing professor, and say: as late as humanly possible. There’s a saying about too many cooks in the kitchen, and for most forms of storytelling, the exact number of “too many cooks” is 2.</div><div><br /></div><div>It’s great to meet an agent or an editor. It’s double great if you want to show them what you’re working on, and it’s super double great if they actually ask and you offer. The thing to remember is: You’re still working on it. The sooner you show an agent, the sooner you open yourself up to them saying something like, “Hey, you know how you’re mostly writing a historical novel about the Second Temple, but with aliens? Maybe you want to lose the aliens.” And even if you say no, you’ve opened yourself up to the possibility that doing a story about the Bayis Sheni with aliens might not be the coolest thing ever. (Side note: this example might be the coolest thing ever. Can someone please write it?)</div><div><br /></div><div>But: Doubt. In one word, doubt is why you shouldn’t show your story to publishers, or agents, or anyone except for helpful and supportive friends — and even if you do that, make them swear up and down, no bli neder involved, you DEMAND the neder, that they won’t say anything critical — until your story is finished, and edited, and you’d feel comfortable having it published exactly the way it looks at this moment.</div><div><br /></div><div>As a side note, the literary industry is in a perpetual time- and money crunch, and editors and agents are looking more and more frequently to take manuscripts that require the bare minimum of editing. The more you can make it sound like a finished book — the closer it is to a finished book — the more likely they are to take it seriously.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Where did you get the idea for the freak thunderstorm?</h3><div>Lolita. Which I never wanted to read, because the idea was gross, then needed to read, because Vladmir Nabokov basically taught himself English so he could do his own translations, and is one of the best writers this language has. It’s in the first few pages, and known as the shortest death in literature: “‘My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”</div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-16694363194917860102022-02-04T05:55:00.002-05:002022-02-04T05:55:16.936-05:00My new chapbook!<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">So I wrote a bunch of poems and bound them together, and the collage artist <a href="http://katieskau.co">Katie Skau</a> cut up some images for them, and <a href="http://ghostcitypress.com">Ghost City Press</a> crumpled the whole dang mess together and threw it into a book so that you can have it for free. Go <a href="http://bit.ly/some-how">here</a> to get it.<br /><a href="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5953e21ad1758ec7f3ea522f/1628730025557-PO3UJDES58T0RYVJ8A6P/59.+Matthue+Roth.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5953e21ad1758ec7f3ea522f/1628730025557-PO3UJDES58T0RYVJ8A6P/59.+Matthue+Roth.jpg" /></a></div>
matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-85340057016648945872022-02-03T09:03:00.004-05:002022-02-03T09:32:09.619-05:00Write On!: But How Do You Make a Plot?<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhxSfesSy_aJKpRVzua_6Z8ZPbpN4jstgOdCVl9sqC1OyT5DQKY4X-JO2Bg783uk5JsHEXJC23GWvgyePSxK9sMxp0SyXx6pjBEUM8iEHBiKhsoM45w7-JzWt7oDSX_UGkBvnVLiICkp6cMDu-KgyiphoQV1Vi8VDVsu6MMV3bcxVGbLYnp8H49XRD_" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1597" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhxSfesSy_aJKpRVzua_6Z8ZPbpN4jstgOdCVl9sqC1OyT5DQKY4X-JO2Bg783uk5JsHEXJC23GWvgyePSxK9sMxp0SyXx6pjBEUM8iEHBiKhsoM45w7-JzWt7oDSX_UGkBvnVLiICkp6cMDu-KgyiphoQV1Vi8VDVsu6MMV3bcxVGbLYnp8H49XRD_" width="308" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div>Hey, welcome back to the writing space. If you have writing questions, send them to me! It’s just my first name at gmail.</div><div><br /></div><div>First lesson today: Always show up. I wrote 700 words of a different story, decided it was too depressing, decided to stuff it under my bed alongside those clothes that are almost-dirty, but still clean enough to maybe wear again some day. I wasn’t going to write anything. I didn’t have time, didn’t have another idea, was still pretty buried in my old idea. (Maybe you’ll see some traces of it in this one.)</div><div><br /></div><div>So I dove in. This is a question I’ve been dying to address, but kept getting distracted by things like Aristotle (who is worth his own column) and Joseph Campbell (ditto) and the Torah (um, probably worth more than one column).</div><div><br /></div><h1 style="text-align: left;">How do you develop a plot?</h1><div>When I enrolled in a master’s program for creative writing, I assumed it would be all about answering this question. Two years, twelve classes, you’d figure that, of the three primary elements of story (plot, setting, characters), this one would happen first, right? WRONGEST.</div><div><br /></div><div>That’s not to say we didn’t talk about it. But we didn’t talk about it enough. Of all the elements of writing, plot seems to come hardest to most writers I know. Plot is a monster. Characters, we have inspiration for all over the place. We know characters, we breathe characters, most of us are characters, of a sort, from Tom Wolfe’s rock-star white leisure suits to Virginia Woolf’s breathless romance and incomprehensibly sad suicide. And setting — we love settings; we love places; from writer’s nooks to exploring new places to the Narnias and Hundred Acre Woods of our mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>But plot? Plot’s the nightmare of nightmares. Once you have these kinetic characters, this perfect place, what are they gonna do there?</div><div><br /></div><div>Here’s why, in my opinion: Plot has to make sense. Not only that, it’s taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story — why does the detective have a limp? what’s in the nanny’s closet? — and it forces them to make sense. It’s the cowboy riding through a field of rebellious teenage cows, trying to wrap a lasso around every last neck. It is the most left-brained part of a right-brained activity, the part that collects all the random stuff we’ve sprinkled throughout a story. And it’s the part most readers nitpick the most about. If you’re a reasonably good storyteller, people will find very little to complain about objectively in terms of your characters — maybe they don’t like them? maybe they did something stupid?</div><div><br /></div><div>But in terms of plot grievances, you hear it all the time: “That ending sucked!” “I didn’t understand what was going on!” “Those middle 200 pages completely lost me!” And probably for good reason.</div><div><br /></div><div>EVERYTHING has a plot. Poems have plots. What’s the definition of a story, as opposed to an anecdote or a joke or a drunken/sleepy story (because we all know those aren’t real stories, they don’t make sense, and most of them don’t even get finished being told)? A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The main character starts in one place, physically and mentally and spiritually, and gets the chance to change — they might take it, they might not, but that decision gives a story its story-ness. We want our characters to be bigger than they are.</div><div><br /></div><div>When Shirley Jackson wrote “<a href="https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf" target="_blank">The Lottery</a>,” she didn’t write about the Lottery in the abstract — she wrote a story of the day it was taking place. She described a typical Lottery that wasn’t typical at all, and the things that were normal taught us what the Lottery was, and the moments that weren’t typical also taught us what the Lottery was. The turning point of that story — the moment you realize who won the Lottery, and what winning the Lottery means — is both completely surprising and completely unsurprising. It makes a horrible sense; it feeds a feeling we’ve had since the first lines of the story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plot is driven by character. This is a big one. My professor, Josh Henkin, says that if you really know your protagonist, you’ll never have to stop and think, what happens next? This never actually happens, partly because we aren’t perfect, but also partly because we aren’t really in the character’s head space. We’re creating people. And people always find something to do. They always keep moving.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plan ahead. Yes, you hate outlining. We all hate this. Outlining robs our story of its soul. When we tell a story naturally, the writer’s head is in the same place that the reader’s is — we’re learning about the characters, we’re diving deeper into the story. And this is good. Sometimes I’ll startle myself by throwing a major surprise into the story as I’m writing it — in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0439691885/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=matthue0a-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0439691885&linkId=2260f44d598452c8355d343ffc7df4cb">Never Mind the Goldbergs</a>, I knew that Moish was secretly filming a movie everywhere he went, but I didn’t know that he would return to Los Angeles and go straight to the movie’s premiere. It made sense within the context of the story (if you haven’t read it, it did! I assure you!), but it wasn’t something I’d prepared for.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here’s what I do: on the last page of whatever I’m writing (short story, novel, haiku) I keep a running of what I think should happen next. In the scene, in the chapter, in the book. It’s never set in stone, and often changes — as I get closer to a Big Event, I’ll add in new little things that need to happen before and after it, and when something big changes, I feel totally free to change or trash other things.</div><div><br /></div><div>Basically: keep a map. But remember that your destination will change.</div><div><br /></div><div>Any time you open a door, make sure you close it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal every time. Sometimes the biggest buildups lead to the smallest payoffs — Netflix series have become experts at this, where 9 episodes’ worth of hints will lead to a really good one-liner between two characters. The important thing is, you close it. Keep track of these things. (An outline, ahem, works wonders.) Not only will they make your story feel more professional, it’ll feel more satisfying, too.</div><div><br /></div><div>Less is more. This isn’t a plot tool so much as it is a tool for everything you write. I’m hyper. I try to leap from idea to idea, to get as much in as possible. DON’T. One of the best things about writing, and there are a lot, is that you have control of the reader’s mind. When you play a song, you have the reader’s ears. When you make a movie, you control the reader’s eyes and ears. Words are the least and the greatest of all powers: you can tell a story that lasts a moment and make it last an hour of the reader’s life, make them think about the same thing twenty different ways, take them inside the mind of two warring characters.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are so many ways for this to go wrong. But there are also many, many ways to do it write — and do it different than anybody’s ever done.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our minds are yours. Now go and do something with them.</div><div><br /></div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-74910079841060337012022-01-03T08:58:00.000-05:002022-02-04T05:56:23.137-05:00The Friend I Never Called<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiB0bZPIwiikU4WWLXBjPjvTT_HdeensyGP6Q6hL33gUt-NdUax8XfX74ImXoaGqO93OJiRfawYdJiXAo5mGpC5G5xTQVCjNDqM-AAbebxLJe-rr_Jghcn9rrj5vqMam0PYIJT_lq0U1yLiXt23LfdgGZnOm4GmddF3b7XVIdJ3BAIVum0A_eJFachO" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiB0bZPIwiikU4WWLXBjPjvTT_HdeensyGP6Q6hL33gUt-NdUax8XfX74ImXoaGqO93OJiRfawYdJiXAo5mGpC5G5xTQVCjNDqM-AAbebxLJe-rr_Jghcn9rrj5vqMam0PYIJT_lq0U1yLiXt23LfdgGZnOm4GmddF3b7XVIdJ3BAIVum0A_eJFachO" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px;">I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"><a href="https://youtu.be/2QZuOQZ1HC4?t=55" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">The Living Daylights</a>, </em>which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Then, last night, <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/health/addiction/Losing-Alex-the-story-behind-one-opioid-death.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">this did</a>.