NEWSFLASH!!! Well how trippy is this. Fresh off writing the cover story for the fall issue of NY slick Black Book magazine on musician Beck -- I snagged another cover story! That's right. Back-to-back. With Black Book again. This time, I got to interview John Cusack, who's promoting his new film "Max" where he plays -- get this -- a one-armed Jewish art dealer, circa 1918 Munich, Germany -- who befriends the young aspiring artist Hitler (played by Noah Taylor.) Talk about a minefield to navigate in that 2,000 word or so piece. I had to enlist the help of my Jewish-issue sensitive Talmudic scholar father Henry Morton Resnick on that one. I made him read the same books even. But only I got to watch all of the Cusack flicks. "Max" doesn't come out until Christmas time. Intense. More on this below.
As for Beck cover story, it's on the newsstands now! Snatch it while you can. It's a really groovy issue actually -- 'cuz it's Fashion/Fiction, and there's a ton of irreverent fiction in there, including a sneak peek of Irvine Welsh's new book PORNO. Dammit if Black Book and his publisher aren't having a blowout fiesta to celebrate this Tuesday, October 1st, in New York -- and I'm here in idyllic Topanga! So it goes in the life of a stone broke freelance writer -- who nonetheless, persists in the pursuit of...scribbling. And stubbornly insists on maintaining freedom over security. Also, the Village Voice (Sept. 4- Sept. 10, 2002 Issue) in a piece by Cynthia Cotts called "Taking the Lead, Again" about feature writers' leads -- she cites the whole first 'graph of the Beck cover story. Press on press. Check out www.villagevoice.com for the article.
RE: FICTION CONTEST. I know. I am so so so slow, lame. This has been a fucked year financially and I'm just always swimming in manuscripts, whether students or freelance editing. I swear I'm doing the best I can to keep the site updated, to pull together the cool submissions and showcase them. Bear with me. I mean to do it soon and I'll do my damndest. If I can pay my rent for this past month that might help clear the mindspace to do it.
HUGE THANKS TO ALL NEW SUBSCRIBERS! I said I'd email you all with news of contest winners and a sneak peek of excerpt from new book-in-progress EDUCATION OF A CUNT. And I still intend to do that. In the meantime, please click on SNEAK PEEKS and you'll find an excerpt from EOAC right there. It was an excerpt published in an erotica antho of all things. I had to jack up the sex for the antho. I still don't think it's erotica per se, but it was fun to get something published along the way of the hard work of writing a book. Let me know what you think! I will email an excerpt I haven't published yet. Also will post up a link to "The Meat-Eaters of Marrkesh" story that's also online, at the very excellent Barcelona Review. Everyone should submit there. Way cool online mag.
UPCOMING READINGS/EVENTS:
Did the Spoken Interludes thing finally, this past Sunday, September 22nd. I read with Cynthia Heimel (SEX TIPS FOR GIRLS), Jean Harfenist (my ol' writing pal! from years ago -- now with her first smash success book out A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FLOOD -- do yourself a favor and pick it up -- it's got critical acclaim across the country, including the MICHIKO STAMP OF APPROVAL!), and Scott Phillips. I got to close the night. The piece I read was "'M' Is For Muay Thai" -- yet another excerpt from EOAC. This piece will be published this spring, May, by Three Rivers Press in the antho THE DICTIONARY OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, edited by Pennsylvania's primo principessa of steaks, Meredith Broussard.
Various UPCOMING READINGS in the works. This Tuesday, October 8th, I'll be reading at Chapman U's Steel & Ivy reading series, along with other professors (ha! am I a professor?! Love it) -- Pamela Ezell, Jim Blalock, and Marty Nakell. At 8pm. Then LADYFEST LA happens November 8-10 over Silverlake way. There'll be tons of music, performance art, random madness, all female-centered. Should be a bra-incinerating blast, a spontaneous comBUSTion. I'll be reading/performing along with Aimee Bender, Michele Serros (CHICANA FALSA) and others. More info to come. You can also check their website at www.ladyfestlosangeles.org . Have been invited to read at Michael Datcher's Leimert Park weekly Anansi World Stage; at the Mimosa Cafe in Topanga with poet Gail Wronsky, possibly Judith Freeman (RED WATER), and others TBA; a publication reading possible for the Cleis Press OBSESSED: BEST FETISH EROTICA.
