The Rebbe in the Basement

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.

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.

My teacher from yeshiva, Leibish, who’s just taken over from the tzaddik Sholom Brodt, was speaking. A band I really like 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?

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?”

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.

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, what are you, in fifth grade, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Leibish is talking.

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.

“The yud in G-d’s name, the י, is infinity. The black part of the letter is just a dot, it’s almost all white. The next letter hay, the ה, 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.”

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.

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.

“Are you here to see the Rebbe?”

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.

“Which rebbe?”

I asked anyway. These days, I think, I am too much hay with not enough yud, all contraction and no infinity. I get done what needs to get done. It’s getting late. Bedtime is calling.

“The holy Ostrova Biala Rebbe! You know him, don’t you?”

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.

“He’s here? In New York?”

“In this apartment, in the back room.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

“Be the hay,” I agreed.

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.

And then we were face to face.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forget reality. I've got my new glasses.

So this weekend was IndieCade East, a video game convention for independent game-makers, and in line with my new job I got to go. Most of it was really wonderful, playing other people's games and stepping into their minds for a few minutes.

Tons of stuff I could tell you about if I remembered all the links, but the one that stands out right now is Gorogoa, a sort of puzzle game with amazing drawing work. You fit the pictures together and then they grow out of each other, and explaining too much is probably bad, but here's what it looks like, sometimes, anyway:

And then there was virtual reality. This is what I did. Essentially it's tiny TV monitors inside a set of goggles. The screen turns in time with you, which is uncannily accurate, and the suctiony power of the goggles sort of blinds out everything else. 

It's not THAT hi-tech, in spite of the concept, but it is surprisingly effective. I was shaking as I walked away, forgetting that in reality there were no climbing spires or castles. (Not in Queens, anyway.) Twelve-year-old me would be so pleased. So pleased and so jealous:

Downtown Seder

Last night was a culmination of good fortune, good luck, and -- as always -- my wife running late. The good fortune came in the shape of a dinner invite on the night after we finished cleaning our kitchen for Passover. The good luck was our good friends Miriam and Alan from the band Stereo Sinai inviting us to the Downtown Seder. And the running late ... well, we just won't go there.

The Downtown Seder is a creation of Michael Dorf, half postmodern religious ritual and half cabaret. Rock stars and stand-up comedians and various random famous people are each assigned one step of the seder. And then it's you in a room with bands like Stereo Sinai, comedians like Rachel Feinstein (who was on Last Comic Standing with our boy Myq Kaplan), half-band-half-comedians like Good for the Jews, and Dr. Ruth. Yes, I said Dr. Ruth.

DID YOU HEAR ME? DR. RUTH WAS AT MY SEDER.

(Yes, she's that short pink dot in the picture. We weren't sitting that far, but she is short, 4'7". My Holocaust-survivor grandfather who's 4'11" looks down at her.*)

And she read the Four Questions, too. Granted, she was not the youngest one in the room (she'll be 83 years old on June 4) but she did it, and she did it up. Backed on a bluegrass guitar by C Lanzbom, she sang the first question solo, and then instructed the audience to accompany her. "If you sing with me," she said in that undeniably adorable German accent, "I promise that you will have good sex for all the days of your life." And if we don't? "Remember," she told us, "I used to be a sniper in the Haganah."

Did I sing? You'd better believe I sang.

A few of the guests were esoteric. Others were total crowd-pleasers. Here's Stereo Sinai, courtesy of my cheapo camera-phone:

Their take on the Son Who Doesn't Know How to Ask a Question was one of only two all-out dance numbers (the other being, of course, Joshua Nelson and the Kosher Gospel Choir) -- but each act was so well-thought-out and cool and unusual that I kept wanting to call someone and let them listen. I'm not a bootleggy type of person, but I wish I had a bootleg of last night. I kept wanting to write things down. I kept wanting to remember them. Joshua Foer* summed it up: "Our tradition demands not just that we eat matzah, but that we interact with it and explain it." Or, to paraphrase Faulkner: Not only is the past not dead, it isn't even past.

Because we're Hasidic and don't get out much, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to a non-religious seder. Boxes of Manischewitz matzah on the table. Behind us, Rachel Feinstein was getting down with woman in a severe Florida-retirement hat decked with flowers. The singer of Good for the Jews was wearing a ruffled tuxedo shirt.

Yes, it was bizarre having a seder a week before Passover starts. It was bizarre having matzah on the table in Manischewitz boxes instead of knitted sleeves, and celebrating with two hundred people I'd never met. It might have been a celebration of freedom, but it was also a celebration of getting down.
_______________
* - Who also referred to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, as "the great cognitive scientist," which probably nobody else cared about but which absolutely made my night.

