James Vance Marshall’s 1959 book Walkabout tells a unique story of two stranded children who are rescued from the Australian outback by another young boy on a wilderness quest. Read the rest of this entry »

This week in NYC:

MONDAY 5/21: Bookcourt hosts a reading by the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, with performances by Nick Dybek, Madeline McDonnell, Eric Sasson, and Julie Innis. 7pm, free.

Roxane Gay (Ayiti) and Brian Evenson (Windeye) read at the Center for Fiction. 7pm, free.

TUESDAY 5/22: Granta launches its new issue, “Britain,” at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe with a reading by Tania James, music from DJ Blue Logan, and Britain-themed refreshments. 7pm, donations to Housing Works get you a tote bag and a copy of the magazine.

Elizabeth Nunez (Boundaries) reads and discusses her books and writing at the Clarendon branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. 6pm, free.

WEDNESDAY 5/23: PANK invades Brooklyn’s WORD bookstore, featuring readings by Mensah Demary, Sean Doyle, Jennifer Pashley, Robb Todd, M.G. Martin, Tess Patalano, and Roxane Gay (again!). 7pm, free.

Dave Hill discusses his latest, Tasteful Nudes, with Ira Glass at McNally Jackson. 7pm, free.

THURSDAY 5/24: WORD hosts a launch party for Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, The Lola Quartet, featuring a reading by the author and a musical performance by Tzvi Skolnik. 7pm, free.

Sideshow Goshko, at KBG Bar, features storytelling by John Flynn, Caitlin Brodnick, and Evan Morgenstern, music by Dr. Michelle-Leona Godin, trivia, and a wine giveaway. 7pm, free.

Apparently this weekend is for backyard barbeques, not readings or launches. Happy Memorial Day?

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If you would like to be listed in Notable New York, please send requests to NotableNYC@therumpus.net.

Happy Monday, let’s talk about ichthyosaurus’s breathing troubles.

Midcentury Modern luggage labels!

Flavorwire has your week’s worth of ruin porn with these abandoned rail stations from around the world.

Way to be bad-ass, 73 year old Tamae Watanabe.

Fact: some orangutans delay puberty (to be more attractive).

By Gary Groth

I had the great good fortune of spending an afternoon with Maurice Sendak in October of 2011. And fortunately, I brought my tape recorder.

But, to begin at the beginning: I had previously spoken to Maurice nearly a dozen times by phone over the previous three years: initially desultorily, and later, when I decided that I was prepared to interview him forThe Comics Journal, more earnestly and purposefully. When I formally approached him about an interview — perhaps in 2009 — he didn’t decline, exactly, but he was standoffish. He told me he didn’t like talking on the phone, and he politely but firmly declined my offer to conduct it at his home, which left me without many (that is to say, any) options. I finally persuaded him to do several short interviews by phone. He asked me how much time I needed, and I explained to him that my interviews could go on for hours because I wanted to do a thorough job. I heard a visible gasp on the other end of the line. He told me he couldn’t talk that long on the phone because he got tired. I quickly regrouped and suggested that we could talk for, oh, say 30 minutes at a time and just do a number of different sessions (hoping, even as I said it, that I could slyly turn 30 minutes into 60). He grumbled. He would commit to a couple. I remember mentioning to him that we’d already been talking that day for 40 minutes without any signs of his slowing down, which was true (I wish I’d had my tape recorder on at the time!), but which didn’t seem to impress him as an argument in favor of two hour interview sessions. Once he’d realized we’d been talking for 40  minutes, he quickly got off the phone.

The fact is, we got along incredibly well. We had several 30-40 minute conversations that ranged all over the place, but which usually centered on the state of the world and how much he loathed it. He was quite cheerfully and gregariously grumpy about it all, an attitude and a point of view that I appreciated, and even shared. It was obvious that he took no small measure of delight in inveighing against contemporary degradations, and I have to admit that I took no little delight in listening to him. He would cite specifics about the world going to hell in a hand-basket and I would inevitably, and truthfully, concur. I can’t say we became fast friends, but I can say that we got on and established a genuine rapport. (We also talked about more substantial matters —such as politics— and about things he loved— mostly old cartooning and old films.)

