This is probably my liberal-New York-Jewboy sensibilities kick in, but should I be worried that "the wrong kind of people" are going to read David Remnick's piece in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker and think: "I don't know what a Shabbos Goy is, but it sounds like part of that god damned Zionist Conspiracy thing.  I knew it!"

I'm doubtful of course, but it's always a hoot to read about the Commander in Chief turning the lights on and off for his buddy, Senator Ira Silverstein after Friday State Senate meetings ran a little later than expected.

I'm sitting here at my desk.  In front of me is one telephone, one iPhone, a cup of coffee, and two computer screens.  One screen has my Tweetdeck on it, and the other, well, I'm using it to write this.  Monday through Friday, I work from about 9:30 AM till about 6:30 PM.  I leave the office, and if I don't go to Whole Foods, I usually go home, sit down on my couch and pop open my Netbook, because I get this feeling that there was either something I didn't finish at the office, or because like Bob Dylan, I too have a "head full of ideas" that drives me insane; I want to work on another project or finish a piece of fiction.  This lust to stay connected never seems to end, and really I'm not complaining about it -- too much.

Tonight, I'll want to know if there are any more NCAA upsets, and even though I want to know who all my friends on Twitter think is the greatest band playing at SXSW, I'm going to let it go until Saturday night, because I like this idea of a National Day of Unplugging as part of The Sabbath Manifesto.  As someone who's used the excuse of "I don't have time for Shabbos" when asked why I don't take part in one of my peoples greatest ideas, I have to admit that I'm sold on The Sabbath Manifesto.

While I cherish and respect all the rituals involved with observing the Sabbath, this simple message of unplugging, relaxing, and unwinding, seems a lot more my style than lighting candles and saying prayers (but the drinking wine thing is always up my alley). 

And who knows?  Maybe if I like this enough, we can make it a regular thing? 

Sam stops by Emily Gould's kitchen to do a little "cooking". 

1.  Your name is Jesse James

2.  You allegedly have sex with a woman who dresses up like a Nazi, and has "W.P." tattooed on her legs.

 Tmz reports: "The woman who reportedly had an affair with Sandra Bullock's husband Jesse James has another bombshell to drop -- a full scale Nazi photo shoot."

Okay, sure.  Anybody can dress like a Nazi, doed that mean they are a Nazi?

"In child custody documents filed in January, Michelle's ex-husband says she "makes the Nazi salute," and has a swastika tattoed on her stomach (not seen in these pics).

In one photo the letter "w" is on Michelle's left leg, and the letter "p" on her right. We're told Michelle tells people it stands for 'white power.'"

This makes it a little harder to argue any sort of case that you aren't white trash. 

Nothing says "statement" more than dressing up in the finest Top Shop and Urban Outfitters gear, taking a trip to a hip music conference, and telling the world how bad Israel is for having musicians. 

Took up cause because they were denied entry to Levis Fader Fort

You know those times where you think a rabbi makes sense, but you also think he might be bat-shit crazy?  Let's use Rabbi Dov Lioras an example:

"We still are not compassionate towards people in our times, so having mercy on animals is irrelevant," explained the rabbi. "Only when the world ascends spiritually and we have mercy on people will we be able to be vegetarians." (Via)

 

Meat eaters and plant munchers: debate!

• Matthue Roth debuts a new column at Brooklyn (The Borough) called "Tznius Envy".

• Coming soon: the collected fiction works of Gordon Lish. 

• I swore up and down that after our own interview with Sam Lipsyte went up, that we were gonna give it a rest talking about the writer and his fantastic book The Ask.  Instead, I want to focus on the fact that he told Largehearted Boy that he likes Liars, Suicide, The Feelies, and Jay Reatard.  This makes Lipsyte even cooler than formerly thought, and gives us reason to continue talking about him.

• The return of Rabbi Harvey

• An interesting take on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

• Why is this the first I'm hearing of a company named Kafkacotton?

• The Big Shakespearean Lebowski opens this week. 

In the rare event the Chicago Cubs win (they haven't captured a World Series title since 1908), you will hear legions of drunken Northsiders singing a simple tune of "go Cubs go" together in unison.  The song was written by the late Steve Goodman, who even after being diagnosed with Leukemia in 1969, would spend his life writing songs that Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins and Willie Nelson, would go on to record.  While that is no small feat, he will always be remembered for his endearing anthem for the lovable losers he was a fanatic fan of. 

Now, nearly 30 years after his death, Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley has introduced a bill honoring the late folk singer, that would rename the Lakeview Post Office --located a few blocks from the Cubs home field of Wrigley Field-- after the man who gave Cubs fans something to sing about.

 

As if I didn't like Rep. Steve Cohen enough.

The first Jewish congressmanin the history of Tennessee, just gave a farwell to the late, great Alex Chilton on the House Floor.  Chilton, one of the founding members of Big Star, passed away at the age of 59.

In an effort to show how incredibly disgusting food like McDonald's is, an author bought a Happy Meal, placed it on a shelf for a year, and has reported that like the plastic toys included, the burger and fries have shown NO SIGNS OF DECAY.

Ladies and gentleman, if there was some sort of rabbinical seal for "Least Kosher/Most Disgusting Food on the Planet", I'd have to guess this would be the clear winner. 

We love to read Pitchfork, Impose, and Brooklyn Vegan for most of our music news, but those guys listen to music for a living, and have obviously developed specific tastes.  While we love long, well-written proclamations as to why the newest Diplo remix of Neon Indian covering a Yeasayer song is the greatest thing since the time Panda Bear re-remixed Diplo's work on a Beach House song, we think it's time for a fresh point of view.  

Introducing that new point of view: 15-year-old Yeshiva student, Tessa G. 

 

April Smith and the Great Picture Show

Songs For a Sinking Ship

Self-made and self-popularized, April Smith seems to get her kicks from retro beats and polka style odes to happy-go-lucky love and sad, sad hurtful love. The first song on the album, "Movie Loves a Scream", mixes what sounds like a 40's jazz band and a ukulele. It's a little daring, but it actually makes it a somewhat catchy, toe tapping song. The next few songs are comprised of a polka sad song, an oldies inspired slow song about a presumably "drop dead gorgeous" person, and the list goes on. The songs are pretty much either sassy and upbeat, or sad ballads. April has a sweet yet strong voice that owes a great deal to older-era music that charms, but lacks depth and the ability to be listened to without getting bored of it after a few minutes.

 

Seven Saturdays

S/T EP 

Self-released

First thought... a whole ablum-about Los Angeles?  JEEZ.  Well the first song is literally just , surprise surprise: some repeating French monologue and mellow tones in the background. A wee creepy, but if that's what the cool kids are doing these days why not? For one thing, it sounds like a song in the soundtrack to an indie tragedy about depression and death and destruction and dying puppies and whatnot. The next song: more of the sad stuff. And of course deep, woeful violin chords, with xylophone. This turns out to be sort of mellow and lament-alicious. The album itself sounds a little repetitive and almost like an introduction to a song, not a song itself. Sometimes drab, and bad mood inducing.

 

La Strada

New Home

Ernest Jenning Recording Co.

Ahhh!  It's that guy who prides himself because all his lyrics are a play on words. The music incorporates violin and guitar strumming.  There's even some accordion.  The lead singers voice is slightly high and smooth, and doesn't prove to be falsetto heavy.  In fact, his voice is kind of rustic and natural sounding. Overall, the music sometimes feels like it was born in the backroom of a tavern frequented by sailors, a little nautical and invoking the spirits of long dead depressed musical pirates. Other songs are almost nursery rhymes, soft and sweet and under not too much foreign influence other than harmony of the instruments. This album has some nice sparkly gems, and a few songs that just make me wanna say "ARRRG" and bury some treasure.

 

 

Those lovable Maccabees of Yeshiva University have absolutely zero chance of ever making it to the "big dance" -- considering their Division III status.  But don't count their coach of nearly forty years to pull a minor miracle out of his behind and scoop up the Skyline Conference's Coach of the Year award even after finishing the season with a losing record.  

And while we at Jewcy want to offer a hearty "congrats" to coach Jonathan Halpren, we do it with a bit of trepidation considering this is probably going to be the last Jewish college basketball story you will hear all year.

• My grandson likes "death metal".  Frankly, it sounds like rubbish to me.  Death metal in Poland sounds even worse.  And when Polish death metalers start tearing up sacred books?  Forget about it!

• A former Nazi writes a book.  Feh. 

• You know what my St. Patrick's Day survival kit is?  Prune juice and Golden Girls. 

• I don't know why all the young men are wearing beards.  I can't tell them and my crazy religious nephew apart!

• Jews back in Berlin? My grandsons ex-girlfriend (the one with the piercings) moved to Berlin.  She said it's the "new Brooklyn".  I don't know what that means. 

• General Grant and Ronald Reagan were both schmucks! 

 

Dying bodies of water green, parades, drunken douche bags: these are things I'm not much of a fan of.  Also the fact that I'm Jewish, and have no reason to take part in St. Patrick's Day celebrations, makes me think of today as simply another day in the office.  Meanwhile, a bunch of guys named "Tommy" and "Frank" are calling sick out of work and pounding Car Bombs right outside my window, and I'm left to fear the sea of green beads and "Fuck me I'm Irish" t-shirts that I'm going to have to deal with when I go for my coffee recharge in an hour.

But wait, I hear a familiar sound.  It's the drunken croon of Shane McGowan!  That bar across that street that would normally be playing an awkward mix of Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, and 90's gangsta rap is blasting Rum Sodomy & the Lash in it's entirety.  For the moment life is good for this Jew on St. Pat's Day.

