I believe my next article WILL be on reading comprehension. I never said I enjoy fan fiction, Mike. I said I have a sick fascination with it. True, I also have a sick fascination with Beverly Hills Bordello and tend to kind of enjoy that, never mind my avowed sick fascination with Rick Springfield and the pitfalls involved with that particular exercise. I didn’t even call anyone a fucktard, which I think, to those who’ve read my work prior to this point would agree, proves that I’ve shown at least mild restraint from my normal bubble of hate and venom. The point of the article, Mike, and follow me here because there will be a test later (and let me just say, of all the thousands of things I’ve written in my life, from the books to the stories to the book reviews to the columns to the story I did hear about the resurrection of Jews during the end days to blog posts about the time I had rectal bleeding, no one has ever needed as much clarification as to the point of a particular work than you have had with this one, but I’m willing to help you because it is my nature to help and help and help) was this: To read some award-nominated Harry Potter fan fiction and see if it was any good, like, you know, in terms of reading it and stuff.

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I have a sick fascination with fan fiction, those often epic-novels written by ardent fans of movies, television shows, books, boy bands, video games and, strangely, real people. It’s not simply that I’m interested in the intense fandom exhibited by the creators of the work, but also that I wonder what separates the writers from the average student I might have in a writing workshop. There must be something that makes someone decide that they’d rather dream up ways for the Oompa Loompas to get their revenge on that bastard Wonka to share with fellow Magic: The Gathering fans vs. creating entirely fresh characters and worlds. Fanfic isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: Sherlock Holmes starred in some of the earliest examples (off-line, obviously) and there are those who’d argue derivative works are in the same class. Now, of course, just like any decent form of art, there are different kinds of fan fiction, though the one that seems to get the most attention is slash, which involves, essentially, Kirk and Spock and a sudden realization that the hungry touch of man flesh (or, well, Vulcan flesh) is what both have long desired. Not all fan fiction is slash fiction, but I find slash by far the most amusing and confounding, particularly when I read about how the relationships are clearly in the subtext of the work, and when the characters are played by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Or children. I’m less inclined to find fan fiction stories about real people harmless — like, you know, stories about the actors from Boy Meets World meeting up in real life for hot sex with their fans. The characters? Fine. The actors? That’s just weird. And troubling. And disturbing. And a little hot. Well, I mean, if I wasn’t married and didn’t have easy access to Cinemax.

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If the workers and patrons of a typical suburban Starbucks don’t sound like a scientifically sound focus group, they do at least comprise a metaphorical one as it relates to the dwindling space and attention given to book reviews nationwide. Their tacit approval of my crime is emblematic of just how little readers in general care about what was once a staple of the Sunday paper and, for authors, the best way for them to get news of their latest work before the most likely buying audience.

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I was both saddened and offended, though not all that surprised, since I think I’ve probably said the same term in a self-mocking fashion numerous times over the years, which I thought provided me some ownership over the pain; some desensitization. Words carry weight, even if they don’t break bones, and for that I suppose I should be grateful, since I’m capable of writing words but am not much of a street fighter. It’s when words and actions marry that it’s hard to make a distinction between intent and result. 

Which leads me to the curious case of Tom Wayne and William Leathem, owners of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, who hosted a book burning – or, in their words an “act of art” – to rid themselves of 20,000 used books they couldn’t sell and which, they say, no one would even take from them for free. 

Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word. "This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books. The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them. Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply – estimated at 20,000 books – is exhausted.

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The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles:

1. Mitch Albom In Conversation With Dr. Phil or Deepak Chopra or The Five People You Meet In Heaven Who, Upon Seeing Mr. Albom, Run Screaming Into The Depths Of Hell Lest Albom Starts Talking About All Those Great Afternoons Spent With Morrie Again, For The Love Of Christ.

2. Julie Andrews signing children's books while adult women pull each other's hair out (literally) whilst jockeying for their space in line, their toddlers screaming bloody Mary Poppins in the background, while Ms. Andrews just sort of sits with a vague look of resigned horror on her face, counting her royalties one snarled clump of bloody follicle at a time.

3. Christopher Hitchens calls an unruly, possibly insane, audience member a fascist crack pot.

If this sounds horrific, it's not. It's the best weekend of the year if you're an author (apart from the 500 or so who take part in officially sanctioned events, at least another 200 come in simply to sign in booths or to hang out, the cumulative effect being like the walls of Barnes & Noble have suddenly come alive), both from a sales and ego perspective, where both are edified by complete strangers, which is unusual at a typical signing at the Borders in Wilmington, DE. For a reader, it's a unique opportunity to come face to face with writers of every genre in an open setting (as in: you opting to take a crap doesn't stop them from continuing their conversation about how, you know, they'd like it better if you wrote more books like your first one and not these new "literary" ones, and how it would be great if you could write a novel like James Patterson, who they consider second only to Dean Koontz as the ultimate chronicler of the human condition).

