Behind the Scenes at Noshland

I wrote a new short story on Hevria -- well, okay, half a short story -- but I have the whole thing in my head, and I'm, like, 98% sure that I'm going to post the other half in 2 weeks. Or next week, if Elad lets me.

And I'm kind of overbrimming with behind-the-scenes stuff to tell you about it.

Last Night at Noshland

BY MATTHUE ROTH • JULY 5, 2016 • STORY

Zvi needs to leave Crown Heights behind, and he is leaving it behind, but every step he takes brings him a new wash of sadness, the nostalgia sinking deeper into his brain and skin and his nose, even though he hasn’t even left yet.

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And Now, the Commentary Track.

• The genesis of the story: I love one-night (or one-day) stories, like American Graffiti and Superbad and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I like giving my stories time limits in general, like how Goldbergs had to end at the end of the summer and this memoir I'm working on goes from Halloween to Thanksgiving. That gives me a ruler to pace everything. Having a single night is even better. It's like a puzzle where every single thing that happens has to fit.
  
• Yes, the name of the shop in the story is based on the dear, wonderful Nosh World, zichrono l'vrocho (the characters and even the store itself are as complete fabrications as anything can be), but another major influence in the title and the story is the book Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan. It's about a Red Lobster that's shutting down, and there's a snowstorm coming, and workers keep not showing up for their shift, and it's really sad and beautiful -- and specifically, the way it was taught to me by my professor Alexi Zentner, who has a new book out this week that I'm not sure I'm allowed to say is really by him.
  
• I'm doing this sort of as a challenge to myself: both to finish something, and to put it in front of people. I've been in kind of a sad place lately. My last novel is in limbo and the new one I'm writing is taking forever, and I keep starting stories and then not finishing them. So I'm trying to vanquish my writing anxiety with performance anxiety. I've put up the first half! Now I have to finish the damn thing.
  
• I just also want there to be more fiction on Hevria! And more stories about Hasidim that aren't about how pathetic we are or people running away or what a horrible place the community is. Not that this is exactly a happy story (nothing I'm gonna write right now is going to be that), but I really do like Zvi, the main character, and I hope other people will too.
  
• I was working on the last part of the story this morning and I realized with a shock of horror, there's almost no chocolate. Sure, I mention ice cream once or twice, but it is in no way true-to-life to write about a snack shop in Crown Heights and exclude chocolate. There's a paragraph in the second part about a girl who buys a bag of tortilla chips, and it would make way more sense for her character to be eating chocolate, but it makes way more sense for me as a person to think of someone eating nachos:
  
  
  And she buys a 50-cent pack of chips, of Golden Fluff tortilla strips, a brand whose name has always puzzled him (no gold? no fluff?) but whose taste is undeniably solid, that perfect balance of spicy and tangy and sweet, that he once read the Japanese call umami, a harmony of flavor, the perfect culinary addiction of which he was the purveyor. He loved the boldness of Tsivia Singer’s pre-party indulgence, and the vision of her walking down the street with the umami tang on her breath, neither of which he would ever taste.

The Gobblings: The Movie (sort of)

I stole a story from the Baal Shem Tov. Well, I sort of stole it. The part about it being in space, the aliens, the toy robots, the overprotective parents, and the saving the universe without the universe knowing about you saving it -- those parts I may or may not have made up myself.

(Except for the overprotective parents. That part's based on real life.)

Anyway: Here's a movie where I talk about The Gobblings and writing and how the rest of the world tells stories to put kids to bed, and we tell stories to wake ourselves up. Thanks to Daniel and David for filming it, and JAKEtv for making it real, and the wondrous people at Hevria for letting me be egotistical for a change.

A Girl Can Become the King

I showed my daughters this morning's newspaper, and it was incredible to watch their faces light up. The oldest read the headline out loud -- Clinton Seals Triumph With California Victory -- and then she squealed, like really squealed, not the I-got-a-new-toy squeal but the I-did-my-multiplication-table-perfectly-for-the-first-time squeal, the squeal that says, holy shit, something in the world has fundamentally changed.

