Jewtown, Fort Cochin

Travel Blog, , , ,

Earlier today I came across a site — a blog, where you can submit your story in six sentences. Here’s the link: Six Sentences and below my submission.

Jewtown, Fort Cochin
We found our way to Jewtown in Fort Cochin, Kerala, India where the street is lined with old shops that have names like Sarah Jacob’s Taylor Shop, but the Jews are long gone. There’s a synagogue built in the 1500’s — the oldest in India, now a tourist attraction – outside, white stone with a large window shaped like a star of David, inside not so different from any old shul with a pulpit, a rich blue curtain with gold lettering covering the ark and hiding the torah, a plaque with the shma, another shaped like the tablets with the ten commandments, a chandelier, an upstairs women’s section. The tourists come everyday except Saturday, but no one is left who knows anything about the Jews. It’s a Sunday at the end of Diwali, and a lot of Indians are traveling and enjoying the holiday, so that day many of our fellow tourists are Indians. My partner and I are trying to remember our Hebrew, pointing and reading the shma when a young woman in a yellow sari asks me about the words. I say them aloud first in Hebrew and then I translate, explain the context, and find myself giving an impromptu tour pointing out where the women sat and why, discussing the mystery behind the curtain, that the rabbi was not a priest just a teacher, and how the torah would be carried around and the men would have a chance to kiss it.

Famous in Denmark

true story, , , , ,

So last week (1/10) I wrote about discovering that a story I wrote a lifetime ago was being read in a high school class in Denmark.

Now I’ve heard back from the teacher:

“Dear Marion!
How strange that I should receive an email from you. Yes, I can understand that you must have been surprised to see your story as part of a Danish final year in advanced English curriculum Way back I attended a university course at South Danish University about
short stories. Your text was there among many others. I got hold of The Quarterly where it was printed and I have used it many times in various contexts. Both when the theme was “Man and Nature” and as an example of a postmodern text. It must have touched a special nerve in me, the description of the good dog that gradually turns brutal, wild, and repulsive. Also the beginning with the allusion to the retarded, not-so-charming looking sibling in the smiling family photo, I have always found full of teaching possibilities.
So the fact that I have not grown tired of it is a sign that it is a very good story, indeed. I will keep your letter and read it to my English class. They will enjoy imagining their 60- year-old teacher as a backpacker, picking up a weatherbeaten short story somewhere far away from Odense.

Best wishes
Karen Dickmeiss
Odense Katedralskole”

I’m going to work on a story about this. Next week’s topic at The Moth (www.themoth.com) is going to be HOPE. So I’m going to tell a story for everyone out there who’s waiting to hear back about that manuscript, hoping that the boss will say a kind word, waiting for some sign that the lover appreciates you or that your familly “gets” you, or that the work you do every day actually has some meaning. Because all this time I’m thinking I’m obscure, I’m being read in Denmark. How fucking cool is that!

Passage to India (Part I)

Travel Blog

Back in October, I visited India. I shoulda been blogging then, but wasn’t. I have a few stories to tell which I’ll get to eventually. For now here’s one:

We arrived late in Fort Cochin, Kerala after a long complex day of travel including a delayed flight and the loss of a guidebook which made us grumpy. We found our way to a homestay – an Indian B&B without the breakfast. There was the requisite eccentric proprietor and a small second-hand bookstore attached. My better half picked up a couple of books while we were registering. One, he knew I would like. It was about a young, uneducated Indian who goes on a game show called, Who Wants to Win a Billion? The concept inspired of course by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. (I live in NY where Millionaire is filmed, and I’ve auditioned several times always passing the written test, but never convincing the producers that I’ve got that certain je ne sais quoi that they’re looking for.) The book, Q&A was written by Vikras Swarup, a diplomat and first time novelist.

It proved to be a much better guide to Indian history and culture than the missing Lonely Planet, featuring as it did a map into the Indian psyche and page-turning adventures in Delhi, Mumbai, Agra and points in between. Through the Dickensian tale of Ram Mohammed Thomas, I learned about the cruel exploitation of orphans, child prostitution, conflict between Hindus and Moslems, war with Pakistan, gangsters, aging Bollywood stars and the dangers of train travel.

