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:
10/24/2008 healing havdalah
What are you up to on November 8? Depending who you are, either celebrating, stewing, or plotting revenge against fraudulent voting booths/elderly Jewish neo-Nazis in Forida, most likely. Or, if you've just spent Shabbos
LimmudLA is planning a giant bonfire on Dockwiler beach in Los Angeles that night. As the event page says, "The etiquette of the evening is that we will not cheer for the winner or lament for the loser. We will not speak publicly or even whisper between us to make anyone feel that they voted the wrong way....We will celebrate Havdalah together on the beach and sing our hearts out. We will then break into small groups on the sand for a Torah-inspired learning session about healing community differences."
The location alone -- "where the 105/Imperial Highway meets the beach" -- makes me get nostalgic for Los Angeles. (I'll actually be on a plane to LA that night, en route to the AJU Celebration of Jewish Books, so burn some wood for me.) On our site, we talk about the idea of Havdalah as bringing a drop of Shabbat into the week, and there's nothing these next few weeks are going to need more than some good healthy helpings of Shabbat. If you're around Los Angeles, you should definitely drop by.
And, like all Limmud ideas, this is viral, so if anyone is planning another convocation of this sort (or gets spontaneously inspired to), let us know.
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.
...
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.
10/23/2008 Meet G-dcast
Dear Mom and Dad, this is why I've been so busy. But, hey, now everyone in the universe can finally keep up with the weekly Torah portion without showing up promptly at 9:00 AM in synagogue every Saturday morning...or, really, without paying attention to anything longer than 4 minutes.
Keep visiting -- there's a different narrator each week. Up next: this punk-rock Orthodox kid who thinks he knows about floods.
10/16/2008 Etrog!!!
You'd think an etrog in Hasidic Brooklyn would be easy to find.
After all, when I lived in San Francisco (Jewish population: high; etrog population: maybe 2 dozen or so?), choosing an etrog was easy to select: your synagogue (Chabad, because nobody else wanted to bother with ordering them) would get a box of etrogim in the mail, and choosing an etrog would be pretty simple: the first person in line got the first etrog out of the box.
If you've ever seen the (best) film (ever) Ushpizin, you know that choosing an etrog can be involved, strenuous, even obsessive. Everything from the color to the texture to the bumps means something -- a tiny horizontal indentation toward the bottom curve, for instance, is known as "Eve's Bite," since one school of thought says that the etrog was the fruit that caused Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden. And let's not underestimate the prime fact: Jews are obsessive-compulsive about, well, everything.
So here's me on Sunday, going through every one of the dozen etrog shops that spring up in Crown Heights for exactly a week and a half, transformed bodegas and corner stores and even one barbershop. The only thing I really know is that I like to have a pitom, that tiny stem that looks like an outie, on top of mine. And it just so happens that, among Chabad, people try not to have a pitom.
I went into my friend Levi's family's store, set up in the neighborhood matzoh bakery. They always somehow forget they know me until I've caused them even more stress than the last time, upon which they're like, "Oh. You.." and vanish to another room. But they're actually really nice. In this instance, they were almost out of pitomified etrogim, except for....
"These are Moroccan, but you probably don't want them."
"Moroccan?" My synagogue is Moroccan. My eighth-grade term paper was on Morocco. I love Morocco.
"Moroccan. They're not like Israeli or Italian etrogim; they're kind of, how do you say, shvach. Lazy etrogs."
"They are lazy etrogs," I repeat, understanding not at all.
He explains. They're solid, sturdy etrogs, lacking in beauty and bumpiness, all the things we are supposed to treasure in etrogs. They're mostly sold to children, to teach them how to say the blessings and how to handle an etrog, and all that. "You know," he says, "the pitom, it does not last long around the children." Then he looks down at my daughter, who's strapped to my chest in one of those portable baby prison things, and says "You have one year left, maybe two."
I went to another place, and the next. One place, I was fighting to see etrogs, not wanting to jump straight in and endanger my kid. At other places, the etrogs didn't have pitoms, were too expensive (hey, hauling delicate and uncommon citrons from across the world ain't cheap) or just weren't the right etrog.
The last place was around the corner from my house, a convenience store that had literally been taken over a week ago. Mexican beer ads with women who couldn't have been wearing fewer clothes if they were naked littered the floor, mixed with somewhat fresher newspaper fragments in Hebrew. Teenage Israelis were running in and out like worker ants, and it took about half an hour of having a twenty-dollar bill in my hand for someone to notice.
