Judd Greenstein’s involvement in modern music occurs through multiple avenues: he’s a composer, one of the people behind the fine independent record label New Amsterdam Records, and a deft essayist on topics of interest to the current state of new music. I talked to the Six Points fellow via email. Topic covered ranging from his current “micro-commissioning” project with the Minnesota Orchestra to the role of politics in modern composition.

What sort of response have you received about “Golden Calf,” your essay written in response to Justin Davidson’s New York article on young composers?

From composers, lots of very positive feedback, often in private — artists don’t like to publicly align themselves “against” critics, for understandable reasons. But two other composers, Alexandra Gardner and Matthew Guerrieri, wrote excellent essays in response to the same Davidson piece. And it was especially great to see Justin’s response — he was extremely gracious, and even emailed me personally to ask if we could move the discussion to the New York website, which didn’t really work out as we’d hoped, but was still an incredible gesture on his part.

As an artist, you’re traditionally supposed to shut up and let history validate either you or your detractors. It feels inappropriate, on its face, to say “you just don’t understand what we’re doing”, since all criticism could be met with that response. And yet, we’re in a cultural moment where the old lines, between different positions along the cultural chain that brings art to audiences, are blurring. Artists speak directly to their audiences, in emails, on websites, through social networking, and even in the songs themselves (what else is the Kanye phenomenon but a direct marketing campaign over killer beats?). The crumbling of the music industry has normally been framed as a burden for artists, since now we have to work not just as artists, but also as promoters, or in my case, as a record label manager, festival founder, and so on. Once you’ve gotten your hands dirty in aspects of the culture industry outside of art-making itself, it’s a lot harder to respect the old divides between roles when they seem increasingly irrelevant. So while it’s a real luxury to have someone as smart as Justin Davidson take the time to consider what our “scene” means in a historical context, if I think he’s missing a crucial element of how to frame the work, I have no hesitation in bringing my perspective directly to potential listeners. In fact, I believe that I (and we) have a responsibility to do so.

To what extent do you feel that your work addresses political themes? (I am thinking of “Free Speech Zone” and “Phantoms of Lost Liberty” as I write this.) And, on a related note, what do you see as the composer’s role in addressing political themes through their music?

My feelings about politics-in-music have changed over the years. Increasingly, I’ve moved away from the idea that the strongest Politics of music reside in the message of a specific piece — though that can sometimes be quite powerful. Instead, the strongest political change that I believe I can make with music comes from the underlying cultural change that the music, and the infrastructure that carries it, can effect in society. The deepest problems in our society are, I believe, cultural problems. When you have people going on WikiPedia to revise the history of Paul Revere, in order to make Sarah Palin look better, you’re talking about people who have no regard for the truth. That’s a problem of cultural norms. Yes, our distribution of resources is all out of whack, our political system is flawed, and there’s too much money in politics, corporate control, and the like, but if individual citizens were culturally inured against the messaging of powerful vested interests, we would be in a completely different place. That inoculation comes in the slow rebuilding of our cultural infrastructure, in the replacement of money-driven cultural products with human-driven ones, and in the resurrection of shared cultural norms that exist beyond the petty politics of individual taste and move into the realm of shared values, a shared citizenship, and a shared societal mission that still allows maximal room for individual freedom. That feels to me like the way forward, and it starts with art.

This doesn’t necessarily stand in opposition to other means of expressing politics in art; I would argue, though, that when composers put overt political messaging in their music, it transforms that music into something separate from non-representational work. That may provide a way in for some people, but it runs the risk of closing off what are, for me, the deepest doors, where our closest relationship to artistic output lies. In a piece like “Free Speech Zone”, the message is abstract enough that I don’t think an audience member is necessarily going to be distracted by the narrative of the outside story while they’re listening to the piece. “Grosse Tugenden” might be more risky in this regard.

The politics of my music, now, is really a politics of the music industry, the culture industry more broadly, and the relationship between artists and their audiences.

