Tonight’s the night, Brooklynites! Join friends of The Rumpus for an evening of comedy, readings, and (of course) dancing. Festivities begin at 8pm.
Dancing with The Rumpus
Libraries: Future and Present
“Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information. Asking about the future of libraries is another way of asking where this big, hot mess of information is taking us.” Justin Wadland reviews three books on libraries and attempts to predict the future of these institutions in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University has just opened and its library has no books at all.
What Happens at Pogofest Stays at Pogofest
“Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid? Who was Pogofest supposed to appeal to, besides—thirty years after the fact—me? I pose the question to Janice Parks, a former city commissioner. ‘Well, look what a rat did for the wasteland of Central California,’ she says.” A bizarre, slightly surreal look at Waycross, Georgia — the self-proclaimed hometown of Pogo Possum.
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Civil War Lit Reconsidered
While there may not be any great literature from the Civil War period about the war itself, the war did leave an indelible mark on some of the great American writers toiling at the time. Craig Fehrman explores the topic at The Boston Globe.
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To Thine Own Self Be True
New writers need to trust themselves, Marilynne Robinson advises in an interview with Thessaly La Force for VICE. “The idea that you might do something radically brilliant—that assumption is very empowering and it has given the world a lot of really interesting things to look at,” she said.
The Lovely Bones
Peter Jackson, beloved director of The Lord of the Rings movies, has turned his talents to an adaption of a very different book. He has directed a film version of Alice Sebold‘s The Lovely Bones (see the trailer here), the story of a young girl who is murdered and looks down on her family and killer from heaven. Saoirse Ronan will play Susie Salmon, the novel’s heroine. Ronan is perhaps making a career of cinematic adaptions of novels–she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Briony Tallis in last year’s film version of Ian McEwan‘s Atonement. Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, and Stanley Tucci also star.
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Hitchens Memoir Moved
The Christopher Hitchens memoir, Mortality, a collection of essays based around the final pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair, now has an official U.S. release date of September, and the U.K. release date has been moved to coincide with that.
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