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After you listen to this, you'll know just as much about the final season of "Lost" as you do now. Which is to say: There aren't really any spoilers.
This is just a poem. It's my fan-fiction version of what's going to happen in the next 18 or so weeks.
I hope you like it.
My novel Losers is on the American Library Association's 2010 Rainbow List! It's composed of "recommended titles for youth from birth to age 18 that contain significant and authentic gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (GLBTQ) content."
Each time I'm invited to be in a queer space, I feel a little bit queer -- queer in the other sense, a little bit awkward and a little bit trespassy. I think that might be where this part of Losers came from. It's from the coming-out scene, after the actual coming-out part and after Jupiter and the Gay Character crash a gay party, and in the aftermath they don't feel any less isolated or alone. Because, just because you find other people who are the same way you are -- whether it's gay, Jewish, geeky, or anything else -- it doesn't mean they're the same as you are.
Before anything could come out, he cut me off: “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I asked, more startled than anything.
“Don’t tell me you know what it’s like, okay? Don’t tell me that you’re different too and that you relate and that you understand what I’m going through and all that crap. Just don’t.”
I said back quietly, almost a whisper: “But I do.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. I turned my head and stole a glance at him, nervous about breaking the moment. He was still staring down the sky.
“Because I used to be the kid in school everyone shat on, and, the first day at North Shore, you made it official. And then everyone started being friends with me. Not because they actually liked me or anything, but because, somehow, I became acceptable. And still, nobody cares about me or hangs out with me one-on-one or wants to hear what I actually have to say. As long as my accent doesn’t get out of control and people like Reg and Tonya keep saying hi to me, everyone else will too. And there’s still no one I can trust, and I still wind up having fantasies about imaginary girls and CD covers.”
I was just interviewed on the blog Heeb 'n Vegan. Michael Croland, who runs the site, managed to get a lot out of me in very little space -- we talk about Muslim punk music, my novel Never Mind the Goldbergs, my vegetarianism -- and, randomly, the last book I read, which is Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
It's hard not to talk about the stories in the book. I've stopped multiple dinner conversations because something popped into my head, and I'm really bad about not saying something. Usually in a charming and offbeat and punky way. But, uh, you can't really say this stuff charmingly.
I don't think anything can be a blueprint for Jewish punk, although it's awesome that you asked. I think that punk is the idea of taking something in a wild new direction, innovating or mutating it, and I think that the essence of any new development/mutation/pwning in Jewish thought involves going back to the source -- to G-d, to the Torah, to the original things that Moses said -- and asking ourselves, what's my relationship to it? And then looking at the relationship that other people and the Greater Jewish World have to those same ideas, and saying that maybe we've got to get back to the source.
DIY Judaism is the way that Judaism's supposed to be. But I think it also means you have to look at the sources and really get to know them, much like food radicals need to read Diet for a New America or political radicals should learn Howard Zinn.
Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank during the Holocaust, has just died at the age of 100.
The New York Times has printed an obituary that gives some interesting background both on Ms. Gies and her role in the family's survival, both during the war and after, as she (along with Otto Frank, Anne's father) spoke out about their experiences, becoming some of the first people to speak publicly about the Holocaust. And here's an utterly riveting clip of Ms. Gies showing the Secret Annexe and the hidden door behind a bookcase:
Last night I went to my first taqwacore concert. Taqwacore is Muslim punk rock, and what that means to you is basically that I was in a room packed full of angry young Muslims, and I was, well, the only person looking like this. Which could 
have been a recipe for disaster at best case and ethnic cleansing at worst, if things had gone that way. Lo and behold, though, it was a crazy, jubilant, good-natured and even sort of flamboyant affair. I was nervous and skeptical on the walk to the Bowery Poetry Club, where the concert was being held. A serious-looking muscular dude with three colors of dyed hair, eyeliner, a heavy beard and a skirt was standing there. He nodded at me as I approached.
"You here for the show?" he asked.
After a moment of hesitation -- did he mean that invitingly or threateningly? -- I threw up my arms and said, as innocently as I could, "Yeah!"
His face split open into a toothy, wild grin. He turned his palms heavenward. "'Mash Allah," he said.
Which, I knew from all the books the movement was based on, meant Boruch Hashem.
The concert was actually only half a concert: the taqwacore band The Kominas played, and preceding that, Michael Muhammad Knight read. He has a new book out, Journey to the End of Islam, and as he took the stage, people shouted requests. It's not that I've never heard requests shouted from the audience -- I have, even for writers -- but these weren't requests for pieces to perform. They were for radical performance art. Mike chuckled into the microphone and shook his head: "Nah, I can't. I didn't bring any thumbtacks this time."
He read a section in which he visits a sacred Muslim tomb, the burial site of a Muslim holy man. One way or another, he's arrested, and quirkily ends up in the office of the curator of the tomb as the man shows Knight movies on his phone of the equivalent (in Pakistani rupees) of millions of dollars being unloaded, the temple's profits from that year's pilgrimage. Knight waxes philosophical about that, and about the unrestrained passion of thousands of pilgrims crammed into a small room -- a scene that reminded me of nothing so much as visiting the tomb of Shimon Bar Yochai in Israel. Knight asks himself: does the sheer capitalist profit-making endeavor mean that the tomb isn't sacred? Does the sheer number of people visiting mean that it is sacred? He doesn't answer the question (although, sharing the experience, it does sound like he went through some sort of religious ecstasy there), but he does say this:
My mission is to make religion applicable to people, even if it's not everything you want it to be.
