MICHAEL SHOWALTER, comedian, actor, writer, director and author of the most recent Mr. Funny Pants.
MATTHUE ROTH, author of the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go, the novel Losers, and the feature film 1/20 currently in post-production.
ALISON ESPACH, author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Adults (Scribner, February 2011).
KOREN ZAILCKAS internationally best-selling and socially-charged memoir Smashed (Penguin, 2005) and its follow up Fury (Viking Adult, September 2010).

Hosted by Founder & Executive Director Mira Ptacin.

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If you believe the British press, the new novel Annexed by Sharon Dogar is a XXX parody of The Diary of Anne Frank, a heated-up redux of the story we all know: A boy and girl, terrified and fairly certain that they would be killed, locked away from the world at the very age when their hormones are taking over their brains. It could be hot, right? Take away the context and it’s basically the bad-parts version of Go Ask Alice.

Now I have to make a confession: I nearly puked when I wrote that paragraph.

Something about the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl makes those of us who have bonded with that book feel fiercely protective of it. Even that word feels insufficient: protective. What would you do if someone through your child in front of a train? When I first read the book, Anne was a friend, a confidante in a world and a school where I couldn’t trust anyone. I got older, old enough to read the unedited version (although it hadn’t been published then)—or, at least, to understand what was happening between Anne and Peter Van Daan—and I had a luminescent crush on her. Now I have grown up, she hasn’t, and I think of her like my two daughters—like if anyone hurts her or tarnishes her name, I’ll break their face.

Which gets me thinking about Sharon Dogar. A few years ago, my best friend died, and I didn’t know how to write about that, so I wrote a book about us. A 13-year-old me, a loser and a cutter locked away in his room with only books, hears a knock at his closet door. It’s Anne Frank, who’s discovered a passage from the Secret Annexe. We hide out and tell each other stories, avoiding the greater issues in our lives together, much the same way that the real-life Anne did with her journal. For a very brief period, I tried to sell it—fielding suggestions from my well-intentioned agent like “Could you make it funnier?” and “Feels like a book for girls, but main character is a boy—mind changing?”

The pages are sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase, collecting dust.

So I know what Ms. Dogar is going through. I know how it must’ve felt to take on this book, to delude yourself into thinking you’re worthy of adapting another person’s voice, one who got it stolen from her way too early. Ms. Dogar is a gambler, and she is brave.

And I know, one false step and I will kill her.

To my surprise, Annexed wasn’t very sexed-up at all. We always downplay book covers—why not judge a book by it, anyway?—but this one does a remarkable job of selling the story’s mood and subject: a teenage boy, sepia-toned, melodramatic, a Jude armband in an exaggerated yellow around his forearm. The prose inside is overwrought and pleading: a riddling of exclamation points, boatloads of repetition, lots of one-word and one-line paragraphs that have the queasy effect of being both exposition and awkward character development (“Is that the only reason we want to [kiss]? / I don’t know. / How do you ever know, anyway?”).

The romance in Annexed is way less subtle than the miscegenation in Twilight—almost to the point where it begins to feel like a parody. Peter’s voice appropriates the gentle smugness of Anne in her diary: He sounds a bit too startled, a bit too proper, like older people translating the voices of younger people.

Which is exactly what The Diary of Anne Frank was, and what Annexed is. Just as Otto Frank was probably the worst person to edit his teenage daughter’s diary, a middle-aged woman is probably not the best person to write the voice of a teenage boy with overactive hormones and control issues. But that’s what writing is all about, right? Imagining. Putting yourself into another world, taking surface lies and spinning them into a fundamental truth.

The thing that’s annoyed me about a lot of young-adult books is how so many of them are geared toward girls these days; the male characters aren’t real guys so much as they’re approximated caricatures of boys, the sort that only exist inside teen girls’ conversations. That’s not the Peter of Annexed. Dogar has given him flaws, and quirks, and dorkinesses—he’s a fleshed-out character who is largely relatable and sometimes detestable.

But her Peter is very rarely unpredictable—there’s a scene at the beginning where he’s walking through the streets after having taken off his Jude armband, imagining the thoughts of the people around him (all of whom, he’s convinced, can tell he’s a Jew, and are thinking that he’s a dirty Jew bastard)—and it might be true, but it’s exactly what you’d expect him to be thinking, with no poetry and no surprise. It’s the limitation that fan-fiction writers have, trying to alter a history that someone else has control of, and it is Ms. Dogar’s Achilles’ heel as well. No matter what thoughts she puts into Peter’s head, or what modifications she makes to his romance with Anne, there’s nothing she can say that hasn’t been said already, with more immediacy and by one of the participants. I wanted to like Annexed, and in a way I really do, but I like it in the same way that I like reading reviews of movies I’ve already seen. I want to catch a dull glimmer of that blindingly good story.

Do I blame Ms. Dogar for diminishing Anne, or stealing some of the light herself?  Of course not. In her own way, she’s making the original shine brighter. Like my crush and my suppositions about what good friends Anne and I might have been, Annexed is a fan letter to the same Anne Frank I wrote to. We just have two very different relationships.

Matthue Roth is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

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In the accompanying article, Andy Borowitz skewers the all-too-easy target of Britney, trying on a new religion with as much disposability as trying on a new pair of panties. Best line: "Madonna is so Jewish I call her Mezuzah." Worst: I was like, “Rabbi P., is there any way you could break this down into a bunch of tweets? I’ll read it on my phone on the way to rehearsal.” He got so mad those curls on the sides of his head started shaking. (I don’t know why he won’t let my stylist snip them off. They’re not a good look for him, K.?)"

Which is, admittedly, more than one line. But you needed to hear the whole thing in order to fully appreciate the awkwardness and the trying-to-write-like-a-ditz-when-you’re-actually-kind-of-an-intellectual-ditz quality of the entire falsified diary. Yeah, you heard me. You come after Britney, now you’re comin’ after one of us.