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">**</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Most of my friends, I don’t deserve to call friends. Most of the people I’d like to be friends with, I don’t even talk to. They seem like such magical people, with magical little worlds, and I’d hate to disrupt that with my stammery bad-haired self.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">When you know someone even a little bit, they’re limitless. We see tiny glimpses of other people, two-second .gifs of a ten-hour series. Those people we think are our best friends, we’re only with them for a fraction of their lives.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">And those people we barely know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know about them.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Alex and I were never part of the same social circle, although we were in orchestra together — Alex was the only cello, and I was a horrible second violinist who sat all the way back at the end of the section, even as an eighth-grader. I thought I would’ve gotten promoted maybe, just out of charity, except that Mr. Meyers was brutal and honest. When Alex played, he had none of the overwhelming praise he saved for Ashley Wilkes who played oboe or Lori Pay, the concertmistress, but she always hit her notes, and that made him proud.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We got along. I probably had a crush on her, but I had a crush on anyone who deigned to talk to me in those days of pimples and squeaky violin solos. More, I always just wanted to be her friend. She seemed like she’d be a good friend. Our lives converged, and then diverged, when she got in an accident with my best friend Patrick. He was trapped in a halo for the next three years, and she emerged relatively unscathed, and maybe I felt guilty being friends with her after that, or felt that I shouldn’t. Or maybe we just had different groups of friends. The Patrick business overshadowed everything, governed most of my social interactions over the next few years (my mom racked up hundreds of miles driving me to the hospitals where they reconstructed his spine). A few years ago I wrote a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Memoir-R-M-s-People-ebook/dp/B005OR01WQ" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">little book</a> about it and this is one of the things I said about her:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In another life, we could have been sisters or maybe best friends, hiding out at each other’s houses, tumbling into bed and telling each other everything. In this world we were lunchmates, and we shared that with a tableful of other kids. I don’t remember how it first happened, whether she asked if she could sit at our table or if Patrick and I took our seats unobtrusively at the far end of the bench, sliding closer each day, having similar conversations about the same things until one day they finally converged. P</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">am’s conversational strengths were classical music, cartoons on TV, and what other people were really thinking.</span></em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">(I changed her name to Pam. Patrick’s name isn’t really Patrick, either. Maybe I just save people’s names for what they sound like they should be doing, or for what I wish they would be doing?)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I should not be surprised, right? The opioid epidemic is everywhere. It’s hitting all kinds of people. According to the articles, this is kind of person Alex was:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">She worked as a therapist with women and children in crisis, kids who were being raised amid abuse and addiction. It was hard work, emotionally taxing, and Alex often internalized it.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Alex loved the beach and the mountains. She was forever dancing, listening to and talking about music — everything from trance to Tori Amos, classical to Alicia Keys.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">“You’d be walking through the mall and she’d see someone and say, ‘He looks like a really interesting character. I want to meet him,’ ” Sarah said. And she did.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Alex was an original — quirky and complicated, restless and gifted. Her parents didn’t give her a middle name at birth, but Alex declared one for herself, Victoria. She liked the way it sounded, cool and feminine. She started spelling her own name Alecks, just to be original.</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">**</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I don’t want to quote the whole <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/health/addiction/Losing-Alex-the-story-behind-one-opioid-death.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">article</a> — every little paragraph of it is another little treasure — although, maybe, I do. I didn’t know her that well. Some of the people the reporter spoke to, I vaguely knew (most of them, I knew as the kids on the other side of the classroom, the ones who were either way cooler than me, or not as cool as me, depending on how you felt about Dungeons & Dragons as a way to spend a Saturday night). The only one I knew was Alex, and I barely knew her.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Are we drawn to death because it reminds us of ourselves? Is it what these people meant to us, or didn’t mean to us, or because we’re hitching a ride on their final journey, wanting to claim some of the glory of it for ourselves, or some of the pain, to use it to define us, to make ourselves martyrs so other people feel sorry for us, so they feel jealous of us, because we have touched a piece of the infinity of this person that can no longer be touched? I read that, when someone dies who knows you, a tiny part of yourself dies along with them, the things you shared with them that you didn’t share with anybody else, the way they experienced you, which no one else will ever have the exact same experience.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">If that’s the case, Alex barely took any of me when she died. And the parts of her — the microscopic, insurmountable parts of her I carried — are contained more in that article than anything I can write.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">You know how I said that, even when you barely know someone, you don’t even know what you don’t know about them? I just want to tell you about the person who wrote the article. In middle school, she was one of those cooler than/not-as-cool-as people. We were definitely friendly and definitely not friends. Maybe she wore shirts with sports teams on them and I scoffed at her. Maybe I wore shirts with sports teams on them, hoping people didn’t think less of me because I was in camouflage.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Let me tell you what she does today. She’s a reporter for the Philly <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Inquirer</em>. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s a reporter — she uses the paper as a platform to show how public schools are fighting <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/kristen_graham/1-in-3-philly-students-doesnt-graduate-on-time-to-fix-that-high-schools-focus-on-freshmen-20180521.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">dropouts</a> and <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/kristen_graham/tamir-harper-southwest-philly-school-district-superintendent-william-hite-michelle-obama-20180615.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">raising prodigies</a> and how a ghetto school went <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/kristen_graham/philadelphia-school-kids-100-dollars-not-fighting-mitchell-elementary-20180608.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">a year without fights</a>. I think of what she’s doing and I tremble. I feel reverent. I think of the once-a-month phone calls I make to my state senator, the stories I write that try to make people laugh — it’s necessary, I know, but with the few people I make feel a little better, I wish I could figure out how to do as much straight-up <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">good</em> with my life as her.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Is that hubris? Chutzpah? A wish to touch more other lives, and my own basic egocentrism? Or is it that same feeling we get when people we know die, wanting to absorb their life’s glory into our own?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">It is neither, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it’s covetousness — the kind we talk about in the Bible, the kind that’s not <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">I wish I had that</em><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"> </em>but <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">how can I get one too,</em> the kind where we see greatness and it inspires us to do great things. It’s been eons since I’ve talked to a stranger but maybe I should. It’s been forever since I’ve put on Tori Amos, since I’ve listened to music that made me dance without thinking about it. Our long winter is over. Maybe I should.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bostankorkulugu/9390275901/in/photolist-cwNsqL-qVro9k-pHiRq7-TRWsvi-25W2Tmv-4NsRGt-fiMBSD-9uFTZy-5kmEmj-cvwWtW-e7fGSU-3rJWqj-dENwnx-TLz6io-qLvDqX-ce4b9S-91UyWm-UEBApN-2Qb6ZN-6r1U4K-F9VKMd-qN6h4C-7kohki-8SdE5T-dmRR3P-5jntzm-MDxYv-3psU8Q-mUKsVP-6LwbYZ-8HQM1u-TDKoBD-dMFPGX-5Q6mn6-9BSytz-92eZax-dzAU9V-kce3YA-5DpV3q-WirDWZ-65TFqp-9io2Ez-S4RWtA-kBLUa6-b3i5m6-dPNLg5-pW5YRV-paQQff-rnG7bi-anE9r1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">photo</a> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bostankorkulugu/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Bostankorkulugu</a></em></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-84799122399985705912021-01-12T16:19:00.004-05:002022-02-03T08:56:09.295-05:00 Sympathy Pains for the Speaker’s Stand<p>I wrote a new poem! <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/sympathy-pains-for-the-speakers-stand/">Go here</a> to read the whole thing. Usually I write (well, usually I try to write) on paper, because I take more time with each word, the physical effort of it. Today I had too much to do, and I just opened the posting screen and let the poem all fall out. I knew exactly the image that it <i>should</i> have, but by now (January 2021, still a week after the Capitol insurrection) we're all sick of that image. A little creative Googling, and I found this. Felt right. And just enough of a twist on the original image. (I tried to find a source for it, but couldn't. Whoever created it, <i>fait accompli.</i>)</p><p>Anyway, here's the poem.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbKlimw9O-9ZGcAJLz3PPdOSP9vOe-4dJ8M8gZ81zThR_C8ZrHcUdN8mlgvvEfzVv1oGjedMaEiBTpmbQEZylQ2HvtsnOx0vz2K41Tsu-LkKJ26j3PM5R2c9STOOSy_mfKTw4JQreYgeA/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="736" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbKlimw9O-9ZGcAJLz3PPdOSP9vOe-4dJ8M8gZ81zThR_C8ZrHcUdN8mlgvvEfzVv1oGjedMaEiBTpmbQEZylQ2HvtsnOx0vz2K41Tsu-LkKJ26j3PM5R2c9STOOSy_mfKTw4JQreYgeA/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I’ve been drinking soup out of mugs in the morning<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />calling it coffee<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />stretching my mouth wider so that<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />nobody notices the noodles</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">These days I feel so sorry for the world<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />everyone is upset about a faraway foreign government<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />being overthrown in Washington<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />I’m just like, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">at least it’s not your family</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">This morning my flavor of coffee is my own anxiety<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />and I’m blowin’ on it right now cause it’s too hot<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Needing the simple on/off switch of caffeine<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />while everything else is too unreliable</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Feels a little too much like an abandoned store<br />at the end of an apocalypse, mobs of moms and incels<br />ransacking baseball bats and canned vegetables<br />while I’m patiently waiting in a line that never advances</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Me, I’m nothing<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />selfless self-important something stuck on the way to salvation<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />trying to feel the pain of the universe<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />and drown out my own while I’m at it<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Me I’m nothing and I like it that way</p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-48564196356571764102020-06-07T13:13:00.004-04:002022-02-03T09:04:01.112-05:00Monument Valley, a poem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLdmigSQW-KNYem564oNkdr7Ebkdjvlq9x967mLTU5XjeaAnUEAuoakzLEbcm8hw5ihdQQK3gUhhs4T9YGpLHzzjEQdjIPRaglbPs7N099ux6WH8v1IBEG3fqPFyViIkSHYFTdsLHUnMQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="882" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLdmigSQW-KNYem564oNkdr7Ebkdjvlq9x967mLTU5XjeaAnUEAuoakzLEbcm8hw5ihdQQK3gUhhs4T9YGpLHzzjEQdjIPRaglbPs7N099ux6WH8v1IBEG3fqPFyViIkSHYFTdsLHUnMQ/" width="275" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">nails across the blackboard <br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />of my sleep.