How did New Amsterdam Records originally come about?

New Amsterdam was a practical solution to a very real problem. When NOW Ensemble (my chamber group) was getting ready to record our first album, we looked around for labels that were appropriate and interested, and found none. We didn’t want our record to be a “document” of the work we’d been performing; we wanted it to be an album that our friends and fans put on in the car, on the subway, in their house, or wherever else, because they wanted to listen to good music. This sounds totally obvious to anyone who’s unfamiliar with the weird world of classical music, but very few New Music labels in 2007 approached their recording, marketing, packaging, and distribution with these basic ideas in mind. Short of Nonesuch or Cantaloupe, there really wasn’t anywhere that we even wanted to take our music, so I decided to start a new label. It soon became clear that there were other artists who had the same needs as we did, and New Amsterdam became a collective of outside-the-lines musicians who were making music that was tied to classical or jazz but also sought a broad appeal in the means of interface with its potential audience.

And how has it evolved over time? Are there things about it that you didn’t anticipate when you started it?

The evolution of New Amsterdam Records has been a bit like that story where the guy is trying to kill a mouse and winds up bulldozing his entire house in the process. If you start from certain premises about what you want to achieve with the release of your record, those initial premises unfold into an entire universe of decisions that places you on the front lines of industry-wide changes. Since Sarah Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle joined me as co-directors in 2007, we’ve made a conscious decision to deeply engage with those challenges, which everyone in the music industry is facing. It’s been surprising to get caught up not just in “local” questions about how composers engage in the broader cultural dialogue, but also in the bigger questions about how music is disseminated, more generally.

Our big realization, fairly early on, was that we needed, as an organization, to break out of the small world of New Classical Music and into the broader cultural conversation about Music, in general. Classical music is like the guy on the block who builds an impregnable wall around his house and then wonders why no one ever comes over to hang out. Our basic operational premise was that we should build a door in that wall, and take a walk around the neighborhood to see how everyone else is living, maybe even make some friends. It’s totally bizarre to have one foot in this deeply conservative world of classical music, with its own premises about how cultural dissemination occurs, and to have our other foot in the Wild West of the broader music industry. Negotiating that balance — in which there’s much to like and much to hate in both worlds — is filled with constant surprises.

It’s also been surprising, and flattering, that we’ve come to be seen as a leadership organization, especially since we’ve been making it up as we go along, and the underlying principles and the strategies feel so basic and obvious to us. Most of our success just has to do with being willing to put in the effort! Of course, there’s also a lot of resistance, but it’s like a Thermodynamic Law, where you can’t have one without the other. It’s ultimately humbling — now that we’re engaged with the wide world of music, not merely the small world of classical music, we have to face the same realities and challenges that everyone else faces, in a world where cultural consumption is quite dysfunctional and the potential to support artists through commercial enterprises (of which a record label is one) is constantly threatened. If our goal is to make a significant cultural impact, then we still have a long way to go. But it’s great to feel like we’re on the right path.

How are things proceeding with the microcommissioning project with the Minnesota Orchestra? Between this and your work with New Amsterdam, do you see this model as having a more central role in the commissioning of new works in the years to come?

Stepping back into the orchestral realm has been utterly terrifying. When you’re a graduate student in composition, everything is all about the orchestra, its mechanics and its history. It’s like Museum Studies. At this point, I’ve been writing chamber music, solo music, weird band/ensemble projects, electronic music, now, for the past 7 years, and the orchestra — upon my return — feels like this strange, gargantuan beast. A wonderful beast, a magical beast, but huge and difficult to tame.

I do hope that other orchestras pick up on this crowdsourcing model. There are other orchestras around the country that are starting to understand that there’s a huge potential audience for what they offer, if they are willing to take the frightening step of building a new audience from the ground up. Orchestras are, like most large, established organizations, deeply risk-averse. But there are many great composers who can help an orchestra sell the appeal of what they’re doing, as artists, to the community. This is not a new idea but it requires destroying the old myth of the Isolated Genius, which never served anyone well, anyway.

