NEWSFLASH: Revamping Contest #3. Details to come. Get your pens, or fingers, or styluses ready! Winners will be posted on the website, with email addresses for contacting by fans and, who knows, maybe editors and agents! It's happened before. There weren't enough responses (interestingly) to the work-themed contest (My Crummy Job), so fuck it, I'm going to change the Contest, and pick something that dovetails with various courses I'm teaching below -- something about, dunno, evil? Perversion? Doppelgangers? Ballerinas? All members of my various workshops and classes are required to submit to the contest. And hopefully, all the wonderful Subscribers will, too. I will send out an announcement of Contest #3 to you guys shortly. And thank you again, as always, for your support and interest. DON'T HESITATE TO ASK FOR STUFF YOU WANT TO SEE ON THE WEBSITE!
Teaching again in fall. Check UCLA Extension catalog. New course called: A TOUCH OF EVIL: WRITING UNFLINCHING FICTION. Also at the four-day intensive February UCLA Winter Conference, teaching THE NECESSARY LIE: TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION. A.M. Homes is one of the guest speakers, along with Sandra Tsing Loh and some big screenwriter, I forget. Sunday, September 9th, I am appearing at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program Open House on the UCLA/Westwood campus at Young Hall, with laminated I.D. hung obediently around my neck, mmhmm. From noon for about an hour, various fall instructors will give a one minute (ha!) rap on their upcoming classes. Doesn't get more exciting than this!
LA TIMES PIC & THE MYSTERY MAN IN PSYCHEDELIC WOODBLOCK PRINT: I have two winners!!! First, the Mag Man himself, Peter Magliocco, from America's hubcity Vegas, whose wildass prose you've enjoyed in BOTH the fiction contests! (check back postings of Pick-Of-The-Litter), guessed correctly that the Mystery Man in the Psychedelic Woodblock Print is none other than the great Russian poiet and playwright VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY! Then, only HOURS behind, Marcy Dyment, first-rate runner and writer and elementary school teacher, winner of the UCLA James Kirkwood Prize, also weighed in with the correct answer of MAYAKOVSKY! So Marcy and Peter share this shining honor. How shall we honor them? Email with suggestions!!!
[Excerpt from opening of Mayakovsky's "The Cloud In Trousers":
...If you wish,/I shall rage on raw meat;/or, as the sky changes its hue,/if you wish,/I shall grow irreproachably tender:/not a man, but a cloud in trousers!]
Weird new online posting. Via the fabulous Jo-Ann Mapson, got an email invitation from Gianluca Bassi, editor-in-chief of STORIE, an Italian lit mag that's in print and online. They were doing a special issue called AFTERNOON. All around the world, they were getting various writers to write what happened to them, where they were, at exactly 5:50pm to 6pm on April 19th, 2001. So I did it. Click on the link that follows to see what was going down in Topanga: http://www.storie.it/pomeriggio.htm . There are TONS of writers who participated -- from Michael Tolkin to Jerry Stahl to Mary Morris to T.C. Boyle -- as Tolkin said, it didn't seem a very interesting time of the day...but you be the judge. As I lived in Rome in '88 for a couple years, I couldn't resist the chance to be in an Italian lit mag. There is a horrific foreshadowing of my beloved bird's demise in the piece: let it be a lesson of, what, the power of writing? Of the danger of articulating nightmares? Or simply life's coincidences, retrospectively eerie and black-tinted, or at least coated with the hubris of the alive and well.
Forthcoming: I have three reviews of Topanga eateries, with many local color details, in the second HUNGRY? guidebook coming out from hypercool local publishing house, Really Great Books, edited by former fabulous student Kristin Petersen. Look for it in October. Check www.reallygreatbooks.com to learn more about this happening LA-based house.
