NEW, SALACIOUS GIG. SEE BELOW!!! And no, I have not given up on the contest. I have been remiss with the website. Apologies. But I'm back, armed with dangerously potent pieces for the contest. It is truly a ripe time now with these submissions. I swear I'll post them soon. It's no longer summer. Time to put away the rubber-slatted beach chairs, pack up the Candies, and get real.
PUBLICATIONS, CURRENT AND UPCOMING:
Last week, Thursday, September 4, 2003, the LA Times published an essay I wrote for the "Where I Live" series for the new Home section. Barbara King was my groovy N'Awlins raised editor. Dylan Landis, the writer I've mentioned to you who's got a whole lotta buzz around her, a Tin House mag protege and soon-to-be published in Dave Eggers' Best American Non-Required Reading collection, had the balls and faith to suggest me for the assignment. For those of you who don't subscribe or can't get to the Times' archives, I'm going to cut & paste the essay below:
WHERE I LIVE
A different drumbeat
In the wilds of Topanga, free spirits roam and nature makes the rules.
TOPANGA CANYON
By Rachel Resnick, Special to The Times
After a year of living in a downtown L.A. loft, I started feeling oxygen-deprived. I dreamed about chain-sawed trees thundering to the ground, a river of concrete flowing like lava. This prompted a trip to Costa Rica, where I saw a flock of scarlet macaws cut through the sky like a ribbon of red.
Back home, on a whim, the boyfriend bought a hand-raised baby Severe macaw. The bird was jungle green, and I was stunned to learn that macaws could live 40 to 50 years in captivity. The boyfriend and I were not destined to last so long in our relationship cage. I called the bird Lima (one who speaks), and taught him how. Soon he had a 50-word vocabulary and spoke in complete sentences.
One evening, the boyfriend and I went to dinner at a home in faraway Topanga Canyon. Bounded by Valley Porn Central to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south, Topanga was a tie-dyed trip to yesteryore. Or so I always thought when I drove straight through, freaked by the crystal shops, Birkenstocks and DIY shacks. But here I was. In the heart of the heart of canyon country. Fairy lights winked from pepper trees, coyotes yipped in the hills, tree frogs filled the night with cicada sounds. There was partial nudity, homemade wine and air so delicious you could drink it — I was spellbound. When the boyfriend and I broke up, I moved to Topanga Canyon with Lima.
In those honeymoon days, six years ago now, my jury-rigged Japanese car barely made it up the steep hill to the small cul-de-sac I live on. With Lima clutching my left shoulder, I would walk 20 minutes down the hill. Then I entered the Mimosa Cafe, which boasts a "French atmosphere," portal to this new canyon cosmos. Inside, people were throwing runes to seek guidance for their day. If the runes didn't work, a 6-foot, bald German horsewoman wearing Ugg boots and a Pucci minidress pushed psychic readings while you drank your coffee.
Lima became one of the town's mascots, along with the café owner's boxer, Harley. "Best butt in town," said a regular, patting Harley's prize rump. She was part of a flock of wealthy, lusty divorcées always prowling for beaus. Out on the garden patio amidst pink bougainvillea and potted palms, you could often find Drummer, smiling in his camouflage jumpsuit and bare feet, sitting lotus position on the painted wooden bench. Lethally allergic to the insides of buildings, he lived in the woods with only a tarp to his name, and crafted customized drums for a living. A light-footed hippie chick glided over when I was writing an IOU, having forgotten my wallet. In the Midwest, her name used to be Mary, or Julie, but now she was Ishtar Butterfly. "Ask for angel money," she said, waving her fingers as if to pluck coins from the air. "It's everywhere if you know where to look." Over the pastry counter, I met a man dressed in purple sandals, a purple robe and a purple cowboy hat, who told me he'd trekked all over Africa, Asia and "other dimensions."
On the sweaty hike back up, I would pass Grand View Drive, where Charlie Manson used to park his bus. There was a dark side to Topanga too. Sometimes I faced off with Dollar Bill. Fresh out of the clinker with only a piece of string keeping his pants up, he would walk the roads, regularly exposing himself to young canyon girls. A year later he was busted and disappeared from the canyon.