What I find most interesting, however, is how the Festival begins to form into a character with striking opinions and definitive trends.This year, the demise of traditional book reviews (and Book Reviews), the emergence (for better or worse) of literary blogs and the contested territory between traditional print media and the online world were the hot topics both in the panels and in the author green room. From the first bell of the Book Prizes, where the editor of the Times lamented how it's mere seconds between the posting of confidential internal memos before they're up on watchdog blogs, to the final conversation I had walking to my car when a woman wearing a purple muumuu asked me if I'd review her novel based on her blog about the corruption of the Iraq war, the assault (real or perceived) on literary and simple culture was on full display.

That the LA Times' own Sunday Book Review (where, in full disclosure, I occasionally review) was recently shrunk in size and combined with the Opinion section into a single tabloid was the clearest conversation piece of them all: The Times and times a-are changing and while 150,000 people may love books, they don't take out ads, seem to prefer the Internet for their culture (if not news) and the time to grapple with it is over. Now, it's time to deal. The Times, at least, is trying, adding specialized online content. It's not clear what other recently downsized papers, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will do, but what became clear listening to prominent critics like Mark Rozzo and Slate's Meghan O'Rourke discussing the topic is that there are still people out there who want to write intelligently about books, but it's not always clear if that's what the people want.

The three panels I took part in — one on the mystery fiction of Southern California's Mean Streets, one on the fiction of the Inland Empire (if you've ever purchased crystal meth, been a long haul trucker, or wondered what it might be like to play an active role in your own involuntary actions, like, you know, respiration, then you've at least metaphorically visited the fetid middle ground just east of metropolitan Los Angeles), and one on the rise of lit blogs (where Andrew Keen acted as the voice of defiance — a role soon to be repeated here on Jewcy, I understand) — were also hallmarked by the kind of passionate dialog that gives hope to a simple fiction writer like myself, which is to say I was only asked fifteen times how to get an agent ("Have a morbid curiosity about the Kennedys, write a book about the mysticism of anal sex or convince Judith Regan that you slept with a guy who killed his wife.") and was only presented with two velobound manuscripts.

That I was sharing the stage with the likes of T. Jefferson Parker, Susan Straight and Mr. Keen might have been the reason behind this semi-draught, but I'd like to think that it's endemic of a cultural shift away from asking stupid fucking questions and the realization that no one wants to read your self-published novel of thinly veiled Lord of the Rings fan fiction. Or maybe it's that people are starting to value that authors aren't receptacles for their wish fulfillment and have begun to view the Festival as the viable opportunity it is to hear the nation's very best voices espousing their expertise — be it in fiction (in addition to Mitch Albom, this year featured the likes of Sherman Alexie, Daniel Woodrell, T.C. Boyle, Vikram Chandra and even S.E. Hinton, who I was surprised to learn was alive and surprised to learn was a woman) or nonfiction (including Neil Gabler, Douglas Brinkley, Lawrence Wright and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel).

Apart from the esoteric delights I've discussed, the personal joys for me come in the odd interactions, like the conversation I had with Sean Penn:

Me: Hey, how you doing?

Sean: Good, good.

Me: Cool.

Of equal interest to many of you might be this fascinating conversation I had with Ralph Nader, who was just sort of standing by a limo looking uncomfortable with the fact that he willfully gave the keys to America to the harbingers of the Illuminati:

Me: Hello Mr. Nader.

Ralph: (blank stare, followed by a slight nod of the head, which I took to mean, Yeah, I fucked that one up.)

I've attended the Festival of Books each of the last twelve years, first as a fan, then as an aspiring writer and finally as an author and what I can tell you definitely is that it's unlike any book festival in America — most notably in that it's completely free — in both its scope and its depth. And while Los Angeles might be viewed as a company town whose primary currency is keeping Sylvester Stallone in designer growth hormones, each year the Festival gives me hope that there is a collective cultural conversation taking place that goes beyond box office receipts and Paula Abdul's opinion and finds value in the logic, the invention and the anthropology of words printed on acid-free paper.

