Kosher on the Road-ster

We're four episodes in, and my Lesbian Hasidic Cross Country Road Trip story -- a little serial thing that I'm writing for Hevria -- finally gets on the road. Basically, we make it to the first bathroom break.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should keep writing. I'll let you know what happens.

Kosher on the Road

BY MATTHUE ROTH • DECEMBER 8, 2015 • ESSAY

One thing I hadn’t counted on when I hit the road: How would I eat? I don’t know if you know, but the kosher diet is one of exquisite restriction, that whole no milk and meat together thing, but also a host of other things we can’t have — namely, anything cooked in a kitchen that’s ever had anything non-kosher inside it. In today’s modern world of packaged food and artificial everything, it’s gotten a little easier — Oreos, for instance, might look like cream-filled wafers, but there’s no dairy, no meat, the whole thing’s basically a lump of sugar cooked by a robot.

But I’ve heard tell of supermarkets on the road where not even the orange juice and bottled water is kosher, where the tiny Ks and Us and Hebrew letters we search for in our secret codes are absent, where even the potato chips and white-bread loaves are baked with lard. When Elyse and I planned our cross-country expedition, I just figured I’d stack up before we left. Or on the way. Or before we got too far.

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The Way Smoke Smells

So I really love going into the conference room at this day job, and I just realized why. Everyone who smokes goes through the conference room and into the fire escape, and so there's a residue, not of smoke, but of sort of pre-smoke and post-smoke, maybe the smell ignited by freshly burning paper, or a special smell that only happens at the moment when a match strikes?

It reminds me of my aunt's house growing up, and of inch-high shag carpeting, and of the '70s. No word on whether there's a bunch of furtive, antisocial Siamese cats patrolling around the office, but I'll keep you updated.

Praying, and Cookies

There's this little afternoon prayer service inside an office building. Today, because it was the anniversary of his aunt's death, one of the elderly gentlemen brought in boxes of cookies and brownies for everyone. Before anybody ate, this one guy held up his phone and said, "This is the kosher certification for the cookies. I'm not saying anything about it, good or bad. I'm just saying I don't recognize it, and you should all know that before you eat it." He didn't take any. I left right away, disgusted with that guy. Now I wish I'd taken a cookie right away and sank my teeth into it. Or maybe I just wish I would've sank my teeth straight into that guy's face.

Scott Pilgrim, You're Old.

So I've been having a bad week and basically a bad year, and just not happy with anything, and my publisher just gave me a list of corrections that's literally half as long as my book and my Sesame scripts are falling apart and there's this guy who really wants to get me fired, and I couldn't even write on the train this morning. And I dug in my backpack and came out with Scott Pilgrim #5, the one where he fights the twin ex-boyfriends and Ramona tells him that she hates his band, and I started thinking about the movie, and how it was the first movie we brought the baby to. And now that baby is five years old, and how can it be true that the Scott Pilgrim movie is that old, that it's been a part of my life that long? And I thought that, if it's been five years since I sat in that theater and watched Scott Pilgrim, I can totally make it through the next five years at least. I think. I hope.

Amplify Is For Sale

The latest: I just got quoted at length in a news story about the company, Amplify, where until a month ago I wrote video games, and how it's ostensibly failing, and that the company is up for sale. I kind of don't believe it's failing -- not entirely -- except that our games have barely gone on sale (they're still not yet available to the public) and there hasn't really been time for anything to happen.

I'm kind of depressed and kind of surprised (almost everything I said about Amplify could basically be boiled down to: "They let us make amazing stuff and it sounds like they're going to pull the plug before anybody gets to see it"). And, unlike my quote, a lot of what we made wasn't even for the Amplify Tablet. I mean, the only game you can actually officially get of ours, Twelve a Dozen, is for your friendly neighborhood iPad.

The entire piece is here, if you want to read it. But hopefully I'll have something better for you to read very very soon.

And one thing that has nothing to do with Amplify: A website I co-founded and sort of semi-secretly co-run, Hevria, dedicated to finding creative folks within religious communities, is trying to raise money for new films and sites and programs. It's an unbelievably worthy cause, and if you've got a few extra bucks, it'd be awesome if you kicked some of it their way.

Skiing with Babies

For Passover, we left behind New York (and our kitchen) and went to a ski resort in remote Canada with my in-laws and a ton of kids. It wasn't a nightmare. It was really wonderful. But me and my anxiety made it a nightmare anyway. Maybe the fact that I took my baby on a 6000-foot-high ski lift had something to with it. Here's my latest piece for Hevria:

I Forgot to Selfie

BY MATTHUE ROTH • APRIL 14, 2015 • ESSAY

I went away for Passover with my kids and my wife and my wife’s family. We went to the mountains, to a really nice ski resort, and I took pictures of trees. I mean it. That isn’t, like, a metaphor for something — on my phone, you click GALLERY and all you have are pictures of furry green. Well, a bunch of stony white patches, too. We were in the mountains. There were a lot of rocks. You couldn’t take pictures of the trees without shooting a bunch of rocks.

Keep reading

The Talmudic Secret of Foreplay

 Via Daniel Boyarin's epic book Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and and the Invention of the Jewish Man:

So, um, I believe a wow is in order. Also in the same chapter: I learned that James Joyce's Ulysses uses the phrase "goyim naches."