He gave me a shrug, almost imperceptible beneath his huge shoulders. He gestured over to a bunch of huge boxes strewn across the floor, all of which had literally hundreds of smaller boxes -- etrogs -- inside each.
I got on my knees. I started poring through them.
Now my daughter is usually an active girl. She struggles, she blips and beeps and chortles, she crawls pretty much everywhere and she puts nearly everything into her mouth. Today, though, she was kind of dreary -- either because she didn't get a full nap, or from the tedium of seeing a zillion men in bushy beards and black hats, one after the other. She watched me poking through the etrogs with a modicum of disinterest, head lolling to one side. She didn't even feel like eating the corner of the Baby Bjorn, which she's usually pretty nonstop about doing.
And then I unwrapped it. It didn't look that special to me, although it certainly didn't look like any of the normal ones -- tilted to one side, the pitom sturdy and washed to the other, waves of green peeking through the yellow to the top and bottom. I was thinking of putting it back, digging through the rest of the box. I'd already spent an hour; what was another twenty minutes? But then my chest tugged at me, two tiny hands working their way inside the box. My daughter was awake in a way she hadn't been all day, cooing like a stoned dove and fighting styrofoam for possession of a fruit she'd never seen before. She gave an imminent tug, then looked straight up at me as if she was asking, Can I eat it? Just this once?
"This is the one," I announced -- to the room full of Israeli teenagers, none of whom was paying attention to me, and the manager, who didn't even realize what I was stuffing into his hand until the money was pressed deep inside, and I was halfway to the door.
You'd think an etrog in Hasidic Brooklyn would be easy to find.
After all, when I lived in San Francisco (Jewish population: high; etrog population: maybe 2 dozen or so?), choosing an etrog was easy to select: your synagogue (Chabad, because nobody else wanted to bother with ordering them) would get a box of etrogim in the mail, and choosing an etrog would be pretty simple: the first person in line got the first etrog out of the box.
If you've ever seen the (best) film (ever) Ushpizin, you know that choosing an etrog can be involved, strenuous, even obsessive. Everything from the color to the texture to the bumps means something -- a tiny horizontal indentation toward the bottom curve, for instance, is known as "Eve's Bite," since one school of thought says that the etrog was the fruit that caused Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden. And let's not underestimate the prime fact: Jews are obsessive-compulsive about, well, everything.
So here's me on Sunday, going through every one of the dozen etrog shops that spring up in Crown Heights for exactly a week and a half, transformed bodegas and corner stores and even one barbershop. The only thing I really know is that I like to have a pitom, that tiny stem that looks like an outie, on top of mine. And it just so happens that, among Chabad, people try not to have a pitom.
I went into my friend Levi's family's store, set up in the neighborhood matzoh bakery. They always somehow forget they know me until I've caused them even more stress than the last time, upon which they're like, "Oh. You.." and vanish to another room. But they're actually really nice. In this instance, they were almost out of pitomified etrogim, except for....
"These are Moroccan, but you probably don't want them."
"Moroccan?" My synagogue is Moroccan. My eighth-grade term paper was on Morocco. I love Morocco.
"Moroccan. They're not like Israeli or Italian etrogim; they're kind of, how do you say, shvach. Lazy etrogs."
"They are lazy etrogs," I repeat, understanding not at all.
He explains. They're solid, sturdy etrogs, lacking in beauty and bumpiness, all the things we are supposed to treasure in etrogs. They're mostly sold to children, to teach them how to say the blessings and how to handle an etrog, and all that. "You know," he says, "the pitom, it does not last long around the children." Then he looks down at my daughter, who's strapped to my chest in one of those portable baby prison things, and says "You have one year left, maybe two."
I went to another place, and the next. One place, I was fighting to see etrogs, not wanting to jump straight in and endanger my kid. At other places, the etrogs didn't have pitoms, were too expensive (hey, hauling delicate and uncommon citrons from across the world ain't cheap) or just weren't the right etrog.
The last place was around the corner from my house, a convenience store that had literally been taken over a week ago. Mexican beer ads with women who couldn't have been wearing fewer clothes if they were naked littered the floor, mixed with somewhat fresher newspaper fragments in Hebrew. Teenage Israelis were running in and out like worker ants, and it took about half an hour of having a twenty-dollar bill in my hand for someone to notice.
