A Chaotic List of Accomplishment
My friend Maayan mentioned that I hadn’t written a newsletter in a long time and that she missed it. She’s right. I haven’t. The last update was in June. But I have thought about writing a newsletter. So here are some newsletters I didn’t write but wanted to.
The One About Short Stories
I wanted to write a newsletter about how I discovered that short stories are the perfect companion for solo dinners because everything wraps up at once, in one beautiful unifying evening. I can’t tell if I use short stories as mnenonic devices for meals or the other way around. I never read short stories but I love George Saunders so after finishing Lincoln in the Bardo (which made me want to hug my son a lot and also cry) I read his A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which he “teaches” eight or so Russian short stories. It’s brilliant, like grad school without the debt or weird intramural cattiness. Since then I’ve been working my way through the O. Henry short story collections beginning in 1996. So far my favorite collection is from the year 2000 and which includes Mary Gordon’s “The Deacon” and “These Hands” by Kevin Brockmeier and Alice Elliot Dark’s “Watch the Animals.” They kept me good company for meals in Atlanta, Cincinnati and Phoenix. [Dark also has a wonderful Substack I highly recommend.]
Anyway, so now I want to write short stories. Here’s a paragraph from one I’m working on called Hero. The protagonist is Ronald Gladden, lovable star of Jury Duty. It’s set in 2080, in a version of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Ronald is on trial for stealing highly rationed power bars from his gated community in order to keep his phone, the last proof that he is not insane, charged. He’s on trial but, of course, doesn’t believe any of it is real. Would you?
He had had a close call before when the phone had died and wouldn’t turn on again. Since then, Ronald had kept the phone on and as close to fully charged as possible. Not that he had anyone to call or could do anything but sscroll through images of him as a younger man, his arm around a woman in peach-colored spandex and in the company of men with unnaturally white teeth. He kept images of articles from the distant past which he claimed proved that he had indeed once been hailed as a hero and a star and, in fact, was a star though an unwitting one, in a television show. Had anyone, even just one person, taken the time or acquiesced to his entreaties and peered at the phone – if he would have relinquished it – they would have seen that the tall man with the broad smile in the images on that cracked screen did, in fact, resemble this shrunken toothless one with rudderless eyes and a scraggly unkempt beard.
The One About Judaism
We’re in the middle of the Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I’ve been thinking about Judaism a lot and why I forsook it. This isn’t because of the holy days however but because I find myself resisting entreaties to be more Jewish by some very cool Jews I know. And trust me, I’d like to be more Jewish . It would be rad. But I can’t. Doctrinally, I do not believe in the God of the Old Testament (or the Old Testamant or, don’t worry, the New one either.) But many, maybe most, Jews feel the same as I do and still identify as Jewish. If, Anna, you really want to know the reason it is this: When I was a boy, the more transcendent messages of Judaism were toxically entwined with the post-Shoah lesson that all goyim will eventually turn on you. Distrust isn’t just beneficial. It’s necessary for survival. [I’d be curious if this is similar to what other Jews grew up with. Demographically, it seems to make sense. My father grew up not very removed from World War II at all, in an America that was deeply anti-Semitic (at least in his experience.)] So I understand the impulse. But'I”m 42 now — oh yeah, I turned 42 this month — and have spent the last ten years trying to recondition myself to have a more open heart, to trust others, and to trust myself. Hell, to make friends ain’t easy when you think they’ll all turn on you. Neither, for that matter, is forming intimate trusting relationships, with Jew or goy. Anyway, a lot of this work is the necessary repair of those early messages so deeply engraved. There is some cosmic joke about how I rejected Judaism in order to make friends only to make friends with Jews who want me to return to the fold.
Odds and Ends and then The End
ILLUSTRATION WANTED: A New Yorker-style cartoon where a recently deceased is standing at the gates of Geaven looking at God. God is a Spotted Lantern Fly, looking unhappy, and the guy says, “Shit.”
Tom Colicchio and I piloted a boat from North Carolina to New York. We caught exactly one fish. I wrote this whole heartfelt piece about the experience for Esquire and the feedback I got from Tom was: “BTW the fish was bigger than 30 pounds. When it was weighted it was already gutted.”
After training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for seven years, I received my purple belt from Rafael “Sapo” Natal a couple months ago. Give me another 10 and I’ll make black belt.
For Fast Company, I spoke to Momofuku CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal about the rise of Consumer Packaged Goods. Two days later, news broke that Ssam Bar is closing. Pete Wells wondered if she had mentioned it o me and the answer is no, no she did not. Vaguely frustrating.
Kwame and I just sold our third book to Knopf. It’s called All Hours. It is, according to Publishers Weekly, “a cookbook structured around the day in the life of the author.” Basically it’s like Ulysses but with recipes.
I most recently wrote about Figure Eight, an exciting new Chinese-American restaurant for New York. I think I also wrote about something else too. Oh yeah, the U.S. Open but that’s over so who cares? Oh, now I see I also wrote about endangered butchers, Jose Andres Bazaar and, the newest outpost of Russ & Daughters. (Separately.) Man, while I was looking for those articles I just read that piece Is This Restaurant Gonna Suck? I really did not like it at all. Maybe funny (?) but also so relentlessly negative from a person who, nominally, is meant to enjoy restaurants. [Grub Street]
I interviewed Alice Cooper for Hemispheres. He is surprisingly — I guess to me — quite conservative and Christian. He really Alice Cooper as a character which, if I’m being honest, kinda bums me out. Like, I really like that Alex Cameron song Stepdad because it’s so discomfitingly real you don’t know where the art and the life separate. Same thing with David Berman, Jackson C. Frank, Johnnie Frierson etc.
I am very interested in country line dancing.
Oh, one last thing, The Band Books — minus Sam, who has to be in Connecticut — are performing at the Brooklyn Museum’s seventheenth annual Children’s Book Fair on November 12th. I’m also sigining books with practically every other children’s book author in Brooklyn. [Info here.]