Joshua Mohr knows how easily the dark parts of the psyche can be sustained and deepened by the seamy parts of city life — drink, drugs, chronic poverty, and sad selfish sex. …more

Our friends over at the Center for the Art of Translation are extending a special offer to San Francisco Rumpus fans to see Lydia Davis at the Verdi Club next Wednesday, at a large discount.

Davis probably needs no introduction here. She’s an insouciant tactician of the English language — a writer of extraordinary short stories (and, lately, a book about cows) — but also one of the most interesting of contemporary translators. In 2003 her translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way made a stir, and this year she has returned with a hugely acclaimed translation of that classic of stifled lives and stifled sex, Madame Bovary.

For a link to tickets and the special discount code, please click through to the rest of this post.
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Cineaste Magazine has published a long, considered review of the new documentary by Stephen Soderbergh about Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine.

The film consists entirely of footage of Gray himself, either performing his monologues or being interviewed. The reviewer, David Sterrit, takes a positive view of the film overall, describing it at one point as “spellbinding,” but he complains that it gives an incoherent picture of Gray’s professional development; he goes on to conclude that the film: …more

The recent documentary about William S. Burroughs, A Man Within, was released on DVD last week, and its distributor, Oscilloscope Labs, sent us a copy to give away to one lucky Rumpus reader!

It’s a fascinating documentary that reveals a more private, sensitive picture of Burroughs than we’re used to. Click through for further details about the DVD and how to enter to win.
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Friend of the Rumpus Richard Parks is Kickstarting a documentary short about “Music Man” Murray Gershenz, LA’s premier rare-vinyl dealer.

He’s put his entire collection up for sale at $500,000 — much of it is literally priceless, but he originally valued it at $5 million. However, so far he has not found a buyer. Parks hopes that this film will draw attention to Gershenz’s dilemma. As Parks says on the Kickstarter page for this project: …more

If you’re in San Francisco next Tuesday night, the San Francisco Film Society is presenting a screening of the 1919 silent classic, Sir Arne’s Treasure, with live accompaniment by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. Full program information is here.

If you live in San Francisco, you might want to check out the Film Crawl on Cortland this Friday night. Yes, the website is a little cheesy, but the offerings look really cool. The idea behind it is that five local businesses will show a program of short films by local filmmakers (and we have a lot of them!), with one screening at 7:30 and another at 8:30. You switch venues at the intermission. It’s part of the larger Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema event that runs from September 2nd through the 5th.

The memorial award established by McSweeney’s in 2004, the Amanda Davis Highwire Award, is now open to applicants again.

The award “is intended to aid a young woman writer of 32 years or younger who both embodies Amanda’s personal strengths—warmth, generosity, a passion for community—and who needs some time to finish a book in progress. The book in progress needn’t be thematically or stylistically close to Amanda’s work, but we would be lying if we said we weren’t looking to support another writer of Amanda’s outrageous lyricism and heart.”

Check the post for application details.

If you’re looking for a long profile of a celebrity to read this weekend (and why wouldn’t you be?) you should choose this one: Sam Anderson’s profile of James Franco in New York magazine. You should read it just based on its literary merit: I have the feeling this profile will soon be regarded as a classic of the genre — I will be surprised if it doesn’t appear in multiple anthologies next year. To my mind, Anderson not only captures Franco’s personality, but he gets right to the heart of all the questions raised by James Franco’s insane anti-career. Believe me, it’s worth the time spent.

The Guardian ran a big feature today about the “new wave of literary events” in England, which highlights Todd Zuniga’s Opium and the Literary Death Match. (Matches are being held in Edinburgh and London on August 10th and 11th, respectively.)

A couple months ago the litmag Pindeldyboz announced that it would be going dark and looking for a way to keep everything published in it available somehow: now the site is updated with their Farewell Edition.

I know this film is a hobbyhorse of mine, but I just can’t resist today: Agnès Varda’s extraordinary filmed memoir, the Beaches of Agnès, is still available to watch for free, online, at this POV page.