If for nothing else, I think we should all take a moment and be thankful for the fact that if not for The Pogues, who would have come along and decided to fuse punk music with traditional folk sounds?  Sure, Shane MacGowan looks like a ghost with bad teeth, but would we have bands like Golem, Gogol Bordello, and The Shondes (among many others) fusing world sounds with punk aggression?

I'm doubtful. 

 

 

Whoops.

Well, for those of you who have already had enough of people reinterpreting The Diary of Anne Frank, you might want to skip Masterpiece on April 11th when PBS unveils the latest adaptation of Frank's diary.  How is this adaptation going to be any different?  Hopefully we can look forward to a heaping dose of that wry humor that British stage actors love adding to famous tragedies.

Wait!  It gets better!

Want to tell your friends you saw a special sneak preview of the upcoming PBS special AND heard esteemed Jewish studies lecturer Whoopi Goldberg discuss Anne Frank?  You can!  In New York City, April 6th, at 92Y: it's on!

Democratic Congressman, former roommate of Jon Stewart, and dude who will never be mayor, Rep. Anthony Weiner, took President Obama to task for what the representative sees as the White House mishandling the ongoing construction of settlements in Israel:

"The appropriate response was a shake of the head - not a temper tantrum," Weiner said in a statement to be released shortly.  "Israel is a sovereign nation and an ally, not a punching bag. Enough already."

(via)

Jason Segel is a lucky man for many reasons:

1.  He's rich.  That isn't so bad.

2.  He's tall.  I'd like to be tall.

3.  He's in movies.  While blogging is fun, I'd assume being a movie star is better.

But to be honest, 1, 2, and 3 mean nothing as the former Freaks and Geeks star prepares his next, and possibly awesomest role: working with the Muppets. 

In this new series, Jewcy will be asking artists --Jew and non-Jews alike-- to discuss in their own words, a specific influence Jewish culture has had on their work.  This week, Zach Lupetin, leader of California old-timey songsters, The Dustbowl Revival, discusses how the Middle Eastern sounds he heard on his trip to Israel helped broaden his world view of music. 


I was raised in a multi-denominational household, with a Jewish-born mother and a Roman-Catholic father. I have always valued both sides of my heritage and was happy to take part in the birthright trip to Israel while at college at the University of Michigan. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least, one that I wish everyone, regardless of faith, could take part in. Our mandolin player Daniel Mark is also Jewish and I've spent many hours with his family here in Los Angeles celebrating the holy days. One of my favorite parts of the synagogue and holiday services that I have taken part in over the years (mostly reform or liberal) are the songs. The chord structures are really cool, dark, moody and get my foot tapping. I was inspired, when in the Middle East, to learn more about Eastern music traditions and fuse those rhythms with blues, gypsy and jazz and tell secular stories with them. There's a reason these songs have endured this long - there's a power in the structure and like a great twelve-bar blues, it just feels good to play and to hear.

 The Dustbowl Revival

 

 

It was 84 years ago today that Jerry Lewis was born in Newark, New Jersey.  In the years since, the man born Joseph Levitch, would go on to have one of the most esteemed careers in show business: from his comedy team with Dean Martin, to the brilliance of the original Nutty Professor, and his underrated role in Martin Scorsese's 1983 film, The King of Comedy.  To call Lewis anything other than a legend, would be an understatement. 

But as brilliant as much of his work is, it's an unreleased film that Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in which is as popular a topic among film buffs as his dual roles playing the nerdy Professor Julius Kelp, and the studly Buddy Love.  The Day the Clown Cried, the 1972 film that supposedly sits in a locked vault in Lewis' office, has Lewis playing Helmut Dorque, a German clown who performs for the Jewish children in a concentration camp. If reports are to be believed, it might be the mother of all depressing Holocaust films, but it's also been said by Hollywood insiders who have seen the film, that it's a masterwork of "Chaplinesque dark comedy". 

If you're thinking "sure, that's what the world needs, another Holocaust film", we would normally agree with you. For his own personal reasons, Lewis doesn't want the world to see the film, leading us to believe it's either worth the hype, or a total piece of garbage.  But if we are to listen to the murmurs that have been uttered by the few who have seen it, it's not only a major achievement for the comedic genius who's birthday we celebrate today, but a landmark of a film that may never see the light of day.

Alex Portnoy: fictional poster child for my people, curious little Yid, anti-Holden Caulfield, insufferable little prick; I wonder if you know how much damage you've caused?

According to this essay, Portnoy's Complaint is forty years old this year.  And while the author of that essay is off on his math (Portnoy's Complaint came out in 1969, making it 41), it got me thinking that whatever age the book is turning, I don't want to celebrate it's introduction; I really wish everybody would just stop talking about it already!

Many hail Portnoy's Complaint as the masterwork of a man who may be the greatest living American novelist.  I won't argue with Philip Roth's stature here; I'm an avid fan, and enjoy his books a great deal.  When it comes to his work, I'd say he is best represented by his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, the chilling alternate history of The Plot Against America, or the largely autobiographical works of the Zuckerman series.  Plus, of all the writers from his generation, he has the least amount of crap in his canon (sorry Norman Mailer and John Updike), and even though he's become a crotchety bastard in his old age, when Roth speaks, it's always worth it to listen. 

So don't think I'm knocking Roth's legacy; instead, this is simply a plea for the world to stop using Portnoy's Complaint as the go-to novel when discussing Jewish literature. 

While Jews in Europe have long been portrayed as big-nosed devils hell-bent on poisoning the wells, making matzoh with gentile baby blood, and enslaving everybody on the continent, it would seem that the common caricature of today's Jew is either associated with the liver-fucking hornball Alexander Portnoy, or the bespectacled anti-mensch (who shares many of the same neurosis as Portnoy), Woody Allen. 

They are both feeble, neurotic, and sexually misguided, and for over forty years, American Jews have dealt with these stereotypes, and as much as it pains me to say it, I blame Portnoy's Complaint.  But is it Roth's fault?  He's a writer, not a prophet.   In reality, It's the fault of lazy critics who either don't have the knowledge to give a better example, or they doubt the intelligence and scope of the people reading their reviews.  Inevitably, if you read ten reviews of any recent Jewish writer --from Gary Shteyngart to Rachel Shukert-- you are going to find a comparison to Portnoy's Complaint. 

I don't need to give you a history lesson about Jews and literature: go pick up the 1,100 page Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology if you need a good primer.  All I know is that sometime in the last 40 years, some braniac placed Portnoy's Complaint next to the Torah and the Talmud in the Jewish holy book section.

I attended Shamrockfest, a massive Celtic-rock festival at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., this past weekend. During the opening set by Celtic-punk band Charm City Saints, an audience member wearing a NOFX sweatshirt shouted "The Brews!" For a split second, I thought that he knew something I didn't and that a Celtic-punk band with a few skinhead-looking members might cover the definitive Jewish punk anthem. Then reality set in, and I reminded myself that I shouldn't expect any Jewish songs. The next band to play on the Guinness Stage was Black 47, the quintessential New York City Celtic-rock band. I'd seen them live twice before, and when it came time for their last song, I was sure that they would play the crowd-pleaser "Funky Ceili." Then the beautiful reality came: Frontman Larry Kirwan introduced "Izzy's Irish Rose" from Black 47's brand-new album, Bankers & Gangsters. The song featured two rousing "Hava Nagila" interludes, and Kirwan sang in Hebrew for the second one. I was worn out from jig-moshing earlier in Black 47's set, but my friend David rushed into the pit for the only time that day. He was overcome with Jewish pride and felt he just had to mosh.

This hilarious ditty tells the love story of Izzy, a "cantor in the synagogue" who "kept the laws of Israel with the greatest of resolve." Izzy's mother wanted him to marry a Jewish woman named Esther Katz, but one night when he and "Rabbi Hershowitz" were out drinking, Izzy fell in love with an Irish redhead named Rosemary Eileen Statia Ann McKnowles:

Her crowning jewels were her smolderin' opalescent eyes
Which she cast up at our hero, sippin' his watery wine
Sent the power of Abraham coursin' down his spine

The rabbi nodded, "Oh, I understand, me son
The Lord provideth in many ways, and yours has just begun"
So he ordered up two pints of Ireland's finest beer
With a couple of shots to wash 'em down, he said, "I do declare
I hear the bells of heaven a'ringin' in me head
That goy would be a joy in any son of Israel's bed"

Izzy's sacred mother was beside herself with grief
'Til the rabbi took her to the pub down on Delancey Street
Her eyes lit up when she heard the till go clang-a-lang
"Oy vey, that Irish shiksa could use an honest man!"

So if you're down on Orchard Street and you see some red-haired men
They're all the seed of Izzy, sons of Israel to the end
But each and every one of them will drink you out of the house and home
They're sprung from the womb of Rosie Eileen Statia Ann McKnowles

 

It isn't all that shocking that a New York band would make a link between the Irish and the Jews. I've been exploring this link for years, and as I blogged about in January, musicians like Mick Moloney and Saints & Tzadiks have made a strong case that there is a connection. As I wrote then, "Thematically, songs in both traditions display cultural pride and refer to the longing for a homeland by a people living in diaspora." Musically, Jewish and Irish folk music are often exuberant and both give the fiddle an iconic status.

Sláinte and l'chaim!

Baruch Marzel and his friends at Lehava sent Bar Rafaeli a letter asking her to dump her loser boyfriend Leonardo DiCaprio.  Using some very Goebbelsesque phrasing, the people at Lehava put it bluntly, asking the supermodel not to "dilute" the Jewish "race".  You might remember Baruch Marzel as the guy who declared a "holy war" against homosexuals in Israel last year. 

