Mother The girl is 18 when she leaves her village in Yugoslavia for Ireland, there to attempt to join the order of Loreto, nuns who work among the poor and dying in India. She got the idea of India from a series of letters a Yugoslav priest stationed in Calcutta wrote, excerpts of which were […]
Harold Jaffe’s Dispatches from India – November 6, 2015
Beat Hindu Rereading Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals. With his reticent longtime Harpo Marx lookalike lover Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg spent nearly two years in India in the early 60s, much of it in Kashi and Bengal. He inscribed that sequence in a delirious prose-poetry filled with misspellings and awkward grammar to convey immediacy and zero editing. […]
Harold Jaffe’s Dispatches from India – November 4, 2015
Sexual Prayer If cut, the highly-endowed ascetic bleeds semen Walking near one of the burning ghats in crazily trafficked Kashi, the Hindu holy city, I see a resting cow in the middle of the tumult with a scrawny little dog, paws extended, sleeping on the cow’s back. Sacred, underfed cow / ownerless underfed mutt. That […]
Harold Jaffe’s Dispatches from India – November 2, 2015
Caste / Color I watch the dark-skinned girl brush her lustrous hair in a littered corner of the roof. Three or four minutes away from the drudgery she was birthed into. She is the “untouchable” cleaner of toilets for the wealthy Brahmin family that owns the large apartment across from my boarding house. She and […]
Harold Jaffe’s Dispatches from India – November 1, 2015
Gherao Late for breakfast, head of the long table, alone. Paratha, chutney, bananas, papaya, spiced chai. An old man in a white lungi and tattered white scarf wanders in chanting Ram-Ram-Ram while dusting the furnishings. I think of Gandhi whose last word as he was shot to death by an avenging Brahmin was Ram. Rama, […]
Editor-in-Chief Harold Jaffe has announced his selections as Pushcart Prize nominees for their texts in FI’s Fluids issue (# 48).
R. Sebastian Bennett – “MY COKE” Kalisha Buckhanon – “Word” Dani Heinemeyer – “The Great Flood” E. Kelly – “Stealing Time” Shane Roeschlein – “Punk Rock is Dead / Art/Dissent / Letter / Strike” KM Seehaus – “Jesus Loves the Little Children”
“Duende” by Erica Spriggs
Since Federico Garcia Lorca reconstituted the meaning of duende, defining it for a new generation of artists, the word no longer fills the mind with goblins. In “Play and Theory of the Duende,” Garcia Lorca states, “the duende is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept . . […]
Harold Jaffe: “Hair” and “Lino 1,” excerpts from the novel BRANDO BLEEDS
Hair There was Lino Ventura, Wally Cox, Satch Sanders, Christian Marquand. My detractors called them toadies and maybe they were. Hell, I was a fucking matinee idol so there’s going to be hangers-on. But they were also my friends, until they died or betrayed me. Or I betrayed thembecause of some mood I was […]
WIPs Conversation: Harold Jaffe on his work in progress BRANDO BLEEDS
Harold Jaffe is the author of 23 volumes of fiction, novels, docufiction, and essays, most recently Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, OD, Paris 60, Revolutionary Brain, Othello Blues, and Induced Coma: 50 & 100 Word Stories. His books have been translated in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Cuba, Turkey, Romania and elsewhere. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of […]
KPBS Interview with Editor-In-Chief Harold Jaffe on Induced Coma
Hal Jaffe will be interviewed about his new volume Induced Coma on KPBS radio (89.5) on Friday, August 19 from 12:40-1 and on public TV at a date to be announced. Tune in, turn on, but don’t quite drop out.