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Little did I know, for its time – and even for ours – Blossom was completely transcendent. In the pilot episode, The Cosby Show‘s Phylicia Rashad, wearing a retro-’50s polka-dot dress, drew a map of the human ovaries on a sheet cake with a tube of icing in order to explain to 14-year-old Blossom Russo how her period worked. Subsequent episodes made pretty profound statements on puberty, body image, premarital sex and divorce and parental responsibility. The endings were always sugar-coated, but the TV show itself (which has just been released on DVD) was meaty and unafraid in ways that make current sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and The Office feel positively sanitized. As much of a travesty as grouping Blossom together with tepid ’80s sitcoms such as Full House might be, mentioning the Mayim Bialik’s name together with the name of the television show might be an even more audacious generalization. In the decades since she stopped playing Blossom Russo, Bialik has not sat still. She’s earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and has undertaken cutting-edge studies at UCLA as one of the top researchers of Prader-Willi Syndrome in the field. (Read more about the disorder here, or sift through Bialik’s blog to find out about her work.) She’s also testing the waters of going back into acting, with recent appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bones. And she’s also in the middle of another big revival: she’s experimenting with being an observant Jew. What first motivated you to start researching the causes of Prader-Willi Syndrome? Are you still? I always had an interest in working with kids with special needs, and in the neuroscience department at UCLA, you generally meet a lot of professors and then drop into a project that suits you. There’s been a lot of genetic research on Prader-Willi, and there’s been a lot of behavioral research, but there isn’t a lot of research combining the two..and that’s what I thought I could bring to it. I got my doctorate last year, so my research was my thesis. Since then, I’ve done some writing for organizations that raise money for Prader-Willi research. In the meantime, I’ve started acting again, and we just had our second child, so I’ve had my hands pretty full, taking care of him and doing auditions. Have you been auditioning a lot? Yes, actually! Far more than I thought I would be. I’m auditioning for all sorts of things. I’m actually filming an episode of Bones tomorrow. I’ve auditioned for comedy, drama, movies — anything they send my way. Is it mostly one way or the other — dramatic roles, films, or ironic stuff? Are you being selective about which roles you take? Not really. I don’t think I can afford to be selective. I’m just seeing what’s out there, and whatever I do get, like Bones, is great practice to get into the swing of things again.

Have you tried connecting your Prader-Willi research to non-Prader-Willi patients — that is, once you’ve discovered the impulse that makes people with Prader-Willi insatiably hungry, can you theoretically control that impulse in people who don’t have PWS? It actually depends on the mechanism itself. There’s a lot of reasons that people with Prader-Willi can’t control their hunger. Regulating the hypothalamus is difficult, because it connects to the brain and there’s a lot of sources in the brain that control every function. There’s a theory that the hunger you can explore, there are several different sources for, and we’ll never be sure exactly what causes it. You can try and narrow down a little more…but also, the reasons are different. So it’s difficult to pinpoint it down to one thing, for sure. I remember reading a few years ago – you know, the way rumors spread between Jews – that you were active at UCLA Hillel, and that you’d started getting more observant. Um, are you? My mother was raised Orthodox, and my grandparents are immigrants from Eastern Europe. I was raised in a Reform household, but with a lot of remnants of Orthodoxy. We lit candles. We had two sets of dishes, but my mom never told me why. I thought it was breakfast dishes and dinner dishes. There was no emphasis on halacha and learning. Totally not to disparage my parents; it just wasn’t their thing. When I went to college, I didn’t have a lot of friends. Blossom had ended two years before. I’d always gone away to Jewish camps for the summer, and so I kind of ended up at Hillel and I started learning with the rabbi, and it kind of took off from there. I’m hesitant to label myself or call myself Orthodox because people will be like, "Celebrity Mayim Bialik says she does X, but I saw her doing Y" – I guess, to be safe, I would say I’m Conservative, but in reality, I’d say Conservadox. But my husband and I have definitely increased our observance over the years, and we’re always trying to grow. We kinda do the Big Three [Shabbos, keeping kosher, and family purity], but it’s hard. I mean, it’s hard for everyone to classify themselves, but it’s a whole new level of hard when people are watching you. Like, I pretty much eat a vegan diet, but I eat eggs if they’re in things. What I say is, I eat a mostly vegan diet, and that’s kind of how it is with Judaism. We keep Shabbos, we keep kosher, and I don’t know if people want to hear about the Mikveh, but, um, yeah. And now that you’re acting again, that whole "celebrity Mayim Bialik" factor is coming back into play. Is it weird to get back into the arena after you’ve been away so long? What sort of gigs are you looking for? What sort of gigs are you getting? When I was younger, things came in and I got offered things a lot. Now it’s my manager saying it’s the girl who played Blossom, which has its own attractiveness, and its own stigma. And then I have projects that I want to do. I just optioned the Rashi’s Daughters books. I love that I can do something like that in the first place, and I’d love to get it made into a film. But I don’t have the kind of star power to say, I’m ready to talk to Steven Spielberg next weekend…. Do you ever watch old episodes of Blossom? Would you ever show them to your kids, or is it kind of something you want to keep in the past? No! I stopped watching in the middle of the first season, and I would kind of watch the last half and part of the second season. But I literally have never watched the last three seasons. So, needless to say, my kids haven’t, either. What was your life like during Blossom? Did you have much contact with the outside world? Yeah. It was actually pretty normal – we would work for three weeks, then I would go to school on my week off. I had tutors on the rest of the set. We got there two hours early than everyone else – me, Joey, and Michael each had our own tutors, and our lessons started at 7:00 and lasted until everyone showed up at 9. I was on the show from when I was 14 years old until when I was 19. At a certain point, I was very recognizable-I’m a pretty normal person, I was always a pretty normal person. I wasn’t motivated by fame or money. I just wanted to act. Were you doing anything Jewish at the time? Not so much. We filmed on Friday nights. The local Bureau of Jewish Education used to have programs for beyond-bar-mitzvah-age kids, which was helpful. I went on retreats like Shabbatons, and that actually really cemented my Jewish identity. When my parents weren’t doing Jewish stuff anymore, I still had a place to pray and live Jewishly. But it wasn’t until UCLA that I really fully realized my Jewish identity. And that was where you started doing chazzanut and leading services, right? I haven’t done that for about 2 years. It’s in conflict with some of what I’ve been learning, but it’s also in line with a lot of what I do as a performer. It’s a great honor to daven, and to dav on behalf of a community. My grandfather was a chazzan in San Diego and the Bronx, and I inherited his voice. It takes a lot of learning, and it takes a lot of kavanah [concentration], but it’s complicated, as anyone in this line knows. And there’s a reason that, in traditional Jewish circles, women don’t lead services. I’ve been pregnant twice in the past three years. Going to shul has been incredibly different after having one child, and then having, thank God, two children, it’s been even more different, and Judaism kind of knows that. How has your Jewish life changed with the birth of your sons? Are you taking them along? At this point, my oldest son’s not yet in preschool. Religiously, my husband and I are both still growing. We’re not quite ready for day school yet – we don’t feel like it’s quite our niche – but a Conservative day school wouldn’t meet our needs at this point. Kosher home, but you get into all sorts of conflicts about other things….You have to find the right place; it’s very important to find the right place. At this point, he knows all the holidays, and we’ve started studying Torah, and he knows all the brachos, and he doesn’t know the English alphabet but he knows the Hebrew alphabet. I grew up speaking Yiddish, and I’m trying to do the same thing with my son. He has a large vocabulary – well, for a 3-year-old, at any rate. Are you still working? No, it’s just me. All day. With both of them. That’s how it is most of the time — I’m filming tomorrow.