Putting your thoughts and feelings about interfaith marriage, gay rights, and political correctness aside for a few minutes, lets call a spade a spade on this: Baruch Marzel is a total stud who just wants the world to know he isn't gay, and that Bar Rafaeli will one day be his.  Oh yes, she will be his...

Baruch Marzel

Dear conspiracy theorist,

You might think we rule all the banks, but to ease your mind a little bit, here is some proof that we don't always necessarily know how to run them. 

"Real estate developer Shaya Boymelgreen's Web site proclaims his finance business is "built on a solid foundation." He might wish to revisit that statement after federal regulators seized LibertyPointe Bank, an institution that he helped start and served as chairman." 

 

Failed Messiah reported on the story, and also gave us what we have to think is the best Elders of Zionesque quote of the week from one of the partners in the failed venture: “Money is begging us to come out.”

Sure, you can chalk this one up to a failure, but you somewhere, deep in an Idaho bunker, some dude is sitting next to his Charles Lindberg biography and collection of Nazi knives thinking to himself, "filthy shylocks with their magic ability to talk to money."

For Sam Lipsyte, it is time. He is now a Guggenhiem fellow, a writing professor at Columbia University and he is about to publish what people are calling his masterwork with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. In reality, Homeland, Lipsyte’s second novel was nothing short of masterful work. It created an entirely new vehicle for story telling by expressing a post college age slacker’s angst through bubbly toned updates to his high school’s alumni newsletter. Homeland is the kind of book people will claim to have taken to right away, years from now when it’s considered a literary staple for the times. Before that, he published The Subject Steve, a novel about a man diagnosed with a fatal and unknown disease. His first book is a collection of short stories called Venus Drive, which reads like less gruff Hot Water Music. Therein lies Lipsyte’s wheelhouse. He writes with the kind of edginess reserved for the hard drinking cult writers of American literature, but with an eloquence and a focus on cadence and sound that we associate with old time poets and literary greats.

Lipsyte’s new novel, The Ask, takes place in the life of a new dad with a job in the development office at a liberal arts college. Milo’s job is to procure donations from anybody with deep enough pockets and big enough egos. It requires him to keep a singular focus on these wealthy individuals or, “asks” and what he could potentially talk them into donating, or, “gives.” Early in the novel, Milo snaps, delivering a tirade at a young art student whose parents happen to be big shot asks. Milo is fired and left to worry about how to support his already flailing family life and pay for his comical toddler Bernie’s hippie-run nursery school. Then, Milo is suspiciously offered his job back if he can land an even bigger ask. The big ask proves to be darkly complicated and challenging. It will require him to re-examine his past, and to ask himself what kind of man he wants to become.

I phoned Lipsyte with my own ask. I wanted to know about the path that led him to his current success, and what the rest of us could stand to learn from it.

 

I want to ask you about Dungbeetle, the band you sang in before you became a writer.  I've read that Dungbeetle was known to put on strange and memorable stage shows but I've never really heard specifics aside from the fact that James Murphy aka LCD Soundsytem was your soundman.  There's a character in Venus Drive that's an ex noise rock band frontman who talks about kissing male audience members, wearing a cape, and a shoving a microphone up his ass while on stage.  Yet, I've been unable to find pictures, videos or songs from the real Dungbeetle. 

Lipsyte: That's good. 

Tell me about Dungbeetle.  What did you guys sound like?  What was the stage show actually like?  Can we find any Dungbeetle artifacts? 

The band was very noisy.  Our stage show was very much about denying audiences that moment, that sort of wink that makes everything okay.  We were very deadpan the entire time. The band would be making a racket and I would go down into the audience and maybe find the meanest, most homophobic looking dude and stroke his cheek gently.  Or I would writhe on the stage and cry about my father, that sort of thing.  It's an acquired taste I'm sure.   

We're there any bands you played with often? 

Six Figure Satellite were sort of a big brother band to us. We played with them a lot and they were just an incredibly powerful machine.  So we would compete with them on the level performative insanity, but certainly not musicianship.  We got to play with lots of great bands.  We played on a bill with The Jesus Lizard one night.  I think you can find one of our songs on iTunes.  It's on the soundtrack for a movie called, "Half Cocked."  You'll get a sense of what the guitar sounds like.  But the drummer wasn't feeling well that day, lets put it that way.  So it's not as punchy as it usually was. 

Speaking of music, people talk a lot about you as a musical writer and about the musicalityin your prose.  One writer even compared you to Dr Seuss.   

Seuss is a master. 

Is music a big part of your writing? 

I think a lot about rhythm and cadence and the acoustics of what I'm writing.  Which probably has to do with my background as a flailing frontman and enjoying certainkinds of explosive punk songs and other kinds of music that reach heights in a very limited amount of time.  I think that's translated in the length of my prose.  I've often wanted to create that feeling for a reader that I've gotten from great songs.   

So, punk rock prose? 

I think I've found different ways to work those rhythms and acoustics so that sometimes it's not just a short blast, it's a long extended glimpse.  There's a reason people talk about music in relation to prose.  There is something performative in writing, especially for the kinds of writers who pay attention to it.  So I wouldn't want to brand it that.  But the punk ethos of not being afraid to let out your joy and sorrow in an impossibly abrasive but also exultant manner, isn'tfar off. 

Do you think music is interesting right now, anyone in particular? 

I wish I were not someone who gets so stuck in the music he came of age to.  In a sense sometimes it sounds like the stuff you've heard before.  But I'm sure everything when I was young sounded to older people like the stuff they'd heard before and it goes on and on like that.  The bands that are interesting to me are, LCD Soundsystem, The Hold Steady have made some great records, Liars, that drum record I liked a lot.  I like The Reigning Sound.  But I also like what Juan Maclean is doing, so at this point I don't really have to choose a camp or a genre to listen to.  Also there are some compositions by this dead composer named Julius Easton from the 70's and 80's.  I stumbled upon it and just found it kind of mesmerizing.   

In your new novel, The Ask, the protagonist is put under pressure by the liberal arts college that he works for to procure a major donation from a wealthy potential donor.  In other words he's asked to ask for a large ask from an ask.  He's told that, "The whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall," referring Liberal Arts Schools.  Basically meaning that in the new economy, parents aren't willing to shell out money to Liberal Arts schools the way they once did.  You work at a university, is this based in real experience? 

No.  

I didn't think so. 

As it turns out I think applications at many places are up.  So people are still applying in large numbers, as I understand.  I wasn't really trying to predict the economic future for liberal arts colleges as I was trying to present a crisis. 

What do you think of the supposed "Death of the Novel"?  What about the possibility of physical books disappearing in favor of E-Readers?  Do you think that would be a good or a bad thing?  

Well the Death of the Novel thing has been going on for centuries and centuries.  The novel is a form of fiction and for a few hundred years it's been the primary delivery system.  I think we need to stop thinking about there being one thing called, "the novel." But, I mean, will the novel morph?   I think as people continue to innovate and be bold, all sorts of fiction will come and a lot of it will continue to be in some sense connected to the traditional.  Anything from Jane Austen to Thomas Pynchon, they're all, "the novel."  I think you can draw that line from Laurence Sterne to David Foster Wallaceand many others.  I think people are still going to be feeding off of that tradition for a long time to come and then they will also be branching off into other modes of fiction making.  What's always going to be important to me is that it be text based, it be language based, it be about how different combinations of words help us access human consciousness.  That's the death of the novel part.  Whether the novel will always continue to be a mass-market item, I have no idea.  As a popular form, even in it's degraded state it's still strong.  You know, Dan Brown, that's nothing I would want to read but when he writes a new novel, millions of people read it.  So it's hard to tell.  The other part of it is, I think there will still be a market for books on paper because I think people will want the books they really care about to be something they can put on their shelf.  I think it's different than say vinyl, because you can be nostalgic about vinyl, and the warmer sound that comes from vinyl but still the old records are kind of cumbersome.  At this stage, I don't see the Kindle being any better than a book.  It's far less pleasurable to use and there's something about the texture of pages in a bound book that people will still desire.  As for everything else, an electric file like Chicken Soup for the Soul #33?  I don't know.  I've had people tell me that it's over for text, that since everyone emails and text messages, text-based art forms are over.  That we're all going to move to this kind of global visual culture which everyone can understand.  I don't think that's so great. 

Have you observed a sense of doom in the publishing industry?  Did they want you to do all kinds of Internet tricks for this book?   

They're doing them.  They haven't asked me to do them.  You can become friends with the book on Facebook.  There's some guy twittering or tweeting lines from the book.  But I mean it's very effective in terms of getting the word out that there's this book made of paper coming out. 

But yes, there's a lot of panic in the publishing industry.  Absolutely, they try to mask it, but they don't know what's going to happen. 

Who do you think reads your novels?  I mean, I'm a 26-year-old guy who recently finished college.  Do you have a sense of what your readership would look like or who would make up the lion's share?   

Did it take you a long time to finish college? 

Yeah, it did.  I transferred a lot and did some fucking up along the way.  I'm just curious who you envision being the kind of person that would pick up your books? 

I don't know.  I mean, initially I thought it was 26-year-old fuck ups like you.  But I was checking out the book on Amazon and they give you your rank and then there are several sub-categories.  One of them was single women and I seem to be number five.  So that gave me a whole new perspective.

Congratulations. 

Well, I' m not on the market.  My point is, you don't know, and I think more and more it's lots of different kinds of people and that's what I'm hoping, as much as my heart is with the 26 year old fuck ups. 

Speaking of fuck-ups, there are two things, or themes, that you mention very casually in all, or almost all of your books.  Two rather lofty subjects that I think other writers, if they broach these topics they tend to harp on them a bit more.  But these two things keep coming up, male bisexuality and heroin.  

