The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot will be all over San Francisco this week, accompanied by his newly released novel Blueprints of the Afterlife. There are two events to choose from, or double up on. The first is Wednesday, January 25th at Booksmith.
...moreToday’s HTML Giant interview with Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot coincides with the official release of his new novel Blueprints of the Afterlife. Discussion veers toward the book after Boudinot reflects on the interview process and his ambivalence toward the promotional side of publishing.
...moreThe January 3rd release date for Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife is fast approaching. i09 interviewed Boudinot about the post apocalyptic novel a while back, and now they have previewed an entire chapter. Here’s a snippet:
“An iron stairwell led to a basement.
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Last year my friend Tom Nissley appeared on Jeopardy!, winning eight straight games, which allowed him to quit his job as a Books editor at Amazon
Rumpus columnist/ writer, Ryan Boudinot is interviewed by Steve Barker on episode 1 of his podcast “Ordinary Madness,” in which he talks about his new book Blueprints of the Afterlife, which sprawls two different time periods—one being the distant, post-apocalyptic future.
...moreLast week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion animated shorts.
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Session four of my six-part class on using experimental films as writing prompts commenced last night at Richard Hugo House.
In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles.
...moreAre there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the films of Kenneth Anger.
...moreI’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to shoehorn this desire into a nonprofit literary arts center.
...moreWhat’s going on with Michel Gondry’s career these days? Well, this, for starters…
...moreYou want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and you hate yourself a little bit for even considering it, but
...moreOn New Year’s Day this year I removed all the bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks bar. When I mentioned to a couple friends that my resolution was to lay off the political blogs, I got variations on the same response: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular resolution right now.
...moreMy family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the theater and at home, cranked up loud on the home system and with a fuckin’ beer in my hand.
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Years ago I happened upon a series of arresting images on cable. There was a young Mick Jagger cavorting in a bath tub with two svelte beauties. A child wearing a fake mustache. A still image of Jorge Luis Borges rising out of a gunshot wound to the head.
Short fiction is often spoken of in terms of genre, a genre of ephemeral writing that is erased from the mind as quickly as it was most likely written. But the fallacy in this is that genre presupposes a style and tendency.
I Remember
Last night I met up with some of my former Amazon colleagues, guys who, like me, served tours of duty on the DVD team, to watch Fellini’s Amarcord at Siff Cinema. The faces, rumps, busts, and girths of the cast jiggled, jumped, and danced.
...moreHey tweens who enjoy a little abstinence-only subtext thrown in with your vampire movies: go out and get a load of the non-virginal variety in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This was one of the Maddin movies I’ve been saving.
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Your Weekend Popcorn Recipe
My brother-in-law Chad Johnson’s popcorn recipe is the best. I’ve enjoyed it at his and my sister-in-law’s place over the years while watching Pulp Fiction and during their rigorously opinionated James Bond sessions. I don’t know if he got the recipe from somewhere else, but in our house my son calls it “Uncle Chaddie Popcorn.”
When I met Chad years ago, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a dreadlocked George H.W.
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