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When you write books for a living (and teach others how to write books for the health benefits, discount tickets to college football games and the built-in opportunity to hand sell dozens of copies of your back list each quarter), there is often a presumption that you are also wildly well read, as if each new novel that arrives at the front table of Borders is first vetted by you for possible use in interesting dinner conversation, extemporaneous workshop quoting and damning insults hurled at other literate folks. The problem here is two-fold, at least as it relates to me:

1. It is often difficult to actually read all of the “important” books, both new and old, because it turns out that “important” also can mean “so boring you find yourself with an anti-diuretic erection from fooling your body into thinking you’re actually in a deep, deep sleep.”

2. Time, as in: There’s just not enough time on Earth for me to read the new Salman Rushdie book, whenever it’s released, and, really, anything by Jay McInerney, either.

Lennard J. Davis, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (and with a general disdain for the French, which is something I think we should see more of in all discourse in academic journals), is by varying degrees apoplectic over people like me and, it seems, sort of envious of the ability to simply not read books you don’t want to read.

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard's best seller How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read. I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don't. But, outrage aside, perhaps it's time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.”

My solution to this creeping problem has always been to simply lie and say I’ve read everything. It makes people think my intellect is so vast and Hitchensian that I’m likely to bark them down at any turn and with probable cause. As such, I’ve become rather adept at speaking in great length, at archaeological depth and with the clinical eye of a forensics expert on books I haven’t read, never intend to read, and, in the rarest of cases, am being paid to read in a workshop setting, simply by employing what I call the Silverblatt Method, so named for the host of NPR’s Bookworm program Michael Silverblatt. You simply make a series of broad pronouncements (“The words are like scrimshaw…”), hark back to obscure work you have read (“I’m reminded of Shirobamba by Yasushi Inoue…”), and pronounce the profound effect the book has had on you as a person (“McInerney’s The Good Life showed me how I might have fallen in love with someone exceptionally vapid after the terrible events of 9/11, too…”) and then wait for the somnolent nodding of the audience. The result is that I feel smart, well read, and have much more free time to play Madden online with a bunch of fourteen year-olds.

In an academic setting, of course, this method can only really work if the novel in question is not the one written by the brooding student of amorphous sexuality over there in the corner rocking the vintage Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt. In that case, what's needed is a well-timed tantrum over the class’ lack of pointed criticism and a proclamation that you’re gonna just sit this critique out to see how the class handles this “innovative, flawed, and ultimately very promising work” and that you’ll deliver your thoughts via private email to the student. As for the novel you’ve assigned the class to read which you inexplicably forgot to read yourself, your best intentions having lost out to the allure of living a real life –  repeat everything except the promise to email.

Is there guilt? Oh, certainly. No one ever likes to feel like a fraud, even when it’s true. But it’s a guilt that just doesn’t apply to the world outside of academia and cocktail parties where book advances are discussed like they have the power to halt the Illuminati.

Davis, however, finds the intellectual bukkake more paralyzing then it might otherwise seem to those not in the business of words:

It's the guilt and fear of not being well read, of having missed out on reading a work that everyone else has read that makes us shy about admitting our nonreading. Remember back when everyone was reading the same book at the same time — in my case it was The Alexandria Quartet, The Hobbit, The Greening of America, Amerika, or anything by Herman Hesse — and you weren't? You felt so out of it, and then it was just too late.”

Perhaps my feelings about this are muted by the fact that I’ve never read The Hobbit (I saw the cartoon), The Greening of America or Amerika (best Ice Cube album ever), and only read one stanza of The Alexandria Quartet, but I’ve long thought that being well-read doesn’t always mean that you have the same cultural DNA as every other professor or writer in terms of the books you’ve committed to your shelves or mental rolodex of fictive examples. It also means knowing that there is a life to be read outside of the printed page, where experience and understanding of human nature often far exceeds the vagaries of imagination.

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But if an undead Jesus scares me, Lord help me when the Moshiach comes. Jewish eschatology involves what is possibly the weirdest End-of-Days scenario ever cooked up. And it includes lots and lots of undead Jews.

According to the Talmud, once the Moshiach bursts onto the stage like Elvis in Aloha from Hawaii, the corporeal (though badly decomposed) bodies of Jews, housed comfortably in pine boxes, or simply dead on the streets of Boca Raton if we missed the warning signs entirely, will be resurrected. According to the Midrash, the process here involves a few complex, magical steps:

1. Our decomposed bodies will be flushed with the “Dew of Resurrection,” a sort of yeast of rebirth.
2. Our bodies will then reform around a bone in the spine called the luz, which is generally considered to be the coccyx.
3. We make time toward Israel to hook up with our souls.

The first two steps are hard to visualize. Rabbis haven’t traditionally been much help, basically saying that all will be clear once it happens. But the texts are clearer about the whole “making time towards Israel” part, and, sadly, it doesn’t involve a Lincoln Town Car.