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />then drive myself crazy till sunset.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Freed prisoners will commit a crime<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />to return to the solace of jail.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I’ve been listening to music by dead people<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />hoping to set their souls at ease</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">though it might be because there’s nothing<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />I want to listen to.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Tonight I am having trouble surrendering<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />to the night, my body quaking </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />from the maelstrom of my head</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">How I wish for something diagnosable<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The ability to put a limit to my problems, say <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">this is it</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">draw a box around them<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />then step outside it</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">G-d just seems to never want tonight to end<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Wondering what happens if I start walking among them<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />and don’t stop till I reach what comes next<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />______<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Image from page 138 of </em><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Call_of_the_Stars/yeLPAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend</a> <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">(1919)</em></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-50583524504928912172020-05-19T13:14:00.002-04:002022-02-03T09:05:58.685-05:00There Is Always a Graffiti Maker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/3831071990_6207a70ac7_o-1155x770.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="533" src="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/3831071990_6207a70ac7_o-1155x770.jpg" width="800" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div><br /><br /></div><div><p class="has-text-align-center" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"><i style="background-color: transparent;">This is part of a story I've been writing for, yikes, way longer than it should have taken me. </i>If you want, you can read from the beginning, or just start here</em>.</p><p class="has-text-align-center" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/huge-universe-g-d-girls/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;"><</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/cross-country-lesbian-hasidic-road-trip/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">1</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/this-is-how-you-say-goodbye/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">2</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/passover-in-exile/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">3</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/kosher-road/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">4</a> <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/huge-universe-g-d-girls/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">5</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/when-i-was-a-country-song/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">6</a> <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shes-the-driver-im-the-d-j/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">7</a> 8 <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shes-the-driver-im-the-d-j/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">></a></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">In Flagstaff we checked the mileage, realized Albuquerque was only four and a half hours away. That was basically less than 2 movies. That was a tiny slice of our days. We had the longest days, didn’t we?, especially waking up early, the sun shoving through the sheer curtains in the motel room, having forgotten to smush the normal curtains closed.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Not that it mattered, because Joey kept us on schedule anyway. Joey was our matron, our den mother, our sheep dog and our shepherd and our team coach all in one: landing on top of me in the morning, then bounding over to Elyse’s bed, slopping his tongue over our faces and digging his nose into our armpits and reminding us in great amounts of glorious slobbery slime that it was time for his morning walk.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I loved walking Joey. He was no higher than my waist, but strong, always with a determination and a clear direction. Later that year, in summer, once I had made it to the East Coast and moved in with an Orthodox aspiring hip-hop DJ in a warehouse deep in Hasidic Williamsburg, I would learn from rendezvouses with kids in pizza places and kosher markets that Hasidic kids, by and large, dreaded dogs. The families had so many kids that there was no money to have pets, and no space. It puzzled me so, since the only way I managed to get up in time for morning prayers was Joey. Caring for a dog was so much like being a religious Jew: this constant presence, nagging but righteously demanding, diverting your attention away from the ego and reminding you of the miracle of Creation and the demands of a higher power.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We circled back to the row of crystal shops. They were slowly opening up, one by one, like heavy eyelids rustling up motivation after a heavy sleep. The first we entered was almost a clothes boutique for crystals, a well-dressed if slightly ’80s-looking woman who inquired what we were looking for, which colors or styles or what we wanted to correct in our lives. “Just browsing,” I half-muttered, half-swallowed up, those instincts honed in me since teenagerhood of being in stores solely to have somewhere to be, never any interest in actually buying something. To my surprise, Elyse said, quick and guilelessly, “I’m looking for a love spell.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Sure, I can show you our love potions section,” said the woman, taking us down an aisle whose shelves were sparsely populated — or was it generously spread out? — with caterpillar-like crystals crawling their way across stone, gorgeously smooth stones the softly postuled shape of breasts, with a breastlike incline and curve, with intensely spiny knifelike undersides full of sharp crystal.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Now, are we looking for a gift for a lover, or a spell to arouse the interests of someone who hasn’t yet fallen under your thrall?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“A gift,” said Elyse coyly.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">They narrowed it down to two: a darkly spiraling purple cone and a sort of cotton candy pinkish-white bowl-shaped structure. Both were distinctly more femme than anything I’d identify with Elyse, and it made me wonder about this trip, this mysterious endpoint of hers, who she might be and what sort of life might lie after these few weeks for Elyse, for Joey.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">She settled on the purple cone. The woman boxed it up, and sinking into the pillowing tissue paper it looked like Darth Vader’s evil castle tucked inside a nest of peaceful clouds. As we walked by the other stores, we couldn’t avoid window-shopping, or second-guess window-shopping, which is what you do when you’ve already bought what you set out to buy but you can’t help thinking, was it the right choice, and what if, and would they take returns. I caught sight of the proprietor of one other establishment, a hippie woman in a long flowing skirt with her hair tied in a dangling thin cloth, skin the color of the desert sand, watching me as I watched her. I had on a baseball cap over my yarmulke and I couldn’t help thinking, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">does she know I’m Jewish?</em> And then, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">is she?</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I asked Elyse if she wanted to stop anywhere. She said no, and we kept walking.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We hung out in a park with gorgeously sinister graffiti tags and waited for the people who’d made them to pass by. The town had a newspaper filled with punk-band ads and snarky personal essays, but no cool kids, no outcasts, barely anyone on the street. We lay in the grass all afternoon while Joey went wild trying to scratch his belly with his nose. It didn’t work, and we didn’t find anyone. We didn’t know who we were looking for, but once they showed up, we’d be able to tell.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The town was heating up, and the sun was just starting to lick the horizon, when we thought of dinner, and of the road. Joey stretched in the grass. Elyse checked the time.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Uh, Matt,” she said. “If we stop for dinner, we aren’t going to get there till eleven thirty.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I checked my watch. Sure enough: the day had gone, and what felt like early evening in this temperate desert town would long ago have been nightfall anywhere else.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We grabbed fast food (her: actual McDonald’s, me: peanut butter and a loaf of bread from the mini mart where we got gas), ate in the outdoor seating, then hit the road. We were both from the East Coast before this, but had spent so long living in California that the existence of other states seemed like a tease. When we passed a sign saying we’d entered New Mexico it felt like an event. And when we realized it was still a good number of hours till Albuquerque, the next city on our agenda, we slowed down and started giving the icons on the highway exits more serious attention.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Soon, we realized that was not the optimal plan. I dug out a AAA manual and started flipping pages. The only motel we could find didn’t allow pets. “It’s only an icon on a page in an old book,” I suggested. “Maybe they do in real life.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">We got there and there was an even bigger sign on the door. But the place looked so picturesque, it seemed a cruel lie. It was one of those motels where the doors had pastel colors and different numbers. The office was in its own cabin, wooden with a triangle roof, built into the side of a cliff. We sat in the car and debated whether to go in and ask, not say anything and try to sneak Joey in, or keep driving. Driving was out of the question. It was late, we were tired, and there were no buildings at all on the horizon, let alone a motel with vacant rooms.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Inside it was homely. Red velvet curtains. Framed family photos. The woman at the desk looked like a Golden Girl, her hair plastic and symmetrical, sweetly wrinkled jowls of cheeks. Her voice was the sweetest thing, and I would swear she knitted her sweater herself. She gave us a look when Elyse said two beds — we were getting used to that — and when she walked away, I whispered to Elyse, “Let’s just ask.