#fuckyeahtalmud

How I Ran Away from San Francisco

Continuing my tradition of writing B-sides to my Hevria posts, here's the latest post and the latest behind-the-scenes story. First, let me apologize for that picture: my friend Harbeer took it on a spur-of-the-moment day shortly before I left the city in 2004. I'd just gotten a college gig performing poems. I had no idea what it meant to have a college gig. They wanted a headshot, so Harbeer and I went looking for the most ramshackle, ghetto background we could find. We didn't have to go far. It was the backyard of his apartment. Later, I used that as the author photo for my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs. This, I guess, is its third life.

So I really wanted to use the view outside the rabbi's house where I was crashing during this visit. They had the most amazing little room they let me stay in, right on the top of the house, with slanted ceilings where the roof sloped. And outside was an awesome jacaranda garden. But Elad said the picture didn't load -- I wrote the whole post as a draft on Gmail on my phone, which was the first time I'd done that (this is also my first smartphone, and is really new, and I'm still not very good at it, and also that's why there are weird AutoCorrect typos like "mazel tomb" instead of "mazel tov") -- so he stuck that old Harbeer photo on instead.

And I was outraged, and I hated having my picture as the lead photo for something I wrote, because I just want the writing to stand for itself, you know?, or at least use something cartoonlike, maybe stolen from an episode of Scooby-Doo, to show you how funny it's going to be. So I promptly took the photo at the top of this piece -- I happened to be walking through one of the coolest, most graffitied alleys ever at the moment that Elad asked me about it -- because, okay, at heart I guess I am still an egotist.

Anyway, here's the piece. I hope you enjoy it.

San Francisco Made Me Orthodox

BY MATTHUE ROTH • MARCH 3, 2015 • ESSAY

I’m in San Francisco this week, the city where I grew up, the city where I learned not to grow up. I moved here when I was 22, shortly after I became observant, partly as a dee-double-dare-you to my Creator — I’ll give myself one month to make a living doing poetry, I told G-d, and either you help me out doing that, or I’ll bow out gracefully and go to yeshiva.

Three years later, I hadn’t left yet.

I used to hate the tourists and business visitors. Now, years later, I am one of them. I stay in the convention center for most of the day. I wander around, searching for the rare corner store that doesn’t sell $7 bags of artisan tortilla chips. I keep kosher, dammit. Back when I lived here, you could buy a normal 99-cent bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, certified kosher by the Orthodox Union, totally ghetto and not that expensive. Now if you want a mass-produced kosher bag of chips, you practically have to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And I don’t have time for that. I’m a professional video game designer. I’m only here for my conference, and another session is starting in ten minutes.

Jews vs. Aliens

It's not properly out until March 17, but I have a short story in a new collection called Jews vs. Aliens. (There's also a companion volume, Jews vs. Zombies, which will be released at the same time.) My story is called "The Ghetto," and I will try not to give anything away but it's about an alien abduction in Crown Heights. And it was just featured on BoingBoing, which for a very small percentage of the population is roughly equivalent of getting a Nobel Prize in Weirdness. Oh, and here's the cover.

My favorite-person-ever (and Big Bang Theory producer) Eric Linus Kaplan also has a story, and so do a bunch of other wonderful people. And the whole batch is edited by Rebecca Levene and Lavie Tidhar, that latter of whom might be the most bitingly satirical and wise Israeli expat science fiction writer ever to exist. Not that there's much competition, but if there was, he'd wipe them out like a bunch of Space Invaders.

Squeezing Art into Life

Hey! I've been super delinquent about posting. But not about writing, I promise. Finishing a novel, and writing a new children's book, and the regular scribbles. And this.

Basically, Alan told me this story, and I knew I needed to do something with it. The other night, I called him up and spent two hours typing what he said -- not polishing his sentences so they sounded more like mine, not cutting out the prepositions and the passive verbs. It felt good. It felt honest in a way I haven't written in a while, to just take another person's voice and mivatel yourself (um, nullify yourself) to it. Here's what I got.

He Tried To Quit Music, But God Said No

BY MATTHUE ROTH • FEBRUARY 17, 2015 • ESSAY, LONG READ, MUSIC

“This isn’t a miracle,” he warns me, the first thing he says. “I can tell you the story of how it happened. But there’s some interesting stuff that happened before, that happened after — well, I think it’s interesting. I’ll let you decide.”

That’s Alan Jay Sufrin talking. He’s one of my favorite musicians. Alan is equally comfortable when he straps on an acoustic guitar as when he takes a bunch of keyboards and computers and makes some ridiculously danceable electropop anthems. He calls himself “the short Jewish Prince” — the singer, not the royal status — although he’ll usually follow it up by saying something like, “Well, Prince is also short.” In any case, the two have a lot in common: they’re both inspiring, both incredibly prolific, both can take the simplest tune and build it into an amazing anthem that sticks in your head for days and that you never regret having there.