Matt Stewart has written an interesting piece at the Millions about how to cultivate good First Novel Karma: …more

Rachel Shukert is coming out with a new book this week, Everything is Going to Be Great, a memoir of her years in Europe, and SMITHMAG has published a thought-provoking and funny interview with her. In 2003 Shukert went to Vienna to be in an experimental play and after that was over, ended up settling in Amsterdam. The memoir, in the interviewer’s words, is naturally very funny, but it also “captures perfectly how contemporary Europeans’ posthistorical cosmopolitanism, so sincere and sacred, is often no match for old tribalisms. Finally, it hits a more poignant note of how her adventures in Europe add new meaning to Shukert’s Jewish heritage, a theme that culminates nicely in the book’s happy ending, when she meets and marries her husband, Ben. Funny, insightful, moving — the memoirist’s Molotov cocktail.” In the interview Shukert offers her reflections on how memoirists need to reinvent the form, so that it’s not just something novelists turn to on their off days. It’s a good read.

Scott Rosenberg has posted a review of Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever: an Aural History of Recorded Music: …more

On August 23rd, 826 Valencia in San Francisco is hosting their second Adult Writers’ Seminar from 7-9 pm. This seminar focuses on DIY Publishing and Marketing.

The panelists are a full slate of Rumpus-friendly folk: …more

Sunday Editor Seth Fischer just pointed me to this amusing article, which lays out rules for a drinking game based on articles about eBooks. For example:

“Will e-books wipe out / kill / decimate /pulverize / HULKSMASH /angry verb real books?” — one drink
Above question is lede — one drink
Every use of phrase “real book” — one drink
Expert you’ve never heard of before predicting percentages — one drink
Any predicted percentage of anything over 30% — one drink
Any discussion of book world after 2020 — one drink
“old-fashioned” — one drink

The Atlantic just did a little piece about Tao Lin here. Apropos of an article Lin published a couple weeks ago about being arrested for trespassing, the Atlantic’s Hua Hsu writes: “The piece gives you a good sense of Lin’s writerly persona—his prose is placid, spare, vaguely hypnotic, “possibly” “ironic,“ and he’s faintly self-obsessed but in a harmless, almost banal way.”

Most interesting, though, are these observations from Hsu:

“Why is Lin so polarizing?  The comments that follow the Gawker ”piece” are generally annoyed or sarcastically dismissive, which is expected given how long and gossip/link-free it is. But is Lin’s writing, as the detractors say, truly narcissistic or selfish? What does it mean to be narcissistic enough to be branded a narcissist, when we are all in the business of cultivating online followers and friends, issuing steady streams of news releases about our wavering moods? There’s something refreshing to me about Lin’s writing, the way it manages to be wholly about him, but deny our craving for interiority or motive.”

Read the whole thing here.

Over at Mother Jones, Rumpus volunteer and Mother Jones intern Maddie Oatman has published a review of the abortion-rights documentary 12th and Delaware, the new film from the makers of Jesus Camp:

“The new documentary 12th and Delaware, which premiered last night on HBO, presents a fly-on-the wall view inside two organizations in Fort Pierce, Florida, that cater to pregnant women. Though across the street from one another, in political terms the offices might as well be on separate planets; the Woman’s World clinic offers abortions, and the anti-abortion Pregnancy Care Center goes to great lengths to goad women out of them.”

Read more here.

From the AP:

“You have the right to remain silent, but only if you tell the police that you’re remaining silent. …more

Caleb Crain has been re-reading and blogging Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams:

“Two forces meet the reader of the Interpretation: Freud’s authority and his charm. Are they monsters? Seducers? Has-beens? The authority interferes before the book is even picked up. One reads Freud because one has heard of him; at last one has decided to make up one’s own mind. One has heard that he’s been discredited, but one has also heard that the discreditors may be motivated by obscure grudges. There’s always someone around who knows a little about Freud’s biography or about the later development of his ideas, a person who can’t help but blurt out these revelations, which are in their way further obstacles to reading the book itself.”