Is it true that you’re related to Chaim Nachman Bialik? Yes, I am. I’m from his brother’s line; he was my great-great-grandfather’s uncle. My grandfather met him when he came to America. My grandfather was young, and Chaim Nachman Bialik passed away young as well, so they didn’t have a chance to know each other well. We do get in free to the Bialik Museum in Tel Aviv. We have some nice collections of books, and we carry that heritage. But all the Bialiks have been extraordinary people. I’m very proud — especially in Israel — to carry his name. What do you have planned next, after Bones? How far are you into Rashi’s Daughters; do you have a screenwriter or anything lined up? I optioned it. So I’m looking to have it written as a movie or a miniseries. I’m kind of a classic actress-performer: I like to be given a script, and then I try to make you laugh or cry. This is the first project that I found that I’m really inspired by, inspired to get involved in the production of. There’s a good story there, a meaningful story. But what I’m interested in emphasizing is the beauty of Orthodoxy, and the dimension and depth of women’s relationship with study. It’s a wonderful story that shows a lot of facets of Judaism that I think want to be appreciated. Other than that, I’m just auditioning and taking care of my kids. Which can pretty much fill up your time, just that. And I learn once a week. My mentor lives in New York — we were paired up totally accidentally, and it’s been amazing. Her name is Allison Josephs, and she runs a YouTube series about Jewish topics. She was a Blossom fan, and wanted to study with me, and I called an organization and they paired her with me. She couldn’t believe it, that she found me after all that time. She’s my Jewish instructor and my guru. We study melachos of Shabbos and tznius and stuff, but even when my son had a bris, I go to her for moral support. What are your favorite things to learn? I didn’t grow up with a strong sense of halacha, and I have family who are religious Zionists, but I never really knew about halacha. I’m a nitty-gritty person. I love that our tradition encourages debate, and a lot of what I love to learn is practical — how to kasher things for Pesach, what legally constitutes bishul. My husband calls it my Jewish book club. It’s more than that, though. We read a Soloveitchik book. I read Rivka Slonim’s book Bread and Fire, which I’ve gained so much from. We’re making our way through our lives with whatever we come up with.

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I was reading Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws, a deconstructive reading of slasher movies, at the same time as I was TA-ing a class in American Literature. I realized that one of the oldest forms our country has – the captivity narrative – is the same form as the horror movie. It sort of went from there.

A lot of these poems are about other people — Karen Carpenter, Anne Frank, JonBenet — but you aren’t afraid to characterize them and take risks with their personalities. How do you get into their heads? Has anything ever made you stop and question, or recant one of your characters?

I’m actually not concerned with getting into their heads. One of the things I’m most interested in this book – we think we know these "people" so well by how they’ve been portrayed, when we really only know their media construction. I was interested in trying to insert a "private" life into a "public" figure and seeing if it altered the myth at all – did it bend? did it break? Did it do nothing at all?

I remember you saying you were consciously avoiding writing about Mia Zapata, the lead singer of the Gits, who was  one of the first distinct riot grrrl singers, when she was murdered…

I honestly don’t remember that, but it makes sense. For the most part, I was looking for "dead" girls – people that are well-known, and we don’t have a strong emotional reaction when their name is mentioned – it’s either been a long time, or it’s sort of a muted feeling. And in a particular subculture, there’s a particular stake in Mia Zapata, a passion and a fury – so although she’s dead, her legend is hyper-alive.

Found texts are a sort of necrophilia with you — you seem to enjoy taking newspaper articles and essays and turning them into poems, subverting the original intention. Isn’t that a weird preoccupation for poetry, where the credo usually goes, "Do anything"?

How so? I *am* doing anything!

True enough — which probably makes this the point where I should ask about your other new book, Fucking Daphne, an anthology of "mostly true stories and fictions" which you both edited and star in. What was it like, reading accounts of people having sex with you?

Honestly, at first it was a little weird – mostly the weird part was asking people to write stories about having sex with me. By the time the stories came in, most of the time, I had a pretty thick skin — it was pretty apparent that these stories weren’t about "me" but about a character that bore a passing resemblance to me. Most of all, across the board, these stories were about the authors; their hopes, dreams, self-images, ideas and nightmares.

What was the single act that surprised you most?

[San Francisco poet] Justin Chin wrote a story from the perspective of my cat. I said yeah, okay, write me that story, but I was skeptical that it could be anything but a cartoon. But the story is rich, moving, and funny, and by far transcended the cute story of a house pet that I feared.

