To: Amanda Marcotte
From: Jonathan Ames
Subject: Sad News, Showtime, Greenpeace, and My All-Around Nutty Friends

Dear Amanda,

In response to your first paragraph, I went to the Jewlicious story, and then I scrolled through The News Blog, and then went to Gothamist, and I feel sick. This is why I don’t read blogs. It’s like the treatment for the guy (Malcolm McDowell) in Clockwork Orange.

So I can’t make any intelligent commentary about children who have lost their mother and yet who are guided to think that she is in heaven for killing Jews. It’s tragic from every angle.

More Wrong: Conservatives like Newt GingrichI skimmed/scanned The News Blog and read something about some conservative think tank/meeting, and there was part of a quote from Newt Gingrich somewhat blaming the residents of the 9th ward in New Orleans for not being smart enough to flee, and the whole thing seemed like a real absurd and gross gathering (Ann Coulter was there, I take it). My general stance in life is: “I’m wrong and you’re wrong.” But conservatives do seem to be more wrong.

And about the triple-murder at Gothamist – last night I was walking through Manhattan after being in something called “The Rejection Show,” and there were all these ambulances and police cars and circling helicopters by St. Vincent’s Hospital (Seventh Avenue and Greenwich Street), this was around 9:50 p.m., and I asked someone what was going on and they said that some cops had been shot. And it was March 14th and mild and balmy and everyone was happy with the weather, except we should have nights like this in May, not March. And there does seem to be more violence in NYC lately. Don’t know what to attribute it to. And the two cops who were killed were unarmed auxiliary policemen…

On a lighter note… about the Rejection Show: it’s put together by this guy Jon Friedman, who must be Jewish and so it’s good to mention him here on Jewcy, and he features acts who in some way address a rejection in their life, often a rejection in the entertainment field, though it can just be a general rejection. I showed a clip from my rejected TV pilot, “What’s Not to Love?”

The Book Before the Not-a-Series: Jonathan's bestsellerIn the clip, I box a naked guy in a hotel room (pre-Borat). I made this pilot in late 2004 for Showtime, but it wasn’t picked up for a series. But the people in the audience really enjoyed the clip, and I recently had a screening of the pilot at this nightclub in New York, Mo Pitkin’s, and that audience really liked it as well. Granted, it’s something of a hometown crowd playing it for these NY audiences, but it’s fun that it gets a good reaction.

Instead of my show becoming a series, Showtime went for a series based on the movie Barbershop, but I think it only lasted one season. If I knew how YouTube worked, I guess I could put my pilot up on YouTube, and then people could watch it. But what’s the point of that? Then again what’s the point of anything I do? Not much point. Oh, wait, my usual rationale – I’m a clown and the world has always needed clowns.

About the environment: you said that environmentalists are often stereotyped, most likely by conservatives, as ‘sanctimonious prigs’; well, if anyone could be/should be sanctimonious it’s an environmentalist – wanting to drink clean water and breathe clean air and not cause the extinction of millions of species is definitely something you can get on your high horse about. That said, it is just conservative propaganda to label environmentalists in a negative way, just as they falsely put forth that environmental actions are bad for economies, when usually it’s just the opposite – new environmental technologies will create more jobs, sustainable environmental practices (like green approaches to logging) will insure jobs down the road.

A few years ago, I spent two weeks on a Greenpeace boat in Alaska. They were up there because Bush was repealing the roadless rule and America’s beautiful rainforest, the Tsongas, was and is in danger, along with all the salmon, whales, eagles, bears, and everything else that is up there that needs the rainforest, including the human beings who survive off of fishing and hunting. It was the usual mess.

Harper's Ferry: Jonathan loves GreenpeaceI was on the boat, covering this trip for Harper’s, and I loved being with the Greenpeacers. To me, they are true 21st century bohemians – people living on the edge; people living out their ideals. I was very inspired. But then I couldn’t write the article. It was so meaningful to me that I had my first case of writer’s block. It really broke my heart that I failed. Anyway, check out www.greenpeace.org. I wish someone from Greenpeace would come clean up my apartment. I wish my mother would come clean up apartment. It’s really toxic in here, but I’m becoming a more and more insane bachelor as I get older.

About bohemians: in this modern world, modern economy, it’s hard for people to just live for art and survive, especially in New York. I would like to acknowledge three of my friends in New York, who despite the insane rents, still manage to live here and make wild and beautiful things: Dean Haspiel, Patrick Bucklew, and Reverend Jen.