I think that the crowdsourcing model, applied to commissioning, makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the only low-hanging fruit; I think the #1 place where more innovation in commissioning could take place is in collections of presenters around the country and the world. The current model is incredibly inefficient — you commission a work for your festival, and it’s played that one time, and only then do the artists start shopping it to festivals and presenters down the road. Classical Music moves slowly in every regard, but it has to become more nimble, because culture changes too quickly.

How much of your music is written with a group in mind with which you’ve already worked? When doing so, do you tend to write to that group’s strengths, or to challenge them in some way?

I write a lot for NOW Ensemble, and for my friends, but increasingly I’m taking commissions from outside groups as well. I don’t usually think about challenging performers, but to challenge myself, from piece to piece, and to not be too complacent, or fall back on things I know how to do too well. If you’re honest about writing the best music you can in each case, you’ll wind up challenging yourself and the performers, both, because you’ll adapt your style to match the new instrumentation, and you’ll force the performer to learn how to do what you ask, which will be idiosyncratic in the way that people are. That’s how I like to think about novelty in music, as a reflection of our human individuality, and I think the challenges of individuals learning to coexist are likewise reflected in the relationships that emerge between performers and composers. Forget “make it new”, I say “make it personal”, and that leads to newness.

Your website lists your work written for “conventional” chamber groups as well as “odd” ones. What’s been the most challenging instrument to write for?

The hardest piece for me was a solo viola work for Nadia Sirota. I hadn’t written many solo works at the time, and I wanted a piece that would take advantage of Nadia’s incredible musicianship. I learned a lot about counterpoint, form, and other musical fundamentals through the process of composing that work — which is now one of my favorites that I’ve ever written.

The other very difficult one was Sh’lomo, for completely different reasons. Once I really started getting into the deep parts of the composition, I realized that I needed to invent a new language for each of the instrument groups — especially the percussion, the synthesizers, and the voices — while writing and compiling texts that were new to me, and constructing a large-scale narrative of a kind I’d never attempted. The sheer amount of new-things-to-learn in that process was quite overwhelming, but again, like most challenges, you learn a lot and wind up stronger for the experience. When I get back to working on it, I’ll be a much better composer for that instrument, and hopefully in general.

(Photo by Joshua Frankel)

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The nuanced stories and memorable settings in Emma Straub’s debut collection Other People We Married are only part of her fiction’s appeal. She also has a skill at creating contradictory yet inherently sympathetic characters. Her stories are fueled by conflicts that are dramatically compelling yet never feel contrived. Whether focusing on a family-run amusement park (“Abraham’s Enchanted Forest”) or the shifting life of a young woman named Franny Gold (who appears in several stories in the collection), these are lives that feel genuinely lived — with all that that implies.

Whether a roadside amusement park, a hotel near the desert, or a Midwestern college town, each of the settings of the stories in Other People We Married is incredibly vivid. Do you tend to begin writing stories around the characters, or does the setting usually come first?

Some of the stories in the collection–“Abraham’s Enchanted Forest,” “Hot Springs Eternal,” and “A Map of Modern Palm Springs”– were absolutely inspired by their settings. Perhaps it’s awful to admit this, and it will make you feel sorry for my husband, but I am always working when I go on vacation. I would like to blame this (good) habit on my father, who worked on every family vacation we ever went on, including to ridiculous places like Disneyworld and ClubMed. The other stories in the collection, though, began with the characters. It’s a mix, in the end. Like ChexMix. Only with stories and not over-salted snackfood.

Your upcoming novel, and several of the stories in Other People… are set during specific times in the past. How much do you need to know about a specific point in time before you feel comfortable writing in it?

