[NEWSFLASH!!! It is now midnight, November 12th. At the crack of dawn manana, I fly to Seoul, Korea, for ten days, then go on to Shanghai, China, for five days. Thanks to my gorgeous and talented friend Jamie Rose, I am tagging along as an embedded journalist with CSUN's (Cal State Northridge's) theatrical production of the ancient Korean folktale "Shim Ch'ong." They've got a wild cast, with students and professionals, Koreans and Americans, even a violinist/aerialist! I'll be generating stories galore from over there, so will have much to update when I return. This gig came out of the blue at just the right time, so calendar's spotty this month. I'll be back the 29th of November. Thanksgiving in Shanghai! Until then...]
POST-GOOBERNATORIAL ELECTION: I'm updating this on October 9th. I was in shock all of the 8th. Please join MoveOn.org and start your repentance, or continue your battling for political sanity, now. I can't really summon the words for our state's current post-mortem, but this email below, currently making the rounds and forwarded to me by the fabulous diva Ann Magnuson, sums up some of the horror:
Dear California,
I used to have this friend in high school. She wasn't a slut, exactly; she
was just really needy. And whenever some hot new jock guy would breeze
into town, she'd think, "Yes, he's the one! He'll fix everything
that's wrong with me!" Then she'd throw herself at him in the most
demeaning way possible.
That always worked out well for her. Jesus. What happened, California? Did
your dad fuck you up that much?
I take back all those things that I took back that I said about you,
California. You are a state of stupid self-hating fruitcakes. But we're
still concerned. We'll build the political equivalent of a battered
women's shelter for you when your hot and totally dysfunctional love
affair with Arnold is over.
And now who's gonna help you out when Arnold's beating you senseless in
the middle of the night? You think Nevada gives a shit? Christ. It's tough
love time. Let's never speak again.
Your concerned -- and really embarrassed -- ex-friend,
New York State
______________________________________________________
EVERYBODY GET OUT AND VOTE TODAY, OCTOBER 7TH!!! EVERY SINGLE VOTE COUNTS!!! Click on this link to find your polling location: http://moveon.org/pac/recall/materials.html
Do you want the Terminator to be your next governor? Please. Please please please. Don't let it happen. Vote No on Recall, No on Prop 54, then place a protest vote, ideally for a dem -- I know Davis is a disappointment.
Some of you who know my book GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED-UP CHICK, will recall a chapter entitled, "Two Minutes and Counting" featuring a star named Helmut Grosskopf. Hmmm. He bears a startling resemblance to Arnie Schwarzenegger, with his fascistic undertones, bodybuilding bravado, and inappropriate behavior with women on the set of the sci-fi film featured in the chapter. Check out pages 32-36 (same pages in hardcover and paperback). Hmmmm, how could that be?!!!!!??????????!!! The fun thing is, the protagonist has the last laugh in that encounter. WHO WILL HAVE THE LAST LAUGH TODAY?!!! GET OUT AND VOTE TO PREVENT THIS DISASTER!!!!!!
Let me post one of my favorite poets here, Jeffrey McDaniel (ALIBI SCHOOL, THE FORGIVENESS PARADE, etc.), weighing in in his inimitable style about what's going down, because he says it so well:
Jeffrey McDaniel's TOTALL RECALL BLOG:
"This whole recall thing is
really spiraling out of control. It’s a shattered light bulb of an idea.
Don’t get me incorrecto. I’m no fan of Gray Davis. The guy is a
schmuck. And he’s laid a big fart in terms of business, got stuck
wearing the dunce cap in that Enron-manufactured electricity crisis, and
he’s all greased up and handcuffed to the prison guards. And he got
played on the casino-pay-no-tax agreement he signed with the tribes, (and
in the process became the first pale skin in U.S. history to get snookered
by an Indian in a business deal—though I like to imagine it was part of
some covert civil rights agenda he’s slipping into action.)