Eating Pork in New York

It was close to midnight, the latest I've been out in months. My friend Fred Chao had brought me to a comedy show in Chinatown, which led to some drinking in Chinatown, which led to us wandering around the streets of Chinatown with our heads full of stories and our bodies craving warmth. It was a weird feeling to get lost in those streets -- most of New York is a neat, orderly grid, but once you hit the Manhattan Bridge, Canal Street turns into a sudden mountain, half going up and half going straight down, and you're never quite sure when a street is going to splinter into three different streets and when it's going to dead-end in the middle of a block. (It's twice as cool because Fred's a comic artist and his story Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero, which takes place on these very streets, has just been excerpted in the 2010 Best American Comics.)

In the middle of all this, Fred and I both realize that we are massively hungry. My stomach muscles, through a few years of this, have grown accustomed to being both kosher and out late. My stomach growls, I reply that we are out on the town and that there are no kosher restaurants around, and it quietly sulks to itself in a corner.

Fred is not so disciplined. "I know a great place right around here," he says. And then he suddenly vanishes around a corner, disappears, and takes me along with him.

I don't usually sit with people in restaurants. I feel too much like a second-class citizen. Everyone else is pigging out, eating great-smelling food (and food always looks better in non-kosher places) and you're smiling to yourself and telling them, don't worry, you're really in the mood for ice water.

But it's late, and I haven't seen Fred in a while, and I don't want to kill the conversation. So we take our seats.

"What should I have," he asks me. "Meat or seafood?"

Is this a test? A test from God?

"I'm always weird about seafood," I say. "Not just the kosher thing. It just feels like, is that stuff really dead? Was it ever alive?"

"Okay," he says. And so he turns to the waitress and orders the pork soup.

Wham.

I manage meekly to say: "I'll just have a cold drink." And I dash for the refrigerator.

Okay. But the truth is, I'm curious about trayf. How it looks. The way it tastes. The animals it comes from. And I've also been way curious about real Chinese restaurants, the kind that real Chinese people eat in, because I've always suspected that the places where white people eat, kosher or not, are faking it, the same way that Jackie Chan exaggerates his accent in the Rush Hour movies.

Almost immediately, they bring a plate. It's just a pile of bean sprouts, with a little lemon slice sitting on top. Is that supposed to be a salad? Fred ignores it. He's like that with salads, though.

Then the bowl comes out, and it's huge. He didn't say "large" or "small," but this soup is the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. There's a stack of those special Chinese-food spoons upside down, in the same holder as the soy sauce and hot sauce. I've never seen that before. Fred takes one, and he breaks into his chopsticks, holds them close to the ground and whittles them twice, to throw off the splintery pieces. He dumps the sprouts into the soup, explaining that that's what you're supposed to do, which I never would have guessed.

And then he starts eating.

He alternates with the spoon and chopsticks, working his way through the meat and noodles. I ask him what that meat is, and from time to time he explains. The pink stuff floating on top is nearly raw. The chef does that in order to show you how fresh the meat is. Underneath, pretty much all the meat is brown or gray. There are a few marble-spattered parts, which Fred says are tendons. And then there's a white bumpy substance, which he thinks (but isn't sure) are the stomach lining.

Stomach lining! "That's gelatin!" I say.

"Are you sure? I thought gelatin was the hooves."

I frown. Instead of ice-water, I have opted for a beer, and it's hard to recall the basics of whatever I've read on animal slaughter. "You might be right," I say. "My family-in-law makes this Yiddish food thing out of cow hooves. It's these yellow cubes. I think they're called gullis?"

"Oh yeah! My family makes something like that, too," said Fred. "It's called," he said, and here ends the tale of charming culture-mixing, because he said something in Chinese that there was no way for me to understand, much less transcribe the next morning.

He scooped the last of the soup-meat dregs into his spoon with chopsticks and slurped it up. Then I let him have the last of my beer -- call me a fundamentalist zealot, but I get squeamish about pork-breath in my beer bottle -- and then we were out. 

Thanks to No-Frills Recipes for the pork pic.

Ten Things I'm Looking Forward To in New York City

Packing now. It's been a breathless pair of months in Melbourne, and it's an added awesomeness that we get to come back here in a few months for a family wedding (and a double added bonus that we could be part of the engagement in the first place, packing snow clothes and meting out advice...well, the advice we could, anyway). I'm feeling a bit down on the world for forcing me to go back to New York, and in February at that, and spending all my time behind a desk instead of, well, doing early-morning praying & working out (seriously!) in the dew and going to the park with my kid every day. And the fact that poetry shows here are as energetic and sing-alongy and fist-thumping as AC/DC shows.