Alan’s also one half of the pop group Stereo Sinai, with his wife Miriam Brosseau. They came out with two amazing albums that took Biblical verses and stories and Psalms and turned them into really wonderful pop songs. Then Alan started writing some of his own original stuff, possibly as a side project, possibly as the next phase of his career — and then he stopped making music entirely.

read the rest

Reunion

So I have this friend who we used to tell each other everything, and now we both have babies and other kids and never talk anymore, and when we do it basically goes like this:

me:  i'm pretty sure i'm going insane.

 liz:  oh, DO tell.

 me:  i don't know liz

my anxiety is worse than ever

i don't know how to talk to people

 liz:  what?

   let it all out

 me:  and i'm pretty sure my novel sucks and it's not even finished yet and if it doesn't sell i don't know if i can take it

      and i started drinking coffee again

 liz:  OH GOD NOT COFFEE

 me:  espresso

 liz:  well, that'll give you jitters and make it hard to talk to people if you're all speedy

or are you just having a hard time finding words for your coworkers who just got laid off? cause that would be hard for anyone

 me:  no, like

everyone

 liz:  who the hell do you talk to?

 me:  i was at a party a few weeks ago and it would've been so easy to talk to people before, and i just clammed up and i was like i don't care about these people but i don't actually have friends around anymore so it might be nice to have some but i just couldn't open my mouth

and the only person i said more than 2 words to was natasha lyonne

but that was because she said hi when she passed me and she looked familiar and i thought she went to my high school

 liz:  oh nice name dropping, i see what you did there.

The Happy Dance

Sometimes you need someone else to teach you what you already know. Thanks, Max Kohanzad, for sending me this little piece of my book.

Outlines and Writing Software

My amazing co-MFA cohorter Kate asked if I'd used any of these writing programs. I'll copy the list first in case you're looking for one:

139. Blogger: This popular Google-owned site is a great place to start your own blog for free.
140. Scrivener: This popular, feature-rich program is great for organizing research, planning drafts, and writing novels, articles, short stories, and even screenplays.
141. The Literary Machine: This free software allows writers to compile research and writing modules that makes it easier to draw on information collected during research to write an outline or a final draft.
142. New Novelist: Created for Windows users, this program is specifically designed to meet the needs of novelists, making it possible to juggle ideas, notes, and more in one place.
143. Open Office: Why pay for Microsoft products when you can create free documents with Open Office? This open source software provides similar tools to the Microsoft Office Suite, including spreadsheets, a word processor, the ability to create multimedia presentations, and more.
144. Script Frenzy: Scriptwriters will appreciate this software. It offers an easy layout that helps outline plots as well as providing storyboard features, index cards, and even sound and photo integration.
145. Storybook: This open source software can make it easier to manage your plotlines, characters, data, and other critical information while penning a novel.
146. TreePad Lite: The free version of this software keeps the writing process simple, ensuring that information stay organized and your story stays on track.
147. WordPress: WordPress is another popular and free choice for starting a blog (or two).
148. Writer’s Cafe: Get creative with writing fiction with this easy-to-use software. Designed by a writer, it features a notebook, journal, organizer, writing tips, and even an e-book all about writing.
149. yWriter5: Another word processor for writers, yWriter5 helps break down a novel into chapters and scenes to make everything a little more manageable.
150. ZohoDocs: Zoho is another free word processing suite, and like Google Drive, it allows you to write and access your work from any computer with an Internet connection.

[edit: taken from this site. they list 150, though, so consider this a scaled-down model.]

Here's what I replied:

OpenOffice is seriously exactly microsoft office. word, excel, all that. it's the same thing. For outlining, I'm partial to regular blank paper -- i make a list of

BIG POINTS
and then little points
     and then i'll indent a little and write scenes i have ideas for 

AND THEN MORE BIG POINTS 

and do it that way. the more bare-bones, the better. my writing partner Eric tried this iphone app called Save the Cat (the free version, oh, here it is) that gives you a 15-point outline to fill in...you can try that, too. but really just see what works for you.

So I guess my big writing secret is, I don't have a big writing secret. I try to be in the moment. Sure, there are some things I know about my characters before the audience knows them -- you can't very well write a murder mystery without having some idea who the murderer was and how she slips up -- but the big, character-defining, wow-instilling moments, I like to come to at roughly the same time as the reader.

But I do spend a LOT of time, hopefully more than my readers, thinking about what's going to happen, and what might happen, and the outliers are always the most interesting parts, al pi Flannery O'Connor's idea that an ending should be both "surprising and inevitable." And those are the chances we get to surprise people. I guess those are the moments that really justify outlining and planning ahead: because you've already anticipated all the expected things, and you've come up with most of the surprising-and-probably-won't-happen endings (the "evitable" endings?), and so what remains -- bizarre, off-kilter, and true to the story -- might be your ending.

(Or it completely might not. Which is why, for the 20 pages I'm writing now, I have four different outlines going. I mean, it's a novel, which means things will get sticky...but sticky is exactly what outlines are made for.)

A Song Lost and Found

Tonight while writing a post for Hevria, this amazing new group blog about art and G-d and Jewish stuff, I had to look up something in my own old blog at Diaryland. I got swept up in the tsunami of ego and started reading all these old entries, parts of a self I barely remembered.

The last entry I posted was about the novel I'd written that had just come out, Losers. Almost all the chapters are named after Cure songs, and I was writing liner notes to them, one by one (the chapters, not the songs). In one of the notes, I got lost mourning for a song that I could never find, one that my best friend put on a mix for me before he died:

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.

READ MORE>>

That was 2008. Before I had kids, before I had a job or style or a pager (I still don't have a pager). At that point, it was already three years since I'd spoken to Mike. It wasn't until tonight that my ex-roommate, dear friend and how-does-she-do-it-and-with-kids-too-type person Andrea saw my whoa-remember-this post and found it on Facebook.