When we talked about who to vote for, I was pretty harsh that the girls weren't allowed to choose Hillary because she was a girl, and that we need to find out as much as we can about everyone, and we want to choose the best people, no matter who they are. (We followed through with this down to some last-minute Googling of superdelegates in the voting booth.) Everyone has good points and bad points, and I really don't like how Bernie probably wouldn't be very cooperative with anyone who wasn't on the same page as him, and I don't like that Hillary seems like a big-balls career politician with no guiding conscience.

But on the level of pure, simple, and direct showing my three daughters that girls can do anything, having a woman on the front page of the paper, claiming the nomination, conceivably becoming the leader of our country, it was an awesome fucking moment. I've been telling them since they were born that they can do anything. There's a lot of stuff that's still in the way, but it just came one step closer to true.


Pic: One more text from Hilary

Why I Write about Peeing

Hey, it's my latest piece at Hevria! I was complaining about our personal posts being too depressing these days, or maybe just mine, and Elad said that I should write something happier. We happened to be drinking at the time. The sun might or might not have been up, I'm not telling. What happened next was this blog post. I guess it really is possible to find inspiration anywhere.

Pee Break

Sometimes you just need to get out.

There’s that moment at the bar where the debate is getting a little too intense and I’m getting a little too evasive, and it hits. The realization that I haven’t peed in two hours. Yes, I am sitting with one of my best friends in the world, and yes, we are yelling at each other at the top of our voices, but the moment I stand up, something changes — I have a bit more of my personal space to myself, I am seeing the room from a different vantage point, and the world seems like a little bit of a different place.

“Excuse me,” I say, in a completely different voice from the one I’ve just been using, and using words, like excuse me, that I never thought I’d speak again. And then: “I’ll be right back.”

And when I slip away, the world slips away from me.

Sometimes it’s just so good to go to the bathroom. Not the act itself, but the act of leaving behind the world and making yourself alone. I’ve been operating on a constant emotional peak over the past few weeks, and I keep telling people, “I feel drained.” Those three words have never seemed so inappropriate: Whenever I feel an emotional overload, what I really should be saying instead is, “I need to drain.” There’s a Hasidic concept called hisbodedus where you leave your surroundings, leave your world and run to the nearest forest and scream as loud as you can, at the top of your lungs. Peeing might be the urban version of that.

(read the rest)

Pee Break

 Sometimes you just need to get out.

There’s that moment at the bar where the debate is getting a little too intense and I’m getting a little too evasive, and it hits. The realization that I haven’t peed in two hours. Yes, I am sitting with one of my best friends in the world, and yes, we are yelling at each other at the top of our voices, but the moment I stand up, something changes — I have a bit more of my personal space to myself, I am seeing the room from a different vantage point, and the world seems like a little bit of a different place.

“Excuse me,” I say, in a completely different voice from the one I’ve just been using, and using words, like excuse me, that I never thought I’d speak again. And then: “I’ll be right back.”

And when I slip away, the world slips away from me.

Sometimes it’s just so good to go to the bathroom. Not the act itself, but the act of leaving behind the world and making yourself alone. I’ve been operating on a constant emotional peak over the past few weeks, and I keep telling people, “I feel drained.” Those three words have never seemed so inappropriate: Whenever I feel an emotional overload, what I really should be saying instead is, “I need to drain.” There’s a Hasidic concept called hisbodedus where you leave your surroundings, leave your world and run to the nearest forest and scream as loud as you can, at the top of your lungs. Peeing might be the urban version of that.

I’m not talking about the actual act — or, at any rate, not the actual act of what you do while you’re in the bathroom. No, I’m talking about the journey itself, the process of getting up and leaving wherever you are and interrupting the normal and mundane rhythm of your life in order to just pish.

It’s not a revolutionary idea. No, it is. I once worked in a place where nobody spoke to each other, we were all in the same big room, at our own desks, each of our heads glued to our respective computer monitors. Nobody even left for lunch.