Diablo Cody, who’s doing a horror film now, has been speaking about horror films as a feminist genre — echoing, in my opinion, a lot of what you’ve said. Do you think the mainstream can change, even with cool people helming it?

Oh, argh. See, I don’t think that horror movies are a feminist genre – I think it’s possible to make a feminist reading of a horror film, even in a misogynist culture. So do I think that low culture can affect the mainstream? Probably, but I think it’s in a really difficult battle of swimming upstream. I do think things trickle up, but I also think that they get re-read in ways that serve the dominant paradigm. I’m not sure this is a great answer, but it’s as far as I can get.

If one of your poems was turned into a movie, which would you choose?

Just to be perverse, I’ll say any poem without a clear narrative line. Though one has already been turned into a film – it’s not in any of my books, but "Somewhere, Over," a poem that splices together images of my mother’s death with fragments of The Wizard of Oz, was made into a short film last year.

The most autobiographical poem in the collection is "Living Legend: "being james dean/isn’t easy./even james dean/couldn’t do it for long." You’ve just hit 40 — past the age of James Dean when he died, and you’re still passionate and talented and rocking out. Do you feel like we get wiser as we age, or just come up with new and innovative ways to fuck up better?

Ha. I don’t think that’s the most autobiographical piece in the book – not by a long shot. On aging, I guess that piece is a tribute to those who didn’t survive – because of addiction, suicide, or all the reasons we lose our lives – and a shout-out to all of us who never expected to be here this long. I don’t know what to say about aging, only that it’s not what I thought it was, and that, unlike James Dean and as you suggest, the price of passion isn’t dying (though it can bring you pretty close).

Which piece do you think is the most autobiographical? Do you feel personal connections to any of these women that you’ve written about in retrospect, as if you’ve seen a side of them that nobody has before — or all of them, or none? 

They’re all autobiography, since they’re all projection. There are some I feel closer to than others, but for some reason, I feel that’s too vulnerable a question to answer — like it would expose things about me that I can’t — otherwise, I’d write memoir.

I *will* tell you that "you make me feel like the whole world is singing" about Shanda Sharer, age 12, killed by three teenage girls, and "heavy the head," in the voice of JonBenét Ramsey’s killer, are two of my favorites in the book, because for me, they deal with desire and loss, which I think crop up in my work over and over — I guess that’s an obsession of mine. That love can’t make anything stay, that love can destroy.

This is a hard question, but what kind of impact do you want your work to have when an alienated little goth girl first hears you or reads you 200 years from now? What do you want to be remembered for?

Maybe it’s already happened. I got an email a few years ago from a girl who was a cutter. She said she’d read my work and she’d stopped cutting. (She didn’t see that this was her achievement, not mine, but if she thinks my work stopped her cutting, great, as long as she’s not cutting.) I said, wonderful. Write me back in a year and tell me you’re still not cutting. About a year later, I got an email: "You probably don’t remember me, but a year ago, you told me to write if I still wasn’t cutting…" I told her, wonderful! Write me back next year!

The post Daphne Gottlieb: Kissing, Fucking, and Hanging with Lemony Snicket appeared first on Jewcy.

The protagonist of her latest book, The Laziest Secretaryin the World, is named Latoya (she’s white). She’s alternately pathetic andbrilliant, a powerhouse at drinking, social analysis, and anything thatinvolves the bottom-most echelon of pop culture. Latoya could write for McSweeney’sbut instead makes fun of tabloid celebrities. She daydreams of the limitlessvariety of frozen dinners, having an unlimited cash flow, and of beinginterviewed on a daytime talk show, answering difficult questions with, "Merv,even if I had a million dollars, I would still buy Butterfingers and M&Ms.I mean, what could possibly replace them?"

When Laziest Secretary begins,Latoya is a secretary for a has-been manager who produces a slowly decayingbrass band and the world’s worst production of Annie. She would be afixture at the local bar, except that all the barflies are terminally hittingher up for a drink, and vice versa. Before long, Latoya trades one form ofservitude for another, and she’s on a plane to Seoul,bound to marry a man she’s never met, with the prospect of being richer thanshe’s ever been.

It doesn’t take long for the scheme to blow up in Latoya’sface, of course, and Blowdryer does a credible job of playing with tension anddanger and intrigue, although, like everything else in Latoya’s life, thethreat of being arrested pales next to the greater threat of breaking her cool.We caught up with Ms. Blowdryer at her improbable, tiny-but-certifiably owned EastVillage walk-up.

What was it like to write Latoya? She’s a combination ofa lot of things — the person who says the things that everyone’s afraid tosay, craftiness, and utter sloth. She’s also constantly critical of her weightand her own slovenness. How much of her is you? How much of her is the type ofperson you despise?

I was in my mid-20s when I originally wrote Secretary,full of piss and vinegar. There’s this window of time that it is best to bereally snarky, from maybe 15 to say, 34. I’ve always been blessed with nothaving an internal censor, so I had no problem taking the worst aspects ofmyself and blowing them out of proportion.

She’s an antihero, bragging about her size and sloth, tryingto get by with a minimum of effort. I read a lot of satirists growing up,writers like Peter DeVries, Vonnegut, and the early National Lampoon crowd, andthey had no problems lavishly rolling around in what we’d call "characterdefects" nowadays.

I don’t despise Latoya. I had times when I was a greatbeauty, times when I was fat and poor and not considered viable for non-gaymale attention. In real life one knows that one is supposed to view one’sfellow beings with compassion and depth, not as instruments to use forappetizers, but I’ve certainly been around enough flaming junkies to know thatthis is not always how one conducts one’s business.

I know Laziest Secretary has a crazy publishinghistory, but what happened exactly?

I was in Columbia’swriting MFA program, something nobody would admit to for many years due to the"I suffered MORE" phase of Caucasian cultural development, which is hopefullycoming to a timely close. Kim Wozencraft, author of Rush,was also there learning how to write fiction-because she couldn’t writenonfiction about a crime she’d been convicted for, due to the Son of Sam laws. Shehad done some time, and was forced to write literary fiction in order todescribe it. She was also working as a temp, and while she was at DC Comics sheput the book on the desk of Mark Nevello, who was running an imprint called .He thought my manuscript was really funny, and got in touch with me.