Four long posts so far; really worthwhile!

Today is the last day you can watch Presumed Guilty for free online, I just found out — through midnight tonight. The documentary is about the shockingly corrupt Mexican justice system, which has no juries and no presumption of innocence, and crimes are often “solved” by grabbing the first hapless poor person off the street and throwing them in jail. The film is about an hour long.

Kathy Grayson is the director of Deitch projects, and I recently found out about her entertaining and interesting blog Art From Behind. You don’t read it, really; each post consists of tons of pictures of art she’s been looking at and things she’s been doing, with a line or two of hilarious commentary for each one. But describing it is almost superfluous: just check it out.

In March, Soft Skull Press released For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question, Mac McClelland’s memoir of the six weeks she spent in Thailand, helping refugees from Burma living illegally in a border city. …more

Atlas Obscura published an amazing pictorial today of this Namibian diamond-rush town, which was founded in 1908 and was completely abandoned by 1960. Check out the description:

“Residents of Kolmanskop accumulated enough wealth to build an entire town influenced by German aesthetics, replete with ballrooms, bowling alleys, mansions, and the first x-ray machine south of the equator.”

All this and more, and it’s now being slowly buried under sand. Go see the photos.

Today the Awl published a long essay by Richard Morgan about his seven years as a freelancer, which I read this afternoon. It’s a worthwhile if sobering read, and really entertaining: the subtitle is “How to Make Vitamin Soup,” if that gives you any idea of the circumstances he describes. It so happens that I attempted the freelancing thing over the past eight months or so, and ultimately concluded that I’d be happier with a job — Morgan’s piece makes me really glad I only spent eight months attempting the nearly impossible!

Kevin Kelly recently published a review of the journalism website Long Form, which seeks to promote long-form journalism by making it easier to find and read articles online or on portable devices. Kelly says that Long Form “points to the best long form articles appearing anywhere in print, and also collects the great magazine articles from the past. Long Form fits perfectly into a small ecosystem whereby you can read these great pieces of writing on a Kindle, iPad, or phone” — or on your laptop or computer, I might add. Check out Kelly’s review for all the details.

Friend of the Rumpus and all around cool guy Paul Collins has revived the Collins Almanac on the McSweeney’s iPhone app:

“After six years of slumber (I prefer to call it “deep cogitation”) the Almanac is back as an exclusive on the McSweeney’s iPhone App. It is, exactly as you’d imagine, basically me puttering about old and odd books, picking them up, and exclaiming: “What! Ho-ho! Listen to this!”

It all began back when I was living in Hay-on-Wye, and scribbling odd finds into a memo pad while I shoveled the book piles in Richard Booth’s antiquarian warehouse; and it started turning into a full-fledged manuscript while writing Sixpence House. In short, the Almanac is that book’s eccentric bespectacled uncle.”

Not long ago David Mamet admitted that he is a conservative, and in his latest book,  Theatre, he attempts to integrate his newly articulated politics into his view of the theater. But as Terry Teachout points out in this essay for Commentary:

“The only unexpected thing about this conclusion is that it took the author of American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988) so long to reach it. In these hard-headed plays, which established him as a major voice in American theater, Mamet respectively portrays small-time crooks, unethical real-estate agents, and ambitious Hollywood executives as engaged in identically savage battles for power over one another. His foul-mouthed characters behave like scorpions in a bottle, determined to sting or be stung. They have no past or future, only the unremittingly bleak present, though they somehow manage to entertain us—if that is the word—because of the manic energy with which they do their frenzied dances of death.”

Teachout’s essay goes on to trace the way Mamet’s views on Israel, Judaism, and the Middle East are of a piece with his newly-articulated libertarian views.

(via Conversational Reading)

The B&N Review has published an amusing piece by Tom LeClair about the way interviewers of novelists are portrayed in novels by DeLillo, Roth, Coetzee and Bolano — and LeClair describes his own experiences from the trenches of interviewing artists.

(via Conversational Reading)