Dean is an illustrator, cartoonist, and all-around nut, and we’re collaborating on a graphic novel for DC Comics, The Alcoholic, which will come out in 2008. I wrote the thing and Dean is doing the artwork and bringing my words to life. I finished writing it in January and Dean has started in on the artwork.

Patrick is a painter, sculptor, performance artist and all-around nut. We’ve collaborated on a lot of things together. If you go to his website, there might be some disturbing images, but also a lot of beautiful paintings.

Reverend Jen is a writer, performer, performance artist and all-around nut. She has a troll museum in her apartment.

Anyway. I’ve been reading this book, Perfume, the last few days and I’m loving it. I’m at this point in the novel where the protagonist is living in a cave in a mountain for seven years. I’d like to do that. Just hide and sleep forever and yet not die.

You mentioned Camille Paglia, because of a link to a satire on her, and no I haven’t read Camille Paglia, or Ann Coulter for that matter, but I have watched UFC fights and they’re quite brutal and thrilling and horrible. I probably shouldn’t enjoy them, and if I saw the exact nature of the brain-injuries that these guys suffer, I probably wouldn’t enjoy the fights, in the same way that it’s hard to enjoy meat once you’ve seen an animal slaughtered.

Well, this hasn’t been the cheeriest of entries. Oh, yesterday you described what RSS is and my head began to spin, like the girl The Exorcist. That’s sort of a religious note and for more religious notes one can go to The Revealer (I think we’re supposed to mention each blog.)

So do come to this Spaulding Gray play in Austin and we can meet in person, if you like.

All the best and none of the worst,

Jonathan Ames

Dear Amanda,

At Jewlicious, there was a lot about a big party, something called the Jewlicious Festival, which happened recently in Long Beach, CA. From what I can gather it was hosted by a Rabbi Yonah Bookstein and his wife Rachel. I like the name Bookstein. Jews have the most absurd names. Bookstein has the word ‘book’ in it and I love books. Sometimes Jewish names seem unattractive to me, but that’s probably my Jewish self-loathing asserting itself. On some level part of me feels intrinsically unattractive because I’m Jewish.

Anyway, at this Jewlicious party, I think some people were playing backgammon; I deduced this from this photo.

Like a CIA expert, I tried to analyze the photo to see who was winning, but it was hard to tell.

Ames' Online Pastime: Backgammon (German opponent not featured)I play a lot of internet backgammon. Most of the people you play are from Turkey or other Middle-Eastern countries, though Turkey isn’t quite in the Middle East. There are also Germans, and when I play a German, I’m like, “Okay, you German, let’s see what you’ve got.” I feel friendlier when I play Canadians. Though just yesterday I was challenged to a boxing match by a Canadian writer named Craig Davidson. Well, actually his American publishing house challenged me. I guess he had a book come out in Canada called The Fighter and to promote it he had a fight against a poet and lost.

I once had a boxing match against a performance artist named the “Impact Addict” and lost. The “Impact Addict” jumped off of buildings as his performance art and once shot himself out of a rocket. I fought as “The Herring Wonder,” a reincarnated, Lower East Side, Jazz-era, immigrant Jewish boxer, who trained by eating Herring. My fight was in 1999. I’m not sure I want to come out of retirement to fight this Canadian. He’s twelve years younger than me and outweighs me by 12 pounds as well. A pound for every year of youth. Here’s a picture of me from my boxing days. And here’s another one.

The problem is that my nose breaks very easily. I broke it training for my fight and then re-broke it during the fight. I’m not sure I want to go through that again, but it’s awfully tempting. I still have my “Herring Wonder” robe and silk shorts.

Anyway, there are also a lot of Israelis on my backgammon site, which is called Gammon Empire and I’m not even sure how it got onto my computer. I wonder if the Turks play the Israelis. I also wonder, since you can send messages to each other, if the CIA is monitoring Gammon Empire, since maybe people could secretly send messages about plots to one another. I don’t want to say what kind of plots, but you know plots, the kind of plots that make you plotz. That was bad humor.

Amanda – are you Jewish? Do you have to be Jewish to write for this site? Marcotte doesn’t sound like a Jewish name.

How many words have I written? 527. That’s all I have to write, according to the Jewcy editor, 500 to 600 words, and I’ve only gotten through one blog. I’m going to try to speed things up.

Jonathan originally spelled her name "Anna Coulter": So he's not lying about not following the newsOn The News Blog, someone named Queequeg wrote about Ann Coulter. Now I don’t have a television and I’m not a blog person, but I’ve picked up from the zeitgeist that this Ann Coulter is a conservative person. Also, I did see her once on TV when I was in a hotel and it was quick thing about some rude speech she gave somewhere.