It was a thin novel, illustrated, and was sent only to comicbook stores. They used my real name, which nobody knew, and I wrote my ownauthor description, which mainly said that I was a parolee. I thought that wasfunny for some reason. Poor Mark didn’t know enough to correct me. It was alsoabout 13 bucks, a lot for a slim novel written by an unfamous person found onlyin comic shops. It tanked.

Did it kill you to see-or hear about-the print run beingdestroyed?

It kind of sucked to learn that all the copies of my bookhad been pulped. I always wanted to reissue the book, because it seemed likewhen people who didn’t read much got a hold of Secretary, they reallyliked it. I met with Andy Helfer, who was brought in when Mark was fired. Andyhad a better idea of what to do with a DC imprint and started Vertigo. He wasalso kind, and after gently telling me that all my books had been pulped, hereversed the rights so that I could do whatever I wanted with my own text.

What was the process of working with an artist like? Didit freak you out to hand over your work to someone and just hope they didn’tmess it up?

When we decided to reissue Secretary, I got Beppi todo it. She is amazing, intuitive, and works with her sister Mary Knott. Theyboth live in Baltimoreand have senses of humor. They had a comic called Pretty Beaver and theseamazing t-shirts…Mary would come up with the phrase and Beppi would draw it.I’d walk down a street in Londonand have people praising my t -shirt, so I had the utmost respect for her.

I’m pretty happy with these drawings. There is no way tomake a profit on this book, but I just always wanted people to be able to readit and to have a low price. It’s hard to get it in bookstores, as there is no distributionand no budget for publicity or reviews. This is kind of standard anyway, booksjust don’t make money, even big publishers don’t know how to deal with it. Itwas still nice of Zeitgeist to do it, and I love a lot of their books.

The next book I’m doing is going to be translated into atleast German and Japanese, because we of the Americashave ceased to be a book buying public.

Are any of the barflies (or the heroin dealer) based onreal people?

The barflies, junkies, and even the guys on the JerseyShore are based on realpeople. I was socially raised by people who were constantly getting kicked outof places.

Did they ever see the finished product?

Yep, Diet Popstitute read it, so did the junkie, and so didthe leather guys in Jersey. One of them wascalled Mike Dragon, and his elderly mother read it as well, and raved about it.That’s when I started to think that it had a broad appeal that classypublishing types had no idea of. My friend Juggernut, who never reads, just readthe [reprinted] Zeitgeist copy twice, really slowly, and loved it to death.What a WASP editor finds beneath contempt, an average mistake-making,hard-living American finds to be utterly true.

Onstage, you routinely offer tips to collect SSI and you hypethe virtues of not having a day job. What’s your philosophy about money?

I have a disconnect with money. I like stuff, but I’mhorrible at business. For years I had a crippling depression coupled with somekind of neurological logic challenge, and had to drop out of society except forworking for thuggish women now and then. For some reason they were able toregard me as a trustworthy Girl Friday, which I really am, but they were theonly ones who saw it that way.

I believe that FDR created what the Republicans areominously calling "Entitlement Programs" when he created the New Deal. It wascreated so senior citizens didn’t starve during the Depression, but it also wasbased on the idea that society should take care of people who can’t take careof themselves. I’m in favor of SSI and SSD, and Food Stamps. The craziest andmost physically disabled often don’t have the tools to deal with bureaucracyand get the help they need. They’re too inconsistent, or missing a leg, orparanoid, and they need tips on how to get help. I figure if I’m fun and verypublic, and show I’m not ashamed to be, um, mentally interesting and oftenparalyzed, I can take some of their shame as well.

I see money only as a way to keep a roof over my head andget more stuff. I mostly just want cheap stuff anyway. I prefer it. JoanCollins said that the best jewelry is either very expensive or very cheap.

Do you think "Laziest Secretary" has a moral?It kind of feels like a really twisted Aesop’s fable….

Nah, there’s no moral, just exaggerated realism and Americana.Similar to my tattoo choice, a Chai sign, because I lost the gold Chai signnecklace my grandma Palley gave me. It’s on my back, along with a logo for someband I never saw.

The post Jennifer Blowdryer: How to Write the Great American Novel While on Food Stamps appeared first on Jewcy.

It’s easy to chalk Yoshie’s existence until that point up to the classic story of small-town-boy-makes-it-big. But between the lines, Fruchter has a lot of stories–his mother is a full-time arts educator in the yeshiva system, and his father is a versatile musician who, among his own accolades, was babysat by Elvis as a child.

One of my rabbis used to say that lineage is nothing but a bunch of zeroes, and you’re either the one in front of it, or you’re just another zero–and the younger Fruchter is carving out his own niche in music. His debut album, Pitom, was recently released by the venerable experimental jazz label Tzadik Records, and he has a veritable bunch of talent that’s all his own numeral. Jewcy spoke to Yoshie about his record, his band, and technical klezmer terms that will get you punched out in a bar.