And, like, I'm sure it isn't as good as you think it will be, but it's been fermented in my memory, and every second of it is about a time I remember more than anything will ever happen again.

And now I am crying.

Here's Your Next Reading List (or mine)

Just finished with my writers' group, a collection -- a straining? -- from my master's program. I think when we all decided to meet up, it seemed like an excuse for a reunion (and to drink). Turns out, it's more of a working night. We workshop two stories, and we go pretty hardcore. The way I know it's going well is, I learn more and get more out of the workshops where other people's stories are being workshopped than the ones where mine are put under the spotlight.

Anyway, we've been coming up with cool interstitial activities to do between workshops. Tonight, our assignment was to talk about whatever we're reading. Here's what people said. I'm mostly writing this because I feel psyched and energized and I want to read all these books. Enclosing links, mostly to the Brooklyn Public Library, so hopefully at least I use them, and you can too. I'll let you know how it goes. I hope you'll let me know, too.

Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey (recommended by Elisia). Elisia knew her years ago, when she was trying to sell her first novel. It never sold. This is her second, and it is apparently all over the place. It's a great story (she read us the first bit), and it's great to keep in mind when you think that you're never going to get anywhere as a writer.

Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz (Laura). Long sentences, a crazy meandering plot, purely beautiful writing. Laura tried to make this a beach read and it was so not beach reading, but it was amazing anyway.

Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante (Ben). Really beautiful quiet moments, mundane, but with surprising moments of violence.

(By the way, I should mention that the six of us destroyed four bottles of wine, so if there are details that I'm messing up, it is my fault alone, and not the fault of the recommender.)

My Struggle by Karl Knausgaard (Marc's reading it). It's named after Mein Kampf. Messed up? Yeah. It focuses on mundane, trivial moments and really blows them into microscopic thinking. Apparently a lot of men are reading this and really digging it. "It's about a guy who wants to be a writer, but can't because he has to raise a kid," explained someone. "What the fuck is the big deal?" I said. "You squeeze it in. You make it work. How do you think people have been doing it for the past thousands of years?" Yeah, Knausgaard. I'm on kid #3. I'm probably messing it up bigtime, but that's life.

Plainwater, by Anne Carson (Caitlin). "I like reading poetry before bed. It resets the rhythm of my brain."

Interlude: Someone tells the rest of us about an 11-year-old whose father is reading Infinite Jest to him and they're recreating it in Lego.

Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray (Caitlin). "You must read this," she told me. I am still not sure why, although the title, and the fact that it's a 3-volume book, have intrigued me for a while.

Oh! And here are mine:

Cujo by Stephen King. In his brilliant (!) book on writing, he says this is the book he can't remember writing. For me, it's seamless. Not just metaphorically but literally: it doesn't have chapter breaks. It's a moment-by-moment, play-by-play story. He commits so fully to the conceit of the book, the situation of the characters and the moment that all the stuff is happening.

And the books I'm actually reading:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I know that it's actually an allegory for Christianity -- thank you, o eleventh-grade Christian fundamentalist girl who I had a massive crush on, for pointing that out. But it's such a good story. And so purely good. I should probably write a Kveller post about my intellectual conflictedness on this issue. But as a storyteller, I could not get behind this more.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami. It's not my favorite of his, but after 50 pages of goodness-but-not-blow-away-ness, there was a moment where the emotional force of the story pummeled its way through -- it's about a guy who's always been part of a group of friends, and suddenly, for no reason he can discern, they kick him out -- and hit me squarely in the gut. And then it keeps hitting. It's not the best book ever, and there are lines that would totally embarrass me if I were Murakami (especially that one about "Tsukuru Tazaki's life was changed forever, as if a sheer ridge had divided the original vegetation into two distinct biomes") but it's a really solidly good book.

I included everyone's names as a way of sort of quoting/attributing to them. Hope it's okay.

2:00 A.M., Thursday night

I'm half asleep. There's a scuffling from downstairs. Eventually, Itta, freshly home from her restaurant, trudges upstairs.

ITTA: Sorry, I ate your leftover falafel.
ME: I was planning to take it for lunch tomorrow!
ITTA: You should've gotten food for me!
ME: You work at a restaurant!
ITTA: I can't eat restaurant food all the time!
ME: But my leftovers were from a restaurant!
ITTA: Okay, I'll make you sandwiches to take for lunch.
ME: You so don't have to. It's two o'clock in the morning.
ITTA: It's fine.
ME: You really don't have to.
ME (thinking): jackpotjackpotjackpot
ITTA: It's fine.

ITTA proceeds downstairs and makes two sandwiches. I return to sleep.

And that, my friends, is what is known in the vernacular as a win-win situation.

The End of Lost Time

From LitBooks' Twitter, here is the last page of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Kind of reassuring to know that, after writing 3000 pages, you're still not entirely sure about everything in your story.

I Hate Birthdays

First thing: I promise this is not a subtle, passive-aggressive way of saying that you should really say happy birthday to me. Second: I really am grateful to my parents and Hashem and everyone who's pushed me out of the way of a moving vehicle or woken me up out of an alcoholic stupor or otherwise contributed to the very unlikely occurrence of my still being alive.

So I guess, technically speaking, I do not hate birthdays. But all the same, every time someone wishes me a happy one, or goes out of their way to talk to me when they wouldn't otherwise talk to me, it feels like a knife applied to a particularly sensitive and recently-fed area of my stomach.

