[Images of Barney Rosset and the Tropic of Cancer ad courtesy of Double O Film Productions.]

Barney Rosset, the man who risked prosecution to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the United States, has been a personal hero to me ever since I first encountered the book in high school. Reading it — and his much finer book Tropic of Capricorn — utterly transformed my life. (Whether that was for better or worse is debatable.) In my hours of browsing at used bookstores, I started to take a careful look at anything that happened to have been published by Grove in the 1950s and 1960s. It led me to Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, some of Kerouac’s later stuff, Samuel Beckett, and — oddly enough — Henry James, whose reputation Grove helped to resucitate in the 1950s.

Barney Rosset is most noted for the battles he fought against obscenity laws. By publishing Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, he provoked the censors. As Win McCormack, the publisher of Tin House, writes: “Through his legal victories in the resulting obscenity cases, as well as in one brought on by I Am Curious (Yellow), a sexually explicit Swedish documentary film he distributed, he was probably more responsible than any other single individual for ending the censorship of literature and film in the United States.”

And now Obscene, the 97-minute documentary film about Rosset, is receiving its San Francisco premiere tonight at the Roxie, at 7:00; a second screening is at 8:50. Directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor promise all of the above, plus “Rosset’s public fight against hypocrisy is inextricable from his tumultuous personal life: the same unyielding, quixotic, restless energy that upended centuries of law brought Rosset perilously close to personal destruction.”

Juicy!

The run is from tonight through Thursday, September 11, nightly at 7:00 and 8:50, plus Sat, Sun and Wed at (3:00) and 5:00. The Roxie is at 16th and Valencia.

According to this post on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Oscar Villalon is stepping down as editor of the books section as of August 29th. Here’s an interview with him from two years ago. I don’t know the exact story yet, but as newspaper book sections all around the country are shrinking or disappearing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be another step towards eliminating the book section altogether.

During the 1960s, professional wrestling was huge at the Cow Palace. There are vast websites devoted to the phenomenon, which was part of a circuit that included Sacramento.

Now a new book, When I Shot Good & Bad Guys Who Wrestled at the Cow Palace, commemorates the era. The book collects photographer Jim Fitzpatrick’s work documenting the bouts held by promoter Roy Shire, a former wrestler who became the biggest wrestling promoter in Northern California in the 1960s (scroll down in that page to “The Beginning” for Shire’s story).

You can order When I Shot Good and Bad Guys here.

Residents and shopkepers of the Castro district are getting tired of tour buses full of “gawkers,” reports the Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius. It wouuld be one thing if they bought lunch, but a deli owner reported:

They come in here, 15 or 20 at a time. They look around, take a picture, and then they walk out. In the last three months I’ve sold one bottle of water. It is not worth having so much traffic.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty says the plague can be exorcised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But let’s not forget the famous response of the Summer of Love hippies on Haight St, as recalled by Mick Sinclair in his book San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History:

On Haight St. some hippies responded to the busloads of gawping tourists by holding up mirrors, inviting the “straights” to look at themselves.

Congratulations to San Francisco’s Joshua Mohr, whose debut novel “Some Things That Meant the World To Me” has been sold as part of a two-book deal, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Mohr teaches a writing course at the local The Writing Salon and has had several short stories in litmags. But as far as I can tell from Google, he has neither a website nor a blog. So he actually might write a second book some day!

In Marin, the literary scene in remote but picturesque Point Reyes Station [map] was the subject of a long article in the Marin Independent Journal on Sunday. The piece draws attention to the visits by nationally known authors and political figures, as well as a recent three-day Stegner conference.

And the folks at Stephen Elliott’s Progressive Reading Series are excited about the upcoming August 16 show to be headlined by Jonathan Franzen.

Score one for the Chronicle’s copy editors today with their headline in the wine section, Mastering the margarita, which is supposed to ring a bell for Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita (which has nothing to do with the Mexican party beverage and not a whole lot to do with the cat on its cover, but is really a satire of 1930s Soviet repression).

This is one of those situations where, as a reader, you don’t know whether to cheer because we have (presumably) erudite headline writers, or boo for their lowering a great work of world literature for the purpose of a bad pun. But if only one reader buys the book and reads it because of this blog post, it will have put a small weight on the side of literature.

