One of the first times I had a real conversation with Isaac Fitzgerald was a couple of years ago at Mission Creek Café on Valencia Street in San Francisco. …more

Got some time? This video og 83-year-old theologian and Harvard prof Gordon Kaufman is a long one, but it is a gem. His theology is that there is no anthropomorphic being, no force, no spirit god or gods out there: God is creativity. (And if you’ve only got a second, watch from the five minute mark to about the nine and a half minute mark. Blow your mind.)

J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long.

Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos, documents, and ephemera that tell in fragments the story of Williams’ life. …more

It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained. This is rural Kansas, where I grew up. …more

Artists are fickle, except when they’re not, and then their lovers are. Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova was born in Tatarstan, Russia to a family of intellectuals — as a kid she hung out with future poet Marina Tsvetaeva. (Tsvetaeva would write in 1938 “I have no need of holes / for ears, nor prophetic eyes: / to your mad world there is / one answer: to refuse!” and three years later hang herself).

Diakonova was a schoolteacher and she married painter Paul Eluard in 1917. In 1929, Eluard, who hung out with Max Ernst and Andre Breton, took Diakonova — who was by then calling herself Gala — to meet a surrealist painter named Salvador Dali. …more

A book—that’s an artifact, often long, filled with deep analysis, and pages, and made of paper—by Francisco Goldman undoes an electoral campaign, triggers assassinations, and drags its author into a political minefield in Guatemala. But can the tome bring closure to the eleven-year old investigation into the murder of human rights champion Bishop Juan Gerardi? Nathaniel Popper reports it for the Nation.

“Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel” is the name of Laurel Nakadate’s new show, opening this Thursday at Leslie Tonkonow in New York City. Nakadate’s work hurls us into discomfort and the awkwardness of lust—read about it in The Rumpus interview with Nakadate. “I’m not turned on by danger,” says Nakadate, “I’m turned on by the narrow escape.”

Nearly a decade after Ploughshares published it, Elizabeth Graver’s short story “The Mourning Door” remains shrouded in a slippery surrealism that’s at once impenetrable and, simultaneously, the source of the piece’s staying power. In it, Graver’s pregnant narrator discovers a tiny human hand in her bed. Then she finds a shoulder in the laundry. Next it’s a foot, five small toes and all, in the basement. Is the narrator giving birth, or having a miscarriage? Is she piecing a baby together, or watching one fall apart?

The Elements of Style, the classic writing handbook by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr., just turned fifty. The New York Times celebrated by posting the opinions of five “experts” on its blog about the book. All of them turn their nose up at the book’s style and substance and so… it’s no surprise the Times‘ coverage unleashed a backlash. Posts have flooded the Times‘ website defending the book’s honor. For comparison’s sake, consider Charles Poore’s review in the Times on June 9, 1959. He gave it a thumbs up. Wrote Poore: “Well, here’s the book. Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It’s as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility.”

In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked). …more

For 109 years, Florida has sent bad boys to the Florida School for Boys–for things like rape and assault, yes, but also for petty infractions like truancy or smoking in the bathroom, or sometimes because the state wanted an easy solution to a kid with no parents. A long overdue spotlight has been directed onto the school, and with horrifying results: it’s revealed FSB to be less a place of reform and more a place of torture. …more

“Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place,” writes Crichton, “and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the Net. And I will have artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests. I’ll have the twelve top stories that I want, I’ll have short summaries available, and I’ll be able to double-click for more detail. How will Peter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspaper compete with that? So the media institutions will have to change.”

In this piece in Wired, Michael Crichton predicts the demise of mass media. Here’s the thing: he wrote it in 1993.

