Over at HTMLGIANT Adam Robinson interviewed Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch about their genre-defying book, Ten Walks/Two Talks:  “It manages to combine a generalized, dog-like happiness with an adult awareness of death.” There is even a chance to win a copy of the book thanks to a walk-off contest! Click here to learn more, and here to read a discussion of the book from awhile back.

I have largely avoided The New Yorker’s Fiction section. The stories were about aging women who lived on Cape Cod, or they were set in developing countries. I don’t want to name names, but you know what I’m talking about, the style sometimes described as “suburban malaise.” …more

When I was in college, I had a crush on Ugly Duckling Presse the way 17 year-olds in 1958 had a crush on Jack Kerouac. …more

We all have reading habits. We read in bed, at the table, on the train. Perhaps you read standing up in your kitchen, waiting for your pasta water to boil. As modern readers, what we read and where we can read it constantly expands. …more

The Revealer, loosely affiliated with the Center for Religion and Media at NYU and Killing the Buddha, covers “religion in the news and the news about religion.” An article about National Prayer Day yesterday examines the evolution of the holiday, from Washington to Lincoln. You never knew prayer could be so twisted.

The Institute for the Future of the Book “investigates the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.” As you may have noticed, here at the Rumpus, we’re pretty interested in that too.

We, though, still very much believe in the printed page, while it seems that the Institute for the Future of the Book is convinced that the transition to digital is inevitable. They have a plethora of ongoing projects, including The Googlization of Everything, and have also tried their hand at creating a new type of ebook, called Sophie, which can be written by “one person, not a programmer, in hours not days.” An interesting “think-and-do tank” that is doing good work and worth checking out.

So why does Eric Clapton sell a lot more records than Daniel Johnston? …more

Bruno, the flamboyantly gay Austrain fashion reporter played by Sacha Baron Cohen, has a feature length film. Due to many wild premiers – from bull-fighting in Madrid to dressing as a Buckingham Palace guard in London -  and a unique stunt with Eminem at the MTV Movie Awards, The Bruno Movie has already earned much attention. Noting that the film outs the implicit homophobia of straight American men, The New York Times called the film “A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts.” Austrians, though, aren’t particularly amused.

Terra Naomi, a friend of The Rumpus, just released a new song, Vicodin, online for free. Professionally trained in opera at the University of Michigan, the Internet propelled Terra to fame. Three years ago, Naomi’s YouTube music videos went viral – her low-key DIY video Say It’s Possible has over three million views!

After hitchhiking from Salt Lake City to NPR’s national office, Scott Carrier became a unique radio producer, interviewing schizophrenics and amnesiacs. Here is a This American Life episode dedicated to his stories. He has also worked extensively with Hearing Voices. Years ago, after Carrier’s first book came out, Salon posted an interesting interview with him.

Andrew Sullivan , one of the most popular bloggers in the world, is a bundle of contradictions – gay, conservative, Catholic. Though British (and Oxford-educated), Sullivan now writes primarily about American politics from his base at The Atlantic in D.C. Most notably, though, he is not partisan. Passionate, yes. He supports the war in Iraq and gay marriage. And he has over 23 million viewers per month. Here is a fascinating interview/bio from The Economist.

Scram, started by Kim Cooper in 1992, is a magazine “dedicated to unpopular culture.” They have some blogs, and they also have published a few books. They “chronicle the neglected, the odd, the nifty and the nuts.” So, we’re comrades. Also, Cooper wrote a book for 33 1/3 on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. (See our own editors lament about “popular culture.)

Last December in their annual music issue, Oxford American lamented the demise of music criticism. But nonetheless here’s a collection of music related internet findings: Douglas Wolk discusses The Celestial Jukebox. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (doesn’t punk, by nature, evade definition?). This blog catalogs library music, as in music found in libraries. Also, Sasha Frere-Jones reviews Britney Spears’s live act in the New Yorker.

A.O. Scott gives a nice shout out to the craft of American short stories in the New York Times, particularly praising, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme. For more on Cheever, Slate ran a review of his newest biography. If the article piques your interest about Barthelme, check out McSweeney’s 24 with a special section dedicated to our favorite postmodern story story writer. Scott also nicely nods to Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which The Rumpus reviewed.

Zoetrope: All-Story published their Latin American Issue this Spring, edited by Daniel Alarcón and Diego Trelles Paz. Read an interview with Alarcón on the arbitrary nature of anthologies and the “outdated lens of magical realism.”

“The diary of a copywriter, written on company time, billed to the client.” The House of Wigs is a small collection of sixty admirable short stories from the folks at Fireland. This collection renews my faith in what reading will become.

As Amazon, eBay, and the 2008 Presidential election demonstrated, the Internet is a great revenue stream. Well, two guys out of Houston (Sean and Kevin Dolan) decided to harness its power for the benefit of the homeless – at least for the benefit of one homeless man, Tim Edwards. …more

Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older than those of Stonehenge, dating to about 11-12,000 years ago. The rocks depict paradisaical figures of birds, lions and flowering trees. These stones have also been linked to the “real” Garden of Eden, which in the Bible is described as west of Assyria (where these rocks are) and between the Euphrates and the Tigris (correct). The Bible even refers to the “children of Eden” as being from plains near where these rocks were found. Obviously, to understand Eden being a real place, the “fall” must be understood metaphorically as a descent from the carefree days of hunting and gathering to the toil of agriculture. This speculation has led to a mystery novel (á la The Da Vinci Code) focused on the possible mythology of the people who created these stone carvings. The Genesis Secret, by Tom Knox, will be available in the U.K. from HarperCollins in March.