Most of all, it's that I haven't done anything to deserve it. Like, what is this day which demands more compliments and wishings of wellness than any other? I didn't do anything. Actually, if we're going to get technical, today's the day I probably least deserve it, since I put my mother into more pain than she's ever been and started the long downhill slide of dependency on other people for my basic human needs.

Like, can you please save it for when something good happens that I've actually earned? Because my pirate novel is still sitting in a corner unsold, and I'm still wearing crappy clothes that don't entirely fit, and I just demanded an entire dialogue rewrite, which is probably necessary, but is going to cause a bunch of people a bunch of nightmares, and I haven't brokered peace between Israel and Palestine, or even between my 6-year-old and 4-year-old.

But I know at heart that it isn't a bad thing that people are wishing me stuff. Even if it's something I would rather gets slipped under the table and forgotten, good vibes are -- should be -- always appreciated. And I don't mean to shoot you down, and I can just see my mom's face when she reads this, But don't you feel good when..., and at this point in my life (old) (sick) (and kind of sweaty) I can use all the points I can get. So if you really want to wish a happy birthday today, probably the place to go is here: My mom's facebook page. Feel free to post on her wall. She deserves it.

In Judaism, you don't really get presents for your birthday. Instead, you're supposed to give blessings to people. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to happen, both to relieve my birthday depression and to make me work a little harder: instead of getting stuff, maybe I should be giving. So, seriously, hit me up.

Oh, and here's a present: They Might Be Giants are giving away their first album free. I know. I know. Happy birthday to me.

36, Stage Fright, and You Should Hang out with Me on a Farm

Last week I was performing, and then there was a Q&A session afterward -- which is always kind of weird; I feel like I should be the one asking everyone else questions, "What did you think?" and "Did that make any sense?" -- and someone asked me about my blog. "Yep," I said, "it's my weird place where I write whatever random stuff is on my head and doesn't fit anywhere else." "I guess you haven't had many random thoughts lately!" he said, "since you haven't written anything in almost 2 months." While I was reading, he'd Googled me and called up my site on his phone.

I have got to get better at covering my tracks.

I have suddenly started doing more readings, which is a weird thing. Not sure how it's going to square away with my anxiety issues -- that is, if I start hyperventilating onstage or ducking and hiding behind the monitor speakers, you'll know why -- but, so far, so good. Tomorrow night (Wednesday!) I'm going to be reading a very new story at Soda Bar as part of the Buzzards' Banquet series, and there will be music, too. And at the end of the month, I'm giving classes (and probably speaking, too) all week at ArtFest on this amazing kosher organic farm. And if you're there, my kids can teach you how to milk goats, because they know.

And the other big thing is this:

Itta and I were named two of the 36 under 36 by the Jewish Week. Here's Itta's and my feature directly, but you should check out the full suite of characters.

Oh! Cover photo by Karuna Tanahashi, taken at Chevra Ahavas Yisroel.

Bad/Good/Bad

BAD: This morning, one kid refused to get dressed, just refused. I cajoled. I promised rewards. In the end, none of it worked and I had to throw a My Little Pony out the window. I am a horrible person. (I think it was even Twilight Sparkle. Like I said: horrible.)

GOOD: On the train the kids played one of the games I designed, and they were actually liking it, liking it a lot.

BAD: Dropped them off. Got on the subway. Was really hungry, and was going to snag a part of my lunch. Opened my bag and realized that same kid left her lunch in my bag. The train was coming in 7 minutes.

GOOD: Ran the distance. Bolted up the stairs, gave the kid her lunch. Was halfway back down the stairs when she called me back. I implored her, "Poppa really has to leave." She beckoned me again. I ran up. She thrust one hand in each of my pockets. "These are the blue crystals," she told me. "Just in case you run into any evil purple crystals on the train, you can make them better."

BAD: On the train, I realized I'd forgotten not only my notebook, but any sort of paper. I dug in my wallet. I found a Duane Reade receipt for a bag of chips I'd bought for a class party eons ago, and I had to continue my story on that.

GOOD: I continued my story. And I'd been plugged up on it all week. And now, in spite of (or maybe because of) forgetting my real notebook, it all came out.

Three Things I Forgot About Babar: Death, Incest, and Shrooming

So today my kids and I crashed the enviable-but-stuffy Brooklyn College library. We didn't exactly get kicked out, but we definitely got enough snarly looks so that at least two out of three of us knew it was time to hit the road. Despite the fact that this particular wing of the library was almost empty, and it was, indeed, the Juvenile Section of a college library, we definitely turned most of the heads in there at one moment or another, and by the point that I was being asked if we could read just one more Dr. Seuss book (kudos to the library for actually having them), we were using our ejector seat buttons.

One of the books we read, for my first time in hmm hmm years, The Story of Babar. Three things I did not remember, in no particular order:

1. His mom gets killed. Not like Bambi's mother, at an emotional high-point of the story. It's just like, Babar is playing in the sand, he's out with his friends, his mother gets shot by poachers.
   
2. He marries his cousin. This is a little less over-the-head shocking, if only because half a dozen pages or so elapse between the line where Babar is visited by "his cousin Celeste" and his grand return to his tribe, whereupon he announces that he and Celeste are to be married. Is this really based on actual true stuff? Do elephants actually marry their cousins?
   
