Cambodia’s Visceral Landscape: Drugs, Sex, Writers, Etc
Rauan: Why did you come back ???
Greg: I won’t have an answer to that question that I’ll like, at least not until I find some stability back here. Cambodia’s beautiful, warm, welcoming, collective, community-driven, adventurous, and so on. There are many magnets of ideas pulling you to stay, and you meet so many people who have stayed and after talking to them and hearing their story, you know, it makes sense. “Why go back to THAT?!” they say, referencing that capitalist hyper-consumerist society they once knew. One truthful reason I pulled away from the Kingdom of Wonder was to feel that reverse culture shock everybody talks about. That’s the selfish end. I also wanted to graduate from UW in person rather than digitally (we need to harness our tangible humanity when we can, no?), and I wanted to see friends and family, both in Maine and in Seattle, who I missed dearly. And Ethiopian food. There’s always that.
RK: You told me, in person, that it’s a great place for Westerners to visit. And then you mentioned Sex, Drugs and Food. So, let’s start with Sex. Can you please tell us about the sex culture and your personal experiences therewith?? (plz be as thorough as you can. gay/straight/trans. animals??)
my friend Greg Bem (poet, photographer, performance artist) spent about 9 months in Cambodia. He came back I guess for the adventure. And that’s why, I suppose, he’ll return. Also, we had Indian Buffet recently: Goat curry (which seems terribly mundane, in a way, though I can’t begin to tell you how crazy good it tasted), Tandoori Chicken and a bunch of desserts: Kheer, Kheer, Kheer !!!
me w/ desert / regaled w/ Cambodia
GB: There are a lot of stereotypes about Cambodia–Phnom Penh in particular–born from the even wilder situation in the ’90s. Certain things, like laws, for example, have been created to narrow down the dirtiest, nastiest side of the wild, but you can still find the wild in all the dark recesses. I found myself following in the shadow of Burroughs and Bowles and other brutal, masculine READ MORE >
25 Points: On the Road
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Penguin, 1999
304 pages / $17.00 buy from Amazon
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1. First thing I read by Kerouac was On the Road.
2. After that I read Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Mexico City Blues and a lot of other Beat shit (the most obscure of which was this poet Bob Kaufman who didn’t write his poems but walked up to ppl in cars at stop lights and spouted them then and there. After JFK died he went into a 10 year silence. When it ended the first words he spoke were: “To all those ships that never sailed” and then some more. I got that quote transcribed on my iPod. The iPod broke last summer.)
3. Big Sur is my favorite. The last few lines – that turn, that blink – I want it to be true and I think it is.
4. I first read On the Road my junior year in high school. It was just what I needed. I was bored. I called it depression at the time, but really I was just bored. I wanted to get my kicks.
5. When I got to college and read more “literature,” I grew wary of my early infatuation with the Beats. It seemed juvenile. I was eager to reread so I could dismiss it.
6. Then I reread it my junior year in college and I still liked it.
7. Dean is a crazy motherfucker.
8. I want to “sweat” like Dean. Of all the words I got from Kerouac (“blow,” “ball that jack,” “kicks”) I think sweat is my favorite. Dean gets going a hundred miles an hour just sitting there talking, scheming, licking his lips.
9. I’m not sweating. When I do sweat I don’t sweat for the reason Dean sweats. I sweat because its hot out or I’m nervous.
10. On the Road is very much of its moment: cars, San Francisco, the attempt to lay naked the psyche.
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September 2nd, 2014 / 1:15 pm
September 2nd, 2014 / 1:15 pm
Venus & Jupiter: The Conjunction of Brown & Powell
Frederick Douglass argued against John Brown’s plan to attack the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Jacob Lawrence
One hundred and fifty years ago, a man named John Brown was put to death by the state. He was not gunned down in the street, nor was he unarmed. He was arrested by Robert E. Lee for leading a raid on the national armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He had planned to arm America’s slaves with a hundred thousand guns. He was a white man, a preacher. Newspapers called him “a madman.” In most pictures he had “crazy eyes.” Abe Lincoln declared him “insane.” One thing’s for sure, he was mad. His rage boiled over.
American poets compared Brown’s life to a meteor that tore across the sky as he sat in jail, very nearly bisecting the interim of his conviction and execution. Emerson called him a saint, “whose martyrdom, if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Thoreau said, “When a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them by a whole body . . . the spectacle is a sublime one.” Both had attended his speeches and probably knew about the raid before it happened. Years later, Melville wrote, “the streaming beard is shown / (Weird John Brown), / The meteor of the war.” Whitman, who was there, put him in Leaves of Grass: “YEAR of meteors! brooding year! / I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia; / (I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d; / I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)” The actor John Wilkes Booth was there, too. He wrote his piece in Lincoln’s blood.
Even Victor Hugo, in exile, called for Brown’s pardon. “There is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel,” he said, “and that is Washington killing Spartacus.” READ MORE >
Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
by Stephen King
Scribner, June 2014
448 pages / $30 Buy from Amazon
Like many writers my age (31), I probably wouldn’t be one if it weren’t for Stephen King. At 16, finding the idea of short story writing woefully unambitious, my early attempts at novels were thinly-masked Stephen King impersonations. Based on the malodorous work that turns up in self-publishing, writers’ workshops, and slush piles, I’m not alone in that my first fictional efforts reeked of The King.
His influence isn’t necessarily a bad one. King became a best-selling author thanks to his expert pacing, gift for metaphor, wry sense of humour, and a number of intangible talents. Adam Ross and Justin Cronin are recent devotees who demonstrate that even elite ‘literary’ writers can benefit (both financially and creatively) when they borrow from King’s bag of tricks.
The most important way that King aided in my development is that his work has always been littered with literary and cultural references. (In recent years, he’s been obsessed with Philip Roth, comparing the reception of his own work to Roth’s in essays, and frequently bringing him up in fiction.) In this way, King inadvertently sabotaged my love for him. He’d reference Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer, and their writing would end up on the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom. With all those major works waiting to be read, I found myself in a situation described by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Magic Window, a short volume that celebrates the contents of his book collection.
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before.”
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September 1st, 2014 / 10:00 am
September 1st, 2014 / 10:00 am