Matthue Roth's Blog, page 126

September 11 babies

This is what I was doing on September 11, 2001, and then what I'm doing right now. Just pulled out my copy of Yom Kippur a Go-Go, which is where this is taken from. So weird to have a record of my life, published and accessible to people who are not me. Some parts make me feel queasy in retrospect. This is one of my favorite stories I've ever done.

Somehow, we had all forgotten how Rabbi Mendy’s wife Tali was pregnant. Hugely pregnant. Nobody at the synagogue noticed, or realized, because pregnancy was a normal state for Hasidim, but when New York broke, so did she.

Mendy called me from the hospital. “Tali’s in the E.R.,” he said. “Everything’s fine, thank G-d, but Golda is here and she’s not used to hospitals and I was wondering if you were maybe free for the day?”

I told him I was on it.

We met at his house, a few blocks from the hospital. Golda was in her crib, snoring peacefully. Her little lungs shot out huge noisy breaths that filled the small room. Trickles of sunlight poked through the border of the curtains. Mendy left me with another apology—“I’m sorry we called you out of the house so close to Rosh HaShana”—and I was, like, Rabbi, don’t apologize, you do not choose when a baby is going to fall out, and I showed him to the door.

I heard a scuttle of footsteps, and walked through the kitchen to find Golda in her pajamas. She looked up at me, confused.

“Where Mommy?” she said.

I kneeled down to the level of her eyes. “She’s at the hospital with the baby, remember?”

“Baby?” she repeated.

“Baby,” I said.

“Where Mommy?”

The second time Golda asked, she didn’t wait for an answer. Her jaw dropped open and she started to scream.

One day I am going to make the worst father. Children crying make me crumble into helplessness. This feeling of utter sadness wells up and makes me all depressed and I want to concentrate on my own depressed state, not how to make them feel better.

I talked to her in that soft bedroom voice. I pleaded with her, showed her Mommy’s coat and the door. I dug through her toybox to find an ambulance or a hospital or something, but Golda was ultra-protective about her toys and when I touched them, she started screaming about that instead.

I shrugged. I got up, walked into the next room, which was Mendy’s office, and took out some computer paper and a set of Magic Markers. I threw them in a pile on the floor and started to draw.

Eventually Golda stopped hiding her toys under the sofa and waddled over to me. With her index finger in her mouth, she said, “What you doing?”

“I dunno,” I said, shading in the side of a woman’s dress.

“Who that?”

“That’s Mommy.”

She plopped down, grabbed a marker, and started to draw on the other half of the paper. She drew another woman holding a baby. “Is that Mommy too?” I asked.

Golda shook her head. “This is Golda,” she said. “I going to have a baby too.”

Now it's a bunch of years later. I'm headed into Times Square, which feels like an ominous thing to say, then walking to the Port Authority terminal to catch a bus. I'm going to see my sister and meet my niece for the first time. I don't know what it's going to be like, and the more I think about it, the more it's going to be about my memories and expectations, the What Should I Be Feeling parts of being a writer, and less about the actual experience of being there. So here's leaping headlong into life. I'll let you know how it goes.

And, because I'm not sure why, the Roots doing "Call Me Maybe."

Sneaking into the Basin

This is where I walked today:




View Larger Map



Mill Basin is one of those places that makes you say, "I can't believe this is Brooklyn," but it is so incredibly Brooklyn. The houses are lavish and spread out, with lawns that are like nature preserves and cars that belong in museums. It's ostentatious and lascivious, but there's something about the neighborhood that makes you want to bathe in it completely, a cross between rubbernecking at an accident and watching Gossip Girl. There's a street that's clogged with houses, shoulder to shoulder, blocking off the view of Mill Basin itself. Some of the houses are Lego atrocities, but in a really compelling way. Others are like little Greek palaces. Just being in visual distance of them makes you feel like your blood is soaking up some sort of classical-masterpiece-based culture. And then there is this house, which I desperately want to get invited to a party at:







...Which, okay, the place ostensibly has its own issues. But there is some beautiful waterfront out there. I really just want to watch a drunken sunset there, possibly while laughing ostentatiously, just once.

An Open Letter about Orthodox Sex Offenders

Rabbi Horowitz is this amazing rabbi in Monsey who, in addition to his actual job, fights against Jewish sex offenders and educates kids. He has a post today about how the D.A., Thomas Zugibe, and his office, are letting these people go under pressure from Orthodox Jews. I just wrote a letter to send some Orthodox Jewish pressure the other way.



If you agree with me, feel free to copy this letter (the relevant parts, anyway) or write your own. His email is info@rocklandcountyda.com. Ugh. Thanks for bearing with the break from writer talk, you guys.



Dear District Attorney Zugibe,



I just read a piece on Rabbi Horowitz's website about the reprehensible treatment of Orthodox Jewish sex offenders such as Herschel Taubenfeld, Shmuel Dym and Moishe Turner. (It's right here, and it's a very sad and powerful article.)



As a Hasidic Orthodox Jew myself -- and, more importantly, as the father of young children -- I want to protest this treatment. These men have been convicted as criminals under U.S. law, and should be locked away and forced to do penance under the justice system.



