Mohr’s latest novel, Damascus, rounds out a trio of novels he’s written about the Mission District of San Francisco. Together the books form an accurate, memorable portrait of the place, or at least of one aspect of its seedy underbelly.

I’m not going to pretend that this is an objective interview in any way. Joshua and I frequent many of the same places, and have had many a chat about art and life. What follows is a bit of a chat between friends who are also both writers. We conducted this interview via email over the course of a few weeks.

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The Rumpus: So, you’ve been working on a 3-book project called the Mission Cycle. How do Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade form a trilogy with Damascus?

Joshua Mohr: These novels are love letters to San Francisco, specifically the Mission district, my home for many years.  I wanted to write a cycle that characterized the Mission from a post-9/11 perspective.  I love Michelle Tea’s Valencia.  It’s an amazing book and it characterizes the neighborhood from a late 90s point of view. I wanted to talk about the changes that have occurred in the years since.

I initially conceived that each book in the cycle would take place in the fall of 2007, and the first two did; however, Damascus didn’t work when placed there.  It needed the emergency, the immediacy of 2003 as a backdrop—when San Francisco was ferociously angry about America’s invasion (re-invasion) of Iraq.  I’m not sure if you remember the protests, but we voiced our anti-war sentiments as loudly as we could.  The book needed that animosity to create the right velocity on the page.

And it’s not a trilogy, in that you have to read book 1, then book 2, etc. Each novel is a stand-alone piece of art. If a reader chooses to read more than one, they certainly will see shared images, characters, themes, and geography, but being familiar with the others isn’t necessary to read Damascus.

Rumpus: It’s really interesting to me that you felt you needed the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq to give the book an urgent undercurrent, because my initial impression was that Damascus is much looser and even kind of upbeat in a weird way, as contrasted with your first two books, which I found much bleaker—I feel like Damascus is a much more affirmative book than the others. Do you see it in a similar light?

Mohr: I like that you used the word “looser” to describe the book. It’s an ensemble piece with probably seven main characters. So the reader hops amongst them, following the specific crises in each of their lives and how they intersect. My goal was to try and structure it like an old Robert Altman script from the 70s.  I dig those old movies, like Nashville.

As for the hopefulness, I’m glad you picked up on that. I’ve gotten off booze and drugs over the last couple years. My world has more joy in it now, and that can’t help but seep into my art. My preoccupations—or at least the way I want to convey those preoccupations on the page—is evolving. It’s amazing how much better you feel about yourself when your days don’t include cocaine nosebleeds.

Rumpus: Speaking of connections between the three books, I really enjoyed the scene where some of the characters from your first two books made cameo appearances. Did you ever have it in mind to bring the same characters back to play more of a role in the book, or was this always going to be just a little nod to your longtime readers?

Mohr: Maybe it’s like having children and I’m the parent: I didn’t want to play favorites. I had to buy everyone an ice cream cone, or there’d be serious sulking on the way home. So if Damascus is the culminating book in the cycle—the grand finale—it felt right to have the other main characters come on stage and take a quick bow.

Rumpus: I was struck by the use, in both Termite Parade and Damascus, of a conceptual artist’s project in each plot—and in both books, the art projects are simultaneously ridiculous and horrifying, which is an interesting combination. At least as I recall, in Termite Parade the art project was a kind of counterpoint to the main narrative, but in Damascus it is actually a driving narrative, in that it sets the stage for the central conflict in the book.

Mohr: I dig writing about artists because those are my people. And I like test-driving other avenues of being subversively expressive, other ways to document all the things I see in the world around me that are so confusing. Art is a way to participate in the dialogue that’s been happening since scribbles on cave walls: art is a person’s way to try and make sense of the world around them. Whether you’re writing magical realism or making surrealistic short films, they’re inherently related to our zeitgeist. Nobody creates in a vacuum.

Someone just asked me if Damascus is a protest novel. I didn’t know how to answer. My instinct is to say no—that it’s only about a small cast of wayward souls trying to figure out how to do right by themselves. But certainly, it’s a story charged with the political and social climate of our times. The war rages outside our houses, our dive bars, whether we want to acknowledge its presence or not. There’s no vacuum even when we want there to be one or try to insulate ourselves.

Rumpus: So do you have any ideas in place about your next book (or trilogy), or is that something you plan to think about after you’re back from your tour?