The Talmud says resurrected Jews will literally roll their way to Israel through a series of underground tunnels and caves to be reunited with their souls, turning Israel into a frolicking undead playground. The Talmud predicts tha
t all this rolling will hurt, to say nothing of the nausea.

The only way to avoid the pain of rolling from, say, Palm Springs to Israel, is to be a righteous Jew at the time of death; though even the righteous have to wander through the tunnels and caves, which sounds messy, what with the need to sidestep the rolling (and probably vomiting) un-Orthodox masses. When everyone’s finally in Israel, the Mount of Olives will open up and resurrected Jews will stream out—presumably in search of Dramamine.

If you find all this hard to fathom, you’re not alone. The idea that Israel turns into an eternal dance sequence from the “Thriller” video has scared the hell out of me since I first encountered Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: “Behold, I will open your grave, O My people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, O My people. And I will put My spirit in you and ye shall live, and I will bring you in your own land, and ye shall know that I the Lord have spoken and performed, saith the Lord.”

If you need me, your basic bacon-eating Jew, I’ll be the one cowering in my grave, gripping a shotgun
and blasting away at the flesh-eating zombies.

The belief in resurrection likely goes back to the 4th Century B.C.E., when Jews were influenced by Babylonian concepts of religion. But it is Ezekiel’s vision that thousands of years of Jews have embraced as the definitive statement on the End of Days—though not without some discussion of the actual process, which is how we got this whole idea about rolling, with the Angel Gabriel leading the way.

Perhaps Ezekiel’s vision should be taken metaphorically. Though I’ve always been told we’d roll to Israel after death, what this really must mean is that we’ll metaphorically rise from the grave and metaphorically roll to Israel, right? Right? Right?!?

Well, no.

The Orthodox, at least, are quite literal in their belief that Jews will rise from their caskets and plunge en masse through the center of the Earth towards Israel. It is, according to Orthodox Rabbi Raleigh Resnick of AskMoses.com, one of the 13 principles of our faith.

The state of our bodies, however, is up for discussion. It’s reasonable to assume that if the power exists to resurrect the dead, the same power would exist to make us look decent, lest we live through eternity in differing states of decomposition. As a person who had hair like Robert Smith of The Cure through about 1990, I’d like to
have a choice regarding how I look. After resurrection, will I look as I do at the time of my death (probably even worse than 1990), or will I be in some perfect state of myself?

Rabbi Resnick, and Orthodoxy in general, believe that we will return in our prime, at our most vibrant, in a perfect state. This is why Jews do not typically practice cremation. To burn the body would be to desecrate it, which would prevent us from returning to the physical state, never mind the State of Israel.

This prompts a larger question: Won’t space in Israel be a little tight once all of the newly re-minted Jews take their rightful place on the 8,500 square miles of Holy Land? (And let’s not forget the issue of coordinating a few thousand years’ worth of undead Jews all the way to Israel. Last Thanksgiving, for instance, it was nearly impossible to coordinate the 14 living Jews who were coming to my house for a simple meal; I shudder to think what it would be like wrangling the totality of the Jewish dead halfway around the world.)

Fortunately, it seems like the Israel in question isn’t necessarily Israel as we know it. Rabbi Resnick says there are statements in the Midrash and also within Jewish literature which assert that the whole world will have the status of Israel, or that that the boundaries of Israel will expand to accommodate all of the Jewish people. Specifically, the Midrash teaches that in a Time to Come, “Jerusalem will diffuse its sanctity over the whole of the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will diffuse its sanctity over the whole world.” Should this come to pass, rolling to Israel should be a significantly less trying ordeal—what without the oceans, mountains, and molten center of the Earth to contend with—though there’s nothing in the literature which makes note of auxiliary Mounts of Olives opening up worldwide.

But as the rabbis say, we’ll know when it happens. I recommend brushing up on your somersaults and investing in some knee and elbow pads; it could be a long journey.

Goldberg, P.I. would like to thank Rabbi Raleigh Resnick and Rabbi Mayer Green. Other sources include To Live and Live Again, by Rabbi Nissan Dovid Dubov, and Holy Mountain: Two Paths to One God by Raphael H. Levine.

Got a Jewish question? Send it to goldbergpi@jewcy.com.

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Men the world over are pondering their foreskins with a renewed sense of purpose due to a recently published clinical study in Africa that claims circumcised men are significantly less susceptible to HIV. Those curious about the gritty details of the operation can consult Slate’s Explainer column, which is so full of information that I understand a pop-up book based on the column is already in production. Even if you’d rather not consider the snipping options, though, you have to wonder: How much does it hurt?