It’s worth applauding the creative efforts behind True/Slant. It’s a website founded by a former AOL executive who’s hired 65 “knowledge experts.” “Knowledge experts,” in this context, means professional journalists or commentators, some of whom work for the New York Times, the Financial Times, or Rolling Stone. Each member of this array of writers files a quota of news stories for the week. But not just stories—the experts are required to post comments and replies, to get their hands dirty in the conversation readers generate in response to a piece written by that expert. It’s social networking meets personality-driven news, Facebook meets Esquire, the prom meets Gonzo. And we like Gonzo, but we have our questions about True/Slant. …more

Decades ago, Hart Crane wrote “To Brooklyn Bridge,” his most famous poem. “And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced / As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,– / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!” Crane would be appalled to learn, then, that the Brooklyn Bridge will soon be blotted from view by an eighteen story commercial center. Historian David McCullough is appalled, and doing something about it: in this urgent, edgy, beautifully-filmed video made for the New York Times, McCullough implores the city, and Americans, to prevent the defacement of an historic treasure.

Matthew Zapruder proposes we meet the current explosion of variety coursing through contemporary poetry head-on with a new kind of criticism. Zapruder wants critics to talk a little less about what the poem said and a little more about how the poem said it. …more

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer and filmmaker from New York City. …more

Poetry readings are notorious for putting audiences to sleep. Which is why Poems Out Loud‘s devotion to the notion of experiencing poetry read aloud—and read well—is so thrilling. The site was inspired by Robert Pinksy’s just-published book Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud. Not to be confused with slam or spoken word poetry (which can be more performance art than poetry), the poems read here exist first and foremost on the page. But taking a poem in this way—many of the poems are read by the poet who wrote them—permits us to close our eyes and be knocked flat by these shots of compressed, refined language.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is compiled by a team of high school students who spend the year reading everything they can get their hands on. The students debate the merits of the year’s crop of both fiction and nonfiction and, in the end, they come out with an eccentric anthology that you don’t have to read but should. What’s more, the committee has a blog: it’s a tantalizing window into what the students are reading, thinking, saying, and arguing about.

Monkeybicycle.net is the punchy literary magazine edited by Steven Seighman and Eric Spitznagel. The mag publishes writers like Tao Lin and Ryan Boudinot, and the piece on the site’s main page, “Wish” by Mike Valente, is representative of Monkeybicycle’s aesthetic. “Wish” is a jittery spoonful of surrealism that lives at the corner of poetry and prose, and it’s surely unsure which it wants to be. Which is its charm, of course. Forget staying in scene, “Wish” is about a kind of leaping from fragment to fragment, electricity jumping from cloud to cloud.

…more

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic was the last book I love love loved. It’s explosive, a text that’s sinewy and daring. It tears open the marks left on the narrator during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s. The chapters are introduced Twain-style–like this one called, “How sweet dark red is, how many oxen you need to pull down a wall, why Kraljevic Marko’s horse is related to Superman, and how war can come to a party.” The book’s a brilliant debut for Stanisic. He creates a sprawling narrative built of equally expansive sentences. There’s this, for instance: “That just-a-moment had hardly died away before Father turned and Hemingwayed Bobuljub so forcefully that the tobacconist was sent flying against the bookshelves. Or this: “Soldiers on the porches of buildings, soldiers behind sandbags, soldiers in bars acting as landlords and guests combined.” Plus, Daniel Handler is on the cover on a beach in a yellow shirt and a black suit playing an accordion.

In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life. Three waitresses at the restaurant where the man ate every day for eight years show up at his bedside. The man has no breath to speak. But they fill him in on the gossip and how George is “still an asshole.” Before we know it the story, the transaction, is over. We are left only with the sound of a receipt being ripped off. We take the receipt. We walk out.

Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s a meandering, dreamy piece drifting between nostalgia and a hard-nosed hope. For twelve years, a fifth of his life, Tsvetkov had planted roots in this, the city of Kafka, the city of falcons and sparrows. Tsvetkov inexplicably quit writing poetry years ago, and though he went to Prague looking for something, it was never quite his home. But he says it gave him back his poet’s voice, just as inexplicably as whatever took it away. Tsvetkov probes this long silence as well as his recent sudden coming back into poetry. He only prays he’s not “a prizefighter crawling out of retirement about to be beaten back” into some dark corner. Why, in his view, did the faucet turn on again? It occurred to him, he explains, that writing poetry “is the only way I know how not to lie.”