Anyway I think there needs to be
another option on the recall ballot. Like if you vote no on the recall,
you should get to vote on variations of
But the other major candidates
aren’t that much better. Even after Bill Simon Said Drop out of the
Election and Arianna Huff and Puffington said “Hasta La Pasta”,
there’s still a lot of jacked-up suckers. That’s right. I’m talking
about the big fella—Mr. Ham and Schwarzenegger. Wouldn’t this goliath
be better off in the Bush administration? He could take Rumsfeld’s job.
They could send his big rippling ass over to
I know for me it freaks me out.
I get suddenly jealous of other countries that elect playwrights (Havel)
or intellectuals (Allende) to public office. Here it always seems to be
actors who get elected. And while I dig movies and respect a good
performance, when you get down to it, an actor’s job is to pretend, and
to recite the words that someone has written for him, in a way that the
director says they must be delivered. So I guess my question is this—if
we elect this gorilla andoid, who exactly are we electing? Who is
off-screen? Who is feeding him the words? Who is yelling action and cut?
Let’s just hope Cruz
Bustamante busts a move to
SO GET OUT AND VOTE!!! POLLS ARE OPEN FROM 7AM TO 8PM!!!
______________________________________________________
PUBLICATIONS, CURRENT AND UPCOMING:
Just finished the first essay on the India trip, called "DEATH IS NOT PING-PONG" for the premiere issue of new bicoastal NY-LA lit mag SWINK, helmed by the lovely and talented Leelila Strogov. I'll be joining great line-up of contributors, including Chris Offutt, Lisa Glatt, Geoff Dyer & others...will keep you posted when it comes out so you can all support a new bicoastal lit mag and get the premiere issue.
Their online editor, Jeremy Horelick, a former hyper & hyper-talented student of mine, writes: "Swink is a new biannual, bi-coastal magazine featuring fiction, poetry, essays and interviews. We are currently accepting outstanding submissions for our debut issue, as well as our online theme issue, 'Lying, Cheating & Stealing.' Anything relating to the idea of deception, whether fictitious, semi-fictitious or God's honest truth, is fair game. Please include your work as an attachment to submissions@swinkmag.com, and write 'online submission' in the subject box. Keep it under 2,500 words unless you're sure you're William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. There are no cash prizes for the online edition, but winners will receive a year-long subscription to the magazine. For more information, check out www.swinkmag.com."
For now, below is a 1,500 word (or so) teaser (that might change as I go through edits) from the opening of the (app. 3,800 word) India essay that will appear in a section called PEREGRINATIONS in, I think, the print version:
DEATH IS NOT PING-PONG
"One morning in Varanasi...wait. Just a sec. Deep breath. If you too couldn’t prick your own finger for high school bio, you’ll forgive.
*
One morning in Varanasi, I find myself at the ManiKarnika burning ghat staring at the cremations in the misty, predawn light. Seven pyres burn simultaneously. One body per pyre -- minimum 200 kg of costly sandalwood -- in various stages of fiery destruction. The pyres are set up directly on the steps leading down to the Ganges River where everybody walks. Wood is piled everywhere: on the steps, in the alleyways, on barges roped to the shorebanks. The incline is so steep, the pyres seem to be pitched on a charred black slope of soot. The Brahmin (priest) caste fire takes the highest position on the bank; the Vaishya (merchant) caste fire is located just below; the Kshatriya (warrior) caste fire, situated to the side, is where they burn soldiers and policemen; and the Shudra (peasant) caste fire is set up in the lowest point, near the sludge of the river bank. The main fire, situated under the Brahmin fire, has supposedly been burning for 5000 years.
An occasional white bone plays peek-a-boo in the soot before a dog snatches it up. The cheapest cremation runs at least 1000 rupees, which is a fortune for most families. If the mourners do not have enough money for a big enough pyre to burn their dead to ash, a man’s chest might remain, or a woman’s hips. If the families are really poor, the unburned corpses get heaved directly into the river. Usually workers toss all leftover bones into the Ganges, or Ganga as the natives call it. Children shout and spring from the barges, play catch, splash into the water while dogs and birds fight over the bones. Though most spectators keep a respectful distance, sitting on the steps a few dozen yards above the karmic conflagration, a few people and children and cows mill around within a few feet of the flaming bodies. They mingle with the white-clad relatives of the dead, the lowest caste doms who tend the sacred fire, and higher-ranked choudhury. No one seems to mind. But taking pictures is forbidden.