No one has ever brought this up to me before.  That's some deep reading.  

I just wanted to throw it out there. 

Well, it's no secret that I've dabbled with [heroin] and consequently struggled with it.  It's something that was for a substantial amount of time a very commanding presence in my life.  There was a very tense period where I struggled with it and had to deal with it.  It's a very powerful drug. 

And the bisexuality stuff? I guess I'm asking because these are the kinds of topics that writers tend to make a much bigger deal about when they write them, where as with you they are mentioned so casually, or as just sort of passing thing.  It almost makes me surprised that you didn't have a publisher or editor saying, "I'd like to hear more about this." 

I would have told them to fuck off.  I find it's much more effective in fiction to treat potentially big subjects more glancingly and the potentially trivial subjects with greater detail.  I think when you do that you're kind of bending and distorting in a way that gives a truer perception.  We live in an age where people make declarations about their sexuality, and that's great but I think the rest of us are a little more flux than we would admit.  But instead of making that a huge deal I'm interested in that being just part of the texture of life.  It's also an anxiety-producing subject that can be a good source of comedy. 

Speaking of comedy, you did an excellent interview/discussion with Gary Shteyngart, the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in which you said something that I found both fascinating and confusing.  You said, "Comedy is hard, pathos is easy."  How is pathos easy?  What's the trick to it?   

I think I was probably talking about the famous saying, which I think was from a Yiddish theater actor who was on his deathbed and people were gathered around him and someone said, "this is so hard," and he said, "comedy is hard, dying is easy."  I guess what I meant is that I've seen a lot more examples of a moving sad story than a moving funny story. 

I've read that you studied with Gordon Lish, who is known as being a very off the wall,non-conventional writing teacher.  Specifically I've read that in his workshops students would read their work aloud and Lish would cut them off at what he considered to be a "false note," and then he'd move on to the next student.  What were the most common kinds of "false notes," that came up?  Where did people get stopped often? What about your "false notes?" 

Well, each of us had our own forays into inauthenticity.  Gordon was very good at spotting when someone was trying to get away with something or using a very stock phrase, or just beginning in a very watered-down way.  So there weren't really any one or two specific things that people hit up against.  I can talk about what it was for me.  I think there were times when I would strain, perhaps, to be poetic.  Or I would use a phrase that was perhaps meant to be ironic, but it wasn't reading that way.  Usually, it's when what you have in your head or in your heart has yet to appear on the page. 

With the undergrad students that you teach, is there anything you find that you have to break them of?  Is there some problem you find that beginning writers tend to have, something universal? 

Yeah, they are really wedded to the information of their story.  A lot of the information they've devised about the world they're creating and characters they're writing about, they think the time the character woke up is very important, they think the make of the car that the character drove to work is very important.  Sometimes it's a good idea to break from that... 

But aren't those just details? 

Right but are they really the ones we want to begin our adventure with?  The main thing, and this is something that Lish talked about, is that you have this very brief window to get somebody into your book.  It's those first sentences that matter in terms of getting them to keep going.  Those first sentences need to be undeniable.  If their chock full of clunky details that we don't really care about.  That may not be the optimal effect.  If instead there's this constant feel of a new world through a strange and exciting combination of words and a sense of the writers full command of the rhythms and sentences, that's what's going to seduce somebody.  Not what kind of car the character drove to work. 

What was the first novel you remember really enjoying as a kid?  Not a children's book. 

When I was about fifteen, I was a junior counselor at a camp and senior counselor gave me an anthology of fiction with a Donald Barthelme story called, "Shower of Gold" and two years later I read these Robert Stone novels that really sort fired my imagination.  Earlier than that, I read a lot of science fiction.  There was a friend of the family who joined a cult and had to give away all of his possessions, so he gave me all of his Phillip K Dick novels.  I was probably about twelve then and I really devoured those.  I also read other science fiction books around that time.  Those books were very important to me. 

Do you watch television?  If so, is there anything on TV that you consider to be particularly well written?  Would you every consider writing for TV? 

Yeah, I would consider if it was the right people, if it was something that seemed exciting and challenging.  In terms of good writing on television, The Wire is good.  My favorite TV show is a British show that was done in the late 90's called Brass Eye.  To me, that's the funniest television I've seen in my entire life.  It was a fake magazine show.  But the controlled outrageousness of it is something that's just been unmatched by anything else that I've seen.  The writing is just beautifully absurd.  He did a show called "The Day Today," before "Brass Eye," and he wrote and directed a show called "Nathan Barley" that was hilarious although it got mixed reviews.  

Can you tell me about your life before getting published, after graduating college?  You were living in New York City, how did you stay afloat?  Any horrible jobs? 

I was a substitute teacher.  For a long time I worked for an online magazine called Feed.  I did the occasional freelance journalism.  I scraped by.  When I graduated college I spent another year in Providnece with my band and then we moved together to New York City.  The worst work I did around that time was telephone survey work.  There's a story about that in Venus Drive.  That was probably the most demoralizing job.  I hated reading from that script and I hated talking to people who seemed pretty desperate for a human connection and I was just kind of pressing them to tell me about which kind of coffee they preferred.  The title of story in Venus Drive is "Probe to Negative," and the idea is that you're trying to eliminate people from the survey.  You keep asking questions to see if you can disqualify them, they're either too old, or they're not making enough money.  Sometimes you would get people who really needed to talk and you'd just have to kind of throw them overboard. 

Before your first book got published, when you were scraping by, was there any point when you considered saying, "fuck it" and giving up on being a writer?  Is there anything else you ever imagined yourself doing? 

No, and I think that was the problem.  If I could have imagined myself doing something else, I think that I would have done it. 

So, you have these classes full of kids who are hedging their bets on ending up where you are, do you ever tell them that it's not worth it, that they need a safety net. 

Well, the fact is that you have a better chance arriving at something if you don't have a safety net.  But it doesn't really matter what you tell people because they're either going to stick with it or they're not and if they don't then that's fine because that wasn't really what it was about for them anyway and they can go on and do other things.  So I never feel like I'm in the position of making or breaking someone'swill because it's all desire.  If nothing else seems possible, if everything else seems like a kind of death, then people will persist.

What I do tell them though, is not to count on making a living off of it, especially now.  Everybody I know has to teach or do some other kind of work.  I can't even think of someone who just makes a living off of fiction. 

 If you could do that, make a living off of your fiction, would you still teach?  Do you think teaching helps you as a writer? 

Yes.  I would teach.  I wouldn't teach as much, but I would teach.  I learn a lot. 

Do you have any major regrets regarding anything you've written? 

There's a UK version of Homeland that came out before the American version and the novel begins, "It's confession time, Catamounts."  Publishers in the UK were worried that British readers wouldn't really understand the frame of the book because they don't have high school reunions and alumni bulletins in the same way.  So they wanted me to write a short prologue to that first chapter that would create another frame to explain, as subtly as possible, the notion of high school reunions and alumni newsletters.  I didn't write anything new I just pulled some pages from later in the book and re-fashioned them and it was fine,but I realized that the book really needed to begin, "It's confession time, Catamounts." 

If you could place a quick call to a seventeen-year-old Sam Lipsyte, what would you tell yourself? 

Stop panicking.  It's going to be okay.  Stay away from the hard stuff and don't bank on a career in music. 

 

 

I have a strong urge to make St. Patrick's Day a Jewish event, because my name is Patrick, and for the past twenty years or so, people around me have acted like St. Patrick's Day was like my second birthday.

I'm not going to get into the particulars about who St. Patrick was. Bottom line: he was a Catholic missionary who went to Ireland and converted the natives. That simple. It's goy.

Like most great things in America, this holiday came from immigration. After the Great Potato Famine, Irish immigrants flooded the United States seeking better opportunities. They were met with strife: a Protestant nation that considered itself settled that did not want any more people "polluting" its shores. Yet, they came, and integrated into society. Eventually, their cultural practices blended with other cultures in the key metropolitan immigrant cities, and became normalized. As people left these large cities for smaller cities and towns to escape overcrowding and to find better opportunities, they took this Americanized Irish identity with them. Over time, people found themselves attracted to their culture and eventually we got the St. Patty's Day that we have today.

The Jews, like all other religious cultures that survived the Axial Age, are really good at adapting to the world that surrounds them and integrating other cultures' ideas to meet their needs. The Purim story is a great example. This tale of survival is most likely an adaptation of the Babylonian story of Ishtar (Esther) and Marduk (Mordechai). Most of what we call "Jewish food" is really "kosherized" versions of dishes that already existed in Europe and North Africa. The wearing of kippah is another folkway that found a means of expression in the Talmud and became the yarmulkes that we wear in synagogues.

 

Today, Jews celebrate St. Patrick's Day, like everyone else in America, in a secular sense. Wearing green, pinning a shamrock to your chest, searching for four-leaf clovers, eating traditional Irish dishes and of course, drinking copious amounts of dark lager, are all a part of the festivities. The fact that Jews can celebrate this holiday without feeling less Jewish is what makes the holiday Jewish! 

 

Our survival has been based on taking what the world provides us, and making it Jewish, so that we can always have a place to be. By being active in the culture around us, but with a Jewish inflection, Jews show that we are the same as everyone else. And it's this adaptability that makes us both attractive, and unique.

 

There are no "Jewish" people in the way that there are no "American" people. We aren't one culture, one language, one race. In fact, we are a collection of cultures, languages and races. But we fuse these elements together, each of us with a different slant, to create this amazing Oneness called "Jewish". This is the same way that America made an Irish holiday a favorite past time.

 

Shalom, and save a beer for me!