Name: Yoshie Fruchter

Birthday: February 1, 1982 Hometown: Silver Spring Marital status: Married (to occasional New York Times – and Jewcy – contributor and food writer Leah Koenig) Links: www.pitommusic.com, www.myspace.com/pitom Favorite book: The Picture of Dorian Gray Your biggest influence that would surprise other people: High holiday wailing Best spot to play music: Zebulon (in Williamsburg) Favorite Muppet: Grover You have an unusual career trajectory. Before Pitom, you released an album of songs from the POV of different biblical personalities with your father. And you’ve got your foot in a lot of different projects — you play bass for reggae-folk artist Chana Rothman, the jam band Soulfarm, and freelance with other groups including Eitan Katz and even Shlock Rock. How do you know which parts are you? I try to inject parts of myself into whatever I’m doing — and I think part of myself gets injected, whether I want it to or not. No matter what kind of music I’m playing at the time, I want to do everything I can to make it as good as possible. That said, the projects that mean the most to me are the ones that I’ve personally created and produced. "Beyond the Book" was a fun project, and a great learning process for me, both as a songwriter and producer.  Working on it with my dad was also really special.  But I was also in a zone at that point where I was thinking more like a singer songwriter.  These days, with Pitom, I’m more about exploring instrumental ideas and raw sounds. I think the "me" changes from day to day with every idea that I absorb.  Right at this moment, Pitom is where I’m at, and I am really finding myself enjoying leading this band and the excitement of performance. I’m also excited to be included with an incredible cadre of artists on Tzadik Records, a label with an aesthetic and artistic vision that I very much relate to. How did it feel to get signed to Tzadik? It’s a label that, like, 95% of people in this world have never heard of, and 5% completely idolize. Do you see it as a start, or do you want to be there forever? I was definitely excited to become part of a label whose music I’d been enjoying and influenced by for years before.  I was also happy because the music that we were making was such a perfect fit for Tzadik’s aesthetic.  I am extremely humbled to be part of a catalogue that includes artists like Marc Ribot, Anthony Coleman and, of course, John Zorn.  This is our first record and it is still quite new, so I’m not sure what the future holds.  But I plan to keep creating music under whatever circumstances come my way.  So far the critical response from reviews and radio has been really positive and enthusiastic so we’ll take the releases one at a time. What’s your songwriting process like? Do you play through ideas with the band, or do you like to have each song outlined before you share it?   When I started Pitom, I felt like I really had to have my stuff together. I had just moved to the city, and I was basically putting everything together from scratch.  I found myself writing very specific parts that had to be played a certain way in my head or the song didn’t work.  As the band began to gel, it became more of a collaborative process.  I still write sketches for all the music, but now, the band works together to mold the tunes. We love talking about how your father’s babysitter was Elvis, but you can never talk about it too much. You come from a pretty musical family — your sister Ora performs puppetry, Temim is the drummer and singer for the Shondes, and your father plays his own stuff and gigs with everyone else in the universe. Do you think it’s something in the genes? Do you think just raising your kids around creative stuff will turn them into creative people?   Though I got some great genes from my folks — they’re incredible people — I think that most of it was just having creativity around. On any given rainy Sunday when we were kids, our mom would set us up with an art project instead of letting us watch cartoons. I no longer do weekly art projects, but I think that being exposed to different kinds of art, music and literature growing up can have a great affect in just instilling a desire for things that are NEW. And, maybe I should start the weekly art projects again. How is writing music and being creative different since you got married a few months ago? Do you feel obliged to, like, write love songs about your wife–and do you think it’s different for you and other nontraditional bands than, say, Gloria Estefan or Jack Johnson? Everything that affects my life works its way into my music somehow or another, and being in love with someone makes it even more so. Leah has been around since the band started, and she’s always served as an inspiration for the music that I write. Now that we live together, she definitely sees and hears my process more closely and she has been a great editor in telling me what works and what doesn’t.  In turn, I edit her articles. Do you have conflicts balancing your music and your Judaism? Or, totally separately, trying to make it as a professional musician and your Judaism?   Theoretically, it can be a struggle — but, in my life, it’s been both a challenge and a blessing. Being raised an Orthodox Jew meant I couldn’t play gigs on Friday nights, but it also connected me to a world of Jewish music that lets me make enough money to support the music that I want to make.  Also, I find that the break that I take on Shabbat from performing and playing gives me a good time for reflection and distance from my practice.  I’m usually able to connect to music differently, through prayer and singing traditional songs.  But there have definitely been numerous opportunities that I have not been able to take advantage of because of observance. It’s weird how, in this age when people are trying to sneak Jewish references into every song they do to attract the "Jewish market," you find a lot of stuff that’s tangentially Jewish, or Jewish for obvious kitsch value. You’re obviously deeply into your Judaism — but at the same time, you’re composing original instrumental music. Do you ever feel like you need to be demonstrably Jewish onstage, or in your writing?   The question of what is considered "Jewish," and whether or not our music can be strongly considered as such, is completely so subjective. Some people see the Jewish element as kind of a loose presence, and some people tell me it’s right there in front. There are definitely some concrete Jewish elements to Pitom songs, some freigish modality, some klezmer phrasing — Freigish modality? What does that mean? "Freigish" is a node, or a scale, in klezmer music; it’s one of the most popular nodes. If your editors give you trouble, I guess you can say "Klezmer and Jewish cantorial modality" — it’s probably more understandable that way, anyway. For me, Jewish music is such a part of my psyche that it seems to come out in everything that I write. Sometimes it’s a whole traditional Jewish melody; sometimes it’s just an emotion. At a recent show, someone came up to me afterwards and told me that the intense rocking and swaying that I was doing during the performance reminded them of a religious Jew praying fervently on Yom Kippur.  And it made me think — you know what? That’s exactly what I am channeling. Years of Jewish song around tables in yeshiva, years of listening to my father blow shofar on Rosh Hashanah, years of wearing my yarmulke in places where no one else was.  It’s just a part of who I am. Maybe you can hear it, maybe you can’t — but it’s there, and that’s what makes it Jewish. Where do you get your song titles from?   Our song titles come from various ridiculous places, usually spur of the moment thematic ideas that the tune reminds me of. "Lungs and Spleen" is based on a class I took with [klezmer musician, singer, and dancer] Michael Alpert in which he described traditional Jewish food as containing these animal organs. When I was forming Pitom, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a Jewish presence in the music, but I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to manifest itself.  Originally, the band was called the Plain Hex Quartet — based on a book from my childhood — but that didn’t really convey the message I wanted. Leah actually came up with the name Pitom, which means "suddenly" in Hebrew.  Since I believe the music can be excitingly jarring at times, and leaves you peeking around every corner for what’s going to happen next, I felt that Pitom was an effective, concise and catchy way to achieve this effect and establish the music as a fundamentally Jewish language. I found out later that "pitom" in modern Hebrew also means "ventriloquism" (or so I was told) which was coincidental since I am working with my sister Ora on building a visual puppet performance element to the music. What are you working on now? I’ve been writing more material for the band, and I’ve been trying to perform as much as possible.  We just got back from Washington DC with Gutbucket, and we’re working on some other touring stuff for the spring and summer.  It has been fun to see what different musical directions the band can go in and establish different identities for the band while still staying true to our original vision.  As I mentioned above, my sister and I are working on a visual puppet element to the music, so we’ll keep you posted on that. Outside of Pitom, I just finished a new record with Soulfarm, and I’ll be going into the studio with the North African fusion band Asefa in the next couple of months. Is there anything, musically or other art-wise, that you want to try doing now that you’ve cut your album? If you had the freedom to do anything, time-wise and financially, what would your next project be? I’ve been so focused on the release of this record and composing material for the band that I haven’t thought much beyond the album at this point.  Maybe I’ll try and train tigers to eat okra while playing Mozart…

