Adam Levin - The Instructions

******** As per the assignment, all five sessions were recorded on mini-cassette and are available at your request. Click to return.

******** Is it so weird to see your actions and motives discussed in an academic paper, Bonnie? It was definitely weird for me to write about you, knowing that you’d be reading what I wrote — not to say that I take issue with your (from what I’ve been told) highly uncommon policy of reading everything your interns write about their clients, not at all. That is to say that if the paper at hand does shed any light on Gurion that may prove useful to you, I’ll be proud. Either way, I hope we’ll have time to process all of the weirdnesses in our next supervision session. (Btw, for obvious reasons [like formality and relevance to the assignment at hand], this footnote does not appear in the version of the paper that I handed in to Professor Lakey — It may be the case, as you sometimes seem to be telling me in veiled ways during supervision, that I’m a little too permissive or forgiving sometimes and that I have a convoluted and tangent-ridden explanation-style, but I’m definitely not some kind of flake or weirdo who’d include a footnote addressed to you in a paper being read by one of my professors. Anyway, jIH muSHa’ Daj tlhej Hoch wIj tIq [that’s, “Have a good weekend,” in Klingon. {JK! — not JK that it’s Klingon, but JK that I’d think Klingon was appropriate.}]) Click to return.

******** Am I right, Bonnie?… supervision on Monday. Click to return.

******** That said, I am determined, despite the length of the quotation, to stay within Assignment 3’s 15–18 page-limit, since, judging from certain comments you’ve penned onto Assignments 1 and 2, it seems you’d rather have us, or at least me (lol! Professor Lakey, lol!), err on the side of saying too little, rather than saying too much, which is, I think, totally understandable, and so, to that end, I have cut out my own contributions to the discussion (again, if you want, you can listen to the audio tape), and replaced them with ellipses. Click to return.

********I do not mean to imply, by describing it, that you, Professor Lakey, are unfamiliar with the term codeswitching. Quite the contrary — it’s that, seeing as you have a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of California at Santa Cruz (’93), I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the term, and, being that you’re my favorite professor (and believe me: I’m not grade-grubbing when I say so — I’m not a grade-grubber), who I respect in so many ways, I become fairly nervous when writing papers for your class and only hope to convince you that I know what codeswitching is. And what’s worse is that I realize how overcompensatory I’m coming off right now, like I’m even maybe trying to hide something, and probably I am, but I don’t know what it is, if not the aforementioned nervousness, which, on one hand, seems reasonable (to be nervous seems reasonable), but on the other hand seems dubious (that this feeling I have which arises from the copious amount of respect I have for you is merely nervousness seems dubious), and so maybe you, who are as well-renowned (as you know) as a clinician as an academic could provide me with some insight into what the root of this nervousness might be some time outside of class. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do so — help me with my dubious nervousness re: you — during your office hours, which I respect as your time to meet with students in an academic way, but maybe at some other time, outside of school. If you can spare the time. Click to return.

********Despite their having the same name, the fictional Jewish writer Zuckerman of My Life as a Man is not the same Zuckerman as the fictional Jewish writer Zuckerman of Roth’s “Zuckerman Novels” (e.g. The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, The Human Stain ). Click to return.

******** Roth’s response to my letter, in its entirety:

Dear Lioncub, Son of Judah the Mallet,

Whereas the praise you’ve showered on my work is deeply flattering, your reading of Operation Shylock eerily incisive, and the section of your letter in which you mimic recent so-called Jewish wunderkind authors both terrifically cruel and on point, your insistence that you are a grade-schooler — despite being mildly entertaining at first — quickly grew as tiresome as your pseudonym. Normally, I wouldn’t mention it — normally, I don’t respond to fan letters at all — but because you strike me as a serious writer of slapstick (I did a Kosmo Kramer — worthy spit-take while reading the part of the letter in which the junior rabbis on the playground debate whether hanging the Natalie Portman poster would violate the second commandment; specifically the section of that dialogue in which Rabbi Samuel claims the poster would be kosher if only the mole on Portman’s cheek—“This mole a dark half-centimeter of flesh which, in failing to be dissonant with the rest of her face, commands the viewer’s acknowledgment that Natalie Portman is perfect”—weren’t showing, and Rabbi Emmanuel responds tangentially, however talmudically, that the mole is not a mole but a birthmark, “for a mole is a squinty animal in the light of day, and one cannot both squint and wink at once; surely you will not insist, Samuel, that Ms. Portman’s birthmark fails to wink at us in the light of day.”), and because you seemed, as well, to be soliciting my advice, I thought I would offer you some: You don’t need this conceit that you’re a nine-year-old. Nor the pseudonym. Your jokes and insights the both would come across better if instead of writing from the unconvincing POV of a boy-genius whose name suggests a messianic fate, you wrote from your current POV: that of someone who remembers, or at least chooses to remember, his childhood as a time when he, like so many of us, suspected that he was the messiah, knew his friends to be kind and loyal, and was convinced that most everyone, to some degree, seemed preoccupied with questions as to what it meant to be good.

Best of luck to you. If ever I write you again, it will be after I’ve read your first book. Of course I won’t know its author is you because I don’t know your real name, but I am certain that once you publish a book, someone will get it into my hands. Til then, I have my own novels to complete, and thus no time for pen-palliness. I trust you understand.

Nearly Yours,

Philip Roth

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******** Actually, by the end of my second week at Schechter, my reputation as a scholar was beginning to spread, and a lot of kids had started making friends with me; at the time we devised the plan, however, only the kids in my Torah Study liked me. Click to return.

******** Real cellies, these, of which there weren’t so many at Schechter. (Cellies were still expensive, the technology was as yet mostly frowned upon for kids, and controlling-parent-friendly call-plans didn’t exist. This was still two whole years before New Traditions in Safety Industries — maker of the kid-hostile Nojack phone — had even been venture-capitalized.) Click to return.

******** For most intents and purposes, Blonde Lonnie might as well have been Co-Captain Baxter — both were blonde and both were tall, both were bullies and A-team starters, both of their mouths seemed to sneer in repose — which accounts for why Reuters would so often miscaption those stills from the videos of the Damage Proper in which both would shortly appear, but Blonde Lonnie hadn’t picked on Eliyahu of Brooklyn whereas Co-Captain Baxter had knocked off his hat, and so, for Eliyahu, to whom that meant a lot at the time, and thus for those scholars of coming generations whose commentaries’ focus will be Eliyhau, distinctions between the two blondes need be made. Click to return.