Just finished proofing the final version of "Scenes From Thailand" -- a double-piece excerpted from my second book-in-progress, titled tentatively EDUCATION OF A CUNT (as Mark Z. Danielewski said eloquently, Why don't you just shoot a big hole in your foot with these titles!) -- which I read at the recent Track 16 Gallery event with Joe Donnelly, Jerry Stahl, Arty Nelson, Ann Heche, Aimee Bender, and Bernard Cooper. Ann Heche even came up to me after and said how educated she was after hearing my piece! Hmmm. I think she's the one who can educate us, on these and other matters, including speaking in tongues..."Scenes From Thailand" will appear in a Cleis Press antho called something like Best Bisexual Erotica 2001, edited by the ever-vivacious and vixenish Cara Bruce (Viscera). Will keep you posted on that. She's got another one coming together on Fetishes, including J.T. Leroy. Think I might be tapped out on the fetish/erotica dimension right now, though. Only in L.A. is there such a close overlapping/lapdancing of arenas -- the erotica with the literary, the porn stars at the local poetry readings, IN the local poetry readings. Is it good, is it bad, is it ugly, is it the future, is it progressive, is it the slow-sifting together of lowbrow highbrow and middlebrow into Frida Kahlo-like monobrow? A melting of molds. Or a rotten sloppy mess.
Long as the writing's good, I say, it's all good. But the writing has got to be good. And, and, it's got to be about something else. Something beyond sex, something beyond the cup on the table and the way the sun hits the chipped ceramic lip, something beyond the words the characters say to/past each other. Somehow, whether from subterranean linguistic burbling forces, the irruptions of the unconscious, from the spaces between the lines, or what's offstage lurking and informing and throwing its shadow -- somehow, the words on the page and the pages all together in a cumulative symphony, must mean more than what they say. And that is the trick. And that is the mystery.
ANYway.
Jervey Tervalon's putting together an antho on the L.A. Riots: Geography of Rage. Rob Roberge started his own dang publishing press (print-on-demand) called Double Wide, and THEY'VE got an L.A. antho coming out soon with fiction AND short plays -- horning in on Sun & Moon's territory (barely anyone publishes theater). Also David Ulin edited another L.A. lit antho coming out from City Lights (excuse me, are they not located up north in that postcard picturesque obscenely expensive yuppified city called San Francisco? Huh?) Interestingly, most of the writers included are not the same ones who were in L.A. Shorts, which was edited by Steve Gilbar over at Heyday Books, and included, among others, Yours Truly. Whatever the intent, scope or case, anthos are coming fast and furious out of the Left Coast global village -- what's up with that? Are we finally making our literary mark? You tell me.
Upcoming events: KPFK's Feminist Magazine, via radio host Melissa Chiprin, has expressed interested in having me and super actor/writer Chloe Webb ("Sid & Nancy" -- she was Nancy! for which she gets automatic life celebrity, and along with Maupin's "Tales of the City", "China Beach" etc.) do another Rad Chick reading, but this time as a benefit for some feminist cause, like, for my money, Planned Parenthood. If you're going to target one area, overpopulation and sex education is the one, to my mind. That, and the environment, are my focuses. And may I remind you all, BUSH WAS NOT ELECTED! HE IS NOT PRESIDENT! WHY ARE WE NOT ALL PROTESTING IN THE STREETS?!
Whew.
Also, Melissa Chiprin's invited me to participate in an upcoming KPFK show on body politics, sexist over-emphasis on women's shapes, sizes, eating disorders and other fun stuff. 'Course men are getting their share of beefcake demands, aren't they? Or is it only me who's busting their chops? Love those signs over at Gold's, like, There's No Rule That Says You Have To Work Out -- Except Gravity(!) If women must suffer cinched waists, waxing, plucking, and other indignities, men can do some squats. Reading Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography to prepare. Friend and stellar actor Christina Haag (catch her on upcoming "Providence" re-run and new episode) just told me about a dinner experience she had recently at a healthy Indian restaurant on Montana in Santa Monica, that kind of sums something up. She was eating. Enjoying. Unlike the other customers. Another woman was sitting by the window, tugging at her puffed face which had clearly just undergone some kind of drastic plastic surgery, and weeping, and talking to herself, over a plate of sag paneer. Then, another woman who was in Anorexia Alert Stage Three (out of three), walked in crackling on matchstick limbs, each step seemingly painful, walked up to order something from the cook and insisted there be no fat. "We don't cook in fat here," said he, pointing at the signs. "But I'm sure there was some fat in the food I had last time I was here, I'm sure there was, are you sure?" Reminds me of the girl who refused to eat her soup, or was it a guy, in my favorite kids' book STRUWWELPETER, Shock-headed Peter, and he refuses, and refuses, until he disappears into thin air and they bury him. The End.
