Justin Taylor—
The Rumpus has got a piece by the great Jim Shepard at the top of their page right now- An Appreciation of John Hawkes. Apparently, Shepard was a student of Hawkes’s at Brown. Aside from painting a fascinating picture of Hawkes, I really feel like Shepard is getting at something fundamental and urgent about the way that effective writing instruction functions, the inextricable dimension of personality, the deeply human nature of the whole enterprise. I said as much in the comments, which by the way have so far garnered responses from two other former Hawkes students: James Robison and Rick Moody (whose first story collection, The Ring Brightest of Angels Around Heaven, is dedicated to Hawkes), and the Brown-but-not-Hawkes-alum Shya Scanlon. Seriously. Go read this piece. Then order a copy of Travesty.
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Justin Taylor—
I focus on surfaces, since learning that Diego’s dying. On shallow stuff. I colect photos of handsome strangers, and endless gigabytes of porn. The scenes I like best lack plots and characters and sets—just boys in bedrooms, tearing each other up, snarling, cursing, savage. The perfection of pornography is that no one owes anybody anything afterwards, there’s no human contact, no messiness, shallowness. Sex for cowards. – from “Sex, Death, Facebook” at The Rumpus. Also, don’t forget the Rumpus Sunday Book Review supplement.
What’s Up, Rumpus? Looking for Funny Women–PLUS–Stephen Elliott Explains Why He Writes
OPEN CALL: The Rumpus is looking for funny women:
Elissa Bassist talks about the under-representation of women in humor. Her consideration of this trend happily includes links to all seven (only seven!) female-authored Shouts & Murmurs columns of the past year. After you’ve read about the problem, you, too, will likely be hankering for a solution. Well, be your own solution! That is, if you’re a woman, and if you’re funny. Read the Guidelines for Funny Women Submissions to the Daily Rumpus . It says the deadline is September 15th, and then the “additional deadline” is never, because you should never stop writing. I’m not sure if that means this Funny Women thing will recur at Rumpus or if it just means you should love and believe in yourself–but stop bothering Elissa about it after September. Seems like the easiest thing to do would be to write something funny now, and not have to worry about it later. But that’s just me–and I don’t qualify.
Also, this is less by women, and less funny, then above, but it’s still really good. From “Why I Write,” by Stephen Elliott (click thru quote to essay).
Uncategorized / 21 Comments
August 24th, 2009 / 10:09 am
August 24th, 2009 / 10:09 am
Ken Baumann—
The Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers, who I think is a charitable, talented guy. It’s sad that there’s such a pervasive Hate Eggers club out there, existing outside of artistic criticism.
On advertising
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru5gTxAy0L0
The Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott (excerpted introduction to their first monthly Rumpus) at the Make Out Room in San Francisco last night.
Commentary after the break.
Stephen Elliott reacts to BEA
Stephen Elliott just got back from BEA (BookExpo America, the “largest publishing event in North America”), and he wrote an essay about it.
I couldn’t agree with this more:
But here’s the thing, I don’t care about those books. I don’t care about the publishing industry that’s concerned with cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. And I don’t believe the people that say they’re publishing celebrity memoirs so they can publish great literature…
READ MORE >
Rumpus/Giant/6word Contest: WE HAVE A WINNER
Congratulations to JENNIFER, for her winning entry in yesterday’s contest. Here’s what she wrote-
I have always been my opposite.
[Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides]
Runners up, honorable mentions & other details after the jump, but first: TO ALL THOSE OF YOU WHO DID NOT WIN / ENTER: WHY NOT COME TO THE EVENT ANYWAY? TICKETS ARE STILL AVAILABLE, AND THE LINE-UP KEEPS GETTING BIGGER AND MORE AWESOME. THIS MORNING THEY ANNOUNCED THE ADDITION OF AMANDA PALMER FROM THE DRESDEN DOLLS.
What’s Up, Rumpus?
Well, let’s see, shall we?
“A Faithful Grope in the Dark” – Joshua Mohr writes about trying–and failing–to place his first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a major publisher, and then finding a happy home at Two Dollar Radio (publishers of Rudolph Wurlitzer and the new Gary Indiana).
I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell. “It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.
“The Last Book I Loved” is an ongoing Rumpus feature. Right now they’ve got David Ebershoff on City of Theives. Recently they also had friend-of-Giant (or is that Giant Friend?) Kevin Sampsell on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Lincoln Michel on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, and person-who-is-me Justin Taylor on Bleak House.
Also, the latest installment of Peter Orner’s column devoted to the short story, The Lonely Voice, is about John Edgar Wideman.
