BLOWING ROCK, NC- 

As space for book reviews continues to dwindle in many print publications, it’s always exciting to see new, high-quality venues for reviews and dialogue about arts/culture. Which means the launch of The Rumpus, overseen by Stephen Elliot, with Andrew Foster Altschul serving as the books editor, is a good reason to celebrate. A recent press release calls this online publication “a single source for books, music, movies, art, sex and politics…The site has already compiled a formidable selection of original content, including interviews with Malcolm Gladwell, James Frey, Steven Soderbergh and Mary Roach, and essays by Po Bronson, Dan Chaon and Robin Romm, just to name a few. Also unique to TheRumpus.net is its stable of exclusive blogs, with authors such as Rick Moody on independent music, Jerry Stahl on life after 50, Bitchy Jones on the intersection of dominance and domesticity, political humor by Will Durst, and tales of an ‘anonymous Chicago cop.’” (more…)

BLOWING ROCK, NC-

As a staff member at Memorious, an online journal of new verse and fiction, I’m super excited to be announcing the release of the Fall 2008 issue. This fifth anniversary issue of Memorious features poetry and prose from Kevin Prufer, G. C. Waldrep, Kelle Groom, Todd Hearon, and B.J. Hollars, as well as a conversation between Alexander Chee and Sigrid Nunez, an interview with Larissa Szporluck, and some pretty awesome emerging writers.

BLOWING ROCK, NC–

Independent publisher Dzanc Books has selected author Kodi Scheer as the winner of the second annual Dzanc Prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service. She will receive $5,000 to support a proposed project of running a creative writing workshop for cancer patients and their caregivers in a Michigan hospital. A native of Blairstown, Iowa, Kodi is a graduate of the Universities of Iowa and Michigan. She is currently working on a short story collection, Gross Anatomy, and her stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Quarterly West. This week, she took the time to answer a few questions.

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BOULDER, CO-

It was a dark and stormy night with the snow dotting the sky like static on a 1955 RCA television.  I pointed my Jeep down the mountain pass in the dark.  The radio blared Smooth Criminal.  Alien Ant Farm version. I was freshly showered, neatly dressed, sober – and I didn’t care who saw me.  I wore jeans, a powder blue shirt, a black camisole, black shoes, a black North Face coat and a necklace in the shape of a silver flower that I purchased in Denmark a few years prior.  I had eaten spaghetti for dinner.  With meatballs.  I was everything the well-dressed, young entrepreneur ought to be.  I was calling on one million dollars.

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CLEVELAND, OH -

This is the third chapter in my ongoing story of how I started writing semi-professionally and all the ridiculous mistakes I’ve made along the way.

The first segment revolved around me scoring an editing gig for a totally shitty magazine and almost getting sued: In the Beginning There Was an Unpaid Editing Job in Cleveland, a Potential Lawsuit, and a Bunch of Unprovoked Angry Geese.

The second installment had me milling around the (X-Games-like) Gravity Games on the 9th Street Pier in Cleveland, taking notes and feeling sorry for myself: Rewriting a Media Guide Is Easier When You’re Both Lonely and Looking Important.

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BLOWING ROCK, NC-

For all you Joy Williams fans out there, I want to point out a new interview with Williams over at Bookslut, which is exciting since this super-brilliant author (in my humble opinion, The Quick and the Dead is one of the best books ever) usually stays somewhat under the radar. Williams talks to interviewer Tao Lin about a fluorescent mineral room in a Wyoming geological museum, book critics, and the “non-expressible,” among other things, and there’s a neat little feature that displays the original answers, composed on a typewriter, that Williams mailed in. Check it out. 

COLUMBUS, OH-

In his last novel, An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan wrote that no place is more surreal than the Midwest. He was right. To explore this issue further you should read Chuck Klosterman’s new book (and his first novel), Downtown Owl. In his amazing story you will meet a small band of inhabitants from a fictional North Dakota town called Owl, circa 1983. This crowd includes a transplanted teacher, a high school coach who impregnates students, students who make and don’t make the football team, alcoholic farmers, retired geezers, barflys and other sundry characters who not only make up the nuclei of our small towns but our larger metropoli.

If you grew up in a small town you have met these people, if you grew up in a large city you have probably still met them. Maybe one married your cousin or coached your nephews or nieces. Perhaps they drove into your brother’s car on a drunken Saturday night or gave you grandchildren. The characters in this town are Everymen and Klosterman paints them in their glaring humanity and vulnerability - he does not look down upon them at all. Klosterman is one of them. He grew up in North Dakota.

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LOS ANGELES-

David Modigliani is the director of a new documentary called Crawford. A hit on the festival circuit, the film offers a poignant view of the small Texas town that was transformed overnight when George W. Bush bought his 1,500-acre ranch on Prairie Chapel Road back in 1999. Crawford just made its groundbreaking premiere online at Hulu.com, and it has been warmly received by both critics and audiences alike. Noteworthy for its even-handed approach, the film features the perspectives of ordinary citizens who were able to witness history at close range during extraordinary times.

Says the Texas Observer:

Modigliani honors [the] spirit of egalitarianism by focusing his film not on Bush and other grandees, but rather on half-a-dozen unfamiliar figures, men and women who live their lives in Crawford out of range of the scores of TV cameras deployed to cover the big cheeses melting in the Texas sun.

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Stefan Forbes is the director of a new documentary called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, a fascinating, funny, and deeply disturbing portrait of the controversial Republican operative who perfected the art of politics as blood sport. The film arrives in theaters this weekend riding a wave of critical praise.

I recently had a chance to talk with Forbes about his film and the man who inspired it.