Studies indicate that three in 1,000 uncircumcised American men end up going under the knife annually, for aesthetic, religious, and medical reasons. A number of these are Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet bloc; under Communism, hospitals refused to perform circumcisions, and mohels ran the risk of arrest. It’s important to note that while circumcision halves the odds of HIV/AIDS in the African study, that does not equate in the US. The spread of AIDS in Africa is largely through heterosexual sex, whereas in the US the prime vectors are intravenous drug use and anal sex.

Then there’s Abraham. He was 99 years old when he performed a circumcision on himself, presumably without even a topical. One could argue that at 99 there is even less feeling down there than at one week, but these days, Abraham would be encouraged to see a qualified doctor, who would inject a local anesthetic into his penis. That stings a bit, but it prevents pain during the next step, when the foreskin is snipped away. After the anesthetic wears off, however, the area will be sore and tender, often for several weeks. The recovery hurts; the procedure doesn’t.

In Africa, researchers are also looking into the ever popular “bloodless” method of circumcision, which entails the following: Gather up your foreskin in a tight clamp; hold it in place for approximately one week while the bloodless flesh slowly rots off like a co-star in an all-penis remake of Night of the Living Dead. Bloodless? Perhaps. Painless? Uh, fuck no.

The difference for adults and babies is largely one of anesthesia and time. Whether the procedure is done in a hospital or by a mohel, babies get very little in the way of pain relief. In a hospital, they may get a dab of lidocaine, but because of the potential neurological dangers of using anesthesia on newborns, doctors shy away from the pharmacological options. During a brit mila, the mohel gives the baby a small amount of wine, which helps during the procedure, but very little after. Fortunately, for babies, the entire process takes just a few minutes, the healing time is about a week, and they don’t remember any of it.

Adults get the painkillers, but they also have to endure a more complex bit of surgery. It used to be that men could have the operation performed under a general anesthesia, allowing them to simply wake up missing their foreskins. Now, however, most adult circumcisions are done as an outpatient procedure via a local anesthesia (which, while supposedly pain-free, sounds terribly unappealing, though, of course, I need a general anesthesia when my dog gets her teeth cleaned). Healing time is typically four to six weeks, during which time the patient must abstain from sex. Erections in general are best avoided; let me tell you, from experience, I endorse this advice wholeheartedly. And, unlike babies, adult patients remember all of it.

Take it from me. While I was circumcised shortly after birth and thus don’t remember the experience, I do have good reason to conclude that circumcision as an adult (or child, or teenager, or frat boy) hurts quite a bit.

The Zipper Incident (circa 1979): On a frigid winter day at Castle Rock Elementary school, I got it in my mind that I’d like to pee behind the tree by the bike racks. After quickly ensuring that neither Renee Sandoval nor Margaret Cashion could see me, I unzipped and let flow a torrent of juice-box-fueled urine. I remember thinking that it was a tremendous relief until I saw über-bully Brian Camp approaching. Surely Brian would tell the girls. Surely I’d be humiliated, not to mention suspended. I shoved all of my machinery back into place and yanked my zipper up, slicing a fair portion of skin off the bottom side of my penis. Pain factor, on a scale of one to ten: ten.

The Friction Incident (circa 1987): Five Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. A thick pair of Guess? jeans. One 16-year-old girl named Michelle wearing equally thick Guess? jeans and a shirt by Genera that glowed in the dark. Two hours of friction, soundtrack provided by The Cure, lubrication provided by denim. Pain factor (during incident): 0, wine coolers presumably having dulled the sensation. Pain factor (after incident): ten.

The Shaving Incident (circa 1995): Given a pair of electric hair clippers, some men make the decision to look less like themselves and more like porn stars. My own adventure in pubic topiary started swimmingly. Places I hadn’t seen since 1979 were suddenly visible. The air seemed cooler. The sky seemed brighter. I thought about buying a Speedo. And then I cut a chunk of flesh from my penis with the clippers. Pain factor: ten.

What these incidents have in common is that they were done outside of a hospital, largely without anesthesia (save for the wine coolers), and long after I’d actually been circumcised. So while I didn’t have a memory of the original process, my nerve endings likely did, and what they communicated to me was that keeping sharp objects away from my penis should become my life’s work.

I'm glad our most barbaric tribal ritual is finally getting some rational justification beyond "Abraham did it, and you'll do it to your own kid." Just take it slow–and let's get some Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers over to Africa pronto.

Goldberg, P.I. would like to thank Dr. Doug P. Lyle.

Got a Jewish question? Send it to goldbergpi@jewcy.com.

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