I am an aging New Yorker who dearly misses Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray and brisket on rye. Living among the elderly here who play and cavort as if in a second childhood, I feel misplaced, but I am always the observer. Unfortunately it took decades before I could metabolize what i “experienced.” I have been an English teacher, the director of an alternative school, a writer and a therapist, and all of these attributes, in the last several years, have merged, and I am having the time of my life expressing myself. I am direct, often blunt — I have no time to suffer fools: a mentor of mine said it best. “Matt has to be felt.” That about sums up my childhood. Growing up, I walked around with a sign on me: “Vacancy.” Now, I own the complex itself and enjoy being its landlord.
The book works with the idiosyncratic pings, dings and dents we accrue just by living — and a major accident or two. I don’t particularly feel drawn to misery, but it does like company, and often my characters are people who don’t want me to say anything or to comfort them. Mostly they want their shadow intertwined with mind as I silently accompany them. Using different styles — reportorial; interior monologue, et al — I try to join these characters in their angst and anxiety, for they are only disparate parts of myself. It is in writing that I take the puzzle pieces that Susan Alexander so carefully figures out in Xandau and see what emerges. It is with the conundrum that I discover who I am.
I was not inspired. This book is a working out and a working through of events that occurred in life over thirty-three years. The reading of a newspaper account about the desecration of Juan Peron’s tomb led me into a macabre tale that also deals with the Jewish experience in Argentina. The unhappy life — but a brave one! — that my cousin experienced with cerebral palsy moved me. He died at 21 as a cab driver because his twisted arm could not handle the wheel well. Sometimes I feel a writer must experience post-traumatic shock disorder to function. I did. Isn’t all writing an attempt to metabolize?
I am chuckling as I freely associate to the Passover service where a young child will ask four questions: Why is this night different from all other nights? is one. My book is not so much different, although that might make a publicist cringe. It is only special in that it reveals who I am. And if I am an interesting person, if I have soaked long enough in brine and produce a good pickle, then what I write expresses all that and you, the reader, might like to experience the juices. Culturally speaking, if the Star of David was no longer the symbol of the Jewish people i might be so bold as to suggest another: the question mark, for it is in my background to be Talmudic — to ask a question, and then another. It goes a long way if you become a shrink. My stories ask painful questions, and I don’t answer them. . .I just ask another, “annoyingly” valuable question.
When I was supporting my family in the vibrantly hectic life of my middle age, I wrote novels, essays, short stories and articles. I struggled and faced rejection at the hands of editors, although I must say that the sweetest no I ever received was from The New Yorker. The dear editor pointed out — gently — why the story failed, but like a good nurturer also stressed where I had succeeded. These infrequent and spare morsels sustained me as well as my not inconsiderable ego. The skinny is this: I have a treasure of work sitting on shelves that in my autumnal years I take out and restore, refurbish and redo, rewrite or shelve again. In that light the next work is a science fiction fantasy that I have worked on for years with a decidedly analytical slant, and the major thematic issue, to quote Khrishnamurti, is the awakening of intelligence. My whole life has been the awakening of intelligence, from the first primordial moment when I oozed from the womb. Think of a distorted Gulliver’s Travels as told by a shrink — “So you feel very tiny and your limbs are bound.” It is called “Gruffworld,” and the very first chapter before it was put on the back burner was published in a major science fiction magazine in the eighties. My son, who did the jacket for this present book, will do the graphics and interior drawings. I hope to have it published within two years as I hear the whistling scythe of the grim reaper in the distance; however, death is a friend if we connive with him, for it energizes oneself. It redeems daily experience so it is not wasted. Kafka said it well: “The meaning of life is that it stops.”
I am not a big fan of control but self-publishing gives that illusion to you. Nothing wrong with that unless it becomes delusional. The publishing world is shambling into the future. The center doesn’t hold. Take advantage of that. (I believe Thoreau only published 75 copies of Walden.) I’ll sharpen my intent. I write not for you, dear reader, but for me. I don’t need the conventional wisdom I hear all the time about how many words to write on a daily basis, et al. It is all conditioning. The real and often bitter struggle for any writer is to fight off all the cultural do’s and don’ts. The real writer is inner-directed and emancipates himself. If you are hung up on being published by Random House, you are literally hung up. We are in an egregious gilded age –produce, be fertile and get it in print, anyway you can. Work on yourself, that is your literature! The rest is persiflage — and corruption.
As to marketing successes, i have readers somewhere. I have family that revels in the very intimate gift that I have given them, for it is in memory and not the headstone that we are cherished. I view my works as a giving. That I can produce them is the self-treasure I own. I often give free copies to individuals in the hope that they will engage me as to their contents. Meshuga? I think not. After all, on a daily basis, I see you, I engage you, I give you of myself if so inclined. Is that not a definition of a book?
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