3. Um, this:
   

There's also definitely that uncomfortable undertone of colonialism--something which I did not pick up upon my last reading at the age of five or so--but there's also a weird, snarkily subversive rejection of colonialism on the part of Babar and his clan. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but I'm sure somebody's written a paper about it some time.

The Greatest Love of All

Today was long and intense, and almost entirely devoid of adults, and after I put the kids to bed -- we read the last chapters of Baby-Sitters' Club #3, Mary Ann Saves the Day, the graphic-novel adaptation, which has an amazIng scene (which I can only guess was not in the original, as it was wordless, and well-paced and utterly beautiful) where Mary Ann goes to visit her mother's grave and lies down on it -- and I emailed Itta and asked if she could bring me something from the restaurant when she gets home. I was so in the mood for restaurant food. sometimes you need food that you didn't cook, that no human being has cooked, that's fresh and warm and comes to you via a server and some cutlery that someone who's not you will wash (or, alternately, that's plastic and that you can just throw out).





Then I zoned out, except apparently I think I might have zoned out more than I warranted, because instead of writing I watched Sherlock -- a gorgeous episode, and one that I didn't think would come together at all, and in the end it totally did.

And that last scene, where Sherlock really wants to dance with someone and then he almost does and then he thinks better of it, a quick cut, and he's alone outside, hit a little too much home for me.

I really do want to write a great Disney movie. But even though the latest (Frozen, it's so incredible, I nearly had an artistic breakdown watching it just wishing I could make something that good and at the same time that inoffensive), where they (very minor spoiler) replace the girl/prince love story with a sisters/best friends love story. But I think what I really need to write, or to experience, is a movie where you learn that yourself is good enough? And I'm not sure if Disney will ever be capable of making that. I'm not sure if I'll ever be capable of writing that.

Tomorrow is my wife's due date. Or, as I've started saying it, her officially-overdue date. Feels so weird, that the world could change so radically at any given moment. And then I remind myself about what the Alter Rebbe said, that the world is created anew from nothingness at every moment, and I realize that all of us only exist by some whim of some Supreme Being anyway, so enjoy the sameness while we can. I feel like I'm hovering at that moment of Tron right before he gets sucked into the computer and everything turns to neon. Like stuff is nowhere near as cool as it's about to be, but I should appreciate the natural colors and relative boringness while I still can.

Not Saying Nothing

matthue roth
hey! you keep coming up in conversation. you aren't headed this way anytime soon, are you?

Rob Auten
I should be in NYC most of Feb!

matthue roth
!!!!
we should hang out early in the month, then. because when later in the month comes, i will be, ahem, indisposed.

Rob Auten
What does that mean?

matthue roth
there will be a lot of family stuff and sleepless nights
how are you??

Rob Auten
Are you having another kid?

matthue roth
sorry for being obtuse. i'm being extra sensitive to evil-eye stuff because i am weird.

Rob Auten
You should practice being even MORE obtuse then; I had it figured out when you said you were, "ahem, indisposed."

matthue roth
i was being way more obtuse for 8 months!!! i'm glad you kept pushing though. it's good to be back on our game.

Six simple things about today I wouldn't have noticed

1.
I love this book. Love it unconditionally. It's sloppy, and the basic premise is something I would have taken to heart ten years ago and now I look at it through the eyes of someone who tells stories for a living and think, that's not a story, but I remember the person I was when I would have loved it. And that makes me kind of believe in things again like a story about losing your soul and then trying to find it.

2.
Also, when you're reading it and walking down the street, it kind of makes you think things you wouldn't otherwise think.

3.
I got off the train early, returned some library books. One of them was The Pale King, the last novel David Foster Wallace wrote before he died. It's huge, and I barely made a dent in it. Too much stuff going on in my life, I thought, and too many other books to read instead. As I slipped it in the return slot, I wondered what my past three weeks would have been like if I'd been reading The Pale King. How radically it would have changed, my conversations, my experiences, what I chose to do on my lunch breaks and at night, after the kids are in bed, the parts of my life that are still my own. If my life would have changed at all.

4.
I walked fast across the park and down the street to my office. There was this girl walking beside me, also fast. Fast walkers are kind of united in our brusqueness and our no-nonsense attitude, our force of will to get things done, and we all kind of hate each other. This girl and I were walking at exactly the same pace, and right next to each other. We didn't make eye contact at all. She probably didn't even realize I was there. It was me with the book, her with these intense military knee boots and a killer stomp. Sexy boots and a sort of messed-up face, the kind that isn't symmetrical but you can't put your finger on why. We pass a nanny and her kids and we both swerve in opposite directions, then we're right back in line. We hit the corner of my work, she turned right, I kept going.