Mohr: A few months back, I was re-watching The Big Lebowski, and I thought to myself: the Coens must have had a fucking blast writing that movie. I want to do something fun in my next novel. My goal with this new project is to get way out of my comfort zone, challenge myself to flex some different muscles. So I’m writing this weird fairy tale, with all kinds of magic and oddball characters and bad jokes.

I think it’s really important as an artist that once you start noticing habits, tics, patterns in your work that you need to shove yourself off into uncharted territory. I don’t want to keep saying the same things, but want to see if I’m up to the task of communicating in varied ways. It’s sort of like the band AC-DC. They’ve written the same song 80 times.  I don’t want to be like that. I want to be like The Flaming Lips, where you don’t know what to expect until you pick up the new piece of art and plug your mind into it.

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Read the Rumpus Review of Damascus.

Related Posts:

• Joshua Mohr Reads From Damascus
• Damascus Giveaway! (Is Now Over)
• Wayward In The Light
• The Unveiled Animal
• Praise for Damascus

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.

The normal ticket price is $15, but if you order tickets here and type “RUMPUS_RULES” (no quotes, all CAPS) into the discount box on the site, you will get a ticket for only $10.

And be sure to spend the $5 you will save on the ticket at the Verdi Club’s fantastic bar!

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Cineaste Magazine

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:

thoughtfully raises an array of issues related to performance, theater, film, and language, and they would be all the more fascinating if Soderbergh went into them a bit more attentively. Then again, I might be ascribing too much seriousness to a documentary intended simply as a tribute to an admired colleague and companion. Viewing the picture from that angle, I salute Soderbergh for making an engaging, absorbing portrait that will spread the word about Gray’s unique achievements far beyond the following he built when he was alive. Beyond the personal interest this holds for me (Spalding was a friend for many years), keeping Gray’s name and accomplishments alive is vital at a time when artistic innovators start fading from public consciousness the moment they leave the media spotlight behind.

What Sterritt says rings true, although I should confess that I haven’t watched the whole film — I hosted a preview screening at my house with a small group of friends, and we found it so overwhelmingly intense that night, emotionally speaking, that we had to stop playback and choose a different film. We were each already feeling vulnerable for different personal reasons, and Gray, whose face was often nearly life-size on the screen, seemed to be with us right there in the small living room, absorbing us into his own maelstrom of obsessions and pushing us just a bit too forcefully, right then, into our own dark places. Reportedly Soderbergh, who for a time was close to Gray, felt the need to withdraw from the friendship out of fear that his own life and work would be completely overwhelmed by Gray’s personal intensity. In that case, the fact that we couldn’t actually finish watching it that particular night is actually a ringing tribute to how well Soderbergh has conveyed Gray’s personal and performative power. I am looking forward to watching the whole thing soon.

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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.

This is a reasonably complete picture of what the winner will receive (though I promise not to send the laundry, miscellaneous papers, and half-read books slightly visible in the background — and nota bene, there is no way you’re getting my packing trunk):

The DVD comes in a cardboard slipcase (front and back pictured at far left and right) and folds out once (center, below) and then twice (center, top). Two mini-essays are printed on the foldout itself, by David Byrne and Richard Hell.

Full information here.

To enter, please send an email to me at jeremy (at) therumpus (dot) net. Use the subject line “Burroughs,” and please include your name and your mailing address in the body of the email. No other information is necessary to enter. Your email will be assigned a number and we will have a random drawing to select the winner. You will only be notified if you win. Please enter by midnight on Saturday, February 26th, 2011.

Good luck!

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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:

We’ll see how treasured these recordings are to this man — not as fetish objects, but as valuable pieces of cultural goods. We’ll learn about the history of Murray’s Los Angeles and the record business, which is at its absolute nadir. And we’ll follow Murray as he pursues his latest dream: a career as a character actor (he’s already scored parts in feature films including The Hangover, and on Mad Men and House).

The film will imbue objects we tend to dismiss as monetarily worthless with fresh cultural and historical meaning, and restore dignity to a serious man who has made records his life’s work. Music Man Murray is intended for a wide general audience, and anybody who wants to hear some of these records played for possibly the last time ever.

To me this looks like a solid project: check out the trailer here. Funding closes on February 6.

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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.

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