From: Matthue Roth
To: Marty Beckerman
Subject:  Chaos and Creation

Marty,

I have the advantage of writing fiction, if we're making it a contest, and the biggest advantage of fiction is that "flaws" don't count. I don't mean flaws in spelling or when characters inexplicably pop up in the middle of scenes -- I'm talking about the emotional rawness and the fundamental awkwardness that authors have, which translates to the perfection of awkwardness and rawness that our characters have.

Case in point: My first novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, is about a self-assured 17-year-old Orthodox girl who's punk-rock, confident, sassy and in-your-face -- basically, everything that I wanted to be at 17 that I absolutely wasn't. Four years later, I look back at Hava and I'm simultaneously wincing and kvelling. I was never that sure about anything in life -- not my religion, not my music, not even my attitude about myself. And then I started reading the reviews. People said I made her perfectly flawed, that I built up her bubble, and then popped it. The reviews were complimentary, but I was horrified. I was like, She's not egotistical! She's the coolest person I always wanted to fall in love with! It was great. My image of perfection imploded on itself, and apparently I learned how to create a tragic protagonist.

Never Mind the Goldbergs: by Matthue RothMy new novel, Losers, is almost the direct opposite. Jupiter Glazer, the main character, is shy and "gawkward" and insecure. He's Russian, and his English comes out sounding like muddy puddles of glop. In one of the first chapters, this girl teaches him how to flirt by teaching him how to lose his accent, and it's a scene I'm hugely proud of -- not because it's masterful or well-structured or anything, but because, well, Jupiter is so overwhelmingly bad at whatever he does.

"Okay, let me try. Um. Did you hear how you said dropped? You swallowed up the O, you rolled the r, and you squish the p and d together at the end. Listen to the way I said it, just from what you remember."
I said it.
"Now try it slower." She said dropped again, in slow motion. I repeated her. She shook her head no. Then she reached over and took my hands in hers.
She lifted them to her face. I could feel my entire body heating up, the knuckles between my fingers stiffening. She placed them gently on her cheeks and throat.
"Feel the way I say it."
"Say it."
"Dropped."
"Draah-ppeht," I echoed her. I felt ludicrous saying it, being made to say that same word again and again. I felt like a domesticated parakeet. I cleared my head: I couldn't second-guess myself now. I felt like I was on the brink of learning some forbidden knowledge, standing on the precipice of this giant mountain that was going to be the rest of my life.
"Once more," Tonya said, smiling at me. "Say it."
"Again?" I asked.
Tonya nodded.
"When I move, you move," she said. My hand tensed into her cheek. She squeezed my fingers, enthusiastically, supportively. Her mouth convulsed, danced through the word like a ballerina in slow motion, vogueing and pirouetting each step in one one-hundredth of normal speed, slowed down beyond the range of any normal household DVD player, moving and reacting to every microsyllable in the word.
I said it again. The moment felt like hours in my head, every part of every sound. My mouth imitated hers. For the merest fraction of a second, my mouth became hers, more vivid than a 3-D movie, more intimate than making out. And it sounded, it felt, absolutely perfect.
"Just like that?" I asked her.
She smiled. "Just like that."

I did it Elmore Leonard-style: wrote fast and took out whatever parts bored me. Is this imperfection as art? Freezing every moment in time, every mistake, cherishing every potential dorky or inappropriate gesture, word, or facial expression, and saying, Well, I meant it at the time.

I prefer to think of it as "Parker Lewis Syndrome." Parker Lewis, if you don't know, was the protagonist of the early-‘90s comedy Parker Lewis Can't Lose, an exquisitely weird show about this kid who wore paisley button-down shirts and made obtuse references to Twin Peaks episodes, but -- for some wildly improbable reason -- was the most popular kid in the town where he lived. It wasn't that he was rich or smart or talented; he didn't even really have a girlfriend. Instead, it was some indefinable combination of wackiness, iconoclasm, and chutzpah that endeared him to each one of the town's stereotypical teen-groups in a different way, from the jocks (who protected him) to the nerds (who helped him hack into the school computer system, although I seem to remember Parker being an expert hacker on his own) to the indy-rockers who played as the backing band when he finally went on a date.

It was being in the right place at the right time; it was the essence of je ne sais quoi, a phrase that we love to throw around and never think about the fact that it has no meaning. Maybe it's Divine intervention; maybe it's that the girl I'm crushing on is fully confessionally drunk the same night that I am. It's dumb luck.

I always wanted to be a Parker Lewis. Instead I ended up being a Jupiter Glazer: bumbling, fumbling, unapologetically trying to be someone I'm not and failing. When Goldbergs came out, people asked if it was autobiographical. Was it autobiographical? Did I want it to be autobiographical? The truth was probably a bit of both. Losers is a whole other side of me: the frank, tearfully honest, and painfully embarrassing side. The part that tumbles out before you have a chance to think about it or analyze at all, and then everyone's staring at you, and all you can really say is: Yeah, I said it.

What do you think of that?

Marty Beckerman, author of Dumbocracy, and Matthue Roth, author of Losers, are blogging together on Jewcy, and they'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

From: Marty Beckerman
To: Matthue Roth
Subject: This be who I am... this be what I do

Matthue,

I appreciate the comparison to Chris Rock, although he is infinitely funnier than I am, at least when he does standup instead of shitty movies. I don't know if we're compelled by the same impulse, or share the insecurity of "why am I the person who needs to say this?" because as I've gotten older, I've become aware that I'm not saying anything new.