For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s Jewish counterpart is Yiddish–and it even sometimes sounds like it. Last March, Der Bote, then one of the last three remaining German language Mennonite periodicals on the continent closed its doors. It was based in Winnipeg and it’d been founded eighty-four years ago by Mennonite emigrants. Last fall, Mennonite Life, the major arts and culture publication of the Mennonite Church USA, also ceased publishing (from 1946-1999 it was in print, since 1999 it’s been available only online). In it’s final issue, Mennonite matriarch and poet Jean Janzen–a woman who only began publishing poems late in her life–dissects her own history by examining the lives of three (she explains how) interconnected women: Czarina Alexandra, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and her grandmother Helena Wiebe, who hung herself in 1908. “The difficult circumstances of each woman cannot be compared,” writes Janzen, “nor can their responses be judged by me a century later. Rather than comparison, I venture some observations.” Read the full essay here.

Jeff Parker‘s narrator watches from a dryer as the woman he’s laid claim to slinks off (and into bed) with a stout beef named Brick. The narrator confronts his rival, who lies naked with the fine-bodied Patsy, by punching him in the face. Next thing our hero knows, he’s wedged under an emergency brake with a tarantula in his mouth and salted slug hanging from the rearview mirror. The tarantula turns out to be his own swollen tongue and the slug is the tip, which he apparently bit off when Brick kicked the shit out of him. It’s gritty. It’s language you can feel in your mouth as you read. It’s effing good fiction, folks. It appeared first in the Indiana Review who have been kind enough to let us post the entire story for download as a PDF. …more

Thesley Beverly is the art czar, and maybe the heart and soul, of Pembroke, Illinois, population 2800. …more

“Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit.” So wrote New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl six months ago in a review that’ll likely prove seminal. It’s not that the artwork he was reviewing was anything spectacular, it’s that Schjeldahl licked his finger, held it up, and with marvelous precision articulated the prevailing winds shaping contemporary art. Artists, he writes, are increasingly “desperate to eschew narcissisms of money and fame, along with academically entrenched ideology,” and are instead operating “at psychological depths at which social attitudes can’t coalesce.” And Schjeldahl’s thinking big. “What we want now is a major artist—a Manet, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, or Beuys—who will manifest durable truths at the core of inevitable hypes and hyperboles.”

The San Francisco-based website Yelp allows users to post reviews of businesses. The idea’s simple enough: trust consumers to tell you the truth about the kind of service you’ll get at this or that restaurant, or the kind of waits you’ll experience at this or that tire shop. Yelp reviews can send a formerly obscure operation–a local babysitter, for instance, who otherwise would depend purely on word-of-mouth–into the stratosphere, popularity-wise. But what if Yelp’s reviews were shuffled around- and even generated- based on how much the business is willing to fork over? It’d be a scam of epic proportions, a classic case of back-scratching for a price. Yelp says no way, but according to the East Bay Express, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Only a few genetic lines–the Hapsburgs, the Hans, the Roosevelts, for instance–have shaped geopolitics as much as the Bin Ladens. In his NYRB review of Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens, Frank Halliday details Coll’s methodical deconstruction of the inner workings both of this filthy rich family and the Saudi society that gave it wings. Halliday writes that “The Bin Ladens is not so much a book about Osama bin Laden himself, or his terrorist network and political aspirations, as about the power structures of modern Saudi Arabia.” (via The Morning News)

The Internet was supposed to wash away the walls governments use to keep information from the people. But the Web is a resource and, like oil or art or love, corporate hands have capitalized in every way they can. While companies like Google and Microsoft help shuttle info at light-speed around the globe, they’re also helping repressive governments control the web.