He gave me a shrug, almost imperceptible beneath his huge shoulders. He gestured over to a bunch of huge boxes strewn across the floor, all of which had literally hundreds of smaller boxes -- etrogs -- inside each.
I got on my knees. I started poring through them.
Now my daughter is usually an active girl. She struggles, she blips and beeps and chortles, she crawls pretty much everywhere and she puts nearly everything into her mouth. Today, though, she was kind of dreary -- either because she didn't get a full nap, or from the tedium of seeing a zillion men in bushy beards and black hats, one after the other. She watched me poking through the etrogs with a modicum of disinterest, head lolling to one side. She didn't even feel like eating the corner of the Baby Bjorn, which she's usually pretty nonstop about doing.
And then I unwrapped it. It didn't look that special to me, although it certainly didn't look like any of the normal ones -- tilted to one side, the pitom sturdy and washed to the other, waves of green peeking through the yellow to the top and bottom. I was thinking of putting it back, digging through the rest of the box. I'd already spent an hour; what was another twenty minutes? But then my chest tugged at me, two tiny hands working their way inside the box. My daughter was awake in a way she hadn't been all day, cooing like a stoned dove and fighting styrofoam for possession of a fruit she'd never seen before. She gave an imminent tug, then looked straight up at me as if she was asking, Can I eat it? Just this once?
"This is the one," I announced -- to the room full of Israeli teenagers, none of whom was paying attention to me, and the manager, who didn't even realize what I was stuffing into his hand until the money was pressed deep inside, and I was halfway to the door.
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.
Okay, answer now: Why have I been up for an hour and a half?
No -- the real question should be, why is it 5:51 a.m. and I've been up for an hour and a half? Luckily -- or, I guess, judiciously, I have a friend (on the West Coast, so at least one of us is up at a semi-rational hour) who's a doctor who just emailed me this epinion about Sudafed. Which I just took for this weird cold I have.
And things are starting to make way too much sense.
The review starts: "PROS: Clears you up. CONS: Amps you up" and goes downhill from there. Basically: Sudafed is made from the same stuff as speed. And the primary ingredient is, apparently, the same as crystal meth. Why don't they teach you this stuff in straightedge school?
Well, at least I'm getting work done. (And, by "work," I mean that I have two major projects due this week, a Jewish holiday that starts in 12 hours, and I just spent half an hour writing an email to an old friend in which I volunteered to edit a documentary on Finnish goth culture.) For some reason, I thought the documentary was a musical. Maybe this speed thing isn't so bad, after all.
10/08/2008 what we leave behind
During Yom Kippur services this year, I came up with the best praying strategy I've ever had, I think. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to write it down and look it up next year...except, of course, I never do.
I'm a regular Ashkenazic guy. Blase Hungarian features, thick Carpathian mountain hair, the same prayerbook as half the universe uses...but, for Yom Kippur, I wound up in a Chabad synagogue. Chabad uses a different nusach than most of the rest of the universe. (It's technically called "Nusach ha'Ari," after the Arizal, except that he'd been dead several hundred years when it was invented by the Alter Rebbe, the first Rebbe of Chabad.) To make a long story much shorter, it's mostly the same prayers, in an almost completely different order than, ahem, normal...or, "normal" if you're a Carpathian like me.
We prayed all day yesterday, except for a 20-minute break at 4:30 or so to pop home and see my daughter. Most of it was silent, to ourselves, punctuated sporadically by a call-and-response hymnal, or a sudden moment on the part of the prayer leader of "Hey! This would sound really good sung aloud." (I can only guess that's what he was thinking. I was praying with a 100-year-old machzor that used to be my great-grandmother's; there's no call-and-response instructions, only big text and little text.) Anyway, for about three-quarters of those responsive readings, I was on a totally different page -- in a different section, and on a different mental plane.
And it was totally great.
With nothing to cling to, all I could cling to were the words. As a result of working here (and from a couple years of praying every day) my Hebrew's getting better, and individual words stuck out at me as I went -- healing; forgiveness; screw up. ("Screw up" is my personal translation of "to sin," since there isn't any literal sinning in Judaism.) But the more I went, the closer I got to that ideal relationship that all the rabbis talk about when they talk about Yom Kippur: the idea that it's just you and God alone in a room, and you're not sure whether to say "thank you" or "I'm sorry," and you end up saying both.