Which is why I'm trying to get myself psyched for the USA.

1. Saying the words "NEW YORK CITY" and kind of getting chills.
2. Listening to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album in the East Village.
3. The first incognito day of spring.
4. My free show at Franklin Park with Penina Roth and Stephen Elliott.
5. A zillion kosher restaurants, and none of them are "America-themed."
6. Nirvana Slam. (More on that soon.)
7. Young Adult Writers Drinks Night.
8. Making our own Passover seder.
9. More little MJL internet movies.
10. ______________*

* I'm leaving this one blank, because I want to find something to take up that spot that's even better than anything I'm expecting.

Paris Hilton Is Responsible (and Jewish)

The awesome Jewish poetry magazine The Blue Jew Yorker has its new issue online today. It probably seems like I'm telling you to go read it because of my poem, "The Other Universe of Paris Hilton," which takes place in an alternate universe where Paris is responsible and Orthodox Jew (and she always wakes up to pray at exactly the right time before sunrise), and I'm a drunken heiress.

But that wouldn't be one-tenth of it. Legitimate (and goood) poet and professor Charles Bernstein gives this very Addams Family-like gothic poem called "Rivulets of Dead Jew." There's a furious poem called "It Takes Awhile" by Heather Bell, and Samuel Menashe, who's basically a living legend of poetry (don't believe me? read the MJL article), has a new poem, "Adam Means Earth," which is as brief and brilliant as anything he's ever written (and that's saying something):

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what’s in a name
READ THE REST >

But my favorite might be this tiny little poem by Gary Levine. It's a love song to his siddur.

It goes wherever I go
My little blue worn siddur
Tattered and well used, cover bent and dog eared.
Wrinkled from praying in the rain
On the way to shul on Pesach day
Wine stains on page 178 & 179
Made while standing making Kiddish by a hospital bed

READ THE REST >

Kindly Ones to Keep Us Company

I got a review copy of Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones -- a massive, 982-page paperweight of a novel about a (fictional) SS officer during the Holocaust -- and didn't immediately read it. Although the novel won one of France's major literary awards and was hailed in Europe, it's still, well, Europe. The American reviews soundly thrashed the thing, calling it bloated and pretentious and severely scatological in its humor. And then there was the size of it:

Finally, a few weeks ago I sat down to conquer the thing. It actually came at an opportune time: I had to run out of work to go to the doctor's. (I'd gotten a tick in the middle of winter, and even though I live in Brooklyn, a city without any trees or bushes or nature, I decided I needed to make sure I wasn't dying of Lyme disease.) I could run down to the medical center and wait for a walk-in. This sounded to me like the prospect of hours with nothing to do. What better time to dig into a monster such as that?

So I had this period of time, roped off, with nothing else to fill it. I dove in and started to read. And I discovered: The Kindly Ones actually is sort of compelling.

The story follows the narration of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a man with no pretense of brevity and a truly OCD mind. The story is by turns relentlessly brutal (explosion after explosion, battle scenes in plenitude) and severely nitpicky. When Aue is given the chance to kill Jews, you get the sense that he thinks of it, not as ethnic cleansing or mass murder, but as an innumerably complex problem to solve, and one more thing to analyze. And the man can analyze: he goes off on ten-page digressions about statistical models and mid-20th-century medical culture. Single paragraphs fill pages, and sometimes when you come to a paragraph break, a chorus plays Hallelujah in your head.

It's cheapening the story to chalk up Aue's neuroses to the author's need to portray the hyperactiveness of the German Nazi methodical mind. At the same time, however, reading this book really illuminates the intricacies of someone obsessed with detail, and how the humanity of humanity can get lost in the process. Aue, at various points in the book, destroys his family, embarks on an incestuous relationship with his sister, and argues -- regretfully, it seems -- that the more accurate tally of Jews killed in the Holocaust is closer to five million than six. There is also the aforementioned scatology: Aue is obsessed with vomiting and bowel movements, both his own and other people's. One of my favorite lines from Publisher's Weekly's review puts it best: "Nary an anus goes by that isn't lovingly described (among the best is one surrounded by a pink halo, gaped open like a sea anemone between two white globes)."

It's not a sympathetic portrait of Nazis by any means. But it's a thought-provoking one. I don't know if I'd actually want to read this book given the choice between it and, oh, just about any other book about the Holocaust (or not) out there. But for those with the curiosity -- and the time to spare -- it's an intriguing perusal.

