The Rumpus is a San Francisco based publication with monthly Rumpus events in the Bay Area. But April 6 we’ve got a mega-show in New York City. Featuring Sam Lipsyte, Colson Whitehead, Michael Showalter, Lorelei Lee, Dave Hill, Starlee Kine, Jeffrey Lewis, and Alina Simone.

Best get those tickets early, rockers. …more

If you subscribed to the Daily Rumpus you would receive messages like this via email throughout the week.

I’m at South by Southwest and have half an hour to compose this note. …more

This is a test of the system clock and was posted at 4:09 EST.

One analysis of the Google Buzz mess.

The Rumpus: What’s wrong with hip hop?

Natasha Leggero: My brother (aka Nickname) is actually a talented rapper.  I wrote that joke after hearing 9 different songs where they steal the entire chorus from another song and just yell over it.  There are a lot of heated, misspelled arguments on the comment section of that video if you are interested. But essentially it’s just a joke.  Some comics are able to just spout one liners off the top of their head but for me to write a joke something really terrible has to happen …more

Author Barry Hannah has died. He was 67.

In honor of his memory A. N. Devers tweeted Hannah’s recipe for Three Bean Soup:

“You start with three kinds of beans: kidney, white (navy) and black-eyed peas. Take a big–real big–pot of water, dump ‘em in, and add some shredded onions. Saute either pork or beef, cut up in little chunks, and dump it in. Bring it to a boil. Add salt mixed with pepper, to taste. Turn up the heat and bring it up again. Add water if needed; dump in a small bag of rice, and bring it up. Boil until it thickens. For extra seasoning, I sometimes add some crab-boil, Tabasco, or whatever’s handy on the shelf. Serve it with French bread and butter. It’s all the nutrition you can stand.”

“This isn’t the most fun to listen to and some viewers don’t find it to much fun to watch, but the 1982 film is without question the best of all serious fiction films devoted to rock.”

Roger Ebert takes a look back at Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Time’s Eben Harrell has a report from Santiago.

No? Why not?

We’d like to know the last book you loved. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved, along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements.

Email to: Isaac AT therumpus.net

“I wanted him to be sure he wanted his first time to be with a stranger, he said he did.”

Everyone I’ve Had Sex With by Megan Boyle.

Steve Almond’s self-published This Won’t Take But a Minute Honey is now a best seller at Harvard Bookstore.

Check out Steve’s self-publishing story here.

This is crazy.

Russ gets a question answered, but won’t say which. Baronetess hopes it’s the Britney one. Daniel Nester complains about reviewers. DominaM had a dream she could turn socks into jellyfish. @nosowsky to edit 20 years of Geoff Dyer criticism. Love is an unsecured network. Twitter hits 50 million tweets per day.

The debate/argument/discussion of the role of the reviewer continues.

Vanessa Garcia wrote a less than positive review of Kathleen Rooney’s memoir For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs. The review has ignited, via the comments section, a debate on the reviewer’s responsibility.

Here’s one comment from Daniel Nester:

Bottom line: People think the review is a shitty one and are reacting to it. We’re having a pretty smart comments conversation–smarter than anything the reviewer said in the actual article–over why and how such a shitty review would be written and how it could be published. We can only guess to the reviewer’s motivations, but my guess is that it’s not an entirely unsophisticated reviewer, one who knows all the implications of genre and gender yadda yadda yadda, and went ahead and wrote a shitty review anyway.

People are also questioning whether a review of a memoir should talk about the author’s motivations. One commenter thinks so: “A memoir is very definitely an invitation to “delve into” the author’s brain the way he or she has written it.”

Follow the whole thing here.

When we getting the band back together? (via HTMLGIANT)

The Awl has some information.

“The ideal tool for robbery has apparently become Foursquare, the iPhone app for sharing your whereabouts with your 900 closest friends.”

Gawker has good tips on how not to be a Foursquare jackass.

Where’s Elliott Holt? Satine Phoenix is considering pumping sedatives into the air over major cities. Andrew slept poorly last night. Lord Zed isn’t scared by your period. Wordpress will make you stab yourself in the eye. School admins spy on students using webcams. Colson explains what happens when people unfollow you. Are all New Yorker poems about poetry?

“Low self-esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.”

Roger Ebert responds to the profile that ran on him recently in Esquire.

“‘Depression doctors’ and drug company sponsors ‘don’t know any better than you or I what life is for or how we are supposed to feel about it.’”

From a review of Manufacturing Depression in New Scientist.

Most of these aren’t published online. Subscribe to get them in your email box.

**

Yesterday I was driving my friend home from the hospital where he’s having chemo-therapy. He said he doesn’t worry about ambition. He’d spent so much time writing his book but he’s not that interested in publishing it now. He just wants to live. I said to want to live is something. It’s when you don’t want anything you have to worry. …more

My MFA workshop responds to my tweets.

Short answer=no.

Adam Robinson has a quick break down of how small presses lose money selling books through Amazon over at HTMLGIANT.

Just reminding everybody about Eric Puchner’s awesome post yesterday, What Makes A Good Title.

The Daily Rumpus really has been almost daily recently. Here’s one from late last week. Most aren’t published online and the only way to get them is to subscribe:

***

We pulled away from San Francisco and there were islands, a tuft of fog hanging on a mountain like a toupe. I was just going to Sausalito. My bicycle was in the lower deck. I was reading a book about love. I was thinking about love, of course, as we pulled out of downtown San Francisco, the Port of San Francisco sign neon and receding. I thought about calling my ex. I wished she was on the boat with me. We could see the bottom of the bay bridge, and then the prison.

I wondered if the world needed another book. Writing is the urge to communicate and be alone at the same time. …more

See here, for the initial story, here for Tumblr’s response, and here for Pitchfork’s.

I asked Meaghan, Director of Outreach at Tumblr, to respond to some of the negative comments on her Tumblr post: …more

Meaghan O’Connell’s, Director of Outreach at Tumblr, responds on her blog: