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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My True, Honest Inner Feelings On Robert Smith of the Cure

There's a new interview with me on Cupcake Witch, a fascinating new young-adult lit blog, which is refreshingly dark and refreshingly not gushy about every manner of YA writing. So far they've covered the new Amanda Palmer album and Poppy Z. Brite's handmade journal collection (side-note: ooogle).

And, me. Marie talked to me about Losers, the underground magazines I used to make, and why I'm so attached to stealing titles of Cure songs for my chapters:

Cupcake Witch: I love how several of the chapters in Losers are named after Cure songs. Did you ever see that South Park episode where Robert Smith comes to save the world from Barbara Streisand and at the end Kyle shouts "Disintegration is the best album ever!"? Do you agree with that statement?

Matthue Roth: You won't believe how long I've waited for someone to ask this question. When I saw that episode -- probably the first time it aired -- I was totally incredulous. Disintegration? Really? Not that I don't like Disintegration, but it feels like the default Cure album, the one for people who've barely heard of the Cure. Pornography is so much better.

But, yes, I was out of my seat and standing on the couch the second that the mecha-dinosaur Robert Smith came on the screen. I think that's one of my life goals -- to get made into a Japanese monster movie on South Park.

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A travelogue to Philadelphia rooftops

Briefly: I'm going to be performing tomorrow at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia! Opening for the retro-Catskills lounge comedy band Good for the Jews, and guest-starring Adam Brodsky.

Also: awesome new review of Losers:

Matthue Roth’s novel is about the character and the voice, and it rocks. It’s hilarious. It’s more than a little crazy, yet manages to ring true. There are universal life truths in here among Jupiter’s escapades, and you’ll find yourself rooting for Jupiter wholeheartedly. And the writing! Even funnier. Descriptive and gritty and captivating. Matthue Roth can write. I already loved his book Never Mind The Goldbergs, so I expected this to be awesome, and it was. It’s a coming of age story that also falls into the madcap adventure category occasionally, and the result is a lot of amusement minus brain rotting. This is a short novel that packs a lot of punch and will provoke a lot of muffled laughter. Highly recommended.

This one's been putting a mad grin on my face all weekend. As if my sixth-grade English teacher's Xmas party, in which I had beers with a bunch of my former junior-high school teachers and watched this guy (yes, it was late) dislocate his butt...I seriously wonder how I'll ever be able to say that New York is more exciting than Philadelphia.

And there is an amazing roof deck on their house, which looks out on the Schuylkill River and the Center City skyline and a Matrix-like ocean of other rooftops, and I'm already too far into writing the sequel to Losers to decide this, but somewhere in Jupiter Glazer's life, he is going to end up being chased atop this very rooftop deck.

Orthodox and Undercover

So I kind of wrote an article about Losers, but it ended up being mostly about me. Go fig.

Six years after my first punk show (The Dead Milkmen, at the Trocadero, $6 if you were under 21) I showed up at a synagogue one Friday afternoon, wearing jeans that were ripped at the cuffs and the only sweater I owned. I stopped checking my email for 24 hours once a week, spent my Shabbos nights reading in the dark of my apartment's living room, and that was it. They say you're supposed to become Orthodox slowly, like wading into a cold pool. I jumped in over my head, and only started sinking deeper. Not that I was losing my individuality or anything—my t-shirts were still geeky and tight, I was still at the gay clubs and the punk-rock shows; I just made my Thursday nights longer and took the next night off.

I don't know what I could have been the poster child for, but I was the poster child for something. When all my other friends who wrote moved to New York, wrapped themselves tight into graduate writing courses, I moved to San Francisco and started teaching myself to write at open mics with a bunch of lesbians, all of whom I had crushes on, and none of whom would look my way. They were the best senseis of all. Michelle Tea, who had about as much in common with me as I had with a hamburger, told me to write about what I was obsessed with. She said to write about whatever I goddamn well wanted to write about.

read the whole article >

Win free Losers!

No, my grammar isn't slipping up -- the indelible Melissa Walker is giving away an autographed copy of your favorite Russian Jewish immigrant geek novel as her weekly contest. She's the author of Violet in Private -- and you know us young-adult authors who write novels about unconventional girls who somehow get into modeling have got to stick together -- and, by the way, she's also going to be quoted on the new edition of Candy in Action.

But, for now, she's got a copy of Losers with your name on it. (Which, I know, sounds wrong, but still -- it's a free book. With a damn cool cover, at that.)

Here's the catch:

To enter to win this contest, you must buy someone a book for the upcoming holiday season. Seriously, books are the best gifts--how else can you buy someone a whole world for under $10? I'm getting a book for every single person on my list this year, which will mean lots of money saved and happy friends!

So go visit her blog already! And let me know what book you talk about....

Red Rum! Red Rum!

Okay, it's not nearly as gruesome, nor as symbolic of the plight of the Native American in "The Shining" (no joke), but the venerable website Red Room has made me one of their featured writers this week!

It's a new site, but totally worth your time. If only because it's probably the only damn social network in existence that will ever get a Salman Rushdie with a member page or Maya Angelou to keep a blog.

All the same, I'm pretty psyched. Even if Mr. Rushdie has yet to write on my wall.

20 (or 10, or 21) Questions

Brina, who runs the Young Adult New York website, has just posted one of the most intense interviews I've ever done. You'll see her format, and you'll be confused, and then it will all make sense -- she asks the author a question, and the author responds and then asks her a question, and it keeps going like that for twenty questions. So the interview's actually ten questions, I guess -- except that (a) both answering and asking reveal some surprising things about both of us, and (b) I manage to sneak an extra one in toward the end, as a precursor to my Sandman question.

Me: What are you working on now?

Matthue: I can’t get Jupiter out of my head, and even more the other characters [in Losers]. In one way Jupiter is about growing up with my best friend who just died, and then I wrote/am still writing this book about his death which is kind of about me and Anne Frank hanging out. … I don’t know if anyone will like it but me, but it’s my heart. I just took my heart out and stuck a bunch of knives in it and this is what I got.

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YA New York: 20 Questions with Matthue Roth

This was actually a pretty cool interview.

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about Losers, the book, not the people?

Matthue: Basically, my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was my kind of idealized fantasy of the person that I’d like to be, if the person I’d like to be was a seventeen-year-old girl. … Jupiter is everything that I was at seventeen, although more so: He’s totally socially awkward, has relationships that exist entirely in his head, and he lives in a factory.

Question Two

Matthue: What did your bedroom look like growing up?

Me: I moved a lot, so I had a lot of different bedrooms, but one thing stayed the same throughout, which is that I plastered my walls with photographs of my friends; since I only had two or three friends at a time, the same people would often appear in the pictures.

Question Three

Me: You didn’t live in a factory growing up, but you did live in Philadelphia. What was your childhood like?

Matthue: I always wanted to live in a factory. I actually really wanted to move into the basement, which was a big area that had a few couches and a lot of pillows and some seventies furniture that no one had used for years. I thought the wall would be filled with books and the floors would be filled with gigantic Lego sculptures. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.

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Saturday in Philly!

The wonderful Alex DiFiori made a great poster for the Saturday show. Go here to see the original graphic, print out a zillion copies of them, and give them to all your friends (or at least to Dr. Pavel, the president of Central High School at Ogontz & Olney Aves. -- see if it makes his eyebrows shoot off his face). I love the graphite-pencil look. Old school, like when people did tests in No. 2 pencil (and hell yes, I still write my books longhand).

Word Jam. Music Jam. Gooseberry Jam.

Tonight at the 92Y Tribeca, I'm hosting the (hopefully first) open mic! Jeremiah Lockwood of The Sway Machinery is playing a set, and Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia, will be reading. A few months ago, it was one of those Shabboses where I'd ODed on writing, and now that I couldn't write anymore, I just wanted to read manically. So I took Elisa's new book, which I'd been wanting to read for a while (her first collection made me actually like Philip Roth, a feat which I'd deemed impossible), and started reading.

And I didn't stop.

The sun was coming up, which seemed particularly noteworthy considering the novel's content. It's a funny, wry, more-wise-than-it-seems look at a girl who finds out she's dying. It's not at all what you'd expect, which is odd to say, considering we basically have every expectation in the world loaded up in our heads when it comes to dying. But the agony of going out to eat with your parents after a brain scan, and the sort of perverse joy in ordering the most expensive thing on the menu, is one of those tiny details that is meaningful and beautiful and terrible all at once -- and that's exactly what you'll find from her.

Sign up for the open mic at 7:30, and have a quick drink with me. Show begins at 8:00 promptly.

Also, the director's-cut commentary to Chapter Four of Losers is up! Read about stealing lines from hip-hop songs, gay teenage bartenders, best friends dying on you, censorship in Candy in Action, and featuring a special music video courtesy of Ludacris.