This week, Lipa Schmeltzer gave us far more than his standard misspelled and gramatically incoherent tweets. Through the God that is Twitter, he provided us with news that he has recently published a Passover Hagadah, linking to a yidenglish "exclusive" interview with a reporter from VIN news, who not only announced  to his viewers that he waited an hour for his VIP interviewee, but reported the wrong date for the release of Lipa's next album, stating a date for the album drop that in no way resembled the actual one.

 

 

 

 

Follow that link and what do you get...Lipa's thoughts on his recent haggada, including images of what happened in Egypt during those wretched ten plagues. Did you know that Egyptians and their Jewish slaves drank out of the same water glass using colored flexi-straws!? - Neither did we. Did you know that the four sons were Hassidic? Or all children of Lipa's? Fascinating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before parting, leaving readers begging for more, Lipa leaves us with one last video in which after comparing himself to a spicy tuna roll he informs us how much he spent to make each Haggadah, how pricy yet luxurious the art of lamination is, and how much work goes into giving folks a Haggadah that's multi-lingual, translating Passover Seders into English and the ever-loving dead language of Yiddish. He also tells us how many he ordered from his Israeli distributor, how he made his family reinact a Seder in mid-January, and how he avoids phlegm by resisting the temptation to drink kosher virgin strawberry daquiris topped with reddi-whip.

From the New York Times:

"About a decade ago I developed a full-blown weekend disorder of my own. Perhaps because I am Jewish, it came on Friday nights. My mood would darken until, by Saturday afternoon, I'd be unresponsive and morose. My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends and swapping tales of misadventure in the relentless quest for romance and professional success, made me feel impossibly restless. I started spending Saturdays by myself. After a while I got lonely and did something that, as a teenager profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined wanting to do. I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue."

Will giving up the amazing meal known as Saturday brunch help you be a better Jew?  Maybe.  Will it make you truly happy to give up the simple pleasure of drinking a wonderful bloody mary, and eating pancakes with exotic syrups?  I don't think so.

James Brown's dead body is missing; here are our guesses:

1.  His body has been stolen

2.  Zombie James Brown is walking the streets right now.

3.  James Brown is Moshiach. 

If number three is the case, you have very little time to make the decision of eternal Torah study, or an eternity getting on the good foot.

Choose wisely.

Saturday night in New York City, a group of young mystics will try to revive the spirit of the songwriter who everybody from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen name checked, and respected: Warren Zevon (son of Jewish boxer, William "Stumpy" Zevon) died far too young, now artist Ari Messer, and a few others will hold "Pray Tell: A Self-Service Séance for Warren Zevon". 


"Following a life of countless ups and downs, songwriting genius Warren Zevon passed away in 2003 at the age of 56. After years of refusing routine medical exams, Zevon was diagnosed with cancer, after which he not only recorded his final masterpiece (The Wind), but was also invited to appear on Letterman for a full hour before eventually succumbing to his fate. Through visuals, performances, and participatory activities, Pray Tell will explore three different visions of the sardonic songsmith: the musical chameleon and Los Angeles mainstay who realized vastly different projects with different producers, opening himself up in ways both trying and humble; the ironist whose insight and humor were ahead of their time, and whose lyrics have come to define a range of self-referential contemporary cultural productions including Californication and Funny People; and the human being who suffered and conjured, partied and disappeared "with the best of them" in a stylized LA scene that has made a living off of confusing the public with the private.

More party-based concept than concept-based party, Pray Tell will be neither "real" nor "fake." Participation by individuals and small groups will be invited throughout the evening. Think of it as a living mixtape."

• Before he puts out Witz --which might be the most controversial work of fiction this year-- Joshua Cohen talks about breakfast.

• Sam Lipsyte continues to be everywhere.  This week,he takes a walk through his neighborhood in Queens, and over at Impose, gets asked what makes him so darned funny:

"There's definitely a lot of labor involved in making something funny on the page. All you have is language, syntax. You have nobody's hilarious eyebrows or colorful underpants to help your cause. Most of the work and the pleasure happen inside the sentences."

• Speaking of funny: Julie Klausner talks about music at Largehearted Boy.

• Ben Greenman takes the 3-D trend in cinema, and applies it to literature.

• Lev Grossman talks to comic writer Mark Millar

• Jews do Jane Austen

• Jami Attenberg is on the road and blogging about it.

• I've been told that there is a 90% chance if somebodies last name is Stein, they are Jewish.  New editor of Paris Review Lorin Stein?  Anybody want to confirm or deny?

Following sets from obscure punk bands that wouldn't be known on the international stage, Israel's most famous punk export performed in front of about 20 people without a stage. Haifa-based Useless ID is touring the U.S. for the first time in years, and with little promotion for the show, their set at Brooklyn's Party Expo on Tuesday was rocking and fun but not much of a spectacle. Between the graffiti-covered, corroded walls of what was apparently once a party supply store, Useless ID blasted their pop-punk with the amps turned up to 11.

The U.S. is familiar territory for Useless ID. They have recorded their last four albums here and released the last five on U.S. labels. Singer Yotam Ben Horin, who frequently straddled into the pit while rocking out on bass, acknowledged that he was born in Brooklyn. He pointed out that he had attended grade school in Brooklyn with audience member David Cameo, who said that the school was then known as Yeshiva Rambam.

The eight songs played from Useless ID's 2008 album The Lost Broken Bones made up the majority of the band's set. "Night Stalker," from that album, featured an awesome guitar solo. "Turn Up the Stereo" and "State of Fear" (from the 2005 album Redemption) were very catchy.

On a day when Israel announced more housing would be built in East Jerusalem, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was in the region meeting with leaders, and both Israel and Syria announced they would be pursuing nuclear power, I couldn't help but read a political message into some of the Israeli band's songs. Useless ID opened with "Mouse in a Maze," which includes the lyrics "We've fallen out with the world. Get used to the feeling." They ended the set with "State of Fear," in which Ben Horin sings, "State of fear, an explosion right outside my door. Well, it seems there's a lot of profit to be made from war." And in the middle of what Ben Horin called "three pretty fast songs in a row," the band played a political punk gem, "Misconception":

Our lives, one minefield
There's more to this than two nations burning up
No one can save us once it's done

They've got an urge to ruin
Every step they're taking leads to worse
It's time we all take action
Because every word is a misconception

Out! Keep the soldiers out
The enemy is wearing a suit and tie
Doubt what they preach about
We heard it all and see it now

Resist! Our nation
Hides the past and makes the same mistakes again
We didn't vote for war

Despite my impressions, Useless ID does not portray itself as a political band. The band did not talk about the meaning behind any of these songs while performing. When I interviewed guitarist Ishay Berger in 2008, he said that the band is not overly political and that "Misconception" was the only political song on The Lost Broken Bones. Last night, he added, "I think it would've been smarter for us career-wise to be outspoken like that, but it's not natural for us."

It seemed that Berger did not want to agree with several of my suggestions. I asked if Useless ID had more fans in the U.S. than any other country besides Israel, and he said he didn't know. I asked if he thought that American Jews might embrace Useless ID because they're an Israeli band, and he replied, "I don't think we're that much out there for the Jewish community to be aware of it." He said that they certainly aren't against playing for the Jewish community but that they haven't pursued that approach.

There was at least one issue where Berger and I saw eye to eye: vegetarianism. The band's members are all vegetarian, and they've said on multiple occasions that they are fueled by falafel. He didn't have high expectations for falafel and hummus in the U.S., which he had tried on previous tours, but he is greatly enjoying American veggie burgers and burritos on the current tour.

This article was cross-posted with Heeb'n'Vegan

When historians look back on 2010 Brooklyn, they will uncover dozens of articles on the phenom that is the Mile End Delicatessen, and for good reason: owner Noah Bernamoff opened the restaurant not to cash in on the foodie trend, but for the simple fact that he missed the smoked pastrami of his home to the north, Montreal.

To say that Mile End has busted out of the gate and onto the pages of every New York magazine that matters is an understatement, but the Canadian restaurateur is modest about his quick success, and as you will read in this interview, the guy really cares about the food he makes, and the hungry Brooklynites that are fast becoming his biggest fans. 

You dropped out of law school to open Mile End?  Is your mother worried?

Well, I'm technically still on a leave of absence.  I indeed left permanently or temporary to do this.  I wasn't very happy in law school, and this was something I really wanted to do for awhile, and I suppose I felt inspired at the time. It was a bold moment perhaps, and rather just feeling enslaved to the process that law school puts you, or fits you into, I decided to do something I really wanted to do.

I have a lot of friends who are either in law school or have recently finished it, and I can't tell who seems more unhappy.

It's not rare that I speak to a lawyer that's been practicing for 20 or 30 years that they say I wish I did what you did.  Even if I do finish it's more to feel a sense of completion.  It's not my primary focus.

What started your interest in smoked meat?  Obviously it's popular in Montreal, but was it something you've been doing your entire life, did you have to go back home and take a class or something, was the talent bestowed upon you in a dream?

It was born out of a loss.  I moved [from Montreal], and when you lose something, you miss something.  I was yearning from it.  It's not even the same to buy some in Montreal and just bring it back down because it just loses it's entire character.  It's not warm, it's not sliced by hand.  It's the kind of thing I did because I wanted it for myself.

Prior to moving to Brooklyn, did you have any preconceived notions that the delicatessens were better than they actually are?

I don't think I had any opinions.  I just did it.  It's important to me, but it wasn't the do all, end all.  I wasn't born on a meat slicer.  My families not at all in the food business.  It's just something that's part of my Jewish-Montreal psyche.  It's that embedded with the culture I grew up with.  But the fact that I moved into an area and there was not a single deli that I'd ever come across is astonishing given that it's New York.  There are no delis left.  The ones that are, are based off being tourist traps...