PUBLICATIONS, CURRENT AND UPCOMING:
In THE DICTIONARY OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, I will join other contributors like: Susan Minot (!), Eliza Minot, Anna Maxted, Pam Houston, Maggie Estep, Shelley Jackson, and others. As I said above, it's edited by Meredith Broussard, a pal of Jerry Stahl's (thanks Jerry!) and a writer over at the cool Philly rag CITY PAPER. Will keep you posted, but looks like a May 2003 pub. date, with readings galore (so they say) -- perhaps in conjunction with McSweeney's crew (did you know Dave Eggers moved the headquarters from Brooklyn to San Francisco?!).
AVAILABLE NOW! Wunder-editor Cara Bruce's BEST FETISH EROTICA antho. I couldn't resist joining forces with writers like JT Leroy (SARAH) and Jerry Stahl. This forthcoming story is called "MAN AND WOMAN, A STUDY IN BLACK & WHITE" and is way more graphic than the previous story. But it also explores touchy subjects like race, racism, fetishizing the Other, power dynamics and abuse, self-loathing -- you know, fun stuff! I wrote it specially for the antho. I used a favorite literary psycho-sexual writer as my guide, and one story in particular. See if you can suss it out. Supposedly, Cara will buy this piece too for her online mag Eros Guide London -- so then I'll post another link...
STUDENT NEWS
After teaching at UCLA, and Antioch, Chapman, various private workshops for the last five plus years -- I've got a bunch of former students who are making the news with their publishing, MFA'ing, or general antics! PLEASE SEND IN NEWS TO ME IF YOU ARE A FORMER STUDENT, OR KNOW OF NEWS OF ONE! And click on back issues to see earlier news.
Former standout UCLA student Teresa Boyer is currently getting her MA at Northridge. She blames me for turning her on to all this literature. Somehow she got sidetracked into deeper study of books -- but I hope she'll get back to writing fiction at some point too. She's hysterically funny, and extremely talented.
Another former UCLA student, the ever-provocative and naturally Czech-style surreal writer Phil Ruta, writes to me from the online hinterlands down beyond the Orange Curtain, where he writes for various websites. But more importantly, after a spectacular motorcycle accident and leg fracture, he's written up his experience for the mag Roadracing World. He says the whole experience was true but felt like fiction -- and he wishes he could show off his new leg hardware to all of us.
And from the Topanga workshops, both Lee Michaelson and Wes Alderson have gotten acceptances for their work!!! More details to come. Lee got the news while on vacation in China to see the world women's basketball championships. And Wes got his news while in the baking hot desert town of Phoenix.
More to come!
Monday, September 30, 2002
John Cusack is so cool. He was so generous with his time. We hung out for a couple hours, talking our heads off, at the swank Windsor Arms hotel in Toronto. Yup, Black Book magazine flew me all the way to Toronto, for the film festival. Actually, it was hit- the-ground-running-and-don't-stop-till-you-leave. Literally upon landing I drove directly to the private screening producer Andras Hamori (you may remember him from the wildass interview we did for Tin House magazine, the Hollywood issue -- I need to post that I think) arranged for me. So I got to see the incredibly intense, disturbing, powerful, prloblematic film "Max" -- alone. Perfect.
I'm not going to get into the film just yet. It's too damn -- big. Everything shrinks before its subject. Before the history it conjures.
So before I go there at all, briefly -- back to Cusack. We hung out doing the interview -- then he suggested I join him and his pals for dinner. I almost didn't do it but Emma Forrest urged me to -- for the article. So I did. And Cusack continued to be warm and gracious, high energy, fun and generous. Compared to the Beck piece, I had tons more material. I think Beck is way groovy, but his publicists kept a tight lid on that meeting. We had one hour, that's it -- and the publicist babysat while we talked. Cusack and I had no celebrity chaperone so it felt more relaxed. Though relaxed isn't the word for it. We were both incredibly hyped and manic. Multiple pots of coffee and cigarettes helped. When you read the piece you'll see -- it was like we were recreating a bit of cafe society.