Pitom’s self-titled debut is available now on Tzadik Records.

The post Jazz Is the New Klezmer: An Interview with Yoshie Fruchter appeared first on Jewcy.

Name: Thea Hillman Birthday: January 17, 1971 Hometown: Oakland, CA Marital status: That’s an odd question because I’m not sure what it tells you about me. I’d prefer to tell you my opinions about marriage than my marital status. Upcoming appearances: I’ve got a bunch of events over the next few weeks and into the new year. I’m still booking dates, so invitations are welcome! Links: www.theahillman.com (website); myspace.com/theahillman (video clips of performances) First section you turn to in the Sunday paper: I love the advice and gossip columns. Favorite song to dance to: Anything by Erasure. Guilty pleasure: US Magazine. Last book read: Mary Mackey’s book of poetry, Breaking the Fever. When I was in 7th grade, I found a book of her poetry in my mom’s books. It was called "One Night Stand" and she used the word "fuck" in a poem. Reading that gave me a sense of artistic permission…because a published poet used the word and because it was my mom’s book!

Your first book was a kind of poetry disguised as memoir. This book is memoir, but the title and the focus gives it the feel of an authoritative treatise on being intersex (which there isn’t actually one, is there?) But the subject matter is unquestionably you. Do you think of this book as a polemic? A mission statement? Or is it more, like, throwing your life out there—and, by the way, it’s the life of an intersex person? There’s not an authoritative treatise on being intersex—that I know of, anyway. There is an anthology of people who share their intersex experiences ("Intersex in the Age of Ethics"). Most published information about intersex deals with it from a safe distance, an ethical, medical, or anthropological perspective. What my book does is deal with most personal aspects of being intersex, from my very singular perspective. I wanted it to answer the questions that people ask me all the time. As I see it, my book is just the first of what will be many books by intersex people about their intersex experiences. When you were writing it, did you feel pressure to be authoritative, or to exclude certain stories because they didn’t feel, like, indicative of intersex, or what intersex should be? Actually, if we can back up farther — at what point did it feel like you were writing a book? The chapters are very short, and they leap around in an almost free-association order, rather than a chronological one. It feels very deliberate — but, at the same time, it feels like brief peaks of emotion, rather than the more conventional narrative idea of taking fifty pages to build up to a moment of exposition, and then kicking that around for another fifty pages. I always knew I was writing a book, but what changed through the years was what kind of book I was writing and what I wanted to say. At first I tried writing a traditional memoir with a very traditional writing style with an initiating incident and climax, but my story didn’t quite fit that model and somehow the way I interpreted that style of writing wasn’t very alive. I do think the book has a chronological drive to it, but it’s just that there are two chronologies, a younger self and an older self. There are also two different writing styles; one is more narrative, the other more prose-poemy (and there are a couple of poemy-poems thrown in at the end of the book for good measure). It was tricky writing about intersex and wondering when to explain things and when to let them stand on their own. I knew book couldn’t stand and shouldn’t stand as authoritative. It’s just one person’s version. I also had to be careful not to tell other intersex people’s stories, even if my intentions were to educate and inspire less informed readers. Six years passed since your first book, Depending on the Light, was released. Were you writing the entire time? Did you go through periods where you were specifically not writing? You know, I wasn’t writing the entire time. Especially not when I had a book contract; that was a time of lots of stress and not so much writing. My strategy is to regularly "give up" writing, telling myself that I’ll still be a worthwhile person if I never write another word. The practice of writing is really hard for me and gets so big and overwhelming that I have large periods of time when I don’t write at all. Giving writing up takes the pressure off. My other strategy is to recognize that I’m a writer whether or not I’m actually engaged in writing; I’m beginning to trust that during those less prolific times I’m replenishing the store of ideas and passion and inspiration. Your subject matter veers into topics that people don’t usually discuss, even in the anything-goes queer communities you perform in the opening story about kinks and sexual trauma, for instance. Do you ever get confronted or avoided because what you write about digs too deep? That question makes me smile because I’ve been thinking recently that if people are offended, etc, by my work, I don’t end up hearing about it. Maybe they’re avoiding me? Or perhaps I’m just blessfully missing what they’re saying. My work is so vulnerable and does dig so deep that it can sometimes be beyond reproach because how do you argue with another person’s experience? My writing could definitely be critiqued more, and sometimes I wish it would be, but the intimate content may get in the way of even that kind of criticism. There’s a certain kind of safety in writing memoir — if people want to say, "I don’t believe the narrator would say that," or even, "That was a dumb thing to do," it’s like — too bad, I frickin’ did it. And then, at the same time, you can be laying your most closely-guarded emotional experiences out for the world to see. Your piece "Starfucking Close to Home" kind of addresses it, but the new book must bring out a whole new level — How does your family feel about your writing? How do your friends feel about you writing about them? I’ve learned a lot between Book One and Book Two about what to write, and not write, about family. Lovers are easy, you just leave out details or names and they can’t be identified. But family is hard. My mom says I can write about her when she’s dead. Thankfully, she’s alive. And I’ve decided that my family relationships are more important than art (this is after a painful, extended battle with a family member after my last book). My family is fine with what I reveal about myself. Sometimes they’ve taken issue with how I represent a situation that they see differently, but they understand it’s my version of things. They’ve been really supportive about the second book, which I appreciate, because for me, letting that book out in the world is the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. You take Jeffrey Eugenides to task for, among other things, not making the effort to meet any intersex people before writing his book Middlesex. It’s also pretty annoying that he made his character intersex as a result of double incest, instead of a genetic wild-card. But it’s impossible to deny the book made a huge impact on the public at large—in retrospect, how do you think it’s impacted the community and people’s perceptions of intersex people? Intersex can be a result of many things, including genetics. Despite its inherent problems (thank you for noting the problematic double-incest theme), Middlesex presented a very likeable intersex character that people could identify with. One of the most powerful things Eugenides did was illustrate the dilemma many intersex people face: while they might accept and enjoy their body as it is, people around them want to "fix" their body so it matches some mythical ideal. I think Eugenides’ depiction creates empathy for the intersex character in the reader, and gives credibility to the perspective of the intersex person who doesn’t understand the horror their body may incite in others. Okay, I never would have thought of Middlesex that way — as a kind of fist-pumping intersex icon. That said, do you think it’s put a stopper on the genre? Eileen Myles and Michelle Tea’s books brought out a whole rash of queer-girl memoirs of sexual exploration and San Francisco pilgrimage and adventure, but I can’t think of any sort of huge boost in exposure to intersex or even trans writing, post-Eugenides… Truth is, I see Middlesex as totally outside the worlds of intersex and trans writing. Middlesex was written by a non-intersex man who never interviewed an intersex person before writing his book. He’s an author who used intersex as a metaphor, but he is in no way an advocate for intersex people, nor has his work sparked any activism (except activism targeted at him). Trans writing in particular—essays, memoirs, and fiction by authors such as Ivan Coyote, Charlie Anders, Julia Serano, S. Bear Bergman, Max Wolf Valerio, and James Green–has exploded over the past several years. And intersex writing is right behind it. You discuss being Jewish in several parts of the book, but never in an expected way. I think the most overtly shocking part is when you discuss how the first pictures of naked bodies you’d ever seen were Holocaust photos — how it was such an un-sexual experience, almost to the point of being anti-sexual. And then you follow it up with a story about the San Francisco S/M scene…how do you think the Jewish community impacted your sexual development? Being Jewish has shaped my sexual development in so many ways. Unexpected ways, I think. Seeing naked Jewish bodies repeatedly in Holocaust films from a young age taught me that my body is dangerous, that the core of who I am and who my people are makes us different and makes us vulnerable…to scapegoating, to ostracization, to torture. That’s a heavy load for a kid. I think I transformed it by playing with the difference, enjoying the attention of "standing out," and owning the freakishness. "Owning the freakishness" is something we love almost to the point of idolization, especially in SF — but it’s almost to the exclusion of being a part of a greater community, like how so many SF people shy away from identifying with Judaism. How has your Jewishness played out within the queer community? And are you playing at all with your Jewish identity these days? I love that question, because it’s just so true. About so many things. It’s so challenging to bring every part of one self to every community one is in. And maybe we don’t need to, but often those communities are better off for us bringing our whole selves to the table. The queer and trans communities in San Francisco, at least in the past, fetishized queer Jewish femmes. I mean, the community fetishizes everything, Jewish femmes is one of those things. I got pegged as a Jewish femme (even though I don’t identify as femme) and got to enjoy certain attention because of that. My Jewishness has inspired my performance work (I’ve been in various shows, at least one with you, where Judaism is an organizing concept or theme) and these opportunities have helped shaped my voice as a Jew.