5.
The subways were psycho today. There was fog, mad fog, and at my outdoor subway station, you couldn't see more than five feet in front of you. People kept staring down the tracks, looking for that ghostly light. It took forever. Ten minutes, fifteen, and then in the fog, a faint yellow pair of eyes, that subway, creeping ever forward. It was packed. We had to force our way on, and then more people forcing their way on. I was one of the last people to actually fit. Or maybe everyone thinks that. At the next stop, this fat kid with a good smile apologized to everyone as he squeezed on, "Sorry, I got to get to work." The stop after that, a fat woman stepped on and literally swished smaller people into each other. I don't mean to call out fat people, I'm sorry it sounds bad, but this morning it seemed like nobody but fat people were even attempting to get on the train. A disembodied woman's voice yelled in our car at each station, "There is no more fucking room!" We all agreed with her. But she sounded more violent each time, and we were afraid to agree. The last stop before we dipped underground, the train stalled for ten minutes. A man's and woman's voices yelled at each other from outside. All the people on the platform, the people who couldn't get in, watched the offscreen drama. Someone said somebody should call 911. I wondered why that person didn't. I wasn't sure if it was really going to get bad, if it was just two people who didn't know each other yelling at each other, or what. I thought about the potential of calling 911 just to say that people weren't getting along, and there were bad vibes everywhere, and could they help out with that. I couldn't call 911. I couldn't reach my phone. My arms were pinned by too many people on every side.

6.
The lobby at my work was, for once, empty. An elevator was right there. A woman slipped into the building just as I was getting on and I held it for her. She hit 6, and then 5. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't realize." "That's okay," I said, "it'll be an adventure." She smiled at me as though having an adventure was the last thing in this world she could conceive of. She smiled at me like she needed an adventure. She got off at 5. The elevator stopped again at 6 and I got ready, instinctively, to step out. Then I realized it wasn't my floor and froze in the doorway. The elevator door held open. The elevator was still. I could have stepped out. Anything could have happened, then, anything in the world.

On slumlords, and slums, and not wanting anyone dead

I completely agree that this morning's New York Post cover is sketchy, and racist, and is basically anti-Semite-baiting creepiness.



But can we talk for one moment about how many Orthodox Jews are running slums and shitty housing operations, and how none of us is saying enough about it?

I'm not going to share the whole story right now. (I'm not.) (My kids are out for an hour, and I'm in the middle of a short story, and although this is burning me up right now, I have to act like writing is my profession and not just listening to whatever the voices in my head are telling me to write about.) But when I was trying to become more observant, and living in Crown Heights, and the only place I could find was a big old tenement on Empire Blvd. -- I was the only Orthodox Jew in the building, and my roommate and I were the only Jews/white people whatsoever -- conditions were atrocious. The halls and stairways smelled like pee. A toilet backup would last weeks before somebody came. You had to wait in line for an hour to hand in your rent check every month, in a dirty office through a glass window. (I wrote this short story about it, although I exaggerated things.) There were roaches the size of hot dogs. One morning I was on a wheezy elevator with a 6-year-old kid, and I stepped on one of those giant roaches, and a mountain of pus oozed out, but he was relieved. (I think he was relieved.)

It stayed there for almost a month, that body and that hardening pus. No other residents would touch it. I kept thinking maybe I should scrape it off, since I was the murderer in question, but I was squeamish, and besides, I kept thinking, I did the good deed in the first place. But, come on. How ridiculous, how devoid of humanity, is it that the landlords and all the people who work for them spent an entire month not going on an elevator in their own building, not even looking inside, and letting all sorts of terrible things happen -- most of which are way more traumatic than a dead squashed cockroach.

I'm not saying that the deceased, may he be remembered in blessing, was one of those people. I'm not saying he didn't do amazing things for other people. But maybe we can do one more act of kindness in his memory, and look at the money we're making from people, and ask just how we've earned every dollar, and if we're truly helping every single person we can.

(Edit: Changed the first line from the questionable "possibly echoes the Holocaust in a really scary and journalistically questionable way" because Yitz and David said it sounded weird and was drawing away from my main point. Thanks for the edits {you can still read about it in the comments below}.)

The thing about writing

The minute you start to think of it as work, it all falls apart. But if you don't think of it as work, you'll never finish anything.

Ghosting

The last girl I danced with was my Aunt Et. It was my sister's wedding. She was 98. Aunt Et was, not my sister. I'd spent most of the time retreating in the corner with my wife, the only two Orthodox people at the wedding, me clapping in a circle with my family at the beginning while the band played the Hora, the lead singer, this black woman in a sparkly nothing dress who pronounced all the Jewish words way too perfectly to actually be Jewish herself, belting out "Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov" while the big baritone sax gave it an illicitly funky bassline.

So then we retreated, and then my wife, who grew up both Orthodox and in a big family, told me, forget it, she was diving in to dance, and I stood on the sidelines alone. I clapped along and plastered this big toothy smile. It felt fake at first, my face muscles contorted too tightly, and then I watched my sister and her husband dancing and it got to be real. This guy was going to be with her forever. Then I watched my wife get roped into the inner circle, the family circle, by my uncle, who officially shouldn't have held her hand, but I think I was the only one thinking about that. My cheeks burned. I felt more and more awkward with every passing moment. I went to check on the kids. I went to get another drink. Then my wife, who'd been at it this whole time, grabbed me and pulled me in.

Flash forward: Almost an hour later, most of the bridal party has retreated to their seats. Even my sister and her husband are taking a breather at the head table. I, meanwhile, am still on the dance floor, dancing up a storm with all the cousins whose names I can barely keep straight. Somebody pushes me to the center. It's just me and Aunt Et. I am way more out of breath than she is. She has way better moves than I do. She's dressed better, too. She wears a swanky white pantsuit and is snapping her fingers above her shiny hair. I try to do the Fiddler-on-the-Roof thing with my feet, because that's as much as I can compete with. We are holding hands. We are laughing and salsaing and trying our best to ignore everyone around us, because they are laughing too, and watching us like we are the only thing on TV, and probably deservedly so. It's the only near-centenarian in the room and the only Bigfoot-bearded Hasidic Jew in the room, and they're reenacting a scene from Pulp Fiction that's itself a reenactment of Saturday Night Fever. This is how our traditions prosper: One hazy memory transmits from one generation to the next, passed like a drunken game of Telephone, or rocked on the dance floor.

