Guns

Project I'll never have time for:

Visit gun stores where people who've gone on mass-killing sprees have bought their guns. Interview the people who sold them their guns. What kind of mood were they in? What did they say? Was there a difference between the time they applied to buy a gun and the time they picked it up? Then interview the cashiers about their own lives.

Slightly more aggressive and questionable project I'll never have time for:

Visit local gun stores. Take photos of people who work there. Hang them all over town, mugshot-like, or like the pictures of the Joker from the Dark Knight ARG. Picket outside their houses. Treat them like protestors treat doctors who perform abortions.

No; that's wrong. It's more than this, and deeper. It's wrong to target these people: it's like cutting off a nose to stop a cold. Friends are visiting me this weekend who own, and use recreationally, automatic weapons, and they're way more responsible and levelheaded than I am.

Really, I think, we all just need to find a way to take care of each other better. Last night a homeless guy asked me for change. I didn't have any and he started shoving me. Why didn't I just stop and get some money? I'm too busy. I needed to get home to my kids, who I also don't have enough time for.

This world has me so scared and so mad.

WANTED: Be in My Music Video

Hey, I'm about to put together a little free spoken-word E.P. and I'm making a music video as part of it -- only, of course, without the music, because it's spoken-word.

And I need your help.

There's a poem. Email me, at matthue at gmail, and I will email the text of the poem to you. Then, if you would be so kind, film yourself using an iPod or iPhone, reciting all or part of the poem. I'll splice it together and make it into a video.

If you have any questions, send them to me too! I'll do my best to answer.

Tron. Avatar. Me?

OK, just saying: According to Hollywood Reporter, a sequel to Tron Legacy is in the works. And since I was in the Tron3 prequel -- or a character named after me, whatever --

-- I just want to let you guys know, I am, in fact, available for major motion pictures. Also weddings and bar mitzvahs.


TRON The Next Day - Flynn Lives Revealed (TR3N... by daftworld

The Oven of Aknai: A Talmudic Story of Debating and Death, in Friendly Cartoon Format

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.

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:

There’s a part in Alice Mattison’s latest novel, When We Argued All Night, in which Harold, a self-conscious intellectual Jewish guy, is flirting it up with Myra, who’s this hot, reserved WASP. They’re talking about Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, which she swiped his copy of.

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.

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.)