The meat that comes out of Montreal is different that what their making at a Katz's or 2nd Ave. Deli...

Yeah, it's not a huge distinction, but it is a different thing.  The meat is butchered differently.  It's spiced differently, cured differently.  Like a place like Schwartz's, that has the most smoked meat in Montreal, for the reason that they are one of two delis that actually make their own meat.  It's also the vibe.  There's more to the final product.  It's about dedication in Montreal, there's an authenticity to things: the original way of doing things.  The bagels speak to that too.  That's one reason why I'm a big fan of Montreal bagels is yeh, their a totally different product, but there is a totally different philosophy to making bagels. 

Another thing I find interesting is that when the meat runs out, you're done for the day...

We usually go a little bit past when the meat runs out, but more or less.  During the week that's roughly around 4 o'clock, sometimes just a hair earlier, and then on the weekends, it's typically earlier.  But sometimes I'm able to sit an extra brisket or two for the weekend, but not every time.

It seemed like the last few years, Brooklyn has been undergoing something of a bacon trend.  Is Canadian smoked meat the next big thing?

I love bacon.  I'd be happy for the bacon trend to continue because I just have an affinity for all food.  I have a cultural love for Jewish food.  Kashrut is bogus anyway.

So now that you have your own smoked meat place in Brooklyn, do you feel more at home?

Yes and no. I still miss the way I was able to live in Montreal, but since I've moved here, I've loved living in Brooklyn.  Could I imagine a place other than Brooklyn to do this?  Probably not.  I definitely feel at home.

One last question, since you're a Canadian living in New York, and the NHL regular season is coming closer to an end: have you become a Rangers fan?

Hell no.  There's no way.  No fucking way.  I could be cool with the Knicks because I've never had a team of my own, but when it comes to hockey, there's one team that has my heart and that's the Montreal Canadians. 

 

There seems to be a renaissance of translated literature in American underway. Maybe it started due to the popularity of the late Chilean scribe Roberto Bolaño's exquisite novel, 2666, but today, a novel by Israeli writer Gail Hareven is being recognized as the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.

The Book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, is available through Brooklyn-based indie press, Melville House; best known for the novella series that includes works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Proust, Twain, and also original works by contemporary writers like Tao Lin and Zachary German.

Dear Chuck Norris,

You are a conservative Christian who has an award for being "Jewish Humanitarian of the Year" (see #4) sitting on a mantle that you surely made with your bare hands.  We aren't sure how you acquired this award, or who gave it to you, but it's no matter. We still remember all the work you did a few years back as a somewhat hilarious internet meme, and of course, your role alongside Johnathan Brandis (RIP bro) in Sidekicks; a movie that made a thousand young Jewish nerds in suburbs all across America think, "if I just karate kick a little higher, maybe I'll kick the shit out of a star."

Carlos Ray Norris, you're 70 years young today, and we at Jewcy hope you live till 120.

Rick Rubin turns 47 today, and considering that he has spent the last 30 years being one of the most important and influential figures in music, we figured that calls for a little roundup of the production gurus finest achievements.

10. The Less Than Zero soundtrack.

Sure, he produced a good chunk of the artists on the soundtrack for the adaptation of one of the defining novels of the 1980's, but seriously, Public Enemy, Slayer, Joan Jett, and Roy Orbison (among many others) on one album? Are you kidding? What could be better than that?

9. His role in Krush Groove

8. Danzig

Walk into any hipster bar, put "Mother" on the jukebox, and thank Rubin for producing one of the most classic metal albums ever.

7. Slayer by Regin in Blood

There's one of the greatest metal albums, and then there is the actual greatest metal album ever made. This is it, and Rubin produced it.

6. Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers

Make fun of the band all you want now, but there is hardly any room to deny that next to Nevermind, this is the quintessential 90's rock album. You can thank Rubin's production for that.

5. "99 Problems" by Jay-Z

Yup, Rubin produced it.

4. The resurrection of Johnny Cash.

Thank Rubin for the fact that everybody and their mother loves Johnny Cash.

 3. Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys

The fact that "Fight for Your Right" is played at 85% of all bar mitzvahs is one of Rubin's greatest gifts to his people.

2. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy

Do you remember the last time music was really dangerous? And I'm not talking Marylin Manson's brand of post-high school theater kid angst, I mean the real deal like this album that Rubin co-produced with The Bomb Squad.

1. Raising Hell by Run-D.M.C.

The reason this is #1? Simply because if there was never a Rubin-produced Raising Hell, would hip hop have gone from an underground movement to the worldwide phenomenon that we know today? I'm guessing no. So while #1 goes to an album, it is actually a testament to Rubin's importance in bringing hip hop to the masses via one of the greatest albums ever made, and through his vision (along with Russell Simmons) of what could be.

Sadly, it's not in the same sort of rocking that Ted Nugent or Lynyrd Skynyrd does (very sad indeed); it's more of a "rabbi busts into a party for a one year old like a gangbuster, and scares the crap out of everybody".

Total bummer indeed, but at least it yielded what has to be the headline of the day: "The Curse That Rocked Great Neck".

TMZ reports that Corey Haim has passed away. 

The son of an Israeli-born computer operator, and a guy named Bernie who "worked sales", will always be remembered as the guy who made only two movies that I really cared about, but those two movies were INCREDIBLE.

 

I'm sure you think you have the craziest of all Jewish families, but with all due respect to your weird uncle who wants to become a rabbi for some esoteric religion like Buddhist Zionism, and your mom who thinks you're gay because you still aren't married at 31, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that your family doesn't have anything on the Feld's.

From yesterdays New York Post, I've gathered these stats:

• The Felds are children of Adele and Irvin Feld, who operated the Ringling Bros. circus.  While this seems like a wholesome family business, this is a company that has a checkered past for their treatment of animals, and also, employs clowns. 

• The sister, Karen, is a gossip columnist. 

• In 1984, after Irvin Feld passed away, Karen found out that her name was cut out of the will, so she sued her brother Kenny for $10 million, but reportedly settled for less than $1 million.

• Karen has Tourette's.  Sure, while the disorder has been put to good use by a few hilarious movies, one could only imagine that it isn't the most pleasant of diseases.  Thankfully, Karen has a dog to keep her safe from oncoming seizures: a toy poodle named Campari.

• And then there's the events of the 2007 shiva services for the Feld siblings aunt Shirley, where according to reports, Karen overcome with grief, started shouting the chorus to N.W.A.'s 1988 hit, "Fuck tha Police", except replaced "police" with "rabbi", and was escorted out of the services by security.

• Now Karen and Campari are seeking revenge, as they sue Kenneth for $110 million dollars.

With all that said, Passover is coming up.  Your entire family is going to have to sit at a table, and wait forever to eat.  Your mind will inevitably wander, and the though will begin to think about how your family drives you absolutely insane. 

When that thought crosses your head, I want you to think about the Feld's, and realize that you've got it made compared to those nutjobs.

Maybe this:

Explains this:

That, we can deal with-- but then we realized that Jews + Jamaica could also be the only explanation for this, and I lost interest...

Deadline is reporting that Paramount Pictures is planning a 3D adaptation of Genesis, titled In The Beginning.  While I've wished my whole life to watch Adam and Eve cavorting through Eden in fig leaves this close to my face, it looks like my dream is finally coming true:

"The film is using The Book of Genesis as its primary resource. A script has been written by John Fusco (Hidalgo), and directing will be TV vet David Cunningham...I'm told the $30 million film will use 3-D visuals to transform the oft-told tale into a spectacle that the filmmakers hope will attract family- and faith-based audiences that flocked to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, that first Chronicles of Narnia installment made on Granat’s Walden watch. I hear Granat pitched the film by claiming that the Adam And Eve story has never really been told by a feature film. (At least not since John Huston.)" 

I could be very wrong here, but there was a little snippet from the presidents speech on health care in Philadelphia yesterday that sounded vaguely familiar. 

Here's the breakdown:

"My question to them is: When is the right time? If not now, when? If not us, who?"

-Barack Obama: smart black guy, low poll ratings

 

 "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?"

-Hillel the Elder: smart Jew, maybe created the sandwich 

 

 

"Oh, not another article on Black-Jewish relations!" is what anyone has the right to feel when the production of books, articles, seminars, and conferences on the subject over the past decades has amounted to what one scholar called an industry.

But before we close up the factory and lay-off all the workers, can we spare a moment for the overlooked Beat writer Seymour Krim? Like an eccentric tech pioneer tinkering alone in his garage, Krim practically started the whole black-Jewish thing in the late 1950s in his Greenwich Village studio apartment. Then, years after his death in 1989, this highly talented flake gets mangled in the official history of the whole period.  A little justice, please.

Buddy, can you spare some tikkun olam?

I mean it would be one thing if Krim was mistakenly dismissed in one of the many doomed-to-the-stacks volumes on the subject, but Eric J. Sundquist's Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, published by Harvard University Press, won the 2007 Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award and was called the "definitive study."

In other words, this might be it.

And what happens? In a discussion of Krim's 1957 Village Voice article, "Anti-Jazz," and his 1959 follow-up, "Ask for a White Cadillac," two of his earliest I-can't-believe-he-just-said-that essays on black life and its white imitators, Sundquist gets it wrong.

He just goes ahead and assumes that James Baldwin, the black novelist and uncontradictable authority on black anger at that time, would have dismissed Krim the way he did Mailer. Baldwin condescended to Mailer's controversial 1957 essay, "The White Negro," by calling the writer a "real sweet ofay cat." Sundquist adds, "Baldwin might just as well have directed his ire at Seymour Krim."

