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Art & Books

Jonathan Goldstein @ This Is Not A Reading Series

Jonathan Goldstein says that public speaking takes him out of his comfort zone. Then again, it doesn’t take much to make him uncomfortable.

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The author and radio host has made not one but two successful careers out of spinning his anxieties into charming anecdotes.

His stories have been regularly featured on This American Life, and for five years he’s been the host of Wiretap, possibly the strangest (and certainly the funniest) show on CBC. His semi-autobiographical 2001 novel Lenny Bruce is Dead has gained a cult following.

With his second book, Goldstein decided to take on a more ambitious project: rewriting the Bible.

On Wednesday night a capacity crowd packed into the back room of the Rivoli to watch Goldstein confront his glossophobia (the fear of public speaking) and talk about Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible as part of Pages Books’ This is Not a Reading Series.

He shared the stage with local improv group Monkey Toast in what was likely intended to be a fitting pairing of an awkward comic author with the most awkward form of comedy. MT’S David Shore introduced him to thunderous applause saying “You are popular Mr. Goldstein,” to which the author, his face hidden beneath a New York Mets cap, murmured, “It’s embarrassing.”

But for all his self-professed discomfort Goldstein fielded Shore’s questions with an ease that would make a seasoned improv comedian jealous. “Did you have a favourite character in the Bible?” Shore asked. “Ummm, I like God,” Goldstein deadpanned. “I wanted to feel God-like when I wrote it, so I wore a toga. But I ended up looking like Otter from Animal House.”

While his first novel was full of intimate personal details about coming of age in Montreal, using the Bible as source material didn’t stop Brooklyn-born Goldstein from injecting his own melancholy humour into the work. “There’s a fair bit of autobiography in the thing,” he said, describing the book as a “projection of personal neuroses onto biblical figures.”

The result is that Goldstein’s version of the Adam and Eve story isn’t so much about original sin as it is about a hopeless schlemiel in love with a woman who’s out of his league. Goliath is recast as an old school comic who relies too much on the “Hebrews drive like that/Philistines drive like this” type of humour, and David simply has to kill him to prove a bigger point about comedy.

Goldstein is the kind of biblical scholar who wants you to know the devastating affect the Ten Commandments had on mom n’ pop golden calf dealerships.

The strength of Goldstein’s writing is that it follows an adage almost as old as the Torah: that the greatest humour is derived from the deepest pain. Underneath his often hokey comedy, hapless characters show a desperate, unanswered longing for connection.

For instance, in his version, when Eve comes rushing up to Adam with the juice of forbidden fruit still wet on her lips, begging him to kiss her, Adam (whom Goldstein describes as Eden’s “village idiot”) can sense trouble. But then again, Adam reasons, “Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him,” and so he tastes the fruit on her lips and like that humanity’s damnation is assured.

In one eloquent passage, Goldstein reduces the the Fall of Man into a case of unrequited puppy love writ cosmically large.

You’ve got to say, that makes at least as much sense as the original version.

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