So this Queequeg was in a green room with her at some Fox news outlet in Miami and held his tongue and didn’t say anything rude to her, which he sort of regrets, but not entirely since he seems like a gentleman. He was also a bit intimidated by this Coulter.

I take it she has called John Edwards a fag, which is her latest offense.

I imagine she says things like this to make money. I wonder if she really believes anything she says. From my glimpse of her on TV, she doesn’t dress like a religious-right kind of woman. She dresses sort of sexy, which implies a different kind of mindset than a Laura Bush sort of Republican woman. So she’s kind of like the female equivalent of Gay Black Republicans – a seeming paradox. I imagine that she had a very stern father and that she’s exotically submissive in bed. Who knows? We’re all so flawed and confused. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. The Buddhists come close, I think.

Would I be wrong in making the statement that Arianna Huffington is the liberal parallel universe equivalent of Ann Coulter? I feel like a blindfolded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey as I try to keep pace with the culture. I’ve heard of Arianna Huffington and Ann Coulter mostly from my perusal of the NY Post, which is the newspaper I read since it only costs a quarter here in NYC.

I’m not very political, I’m afraid. I’m broken-hearted and passive. I feel bad for the state of the world and do nothing about it. I did go to Ohio in 2004 to try to get college kids to vote. I did this because this writer, who’s wonderfully politically active, Stephen Elliott, invited me. He organizes readings to raise money for progressive candidates. I’m sort of a one-issue human being – the environment.

We're all doomed: Earth is fucked, anyway you slice itWhen I was in rehab in 1987, my mother gave me a Sports Illustrated to read and on the cover was a picture of the planet Earth and a detailed article about the destruction of everything, and leading up to my hospitalization I had been going crazy, thinking of every car as a small fire destroying the world and I was a vegan because we were plowing the Amazon to make McDonald’s burgers and I was losing my mind . . . and then I had to be hospitalized because I had polluted myself and been abused by substances (I was a small planet wrecking itself) and then my mother gives me that Sports Illustrated, she was trying to be nice, and it was an issue about the environment and I went even more nuts.

Anyway . . . I eventually became less hysterical and just more passive and brokenhearted, while holding out some small hope for humanity, because when I was a kid I was reading some Encyclopedia and Richard Leakey had some quote about how man is the only self-destructive creature on Earth and that he was wrecking the planet, but that also man was the only creature who might figure out a way to change . . . so I hold on to that.

On Gothamist, there was mostly postings about what’s going on in New York. Nothing really caught my eye. Murders, Alex Rodriguez, new restaurants.

There was something about Bernie Kerik and I thought of him sleeping with Judith Regan, and I imagine that Ann Coulter would like somebody like Bernie Kerik, too.

Not much in The Revealer caught my eye. I did glance at this because it mentioned Bridge to Terabitha which I saw the other night. A friend of mine told me they wept during Terabitha and so I went to it by myself. I love going to movies by myself and I love to cry during movies. So I may have been set up to cry by my friend and started crying before things got sad, and then when they got sad, I really did weep like crazy. I wish I could cry right now in fact.

I’m having euphoric recall about crying the other night. I just felt inside myself to see if I could conjure up some tears but none came. My stomach is full of coffee so that I could write this letter to you and I think the coffee is cutting me off from my soul or wherever it is that crying comes from.

Don't Tell Ann Coulter: A Spartan and the effete Persian king from "300"After Terabitha, with my face all swollen and my nose stuffed, I sneaked into 300, but by then my eyes were really blurry because I need glasses and I was sort of emotionally drained, so I couldn’t fully give myself over to 300. Also, the couple behind me kept laughing at and calling the Persian king a “fag” and this affected my suspension of disbelief and my ability to fully lose myself in the film. I don’t think it was Ann Coulter sitting behind me, though. When I go to a movie, I like to guffaw and shout and cry and emote and squirm and writhe. I’m sort of like Ignatius J. Reilly from the Confederacy of Dunces in this way.

Maud Newton – who like Rabbi Bookstein, has a great name – Maud Newton – it’s just a good name; it has feng shui or something; maybe it’s the combination of Maud, which makes you think of Yeats and Maud Gonne, and Newton, which makes you think of the scientist and Fig Newtons . . . Anyway, she writes about this writer James Hynes, who, because I’m an idiot, I have never heard of but she inspires me to check him out.

