Oh, Excellent.

At the out-of-control and totally uncouth forty-author-signing yesterday at Books of Wonder, it seemed like everyone had a story -- the people who hadn't written books most of all. There was the woman who gave me the MMORPG-type business card and told me that her just-finished novel was like a girl version of the Goonies -- total booklust on that front. And Michael Northrop, who was lurking like a fan, even though his first book is coming out in 2 weeks, and it's going to be bigger than Twilight. And then the awesome punk-rock girl who stormed up to me to announce that she went to an Orthodox day school and we probably had the same history -- and I was like, no, I just wish I had your history. (Which I actually don't. I'm pretty alright having gone to a school which has been fictionalized as North Shore High, and became religious when I did -- but it still would've been fun, I think.

And then there's Hayley Anne Perkins, who was walking around with a beautiful oversized dictionary yesterday (American Heritage, I think) and asking everyone to sign on their favorite word. She very courteously listed them on her site, right after a poem called "Ned Vizzini Stole My Pen" -- but here are a few of my favorites:

SOMETHING (BECAUSE “SOMETHING IS GOOD”) - Billy Merrell
CRASH - Blake Nelson
BONVIVANT - Micol Ostow
SNEAK - Lisa Ann Sandell
SLUICE - Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Adrienne replied "oh, sluice!" after not even a second's pause, as if it was the most matter-of-fact thing that could ever occur to anyone. Because every time you say it, it sounds like you're pronouncing it wrong. Go check out the whole unexpurgated list, though -- if only to read that fun poem.

Sometimes Even I Write about Meat

This week on G-dcast: how to grill an animal in the Temple.

Rachel Kohl Finegold, the exemplary ritual director of our old synagogue in Chicago, was totally great about jumping in to launch this episode. As a matter of fact, she (shomer-negiah) strongarmed me at Alan and Miriam's wedding and was like "what's the G-dcast emergency, huh? How many weeks do I have to do this?" We hadn't found anyone for Vayikra. She and her husband, Rebbetzin Avi, started pelting me with pitches right then and there. Usually, it takes us *weeks* to get to pitch level.

But: boom.

(and i know which lines you will probably think come straight from me and my wacky radical vegetarian-separatist mentality. well, you're WRONG. and, may i point out that rachel is a proud meat-eater....?)

Rupert Murdoch Dreams

Last night, I had dinner with Ronald Lauder and some other folks who tackled a lot of different political, philosophical, and theological questions -- most of which can be summed up pretty simply: Why does everyone hate Israel?

And then this morning, I woke up to Rupert Murdoch saying the same thing:

"I am curious: Why do we never hear calls for Hamas leaders to be charged with war crimes? ... Whether Israel is ever found guilty of any war crime hardly matters. Hamas gets a propaganda win simply by having the charge made often and loudly enough."

Weirdly, his editorial in the Jerusalem Post takes a bit of a stand-uppy beginning -- "Let me set the record straight: I live in New York. I have a wife who craves Chinese food. And people I trust tell me I practically invented the word 'chutzpah'" -- and then segues directly, and intelligently, into an impassioned and fairly creative analysis of Israel's (failed) PR battle. He reiterates several points -- "If you are committed to Israel's destruction, and if you believe that dead Palestinians help you score a propaganda victory, you do things like launch rockets from a Palestinian schoolyard. This ensures that when the Israelis do respond, it will likely lead to the death of an innocent Palestinian - no matter how many precautions Israeli soldiers take" -- but this editorial succeeds so profoundly because of two things:

1. These are facts that, in the past, have primarily been said by Israeli strategists to other Israeli strategists, like shipwreck victims screaming into the wind.
2. It's Rupert Murdoch saying it. Dammit, he's Australian. People listen to him.

The International Herald-Tribune also featured a prominent article on Israeli rebranding -- or it was touted that way, anyway. The text actually ended up spending most of the article talking about Avigdor Lieberman, the allegedly racist head of the Israel Beitenu party (and prospective appointee to be foreign minister) before turning to these sage words -- which have some pretty hot "duh" action, and which most of us could probably recite in our sleep:

"When we show Sderot, others also see Gaza," said Ido Aharoni, head of a rebranding team at the Foreign Ministry. "Everything is twinned when seen through the conflict. The country needs to position itself as an attractive personality, to make outsiders see it in all its reality. Instead, we are focusing on crisis management. And that is never going to get us where we need to go over the long term."

What will work for the long term? G*d knows, probably not Rupert Murdoch. But he's headed in the right direction, at least.

Yiddish 2.0

It's weird and somewhat scary to realize that you can put a cap on the number of Yiddish books ever published -- and, by most reckonings (for the secular world, anyway), the number of Yiddish books that will ever be published. But that's exactly what the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library says in its introductory statement: "Over ten thousand Yiddish texts, estimated as over 1/2 of all the published works in Yiddish, are now online" -- and the implicit notion is, there aren't going to be that many more Yiddish works published.

This by no means diminishes the excellent, massive, and spotlessly-presented Yiddish library on Archive.org, which came online a few weeks ago -- one of the most unbelievably selfless and thorough nonprofits on the Web. They've been collating every single website since 1996 and keeping track of them (so, if you ever wanted to see your first-ever freshman-year I-just-learned-HTML site, you can), and they also have a massive Live Music Archive with tens of thousands of concerts.