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Elyse looked on the verge of agreeing with me. Right before the woman returned, she hissed to me, sidelong, without making eye contact, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">“Just don’t.”</em></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Here are your keys,” said the woman, slipping them across.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll just get the bags and unpack.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">On the way out the door, I said to Elyse, “What’s wrong?”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">“That,”</em> she nodded across the counter at the wall.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">There, in the center of dozens of family photos, was one with a more elaborate frame, gold, with gilt covering and a sort of genuflectable position. It was of President George W. Bush, and it was autographed. Bush, of course, had been on the radio all week, a vote on gay marriage was up, he was promising to reject it. His rejection, as we drove deeper and deeper into the country, and left the ocean farther and farther behind, was celebrated more and more, and its implications were darker and darker.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The woman at the counter, apparently resolved to our cohabitational weirdness, offered up a gentle wave as we left. I went into the car, slung a suitcase over my shoulder and held another at my side. Elyse quietly, quietly cuddled Joey against her, kept pace with me, and together, we slipped into the room.</p><p class="has-text-align-center" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/huge-universe-g-d-girls/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;"><</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/cross-country-lesbian-hasidic-road-trip/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">1</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/this-is-how-you-say-goodbye/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">2</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/passover-in-exile/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">3</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/kosher-road/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">4</a> <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/huge-universe-g-d-girls/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">5</a> <a href="http://hevria.com/matthue/when-i-was-a-country-song/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">6</a> <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shes-the-driver-im-the-d-j/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">7</a> 8 <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shes-the-driver-im-the-d-j/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">></a></p></div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-35480463050593927952020-04-21T13:19:00.003-04:002022-03-09T13:34:23.852-05:00The Beauty of Being Disappointing<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/counting-fingers-1155x770.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/counting-fingers-1155x770.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Last night we were one week and five days into the seven-week, seven-day cycle of counting the omer, our contemporary verbal gesture toward the ancient pentecostal offering of a sheaf of ripe grain with a sacrifice immediately following the commencement of the grain harvest and the First Fruits festival (that smart-sounding text lifted unapologetically from Wikipedia).</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Anyway, if you don’t know: each night, starting on the second night of Passover, going till the eve of the <span style="box-sizing: border-box; color: blue;"><u style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;" title="Shavuos, if you didn't know">Feast of Weeks</span></u></span>, we count, out loud, the number of the night. Each one represents a combination of kabbalistic emanations. Each one can heal a different part of your soul. And the theory is, after 49 days, you’ll heal your whole self. And each night, as long as you haven’t missed a day, you say a blessing.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">The past few years, in spite of my normal everyday forgetfulness — or perhaps because of it — I’ve been exceedingly vigilant about counting omer, every night, with a blessing. The past few years (oh, hey, maybe it’s already up to the past <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">several </em>years) I’ve made it all the way to Day 49. I’ve signed up for alerts from both <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2907734/jewish/Omer-Counter.htm" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Chabad.org</a> and <a href="https://www.myzmanim.com/alertsdemo.aspx" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">MyZmanim</a>.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">And this year — in spite of my vigilance of the past few years, or perhaps because of it — I screwed up.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">On the very second night.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">It was Shabbos. It was the dead center of a three-day yontif, without electricity or internet or text alerts or friends or walking to shul or the grouchy guys in the back of the shul.* It was a little bit of a personal whirlwind, and a little personally tempestuous.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Look, I’ve been through much worse — including kid-related incidents and accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents in the middle of evening prayers — and I still managed to get the night’s count in.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">But this year, the seder became an all-consuming tsunami. How am I going to get all this stuff done? am I going to order food from a caterer, when usually we make everything by hand, down to ketchup and chips? how can I afford it? do they not do delivery? can a taxi pick it up? how do I bridge the distance between the store, who will only bring the order to the door, and the taxi driver, who will load it into the car but won’t go to the door? what are we going to <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">do</em> for a three-day period of no electricity, video chats, or <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Hamilton </em>dance parties?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">It was so stressful. It was so wonderful. It was so intense that after the seders, there was nothing to do but sink into the sad silence of aloneness, reading too much and waiting for the books to talk back to me, trying to suck meaning out of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">The Particulars of Rapture</em> because it’s the closest I have to a dvar Torah, I was trying to ignore my thoughts, my obsessions, my brain in overdrive.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px; text-align: left;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">And, I guess, also ignoring that overlap of the rational mind and the free-associative where I ask myself at some point each day, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">have you counted yet?</em> And then course-correct when I haven’t.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Sometimes I forget to count until the next morning. Occasionally, I forget until later that day. This is the first time in a long time that I’d forgotten, not yet back into the rhythm of things, into <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">any</em> rhythm in these chaotic times where nothing is normal, until the entire next day.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">The first few days, post-blessing, my count felt supremely ineffectual. Like, since I’d forgotten to heal that one particular aspect of myself (it was the kindness of stringency, dammit! Maybe if I’d gotten the kindness of stringency down, I would’ve been able to get through the 47 subsequent gates!), all the other healings are closed off to me. I spent a day and a half feeling crushed, a bombed-out feeling of squashed-ness that comes to me entirely too often these days, like when the list of mourners at my synagogue is a dozen people long instead of one or two, or when my tefillin were stolen — this idea that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something I both needed to do and was simultaneously unable to do.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Or the things I should’ve done at my desk the last day of work before quarantine, before we knew what the world would turn into. Or the ways I’ve rephrased saying things in my head a million times, or the ways I’ve tried to redo things, or undo things, that are now irrevocably done. There are the things in our lives we can control, the things we can’t, and the things we could have, and we didn’t, and now we just have to suck it up and make it better, deal with all the shtuss that’s being flung at us and treat each piece as peacefully as we can.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I can still count. I <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">do</em> still count, once a day, usually during prayers, sometimes not till after. I don’t say a blessing.** And it feels like I’ve lost that potentiality, that mitzvah I could have fulfilled, and could still be fulfilling right now, a moment that’s forever gone, like a saccharine meme of a butterfly darting away from fumbling fingers.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">On the other hand, it’s a gift — a gift of a different sort. I know there’s no way I’ll complete my 49-piece set. But now each day I count is a fractured mitzvah that I’m still trying to give wings to, an imperfect beauty that I hope is still beautiful. Last year, each night I counted sefira was a rung on an ever-increasingly delicate ladder, and somehow, miraculously, I made it all the way to the top.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">This year, knowing I’ve already failed, each rung can be its own journey. Beauty, glory, victory, kingship — each of these sefiros is both simultaneously un-understandable to me and eminently observable, like a giant dragonfly I’ve been chasing, who’s gotten away, whose shadow now falls over me in completeness. Or who buzzes in front of me, and I can see each vibration of its body, each tremor of its wings. I can appreciate it in a way that I never could have if I was trying to catch it.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I wish I hadn’t missed the count. I hope next year I’ll be able to remember each night — I also hope, by the way, that we can all actually be around other humans on Passover, and that we’re all healthy, and that we spend it with the people we’re meant to. For this year, however, I know we’re in exile, and with the taste of that bitterness in my mouth, I’ll try to do each day’s count as its own flawed worship. A worship that might not be quite worthy of a blessing, but still is what G-d wants me to be doing, but still is all that I can do.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />__<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />* — I feel completely at liberty to complain about the grouchy guys in the back of the shul, as I have of late, in my middle-aged complacency, become one of those very same grouchy guys.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />** — Actually, according to the Komarna Rebbe (and according to my friend <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/tried-quit-music-god-said-no/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">Alan</a>), I can still count with a blessing. But according to most authorities, including the ones I hold by, I can’t.</p></div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-78761053972881527822019-08-14T12:00:00.001-04:002019-08-14T12:00:20.074-04:00It's a Whole Spiel launch party!Hey! My story "Find the River" is about to be published in the collection <i>It's a Whole Spiel, </i>alongside luminaries like Alex London and David Levithan and Mayim Bialik. Hopefully I'll be able to share an excerpt soon! But if you're around NYC on Sept. 17, you can hear a whole bunch of us get out our pre-Tishrei rage at Books of Wonder. It's free!<br />
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matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-44049777428667061012019-07-02T11:14:00.002-04:002022-12-07T09:04:27.317-05:00Sweater DogThis is <a href="https://madcapreview.com/issue-10/"><i>Madcap Review</i> #10</a>, and herewith are two poems of mine that are published therein.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2SD24XHn-0x2sz5qq3BFHxDAhrAlwIpYAmknQcUZtwokgsJiWCRTozQLGZa63UAnm0OKOMgjXJtc2Lojo-c9HeNCd0vux58GnwrCMVVOma_jOhcIbULBAGnf_gVNjGKfjGecHmDePiw/s1600/issue-10-cover.jpg"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2SD24XHn-0x2sz5qq3BFHxDAhrAlwIpYAmknQcUZtwokgsJiWCRTozQLGZa63UAnm0OKOMgjXJtc2Lojo-c9HeNCd0vux58GnwrCMVVOma_jOhcIbULBAGnf_gVNjGKfjGecHmDePiw/s400/issue-10-cover.jpg" width="271" /></a><br />