I have had my first chew of paan, betel leaves, otherwise I couldn’t stomach this. Even so, my stomach now is like a motorcade, doing somersaults on a tsunami wave. We are no longer linked. We are watching this together. There is Stomach and here is Madam.
Flames play on the surface of the murky Ganges, where a few lotus-flower candles still drift, tiny winking lights like a flotilla of eyes. As a child, I doodled single eyes in the margins of every notebook. Did I think I was Egyptian? I have a death-denying issue that needs confronting.
Oily blue-gray smoke billows up from the pyres, drifts steadily, and stings my eyes. Following another female tourist’s cue, I pull my dupatta scarf around my mouth and nose to block the ashes and mute the smell of melting flesh. With my cracked and bleeding fingers I hold the dupatta to my face. This January is the coldest on record, says the Times of India. Even with a first layer of silk underwear, then a thick navy blue cotton salwar kameez ensemble, Punjabi style for women -- a shapeless knee-length tunic worn over balloon pants -- and a high-tech, wind-resistant, water-retardant, lightweight, thermal top-of-the-line wilderness adventure jacket, I am shivering. My skin is raw and thirsty, splitting down the seams of my ragdoll body. Ever since Delhi, I’ve had a nasty, racking cough.
Since arriving in India, I’ve probably aged a decade. Call me a crone, a crab apple doll. A teenage girl committed suicide in the province of Guwahati by hanging herself with her own dupatta. They are versatile accessories. Suicide is considered a bad death. Don’t do it. You will probably be reborn as a cockroach, or a wood tick.
Instructions for a proper cremation: Pile logs. Immerse the body in the Ganga. After ablution, place the body on top of the logs. Pile more logs over the body. Light the fire with a smoking straw bundle. Stand back and enjoy. Enjoy that it is not you, yet. Though that would be incorrect, Western thinking.
George Plimpton, who recently passed away, was, among other things, the Fireworks Commissioner of New York. He would have appreciated this ancient Hindu ritual, I think, and seen the possibilities. Human pinwheels. Flaming femurs. Flying rib-spinners. Exploding bottle sockets.
It’s the betel leaves speaking. The red juice awakens the third eye.
Groups of chandals, Untouchables, hold the bamboo stretchers where the corpses lie shrouded in shiny-bright gold, red, white or orange silk or linen depending on the age and gender of the deceased, while the male members of the families stand nearby in a patient cluster. Often the families pass around a ceremonial bowl of bhang, local slang for marijuana, to give them courage. The familiar term ganja, coined by Indian slaves in the Caribbean, is rarely used. You will not see any tears. For Hindus, dying or being cremated in Varanasi means a shot at moksha, a chance to break out of the dreaded cycle of death and rebirth. If sorrow is demonstrated, this will adversely affect the karma of the dead and hamper their passage to nirvana. That’s why women aren’t allowed. They cry. They are sad. Last year, I heard one grieving widow tried to commit sati by throwing herself on her husband’s burning pyre, even though sati is mostly outlawed now. Widows don’t have it so great in India. The government promises them compensation, then never pays. Often they end up working as servants, or they drift to Varanasi to beg and die.
Even with the dupatta mask, the sick-sweet smell of burning human flesh, sandalwood, incense, sewage, cow dung, garbage, river stench, chai and soap curls around my nose and mouth, then tunnels in. It is a brain-burst, a peacock tail unfolding into scent. Inescapable.
ManiKarnika is the most popular burning ghat, averaging two hundred and fifty cremations per day. Its rates are cheaper than Harishchandra, the more ancient and original burning ghat, located at the opposite end of the holy city of Varanasi. I have never seen a cremation before. Never been to a public funeral. You couldn’t move me with a life-sized pair of pliers.
Now things really get surreal.