Paul Rudnick: The Man Who Tells Bette Midler What to Say

There is no better introduction to Paul Rudnick's book of essays, I Shudder, than its subtitle: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey. And there is nowhere that this description is more apt than the first essay: in which Rudnick tells his life story -- a common story, really, of being a writer and moving to the Big City and coming out as a gay man -- through a series of visits, by his mother and her two sisters, of his West Village apartments.

Rudnick has a gift for writing about any situation -- whether facing off against a movie producer high on cocaine or being a Jew doing fieldwork at a convent for a film script (Sister Act) or emigrating from New Jersey to Manhattan -- with good humor and total nonchalance. More remarkably, he shares that sort of easy wisdom with his characters. He doesn't offer a coming-out story so much as an understanding, sometimes silent and sometimes not, and even the darker sides of his new New York neighborhood are treated with a gentle glibness by his aunts: "'S and M,' said Lil, nodding her head. 'That's when people like to have other people beat them up, right? Like on dates?'"

Aunt Lil, the don of the Rudnick aunt mafia, reappears again and again in these stories. When Rudnick finally achieves the Jewish dream of dating a doctor, his Aunt Lil is the judge and jury to whom he must present his new acquisition. The comic tension is insurmountable, of course -- not so much because of the doctor's gender, male, so much as his name, John -- and the ensuing conclusions about his religion.

And then there are the essays that don't dwell on the Jew stuff at all. Reading about the making of the Addams Family film is a bit of gleeful joy that arouses both my sycophantic goth side and my faux-pas-friendly flamboyant side. Reading Bette Midler stories during the writing of Sister Act (she was contracted to star in the film, until the last moment) is pure joy. His series of grumpy-old-man meditations -- well, meditations, fashion tips, and plots to assassinate Rachel Ray -- are a weird series of interstitial fantasies that make the rest of his essays that much more vividly real.

Most compelling of all, however, is "Good Enough to Eat," which, though it's entirely devoid of gastrointestinal jokes, is no less a quintessentially Jewish musing on food than anything you're likely to find on Seinfeld or the humor bank:

An unlikely number of people, and particularly my family, have always been obsessed with my diet. This is because, since I was born, I have never had the slightest interest in eating any sort of meat, fish, poultry, or vegetable. I wasn't the sad-eyed victim of some childhood trauma; I was never frightened by a malevolent tube steak or a rampaging halibut. A greasy-haired stranger never lured me into his van and forced me to stroke an ear of corn while he took photos. I don't have what daytime talk shows and the Healthy Living sections of newspapers call food issues. What I have is a sweet tooth which has spread to all of my other organs. I probably have a sweet appendix.

I've always thought that David Sedaris was Jewish, even when I've been corrected by people much more in the know than I. Paul Rudnick has done more than enough to convince me -- not that Sedaris is Jewish, but that Rudnick is actually David Sedaris. It's good, and so is he.

Michael Jackson, Power Girl, and the Deeper Meaning of Chests

I just took a walk outside on the rare lunchtime spent in the company of fresh air -- well, as fresh as it gets in urban Manhattan, anyway -- and I can report back, with almost no mean degree of inaccuracy, that this is going to be the summer of the Michael Jackson t-shirt.

I'm serious. For a while, I thought that Barack Obama was going to take the cake -- I mean, the t-shirt stores and bridge-table vendors near Times Square have been selling BO t-shirts and baby tees since January, and back then no one was even wearing t-shirts -- but things change, and the stakes are raised. After all, nobody expected the King of Pop to die.

And then I start wondering, where did we get this idea to wear our heroes on t-shirts in the first place? You didn't find the Children of Israel wearing I Heart Moses t-shirts, and how many times did he save their lives? More than Michael Jackson did, for damn sure.

Recently, in Israel, a clothing manufacturer started selling baby t-shirts that bore Rabbi Akiva's summary of the Torah, the words V'ahavta l'recha kimocha -- literally, "love your neighbor like yourself" -- written across the bosom. As much as Rabbi Akiva probably didn't linger too long on the free-love double entendre of his core principle, it's not a bad thing to go spreading to the rest of the universe. And, hey, it encourages various rereadings and reinterpretations...which is the essence of Torah commentary in the first place, right?

When I started working at MJL, there was a dress code. I suppose most day jobs have one. But, being as though I'd spent the past three years doing single days at law offices and anywhere that needed something typed, I wasn't used to having to do something that didn't require my one tie and single pair of fancy pants.