Oh Also too, if you live in NYC, know that the Rumpus is coming. The NYC event, You Are Not Alone, is May 30. You can get more info about the event (Eugene Mirman, Anthony Swofford, Amy Tan, the list goes one…) here, or check back in with Giant early next week when we’ll be giving some tickets to it with some sort of contest that’s so simple and fun and right-on that I still haven’t figured out what it will be.
The Rumpus on Shane Jones and Stanley Crawford
Justin Dobbs tipped us off that The Rumpus had published last week a nice review of Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. Jovanovic writes:
Jones makes use of ambiguity and possibility in the fabulist tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, but Light Boxes should not be considered a magic-realist novel. The sidereal reality of Thaddeus and The Solution is not simply one where magical elements are introduced into ordinary settings, like the man vomiting rabbits into flowerpots in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (though Thaddeus does vomit ice cubes)—in Jones’s novel there are few touchstones to the world as we know it. Light Boxes partakes in the traditions of folklore, archetypal myth, and oral history, a pedigree reflected in its images and descriptions. Clouds have legs and shoulders. They are shaped like a hand and can fall apart like wet paper.
Dobbs’ email reminds me that I need to read The Rumpus more, because likely I’ll find good stuff over there, such as this blog post by Deb Olin Unferth on Stanley Crawford’s The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.
If I had to make a small, partial statement here about book reviewing, I’d say this: I find that the most effective reviews (those that affect me most, I mean) tend to be the reviews that make me remember how much I enjoyed reading a certain book (for some reason, I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t yet read?). And I’m using ‘reviews’ here in the loosest sense. Jovanovic’s review and Unferth’s blog post both do this. I enjoy reading another’s telling of his or her experience of a book and I enjoy the connections that telling ignites in my head.
Is this a stupidly simple appreciation of book reviews? Probably.
Uncategorized / 15 Comments
May 14th, 2009 / 11:14 am
May 14th, 2009 / 11:14 am
Rumpus Love: Special Police-State Romp Edition
Hey it’s been a while since we spoke with Stephen Elliott about The Rumpus, the awesome online magazine he runs. So I thought that this would be a good time for us to check back in and see what the site’s up to this week.
“Winston Smith is 39” by James Warner.
Winston Smith is 39.
And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
I notice now how conscious he is of being middle-aged. Orwell tells us early on that Winston has a varicose vein above his left ankle and has to take his time walking up seven flights of stairs. He has difficulty touching his toes when instructed to do so by the instructress on the telescreen.
A Long Interview with Bill Ayers.
What we thought fascism would look like was that it would have two faces: the face to black people was going to be increasing depression, increasing economic hardship, and the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. That’s what fascism looks like. That’s exactly what it looks like. Targeted assassinations. Terror against communities. I was in Detroit during the riots of Detroit, I was in Cleveland during the riots in Cleveland, I was in Chicago during the riots in Chicago. And what that looked like was fascism. They were lining up bodies in Cleveland like cordwood. It was disgusting.
The face of fascism in the white community would be conspiracy trials. What we envisioned for ourselves were endless trials, endless prison sentences, conspiracy indictments. And it was all happening. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
Even Sugar, the advice columnist, gets in on the social meltdown action!
Dear Sugar,
How in the fuck am I going to survive the econopocalypse? Seriously. What’s your plan? Do you have a plan? What should my plan be? Holy. Fucking. Shit. I am so scared.
[She responds:]
[…]The long dream of American consumption is over. Gil Scott-Heron told us this would happen 25 years ago. Nobody listened. That’s our national specialty, it turns out. That and porn. You can count on the government to keep printing money – it’s what they do when the tea leaves read “busted” – but the real recovery program will be taken on by you, brother. Your personal economy is just about to wave bye-bye to the inefficiencies of abundance.
Speaking of porn, one of the (relatively) more upbeat pieces currently on the site is this addition to The Rumpus Oral History Project, featuring porn performer Lorelei Lee.
Porn was an incredibly therapuetic thing for me. I got to go into rooms with people and experiment with being vulnerable in a place where I had no emotional responsibility. I went into work and people said, “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do today?” Nobody ever asked me that before in terms of sex. I could decide at any time that I never wanted to go back. I had to be there for four hours for the shoot and I got to deal with whatever the emotions were afterword on my own.
Not that everything in LL’s essay is sunshine and simultaneous orgasm, but it’s a fascinating insider’s take on an endlessly complicated subject. Also, fyi, the link to LL’s piece is SFW but several of the links from the piece are not.
Tough times call for tough heiresses.
Uncategorized / 3 Comments
February 23rd, 2009 / 1:13 pm
February 23rd, 2009 / 1:13 pm