Please don't plea bargain with them or cave in to community pressure! Many of us support you, and we don't want these sick people returning to our communities and living around our children.



sincerely,

A Jewish father



Once again: info@rocklandcountyda.com.

(and thanks to Rabbi Fink for posting in the first place.)

How do you handle negative reviews?

A new-author friend just emailed me to ask about a negative review. (I'm not saying which friend, or which negative review {actually, it was more a not-entirely-loving review than a negative one, if you ask me...but I will be telling you about this book in the months to come and how amazing it is, so just stick around.) I should be embarrassed or chagrined by the question -- yes, I am your go-to guy for questions relating to bad reviews -- but by this time, I'm pretty okay with it, and besides, the sheer amount of amazing stuff that people have said about Kafka is reason enough for me to owe the universe some karmic feedback.




So, here it is, my advice for dealing with negative reviews.

get it out of your mind. see what i did, starting the email with something else? [note: I started the email talking about something else.] there is SO MUCH FREAKING STUFF going on in your life, and so many people are going to be reading your book and thinking good things that you won't have time for the naysayers. Get a jump up. Start disregarding them now.


make it drive you harder.So 10 people won't buy the book from reading that review. Write to a blog or a smaller site that passionately cares about your subject matter. Force yourself to do more publicity. Publicity is the most important part of bookselling, and it's the part authors hate most. Combat that feeling! Bring it on. 


Here's the thing about reviews: They don't matter. There was just this major study of books featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. They discovered, being featured only sold a couple hundred copies at most. Think about anything that's only reviewed inside. Think about anything that isn't the Times. Yeah, it doesn't really matter.

Way more effective: The aforementioned smaller sites with readers who are actually passionate about what you're writing about. And, like, PEOPLE. Ordinary people. People who aren't consumed by a zillion books every day. these are people who will love what you write, and who will tell their friends about it. love sells tons more copies than a review. even a good review. there are still people who care about books in this world -- not all books, but a few books -- and those people are the reason that books are still in business.

"His memoir reads like virginal masturbation"

Such an intense and flattering review of Yom Kippur a Go-Go on Goodreads. I asked, and received, permission to repost it.



I just came across the review today, and also came across this news, that the Lusty Lady -- the worker-owned co-op strip club which figures prominently in the book (but which I still haven't {and, well, never will} set foot inside), is closing. It's weird; one more element of the San Francisco I used to live in that won't be there anymore. I wonder what Armistead Maupin does about this stuff? Anyway. My skin still kind of crawls when I talk about this book, primarily because it's all about all the stupid stuff I did when I was younger (when a book is fiction, you can pretend that, well, it's fiction). But I've also never felt closer to it. Here you go, guys.




Amanda said to you:
YOM KIPPUR A GO-GO

I spent all day devoted to Matthue Roth's memoir, in such a matter that I became him and when the book ended I was left in a deep sucking void. My own life is slow to raise up and greet me now, so I clicked on the computer and yes, sent him an email. A short email. I was inspired to ramble onwards, giving him my own memoir in return, but wrote three sentences and one Kudos.
Growing up, I've always read. I've adored books, libraries, the smell of musty pages, the quiet refuge, the chance of seeing more of the world than this small isolated town could ever offer. I've only wanted to really meet one other author out of all the books I've devoured soundlessly. My hopes are realistically dashed--Kurt Vonnegut will be dead before the planets align, and really, what would I talk about with a man so many years my senior?
But Matthue? I see myself hanging out with him, just another misfit in his cast of characters so profoundly opposite of everything he is trying to cultivate within himself. I'd delight in all the things he could teach me about religion, specifically about being a Jew and with the same amount of zealousness follow along into the genderfuck San Francisco scene.
His memoir reads like virginal masturbation, with such a sexual tension brewing with only self-release to be had. I can't believe he remained a virgin throughout his time in San Francisco, my age and innocent. It only added to the depth of his experience, to be a witness to such depravity and sexual embrace without fully understanding the complete release that sex brings.

Late-Night Storytime

I had the closest thing I'm probably going to get to a Kafka release party at this otherworldly party called Chulent. If you've never heard of Chulent (you can read some New York Times articles about it here and here), it's this late-night gathering of independent-thinking and questioning and rebel Hasidim. A while ago, when I ran away from San Francisco and visited Brooklyn for the summer,* a friend brought me to this midnight barbecue of Hasid-types tossing around Sartre and Kirkegaard in a bombed-out building in the middle of a completely-empty factory district. 




Nine years later, they've graduated to a magnificent crumbling synagogue on Ocean Parkway. There's some Russians drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags and some club kids that speak in fierce Yiddish accents. It's all pretty wonderful.




And at around midnight, we all gathered in a circle in the sanctuary hall and I read them some Kafka.




The remarkable Geo Geller took a series of great pictures (some are here; the rest are on this page). or you can actually listen to the whole reading (with a slideshow). It was the second time I read the book straight through, all three stories, not counting in my kids' bedroom. It was a little bit intense. You can probably hear me breaking up toward  the end of Josefine, which might just be Geo's recording. Yes. Let's chalk it up to that. 


