He agreed to sit still for a phone conversation and perhaps more than one. But each time we set a date, something came up to thwart it. He had to cancel twice, once due to a deadline and once due to momentary health problems. On the third date that we’d agreed upon, I was sitting at my desk, my notes in front of me, the recorder plugged in, prepared to keep the imminent conversation chugging for as long as I could. I dialed the number — and discovered that Hurricane Irene had downed his phone lines! Truly, it appeared as though the fates were conspiring against us, or at least, against me. I was becoming demoralized. Perhaps it was not meant to be.

When I casually mentioned to his assistant and close friend, Lynn, that I was planning a trip to New York the following week, she told me to come on up and conduct the interview in person. This surprised me because I’d learned, subsequent to my offering to visit him earlier, that he was wary of visitors and never let anyone he didn’t know visit his home. My theory is that he simply took pity on me and distrusted any future attempt to communicate by modern or semi-modern technology. The following week, on November 8, I boarded a train from Penn Station headed for Ridgefield, Conn. I had with me my trusty three-ring binder full of notes, ready to get as much of a career-spanning interview as I could, but nervous because I wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t throw me out after 20 minutes; he didn’t seem like the kind of artist who would sit still for a conventional interview.

He didn’t throw me out; in fact, quite the opposite, he spoke animatedly all afternoon and into the evening, mostly while we walked around his property, sat on a bench in his sprawling backyard (more like a private park), and strolled down the street, the tape recorder going much the time, and yielding the most unconventional, conversational interview I’ve ever done. (I could’ve left my binder full of notes at home.)

I had an unforgettable time. Maurice and I spoke a half-dozen times since; he’d agreed to a few follow-up questions, but all our conversations were casual, consisting of good-natured badinage. His fatalism was couched in a blithe spiritedness, and he was funny. The last time I spoke to him, in April, he actually sounded robust despite suffering from flu-ish symptoms, and told me to call him back in a couple weeks to ask him short follow-up questions. I put it off, and then learned that he passed. I had hoped to see him again soon, and despite knowing him briefly, I will miss him.

The full interview will appear in the next print Journal, #302, but below are a few choice excerpts.

Gary Groth, May 10, 2012

SENDAK ON HIS COMICS CAREER

SENDAK: I would take my stack of papers back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and Jeff, backgrounds for Tippy and Captain Stubbs. And there would be a weekly down below, one strip, and I would take it and cut it up, and make it fit on a comic page so that I would have to extend the drawing to fit the size of the comic box. Oh, God. I loved it. But I lost that because — What did they ask me to do? They asked me to do a more moderate thing, where the drawing was more Prince Valiant-ish. And girls were sexy, and it’s like, “You can’t draw sexy girls.” I failed. I failed. I loved it. I was really gonna be a cartoonist. I had a cartoon in my high school newspaper magazine. Terrible, terrible shit. [...]

GROTH: Didn’t you work on Mutt and Jeff? In comic books?

SENDAK: Yes, yes: small things like smoke coming out of heels.

GROTH: This is one of the things I wanted to ask you, which was how you became the artist you became and how you had the career you did. When you were a kid, you read comic strips. You must have read comic strips.

SENDAK: Yes, yes.

GROTH: And comic books came along around the mid-1930s, and you read comic books as well. But you didn’t become a comic-strip artist or a comic-book artist. You went an entirely different direction.

SENDAK: I would have liked to become a Big Little Book artist.

GROTH: But they died. [Laughter.]

SENDAK: They died, yes, they died. Although I have my collection.

GROTH: But I was curious as to why you didn’t — I mean, the dream of many artists back then was to have a syndicated strip. That was the Holy Grail. And those who couldn’t do that went into comic books. And so I’m wondering why you didn’t move in either direction.

SENDAK: I have no idea. I think part of why it happened had nothing to do with the actual craft. It had to do with meeting Ursula Nordstrom at Harper’s [Harper and Row] and knowing instantly my life was with her.

GROTH: I see.

SENDAK: And she said, “You do a book.” I would do anything she said. If she said do a comic book, I would have done a comic book. So she was integral, she was so important to my life.