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LOS ANGELES, CA –

Mr. Gibson requested that he be able to observe me in my natural habitat. Due to the relocation of my family members, and the dissolution of our family compound, this interview took place over two days at Solley’s Deli in Encino, California. A place my family and I inhabited frequently during my most formative years.

Mr. Gibson insisted on a relaxed and casual atmosphere. I showed up on time, but comfortable, in my usual ensemble – an American Apparel zip up hoodie in white, crewneck t-shirt in red, and sweat pants with the gathered ankle in navy blue.

The contents of this interview have been edited. All pauses and blinking removed for the sake of brevity.

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LOS ANGELES-

Recently I had a chance to sit down with the actor Stuart Townsend. A native of Ireland, Townsend has appeared in a variety of films and television shows, and he has now taken on his most ambitious project to date: writing, directing, and producing Battle in Seattle, a movie centered on the WTO riots of 1999. Battle makes its debut in select theaters on September 19th. New York magazine has called it “a triumph,” and Jeffrey Lyons of NBC’s Reel Talk has hailed it as “a compelling and impassioned film with powerful performances.”

At the time of our meeting, Mr. Townsend was neck-deep in promotional work, hustling to get the word out about his film. He was sleep-deprived but cordial, passionate about his project and the issues at its core. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the movie and its origins.

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BALTIMORE, MD-

I met my mother when I was born. Since then she has progressed from a dress-sewing, dinner-cooking, hair in a high-bun housewife, to a nude swimming, pot-smoking artist to a grey-haired lady who thinks old age is an embarrassment to be treated like some hideous debilitating disease. The one thing that has remained constant in my mother is that she reads a couple novels a week (she keeps one upstairs and one downstairs and reads the one on the floor she’s on), is an intense thinker and critic and is brutally honest refusing to bullshit even for the sake of social nice-nice at a cocktail party. The following is an interview with my mother that took place over the phone on Sunday, August 7th, 2008. I was in Baltimore, Maryland where I live. She was in Santa Barbara, California where she lives.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

There’s that one line from the new Dark Knight Batman movie that I keep stumbling on. It sticks in all the commercials. I hear it from my family. I read it in grafitti. It squeaks from comic book action figures: “Why so serious?” Maybe it’s because Comicon 2008 in San Diego is a place of spandex god worshippers who want their asses signed with celebrity lightning bolts. I mean, that’s gotta seriously hurt. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Can I just say now that spoken word poet Rich Ferguson is a great inspiration? Recently I wrote a rebellious poem-essay that I read at the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and got freaky nervous because Ferguson showed up. OK, I would have been nervous anyway, but he was there looking like a poet gunslinger… (more…)

LOS ANGELES-

And here’s some more good news:

Jonathan Evison, contributor to TheNervousBreakdown.com, has just published his debut novel, All About Lulu, which comes to us from the fine people at Soft Skull Press in New York. The movie rights have sold, the buzz is building, and critics are calling it “a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man’s thwarted longing.”

In short, it’s a great story. And one worth sharing.

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Mr. Evison about his recent life and times, and I’ve posted the transcript of our meandering conversation right here at TNB.

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LOS ANGELES, CA

Every year, the New York Public Library hands out its Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize given to a writer under the age of thirty-five who has published a novel or a collection of stories of great distinction. The award was established in 2001 and is helmed by NYPL committee members Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland. Past winners include Andrew Sean Greer, Monique Truong, Colson Whitehead, and Jonathan Safran Foer.

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MADRID, ESPAÑA

In contemplating this post (possibly the first all-video post on TNB?) I looked into the history of the handshake and why humans have come to do it.

While it may be of (trivial) interest to note that Sir Walter Raleigh is accredited with bringing about the modern handshake (along with tobacco and thus the cigarette, the bastard) and also that it was initially used to reveal no weapons were being held and hence it was a show of trust and so on and so forth, I realized that I am not Wikipedia, that Wikipedia itself is probably only 80% accurate and that if you, dear reader, wish to know more about the handshake, reading it via my vapid digital prose (or non-plagiarized copying from Wiki) is probably not going to wow or educate you anymore than the pertinent text of Wikipedia itself.

So, JGreen and I developed this unique greeting which has been called the Viking S (more…)

AMHERST, MA-

Create a background for one of your characters by filling out this list:

Full Name: Alexander Suk Hyun Chee

Birthday: August __, 1967

Birthplace: Rhode Island. Or rather, a hospital near the campus of the University of Rhode Island, the Ocean State. Photos from that time show my parents living in a small graduate student apartment.

Current Location: Amherst, MA, in a small faculty apartment overlooking a football field. Tall old trees line the streets. All the houses I can see are white with black shutters.

Heritage: Korean/Chinese/Mongolian/Scotch-Irish.

Eye Color/Hair Color: Hazel/Brown.

Right or Left Handed: Right, for most things.

Major Strength: Students and friends believe he has X-Ray vision. (more…)

SEATTLE, WA-

1.) Hey, do you have a second?

2.) Why do some people have everything while others have nothing?

3.) Will there always be war?

4.) Why is there disease?

5.) Mental illness?

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SEATTLE, WA-

Two years ago I interviewed Sherman Alexie for the second time. The interview was going to be a centerpiece of a theme issue for a magazine that I had written for a number of times before. The editors decided to scrap said theme and the interview hung in limbo for nine months before the managing editor killed it.

I’ve interviewed dozens of individuals from Wanda Sykes to Ron Jeremy and Alexie remains among my favorites, both because his art impacts my life and because he is boundlessly intelligent. He sends my mom the sweetest thank you notes when she sends him baklava, plus, he is the only person who’s ever had the balls to write her and say, “Could you please send more?”

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