For half a dozen years, I've lived off Observation Drive in the lower level of a house. My modest feng-shui disaster zone of a one-bedroom rental looks out on leafy green Topanga State Park, the world's largest wildlands within the boundary of a major city. No house in sight. An old torrey pine grows right through the deck, dropping pine cones as big as babies' heads, and sap thicker than tahini. Aggro hummingbirds buzz the windows of my office. Red-tailed hawks soar over the live oak treetops, scanning for spaced-out ground squirrels.
Topangans seem more bonded with the environment here. We can see the stars. Comets. Even UFOs. Across the street, they have parties to celebrate the solstices and new moons. Guests bring their bongos. All are welcome. "I need a place to grow pot. How big's your closet?" asks one man, a former Playgirl centerfold who paid bills for years by supplying sperm banks. Now he lives in a station wagon with five yapping dogs. In the yard, a skinny, blond goddess in belly-dancing finery and Egyptian makeup blows a mournful didgeridoo. A man wearing only a sheepskin loincloth writhes and twirls fire clubs that blaze hieroglyphs against a moonlit sky.
I SLOW DOWN THROUGH TOPANGA. That's what the bumper stickers say. You've got to navigate treacherous blind curves, overhanging palms and jutting prickly pear to get to the mountaintop where I live. Staked along the way are colorful hand-painted signs like: STARS ABOVE, KIDS & PETS BELOW or LOOK 4 LIFE! One winding mile down on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the bumper stickers are another gentle reminder to the estimated 30,000 daily commuters that there's still a small town here.
When I landed, there were rock 'em-sock 'em community meetings over putting up the first traffic light. After battling traffic along PCH, leaving the glittering ocean behind as I head north toward home, I relish the imperative to slow down. Over time, this natural imperative has seeped into my bloodstream: Zen by way of the environment.
But nature isn't always kind, the solitude isn't without its price, and Zen has lessons about the dangers of attachment. There are also the dangers of living right next to untamed wild lands. Anyone who lets a cat out at night rarely sees it survive the year. Coyotes eat cats for snacks. One day the Labrador retriever next door disappeared. There was a mountain lion in the area. I made the fatal urban mistake of thinking my exotic, pampered companion pet was safe during the day. What did I think, that this tiny bird was, shazam!, SuperParrot! with machine-gun beak and ear-splitting squawk, his bright feathers a virtual flak jacket?
Four years into Topanga, a bobcat snatched Lima off the deck in the middle of the day. I'd left him for a moment, decimating peanuts on a manzanita perch, while I answered the phone. His startled cry shattered me, and will always haunt. When I ran outside, he was already gone. The neighbor said she'd seen a bobcat tearing down the hillside with something in its mouth. I searched for hours, calling out his name, sprinting past the live-oak stand and through dense brush. I found no trace. Not even a feather. I built a makeshift shrine, even solicited an online animal preacher to say a prayer. After four miserable months, I adopted a homeless Scarlet macaw as a tribute to Lima. I never post Ajax outside without supervision. Nature taught me a new respect and understanding. If Lima had to go, there might have been worse ways. What if he'd been crushed by a car, fed the wrong food? Maybe there is more nobility in being seized by a bobcat and returned to nature. Maybe this is what Robert Stone, in his classic novel "Dog Soldiers," meant by Cold Zen.
No matter how many grueling, trafficky hours I burn through to get home, once I arrive I am awed by the sweet scent of jasmine, the blazing stars in the night sky, the kneeling silence. In the presence of that immensity, something always takes flight.
*
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Rachel Resnick is a contributing editor to Tin House magazine and the author of the novel "Go West Young... Chick."
{Dig the censorship of book title, even though it had appeared with the full title (with one kinetic asterisk) in the LA Times Book Review, both reviewed in brief and on the bestseller list...hm...Some people in the canyon were pissed about the "lusty divorcee" bit...maybe it hit home?! Course there was so much I left out. Please. The real stomping grounds are the elementary school, and both married, unmarried, men and women, are on the prowl there -- or so I hear. I didn't get into the new politics of the wealthy yuppies with their SUV's and Beemers running people down, or the interaction with the day laborers, their presence, pov...there just wasn't room. Consider this a taste, an appetizer, of Topanga. My small, circumscribed take on it, one tiny story.]
THE DICTIONARY OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS (Three Rivers Press), with my story "'M' Is For Muay Thai," is now available. Other contributors include: Susan Minot, Eliza Minot, Darcey Steinke, Anna Maxted, Maggie Estep, Dana Johnson, etc.