At first, I thought she was talking about Samuel Hynes who was a teacher of mine at Princeton. He taught a course on the British novel and I recall reading Ford Maddox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, and a bunch of others, and I was introduced to the word “muddled” as a wonderful adjective to use as a blanket description for the human condition and further along those lines every lecture was on how man was doomed and flawed and a terrible mess, and I was still young then, only 20, and wasn’t yet a vegan and hysterical and I didn’t know that the world and man were this bad, and so I went up to him, half-way through the semester, all worried and frightened, and said, “Every lecture you give paints such a dark picture for the world. What are we going to do? Aren’t you scared?” And he said, “No, I believe in God.”

And that really shocked me. I went running out of the lecture hall. He should have mentioned that in his lectures. Every week he was freaking me out but holding back his own personal antidote to it all . . . and I was only twenty and an agnostic and confused and didn’t know what to do, so I kind of stopped going to the class . . . I was actually quite a mess back then. I had joined ROTC to pay for college, not knowing anything about the military and I couldn’t march and didn’t know how to read a map. So I ended up taking a year off from college and later became a conscientious objector when I realized that I didn’t want to have kill anyone as a means to end conflict and in the long run I avoided going to the first Gulf War as did a number of my ROTC classmates.

Anyway, that’s my ramble. A friend just called. I said I was writing a blog for something called Jewcy and she said, with disgust, “Oooh, is that a porn site?” And I said, “No, it’s a Jewish site, spelled J-E-W-C-Y, not J-U-I-C-Y.” She still thought it might be a porn site and I refuted this and then I said, “I’m writing a blog about blogs about blogs about blogs,” which is like that old Gertrude Stein poem . . .

All the best,

Jonathan Ames

P.S. I’m not going to proofread this. I wrote it an hour and it’s 1 p.m. and I think Jewcy needs this, so if there are weird typos, I apologize. I just did a word-count – nearly 2,000 words. I’m a typing fool. Two thousand words in an hour. It’s like what Capote said about Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

To: Amanda Marcotte
From: Jonathan Ames
Subject: My Left Pinky and Bill Donohue's One-Man League

Dear Amanda,

I’m going to try address each of your major paragraph blocks in order. You began with talking about the The News Blog, but mostly you wrote about blogging and nothing specific about the site. I don’t say this as a criticism but just some kind of need to restate things so that it explains to the reader and to you my comments. Does that make sense?

Lit Blogger: Maud NewtonAbout blogging: I’m way behind the times. I don’t read blogs and when I’ve gone to them I find them hard to navigate, and so I just don’t do it. (Except for one blog – see below when I talk about Maud Newton.)

Also, my vision is going and reading on the computer kills me or something. It’s the glare, I think. I’m a very slothful person. For two years I’ve had the name and phone number of an opthamolagist and yet I don’t call. I desperately need glasses. But I never take action in life until it’s practically too late.

I write on the computer and I play internet backgammon on the computer and this is killing my eyes. My eyes are blurry all the time and they hurt. I can’t make out people’s faces the way I used to. Maybe today, I’ll call the opthamolagist. I also have some weird condition in my hand – dupuytren’s contracture – and I need to call the hand doctor since my left pinky is starting to look like a fish-hook.

Even my 95 year-old great aunt, whose vision may be worse than my own, said: “What’s wrong with your finger?” This was in the nursing home two weeks ago. This past week, I took her out, it was a bit warmer, and we went to a restaurant called ‘the Kosher Nosh’, located in Glen Rock, NJ. I ordered a smoked-fish plate and fed her little bits of lox, sable, and smoked white-fish, kind of the way you would feed a child, since she has, unlike a child, lost her appetite.

If Ya Got 'Em: My grandmother's preferred brandThen I bought her cigarettes and she smoked a Virginia Slims, which I had to get going for her by taking a hit off the thing and I nearly choked, and then I think the cigarette made her a bit sick and so she had to lie down when we got back to the nursing home. Anyway, I’m digressing . . . She wanted me to lie on the bed with her, because I was also exhausted, but I was afraid one of the nurses would come in and I’d get in trouble, though I often take a nap on her nursing-home bed and she sits in her chair and looks at me. But this is different from the two of us being in the bed together.

Well, this digression is sort of all right because I mentioned smoked fish and I think the website we’re writing for is somehow connected to things Jewish, though I’m not entirely sure because when I went to the site I couldn’t really decipher what it was all about; this is not a fault of the site but my own blog problem.

One further thought on blogging: I used to write for the New York Press in the late 90’s and people used to really look forward to getting the Press when it came out once a week. It’s where people went for unusual, idiosyncratic writing, but now readers don’t have to wait once-a-week, they can, as you wrote, go to blogs and refresh constantly over the course of one day. So I feel the kind of writing I once did for the NY Press (I had a bi-weekly column) has been replaced by what happens in blogs. This is neither good or bad, just a change I’ve noticed.