IN HIS TIME

SENDAK: We cannot, I think, separate ourselves from our time. Like when I began in the ’50s … Of course, I’d had the privilege of having great siblings. So me as an artist was with my brother as an artist, learning from him, copying him, living in the same house with him. It was unbelievable to have such a brother, and on top of that, I had such a sister. She wasn’t an artist. She had no impulses in that direction, but she was a great sponsor of. She was delighted with me and delighted with my brother and her brother. And then I grew up and lived through all of that Auschwitz time, and then we won the war. Hitler might have won the war, but he didn’t. That doesn’t sound like much now, but it sounded like a hell of a lot then. We won the war! My God! And we ran from Brooklyn to New York City to get ahead of the soldiers, and those doors opened, and we were welcomed. Young people were welcomed. New things were happening, a surge of energy: a surge of hope. A surge of happiness. And now it’s all dwindled. And so I say, look, I’m very lucky that’s when my time was. What a blessing that I could be there then and be with editors and people in the publishing world who appreciated young people and wanted them to be crazy like I was. Nobody wants them now.

WHY SO SERIOUS

SENDAK: Well, I get criticized for doing too serious books. Why is there a dead child in so many of your books? Why is there a chagrined mother? Because that’s the way it is. It works both ways. You either become very superficial, and do it strictly for the money, or you become very serious and turn people off. And if it’s a book for children, my God! I would not know how to write a book for children. I’ve never written a book for children. And yet I’m known as a children’s book writer and illustrator, OK? Why did they define me that way? I used to object much more when I was younger, much more. But I don’t care any more. I’ve thought that’s all part of this third-rate worldly thinking that should not be of interest to me and truthfully it’s not. Thank God I can still read. Thank God I can still hear music. Thank God I don’t mind being alone. I am very alone, and I’m lonely and there are very few people who satisfy me and what do they have to be, they have to be artists, for the most part [rooster crows]. They have to understand what it means to be a serious person in an unserious society.

SENDAK THE ANARCHIST

SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”

GROTH: A group hug.

SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.

GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]

SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.

Check out some other stories now featured at The Comics Journal:

Tezuka, Mickey Mouse and post-WWII Japan.

UPA and the life of the animated cartoon.

I moved to New York the week I turned twenty. I lived on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up with a boyfriend I was too young to realize I shouldn’t have been with, and I got a job waiting tables in Union Square. A year and a half earlier, during my freshman year at a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont, my mother died of cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Nash recently gave this talk at an event for Grub Street.  If you haven’t heard Richard wax on publishing in general, and his latest venture, Small Demons, in particular, you should check it out.  Small Demons is a pretty phenomenal concept.  I’m still trying to figure out how Richard’s publishing community, Red Lemonade, functions precisely . . . it’s sort of Fictionaut-meets-indie-press-meets-a-dating-site, maybe?  But their books are great.  That’s the thing about Richard: you don’t get to become a mover and a shaker by putting out a crap product.

Richard’s in that rare category of people in publishing who are both arbiters of taste and a kind of “brand” in and of themselves.  Some other people like that are Lauren Cerand and Jessa Crispin.  That doesn’t grow on trees.  I’m not talking about the Jonathan Galassi or Nan Talese kind of mover-and-shaker: the establishment kind, with a financial engine, even though actually, in both of those cases, I’m fond of the particular aesthetic involved.  I’m talking about the quirky lone wolf types, who forge ahead with a kind of force of personality, and usually an absence of any serious money.  It’s worth watching people like this, and seeing what they’re doing next.

Everyone wants to brand themselves these days.  The writer can feel like the product, instead of the product being the book.  Never mind the book as Art–if your book is even the product at all you may be ahead of the game in contemporary publishing.

Erika Rae is rebranding the fallen Evangelical, over at her multimedia website.  Erika looks fetching in thigh-highs.  She’s terminally adorable, but don’t let it fool you–she bites.  Her memoir, Devangelical, is coming out from Emergency Press.  We’ll be running a bit here, sometime before it drops.  Here, she interviews author Frank Schaeffer on a number of juicily maddening topics, including Pat Robertson on masturbation.

Meanwhile, TNB Books’ latest, The Beautiful Anthology, may be aiming at nothing short of rebranding Beauty.  The editor, Elizabeth Collins, is stirring up some mischief.  I’ve got a story in this bad-ass thing.  The same story featured in my book trailer for Slut Lullabies.  It may be my favorite of my stories, actually.  It’s also the one that’s gotten me, far and away, in the most trouble with my friends.