Then I met him and a posse at a restaurant -- and ubercool actor Sarah Polley joined too. And Menno Meyjes, the writer-director (he wrote "Color Purple" but this is his directorial debut.) And Ulrich Thomsen (from masterpiece "Celebration") joined. After a smaller gang went to the Four Seasons bar, and I got to walk home alone with Senor Cusack, through the garbage-filled streets of Toronto. And stayed up all night writing up the damn notes. I didn't sleep from thenon -- 'cuz I had one week to turn the piece around.
A minefield. How can you even mention Hitler, the holocaust -- and say anything else? Let alone write a celebrity profile, dropping those words in. Those concepts. Those unspeakables. I immediately enlisted the help of my Talmudic scholar father. I made him read the same books (he even read more.) With his help, I navigated some tricky terrain. It was an exhilarating, stressful, incredibly challenging gig. My father and I worked intensely together -- he in Jersey/New York, me in Topanga -- we would talk at all hours. Both of us were obsessed in our own ways. Because I didn't grow up with my father, this was an especially moving project. We had hardly spent any time when I was growing up. This piece, the preparation of it, came to be like the bas mitzvah speech I never gave (and never had.) With all his other children from the second marriage, he'd worked with them on their respective speeches. So there was this added dimension to the work.
I could go on at length. But I just want to be loose and give you a fast, casual catch-up. If you want more about anything in particular, don't hesitate to zip me an email. The books we read, or read partially, were RITES OF SPRING by Modris Eksteins; DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Reck-Malleczewen, EXPLAINING HITLER by Ron Rosenbaum. Eksteins was the book Menno (and Cusack) swore by. They called him the Wizard. But my father found him glib and distasteful in the end. As an avid opera buff, there was one quote Eksteins used that my father felt indicted him, morally, and also the entire project. He felt it was exploitive, easy, sloppy academically-speaking, and intellectually. Whereas the Rosenbaum is all about -- the impossibility of explaining. Rosenbaum, an extraordinary journalist, follows his own need for explanation by interviewing countless experts on their explanations. And traces how each of them projects their own issues onto their explanations -- and how wildly they vary -- and how little hard fact is available due to so much destruction of those facts -- and how in the end, there is no explanation.
Who was it who said that after the holocaust, poetry is dead. Words can no longer be spoken?
So there was a huge burden, a shrinking, a humility I felt -- a moral wrestling (and a plaguing in my sleep time too) -- that was necessary to bring this piece off, and still fulfill my genuine liking of Cusack, my appreciation for the film and the effort (but also my enormous discomfort with the undertaking itself and certain ideas suggested by it, stemming from Eksteins) -- my feeling that it is an important film to see, an important history to keep alive, to keep wrestling with -- each of us, on our own. Plus, I had to satisfy Black Book -- and write a lively, irreverent prose-styled piece that focused on Cusack. So I had to avoid many topics because there just wasn't time to do them justice, or his take, or mine -- or to set the context.
In the end, I tried to write a piece that functioned on one level as fun, a glimpse into Cusack's essence (if I succeeded at all, and he revealed some of the real him) -- an evocation of an energy, of an afternoon and an evening, with the touch of the surreal (that both the film and the surroundings and the celebrity stuff engenders.)
It comes out on October 15th. That's when it hits the stands in New York. Seems to take a little longer in LA. You'll all let me know what you think. I feel really good about it. But no idea who will dig it and how.
Also started teaching at Chapman. More on the Adventures through the Orange Curtain soon. The students there blow my mind. Their two truths and one lies (my traditional icebreaker) were nothing less than explosive.
And to stave off money anxiety, I hustle, scramble, scribble -- and work out like a motherfucker. That is the key to maintaining sanity, and optimism, I say. Or at least, some balance, and feeling of strength. Yeah, I can bench my weight, yeah! (No, I can't. Or, I don't think I can. Maybe I need to try it.)
Also -- Tin House is planning a SEX ISSUE for January so I'm jumping into that naked and full of manic energy. Hoping to get them cool submissions of people I know, whose work I admire -- and maybe to contribute myself. Certainly dovetails with my book, right?
More as it happens.
Yours,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
Summer Splash 2002: Entering Beckworld and Other Self-Tanning Adventures in Scribbling
December 2001-January 2002: General Holidaze, & The Erotic Side of the Flu
September-November 2001 -- the 9.11 Spread, This New World Of Ours
September 2nd Update: Loss of Lima, and, other ramblings from the days before The World Changed
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