A young half-naked boy pulls a primitive toy -- a piece of wood tied with string -- along the sloping, smoking ghat past the burning pyres, giggling as he runs. I wonder what he imagines that piece of wood to be, and whether it is fashioned from the same costly sandalwood that is used to burn the corpses. Maybe the piece of wood is a ram with blue-painted horns galloping along the ghats, or a yogi with his beard on fire. Maybe it is a corpse speeding toward nirvana. If this were the States, he’d be told to take that toy and go upstairs to his room to play, why don’t you, or go be a good boy and watch TV. But you would never see this in America anyway. Who ever heard of a public cremation? Barbaric. A lynching, okay. A police beating. A massacre. A death camp fronting as a mission, sure. But a public cremation? You go too far.
The piece of wood stutters, bone-clattering over the steps leading to the Ganga. There is a snap. I realize it is the crack of a rib, bursting into oblivion.
"Madam, you are alone?" Yes. Everyone knows if you want to torch old scaffolding, you travel solo. I am here for internal arson. Don’t touch me.
A moment of longing. I watch it rise like a leaf caught in wind. Walter Kistler’s poem "Standing Near the Ghats Along the Ganges" comes to me. ‘And who is it, friend,/and sometimes ghostly lover, who is standing?/I see that you are also a flowing over,/just as the burning of the dead body/is here a flame of bright anguish,/brought forward, then cracking, bursting/into ash, gone without hesitation/into the sky of continuous beginning."
Hours pass. Bodies burn, disappear, children play, we watch. All is calm. You could wave a Vedic sword in my face and I’d shrug. A strange peacefulness suffuses me. I am a human lava lamp, all viscous oblong blobbing and oily globulating.
I am also high from the accidental psychotropic cocktail of cough syrup and the anti-malarial drug Malorene. Woozy. My head is now full of space snakes, coiling. Images of Shiva in a cannabis trance bob in my head, mimic the lapping of the Ganga. I shrink back from that water, lest I die from one drop. Has it already touched me? Have I already, unwittingly, drunk it? Is my skin turned shiny blue-black like the destroyer god I see plastered everywhere in this ruinous city of light?
In some posters, Shiva wears a moon diadem on his head. His long matted hair is shrouded by night sky, infinite space. If I wore a diadem, people would think, there goes a middle-aged woman who used to wear pink tutus and tiaras in her youth, who cannot let go.
When I leave, sometime between today and tomorrow, I spit betel juice against a crumbling wall decorated with cow dung. I make a red splashy stain and sign it with my initials."
______________________________________________________
On 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 (OUT NOW!), 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, just click on the previous Update of September 2003 (zoom down to bottom of page) and read the text in full until they tell me I have to remove it.
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 chosen by Susie Bright to be in BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2004 along with people like Jerry Stahl. Comes out spring 2004.
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.)"
October 7, 2003
Dear all,
Mid-way through the course for excellent www.mediabistro.com, called Bootcamp: 12-Week Novelist. That's right -- the participants write a novel in 12 weeks.
A moment of thought for all the many amazing ones who've passed recently, from Johnny Cash to George Plimpton and the many others. Each one was a blow. There's a framed photo of Johnny Cash that appears, improbably, in the carnivorous story I wrote "Meat-Eaters of Marrakesh" you can find on www.barcelonareview.com. The Man in Black. I never met him, but he affected me profoundly with his presence, his voice and songs, his ethos. Hearing his voice reminds me to keep honest. George Plimpton I did have the pleasure of meeting, and would monopolize him for some minutes whenever I saw him at various literary functions. He was one of the best conversationalists I've ever met. Full of life, energy. We talked bird watching in Africa (he was a big bird watcher), the Robert Kennedy assassination (he was there), the Playboy Mansion, and scotch. He used to carry around his own glass and bottle. More fun than people half his age. Once I watched him chat up and seduce a couple of nubile knockouts at the Sky Bar. They didn't know who he was. But even in the ridiculousness of L.A., he was able to utterly charm them. These are big losses, reminders to live fully, and venerate those who did, and who gave and left behind so much to enrich and nourish us.
Contest postings to come. We need all the heart we can get.
More news to come. Update on erotica gig, etc. But want to make sure everyone votes today.
Peace,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
September 2003: Lusty Divorcees!!! A Different Drumbeat -- LA Times essay on Topanga
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