Jeremy Kaplowitz: Walking Into Trees

I would describe my occupation as “person who does comedy all of the time, including while no one is watching him at his day job.”

Two times in my life, a doctor has pulled an intern into the room to show them something on my body that you “only read about in textbooks.” Two different parts of my body. Two different doctors.

I am reading Dune by Frank Herbert! Dune is one of those books I always wanted to read, but never got around to it. In college, I absorbed the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin right after the first season of the show came out. I would hang out on a bunch of ASOIAF forums and people were always like “Ya know, I love these books, but GRRM borrows pretty heavily from Dune.” So I have finally gone to the source. I have picked it up and put it down a handful of times — something I wrote about on my website Hard Drive in the satirical article “Sixth Attempt to Start Reading Literary Classic ‘Dune’ Going OK”— but now that it was announced that Denis Villeneuve (who is GREAT) is making a Dune movie, I really have to finish it before that happens. Dune is wonderful, though, so it’s not that much of a burden.

In Elementary School, I was obsessed with the Pendragon series by D.J. MacHale. My Dad worked one floor above the office for Kirkus Reviews and befriended someone who would get me all the advanced copies, which I would read as quickly as I could, often walking into trees on my way to school while reading. My friends tease me that I invested my nerd fandom into the wrong young adult fantasy series (never finished the Harry Potter books as a kid), but they don’t know I’m playing the long game. If I’m ever successful enough to create my own big-budget movie adaptations, I’m making that goddamn Pendragon movie. D.J., if you’re reading this, send me an email.

I have very distinct memories as a young child of switching bullies onto my side mid-bullying by making jokes. I think a lot of comedians develop their humor as a defense mechanism, probably. But it wasn’t until high school that I started absorbing all things comedy and it wasn’t until college that I started actually creating and performing comedy myself.

The last book I purchased was Robin by Dave Itzkoff because I like Robin Williams and I like Dave Itzkoff and I like reading books. Seems like a match made in heaven!

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card meant a lot to me growing and it is an absolute shame that Card turned out to be a pretty terrible person. I recommend that anyone who hasn’t read it should pirate Ender’s Game.

Because I used to get those advanced copy books as a kid and because my dad was/is really into science fiction and fantasy, I have a ton of old half-finished books sitting in my parents’ basement that I don’t remember the names of. This one definitely isn’t the most obscure but one really great fantasy book I read as a kid that I rarely hear people talk about is Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies. Other than that, I got something that no one ever reads, a little something called The United States Constitu—I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

Definitely the bits of Dune by Frank Herbert that I’ve read in between giving up and moving onto other things. I find it annoying to read too much of Dune at once, but I keep coming back to it! The best/worst experience I ever had reading Dune is when I sat down on an aeroplane hoping to read a decent chunk of it and it turned out I was sitting next to the world’s biggest Dune fan who went through his pros and cons list of every single book in the series. Informative and tedious!

I know this is a really cheesy answer, but I don’t know that I have a proudest achievement. I work on a lot of different things and I’m really proud of them for very different reasons. Hard Drive, the satirical video game website where I am the Editor-in-Chief had its first birthday a month or so ago and I’m so proud of how much it has evolved since it launched. Lizard People of New York and everything I got to do with that was also really fun and fulfilling. I’m really proud of the live shows we put on and the script we wrote. I’m very excited about a project I’m working on right now that I hope to release in the near future. That’s not the answer people like to hear, but there’s no one Big Achievement that I’m really proud of. It’s a lot of little things that have gotten me to where I am right now and makes me excited for where I want to go.

I could list a million things here so I’m just gonna list three favorites off the top of my head and I’m not gonna let myself change them: the TV show Stella, Maria Bamford, and Mike Birbiglia.

Fake answer: Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle so I could trick them into a conversation about how friggin cool the Mountain Goats are. Real answer: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke because that book is really interesting and funny and makes me feel smart for liking it.

Go out and start making stuff now because there’s no point and waiting and you might as well suck now while no one is paying attention.

I would explain to the alien that because I live in New York City, that I’m actually not really supposed to be in our building’s community garden because it’s only for specific tenants and I’m a starving artist.

John Dies @ the End by David Wong is really funny and the sequel This Book is Full of Spiders, Seriously Dude Don’t Touch It feels like a very accurate description of how a zombie outbreak would go down in the real world. I have not read the third book and I’m sorry.

The third book in the aforementioned John Dies at the End series, What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror, is something I’m saving for my next long aeroplane ride.