OTHER UPCOMING EVENTS:
On October 23rd, I will be doing a reading and talk at Whittier College as part of their Fall Writers' Series, which also includes Kate Braverman, Richard Garcia, Philip Levine, Majid Naficy, Charles Webb, Marilyn Chin and a few others. Laurel Ann Bogen, lustrous local poet, is teaching there and running the series, and was kind enough to invite me. I will be Dreaming Of Nixon as I prepare for that one. Shaking my sympathy jowls, and peacenikifying my prose. If you guys haven't been to the Nixon Museum, by the way -- you must. I took my Chapman University novel writing class there on a class trip -- only some took offense at my irreverence: I laughed during the whitewashed Nixon short film. Not to mention the blue-haired-docents-in-uproar.
Then, that same week, I will be doing the Induction Speech (what's that?) for Sigma Delta Chi, or Kappa Gamma Ray, or something like that -- it's the English society at Chapman University, and their president (I think) Mindi Combs has kindly invited me to do that. I don't know what's expected, really. All I can think about is different initiation humiliations I went through at Sylacauga High School in Sylacauga, Alabama, (yes, Jim Nabors' hometown, how'd you know):
Like, rolling a peanut on the floor of the filthy football stadium with my nose, crawling, to get into some sports letter club (also, getting a disgusting slick egg yolk dropped down my throat from some brutal overalled halfback towering above me in the stands, and having to swallow.
Then, there was the one for some social club of girls, where I had to smear peanut butter on my legs, then pull on cheap pantyhose, get about a hundred condiments poured into my hair -- oh, and I was wearing a burlap sack -- then walk into town with a handful of catfish bait (do you have any idea how unbelievably wretched the stench of catfish bait is? it must be made from worm blood and guts and pig excrement and other choicely savory items -- I've never smelled anything so foul ever) -- and, beg for money at the Ogletree Plaza. Needless to say, I went through this humiliation for the experience -- I was into "infiltrating" -- then made a point of quitting, on the grounds that I didn't believe in social clubs based on popularity and I thought the hazing was OTT (over the top). Talk about a pill! Oh, I had fun down there, driving everybody mad. But who could blame me, when the students whispered "I prayed for you last night" every day at school, and gave me patronizing looks. If that's not a Touch Of Evil...then remove one of my Heavenly crowns.
HEAR YE, HEAR YE!!! NEW SECTION!!!
STUDENT NEWS
That's right. After teaching at UCLA, and Antioch, Chapman, various private workshops for the last five years -- I've got a bunch of former students who are making the news with their publishing, MFA'ing, or general antics!
Phil Ruta sold his haunted house up in Woodland Hills, relocated to the beach area, and got in a nasty motorcycle wreck. But things got nastier post-wreck, when the medical technicians seem to've fumbled a bit, and his wife had to step in and help with some stitching. Leave it to the every-wry Czech surrealist to make a motorcycle wreck cause for satire.
And Teresa Boyer, who unlike "Six Feet Under", grew up for real in a mortician's house, has given up writing literature for now to study it instead. She's enrolled at UCLA and headed for a PhD! In part, she blames me and all the heavy reading we had to do in our workshops -- along with, of course, the true blinding angel Flannery O'Connor.
Andrea Drugay just finished up her MFA at San Francisco State. Linda Alcorace, the Venetian rollerqueen, did a year at Florida State but didn't turn rebel. Now she's about to enroll at St. Mary's, where she'll study with Gail Wronsky, Chuck Rosenthal, Greg Sarris.
Mia Taylor is busy over at www.thebookla.com writing articles, interviewing the likes of Sam Jackson and John Leguizamo, and serving as Associate Editor! All this after her spectacular debut in journalism in the acclaimed film issue of Tin House magazine from this past winter.
More to come!
Sunday, September 2, 2001
Is this Groundhog Day? I fucking loved that film. Pure existentialism. Perfect film, I thought. Don't know how it snuck under the radar.