"Man and Woman: A Study in Black & White," the first erotica story I ever penned specifically for an erotica antho, appeared in BEST FETISH EROTICA, reappeared in BEST WOMEN'S EROTICA 2002 (also Cleis Press), and was just chosen by Susie Bright to be in BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2004 along with people like Jerry Stahl.
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.
Aaron Jacobs, founding editor of forthcoming Los Angeles mag Quench, had a story come out in the excellent Surfer's Path mag out of London. Here's the link where you can get a salt-tang taste of his story, "Living With Water": The Surfer's Path: "Living With Water" They liked it so much, he's doing a ton more pieces for them, including one currently on African-American surfers. Turns out these dudes get their hair cut at the same place as Aaron.
Kristen-Paige Madonia, a former student from Chapman's MFA program, writes: "The lit journal Barbaraic Yawp, a quarterly, is publishing "Paper Thin" in their Sept 2003 issue and Beginnings, a tri-annual, is publishing "The Guest House" in their winter 2004 issue. The Beginnings website is www.scbeginnings.com and it's a magazine for novice writers (stories by new writers and articles on writing and writing books). These are my first publications (outside of Chapman's mag and my undergrad lit mag.)"
September 9, 2003
Dear all,
On August 1st I began a new job. The time had come to say goodbye to all the insanity of adjunct teaching -- at least for a while. Even though, admittedly, I did just start up a course last nite for the excellent www.mediabistro.com, called Bootcamp: 12-Week Novelist. That's right -- the participants write a novel in 12 weeks. Cake, right? Maybe I'll try and join them as I teach. I'll keep you posted on the books and writers.
But back to the new job. I owe it all to www.craigslist.com. I'd been searching for different jobs for a while. I'd applied for a gig as a publicist for an elephant, Flora, who'd been rescued by a couple from the circus. They needed help raising money to get her a special Indian elephant pen at this resort for elephants in, I think, North Carolina. There were African elephant pens, but not ones for Indian elephants. The latter are not venerated in the same way. But, I didn't get the job. I tried for another where I would've organized a conference on con-men (for con-men? -- either way I would've loved it.) Didn't get that either.
Then I saw an ad for someone to run a start-up publishing company. In Venice Beach. Erotica. I thought someone was kidding. It was my job. I had to get it. It took a while to convince Colin Walkden, the former wheeler-dealer businessman turned Brilliant Health lifestyle counselor vegan A.L.F. (Animal Liberation Front) activist turned music CD company CEO wanting to branch into erotica publishing to fund a raw food resort in Costa Rica...you know how that is...that I was the one for the job. He was concerned I hadn't worked in an office before, or at least for a long time. But even when I couldn't manage to track down anyone who'd seen me in an office, to vouch for my ability to sit behind a desk, I scored the gig.
Right now, I'm racking my brains trying to come up with a name for the company. Tops on the list so far are things like Satyricon, and Odalisque. Except we want to have it be classy, but accessible -- suited to men, women, couples, highbrow, lowbrow -- not so easy! Satyricon might be too freaky for some, if you know the ancient Roman text, or Fellini's fabulous interpretation. And Odalisque, which means sex slave or concubine in a harem, seems to be hard from some to pronounce. What? Odorless? Oy. So, IF YOU HAVE ANY IDEAS, feel free to send them along. I have already, however, tried out reams of names. Remember, it has to work for the spine of a book, as a company to say daily on the phone, and for possible growth into CD's, DVD's...a tall order.
I'm having a blast beginning, slowly, to solicit. Been in touch with Candye Kane, big-busted blues mama from San Diego way; and Thom Racina, who co-wrote books with Marilyn Chambers & Xaviera Hollander -- and made up many of the stories! Lydia Lunch and film director Asia Argento; San Francisco's shining smutty star writer & editor & personality Cara Bruce; former hardcore porn actress turned feminist self-photographer Chloe des Lysses; and more...I will have tons to update you with on this raffish front.
In the meantime, consider this the first installment of the post-summer. More to come, including, I swear, ridiculously overdue story postings for the Contest. I finally have an unbelievable batch -- full of heart, emotion, and guts. You guys rock.
Peace,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
May & Summer 2003: R.I.P. Eddie Little
December-February 2003: India! White Tigers, Cremations, Maharajas & A One-Legged Sadhus from Texas
Winter 2002 -- Back-to-Back Black Book Covers -- All Things Cusackian & "Meant Work"
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