Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

My lit quarterly Cantaraville was lucky enough to get acquaintance Stephen Tobolowsky to contribute a written version of his soon-to-be periennial classic “An LSD Christmas” to the special free Winter issue, which can be read and downloaded here. Tobolowsky’s story can be heard in different versions, in the film Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party (directed by Robert Brinkmann) and now—thanks to Slashfilmcast producer David Chen—in audio podcast at the two-month old Tobolowsky Files . So gather the family around the old laptop, and remember, when the dog talks, you listen. _____ SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE.

The first time I ever saw Clifford Irving was on The Dick Cavett Show , when I was 17 and just starting my sophomore year in college. My girlish impression was that he was a handsome, cultured rogue, as indeed he was—he’d just been caught earlier that year perpetrating the biggest hoax the New York publishing world had ever been victim to, the Howard Hughes fake autobiography. I saw him again thirty-six later, last autumn in fact, when I was going through a serious Orson Welles phase, renting from Netflix the restored Magnificent Ambersons , Chimes at Midnight , and Othello , among other treasures. I also finally decided to sit down and finally watch Welles’s last film, an audacious experiment in editing and narration called F for Fake , which got scathing reviews when it first came out in 1974. No one knew what to make of it at the time, but film critics have favorably re-evaluated the film since then. Featured among Welles’s fun-loving cast of jetsetters, world-class actors and da...

It was an acquaintance, the film and stage director Mirra Bank, who turned me on to Vimeo, which I like a lot better than YouTube. You get a nicer profile page, you can make it part or all private if you prefer, and if you have any digital footage (terrible word footage, like saying dialing for phone, what word do people use now?) you can try them out here. Mirra uploaded material on Vimeo to raise interest in one of her documentaries. Me, I’m just seeing how much I can do with my little pink Flip camera, and it’s turning out to be more than expected. My friend, underground comix-maven-turned-“herstorian” Trina Robbins—whose upcoming book, Forbidden City: The Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs is excerpted in Cantaraville —was so happy with the clips I managed to get, impromptu, of the subjects of her new book, she let me know that she wants to show them at her book party at the San Francisco Historical Society, they were that good. Well, we’ll see. Of course you can’t do much edi...

Cantarabooks, it should be noted, is not the first literary PDF ebook publisher on the internet. That honor goes to Electron Press, a solo operation started by Philip Harris back in 1997. Philip, by profession an IT consultant, saw the possibilities the internet offered early on and started Electron; and because at the time web publishing was such an intriguing frontier, he was able to acquire the works of varied and veteran authors such as Barry Malzberg, Arthur Herzog and James Ridgeway. I worked for Philip for a few months about five years ago as a special-projects editor when he still had his office in Manhattan (the last news of him was that he relocated to Connecticut), and a great deal of what I know about e-publishing I learned from working for him. Thirteen years into the so-called Internet Revolution, the only two literary PDF ebook publishers I know of in the entire world at present are Electron Press and Cantarabooks. The only two literary PDF magazines I know of are...

About a week ago I had to opportunity to view again, after twenty years, an arty but satisfying film by director-documentarian Jill Godmilow, called Waiting for the Moon . Plotless and rather devil-may-care when it came to realistic chronology, it depicted the lives of Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, as they spent them in the artistically rich atmosphere of pre-war Paris and their peaceful country house in the French province of Ain, near the Swiss border. Their days spent in Ain hold a particular glamour for writers. For who among us has not longed for that quiet place, where nothing is heard but the rustling of the leaves, the whistling of the teakettle and the steady scratch of pen on paper? And who among us has not longed for that ever-present companion who understands and fulfills not only our bodily needs—in kitchen and bedroom—but our fundamental need to get the words down right, and in order, the way we see them in our head? And, of course, how many of us...