I learned pretty quickly, however, that the MJL dress code didn't cover much -- basically, it was no t-shirts with writing on it. It sounded pretty simple at first (I mean, the last thing that fosters a productive work environment is an ALOHA FROM MAUI shirt, or one of those ITHACA IS GORGES joke t-shirts that nobody really understands but everyone spends hours looking at, trying to figure out) but I soon came to have a different understanding of the rule. Wearing a word on your chest, whether it's "Sexy" or "Rock Star" or "I Voted for Fred Thompson," it's making a statement. It's limiting you. Even if the word is as simple as "hope," it's still setting a direction for your day. And the beauty of us as human beings is, our days can go anywhere.

In DC Comics, there's one superhero, Power Girl, whose uniform, in place of a Superman "S" or a Batman bat logo, has -- to put it delicately -- a lack of fabric. For years, it was never mentioned. Then, in a recent issue of Justice Society of America, it was called attention to rather vividly (and, at first, rather indecorously). At the end of the issue, however, there was a blazing monologue that caught me off guard: "Superman can wake up every morning, put on that big 'S,' and he knows exactly what his job is," she said (I'm paraphrasing). "Batman can wear a bat and strike fear into people's hearts or whatever. But I don't know what my mission in the world is, yet. I'm not ready to limit myself to one thing. So I have to keep searching."

Which is the biggest reason (though certainly not the only one) that I'm not going to wear a "V'ahavta l'recha kimocha" t-shirt. But even if there's nothing across my chest except for a blank shirt and a couple buttons, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Sand is grand and money is dummy

From the NYTimes blog: Olaf Breuning creates sand sculptures in Switzerland, and is being exported to Miami Beach. Reports the Times: "A fleeting masterpiece, it will vanish within days, eroded by wind and sea, but Breuning is not worried. 'I’m very proud to be making an art piece you cannot buy. In our time, it’s actually really perfect.'"

I love miss the idea of art for art's sake. Like writing a book, not because you want other people to read it, but just to throw it up on a little website that only a few people will ever see and be satisfied with the idea that they will see it...actually, I just think money is stupid. But you've already heard that rant, right? Actually, I think I'm just being tempted by the idea of temporariness these days. Itta and Yalta are about to leave for Australia for 3 weeks, and I'm just going to curl up with my computer and write until I can't think of anything else to write. Which might be forever.

I'm live!

My book is live! My new novel Losers just got a really nice writeup in Booklist. I'm not allowed to say what it says, but I can tell you it was pretty rocking (although they give away 2 pretty major spoilers, blegh.)

I'm live too! If you live in New York, come see me this Wednesday! I'm doing a free show at the New York Public Library, Jefferson Market branch (that's the big one in the West Village), Wednesday 10/29 at 6:00. I'll be reading from my new novel Losers, and possibly dropping some surprises. It's the night before Mischief Night, and I'm going to be spending the actual mischief night at a literary banquet in Philly, so this is going to be the night when I get it all out.

Not to mention the other readers. It's hosted by my editor, David Levithan, better known as the man who puts the words into the mouth of, uh:

Also appearing: Coe Booth (loved by the New York Times), Christopher Krovatin (adored by the band Deicide), Katie Finn (I met her at a picnic; she's cool) and other folks.

And, not to overload you, but G-dcast is live! This week, I'm the host -- go to G-dcast (remember the dash) to see it, or look below:

common

i never treasure quarters anywhere so much as new york, where one of those silver discs will buy you a bag of potato chips, pretzels, rippled Dipsy Doodle corn chips or, occasionally, even weirder fare. party mix is what i eat (constantly, constantly) when i write. tonight, erez and i both stacked up on day-glo orange spiral things, grabbed some Tastykakes as dessert, and sped off toward the brooklyn memorial highway.

we sat on this little catwalk by the river, stared at manhattan across the water, and watched it sparkle back at us. erez was curled up against the metal gate and my feet dangled over, scraping the water like teeth and nails.

presently the police came and took our IDs, walked around with flashlights and looked at us sternly for trespassing on city property. the people on the other end of the pier kept insisting that they lived here, only they'd never changed their drivers' licenses. at the time it seemed like the absolute dumbest thing in the world. eventually they waved us away, handed us back our licenses and told us they were letting us off with a warning. they looked like nice guys, honest, just tired. we could relate.

then we drove down the road, to the actual park, where the water was right up against us. glittering boulders got smaller and smaller and ran right into the water. a bunch of punk rock kids sat on the rocks, swilling 40s and combing their mohawks. i thought of hava, sneaking out after hours to visit them.

i'm in new york. it's always felt a little bit like a nightmare and a little like a dream. it's never felt like home. but now?

we've got a book in common, baby.

i'm learning yiddish from children's picture books about the Vilna Gaon. wish me luck.