I maybe needed a rebranding of my own after that story.  I’d based things on friends, yet because it was fiction it was particularly problematic because if you knew my friends you could easily tell who was who, but at the same time everyone was slightly–or sometimes extremely–more fucked up in the story than in Real Life.  But how was anyone supposed to tell what was fact vs. fiction?  The people I’d based things on thought I’d made them look bad.  Not using their real names wasn’t much consolation.  Autobiographical fiction is like that.  People end up, usually, looking more compromised than they would in a straight out essay that told all their actual secrets.  Some of the secrets you imagine for them, in fiction, may be emotionally true and yet somehow “worse” than the actual truth.  I wrote in the Acknowledgments section of Slut Lullabies that writers are gossips, liars and thieves; I thanked my friends in advance for putting up with me and loving me anyway, and in the end they all did.  I’ve been lucky that way.  The angriest anyone’s ever been at me for my writing was my mother-in-law, who didn’t speak to me for six months after my debut novel because she concluded I was a deviant pervert.  None of that novel was based on her–it was based on a Freud case study; it was supposed to be securely behind the veil of fiction and therefore “safe.”  But of course writing is always risky.  There are a lot of potential mistakes to make as a writer, but not shying away from risk seems the bare minimum of what you need to do right.

This overuse of the word “brand” in this Round-up is making me laugh.

You’ve gotta love Dan Wickett, over at Dzanc Books.  You will never, as long as you live, hear Dan use the word brand.  Here’s Dan selflessly championing other writers and celebrating Short Story Month, as he’s done for as long as I’ve been in this business.  And here’s Dzanc going all Kickstarter, to raise money for their rEprint series–they overshot their goal, and now will help hundreds more writers get their words out there in the ethersphere.  If people in publishing rode white horses, Dan would have one.  It’d probably be wearing a baseball cap and somehow it’d need a shave, but still.

If you’d like to spend some of your Sunday sobbing in a puddle on your floor, watch this.  Weirdly, unlike most things that make you sob on the floor, your day will be better for it afterwards.

An Epidemic of Hidden Fat – The Week headline, April 20, 2012
“A 55-year-old woman who looks great in a dress could have very little muscle
and mostly body fat, and a whole lot of health risks because of that.”
– Dr. Eric Braverman

Read the rest of this entry »

Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I fell for that poem of his that begins, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” and reminds its object that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” It was the most romantic thing I’d ever read; how anyone could refuse this man was a mystery to me. Read the rest of this entry »

A few links to get you started reading this Saturday morning. (I know it’s nice out, but I took my coffee out to my little backyard and am ignoring my cat’s mournful stares from the window, and encourage you to do so as well.)

At the Guardian, Tom Shone takes on the auteur theory — and its distinctly “male gaze.” “The carving up of the movies, a collaborative medium, into a series of solo acts, each bearing the unmistakeable imprint of an all-controlling “master”, most often male, is basically the great man theory of history transplanted into movie theatres – the swinging dick of film theories.” I hate balls metaphors but I hereby grant myself an exception to say that I respect the brass ones it takes to point this out. The way we talk about movies does have a self-reinforcing qualities. If the highest accolade we accord directors is that they have a “distinct worldview” and their “ambition,” then the James Camerons of this world are going to follow that garden path straight down into palm fronds and blue cat-people. No one, I think, wants more of that.

There’s a new musical at The Public about a literary roommates arrangement from (what else) Brooklyn. Called February House, the musical is set at 7 Middagh Street, which in the early 1940s was the home address of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and others. Gypsy Rose Lee dropped by for awhile too. The name “February House” came, allegedly, from Anaïs Nin. I haven’t seen the musical — it’s still in previews — but maybe I will, and report back. For now, read this lovely little bit at the London Review of Books blog about all the other 7 addresses Auden occupied, which may not have been an accident of chance, Jim Holt speculates.