Been a very long time since I've updated. Apologies. But on July 1, 2001, I lost my beloved Severe macaw Lima. You can see pics of him, with me, in the Calendar and the various author photos (on the book GWYFU-C). I don't know if you dig the awesome bond that can form between human and non-human, but if you can, this one was incredible. I've been devastated. Heartbroken. Crazed with grief. Perhaps such a loss opens up a new aperture in the self's perception. I have been reading Mark Epstein's latest, GOING ON BEING, and it has been a great eye and soul-opener (think can opener ripping through the defenses).
I just got back from New York City, where I saw tons of literary folks. From Emma Forrest (NAMEDROPPER and forthcoming in U.K. THIN SKIN), to Ann Marlowe (HEROIN FROM A TO Z) to Michele Serros (CHICANA FALSA) -- with much anecdote and gossip to come...but I also, one night, in swelter city, the sweat drenching my back and clothes, water bottle in hand, navigating through the vibrant streets, on my way back to Christopher Street where I was a guest of publishing legend Jim Fitzgerald, when I saw a book lying open on the street. Of course, I had to stop. I did. I stopped. I looked down. The book was splayed open. It was muddy. Maybe trod upon. I bent down. I saw this chapter heading: THE NATURE OF DELUSION. I took in my breath. I stood up. I didn't need to see any more. Nobody would believe me if I wrote this in a story, let alone recounted it as fact! But fact it is, dear Website browsers. A new depth of journey is opening up, a subterranean corridor full of dark and damp and, probably tons of spiders, too.
How did I lose my beloved Lima? I put him outside on his perch. For a short time. It was a treat for him. I went inside on a phonecall. I heard a screech. His extraordinary voice. A screech like I'd never heard from him, then it was cut off. By the time I threw the phone down and ran out, he was gone. No sign. A rustling. I heard a rustling. But I looked in a tree right off the deck. A neighbor had also heard Lima and she saw the bobcat flying down the hill toward the grove of California oaks. It was noon. Broad daylight. Wearing basically night skivvies and flip-flops, I leaped off the deck, my hair wild, already a woman in a Greek tragedy, wailing, running down the uneven hill, after the bobcat. Right. I was insane. I still have thick bands of scar on my thighs from poison ivy. Of course there was no sign of the cat. Of Lima. I called his name. I still call his name, two months later.
I could go on. But I will do this in increments. Have to go to a Labor Day fiesta right now. Taking a break from updating website and preparing syllabus for this UCLA course. Also will teach a couple of private workshops (shhhhhhhhhh! big secret!!!!!) this fall. One in West Hollywood. One in Topanga.
To the left of my desk, which looks out the window onto the glorious state park of Topanga, wherein behind curtains of green, hide all manner of predators, is a makeshift shrine to Lima. This is Nature. Lima is returned to Nature. I will tell you more about the shrine later. It was necessary. These are ancient rituals and needs, how to succor the dead. How to help their passage to the next world. I had a memorial service/celebration for Lima, too -- on August 13th. What would've been his fifth birthday.
Am I mad? These birds are remarkable. The bonds are amazing. The intellectual and emotional capacity of these birds is equivalent to a two-three year old, they say. They. Lima was a character. A big spirit. He made my isolated writing life full of joy. And lightness. Nonetheless, I continue writing. Working toward completing the second book. And thinking how else to pay tribute to this bird, what he taught me.
Don't worry. I haven't lost my edge. I am informed by loss. Life is loss. I appreciate the gifts, the momentary hovering of a hummingbird, the gesture of a loving friend -- with so much more depth. Maybe you read the recent (July 23rd) New Yorker article about some scientist Nootebohm (sp?) -- and his obsession with the songs of canaries. And how the complexities of bird brains pointed toward a revolutionary idea about neurogenesis, the continued growth of neurons after maturity!
To be continued...
Yours in cruel Nature,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
June-August 2001: Off the Rails at Track 16 Gallery & Other Tales
April/May 2001: Second Pick-of-the-Litter Winners! plus Snap and trash from Tin House bash
December/January 2001: Happy Kwanzaa Send-Off, Holidazing
November 2000 Update: Seven Deadly Sins Contest! Plus Bonus Political Rant
June 2000 Update: Hell's Angels, Rocking the Tin House, and More!
February 2000 Update: My Bloody Valentine