FOR MY CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS LISTING:

Feb 20, 2008

---What first got you interested in writing?

I had always been a decent writer -- school essays, and later, press releases, and as a minister, sermons. But my first really substantial writing bloomed when my 70-something aunt wrote me that she was taking a seminar on feminism, and that she “couldn’t make heads or tails out of postmodernism.” So I promised her I’d write her a ‘Postmodernism for Beginners’. I had in mind a comic book format like the ones Andre Schiffrin pioneered for Pantheon.

I started writing, immediately over-ran the format, and wound up with an interesting full-length book called Postmodernism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Because I had discovered Baudrillard while doing it, I sent it to Jim Fleming at Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia, Baudrillard’s US publisher. He loved it, and said they wanted to do it. But the project got so bolluxed in it’s complex graphical design it never happened. So it sits on my shelf, and I think my aunt still doesn’t understand postmodernism since she didn’t read the ms I sent.

This was the first ‘real’ writing I ever did. I knew it was ‘real’ because it had more than 100 pages. 300 in fact.

My first fiction was Golem Song, written, as you note, after someone called asking me to send him a gun to kill blacks in the upcoming war between blacks and Jews in NYC. 

---Who or what particularly influences your work?

My reading, primarily, and also my music. I think in musical terms and forms and try to use them to structure my longer works. I also enjoy trying to write about music, and have scenes concerning classical music in each of my works. Hommage to Thomas Mann, who, after high school, turned me on to so many things. His description of Beethoven’s last piano sonata in Doktor Faustus, or of Hanno’s improvisations in Buddenbrooks, remain inspirations and unreached goals for me.

Looking over my work to this point I seem to have come down unintentionally as a writer of comic novels with serious themes. What gave me “permission” to write Insect Dreams was Gogol’s short story, “The Nose”. If a nose can go walking around the street, dressed in a general’s uniform, well, hey, then a six-foot talking cockroach can become the risk management consultant to the Manhattan Project – no? As Gogol says, these things don’t happen often, but they do happen.

In service to the comic level of my work, I bring into play the many lovely (and unlovely) maniacs I have known that seem to be attracted to my stodginess, yin to my yang. They generate events simply by walking down the street.

---Describe your writing process.

I don’t write on a regular schedule. It’s more a process of inbreath and outbreath. An idea begins to pester me – often something that came up and was unaddressed in a previous book. I think about it, do some reading, do some research online or at my university library, and then it either roots or it doesn’t. I then might start writing something, and will soon intuit if “this will work out” or not. If it’s a “go”, I’ll plunge into more directed research, if necessary, and after a while, I start waking up a 3 AM, needing turn on the light to jot down phrases or notes. That’s when I know it’s time for outbreath. My sleeping wife, too. Sometimes I’ll make an outline, but more often, things just follow, page to page, chapter to chapter. I’m not one of those who writes an inspired scene, then uses it where it is best placed. I have to write consecutively or I don’t know what happened before, and have nothing to go on.

---What is the most surprising thing you have learned as a writer?

Early in my writing career someone labled me a “new Jewish writer.” Hmm. I never though of myself that way before. I grew up a red-diaper baby of non-religious parents. I was the only kid on the block who wasn’t bar mitzvahed. I (alas!) never learned Hebrew, or even the Yiddish my parents spoke when they wanted to keep secrets. So how come I was a “Jewish writer”?

Nevertheless, it seemed to be true, dammit! I did a lot of reading about what makes for a Jew. Much of it went into Arnold Hitler’s explorations of possible conversion. I fit every pattern, especially my sense of humor. I realized that although my family was not officially Jewish, my neighborhood, my ghetto, was intensely so. And so I can effectively call on neighborhood types and themes when I choose to go there, as I did in Golem Song, and Julius Marantz. I’m trying to get away from this self-pigeonholing. The Annotated Nose has no obvious Jewish characters, and I just finished a manuscript set during the French Revolution, again without Jewish themes. 

But it’s true: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and I’ve just accepted an invitation from the Charlottesville Book Festival to be on a panel entitled “Good Jewish Boys Gone Wild.” That may be me, after all.

---Which of your books is your favorite and why?

I think of Insect Dreams as being the most significant, if only because its theme is world historical: the Trinity test at Alamogordo in July of 1945 was a moment from which humans can never turn back, and which, in its further development, profoundly affects our current world, and not just with respect to nuclear weapons, but concening our relationship to nature and power.

Arnold Hitler is about the misuse of language, also a crucial current pathology, and Golem Song explores the fraught concepts of chosenness and superiority, again something the world is habitually subjected to. But both these books embody themselves in a particular character, and so feel smaller to me. Insect Dreams, on the other hand, is a contribution to a larger intellectual history in its accurate tracing of the trajectory of paranoia, xenophobia and racism pointing the world to suicide.

---What kind of effect do you hope your books will have?

I write my books to share my intellectual, political, and cultural concerns, and also some of my favorite things with any who may read them. While every reader will be somewhat familiar with, say, the bomb, or the situation in the Middle East, I hope I’ve been able to introduce some of them to the uniqueness of Charles Ives, or the provocative strangeness of Edmund Jabès, or the implications of the often-excluded parts of the Passover Haggadah, or the pregnant idea of God going into hiding. Such things are my little embedded gems. I’d like to see them as gifts to the diligent reader. Sharing.

It would be madness to think that books such as mine can have any effect in changing the world for the better, especially in a culture which pays less and less attention to text. On the other hand, among the small groups that they affect, they have generated deepening discussion of the issues they raise. That is all I can ask.

I also write to have fun, and to justify my existence.