There’s only one story on OPWM (“Pearls”) that takes place in what I solipsistically consider to be “The Past,” in that it takes place before I was born, and therefore required research outside my own memory banks. The other stories take place in the recent past, the wonderfully fuzzy zone that could be five years or five minutes ago. That’s my favorite, always. I feel totally intimidated by writing in past eras, which is, ahem, why my novel begins in the 1920s and ends in the 1970s. Please don’t tell me that I’m writing a historical novel, because then I’ll be so terrified and unsure that I’ll be unable to finish it.

Do you see the trajectory that Franny follows across some of the stories in Other People We Married as a complete one, or are there more aspects of her life that you plan to cover in future work?

Oh, poor Franny. My darling Franny Gold has an entire novel devoted to her, one now sitting in my drawer. The book was terribly boring, if I do say so myself, and had to be chopped to pieces. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to the complete novel. One never knows. I do love Franny, and I know her so well that it seems a shame not to introduce her to my friends.

What initially drew you to the period in which the novel is set?

The novel (Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures) is about a movie star, and the Hollywood studio system was an integral part of my idea. I’ve always loved movies, and the idea of going that far outside the realm of my own experience was really exciting. And just imagine the dresses! Don’t all writers plan their novels around the dresses? Not just the characters’ dresses, mind you, I’m talking about the vintage 1940s dress I’m going to wear to my book party.

Something that struck me about your work is the way that certain moods and assumptions can change with the right sentence. In particular, I’m thinking of “Rosemary,” where the last sentence sets on its head most the ways in which class and perception have been used over the course of the story. Did you have that in mind from the outset, or did that particular ending become clear as the story evolved over time?

Thank you, Toby. That is a very nice thing to say. I didn’t know that was going to be the ending, no, but it just felt right. I knew the cat was going to be dead, but I didn’t know the perspective was going to shift. To me, that story is about the relationship between these two women, though that only comes into focus late in the story. And I am a serious cat-lover, so it pained me to do it, but sometimes you have to kill the cat, you know?

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As someone who grew up reading MAD magazine, the name of Al Jaffee was an omnipresent one. His work as a writer and artist spanned multiple styles and established a sharp, satirical style that left no appropriate target unsullied. Much of Mary-Lou Weisman’s new biography of Jaffee, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, focuses on the evolution of his sensibility.

Jaffee’s childhood involved moving back and forth from the United States to Lithuania, and those experiences, along with a progressively more fragmented family life, form the core of this book. Later chapters trace Jaffee’s emergence as a writer and artist, and serves as a pocket history of twentieth-century comics; the likes of Will Elder, Stan Lee, and Sergio Aragones all make appearances. Al Jaffee’s Mad Life abounds with examples of its subject’s work, from older material reprinted to new illustrations tracing Jaffee’s life. From longer strips to single-panel works to Jaffee’s ubiquitous fold-ins, one leaves this book with a good sense of the depth of its subject’s work. And I’m happy to report that Jaffee’s illustration of a retching jackal — one of the pieces reprinted in here — remains a deadpan comedic masterpiece.

–AL JAFFEE–

At what point did you begin work on the illustrations for Al Jaffee’s Mad Life? I began work on the illustrations for Al Jaffee’s Mad Life after reading Mary-Lou’s proposal for the book and her first chapter. They established clearly in my mind the atmosphere I needed to create pictures that would blend with Mary-Lou’s writing style.

Did you approach these illustrations differently from your other work?

My usual work involves humor and satire which is not what the biography is about. There is humor in some of the illustrations but the book is more poignant than knee-slapping. The biography contains several reprints of your work, from the fifties on through until today; do you feel that someone reading the book would have a good sense of your body of work from them?

Some of the humor in my early work might go over today’s readers’ heads. Subtlety is sublime in satire but it doesn’t age well. Ridiculing a pompous politician by having him sit on his top hat wouldn’t fly at all today. Is there one particular piece, longer or shorter, of which you’re proudest?