This is an old one but a friend tweeted this Believer interview with Rebecca Solnit this week and I want it to be one of those things everyone reads and clasps to their chest and sighs with pleasure — a bit harder to do in the age of the laptop but you know, improvise. One good quote, and there are so many, is, “Public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context, saves you from drowning in the purely personal, as so many Americans seem to. I still think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.” Also: “That term public intellectual: all I know is that I stayed home alone for almost two decades, writing, before it became oddly visible and audible.”

No? Why not?

We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.

Email to: Marie AT therumpus.net

Jen Vafidis’ Rumpus review of Threats won “Best Anointing” over at Electric Literature’s May Critical Hit Awards.

WEEk 39, DAY 5

Jesus, this fucking waiting! It’s like, if I were paranoid, I would actually be wondering if this baby-to-be kind of hates us. Or, more accurately, hates me. Read the rest of this entry »

COMIQUES:
Instructions

Another fantastic Rumpus Comic from Anne Emond!

The second installment of “Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers” features a number of our friends, including contributor Chloe Caldwell, and Adam Levin, whose novel The Instructions was a Rumpus Book Club selection.

Here’s Nick Flynn on his pre-writing ritual:

“Before I sit down, I need time to wander in the unknown for awhile, either psychically or physically, somewhat aimlessly, yet in a state of awareness, allowing seeming distractions to build up some energy, maybe around an image or idea or sound, until something reveals itself: a pattern, an echo, something that resonates with whatever it is I think I’m supposed to be working on.”

“…Prejudice is a kind of cartel that works best when there is no real dissent. Once one person breaks away, others who may have had doubts find it easy to speak up. Moreover, those who never really had objection–but were just kinda going along–also fall away.”

As more public figures express their support for marriage equality, Ta-Nehisi Coates analyzes the nature of same-sex marriage opposition.

HORN! REVIEWS:
Leaving the Atocha Station

Another fantastic Rumpus Comic book review by Kevin Thomas.

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair.

Read the rest of this entry »

I, for one, am entirely excited about New Mexico’s new science ghost city.

It looks like the Soviets had us beat there back when that was still a thing.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are crushing us when it comes to teleportation.

Plutonium’s signature has been captured at last (which is good).

Here are some pictures of people being blown (by a wind machine). Have a good weekend.

Dita von Teese, burlesque superstar, author, actress, costume and lingerie designer, and formidable businesswoman, is idolized by many who might not otherwise fancy themselves enthusiasts of burlesque, let alone openly admire a star of “adult entertainment.” Read the rest of this entry »

People are beginning to get their Letters to Each Other, and they’re leaving comments on Karen Duffin’s essay, “A Letter to the People Who Wrote Letters to Each Other.”

If you’ve received a letter, we encourage you to head over to the comments section and share your own thoughts, experiences, etc.

POLICE LOG COMICS:
March 28th Carmel Area

Another rad Rumpus Comic from Owen Cook.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus will read from his new book, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, a “dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties.”

Tonight, 7p.m. at San Francisco’s Books Inc.

Now That We Have Tasted Hope archives the “most important” primary source documents of the Arab Spring. Published by McSweeney’s and Byliner, and edited by Rumpus contributor Daniel Gumbiner, the book derives its title from Khaled Mattawa’s poem by the same name.

“From the harrowing accounts of tortured protesters to the hollow appeals of crumbling regimes and the triumphant songs of revolutionaries, these documents catalog the events of the Arab Spring in all its complexity and drama.”

Dear Sugar,

My mother left my father the month I was born. She remarried and had my brother two years later. My stepfather (the only father I knew) committed suicide when I was five years old. My mother became a raging alcoholic following his death. Read the rest of this entry »

Some undergrads from Yale recently found a fungi that eats plastic while on an expedition in the Amazon designed to introduce students to discovery-based research.

This super fungi can survive on polyurethane alone and even in oxygen-free environments, making it a viable solution to our growing waste problem. No word yet on its worth as a pizza-topping or psychedelic advantages.

Have you noticed? The site is brimming with excellent content. Highlights from the last two days:

Thomas Page McBee’s “SELF-MADE MAN #9: Passing.”

The Rumpus Review of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Roxane Gay addresses privilege in “Peculiar Benefits.”

Jerry Stahl’s new series—about impending fatherhood and being an Old Guy Dad—continues with “OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane.

Nicholas Rombes writes the “possible, secret story” of an Empire Film Exchange photograph.