( listen .  photos . kafka )

Kafka in Swedish! Kafka in Romanian!

Brief nuggets of awesomeness. Here is a piece of press about Kafka in Swedish.








Matthue Roth säger att han kan räkna upp miljoner skäl till att han valde att förvandla några av just Kafkas berättelser till en barnbok. Hans nya ”My first Kafka” om ”bland annat gnagare och jätteinsekter är nu omskriven lite varstans, av exempelvis New Yorker-bloggens Kelsey Osgood som gillar bearbetningen och noterar att det inte är något nytt att barn fascineras av otäckheter.
And a longer one in Romanian.



Volumul "Prima mea lectură din Kafka" cuprinde fragmente din trei povestiri ale scriitorului ceh de limbă germană Franz Kafka (1883-1924), pe care autorul american le-a rescris sub formă de versuri – „Metamorfoza”, „Excursie în munţi” şi „Cântăreaţa Josephine”. Versurile lui Roth sunt însoţite de ilustraţiile în alb şi negru ale graficianului Rohan Daniel Eason.  Prima strofă din „Metamorfoza” prezintă  schimbarea prin care trece Gregor Samsa, personajul principal al poemului în proză: „Gregor Samsa urât adesea a visat /Într-o dimineaţǎ s-a trezit/Că într-un gândac s-a transformat”. În 2005, M. Roth a publicat prima lui carte, „Never Mind the Goldbergs”, căreia Librăria Publică din New York i-a oferit titlul de Cea mai bună carte
.


(Goldbergs! They said Goldbergs!)



And Brain Pickings, one of the most gorgeous blogs out there, wrote a lengthy and really complimentary piece about it that talked a warrantedly lot about Rohan's illustrations and called my text "hauntingly beautiful."



And my comic-artist friend Mat just visited, which meant we stayed up late and played games and drew some mini-books, which I'll try to post tomorrow, if I can get them scanned. That's all thanks over and out.

Kafka & Kafka

Somebody just sent me this picture, of My First Kafka and Kafka's first Kafka.





Also, if you haven't seen Rohan's work yet, you really need to. In addition to illustrating Kafka, he's done Wolves of Waverly Place and some simply breathtaking other stuff. (Including a gorgeous book that's out of print and like $100 on Amazon, and I wish I had a copy of it.)

Life after Kafka

It's been a weird run of weeks. My First Kafka  is doing amazing. The BBC! The New Yorker! Electric Lit! Google! (Granted, the Google thing was more, well, Kafka himself than the little book that Rohan and I put together, but I'm so not complaining.)



And the same week I got some hugely awful news about a close friend, and some more pretty hugely awful news about my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, going out of print -- this had actually happened back in April, but Scholastic didn't tell me, and they sold all the remaining copies to some Amazon reseller, and the only way I found out was that people kept asking me why it was out of stock. (I still have a bunch of copies on my site store, which you can buy if you want, until they run out, and if they do, I'll just send you a pdf if you ask.) And then I came down with this cold that turned into a cough that didn't go away that, apparently, is pneumonia.



Anyway. it's been pretty wild. Thank you for sticking with me. The fact that I have now appeared on the same network as Doctor Who is really all I've ever asked out of life, and I've got it, and the blessings are flooding in like moldy bread.



And now it's the Three Weeks, this period in Judaism where we mourn for the burning of the Temple, and more crazy stuff is happening. I have a ton to say about it, but most of it's not really relevant -- for actual insightful stuff from an Orthodox perspective, you should totally read Rabbi Fink or Yakov Horowitz. Me, I'm just good for stories, mostly. These days I keep getting a Kafka quote stuck in my head: "The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary." (Granted, it was part of the Talmud a while before Kafka, but who am I to come down on the man for appropriation?)



It's almost two in the morning. I have a head stuffed with snot and a brain stuffed with thoughts that won't quit. But the trees look so nice out my window in the streetlights that they're actually glowing, and Brooklyn doesn't feel like an iron city but an actual place to live, and I'm going to try to sleep for a bit before I have to wake up and make video games. Like I said. I'm blessed. Thank you.

Kafka on the BBC!

I flew out to the far remote borough of Manhattan yesterday to record an interview for the BBC! They did some really cool things with it. I had a super long conversation with one of their producers, completely without knowing that they'd recorded her 7-year-old listening to (and reacting to) our version of "The Metamorphosis" being read.



Here are the oddest things about it:



a) it was in Manhattan, not London;

b) the person interviewing me was in London, and so I ended up talking to an empty chair in a completely empty room;

c) they asked me a line of questions about what my kids thought of the book, and what other kids thought of it, and then they asked a question about how Kafka's feelings about the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to his feelings of isolation. I didn't really answer that one well. Seriously, interviews make me into a deer in the headlights! Which is really odd to say, itself. I'm not used to, you know, saying "interviews" in the plural. Or being on this side of the gun. Err, the microphone.



But the producer was wonderful and Dan Damon, the host, was incredibly nice and gracious, and asked about my other books even though the interview was over and he didn't have to at all. I didn't see the real TARDIS, but I suppose they could always invite me back one day. You can listen to the whole dang thing at this link. For the next week, anyway.