Matthue Roth is a performance poet and the author, most recently, of the Russian Jewish immigrant geek epic novel Losers. He lives in Brooklyn and is associate editor of MyJewishLearning.com.

The post Thea Hillman: The Inner Sanctum of Intersex appeared first on Jewcy.

Matthue,

You make an interesting point: authors are often unaware of what we say on paper, and sometimes our readers know more about us than we know about ourselves. When the chief of my publisher finished reading Dumbocracy, his exact words were: “The manuscript seems preoccupied with sodomy.” So I gave it another look, and discovered he was completely right — I am preoccupied with sodomy!

A book reviewer friend of mine insists that an author’s life story should not affect our judgment of his or her work — for example, we should loathe Mein Kampf because it’s logically unsound, not because a mass murderer wrote it. But we are products of our experiences, and our books are products of us, so it seems logical that our books are extensions of our experiences. (Shit, did I accidentally compare us to Hitler? And I thought comparing myself to Socrates was a little much…)

You write about a foreign-born social outcast in Losers, and his insecurities when it comes to prejudice and assimilation; if you denied that your novel is a vicarious examination of your Orthodox convictions, I wouldn’t believe you for a moment. Even if a book is marked "FICTION," it’s the product of a human mind, and Freud’s most enduring observation is that self-expression leads to unforeseen revelation. (Extraneous question for Sigmund scholars: do gay dudes want to slay their mothers and bone their fathers?)

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook — which allow people to share their humiliating personal lives with others — became popular concurrently with blogs, which allow everybody to share their (unintentionally) humiliating thoughts with others. The Average Joe suddenly has the ability to write for a large audience, which was impossible ten years ago because of the editorial chain of command. Psychologists will have a voluminous supply of unhinged, self-incriminating bullshit to study for centuries to come.

As I said at the very beginning of our exchange, writers are not exactly well-adjusted people, but thanks to technology, everyone is a writer these days. Whereas authors once spoke for generations, we now speak with generations. And if we want to make our voices heard over the wretched cacophony, we might need to say more about ourselves — scream more about ourselves — than anyone wants to know.

Marty Beckerman and Matthue Roth spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.   This is their parting post.  Buy Marty’s book, Dumbocracy, and Matthue’s book, Losers.

The post Primal Scream Therapy with Tortured Authors, Part 5: Iceberg Theory vs. Oedipussy appeared first on Jewcy.

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. My 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.

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