So I taught storytelling at this Jewish animation festival this summer. Stu Sufrin, you are wonderful. Eliana Light, you are wonderful. So glad I got to see this.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Introducing Alice Mattison
Sorry I haven't been writing! Great things are afoot at the day-job, but of course I am not allowed to talk about them. And there are all these things I've been meaning to say, but they're all percolating, and they'll probably all bubble to the surface at the same time and I'll be unable to speak coherently. For a change.
Last night I was asked to introduce the writer Alice Mattison at a reading at Brooklyn College. I wasn't going to share this, but I got asked a few times and her book is wonderful and unexpected and wild. Here's what I said:
It had not occurred to him that Myra would have read the book, much less have an opinion about it. He was charmed, though he disagreed. He tried to explain what he believed to be true about the ending. If James thinks Isabel Archer should stay away from her husband, what is the book about? Why would it end just there? What has she accomplished?
Myra scoffed. What does anyone accomplish? She should have stayed away. She could manage.
In college, they did not speak as if characters in books could have chosen to do something else. Harold couldn’t think how to explain that this wasn’t the proper way to read.
This is one of Alice Mattison’s favorite things to do (not that I have any idea whether that’s actually true or not) : To introduce us to characters, a scene, a reality, and then subvert it by completely reversing the tension, upstaging the power dynamic, and yanking the carpet from beneath the reader’s feet.
Mattison is a remarkable, piercing, unsettling and versatile writer. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont. She’s published five novels and four collections of short stories, and, as far as I can tell, is equally at home in both forms. She has a knack for details, quirks, surprise turns, and single lines that could be novels unto themselves. She also might be one of our finest living book titlers: the novel The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman; the collection Men Giving Money, Women Yelling; and her previous book, 2009's Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn.
When We Argued was released this summer and . It was a New York Times editors’ choice book, and received a wholeheartedly geeking-out review: “Mattison makes you care about her characters right to the end, and care so deeply that you take their every disappointment personally.”
In an alternate universe, Mattison’s acts of world-building might belong to a science fiction grand master. Among the several achievements of When We Argued, Mattison takes us back to the mid-1930s in Jewish America and, with startlingly little explanation or set-up, gives us a vivid picture of what it’s like to be a Jew in a world where half the population is trying to kill you and the other half has no idea that it’s happening. In one line, the novel is straddling a fence with Catskills hookups a la Dirty Dancing, the next it’s sharing Holocaust-era guilt and aggression with Maus.
She gives the same weight to police beatings, family fights, and a strip-tease in a 1930s Catskills bungalow. When We Argued might be a secret epic, one that takes on the grandest scope--two best friends, an entire lifetime--but also breathes life into the smallest of moments.
Here she is.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
G-d Dialogue
Internal dialogue while bringing cereal back to my desk.
ME: I already have a spoon at my desk! Thank G-d I remembered to leave it there before.
ME (smarmy): You know, it really isn't G-d's fault. You kinda got that one on your own.
ME: Yeah, but people are always blaming G-d for stupid things when they go down, and it isn't really G-d's fault at all; it's their own. So why not thank G-d for something that isn't necessarily G-d's direct doing for a change?
ME: Ah, but G-d created the universe and everything in it, and therefore, nothing that happens is an accident. So one way or another, G-d really manipulated you to leave a clean spoon at your desk earlier...right?
ME (undeterred): Thank G-d there was soy milk in the refrigerator. I hate it when they're all out.
THE END.
(Well, the end of the dialogue. The beginning of my very late breakfast.)
Friday, September 28, 2012
Joshua: The Movie
A while ago, I helped produce this series of movie adaptations of the Torah with G-dcast.
Our plan at the time was to hit the Prophets and Writings and just not stop. "No sleep till Malachi" was the actual phrase used, I believe.
It's taken a little while, but today G-dcast launched the next book. Here's the three-part series "Joshua," which I wrote, which Sarah Lefton directed, Richard O'Connor animated, and Matt Ryd wrote the theme song to.
...originally I was trying to convince them to let me play shofar for it, too, but that didn't really happen.
This is Part II:
And Part III:
Next up is Judges, but don't ask about that yet -- apparently it's a lot faster to write words than it is to draw a few thousand animated icons. Who knew?
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
grad school confidential
a new question from the FAQ desk. weirdly, three people asked me this today. so here is what i said, more or less.
Why are you going back to grad school?
if i could do anything with my time, i'd do a degree in physics or math. that, i think, is where real religion flourishes. it's the actual fulfillment of the biblical commandment to "know g*d and know g*d's work." but life is the way it is, and i need (a) constant practice writing and challenging myself, (b) connections in the literary world, and (c) willing people to read my work on a mass scale, and this program is being very generous with all of them.
Monday, August 27, 2012
The Kafkaesque Mess that is LAX
Oh, man. I hate complaining, but sometimes in life it's either (a) really therapeutic or (b) really necessary. This might be both, but hopefully it's also entertaining. Yesterday, we were stuck at the airport for hours. I tweeted:
Because ofAnd they very nicely (if obliquely) replied:@americanair, my kids have been stuck in an airport all day. twitpic.com/ao2u1s
— Matthue Roth (@matthue) August 26, 2012
So this is what I wrote back. (Start reading from the bottom, if you're curious.)@matthue Sorry for the delay Matt. What is the flight number?
— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) August 26, 2012
Or come back tomorrow? I promise I'll have something more fun.
Matthue Roth
Baggage claim. Never have i been happier to type these two words. My face says it all: http://twitpic.com/ao62mh
Because of @AmericanAir, my kids have been stuck in an airport all day.http://twitpic.com/ao2u1s
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