Of course the book has been made into a movie with a new title and a completely revamped plot. Now it’s known as Slumdog Millionaire and even the protagonist’s name has been changed. The movie is entertaining, even moving, but ultimately forgettable. I will never forget riding the packed train from Kerala to Goa during Diwali, sharing cashews with a group of young men who occasionally passed the time with some a cappella harmonizing in I know not what dialect, as I raced through Ram’s exploits and and learned how he saved the girl from the dacoit.

Saturday, January 10. 2009 Finding Myself on the Web

true story

Googling oneself — masturbation or just another way to say: I’m a self-indulgent narcissist?

I was awaiting the results of the 3-Day Novel Contest as though it were a biopsy, obsessively searching out all links that would help me decipher when the winner would be announced. Jan Underwood, who previously won for Day Shift Werewolf , said in a podcast that she got an email New Year’s Day which made me question the veracity of the Contest’s official Tweet.

Before 11/4, I was constantly bouncing from Huff Post to Wonkette, Politico and of course Nate Silver, as though by visiting often enough, I would influence the outcome which would be determined based on the number of hits (Luckily this may have been the case). Afterwards I applied the same magical thinking to the 3-Day – like it might increase my chances if I checked the website and googled early and often. (Except of course the Election delusion was shared by millions who wanted the same outcome whereas with the contest every one of the 500 suckers who paid their 50 bucks wants to win.)

I kept thinking about how my life would change if I won, how the novella I’d submitted might be really good, how there was almost no chance of marketing a novella unless I won, how I’m destined to never win anything, how the producers of Who Wants to Be Millionaire just weren’t that into me and I never got my shot to sit in the hot seat across from Meredith, how I showed early promise but let it slip away and time is running out and maybe HRT would be worth it even with the cancer risk…

And there I was distracting myself on the Internet. Out for a metaphorical drive past a place I used to live. It’s not surfing. How the hell is it surfing? It’s driving. It’s aimless driving with free gas on a highway with infinite exits. I typed my name, Pogo (the name of a story I’d written over 20 years ago – my entire published oeuvre) and The Quarterly (the legendary literary magazine in which it was published – known primarily because of its famous editor.)

Previously I’d done this and brought up links to used copies on Amazon, maybe Powell’s and a blogger or two who was looking for old issues.

But somewhere on the second screen there was this:
• [MS WORD] Undervisningsbeskrivelse
Fra The American Way – an Introduction, (Prentice-Hall 1984) Kearny and Crandall, The Rugged Individualist artikel. Marion Stein, Pogo, The Quarterly 1989 …

Danish is sort of like English with extra syllables, plus enough of the doc was in English for me to figure out that it was some kind of syllabus and in a unit entitled: Nature versus Man, in a course with readings from Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, there I am – or rather there’s that story I wrote so long ago featured in a literary mag that featured writers who were also up and coming but unlike me, actually arrived.

Google translation clarified that it was a secondary school. The document was to let parents know what the kids were reading. ¡Fijate! — as they say down south. How did the teacher even come across that story printed twenty years ago in a magazine with a circulation in the thousands?

I found my way to the school’s website and the personnel page. There was a thumbnail of the teacher – graying curly hair, forties. But I imagined her in her twenties, maybe during the gap year that those social welfare types get, trekking through Asia with various friends and lovers. In Chiang Mai, she stays at a backpackers hotel run by a German and his unstereotypically assertive Thai wife. Her friends are out hiking, but she’s getting over the effects of some bad seafood or maybe Ecstasy and sits the day out. There’s a bookcase with free exchange and a rooftop patio with comfy chairs and a startling mountain view. Nothing in Danish except Lonely Planet, but that’s okay. She loves English literature. She picks up a weather beaten copy of The Quarterly, Issue 9 and starts to read. There are a couple of pieces she really likes, so she holds onto the book and it makes it’s way to her home. She moves a few times and it always winds up on her bookshelf. Then one day in the late summer before the kids come back to school she’s working on the curriculum for her English class and comes up with an idea. There’s a story she remembers reading years ago that would fit in. Where was it again? She goes to her shelf and picks through several English language anthologies. Oh there it is! Oh yes, that will do.

So it isn’t exactly lunch with Scorcese and a discussion of my screenplay. It isn’t winning the 3 Day or even getting my shot on Millionaire, but it’s something. Somewhere out there, this story was floating like a note in a bottle and it was found, and miraculously, I found out that it was found, and in a moment of everyday despair, I was rescued.

God I love the Internet.

BTW, I emailed the teacher to ask her how she really got the story and why she picked it. I’m waiting to hear back.