The one piece in the book that brought back many memories was the illustration of the town square. This was the liveliest place in town, especially on market day when people from surrounding farms and villages came in to sell a great many products. Is there anyone whose comics work do you follow these days?

There are so many wonderful new, young comics artists today it would be impossible to single one out from among all of them. I know this is a cop out but I do love them all. –MARY-LOU WEISMAN–

Before working on Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, what had your background in comics and cartoons been?

I had virtually none. I don’t remember ever reading MAD. I spent my adolescence reading Archie Comics, trying to figure out whether I was nice Betty or snarky Veronica. Turns out I was a little of both. Who do you see as the audience for this book: readers already familiar with Jaffee’s work, or people looking for an introduction?

For both, as well as for people who never heard of Al Jaffee. This is a book for anyone who relishes a remarkable, true life, survival story. The book’s title, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life is a pun. Jaffee fans will learn about Al’s career at MAD, but even those who think they know the man will be amazed by the perversely mad life that led him to MAD. The reprinted art inside the book covers a large portion of Jaffee’s career; what was the process like for selecting them?

Al and I went over the manuscript together and decided together which anecdotes or situations would best lend themselves to illustration. When it came to the chapters on MAD, we used a similar approach. We matched the art that best exemplified the full range of his talents as narrated in the manuscript. In the acknowledgments for this book, you thank James Sturm for suggesting that you expand on an earlier profile of Jaffee. In working on this book, were there any of his contemporaries whose lives also interested you for similar treatment?

No. But I am a big fan of James Sturm’s latest graphic novel, Market Day. More generally, how do you feel about the current state of comics scholarship?

I’m not the right person to answer this question. The only comics expertise I can claim is the understanding of and appreciation for the work of Al Jaffee.

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Neatly summarizing Ben Greenman’s fiction is not easy. His first collection, Superbad, included a number of well-crafted, emotionally crushing short stories — but also prefaced several with editorial notes suggesting that Greenman would be better off including more musicals about then-current events. Some of his fiction opts for an experimental structure; other work — notably, his funk-rock inspired novel Please Step Back — is, on the surface, much more traditional in its organization. And oftentimes, his work can be deeply moving even as it gently (or not-so-gently) tugs at the borders of form. His new collection, What He’s Poised To Do (Harper Perennial), takes as its focus stories built around letters; it is itself an expansion of an earlier work, Correspondences.

What He’s Poised to Do takes as its starting point your earlier collection Correspondences. Earlier, you also revisited portions of Superbad in the later Superworse. Did these revisitations arise out of a dissatisfaction with the initial work, or is there a constant impulse to revise, even after a story or book has made it into print?

It stems, first and foremost, from a misunderstanding. When I was a kid starting to read, and I saw different editions of books, I assumed they were different books. It didn’t occur to me that the hardback of The Ox-Bow Incident, the one with the wagon train silhouetted against a mountain range, was the same as the paperback with the noose in the foreground. That naïve idea stuck with me and, when I became a writer, turned into something else. There is also, of course, some element of fussiness, though in the case of Superbad/Superworse it was strongly comic – the second book invented an editor who thought that the first edition was a mess and I was a charlatan and readers were stupid and everything needed fixing- and in the case of Correspondences/What He’s Poised To Do it’s more like the traditional relationship between a hardback and a paperback.

Is there a point at which you feel that a particular work — whether short- or long-form — is, essentially, out of the scope of revision or reassignment?

Yes and no. I don’t do much line-by-line revision. It’s hard to re-enter a piece of writing at the level of the sentence or paragraph. But I like the idea of putting old stories in new soil. There are pieces from my collection A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, which was published in 2007, that I considered transplanting to this collection, just to see if they would flourish or wilt, but in the end, they seemed like they would be weeds more than flowers.

Do you see digital editions, which in theory can be constantly updated, as at all advantageous to this process?