<h4 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Sweater Dog Brings Himself Joy</h4>
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<span style="color: #333333;">The happiest tiny dog<br /></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">is kicking up dirt in his sweater</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">His paws don’t scratch much grass<br /></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">but tiny shitlike flakes snow all over</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; orphans: 2; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The only mess he can make<br /></span><span style="border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">so delightfully constipated</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; orphans: 2; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here's <a href="https://madcapreview.com/issue-10/matthue-roth-sweater-dog/">the poem on their site</a>. It really happened! One morning I was walking to work and this enormously tiny weiner dog was frolicking in the freshly unsnowed grass, kicking it up all over the place. It felt like he couldn't get it out and was just using the dirt as a substitute to make him feel better about himself. The owner wasn't looking at all. The dog stopped and looked straight at me. I think we shared a moment. I hope he felt better about himself.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">They also published another poem of mine, <a href="https://madcapreview.com/issue-10/matthue-roth-my-jesus-fear/">My Jesus Fear</a>. Really, you might want to just go and <a href="https://madcapreview.com/issue-10/">read the whole dang issue</a>, which has a weirdly labyrinthine clickthrough pattern and is really strange and enjoyable, and has a great deal of good, freaky art.</span></div>
matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-34802004543696525422019-05-07T11:06:00.001-04:002019-05-07T11:06:50.797-04:00All hail Zuby Nehty, guardians of Weird Music forever 🤘Today I wrote about the odyssey of the second (and first) times I saw <a href="http://zubynehty.cz/">Zuby Nehty</a>, one of my favorite bands. In the story, I describe them as "Operation Ivy meets They Might Be Giants," which I realize is a bit of an insider name-drop. (I try to avoid mentioning too many obscure bands, unless of course I'm writing about them, since some reviewers complained when<i> <a href="http://bit.ly/thegoldbergs">Goldbergs</a> </i>came out that I was too punk-rock with my band knowledge. But here, I think it's ok.)<br />
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This happened almost 20 years ago, and I'm startled I remember this much. As with all nonfiction, I'm nervous that it means more to me than it ever could mean to anyone else. But that's why I'm sharing it, I guess. Here's how I found out about Zuby Nehty, and part of why I love them so much.<br />
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "Playfair Display", serif; font-size: 37.5px; font-weight: 700; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/a-concert-at-the-end-of-prague/">A Concert at the End of Prague</a></span><br />
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For a year I lived in Prague. I was living deep in the middle of my own thoughts, desperately wanting to find my own inner Kafka, kind of suspecting that even Kafka didn’t really want to find <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">his</em> inner Kafka. Eastern Europe appealed to me, part because of its historical Judaism, part because it was just so damn <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">vampiric.</em></div>
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I signed up for a study-abroad program — because my American school didn’t have a program available in the country, I enrolled directly in the Czech foreign-student program. Several students from another program were on my flight, a more lavish American program, staying in dorms that faintly resembled hotel rooms. We were housed in the more modest Czech student dorms, a fake-wooden-paneled Communist affair with mattresses stuffed with sawdust and a single receptionist posted at the door — the same blank-faced woman sat there, day and night — who did not know, or steadfastly refused, to speak English.</div>
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We were a motley crew: a handful of Americans, one or two representatives from an assortment of European countries, and several Finns. Weirdly, they all were Czechophiliacs, knowledgeable in both the country’s history and its contemporary culture, as though a whole gang of the coolest kids in Helsinki’s premier art school all climbed on a plane one day and, to their mutual surprise, found that they’d all bought tickets for the same place. </div>
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{<a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/a-concert-at-the-end-of-prague/">read more</a>}</div>
matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-80079233772367149562019-04-09T10:01:00.000-04:002019-04-14T08:01:51.631-04:00A bissel Shtisel for your morningI have a <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shtisel-and-giggles/">new poem</a> on Hevria and I hope you like it. Without overtly intending to, it covers my 3 big themes: the human relationship with the Divine, imposter syndrome, and public transportation.<br />
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<img src="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/shtisel-1170x585.jpg" width="410" /><br />
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In the exiled world, Jews have<br />
phone calls and Facebook to keep up<br />
with yontifs and life events<br />
<br />
In New York I come up empty. A funeral across<br />
Boro Park, streets shut off, Hasidim rend clothes<br />
and scream to Shomayim. In Manhattan<br />
<br />
I heard nothing. I davened mincha<br />
between meetings, prayed to my food and<br />
nobody caught it but me and G-d.<br />
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[ <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/shtisel-and-giggles/">keep reading</a> ]matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-7607480983064751552019-03-25T06:11:00.000-04:002019-04-08T06:15:33.301-04:00G-d's Little Obstacle CourseI wrote this poem a while ago, but wasn't really sure what to do with it. One of those things that seemed too cheesy to non-religious people and too heretical to religious people. But necessity is the evil stepmother of creativity, and I had a post due for Hevria, which -- inspired? no, demanded -- that this poem and I get to know each other better.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRlU_LwN2lhJt4HJ5KSRuWhd3YlyhEwOrUat3ssxjwsWCxXWBiVjhWQVA1zi1rxqdYs0IpYxjhhRaAwJKlP6SqtpzfdPEo82LsrG9Q1g5e16XCJnWpcW30ftSiNLxU3BUPuFZOTe_4avA/s1600/poop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="625" data-original-width="960" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRlU_LwN2lhJt4HJ5KSRuWhd3YlyhEwOrUat3ssxjwsWCxXWBiVjhWQVA1zi1rxqdYs0IpYxjhhRaAwJKlP6SqtpzfdPEo82LsrG9Q1g5e16XCJnWpcW30ftSiNLxU3BUPuFZOTe_4avA/s320/poop.jpg" width="410" /></a></div><br />
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I believe in G-d today<br />
and I think it’s making me less clumsy<br />
stopping to notice the patterns in everything<br />
once you’ve given up the excuse<br />
of chaos<br />
<br />
flower petals<br />
the bunching together of eyelids<br />
of girls who look at me<br />
and crap<br />
<br />
especially crap<br />
laid out on the sidewalk<br />
like an obstacle course<br />
a rhythm and reason to its fall,<br />
impossible to avoid<br />
all trying to catch my feet<br />
no way to get around all of them<br />
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[ <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/g-ds-little-obstacle-course/">read the rest</a> ]matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-43265707332553077662019-03-11T06:21:00.000-04:002019-04-08T06:44:44.831-04:00My Slow-burning Obsession with Steven MnuchinThis is a weird one. Sometimes I'll start thinking about Steven Mnuchin and get so mad. Other times he just seems like a paradigm of all that is weird about the Trump administration -- not <i>wrong</i> (although that, too) but <i>weird</i> -- how Trump mocked Hillary for her Goldman Sachs connections and then dragged this guy into the White House, the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6518391/">portfolio of movies</a> he's invested in, including (but not limited to) <i>The Lego Movie, </i>the Thomas Pynchon adaptation <i>Inherent Vice, </i>and <i>Mad Max: Fury Road, </i>and the way his wife invites rubbernecking, <a href="https://gawker.com/asma-al-assad-a-rose-in-the-desert-1265002284">Asma al-Assad</a> style.<br />
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But most of all it's this picture, and the accompanying <a href="https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/930875013648887808?lang=en">tweet</a> by Christopher Ingraham that seemed so sad and poetic and weirdly hopeful, that made me want to write this poem, and which I sampled for the last two verses. There it is. My confession of love. Steven Mnuchin, I hope you're happy. Now please take care of this country.<br />
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<br />
With enough money <br />
Steven believes <br />
you can change minds <br />
<br />
The way his name slips by<br />
in the credits for Avengers<br />
and The Lego Movie<br />
<br />
to show his old bullies<br />
whatever they wanted<br />
to do to him, it backfired<br />
<br />
Steven marks his territory <br />
like a bulldog on a Sunday outing<br />
<br />
The United States, Steven says <br />
is the greatest country <br />
to invest in<br />
<br />
and we are his investment<br />
Steven shouldn’t be this happy in life<br />
but somehow figured it out<br />
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[ <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/the-autobiography-of-steven-mnuchin/">keep reading</a> ]matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-76200557150476368052019-01-28T06:45:00.000-05:002019-04-08T06:56:10.961-04:00How to Offend the JewsGotta tell you, most of my posts on Hevria don't get much mileage in terms of feedback -- that's mostly for <a href="http://popchassid.com/">Elad</a> and his political ilk (politilk?) -- but this was the exception. Posted this and, the next time I checked Facebook (I've been staying off Facebook for the most part, because Russians), I got this rebuke from someone who, I'm not sure if they're Jewish or not, but her name is Hana Grossman:<br />
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As a mentor and editor, I always tell writers to just ignore this stuff. Your job is to create; your power is in creativity; and while dialogue might come out of it, some people are just there to troll. (Ms. Grossman, I will try not to assume but instead create a likely fictional reality, didn't even make it to the first line of my poem.)<br />
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As a writer, though, that shit dives straight under my skin. So I wrote back:<br />
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<div class="_3058 _ui9 _hh7 _6ybn _s1- _52mr _43by _3oh-" data-hover="tooltip" data-tooltip-content="19 February 2019 at 12:53" data-tooltip-position="right" id="js_cn" style="background-color: #0099ff; border-radius: 1.3em; box-sizing: content-box; clear: right; float: right; margin: 1px 0px; max-width: 70%; outline: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 6px 12px 7px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div aria-label="I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you actually got to read the poem. I try not to tell people what a poem is about - I think it limits the poem's power - but I don't really think it's about how I (or anyone) sees non-Jews at all; I think it's about the struggle between wanting to follow halacha, or Jewish laws, and wanting to live autonomously by your own rules." class="_aok" style="color: white; font-family: inherit; outline: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;" tabindex="0">