If I mock grotesque hedonistic excess like I did with Generation S.L.U.T., I'm only following in Petronius's footsteps, never mind Bret Easton Ellis's. If I criticize authoritarian notions of morality, I'm boldly going where Socrates has gone before, never mind George Carlin. So maybe I'm not "the right guy to say it," because plenty of people have said it already -- and said it better -- and the world would keep spinning if I weren't around to identify its bullshit.

Plus it's getting harder to write with conviction because I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. There was an excessively puritanical bent to my writing for a few years, which makes me cringe now because it was so over-strident, over-earnest and over-preachy, which is what happens when college students try to share their opinions. (They need a few more years to become embittered and disillusioned.)

Sometimes I'm paralyzed by the feeling, "Whatever I write, it's going to embarrass me five years from now, because my perspective will be completely different." We're all on a conveyer belt in the same factory, getting assembled at approximately the same speed, and I know my opinions and outlook will change over time because I already want to go back in time and kick my own ass for being a complete douche bag.

But the bitch is that I need to speak my mind. I'm a loudmouth, a blowhard, a guy who loves the sound of his own voice nearly as much as the sight of his own (rockin') body. In some ways the WASP sensibility fascinates me -- politeness and discretion, never discussing sex, politics or religion -- and I wish I could be a debonair gentleman who epitomized tact and never offended anyone, but I wouldn't feel human. You have to ask yourself one big question when it comes to interacting with society: do I want everyone to like me, or do I want to be the slightest bit interesting?

Generation S.L.U.T.: by Marty BeckermanEven though Generation S.L.U.T. is melodramatic and emo and preposterously morose when I look back on it -- now that I'm past adolescence, my hormones have cooled off, and I'm generally in a happy (or at least mellow) mood -- that's what the world is like when you're nineteen years old, dealing with your first serious relationship/breakup, and half your friends have tried to kill themselves. If I were to rewrite the book today, it would be funnier and more lighthearted, but it wouldn't be genuine because I can never feel those emotions again, at least never to the same degree. You build a wall to protect yourself, you become a man instead of a boy, and your memories suddenly seem hysterical and pathetic instead of tragic and devastating. You forget how much it hurts to grow up because scar tissue replaces the open wounds. You stop whining because you learn that happiness is your own responsibility. And if you don't, the world will eat you alive.

But that book was the best one I could write at nineteen/twenty, just like Death to All Cheerleaders was the best I could write at sixteen/seventeen. Dumbocracy might embarrass me down the road, but it's the best I can do at twenty-five, and the price of lifelong consistency is never expressing any opinions whatsoever. I'd love to extinguish any risk of future humiliation, and I'd love to erase some of my overzealous tirades from millions of people's memories, but all I can do is trust that I'm getting better and smarter -- and more entertaining -- as I go. And hope that readers agree.

(Or at least be willing to say, "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," which is more difficult than you'd think.)

Marty Beckerman, author of Dumbocracy, and Matthue Roth, author of Losers, are blogging together on Jewcy, and they'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

To: Marty Beckerman
From: Matthue Roth
Subject: From one freak to another

Marty,

You're right. I know I shouldn't admit you're right -- I am, after all, one of those fundamentalist zealots you're talking about -- but the fact is, religion often gives people an excuse for idiocy.

It's not what Jewish Law is supposed to be. Jewish Law is supposed to place the responsibility on the individual -- if you screw up, you're culpable to God. But that's not how it plays out in contemporary religion. Instead, we let rabbis and priests tell us what the books say. When the religious leaders have that power, either through ignorance or a lack of dissent, the power has a tendency to get abused. The attitude is that, as long as you have a rabbi saying something's okay, you're covered. Some of them -- again, not most -- have learned to manipulate the system, and they use their power for no good, or even straight-up evil.

You proposed that there's a link between the degree of someone's fundamentalism and his/her kink. I feel duly obliged to note that, in Judaism, many forms of consensual kink are both acceptable and welcomed (and many others are debatably acceptable).

The greater world likes to divide religious fundamentalists as either incredibly knowledgeable, having the entire Bible memorized, or as totally ignorant, only thinking what, like, Meir Kahane or Pat Robertson or Swami Prabhubada tells them to think.  The reality is more of a bell curve. There are people who don't know very much -- or who are the least fundamental of the fundamentalists -- who are struggling (in prayer, with a job, in life itself) just to keep up.

Then there are the people who are on top of everything. Some of those people are totally comfortable with their station in life. Some of them are even really good at it, and some are obsessed with condescension and moralizing, but you can find others who don't make it a central issue. In a weird way, it's kind of the same phenomenon that happened with cable TV and Internet music: we're decentralized now. You can find a community that shares your own interests, quirks, and even kinks.

But fundamentalism is not merely about sexuality. There are tzaddikim of every faith who run soup kitchens and strive for the betterment of humanity. Their every thought comes back to God, but we never see 99% of these people because they are too damn busy saving others instead of condemning others.

Religious people aren't the only ones who condemn the ills of society; that's actually a big part of your persona, and certainly the approach of many comedians. This morning, getting off the subway, I saw Chris Rock on a fifteen-foot-tall video screen, promoting his new HBO special. I couldn't help but notice that his physical movements and posturing were remarkably similar to yours in the Dumbocracy promo video.

I think it's more than coincidental. You and Rock both possess both a drive and confidence that what you're saying has weight, and, more directly, is both correct and needs to be said, but neither of you is totally sure you're the right guy to say it. I suppose if I were a better person, I'd call it modesty, but I actually think it's closer to awkwardness, as if you're unsure you can handle that responsibility. Rock has learned to cover it up better, but he's had more practice.

Marty Beckerman, author of Dumbocracy, and Matthue Roth, author of Losers, are blogging together on Jewcy, and they'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.