But Baldwin did not. In fact, in Baldwin's Village Voice review of Krim's 1961 Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer collection, which included his essays on blacks, Baldwin called Krim, "God bless him, almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes." And Krim's "Anti-Jazz" made Baldwin exclaim, "Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, King Oliver, and my mother and my father thank you, baby."

Let's find out why.

lIn 1957, Krim's "Anti-Jazz" and Mailer's "White Negro" both treated the same subject of black influence on white behavior. Mailer clearly won the marketing contest. "The White Negro" was a brilliant formulation. But Mailer took the romantic view that the influence was profound, that white hipsters "had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro." Krim saw a lot of ignorant white people playing dress-up.

These people, the white jazz-lovers, hear only the extract of the kind of life that produced this music; its sensuality, rhythm, humor, passion, even closeness and intimacy. It is especially attractive to young people who are disillusioned with the values of white society. But no matter how beat they are themselves, the majority have literally no idea of the conditions of life that lie behind this music.

What did the white listeners have no idea about? Well, Krim spelled it out. And these lines are what made Krim, as Baldwin noted, neither romantic nor defensive about black life.

Does the reader think that jazz, that great beat, those beautiful melodies, the way a blues singer belts a song, the way a sax man raises up on that platform like an athlete and lets the combinations fly and flow from his horn are anything but Negro in their central heart? They are the Negro in America thus far, the humor, wit, easy stride, subtle rhythm, great power; but also, which is harder to accept, the awful ignorance, poverty, violence, lack of constancy, me-firstism, and all the other facts that open-minded people who know Negro life well-the inner lower-middle-class communities of Harlem, or Newark, or Durham, North Carolina-see all too often. And that too is part of jazz.

It's not hard to see how politically incorrect this would be if written today, but it also turned out to be politically incorrect in 1957. Even Baldwin's defense did not quiet Krim's critics in the Village. So in 1959, Krim revisited the topic in "Ask for a White Cadillac," which appeared in a little magazine called Exodus, published by Greenwich Village's very hip - and still impressively progressive - Judson Memorial Church.

But if Krim's Village detractors were hoping for an apology, they did not know Krim. In fact, in 1959, nobody did. He was 37 years old that year and still just starting to turn out the personal, subjective, proto-New Journalism articles that would win him his scattered but passionate and sturdy fans. Even Krim did not know Krim. The excitement of his essays is in traveling alongside him as he discovers his own mind; undaunted if not unafraid to follow his thoughts wherever they led him.

They led him into some dangerous mental neighborhoods.

In "White Cadillac," Krim recounts his own youthful admiration, infatuation, and eventual disillusionment with 1940s Harlem. Like an excited tourist who experiences a personal liberation in a new land Krim felt that, yes, this is my true home! This is where I belong. "Here was the paradise of sensuality (to my thirsting eyes) that I had dreamed of for years," he writes. "The streets hummed and jumped with life right out in the open, such a contrast to the hidden, bottled-up phobias that I knew so well."

But his time in Harlem also revealed to him his participation in American racism and how it transformed him in ways that were uncomfortable to discover. He even saw that racism released him from certain problems of Jewish identity that confronted him elsewhere.  "For the first time in my adult life I felt completely confident and masterful in my relationship to both sexes because society judged me the superior, just as in a different,

Irish-bar-type scene it made me stand out unto myself because of the Yiddish bit," he wrote.

In Harlem, the Jewish Krim was simply white, and he briefly experienced life "like a southern white, understanding for the first time the tremendous psychological impregnability to the cracker (every white man has a built-in colonel-kit!) in having an "inferior" class beneath him. It was an astonishing revelation to realize that you could be a better person-more attentive, calmer, happier, and that last word is the truth-for the wrong reasons."

These revelations about himself, and equally uncomfortable revelations about black life in Harlem, ended Krim's sojourns there.  But they are exactly why we should give Krim a job on the dayshift of the black-Jewish relations industry.

 

 

You know, I've taken a lot of crap from the Kosher police in my lifetime: marshmallows, select Dunkin' Donuts locations, fancy cheese, and while I was growing up, Oreos! All verboten by the munchy-hatin' rabbis that make the Kosher rules. But now they are going after my beloved lox, and I am putting my foot down.

Gothamist reports that though the OU denies it, ultra-Orthodox group Chevra Mehadrin is revoking the hechsher (stamp of approval) of all lox, due to a parasite that sometimes infests wild salmon. Personally, I'm willing to risk a few worms here and there if it means chowing down on that perfect bagel on a Sunday morning!

Sure, I might be falling prey to the sensationalist nature of internet news, but I can't help starting a call to arms when a Jewish delicacy is threatened: save the lox!

While the former president has had, at best, a spotty relationship with pro-Israel supporters in the past, we couldn't help but wonder, is it simply a coincidence that The Carter Centers logo has a striking resemblance to the logo of the Republican Jewish Coalitions?

Carter Center logo

 

RJC logo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If anything, we at Jewcy find this to be a hilarious coincidence, especially when you take into consideration the differences between Carter and Jewish republicans.

The Breakdown:

Carter Center: Founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Carter.

Mission: "wage peace, fight disease, and build hope by both engaging with those at the highest levels of government and working side by side with poor and often forgotten people."

On Israel: "When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa."

Republican Jewish Coalition:  Founded in 1985

Mission: "to be a permanent Jewish presence in the Republican community and a credible Republican presence in the Jewish community."

On Israel:  "Israel is a democracy in a region that is unstable and where rogue countries continue to be hostile to America. Israel is also the U.S.'s strongest ally in the War on Terrorism, and is in a unique position to facilitate the war effort in the Middle East, as well as share her extensive experience in battling terrorism domestically, militarily, and diplomatically. The evil and vicious September 11th terrorist attacks against the U.S. are indicative of the sort of terrorism Israel is threatened with every day"

So what's the answer to this silly mix up?  Stay tuned and find out. 

I'm a fan of bold claims, and I'm a fan of Justin Taylor.  So, to preface this interview with him, I'm going to say one thing: when the book is closed on this decade, I get the feeling that Justin Taylor will be remembered as one of the generation's finest writers.  His new book of short stories, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial), is out, and to be honest, if I attempted to write some long-winded introduction, I wouldn't be able to do him justice.  He paints pictures of boredom, alienation, joy, sorrow, and the downright odd, like an old master. 

If Donald Barthelme wrote Goodbye Columbus in a different time and place, of if Leonard Michaels had been influenced by Aaron Cometbus, Taylor's book would be the end result.

You hear a lot of writers say that their work is, at often times, auto-biographical, especially in their early work.  While reading through Everything... I got the distinct feeling that might be the case with some of your stories.  Is that assumption correct? 

Sometimes an event that really happened inspired a story-such as "Go Down Swinging." I really did know a guy who broke his ankle jumping off a roof, then considered undertaking the insane DIY medical care described in that story, but I don't think it counts as "autobiographical" in the sense that you seem to mean. My character, Roger, is not a cipher for that guy I knew, and that guy is not answerable for anything that my fictional character is or does. If he-the guy-even ever sees the story, I hope he gets a kick out of it. If not, well that's just part of the price you pay knowing a writer: we're like explorers with old-timey cameras, and sometimes the natives are going to wind up getting a bit of soul stolen. But the final word on these stories is that they are emphatically not reportage. You can't find Andrea from "Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time" among my Facebook friends. She has no reality independent of the short story she appears in. 
 

You talk about (Silver Jews) David Berman an awful lot, and you contributed a pretty extensive playlist over at Largehearted Boy: How much influence does music have on your writing? 

I don't understand how music works on a technical level well enough to be able to steal ideas from it. And even in terms of the prose itself, while I do hope my work has a strong auditory dimension, I'm more interested in the aesthetics and poetics of the voice, and the rigorous play of language. But I'm definitely predisposed toward name-checking artists or particular works of music, and toward characters for whom music is a large part of how they relate to the world and to themselves. That last part is definitely my fully conscious attempt to reproduce on the page a sense of the role that music plays in my own day-to-day life.

      Berman is off in his own whole category, as far as I'm concerned. He just hits me in a way that's not like anything else. There's not a single Silver Jews song I would skip if it came on my stereo, and his poetry collection, Actual Air, is one of my favorite books of poems. (I wrote a big piece about it for The Believer last year.) Just a major, major artist, in my opinion. If my protracted exposure to his work has shaped my own at all, so much the better.  
 

In the New York Times review of your book, Todd Pruzan describes the story "Tennessee" as "a classic Jews-out-of-water tale".  Beyond your fiction, is the label "Jew-out-of water" something you relate to? 

All Jews are out of water all the time. Isn't that like our whole thing?

      That's the joke answer-except I'm not really kidding. The truth is, I've always been more likely to feel out of water within Judaism than out of water on account of being a Jew. It kind of amazes me how much attention the "Jewish angle" of this book has gotten. "Tennessee" notwithstanding, it felt to me like I had almost completely sidelined any notion of Jews or Judaism, but that's coming from someone who grew up in an enormous Jewish community-the descriptions of Jewish life in South Florida in "Tennessee" are more or less nonfiction-so my sense of what counts as a lot versus a little is probably way off.

      And actually, my family was consistently involved in synagogue life when I was growing up. Both my parents sat on various boards, volunteered time, and so on. I did Hebrew school, Bar Mitzvah lessons, plus of course the thing itself, and later on something called Thursday Night School, which I never really understood the point of-but of course my understanding it was at best incidental to my having to do it. That's how it is with kids: you sign them up; they go. In any case, my family was actually a good deal less derelict in their participation in Jewish life than the family depicted in "Tennessee." But I did always have-and to some degree, retain-a sense of unease about that involvement, like everyone else actually belongs there but I'm only faking, or something. Which leads us nicely into your next question, does it not?  
 