Though high gas prices and “Spare the Air” days like today have more passengers than ever riding public transit — including the ACE Train that runs from Stockton in the central valley to Silicon Valley — sometimes they can’t win for losing. Yesterday the ACE trains were threatened by the heat wave now torturing inland areas, with 110+ temperatures hot enough to warp steel rails. Train workers had to walk in front of the train to make sure the rails weren’t damaged by the heat, delaying the trains one to two hours.

At least there have been no reports of BART delays due to the heat, as in the May heat wave.

I saw that occasional SF Metblogs contributor and relentless self promoter and sex book author Violet Blue is the latest recipient of the tempest in a web teapot award. The LA Times website has David Sarno covering a fracas in which any Violet Blue mentions or posts have been deleted from Boing Boing and it’s archives.

Writes Sarno:

“I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of,” Blue told me on the phone. “There’s been no argument, there’s been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things.”

Could Boing Boing really be a Stalin era throwback that wants to erase it’s own history, and somehow have the world to believe the widely read SF Gate columnist doesn’t exist?

At AdRants they speculated a possible conflict with blog ad provider Federated Media, which seemed somewhat unlikely to be involved in editorial concerns (IMHO ) since they supply ads for dozens of popular sites including the Metblogs network.

BoingBoing eventually issued it’s own terse comment and explanation after the web “sh*tstorm” lapped up on it’s serenely acerbic shores:

“[Violet's] posts were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.”

Read the LA times blog, or for a more concise semi ad biz related wrap up read more at AdRants.

Everyone loves Diesel Books, the independent store on College Ave. in Oakland [map]. Now they’re planning to open a branch in the L.A. neighborhood of Brentwood, replacing the Dutton’s that closed last year. They already have a foothold down there in Malibu (ooo!).

In other book retailing news, a local neocon blogger criticizes Green Apple Books in the Richmond District for not carrying a book by Douglas Feith, a DoD hack who was involved in pushing the country to war in Iraq and is now one of the Bush administration’s most mocked and discredited figures. (Googling “Feith +idiot” gets 92,000 hits, for example.) The same blogger elsewhere refers to Feith’s book as “a masterpiece of history,” and in another entry characterizes global warming as “hysteria” and says “the most absurd part of this hysteria is the idea that we should reduce the amount of CO² we produce.” So you can judge for yourself whether he’s credible on bookstore ordering policies.

Speaking of Green Apple Bookstore and the Bush administration, the Chronicle’s Kathleen Pender today quoted the store’s co-owner, Pete Mulvihill, as having a feeling customers were spending their Bush “stimulus checks” at the store, and Luan Stauss of Oakland’s Laurel Book Store said three customers had told her they were doing just that.

A couple weeks ago on the MediaBistro site Agency Spy, a blog about the advertising industry, there was a post about a mysterious (to me) booklet published by “an international trends-led publishing, events and consultancy business” called Piers Fawkes. The booklet, PSFK Snapshot, purported to be a sort of guidebook to San Francisco’s most cutting-edge culture, the places to find the real trend-setters, or “influencers,” which I think is the more current term.

Curious, I ordered the book (seen at left). It’s a square booklet about 4 inches on a side, and about 56 pages long. It lists a few cafes, restaurants, art galleries, community events and so on. The list is pretty standard hipster fare: Blue Bottle Coffee, Red Poppy Art House, The Crucible, Maker Faire, Burning Man. In other words, nothing you wouldn’t learn living in San Francisco for one week, or by reading this blog, SFist, and BoingBoing for a month or so.

I got through the whole book in about 90 seconds, and when I was done I understood even less what the book was for. Suppose it is absolutely essential to know that the most snobbish coffee fanatics go to Blue Bottle. If I’m in the advertising industry, what is that knowledge going to get me?

In fact, I was much more interested in the booklet as a product of the Blurb publishing website, where you can upload photos and text and have them print a pretty little book. If I were a photographer, or preparing a booklet for my mother’s 70th birthday or something, it looks like a great service.

more thoughts after the jump