It's two years later. My sister and her husband have just had their first baby. And I have just gotten a call: Aunt Et died today.

I'm not really going to process it right now. She's my grandmother's sister, and now she feels like she's a little lonelier in the world, which makes me feel a little more lonely too. And death is one of those things I can't talk about and can't even think about too hard, or else my brain will revert to thinking about something else entirely, and even when I write a book about it I can't even really tell you what I think, or how much I miss the people who aren't around anymore, or think much past the times we've had to think about what they might be doing now. I've never actually seen a ghost. Unless these count as ghosts, in which case, I think I see them all the time.


I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I was a little too emotionally unstable to think about it myself.

Calling out Joyce Carol Oates

I'm not sure if I wrote this as a dare for her, or as a dare for myself.

Got invited to see @JoyceCarolOates at the same time as I have my story workshopped in grad school.

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

I picture going to see @JoyceCarolOates, speaking to her afterward, and her yelling at me that I should have stayed in workshop.

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

Actually, @JoyceCarolOates, it's more like a fantasy. (Though I will probably be responsible. Sigh.)

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

(By the way, if you don't have a story due in your grad school workshop, you should go to this. And listen to every word she says, because she is a legend, and then brag about it to me and tell me every word.)

FAQ: What do you do when you hate your book?

Q:
Hey Matthue,
What do you do when you hate your book? Start from the beginning? Randomly change words here and there? Delete paragraphs? Chapters? Help!!!

A:
No! Don't delete anything! I save every sentence I write. I'm a total diva, but this is one thing I'll freely cop to. If I'm deleting stuff in my manuscript, this is what I do first:

1) Get to the end of the story. Finish it! No sense destroying the walls until you've got a floor you're happy with.
2) Make a copy of the file. Sometimes I'll go back and steal stuff from earlier drafts. There's always goodness, and there's always sloppiness. Sometimes you don't know till later which is which.

Best thing to do is put it aside until you get over yourself. The problem is, when you're writing, you're too much in the middle of things -- you can't step back and look at the book as if someone else is writing it.

What you can do is, start over. Not from the beginning. But just turn the page, skip to the next chapter, or the next big fight scene/explosion, and start writing something you do feel good about. Don't worry about tying it in, or making it fit. That's what editing is for. Right now, just get all your ideas down and get yourself to a place where you love what you're writing.

Hasidic Writers Read in Crown Heights

This Monday night, I'm reading with some jaw-droppingly vital Hasidic writers in Crown Heights. Please be there. You really aren't going to want to miss this one.

(Just click on the pic, or the related text, to find out details. I think that should work?)

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  A Spotlight On Hasidic Writers

  
  

  Public · By The Creative Soul

Goldbergs, Meet the Goldbergs

My wonderful friend Sarah Lefton wrote me an email the other day:

I just want you to know that although I have no idea what your feelings are on the matter, and you've been either surprisingly (or studiously) publicly quiet about the matter, I am enraged on your behalf about The Goldbergs and have found myself talking about your book an awful lot lately.

So actually, yes, my first novel was called Never Mind the Goldbergs and was a book that was about a TV sitcom. I'm told that it's totally nothing like the new TV show, although, when I first found out about it, I started telling people that they utterly ripped off my book for their background color.

I didn't actually think for one second that ABC used or borrowed or even knew about my book. Really, both of us should be dipping our hats to the original Goldbergs, a radio-and-then-TV series in the 1950s written by and starring Gertrude Berg, who was probably one of the most versatile and amazing people who ever worked on TV. (Primary evidence: It takes major cojones to produce an episode about racism and anti-Jewish sentiment in America...during World War II.) Although, hey, I did give the old TV show a shoutout in my book.

Here's the real bummer of it: Never Mind the Goldbergs did really well last year. It sold out its complete first printing -- which, because it's Scholastic, they'll print tons of copies and just expect them to last forever. But this summer, some friends told me that Amazon had stopped listing the book. I called Scholastic to find out what was up. Apparently they had sold out completely, and they don't see a sufficient need to reprint.

BUT DUDES THERE'S A MAJOR TV SHOW WITH THE SAME FREAKING NAME AS MY BOOK THAT'S ABOUT TO BE ON AND--

I did not write that email to them. I also didn't yell at them when I found out they got rid of the last hundred hardcover copies by selling them for 50 cents each to some random store in the Midwest instead of asking me if I wanted them. I love Scholastic -- I mean, Goldbergs wouldn't be in print if it wasn't for them -- but, yeah. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes you get the bear trap.

On the plus side, I do own the rights to my book again. And my agent is really excited about finding a new publisher. And in the meantime, I have this new book that, if you haven't heard, is doing pretty insanely wonderfully. So I'm in a mostly-good mood. And if you do want to read Goldbergs in the meantime, just email me and I'll send you an ebook of it.

And, if any of you know those people from that other Goldbergs? Feel free to tell them I said hey. And if they ever want to make another series, we can totally reprint it as Never Mind the Goldsteins.