I feel like outsiders play pretty important roles in many of your stories, did you feel like an outsider growing up? 

Yeah, absolutely. In retrospect, though, I often wonder if that perception of being an outsider was really as accurate as I thought/felt at the time or times. I was never one of the super-popular kids, but I also never really wanted to be. I had some pretty lonely stretches, and all the usual struggles that kids have, but generally speaking I was always good at finding or creating communities, circles of friends, etc. I definitely didn't experience anything like the isolation that, say, Brad from "The New Life" feels after he ditches his only real friend in the world. There were times when it felt that way, though, and so irrespective of whether younger-me's perceptions really corresponded to any given reality on the ground, or whether it was more of a self-romanticizing angst thing, the emotions generated by those perceptions were real, and were true, and in a certain sense still are true and always will be. Because emotional memory is like pangs in a phantom limb-you're staring at this empty space, and you know there's nothing there, but damn if it isn't aching. Personally, though, I think that what a lot of these stories are concerned with-more than being an outsider-is that attempt to forge communities or connections, pairs and trios and small groups that are based on an intimate affinity of some kind, and then to negotiate the terms and conditions of existence within that world, which is of course no less difficult or fraught a proposition than doing so in the larger world. 
 

do you feel like one now? 

Oh, I don't know. A writer, like a Jew, is a kind of eternal outsider, not least of all among his own people or in his own skin. That's a kind of breathless, bumper-stickery answer, and you'd be right to be suspicious of it, but for whatever it's worth I really do believe it to be the truth. That said, I certainly can't complain about the way this book has been received-people have been very supportive, and they seem to be reading it and "getting" it. And I feel very lucky to be part of several communities of artists-I'm thinking specifically here of the scene that's coalesced around HTMLGiant.com, and also of working with Jeremy Schmall, Mark Wagner, and Amy Mees on our arts annual, the Agriculture Reader. So in every practical, pragmatic or, you know, real sense, I'd be delusional to try and claim "outsider" status. But the heart is a strange place with its own rules or lack thereof, and so in the deeply irrational and emotional senses of the word "feel"- yeah, definitely, an outsider always and forever.

      You know when I don't feel like an outsider? When I'm writing. Sitting at the desk, not warming up or editing drafts, but actually in the act of producing words in a new order they've never been in before, telling a story that's never before been told. That's when I feel like the best incarnation of myself; that's me being who and what and where and how I'm meant to be.  
 

What does the future hold for you? 

The next few months will see a bit of touring to support the collection, and the completion of an anthology of photographs that I'm co-editing with my friend Eva Talmadge. And I'm working on revisions and additions to my first novel, with an eye toward finishing the manuscript sometime this year and putting it out sometime in 2011. I've been very lucky to have this semester off from teaching, but I assume I'll be back in the classroom this fall, and I'm looking forward to that-to all of it, actually. I mean, why not?

I'm a fan of bold claims, and I'm a fan of Justin Taylor.  So, to preface this interview with him, I'm going to say one thing: when the book is closed on this decade, I get the feeling that Justin Taylor will be remembered as one of the generation's finest writers.  His new book of short stories, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial), is out, and to be honest, if I attempted to write some long-winded introduction, I wouldn't be able to do him justice.  He paints pictures of boredom, alienation, joy, sorrow, and the downright odd, like an old master. 

If Donald Barthelme wrote Goodbye Columbus in a different time and place, of if Leonard Michaels had been influenced by Aaron Cometbus, Taylor's book would be the end result.

You hear a lot of writers say that their work is, at often times, auto-biographical, especially in their early work.  While reading through Everything... I got the distinct feeling that might be the case with some of your stories.  Is that assumption correct? 

Sometimes an event that really happened inspired a story-such as "Go Down Swinging." I really did know a guy who broke his ankle jumping off a roof, then considered undertaking the insane DIY medical care described in that story, but I don't think it counts as "autobiographical" in the sense that you seem to mean. My character, Roger, is not a cipher for that guy I knew, and that guy is not answerable for anything that my fictional character is or does. If he-the guy-even ever sees the story, I hope he gets a kick out of it. If not, well that's just part of the price you pay knowing a writer: we're like explorers with old-timey cameras, and sometimes the natives are going to wind up getting a bit of soul stolen. But the final word on these stories is that they are emphatically not reportage. You can't find Andrea from "Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time" among my Facebook friends. She has no reality independent of the short story she appears in. 
 

You talk about (Silver Jews) David Berman an awful lot, and you contributed a pretty extensive playlist over at Largehearted Boy: How much influence does music have on your writing? 

I don't understand how music works on a technical level well enough to be able to steal ideas from it. And even in terms of the prose itself, while I do hope my work has a strong auditory dimension, I'm more interested in the aesthetics and poetics of the voice, and the rigorous play of language. But I'm definitely predisposed toward name-checking artists or particular works of music, and toward characters for whom music is a large part of how they relate to the world and to themselves. That last part is definitely my fully conscious attempt to reproduce on the page a sense of the role that music plays in my own day-to-day life.

      Berman is off in his own whole category, as far as I'm concerned. He just hits me in a way that's not like anything else. There's not a single Silver Jews song I would skip if it came on my stereo, and his poetry collection, Actual Air, is one of my favorite books of poems. (I wrote a big piece about it for The Believer last year.) Just a major, major artist, in my opinion. If my protracted exposure to his work has shaped my own at all, so much the better.  
 

In the New York Times review of your book, Todd Pruzan describes the story "Tennessee" as "a classic Jews-out-of-water tale".  Beyond your fiction, is the label "Jew-out-of water" something you relate to? 

All Jews are out of water all the time. Isn't that like our whole thing?

      That's the joke answer-except I'm not really kidding. The truth is, I've always been more likely to feel out of water within Judaism than out of water on account of being a Jew. It kind of amazes me how much attention the "Jewish angle" of this book has gotten. "Tennessee" notwithstanding, it felt to me like I had almost completely sidelined any notion of Jews or Judaism, but that's coming from someone who grew up in an enormous Jewish community-the descriptions of Jewish life in South Florida in "Tennessee" are more or less nonfiction-so my sense of what counts as a lot versus a little is probably way off.

      And actually, my family was consistently involved in synagogue life when I was growing up. Both my parents sat on various boards, volunteered time, and so on. I did Hebrew school, Bar Mitzvah lessons, plus of course the thing itself, and later on something called Thursday Night School, which I never really understood the point of-but of course my understanding it was at best incidental to my having to do it. That's how it is with kids: you sign them up; they go. In any case, my family was actually a good deal less derelict in their participation in Jewish life than the family depicted in "Tennessee." But I did always have-and to some degree, retain-a sense of unease about that involvement, like everyone else actually belongs there but I'm only faking, or something. Which leads us nicely into your next question, does it not?  
 

I feel like outsiders play pretty important roles in many of your stories, did you feel like an outsider growing up? 

Yeah, absolutely. In retrospect, though, I often wonder if that perception of being an outsider was really as accurate as I thought/felt at the time or times. I was never one of the super-popular kids, but I also never really wanted to be. I had some pretty lonely stretches, and all the usual struggles that kids have, but generally speaking I was always good at finding or creating communities, circles of friends, etc. I definitely didn't experience anything like the isolation that, say, Brad from "The New Life" feels after he ditches his only real friend in the world. There were times when it felt that way, though, and so irrespective of whether younger-me's perceptions really corresponded to any given reality on the ground, or whether it was more of a self-romanticizing angst thing, the emotions generated by those perceptions were real, and were true, and in a certain sense still are true and always will be. Because emotional memory is like pangs in a phantom limb-you're staring at this empty space, and you know there's nothing there, but damn if it isn't aching. Personally, though, I think that what a lot of these stories are concerned with-more than being an outsider-is that attempt to forge communities or connections, pairs and trios and small groups that are based on an intimate affinity of some kind, and then to negotiate the terms and conditions of existence within that world, which is of course no less difficult or fraught a proposition than doing so in the larger world. 
 

do you feel like one now? 

Oh, I don't know. A writer, like a Jew, is a kind of eternal outsider, not least of all among his own people or in his own skin. That's a kind of breathless, bumper-stickery answer, and you'd be right to be suspicious of it, but for whatever it's worth I really do believe it to be the truth. That said, I certainly can't complain about the way this book has been received-people have been very supportive, and they seem to be reading it and "getting" it. And I feel very lucky to be part of several communities of artists-I'm thinking specifically here of the scene that's coalesced around HTMLGiant.com, and also of working with Jeremy Schmall, Mark Wagner, and Amy Mees on our arts annual, the Agriculture Reader. So in every practical, pragmatic or, you know, real sense, I'd be delusional to try and claim "outsider" status. But the heart is a strange place with its own rules or lack thereof, and so in the deeply irrational and emotional senses of the word "feel"- yeah, definitely, an outsider always and forever.

      You know when I don't feel like an outsider? When I'm writing. Sitting at the desk, not warming up or editing drafts, but actually in the act of producing words in a new order they've never been in before, telling a story that's never before been told. That's when I feel like the best incarnation of myself; that's me being who and what and where and how I'm meant to be.  
 

What does the future hold for you? 

The next few months will see a bit of touring to support the collection, and the completion of an anthology of photographs that I'm co-editing with my friend Eva Talmadge. And I'm working on revisions and additions to my first novel, with an eye toward finishing the manuscript sometime this year and putting it out sometime in 2011. I've been very lucky to have this semester off from teaching, but I assume I'll be back in the classroom this fall, and I'm looking forward to that-to all of it, actually. I mean, why not?