<span class="_3oh- _58nk" style="font-family: inherit; user-select: text;">I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you actually got to read the poem. I try not to tell people what a poem is about - I think it limits the poem's power - but I don't really think it's about how I (or anyone) sees non-Jews at all; I think it's about the struggle between wanting to follow halacha, or Jewish laws, and wanting to live autonomously by your own rules.</span></div>
<div aria-label="I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you actually got to read the poem. I try not to tell people what a poem is about - I think it limits the poem's power - but I don't really think it's about how I (or anyone) sees non-Jews at all; I think it's about the struggle between wanting to follow halacha, or Jewish laws, and wanting to live autonomously by your own rules." class="_aok" style="color: white; font-family: inherit; outline: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;" tabindex="0">
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<div aria-label="I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you actually got to read the poem. I try not to tell people what a poem is about - I think it limits the poem's power - but I don't really think it's about how I (or anyone) sees non-Jews at all; I think it's about the struggle between wanting to follow halacha, or Jewish laws, and wanting to live autonomously by your own rules." class="_aok" style="outline: none !important;" tabindex="0">
<span class="_3oh- _58nk" style="user-select: text; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: white;">by the way, I'm not really on facebook much, but if you'd like to talk further, here's my email.</span></span></div>
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<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Anyway, you should read it. Let me know if you're offended please!<br />
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<h2>
There Are Such Goyim in the World</h2>
I love how goyim hug<br />
so perfectly freaking friendly<br />
like the only reason they’re not married<br />
is, why waste all that time at a party?<br />
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They eat food from anywhere<br />
and eat the same amount of food all week.<br />
They jump out of bed and straight<br />
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[ <a href="https://hevria.com/matthue/there-are-such-goyim-in-the-world/">keep reading</a> ]matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-71779726568698407342018-12-18T08:50:00.001-05:002022-02-03T08:52:57.639-05:00The Rebbe in the Basement<p> </p><div class="hero-wrap clearfix hero-15 tipi-row content-bg no-par mask-loaded" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 3px; max-width: 1230px; overflow: hidden; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; transition: all 0.5s ease 0.3s; width: 1123px;"><div class="meta-wrap hero-meta tipi-m-typo elements-design-1 clearfix tipi-row" style="bottom: -1px; box-sizing: border-box; left: 561.5px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 1230px; padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; position: absolute; text-align: center; transform: translateX(-50%); width: 1123px; z-index: 5;"><div class="meta tipi-xs-12 tipi-m-8" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 30px 15px 15px 30px; position: relative; width: 708.656px;"><div class="title-wrap" style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><h1 class="entry-title title flipboard-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 2.5rem; letter-spacing: 0em; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 10px 0px 0px;">The Rebbe in the Basement</h1></div></div></div></div><div class="single-content contents-wrap tipi-row content-bg clearfix article-layout-36" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; height: auto !important; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 1230px; padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; padding-top: 30px; position: relative; transition: all 0.5s ease 0.3s; width: 1123px; z-index: 1;"><div class="tipi-cols clearfix" style="background: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; height: auto !important; margin-left: -15px; margin-right: -15px; position: relative;"><main class="site-main tipi-xs-12 main-block-wrap block-wrap tipi-l-8 tipi-col clearfix" style="background-position: center center; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: cover; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: none; height: auto !important; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; min-height: 0px !important; padding-left: 45px; padding-right: 45px; position: relative; width: 728.656px;"><article style="box-sizing: border-box; height: auto !important; min-width: 0px;"><div class="entry-content-wrap clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box; height: auto !important; padding-top: 0px;"><div class="entry-content body-color clearfix link-color-wrap progresson" style="box-sizing: border-box; height: auto !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York, Upper East Side: “Are you here to see the Rebbe?” someone asks, a guy I haven’t seen in maybe a decade, shouting over five or six heads in the two or three feet of space between us.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It’s a crowded, windowless basement, deep in a part of Manhattan I never expected to find myself in. I got off the subway near the 59th Street Bridge, which may have been where Simon & Garfunkel hung out 50 years ago but now is just a neat mess of shiny apartment buildings, most decked out with holly for the season with a few darkened windows where there’s probably Jews hiding.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjuMbBh65YnyRk8sXx3uuUmskpGoCnLTEwoCAdIBefe7y_ndD3SjKcSC4QP3XfT93F7A-0OAFquvZCkLzx4MEgr6L3Hmis2lTNUZhgfjYu1ecbRig45S3VIIDUr9HYs2nZYbyzxMdVGlfKQS1AOG2-AcEiJ4coGMSY-zCIa0V1zgOILvTaf-fqnuTE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjuMbBh65YnyRk8sXx3uuUmskpGoCnLTEwoCAdIBefe7y_ndD3SjKcSC4QP3XfT93F7A-0OAFquvZCkLzx4MEgr6L3Hmis2lTNUZhgfjYu1ecbRig45S3VIIDUr9HYs2nZYbyzxMdVGlfKQS1AOG2-AcEiJ4coGMSY-zCIa0V1zgOILvTaf-fqnuTE" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">My teacher from yeshiva, Leibish, who’s just taken over from the tzaddik Sholom Brodt, was speaking. A </span><a href="https://www.peydalidmusic.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">band I really like</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> was arranged to play. I had a work event late; I’d be in the city anyway, and I’d been a little antisocial lately but my best friend in town was moving to Texas so I might as well force myself to stay out a bit, right?</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The apartment on the invite was dead. The doorman looked at me askew, but I told him the number and he called up once — no answer — but he tried again and he said into the phone, “Niccolo, someone named Matthue to see you?”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Now, when you’re not just Jewish but Orthodox, and not just Orthodox but into weird hippie mystical occult stuff, there aren’t too many people with names like Niccolo. There aren’t many Matthues, either, and I recognized the name as one I’d heard in Crown Heights, one Purim several years back, when he asked what kind of Hasid I was and I said Biala Ostrova and he literally fell on the floor in surprise because he was, too, and there aren’t too many of us in the world. The joke is, most Hasidic rebbes show up with a carful of followers; in Biala, you get a follower and a car full of rebbes.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">He tells the concierge, the class is somewhere else, and it’s a cold night so I don’t blame him for staying home but I say, “Could you tell him Matthue says hi?” and the guy looks at me like, </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">what are you, in fifth grade,</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> and asks if I just want to talk. I take the phone, hungering for that little bit of connection, and he says, “Good to hear you, brother, I’ll see you in a few minutes, right?” and I figure I’ve misread the situation and I figure I’d better take the address and start walking.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It’s 18 blocks and an avenue or two. I’ve been out of Manhattan nights so long the numbers don’t naked any sense to me and I don’t know whether the walk is normal or ridiculous, but it’s to see Leibish, which is worth a little sacrifice. Along the way I pass diners, old men in jeff caps walking tiny dogs, single people crying or laughing into phones, and it’s so cold you can’t tell which and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a hundred years ago I would’ve stopped to ask if they were okay, but tonight I’m already an hour late, I’m no longer good with people, I’m not looking for adventures, just a way to get home as early as possible — I have to be up for the kids — and I don’t know where I’m going, and it occurs to me that the new address has no apartment number, an impossibility in this neighborhood.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I walk there, and I walk past it, and there on the basement door is the number of the place. The plaque says BOMA and there’s no windows, but there is singing, and I go in.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The room is packed. A wall of tall potted plants separates men from women. There are guys with long beards and guys with no beards, guys in black and white and guys in crosshatched business shirts, guys with empty plates, guys still stuffing their faces. The smell of kugel hangs rich in the air, this bubbling hot pudding of pulverized potatoes and onions and oil, and it’s the most addictive thing in the world, like French fries mixed with cocaine, and a whole mosh pit separates me from the kitchen, but getting some is the furthest thing from my mind.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Leibish is talking.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">He’s gray now. His beard is an upside-down Afro, his payos are frizzy antennae plugged into another world, and his voice has not aged a day, that half-singing, half-whispering voice like he’s always about to tell you a secret.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“The </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">yud</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> in G-d’s name, the </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">י,</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> is infinity. The black part of the letter is just a dot, it’s almost all white. The next letter </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">hay</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, the </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">ה</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, is the space we have to make for G-d in this world, not the world of infinity, but how we harness that infinity and constrict it and bring it into our lives. Like, this world is nothing! You can’t take it too seriously! Here, I’m going to tell you a joke. Let me think of a joke.”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">This is what I crossed the city for. It’s already 9 p.m., I’m barely going to stay here an hour, but if all I get is this moment of Leibish and his Torah, that’s all I need, that’s what I was meant to be here for.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">He speaks, and he speaks for a while, and then we move into the basement apartment next door, where the band is setting up. Someone hands Leibish his saxophone and it sort of swings around his body. He contorts into it, like Coltrane, like a baby spooning its mother. And maybe this is the time I get up and start thinking about the potato kugel upstairs? Except I’m probably volunteering to help move stuff. Carrying the microphone stands like harpoons, swinging two chairs on each hip almost like I know what I’m doing. Down the stairs, back up again.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Are you here to see the Rebbe?”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I forget his name. Someone I haven’t seen in a decade. The place is even more packed, if that’s possible. The Rebbe? Which rebbe? I didn’t even have to ask. I knew which rebbe.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Which rebbe?”</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I asked anyway. These days, I think, I am too much </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">hay</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> with not enough </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">yud,</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> all contraction and no infinity. I get done what needs to get done. It’s getting late. Bedtime is calling.