Notable San Francisco 2/20-/26
This week in San Francisco – pepper the week with shows by indie artists for Noise Pop’s 20th birthday. AAAnndd….:
Monday 2/20: Bender‘s kicks off a week of happy hour free shows in partnership with Noise Pop. 4-7pm drink specials and local bands.
Wednesday 2/22: Ian Tuttle’s debut short story collection, Stretchyhead, launches at Green Apple Books. Tuttle’s stories have been described as “a perfect blend of Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver.” Free, 7pm.
Tuesday 2/21: SOMArts’ monthly literary potluck, Feast of Words, hosts the inimitable Maxine Hong Kingston tonight. 7pm, if you bring a dish to share!
Thursday 2/23: Booksmith hosts Richard Mason’s reading of History of a Pleasure Seeker, the seasons author’s “portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love.” 7:30pm, Free.
Friday 2/24: The San Francisco Writer’s Workshop throws a benefit reading for Lit-Loving Meridian Gallery. 7:30pm, . Meridian Gallery. B.L.ING aka the Big Lit Thing reading hostsStephen Rosenshein, Lizzy Acker, Anhvu Buchanan, Chelsea Martin, Ben Mirov and Diana Salier. 7:30pm, Free.
Saturday 2/25: The launch party for Franco La Cecla’s Against Architecture goes on without the author! Live music and discussion on the book that “dismantles the glory of the ‘archistar’ in their proud myopic grandeur that totally ignores people and their rights to a better urban life.” Free, 8pm. Green Arcade. 90′s Rock downstairs and 90′s Hip Hop upstairs at Debaser‘s tribute to our youth. Free (with flannel), 10pm, Elbo Room.
Sunday 2/26: Free chocolate throughout the city’s independent bookstores. 12-7:30pm, various stores.
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: 2/20/26, Francisco, Notable | Comment (0)Lit-Link Round-up
Sometimes, there’s so much cool stuff happening close to home, that a girl has to give in to Rumpus self-referentiality:
1) This has been Cheryl Strayed week, pretty much. If you’ve been down with dysentary since before Valentine’s Day, you may not have heard that Cheryl is Dear Sugar. You can read every single thing your heart desires about that freaking awesome news, here.
Cheryl’s memoir, Wild, scared the hell out of me. In it, a much-younger-and-more-fucked-up Cheryl hikes the PCT solo. If you’re like me, and would have been the first member of the Donner party the others sacrificed because of your wilderness uselessness, you will read this book on the edge of your seat. You may emerge thinking Cheryl is a little bit crazy, even. Which is, of course, where she gets the immense, bottomless heart necessary for a gig like Sugar.
Cheryl and I have had a few interesting exchanges about the fact that Sugar is “nicer” than Cheryl is. I’ve been a fan of Sugar’s for a long time, predating knowing her true identity, but my favorite thing lately has been Cheryl’s self-awareness about the differences between a created persona and a real self, and her ability to maintain these differences while being consistent and authentic in both spaces. Sugar wouldn’t have such a following if she were inconsistent–if she weren’t very much a Real Person. And yet, Sugar isn’t “Cheryl,” precisely. It’s cool.
Cheryl and I talk about this and a bunch of other stuff in an upcoming Bookslut interview–I’ll keep you posted.
2) The first Sugar–who turns out to be Steve Almond–also continues to rock it in these parts with his new, hybrid fiction/historical essay column. Steve is required reading for humanity. That’s my final word on the matter.
3) Rumpus editor, Roxanne Gay, also knocked it out of the park yet again this week. Nothing slips by Roxanne. (Me, on the other hand: I didn’t even know who Chris Brown was when I first read this.) But the thing is, you don’t have to know jack about Chris Brown, or keep up with music celebs for this piece to be pertinent. The glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture, of course. It’s not just in the way dating/domestic abuse is romanticized, or in young girls’ hunger for any form of attention, or the way “famous” can get away with anything . . . Roxanne calls us all out, in a good way, to pay more attention.
Happy Sunday.
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: LitLink, Roundup | Comment (0)Porchlight: Young Love, Monday!
Porchlight is hosting an event at the Verdi Club on Monday, February 20th at 8p.m. The storytelling theme of the evening is “Young Love,” and our own managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald will be performing! Click here for tickets.
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: Love, Monday, Porchlight, Young | Comment (0)On Zoe Strauss and Thinking Big
At The Nation, Barry Schwabsky writes about photographer Zoe Strauss’ “Ten Years” exhibition. Exploring Strauss’ evolving approach to photographic techniques, portraiture and storytelling, Schwabsky argues that her artistic triumphs come from “thinking big”.
“Strauss’s work was a runaway from birth, and by putting her photographs on billboards she is returning them to the streets from which they sprang… But more than that, Strauss’s images are not only about but for the urban rough-and-tumble. The streets of Philadelphia have become her museum: no admission, no coat-check, no guards, and a true public space for all that.”
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: Strauss, Thinking | Comment (0)TRUTH SERUM: Fan Club
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: Club, SERUM, TRUTH | Comment (0)Flavor of the Week: Library Boing Boing
The handy WordPress search function reveals the fact that I used the phrase “two great tastes” as a post title just under two years ago, so I’m going to hold tight to my integrity and refrain from using it again. But if I did, I would now. One of my favorite places to geek out on the offbeat news of the day, Boing Boing, has partnered up with ALA to give us Library Boing Boing. Or, to use its proper title, LibraryLab—since if you’re on a site called Boing Boing in the first place, you’re obviously concerned about keeping things dignified.