In a way, perusing their archive feels kind of like looking at a time-capsule after the end of the world: It's a perfect fossil record of the Web at any point in time. Michael Chabon, while talking about the impetus to write his Yiddish Policemen's Union, spoke of finding a Yiddish travel phrasebook with translations like "How much is a ticket to Lublin?" and instructions for ordering in restuarants...like a key to a lost world. If the world was no more, and all that remained were the echoes of the Internet bouncing off distant quasars (I know that isn't how it really works), Archive.org would be the container with every nuanced bit of what we are contained inside, from badly-scrawled blogs to even worse-scrawled CNN and MSNBC reports, and all the beauty that they contain.

The Spielberg Archive is kind of like that, only using Yiddish books instead of websites. Der Purim-Ber is a children's book, as far as I can tell, narrated by the bear itself. A Shṭeṭele in Poyln is a travelogue of the author's trip to his hometown of Ciechanowiec -- which, like Chabon's idea, no longer exists.

This, of course, doesn't include the hundreds of new Yiddish books being published every year, almost exclusively by religious Yiddish publishers, for the Haredi public...one of which my daughter is currently chewing on at this very moment. I don't speak Yiddish, but we can both read it. It's kind of the exact opposite of this archive -- I certainly didn't grow up with this language, but in the place where I live now, it's almost certain that she'll learn it in school, and it will almost undoubtedly come in handy at some point.

Free Music, Filipinos, and (how) Jews (look)

Hey, remember our video? The one about how Jews look? The theme song was composed by my very good friend, the astute and fearless C.J. Pizarro -- and, by the way, you can download the mp3 for free or download the whole album, Snow Crabs, if you like.

C.J. is (gasp!) not Jewish. He is, unrelatedly, Filipino -- and together, he and I are in a science-fiction hip-hop band, Chibi Vision, which we used to refer to as an Orthodox Jewish-Filipino cross-cultural multi-platform geek project -- or, to save breath, the "Jew-o-pino team-o."

Anyway: the other day, I received an email from him, sounding as astounded as it is possible for an email to sound. "I found our love child!" he wrote.

The love child in question: Eliyahu Enriquez, a Jewish Filipino poet, publisher, cultural theorist and active Twitterer. After receiving Honorable Mention in Lincoln Center's Robert Nettleton/Ully Hirsh Poetry Prize, he's released several poetry chapbooks, and is currently working on a collection of piyyutim. I've been blasting madly through his stuff, and you should, too. Equal parts irreverent and reverent, his poems are random and play off a big-muscled veneer of stream-of-consciousness, but actually connect and make sense in ways that are both cerebral and factual.

A lifetime of lesion has brought us
Back together in Balikbayan coffins.
His memory is erection.
Forget forgiveness.
Navigate our leather
Phylacteries and arteries.
Toda Rabba for traveling
Cosmos de Vie.
So long,
Galut Graveyard!

That was R.S.V.P. He's grinning in one corner of his mouth and keeping the other corner totally solemn. In "Akhdut," though, he's formal, sentimental, although, curiously, playing it just as cool:

I attended two funerals today
I did not bother to bring an umbrella
Or flower
Or Bible
Or date
A few others did
A few

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Me and Robert Pinsky down by the Schoolyard

On the heels of this bizarre viral video from the 92Y, JBooks, needing a big kick in the donations bucket, asked former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky -- who, apparently, is both a fan of poetry and a fan of JBooks -- to help them promote their site. Pinsky hails from the classical tradition, but has both an excellent sense of irony and exquisite comic timing (as evidenced on his Colbert Report appearance).

I could act all swaggery and say that's the reason I'm there, too. It's not -- I'm just a kid who writes books who got asked to talk about Losers, which is just a loosely autobiographical book anyway, except that, in the book, I say and do everything that I'm too inhibited or embarrassed or just straight-up dorky to do in real life.

But asking to talk about yourself is a pretty cool feeling. It's kind of the opposite of a blog, where you're asking other people to listen to you talk about yourself. Here, I kind of excoriate the fabulous Nathan Englander for writing Orthodoxsploitation, and talk about how I there need to be more books in the world that make you feel good about being a geek.

I don't know if Mr. Pinsky would self-label as a geek, but I certainly would label him as one. Purely, purely as a compliment.

A few years ago, I had a bright future as a Young Orthodox Novelist—surely you know the type. A little bit disgruntled, a little bit smarmy; a bit of an idealist, a bit of an exhibitionist. If Nathan Englander and Shalom Auslander were the literary world's reaction to Orthodoxy, then I was the reaction to them. I was a punk-rock kid who'd grown up as a Saturday-morning Jew, going to Hebrew School at my Conservative synagogue when I couldn't get out of it, and sick of the half-baked theories of God that were Xeroxed through three generations of crappy old textbooks. That's the way Judaism felt to me—like a smudgy third-generation bootleg of something that, to my great-great-grandparents, was crystal clear. Whatever that crystal-clearness actually was, I imagined it was God.

I'd almost been born disenchanted. I was disenchanted with leading a secular lifestyle, sick of the hypocrisy of going to synagogue Saturday mornings and then baseball games Saturday afternoon, and of all of that coming to a dead halt after my bar mitzvah. Like Hella Winston's book Unchosen, I was sick of Jewish culture. Only, I was sick of the other Jewish culture, the secular American kind. I wanted something legitimate. I wanted something real.

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