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it. You mean beaming updates into a text, like making prices of food more current? I think something like that will certainly happen, but that means that the way we read will have to change, because we will still need a convention that tells us what the Real Work is. There has long been a divide between the Alexandrian and Pergamanian schools of textual scholarship: the Alexandrians believed you could absorb all the revisions and shifts and, from your experience, generate an ideal master text. The Pergamanians said that change is arbitrary and inevitable, so you had to pick one version and declare that The Thing. This is a third thing: the text that perfects itself.  It sounds scary and a little wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right.

Letters have played a part in your fiction going back to Superbad’s “Snapshot.” Is there anything specific about the form that has led to its long-term appeal for you?

Everything: the specificity of audience, the importance of voice, the necessity of establishing character quickly, the foregrounding of motive. Also, letters are very intimate documents that depend on a dialogue between a writer and reader, and usually between two writers. But letter writers aren’t necessarily writers in the professional sense, and there’s a great relief in that. I am naturally suspicious of the professionalization of writing. What makes one person better at it than another? Isn’t it just that there are different kinds of writing needed at different times? Aren’t most people good (and even great) writers in certain circumstances? In conjunction with this new book, Harper Perennial and I launched a blog called Letters With Characters, which invites people to write letters to their favorite fictional characters. The response has been tremendous, and tremendously interesting. People really want to speak directly to fictional characters, and the letter form lets them interact with literature in ways that other forms – essays, say – don’t. A friend of mine said that she thinks people like letters because they feel they are allowed to write them.

Was there any overlap in the time spent working on Please Step Back and the stories in What He’s Poised to Do?

Yes and no. The first set of stories, the ones that were in Correspondences, were done and published, in a way, before Please Step Back ever came out. But most of the pieces came later, after I was done touring for the novel.

In the story “A Bunch of Blips,” there’s a line about letters that could be taken as a theme for a collection as a whole (“…but then he designed this inverted critical structure that privileged a letter you might write to a girlfriend over, say, Tolstoy”)? From where did the idea of doing a collection of letter-themed stories arise? Did the idea come first, or was it an outgrowth from one particular story?

Corespondences, which came out at the end of 2008, was a reaction to Please Step Back: to writing a longer novel, and to writing something that had a kind of traditional shape – it told a story on its own terms, from behind a curtain, and then released that story in a time-tested form, the codex. That seemed fine to me, but also limiting, or at least potentially limiting. I designed, with Hotel St. George, this weird book-box with seven stories, six on accordion books and the last printed on the casing of the box. That was Correspondences, and when it came time to pick which stories we’d use, it seemed natural to use the ones that were about letter-writing, because they were the most subversive of fiction-as-monologue.  One story, “Helpmate,” came first in Correspondences, and the others came along soon after – although, ironically, “Helpmate” (which was a kind of suicide note from a wayward husband to his loyal wife) didn’t make it through to What He’s Poised To Do.

The design of What He’s Poised to Do places postmarks by the titles of the stories. What are your feelings about having some of this information — location and time, specifically — imparted to the reader outside of the confines of the story?

I think it’s subtle enough. My original idea was more elaborate: I wanted to transport myself to different points in time and mail myself letters from those eras. Harper Collins rejected that as too expensive. They have no budget for time-travel.

At the same time, some of those postmarks — “Lunar City, 1989,” for instance — suggest a reality that isn’t exactly our own. Similarly, the “sides” structure established in Please Step Back ends up being subverted by the end, when the fourth side is significantly shorter than the previous three. (A double LP with an etching on the last side, perhaps?) With this in mind, what are your views on form and structure — do you see them as hard-and-fast guidelines, or ideas to be subverted if possible?

Everything should be subverted if possible. That’s how you know you have an idea, and also how you pay your respects to form. I don’t think you honor structure by simply acknowledging it – you make it visible and make it strong it by challenging it. Plus, this is fiction. If you can’t mount a challenge to established ideas orconventions in fiction, where can you? Upset the apple cart whenever possible: or, if you’ve got the time, upset it, douse it in gasoline, drop a match, and turn to walk away before the flame hits apple one.