The concept has been in the works for a couple of months. And they actually have an agenda beyond the cute and oddball which includes some very worthy library advocacy goals:
Provide active ways for Happy Mutants [Boing Boing fans and readers] to support and get involved with their local libraries (eg, toolkits, best practices, ideas for local projects).
Create dynamic programming at library conferences that Library Boing Boingers can then take outside of the library community to promote libraries (eg, SxSW, local community events, etc.).
Work together to help Happy Mutants advance our shared interests (e.g., copyright reform, net neutrality, game culture, digital divide issues, open government, etc.).
Coordinate an international community of librarians working with their own Happy Mutant groups.
OK, the Happy Mutant thing is a bit silly. But hey, so is pretty much anything if you say it over and over, and this promises to be an engaging go-to resource for anyone interested in libraries, literacy, free exchange of information, that kind of silliness. In other words, good stuff. Bookmark it.
Rainbow Book Fair
4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR
Saturday, March 24, 2012 11am–5:30pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street NYC
Welcome to the 4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR On this website you can find out how you can become a Sponsor of the Rainbow Book Fair, how to become an Exhibitor, and keep abreast of Panels, Readings and the Poetry Salon for the 2012 Fair.
Plan to be a part of the most exciting LGBT book event in the U.S., the
4th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair. More than 1OO publishers, writers, poets, editors, booksellers, and the 15OO+ readers who love and want to buy their books—from serious to wild, zany, and super hot. It’s totally free to the public with book discounts, giveaways, panels on writing and publishing, author readings, a non-stop Poetry Salon.
The event is sponsored by CLAGS The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies web.gc.cuny.edu/Clags/
Sponsors:
. 
Hosted by:
.
Visit us on Facebook 
Links
http://www.glreview.com/
http://www.gaywisdom.org/
Filed under Poetry
| Tags: Book, Fair, Rainbow |
Comment (0)
The Chimerist
The Chimerist, a website created by Maud Newton and Salon’s Laura Miller, launched this week, uniting “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories, and technology.”
Related Posts:
Filed under Poetry | Tags: Chimerist | Comment (0)I Contain Multetudes Multidudes Multitudes
From the brave folks at We Who Are About to Die, here is Walt Whitman on the subject of proofreaders:
What a tribe the tribe of proofreaders is! I think some men, some writers, owe a great part of their reputations to the excellence of their proofreaders–to their vigilance, their counsel. Who can do justice to the [a]cute, keen intellects of men of this stamp—their considerate patience, their far-seemingness?
A wise man indeed. The passages are from Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892 edited by Gary Schmidgall, part of the University of Iowa Press’ Iowa Whitman Series.
1912’s Greatest Hits
Here’s something interesting. Last year right around this time, one of the better online literary distractions involved looking up the bestselling books on the day of your birth. This week John Scalzi took a look at the top sellers from 1912, a hundred years ago (and anyone who thinks they might want to get a crack about my birthday in here, just skip it).
Off the top of my head, 1912 sounds like it might have been a good year for books. And, in fact, that year saw Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and the original German edition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. But popularity doesn’t necessarily speak to a work’s status as a classic, or any powers of endurance at all, as it turns out. The bestsellers of 1912 are as follows:
1. The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter
2. The Street Called Straight by Basil King
3. Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
4. The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Davies
5. A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson
6. The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright
7. The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester
8. The Net by Rex Beach
9. Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
10. Fran by J. Breckenridge Ellis
As Scalzi points out, none of the ten titles or authors are exactly household words, even if you have a relatively geeky literary household. I recognize Stratton-Porter’s name—I’m pretty sure I had her A Girl of the Limberlost on my shelves when I was little, though I wasn’t very predisposed to reading anything with the word “girl” in the title. The rest of them, though, not so much. Which is definitely potentially depressing from a writer’s point of view. If best-seller status doesn’t confer any kind of relevance through the ages, then what does? Scalzi says,
I understand the temptation is to try to write something that will speak to the generations, but, look, in 1912 they hadn’t even yet invented pre-sliced bread. If you aim for being relevant to the future, you’re probably going to fail because you literally cannot imagine it, even if you write science fiction.
These books are all still in print in one form or another, many as public domain eBooks—now that would be a fun reading challenge for someone to take on—and a large number of them in large print, presumably for those readers who remember them fondly from days a little closer to their publication. But as he helpfully points out, we’ll all most likely be gone in another hundred years anyway. Although as readers and reviewers it’s always fun to second-guess the canon, as writers it’s our job to just… write.
If you must aim for relevance, try for being relevant now; it’s a context you understand. We can still read (and do read) Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dickinson, and I think it’s worth noting Shakespeare was busy trying to pack in the groundlings today, Cervantes was writing in no small part to criticize a then-currently popular form of fiction, and Dickinson was barely even publishing at all, i.e., not really caring about future readers. In other words, they were focused on their now. It’s not a bad focus for anyone.
What’s interesting, if you think about it, is that as often as not it’s genre that tends to hang in. You have the thinkers for the ages who’ve maintained, sure—your Thomas Manns, your Bertrand Russells—but also, if we’re looking at that same year, a heavy dose of Westerns, mysteries, and adventure stories. Not to mention, regarding pretty much any year you pick, YA and children’s literature. Endurance is a funny thing. You never know—another century from now, in whatever forum has replaced blogs, the same debate will probably be going on. “Oh sure, Freedom,” opinionmakers of the future will say. “It had its moment in the sun, but it was no Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”
(Photo is Three Girls Reading, artist unknown, 1912.)