I would take the longest bathroom breaks. Luxurious, ostentatious ones. Just the walk from my desk (right at the head of the office, the furthest of all from the restroom door) would take a good two to three minutes. I stretched my legs, feeling each tendon loosen, feeling my butt balloon from its hours of squashedness, feeling the newfound if momentary freedom of all my limbs moving. I tossed my arms forward and back, that exaggeratedly comical 19th-century walking that you only see in Monty Python sketches. I would drop something on the way, a coin or a piece of paper, take my time picking it up — kneeling down rather than just stooping over, because I had this vague notion of it being healthier, or it being, you know, like exercise. A very minor form of exercise, I was well aware, and almost nothing when you consider that for almost the entire remainder of the day I was sitting at my desk, chair too high and keyboard too low, basically committing a slow form of suicide by laziness, whatever the opposite of yoga is.

This is nothing compared to actual restroom time. I have thought many times of acting like I needed to go to the bathroom at work — doing the walk, the flush, the running of the water tap in the sink, maybe even washing my hands for real, and my face for good measure, just because water in movies always symbolizes a new life and, hell, at 3:00 in the afternoon of a work day I can definitely use a new life, even if it’s basically the same as the old one.

Just, here’s the trick: I wouldn’t go to the bathroom.

I’d just stay there. Hang out for a minute, or two, or ten. Maybe check my email on my phone — no, don’t do that, because that’s basically the same as sitting at your desk. No: just enjoy the damn silence. I used to work in a neighborhood called DUMBO, by the East River and among a bunch of old factories, and there were tons of areas there where you could hide, write stories, make out, even take a nap if you wanted. Now I work in Manhattan, and what we have are bathrooms. It really is the city’s consolation-prize equivalent of a forest: if you want to be alone, this is what you’ve got.

When I was just getting started with being a parent and Mayim Bialik was a little ahead of me being a parent, she said that one of the hardest things about being a parent was that she couldn’t even get away with going to the bathroom. In the moment, I didn’t really understand. Can’t you just leave your kids for 30 seconds? Even easier: if they’re really that young, can’t you just bring them into the bathroom with you or leave the door open and have them crawl around or drool right outside for a few minutes? It’s only now that I truly realize what she was talking about: it wasn’t the shitting, it was the separating.

I once had a girlfriend who would never go to the bathroom when I was at her place. She said she thought it was indecent, that she didn’t want me to see her that way.

“But you walk around naked all the time!” I exclaimed.

She thought about this for a moment and then acknowledged that, yes, that was true.

“So what is it that you don’t want me to see?” I asked her, and in that moment the answer opened itself up in my head: It was that rawness, that fundamental grossness that we are all repulsed by yet that we all share, that raw and stinky moment of knowing — and admitting — that each other, and that we ourselves, are human.

Because I can talk about bathrooms as a place of escape all I want, but the truth is, it’s there for a very specific purpose. We place a holy scroll on every doorpost of our house except on the bathroom door. When excessively polite people talk about shitting, they call it voiding. One of my favorite Jewish prayers is the prayer for going to the bathroom (not going but, you know, going):

…You formed us with wisdom
and created within us
many openings and many voids.

And isn’t that all we are, in the end? A series of openings and a series of hollows, the things that fill us up and the things that will never fulfill us, the times that we are busy and full and productive and the times we need to just get away.

Dancing by Myself

When I wrote my latest Hevria post, I was feeling kind of fatalistic. The kids were not sleeping and I was watching Avengers: Age of Ultron. I'd just talked to a bunch of friends who went to the much-newer, and much-better-reviewed Civil War. That's probably why I was feeling so depressed. Anyway, most people told me it was depressing. Although I think it's kind of funny? Maybe you can figure it out.

Dancing in Traffic

BY MATTHUE ROTH • MAY 10, 2016 • ESSAY

This morning I caused a traffic jam. Walked in front of a car on my lazy Brooklyn street, didn’t realize there was a car behind that, and another one. Six or seven total. Our street is narrow, with traffic further hidden by an islet of trees in the middle. I was taking my time walking. I hate crossing at the light. I’m very resentful that way. Most times I try not to take up space but when I do, I really do. I was walking, trying not to use any gas, any money, anything. Blocking all those cars, even for thirty seconds, just think how much fossil fuel I burned.

I’ve been taking up too much space. Money, air, people’s energy. I don’t actually make money at work. My job is all about potential, finding things that might still be worth money in ten years. They still pay me for it, for now, trusting that I’m doing something of value, even though none of us will probably ever find out. Will I still be around in ten years? At the job? On this Earth?