That's where this whole confusion about YoKo comes from. Nobody ever says "Happy Yom Kippur!" But people who regard it as sad and mournful aren't getting the whole picture, either. There's a story in the Talmud about how, when we fast, God is fasting, too. Not because God is getting ready to make harsh judgments on us, but because God doesn't want to make harsh judgments, and God's hoping not to have to.
It also got me thinking about the recent exhibition of the diary of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed in the Columbia crash. Thirty miles from the crash site, in the middle of a field in Texas, a farmer found the pages -- literally the last thing in life that he left behind. Paper is one of the most intangible, temporary things to leave. But praying, talking, our secret whispers -- if we die this coming year, that's all that we have left, too. Words? Emotions? Complaints? But if you're saying something good, it's nothing to be ashamed of at all.
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."
10/05/2008 Vilde Chayas
I'm the first person to 'fess up to my Maurice Sendak obsession -- Where the Wild Things Are is the only book that my daughter actually asks for on her own. (The fact that I toss her around during the Wild Rumpus probably has a lot to do with it, but I think she admires the strong narrative tone, too.)
Anyway, I kept telling everyone that the Wild Things themselves were given traditional Yiddish names from the 1940s and '50s: Moishe, Emil, and Tzippy, but no one seemed to believe me -- even when I tracked down references).
Anyway, here's a site where you can buy mini-Wild Things of your own -- named, as it turns out, after Sendak's uncles and aunts. Even the term "Wild Things" comes from the Yiddish vilde chaya, which is what your grandmother called you after you had a little too much salt water taffy and were leaping on the furniture.
10/05/2008 Doctor Who geekout moment
I don't know if anyone I know will find this riveting, but I do: A catalogue of every time anyone has said "What are you doing here?" on Doctor Who.
10/02/2008 r.i.p. runaways
I usually hate reading reviews. I'd rather just love a movie on its own -- and, even when it's really bad, I do find things to love about it. And then I can blab about them all day with whoever I saw it with. (Two exceptions: "From Dusk Till Dawn," which I saw in a really anti-Quentin Tarantino part of my life, and "Clay Pigeons," which was just sexist.)
It's almost the opposite with comic books. I lurve reading comic reviews -- if only because I don't have enough friends who read comics to talk to about comics. And the ones who do are usually more interested in the good stuff -- Johnny Hiro, Skyscrapers of the Midwest -- than the crappy X-Men-influenced science fiction dramas and dead people getting resurrected.
What made Runaways so great was the Buffy-like balance of suspense, emotional candidness, and not knowing what's going to come next. The original creators, writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Adrian Alfonso, were champions at that. They had an amazing talent of ratcheting everything about it -- the action, the story, the characters -- up one notch when you'd least expect it. Of course Karolina is gay. Of course she's going to try and deny it by throwing herself at Nico's boyfriend. But who knew she'd eventually fall for a shape-changing alien who is sometimes male, sometimes female, but always a warrior with a constantly, bewilderingly sexist streak?
Anyway. The Buffy comparisons worked, and Joss Whedon actually took over the book for a bit. It took almost two years to get six monthly issues out, and the plotting was sometimes bewildering, but you always got rewarded -- like when 11-year-old Molly (whose superhero name is Bruiser, except that she keeps trying to change it to Princess Powerful) knocks out the Punisher, and then gets a lesson from Nico on where you can punch bad guys and where you can't.
Anyway, enter new writer Terry Moore. He's done some amazing stuff. I went back and forth on Strangers in Paradise, which is one of the first independent comics to be universally canonized (but is sometimes too melodramatic to read, and sometimes too silly). But now he's writing Runaways, and I can't follow anything. The two teenage guys are suddenly interchangeable. Nico, once a cool, insecure goth girl, barks out orders and not much else. And my beloved platonic-girlfriend-for-life Molly is reduced to the cute punchline at the end of a fight.
Gah. I never usually write about comics, except in articles to rave about what's great, but this review got so many things right about how I feel about Runaways right now, and it didn't say enough about how I feel. I love you, Terry Moore, but love sometimes means knowing when to let go.