When you mentioned The Revealer you referred to your RSS. I have no idea what that is, but I know that it must have something to do with the internet. You also mention that this site goes into issues about Catholicism, and the editor of Jewcy who asked me to do this, wrote to me something about you getting in trouble with the Catholic League, and I was wondering if the person you got in trouble with in the Catholic League is William Donohue?

Bill Donohue's Personal Assistant: Bill DonohueIf so, that fellow once wrote a letter into NY Press complaining about a column of mine. In that column, I recounted my visit to a Mexican strip-club/brothel where some of the strippers were wearing Catholic schoolgirl outfits. I didn’t write that I thought this was a good thing but I did mention that the girls were awfully cute. Anyway, I think I was told by my editor at the NY Press, though my memory could be faulty, that William Donohue is the Catholic League, or at least he was back in 1999 when he wrote to the Press about me. I could be wrong about this, though. But my impression was that the guy was the self-appointed leader of a group that had only one member – himself. Nevertheless, he puts a lot of people on notice – if you make yourself President of something it helps to get your letters-to-the-editor published. Then again I could be completely wrong and there might be many members of the Catholic League. Is there a Protestant League? A Jewish League? There used to be a Negro League.

One blog I have glanced at on occasion – about once every two months – to find out what’s happening in the lit world is Maud Newton’s blog. She’s very bright and writes beautifully about books and her various passions. For example, she’s a big Graham Greene fan. I went through a Greene phase about ten years ago and read about fifteen of his novels. His use of the colon is quite remarkable.

I thought I should check out Gothamist and so I typed in Gothamist and got something completely wrong. So then I typed in www.gothamist.com and it worked, but see this is why I can’t take the internet.

There was a piece on there about how there have been no female bridge-painters, or, rather, no female bridge-painters hired. I have no strong feelings about this one way or the other. It seems like an injustice that will now be rectified. I don’t know if you need extra strong arms to hold onto cables and paint them but I’m sure women are strong enough to do this sort of job and this leads into the next subject:

So That's Why She Wanted to Lose to the Fin: Little Mermaid Phallic ArtI like your mention of the posting on Maud Newton of “this story about an errant penis snuck into an illustration in the first printing of Huck Finn.” And then your further mention of the “little Mermaid scandal,” which I had never heard about, and when I expertly followed your link I was shocked to see that horrific pink penis on the Little Mermaid video-box cover.

But you write that you’re a proper paranoid feminist. What do you mean by this exactly? What should a feminist be paranoid about in relation to these two things? I don’t ask in a confrontational away, but in an honest and curious way as a myopic fool/male, and I’m not talking about my organic eye problems above but a sort of intellectual blindness.

Pursuant to this, I should mention that I once had a contest called ‘The Most Phallic Building in the World Contest’ because I made a remark in an article for Slate in 2003 that living in Brooklyn with the Williamsburg Bank building was like being in a locker-room with Shaquille O’Neal, that you just had to look at the thing, and I also stated that the Williamsburg was the most phallic building in the world and then lots of people wrote to me saying that it wasn’t the most phallic building in the world. So I held a contest to determine which building is, in fact, the world’s most phallic.

Four years later, people still send me pictures of phallic buildings. Here’s a link to the contest, which was hosted by my friends at Cabinet Magazine, though I just tried the link and it didn’t work (I don’t know why): but maybe it will work later.

Your last mention had to do with Jewlicious and more Catholic issues. I more or less covered this above, though I am a bit worried that William Donohue will somehow get wind of our dialogue and give us a hard time, but I guess it won’t be too painful. But maybe he’s not even the person who gave you a hard time. Who knows? I imagine I could search the internet and find out what happened to you, but my eyes are already killing me.

I do want to say, not to appease William Donohue, though I am a people-pleaser at heart, that I like the Catholic churches. They are often so beautiful. A couple of times a year, I find myself staggering into some Catholic church and breathing in the dusty air and feeling sort of peaceful, and I meditate and pray in my own confused, agnostic, lost, disheveled, and despairing way.

And I like the fact that the Catholicism inspired Graham Greene to write so many novels of torment (see my mention of Maud Newton above.)

Well, I guess that’s it.

All the best,

Jonathan Ames

P.S. You mentioned enjoying living in Austin, TX. I am going to be there twice in the coming months. March 29th at 8pm, I will be at the Paramount Theater in the cast of the Spalding Gray play Stories Left to Tell, and on May 3rd at 8pm, I will be telling a story as part of the Moth, and this will be at Alamo Draft House.