Another Cure chapter. The song "A Night Like This" is a beautiful song in its own right, track 8 on "The Head on the Door," which some poet-friends in Melbourne performed a track-by-track jam of poems influenced by the songs. But there's another Cure song that my best friend Mike put on a mixtape for me that was just Robert Smith's voice and a brilliant string section and tympani drums that's called something like "Other Nights Like This" -- the handwriting was scratchy. I never remembered to ask him, and now it's too late. Now the tape's broken, and I keep googling the first words, but I can't find anything.

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Eye Candy

Not to get too self-promulgating, but if you're in New York, show up at the New York Public Library, Jefferson Market Branch in the West Village tonight -- I'll be reading from my new novel Losers, and a host of other people will be appearing, including Coe Booth, whose book Tyrell the New York Times couldn't get enough of, and David Levithan, who wrote this little movie about two kids and an infinite playlist.

And the fabulous Greg Holm has a new website! Just in case you don't believe how gorgeous it is, see above. And play a Where's Waldo to find the photo of me (hint: it isn't as hard as Waldo).

Noah, Meet Youtube

First of all: come to my reading at the New York Public Library tomorrow! New book! Free zine! What else do you need?

G-dcast has been going off the hook lately. First there was the wave of Jewish blogs raving, then the New York Times. Now it seems to have led to erudite observations about why Jewish education turned out the way it is, and what the potential for Torah education could be.

Not to ego-ize too much, but I'm excited.

I'm live!

My book is live! My new novel Losers just got a really nice writeup in Booklist. I'm not allowed to say what it says, but I can tell you it was pretty rocking (although they give away 2 pretty major spoilers, blegh.)

I'm live too! If you live in New York, come see me this Wednesday! I'm doing a free show at the New York Public Library, Jefferson Market branch (that's the big one in the West Village), Wednesday 10/29 at 6:00. I'll be reading from my new novel Losers, and possibly dropping some surprises. It's the night before Mischief Night, and I'm going to be spending the actual mischief night at a literary banquet in Philly, so this is going to be the night when I get it all out.

Not to mention the other readers. It's hosted by my editor, David Levithan, better known as the man who puts the words into the mouth of, uh:

Also appearing: Coe Booth (loved by the New York Times), Christopher Krovatin (adored by the band Deicide), Katie Finn (I met her at a picnic; she's cool) and other folks.

And, not to overload you, but G-dcast is live! This week, I'm the host -- go to G-dcast (remember the dash) to see it, or look below:

Who Got the Beat?

My new column Tuned In is up on Nextbook! With a Sholom Auslander-like digitized picture and everything.

When I first got into Judaism (read, betrayed my secular family and Conservative synagogue and became a religious zealot) I was convinced that Jewish culture was never going to replace secular culture in my life. During some of my first Shabboses as an observant Jew, I went to They Might Be Giants and Fugazi concerts, buying my ticket beforehand and manufacturing excuses, if only because, well, the Miami Boys’ Choir was next to impossible to slam-dance to, and I’d be damned if I was going to listen to any one-man synthesizer band just because we have a God in common.

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Also, this is only going to affect about three people in the universe, but it's so great that I need to scream it: the first band I ever loved, The Dead Milkmen, are getting back together. So far it's just a one-off show -- while I'm doing a reading in Los Angeles, no less -- but, for the moment at least, it makes the world feel like a better place. At first I got scared that it would change what I wrote about them in Losers. but I think it makes it even MORE relevant. you know, to today's kids.

Hol Hamoed Jam

Back from the Sukkos-imposed hiatus -- and, hey, the whole world has changed. For one thing, Prowler, the band that cameos in Losers, has a new music video...and also, I apparently guest-blogged on Jewish Grandchildren for Obama.

About a year ago, I wrote an essay for an academic anthology -- okay, no, it was Chicken Soup for the Democrat's Soul --saying how I really believed in Obama. He called on Congress to change. He asked the American people to believe in him. I think Shepard Fairy's Obama poster was the summit of this for me: the Senator's face and the single word "HOPE."

But this whole idea of HOPE is weird. You can HOPE for anything....

(keep reading)

And here's your Hol Hamoed jam:

Losers Press

And there's a ton of new press on Losers. Check out the site for the whole megillah, but here's some of it:

Bookami
"As the volumes of YA novels published each year continue to grow, it's going to be less and less about what happens, and more about how you say it, and I think Matthue Roth knows how to say it."

The Bloody Snow
"Losers...shows that not all kids want or like to be popular, that some strive for something more meaningful, and that awkwardness is an art form. The resulting product is a story of not only meaning, but also hilarity."