Reading What He’s Poised to Do, I found many of the stories to tap into this sense of personal connections — whether romantic or familial — that remained elusive. That in turn echoed Rock Foxx’s attempts to complete the song that gives Please Step Back its title — something that was, for him, every bit as elusive. What about that pursuit appeals to you as a writer, and how do you capture the feeling of something that, by its nature, can’t be captured?

This is the central theme of everything, so thank you (and damn you) for ending with it. Art is, for me, that attempt to capture the things you know you’ll never really have: the energy that moves the drums at the beginning of “Street Fighting Man,” a beautiful person’s beautiful face, a truth about society or psychology or even science that doesn’t fade when you stare at it. I am suspicious when stories or novels come to conclusions. I feel like those writers are colluding with death or despair, even if they pretend that they are showing you something good.  I haven’t seen conclusive proof that there is any such thing as conclusive proof, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Blogs covering arts and culture have flowered in the last decade, covering everything from literature in translation to 1990s post-hardcore bands. David Gutowski’s Largehearted Boy takes an impressively cross-disciplinary approach, finding areas in which novelists and musicians (and those who are fond of both) can find common cause. Though currently based in Birmingham, Alabama, Largehearted Boy has maintained an affinity with Brooklyn via regular updates from the Greenpoint-based bookstore WORD and several Jami Attenberg-hosted readings at the Knitting Factory.

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Sara Jaffe first received attention earlier this decade as a member of the postpunk group Erase Errata. After leaving the band in 2004, Jaffe went on to release the folk-influenced 2006 EP Salt & Water. Her most recent project finds her in an editorial role: The Art of Touring, a book and DVD credited to Jaffe and former Electrelane guitarist Mia Clarke, was released in 2009 on Yeti; contributors include Jem Cohen, Matmos, Rebecca Gates, The Ex, and Le Tigre.

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What is the experience like for you of watching another writer adapt your work for the screen?

It’s like being in a reader’s head. When you write something you never know how it feels when you read it. When you see an adaptation you do.

In the process of assembling this series, was there any discussion of including shorter-form adaptations of your work along with the three features?

It never came up as an option.

To what extent has working as a director changed your view of what the mediums of film and prose are capable of? In Jellyfish, there’s a visual motif in which the subject of an establishing shot is revealed to be something other than what it initially appeared to be. Did that arise out of a purely cinematic line of thought, or were you looking to emulate a sensation you had previously evoked through prose?

I think that Jellyfish is a very "literary" movie. My wife is a poet and the screenplay read a bit like a poem. I’ve felt that many of the shots were formed like literary devices.

You’ve also written several graphic novels; do you find the process of writing for this medium to be similar to writing for the screen?

It is different because it is much more intimate and you are more in control.

Has working as a director affected how you have adapted your work for the screen?

I usually prefer not to adapt my stories. An adaptation is a reading of a text and a writer’s reading is usually less surprising and interesting. $9.99 was a great experience but I don’yt believe I’ll write any more adaptations in the recent future.

In trying to think of other writers who have also directed films, not many come to mind — Paul Auster being a notable exception. Was making a film something you had always aspired to, or did it arise as a result of your writing?

I also wanted to tell stories. Film making is one way of doing it, but I never dreamed of being a film maker- only a story teller.

Was Jellyfish the first film you had been involved with in a role other than as the writer?

I’ve co-directed a Israeli TV drama before called "Malka Lev Asom".

  One of the film’s main characters doesn’t share a common language with the people she’s hired to watch over. Given the importance of language to many of the other characters, did you know from the outset that there needed to be a character who didn’t have common language to rely on?

Israeli is an immigrant country and the situation in which you find yourself unable to communicate verbally with someone is common. This particular story was based on Shira’s grandmother and her Philippine helper. It was the last story of the three that Shira came up with and the moment she wrote it it became an essential part of the film

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