Tag Archives: Stephen Elliott

Book Tour / Living Room

Last month, there was some talk here of the tours of house shows undertaken by musicians like David Bazan and Rocky Votolato. (As an aside, Mr. Bazan’s Curse Your Branches is a fantastic, haunting record, and well worth your time and money.) With that in mind, it’s worth mentioning that Stephen Elliott’s book tour for The Adderall Diaries (which I wrote about here) is taking a similar approach, encompassing both bookstores and people’s houses. He’s written about it here; one passage that stood out was this one:

There were 30 people, about the same as the book store in Seattle, Washington, but they were more into it. And they bought more books…

Reading on Reading: 2 June 2009

One: Stephen Elliott reports from Book Expo America, and makes any number of good points.

Two: Via Warren Ellis: the launch of The 5Lights Project, in which one story will be told per week, each day via a different medium. Which sounds like a genius idea, and one that bears watching.

Three: Speaking of Mr. Ellis: today marks the launch of his new column on comics, Do Anything. In which Jack Kirby is invoked, via a robotic head.

notes from the rumpus room

Headed out tonight with my friend and occasional editor Elisabeth to a benefit for The Rumpus; things we saw there included Michael Showalter introducing his “The Weekender” parody*; Jonathan Ames interviewing two random members of the crowd, one of whom discussed a run-in with a substance that resembled, but was not, plum pudding; and Will Sheff playing a pair of Okkervil River songs. At one point, I noticed a guy wandering around helping to manage the crowd; we were late arrivals, and he directed us to some open space with a better view than the spot in which we were standing. Realized once we’d reached the new spot that said guy was, in fact, Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott.

HTML Giant has a lengthy piece on The Rumpus and interview with Elliott up today. One interesting quote from it, taken from a larger discussion of the evolving format of the arts:

But in many ways The Rumpus is working off a very old model, as is HTMLgiant. A group of writers starting a cool literary journal, like McSweeney’s or The Paris Review, where you have great writing and you raise just enough money to publish.

A lot of good ground is covered — both in terms of questions of arts coverage and in terms of forms of media.

*-”Dayton for under $900 a day” may well be the highlight, at least for me.