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box; float: left; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“The holy Ostrova Biala Rebbe! You know him, don’t you?”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">That’s one way to say it. When I was in Israel, pulled there by a new wife and father-in-law whose motives I had yet to completely grok, I resented Israel for not being San Francisco. Then I started in the yeshiva where Leibish taught, and at night one of my teachers would take me to the office of the Ostrova Biala Rebbe, where we waited for hours for him to repeat our names over and over again, give us advice for love and jobs and friends and art, pray with us, and pinch our cheeks with a grip that was alarmingly firm.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“He’s here? In New York?”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“In this apartment, in the back room.”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I ran to the back room. The door was shut, of course. In front of it was Niccolo, who had stood back up since the last time we met. “Is the Rebbe here?” I gasped out, breathless.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">He told me he was. He told me I could see him. He told me there was just one person in line, just as a short Israeli woman left, together with her interpreter, and half a dozen people leaped from all corners of the apartment to bum rush the door.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Niccolo stepped in. He had all the decorum and reserve of a documentary moderator. “Now, who has an appointment,” he said, “and who just wants a blessing?”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">A blessing seemed like the 10-items-or-less express lane. I would take a blessing. That’s all I really wanted, right? To be blessed.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">We waited. The quickie blessings seemed not to be so quick. In the meantime, the as-yet-unblessed of us hung out outside, talking, trading stories, figuring out where we knew each other from. I freaked. My friend Hillel, who when we used to hang out were both Kafka nerds and now he’s in charge of a whole school, hundreds of kids’ minds being formed by him, talked me down. “Don’t prepare things to ask about or things you want to tell him,” he said. “Just let it happen.”</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Be the </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">hay</i><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">,” I agreed.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">It was my time, and I went in. Niccolo, who I realized somewhere in the waiting was actually the conductor of this whole operation, the concert that was still going downstairs and the Rebbe and his stalkers, stayed inside. In part of my aforementioned freakout, I remembered in a rush that the Rebbe only spoke Hebrew, and then I remembered that I spoke no Hebrew.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">And then we were face to face.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. I will tell you that he said shehechiyanu, the prayer that you say on special occasions, when he saw me. I’ll tell you that he made me say my family’s names, including all my kids’ ridiculously long full Hebrew names, and he said “is that it?” when I was finished. We talked for two minutes. We talked for an eternity. We laughed a lot, and I can’t remember at all why we were laughing.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">He said something that made Niccolo and I both jump up and down. He didn’t pinch my face, but he slapped my cheek, several times, hard, and I literally lost my balance. (Full disclosure: I’d been up since 6, and blowing on me might have made me lose my balance at that point.) He said one thing that was totally unexpected, that I’d only been thinking about for a day or two, and when he said it he looked surprised and turned to Niccolo. Niccolo didn’t look surprised at all. “Rebbe, of course you knew,” he said.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">And then I left, and then I stumbled to the subway. I’d only taken a few steps when I remembered that, in the waiting room, someone had told me to look outside the door. “The Rebbe’s not the first wise person to have a minyan here,” he’d said. I looked, and this is what I saw.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-21796 aligncenter embed-vis" data-wp-pid="21796" height="960" sizes="(max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px" src="http://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-960x960.jpg" srcset="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-960x960.jpg 960w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-500x500.jpg 500w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-200x200.jpg 200w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-150x150.jpg 150w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-768x768.jpg 768w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-620x620.jpg 620w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-225x225.jpg 225w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-560x560.jpg 560w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-800x800.jpg 800w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198-473x473.jpg 473w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20181218_004450_198.jpg 1080w" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: left; display: block; height: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 20px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: all 0.4s cubic-bezier(0.3, 0.7, 0.7, 1) 0s;" width="960" /></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I never expected to be on the Upper East Side. But I guess G-d has plans for us all, even those ghosty areas of Manhattan.</span></p></div></div></article></main></div></div>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-74060033622693702752018-11-08T22:30:00.000-05:002018-11-08T22:30:02.178-05:00Stubby Teeth: a new short storyMy story <a href="https://www.barzakh.net/2018-fiction/2018/3/26/stubby-teeth">Stubby Teeth</a> was just published in <i>Barzakh</i> Magazine. I'm honored to be in its pages.<br />
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So the story is a response to something my<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3UhnCHwY8RoHWIE61JKVUPtQExfFhgpte0hkDk9keiEQPCmcaA1l9JrfsnWaDq6n2H4E2XzJgo8IMv0CY9-q7TxCEUgKjYgyFxHOdKfD-4MlnADbcjVZsJCuURO1GJgrLm7u0c-g-a4E/s1600/Mali_Fischer_17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3UhnCHwY8RoHWIE61JKVUPtQExfFhgpte0hkDk9keiEQPCmcaA1l9JrfsnWaDq6n2H4E2XzJgo8IMv0CY9-q7TxCEUgKjYgyFxHOdKfD-4MlnADbcjVZsJCuURO1GJgrLm7u0c-g-a4E/s400/Mali_Fischer_17.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="300" /></a></div>
professor <a href="https://www.joshuahenkin.com/">Josh Henkin</a> told our class when I was a cocky first-semester grad student at Brooklyn College. He said (and I'm paraphrasing, and he said it better) that it's impossible to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object, a pet, or a small child, because stories are based on characters being able to act on their own, and a good story is all about your characters taking agency.<br />
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Well, I was young and eager and full of chutzpah. I was also a young father, underslept and full of conviction that not only <i>did</i> babies have agency, they were running my whole damn life. I went home and, right away, started writing this story.<br />
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I hope you like it.<br />
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Stubby Teeth</h1>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.16px;">H</span>is mother was gone, and she had never been gone before. And now he was in a very big room with a very big woman who was not his mother, and several toys, and a smattering of other kids, and no mother. The walls were white. There were no windows, and no mother. He screamed.</div>
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The scream lasted several minutes, until he had run completely out of breath. He rubbed his stubby <span style="letter-spacing: 0.16px;">teeth together while he gathered the oxygen for more.</span></div>
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A pair of woman’s hands—long fingers, chubby knuckles—sandwiched him, his back and his stomach. They rubbed and rubbed, and though he tried to squirm out of their tractor-beam pull and fight the rhythmic alternation of palms and fingertips, those large hands with their pod-like palms, steady and insistent, and their confident beat lulled him into complacency. Just why was he agitated, again? He no longer remembered.</div>
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The woman spoke to him, slow and warm. Gradually, he realized that she wasn’t trying to communicate a specific meaning or directive, as his mother did when she spoke, but rather to give a sort of human background noise, like music during his mother’s yoga or television when he was supposed to not talk to her, a meaningless string of syllables as she guided him to an area of the room with one thick oceanic carpet, on top of which sat a gaggle, a small herd, of other humans, small humans.</div>
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<a href="https://www.barzakh.net/2018-fiction/2018/3/26/stubby-teeth">Read the rest</a></div>
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<i>(Barzakh's cover by Mali Fischer.)</i></div>
matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-87265103430911990912018-11-06T08:54:00.000-05:002022-02-03T08:55:14.558-05:00A Rebel Poet Wrestles with His Rebel Kids<p></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiN_YUy91QD9Mk23azRSz9_GqmnNC6DqF8YwplgrBVU_Yl3_xt63rxAK9Ezp1irMyipKWTftBr0DnqFu92JgMh9-cSEIVemnnsI_diP4MIa503WF6rsiyOKLGmTqN2RBh8VLKRDDSAIYCOVB7B2LWc9b0aAuXQqP54dRXH8D9a00CjUwKnpE76oOwTV" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiN_YUy91QD9Mk23azRSz9_GqmnNC6DqF8YwplgrBVU_Yl3_xt63rxAK9Ezp1irMyipKWTftBr0DnqFu92JgMh9-cSEIVemnnsI_diP4MIa503WF6rsiyOKLGmTqN2RBh8VLKRDDSAIYCOVB7B2LWc9b0aAuXQqP54dRXH8D9a00CjUwKnpE76oOwTV" width="320" /></a></div></h1><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Poetry is so hard to understand. It’s like a dream, but not a full <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">dream</em> dream, more like a vivid half-waking experience with people who you aren’t sure if they’re real or not, standing in places that might never have existed.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Jake Marmer’s new collection of poems, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">The Neighbor Out of Sound</em> (<a href="https://www.upne.com/1937679781.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">buy it direct</a>) (or <a href="https://amzn.to/2OtOfiL" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;">amazon</a>)<em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">,</em> takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, but its influence stretches out way farther in both directions, toward the more distant past and the more recent one: he combines jazz with Jewish teachings, improvisation with careful rhythm and breaks, the wisdom of thousands of years of <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">chazal</em> with his own frantic, limitless thoughts.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><img alt="" class=" wp-image-20973 alignright" data-wp-pid="20973" height="455" sizes="(max-width: 329px) 100vw, 329px" src="http://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover.jpg" srcset="https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover.jpg 690w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-500x691.jpg 500w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-362x500.jpg 362w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-620x857.jpg 620w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-560x774.jpg 560w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-342x473.jpg 342w, https://hevria.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/JM_Book_cover-579x800.jpg 579w" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; display: inline; float: right; height: auto; margin-bottom: 25px; margin-left: 1.5em; margin-top: 20px; max-width: 50%; transition: all 0.4s cubic-bezier(0.3, 0.7, 0.7, 1) 0s;" width="329" />(And yes, I know it’s weird to call poems that are printed in a book “improvisations” — it sounds like a nice way of saying <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">unedited</em>. But there’s a spontaneity to these verses, a connected randomness like a really good middle-of-the-night dvar torah that comes at the end of a Shabbos tisch, where your brain connects one thing with another, geography homework with Elijah coming before the idol-worshiping priests, and everything seems to flow together in a way that makes utter sense of the universe.)