In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how he inhabits multiple voices. She reviews his first book Dreams From My Father and sees him as an artist as much as a politician, but Smith warns: “For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility [...] From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive fools.” Smith concludes, that multiplicity can be a gift, “a proper and decent human harmony.”

In A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter chronicles the history of female American writers, from captivity narratives to Annie Proulx. Salon calls her “the woman for the job” due to her 1978 book A Literature of Their Own: British Woman Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. One of the founders of feminist literary criticism, Showalter “brings a perspective to changing literary culture that makes criticism seem not only understandable but also healthy and invigorating,” according to the LA Times. (Passionate Minds, a title from 2000, also catalogs female writers “to reckon with.”)

Though once upon a time Noah Webster wrote a dictionary to reflect the ever growing and changing language of American English, the Oxford English Dictionary does regularly update their logs to include such words as “bootylicious” and “MILF” – terms definitely in everyday use but not requiring etymological analysis. Dictionaries, also, remove words that have been discontinued by the collective unconscious. But a band of dedicated logophiles is making it their business to protect endangered words.

So, where is the publishing industry going? No one really knows. But we like to speculate. For the March issue of Harper’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus covered the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, what he called “the last book party.” Read an interview about the article here. (Lewis-Kraus must like to review literary conferences as he did in the Believer for the Annual MLA gathering in 2004.) Last year, Maureen Dowd reflected on outsourcing local news writing to Bangalore, and, in January, The New Yorker reflected on the origins of newspapers.

Update: …more

After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known for his dystopian science fiction, Ballard analyzes his own life with some surprisingly similar tools, principally Freud. LAWeekly labeled the book a “pre-posthumous memoir” because Ballard tells us, at the end, that he has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Read an excerpt and an interview here.

Koert van Mensvoort is transforming the Internet and the culture around it. A Dutch artist and professor, Mensvoort challenges how we experience the world around us, especially, but not only, the digital world. His Web site asks: “Why not start a new renaissance right now?” But when he says it, the question is rhetorical because he already has. His interfaces engage us with the digital world – physically, or, as he calls it “tactile Web.” He also paints, in ways that combine the digital and the “natural” world. …more

Fact: The Internet changes how we read. But is reading on the internet not really “reading” at all? In a recent column in The New York Times Virginia Heffernan analyzes how her three year old son “reads” on Starfall, a website designed to teach young children to read. (Starfall, by the way, is the first Google result when you search “reading.”) What exactly is it that makes reading a physical book special? Maybe the difference is all in our heads. Mitika Brottman’s The Solitary Vice tell us that reading isn’t as transformative as we think. Sure, it’s fun, but it doesn’t – she argues – make you smarter, better or more interesting. Schools are pressing for digital literacy being as important as print reading comprehension (it is definitely more practical). Even librarians are being retrained. Do we just need a new vocabulary to differentiate the information-saturated internet reading from the experience-saturated book reading?

Last week Pennsylvania judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. plead guilty to illegally prosecuting minors, in order to get kickbacks from privately-run juvenile detention centers. Children were sentenced to three months incarceration for making fun of their teachers on MySpace. The judge had closed down a public detention facility in order to make way for his private business partners, underscoring the danger of adding a profit motive to punishment.

The George Bush era was a time of rampant privatization and dismantling of social institutions meant to keep us safe. In addition to outsourcing prisons we also outsourced the military. Remember the Blackwater scandal in Iraq? The private security firm was hired by the State Department as mercenaries and got in trouble for shooting civilians. Once Iraq got its own constitution they faced criminal charges and their contract was withdrawn. (Recently the company changed its name for PR purposes and got out of the mercenary for hire business.)

Some things should not be done for profit. In Alabama a Sheriff was allowed to pocket money saved on feeding prisoners and the result was many of his prisoners starved. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) manages more than 60 detention facilities, holding up to 85,000 prisoners (inmates? detainees? clients?). Private prisons may be the most profitable business in America. Apparently, there is a lot of money to be made in crime.

In 2001, Elmore Leonard, famous for his crime fiction and suspense thrillers, wrote a spicy essay for The New York Times cataloging his suggestions for good writing, or, rather, he lists what we shouldn’t do. He continues his list of do-nots, in 10 Rules of Good Writing, reviewed here by The Christian Science Monitor.

In January 2006, The New Leader stopped print publication, an early omen to The Christian Science Monitor. But this eighty-five-year old magazine continues to publish bimonthly in the form of PDF on their website. In its heyday, The New Leader was the first to publish Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” alongside other great cultural and literary figures as diverse as George Orwell, James Baldwin, Bertrand Russel, and Arthur M. Schlesigner, Jr. A brief history available on their website tells us that they “proceeded on the assumption that a sophisticated audience wants to be exposed to the opinions, analyses, and reportage of respected writers, regardless (or perhaps because) of their not always being in lockstep agreement.”

Helvetica, a 2007 film, looks at the history of this now-ubiquitous font, from its classical modernist roots in 1957 Switzerland to contemporary American billboards. Originally designed to be neutral, fonts have taken on new weight. New designers follow font trends, believing that the font in itself says something. There is even a Font Bureau for particularly interested designers willing to cough up some cash for an unusually unique serif. The largest independent directory of typefaces can be found here, or a more intellectual analysis of fonts from Typotheque. (And why do any fonts cut from the Internet translate to the hideous Lucida Grande?)

This blog captures People Reading as an on-going testament to the fact that people still read. They read Focault, Michael Crichton, Emily Dickinson; they read in Spanish and in Russian; they read on the BART platform, at the laundromat, and in coffee shops. After two years of photographing San Franciscans, the blogger is reaching out to distant fans and trying to gather 100 readers for every 100 miles.