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Geez, it’s hard to review poems, isn’t it?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">It might be easier just to make you read them. Two poems, placed side by side in this book, “Root-Note Nigun” and “3 A.M. Nigun,” give two different takes on the Hasidic form of melody, a type of song that, traditionally, has no words. Here’s what I mean:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Root Nigun</strong></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">this nigun is about a stick figure<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />a two-bone abstraction, solitary root<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />note, resounding its stripped chorus —</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">It keeps going, but then, a page later, we get this:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">3 A.M. Nigun</strong></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><div class="block-da-1 block-da block-da-post_middle_content clearfix" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; float: left; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 15px 15px 15px 0px;"></div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">two silences rise on each side of you<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />amplifying shadows of possession —</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">family of three — the dream of us<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />like the never-thickening liquid<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />all night poured in<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />and out of the bedroom’s cup</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">These poems are almost not poems. They’re half-poems, half jazz, the same way that Miles Davis will play a song that scales up and down in complicated patterns and then, somehow, it stumbles into a pop chorus that’s simple and catchy and gets stuck in your head all afternoon.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The poems wrestle with Judaism and G-d just as they wrestle with new fatherhood, career-hood, the unfamiliar weight of responsibility. It’s hard to go from being a snarky, provocative single person into an ostensibly responsible adult who’s not only responsible for teaching your children about traffic lights and potty training but also your own history, the old country of Ukraine, where Marmer grew up, and also the old country of New York, while living in a California paradise. He writes: “Almost three years old, on the toilet / he says: god / is everywhere / but you can’t see him, papa,” and then wryly notes: “The things we fought for / came back to bite us.” As his children discover themselves — playful, contrarian, mischievous — Marmer wrestles with his own self-discovery.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">And yes, it’s funny, and yes, it’s cute, but Marmer doesn’t stay there. He takes us to the next level, a level of intimacy and truth. It’s messy, it’s gross, it’s inexact, and it takes us to a place of raw emotional honesty. In “Writing Prompt for a Young Parent,” he writes:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">When your kids are sick, really sick, let them into your bed.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Let them cough and drool on your pillow.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />In the morning, inhale the pillow’s worth of their sweet bad breath, and<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />their pain and terror intensified by sickness —<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />the terror you must have been the source of</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Marmer straddles so many worlds in his verse, old and new, East Coast and West, jazz and Talmud, that it can sometimes feel dizzying to read them all at once. But you can’t stop. The greater effect of these pieces is a biography: not just Marmer’s story but that of his children, his parents and grandparents in Russia, his influences (from Mingus to Monk to Rebbe Meir and Sholem Aleichem) and his world. This book, this cross-section of his life, is a record of a transformation that is both singularly Marmer’s voice and an experience that touches us all.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: Lora; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;">Buy the book </em>The Neighbor Out of Sound <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1;"><a href="https://www.upne.com/1937679781.html" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank">direct</a> or on <a href="https://amzn.to/2OtOfiL" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c9a11c; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s;" target="_blank">Amazon</a>.</em></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5123673175206096526.post-64376528893325978502018-10-23T10:07:00.001-04:002022-02-03T10:14:16.177-05:00Sholom Brodt Was Not a Tzaddik<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div></div><br /><p></p><p>When wine goes in, the secrets come out. In <i><a href="https://barakhullman.com/">A Shtikel Sholom</a></i>, a new memoir of stories about his teacher and mine, Sholom Brodt, Barak Hullman writes about a drunken Simchas Torah they spent together.</p><p>“When you die,” Barak said to Rav Sholom, “everyone is going to say, ‘Oh, what a great tzaddik! Such a big rabbi!”</p><p>Sholom, who was, at these times and most others, playful and mischievous, turned hard and sober.</p><p>“G-d forbid,” he told Barak.</p><p>And Sholom, who was always thinking about G-d, who spent pretty much every moment I’d ever seen him doing things for other people, going out of his way to be kind to the students in his house and tolerant to the neighbors who swept in and ate his food and filled his rooms and stayed all hours of the day and night, maybe approached sainthood in a way that most of us wouldn’t dream of, or want to.</p><p>But he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t even a hidden tzaddik. He was a tzaddik in denial. He had such gorgeous, perfect faults. He was so good at being human.</p><p><br /></p><p>“When you die,” Barak said that night, “I’m going to shout at the top of my lungs, ‘Sholom Brodt was not a tzaddik!’ That’s going to be my final gift to you.”</p><p><br /></p><p>In the years after, Sholom would remind him of his promise. Years later, when Sholom did die, Barak said to his wife, “What am I going to do? I promised him.” You can’t, she said. People wouldn’t understand. And Barak said, “It’s a once in a lifetime deal. Do you think Sholom would want people calling him a tzaddik?”</p><p><br /></p><p>So at the end of the funeral procession, after everyone spoke, when the assembled company was about to dissemble, Barak stepped to the front. He said what he needed to say, what he’d promised Rav Sholom all this time ago.</p><p><br /></p><p>**</p><p><br /></p><p>A Shtikel Sholom is friendly in the most intimate of ways. It doesn’t have deep secrets, but it has plenty of shallow secrets, the moments that you only share with the people who know you better than anyone else, better than you know yourself.</p><p><br /></p><p>It’s the reason I felt repulsed when I first read it. Because I thought I knew Sholom like that, and I only knew the book’s author, Barak Hullman, in a cursory, across-the-shul, oh-he’s-the-guy-who-sings-a-little-too-glee-clubbish way. When my in-laws sent me a clipping of the Jerusalem Post advertisement for the book, I had to ask myself, who was writing it? Who has the chutzpah and the closeness to write 300 pages about the man who helped us survive our first year of marriage, who stayed at our Brooklyn home whenever he was called away from Jerusalem, who seemed to have something new to share, something meant only for me, every time I saw him or spoke to him?</p><p><br /></p><p>That was one of Sholom’s gifts. I wasn’t his only confidant. I wasn’t even his only student, even though his yeshiva, Simchat Shlomo in Nachlaot, fluctuated between two and ten students during the year I was there. It’s bigger now, not that numbers matter, because Simchat Shlomo’s virtue, and Rav Sholom’s virtue, was not that he attracted masses of students — the yeshiva attracted the students who needed it to exist, a yeshiva of misfits and weirdos and doubters and true believers. While I was there, my chevrusas included a comic book artist, a self-proclaimed heathen, an Internet activist with the handle Orthodox Anarchist, and a banjo player.</p><p><br /></p><p>The yeshiva was named after Shlomo Carlebach, but it took on Sholom’s personality. It may have been scant most days for morning prayers, but every week for shalosh seudos, the come-and-hear meal and meditation that closes out Shabbos, Sholom and Judy’s house was packed, and the walls swelled like the cosmic sukkah made of leviathan skin that will grow to house all the righteous at the end of days.</p><p><br /></p><p>**</p><p><br /></p><p>I don’t want to tell you about Sholom, I want to tell you about this book. And the book is such a treasure. Some chapters are only a paragraph long, some expand to a page or two. All of them are deft, funny, wise in unexpected ways.</p><p><br /></p><p>Like the one where Barak complains about a crazy guy at shul who was praying maniacally, and Sholom says that we should all merit to pray like we’re crazy.</p><p><br /></p><p>And the one where he ducked out of a rabbinical program just before the final test, telling Sholom, “I don’t want to be a rabbi,” and Sholom, thinking deeply, said, “Neither do I.”</p><p><br /></p><p>And the one where, also on Simchas Torah, a stranger shows up in a black hat and a long kapota, dancing around the shul, and it’s revealed to be Sholom, who would never wear such things, but that night his hidden self has become revealed.</p><p><br /></p><p>Reading these stories makes you profoundly sad. Not just a retroactive fear of missing out based in the past, where you wish you could just grab a time machine and wind up at a party you hadn’t known existed, but in terms of putting limits on the limitless. Sholom was infinite. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth next, or where he’d show up. When he died, he became finite. He would never be unexpected again. This book has an end.</p><p><br /></p><p>**</p><p><br /></p><p>On Shabbos I was getting water for our family’s lunch table and I reached for what we always call the Sholom pitcher. Once, while staying at our house, Sholom used a pitcher of water and accidentally cracked it. He got up early and went out to all the Jewish markets until he found a glass pitcher that matched its design almost exactly. It was no big deal! And we had other pitchers! And we barely even used pitchers! But he wanted to replace the pitcher he broke, and we didn’t even know until he replaced it. What could we say but thank you? So we did.</p><p><br /></p><p>“Be transparent to your source,” Barak quotes Sholom saying in one of these stories. “When you give someone a glass of water, they should know it’s from G-d and not from you.” I poured water for him hundreds of times, Barak writes. Every time in my head, I’d repeat, be transparent to your source, be transparent to your source.</p><p><br /></p><p>The philosopher Alain de Botton once attempted the impossible: to write an autobiography of his best friend. The effort was interesting, but it was so insular and overthought that it ended up revealing less about his subject and more about de Botton himself.</p><p><br /></p><p>This book is a treasure, a gift. I almost wish that I didn’t know Sholom before so that I could have the experience of knowing his character through this beautifully incomplete portrait. I’m sure I will go back to this book again and again, get to know its hundred-plus anecdotes, each another piece of the gorgeously complicated puzzle that was Sholom Brodt, memorize these lines as well as I know some of my favorite books. But I did know Sholom, and he still holds an infinite piece of my heart, and I’ll never be able to see the borders and the limitlessness of the person I knew, who might not have been perfect in the classical sense, who would hate my saying this, but whose mistakes were the mistakes of a tzaddik.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Buy the book A Shtickel Sholom on the author’s website or on Amazon. </i></p>matthuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14091862925316117002noreply@blogger.com0