The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Every coffee slinger or fry cook is a drummer or bass player in a band covered by Pitchfork. One can live and work in an unfettered way, or at least a way less fettered than is possible in any major metropolis.
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This is the first in a series of retrospective collage art focusing on myth, stories, historic events, and cultural attitudes about rape as seen through different time periods.
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Novelist and short story writer Jess Walter explores fathers and sons, addiction, creating a Statistical Abstract, finding inspiration in the grocery store, and writing from a pure place of empathy.
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PERSONALIZED PENS
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing personalized pens.
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The core duo of bliss-drone-space-twang group Speck Mountain formed when Karl Briedrick went looking for a singer for his Brooklyn-based band
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Years after losing her entire family, the author takes a romantic vacation in paradise and instead must confront the physical manifestations of her grief.
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Last night I had a dream about my dead friend. He committed suicide six year ago. This was my third dream about him.
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The long-door-hold seems to say, “I want to fuck you, look how nice I am, I’m just being a really nice guy is all.”
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Rick Moody talks with Frank Zappa’s widow, Gail, about her new idea to license distribution rights of an unreleased project to Zappa fans.
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But writing poems allows me mastery over a miniature universe. For those moments or hours, I am God of my kingdom. No one tells me how things go. No one can argue against me when I’m writing poems. When I am writing, I get to speak.
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Just like that, I knew I’d been bamboozled. Stenson could write. The rest of the story sailed past and I found hardly a single occasion to complain, which is, for Super Hot Profs, a legitimate cause for despair.
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In the following story, excerpted from Lucky Peach, one man meets a very special oyster, and together they embark on a fateful homeward journey.
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Writer, journalist, activist, and lifelong feminist Eve Ensler talks with Suzanne Koven and explores the body’s relationship to the desecration of the earth, the importance of listening to the “real” in ourselves, and how it feels to be known as “the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues.”
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One misconception people have about poetry is that it is written in “code,” one they aren’t smart enough to understand. In fact, if you do not comprehend a poem, you may return it.
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They told my father three hours. Ideally, she would have needed to get to the hospital within three hours for the best chance of recovery from the stroke.
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Writer and Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt sits down to discuss her debut novel, You Are One of Them, her preoccupation with secrets, and working in 1990s Moscow during Russia’s economic transition.
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MY NEW COLOGNE
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing my new cologne.
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I wanted to hide and quiet my mind by drowning it in alcohol, and I wanted a familiar place to do it. Much like my job, however, I had returned to something that no longer existed.
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Wendy C. Ortiz conducts a mini-interview with one of her favorite Facebook friends, who happens to be in a notorious motorcycle gang.
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I wanted to present three complicated portraits that raise important questions, not just about what it means to be a porn performer, but what it means to be a sexually open woman
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This is what my parents told me about sex: nothing. Not one word. Ever.
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Discussing their collaborative book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton tackle neighbors, sexuality, and the fetishization of pets.
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Before someone spilled Hi-C on it during a hot Iowa summer and my car window fixed sunlight into its silky black innards, warping Steve Earle’s voice into that of a sexually beleaguered chipmunk, that tape drove me through a lot.
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Adam Braver is a novelist, professor, and human rights activist, though not always in that order.
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One fall morning, we rose before dawn and drove bleary-eyed with my friend’s father down still-silent streets to a field where, in the company of other enthusiasts, we hitched a patchwork vinyl blanket to a basket, turned on the heat, and set sail. I think.
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We talked to composer-performer Missy Mazzoli about the sometimes invisible world of new classical music, her relation to it, and what she’s doing to help to redefine what it means to be a composer in the 21st century.
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Perrin Ireland’s work combines art with science, using shape and color to tell visual stories about cerebral subjects like microbiomes and the Higgs-Boson particle.
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Photos of the Second Avenue Subway construction are my favorite things today.
Manhattan’s payphone graveyard is pretty cool too.
Behold the Fiji cannibal fork.
It is time to put backpacks on dragonflies because science.
And now children’s textbook covers from 1920s Japan.
— 20 hours ago (0)
Tuesday 06/18:
The Bushwick Book Club does Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers
Neil Gaiman reads from his new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Wednesday 06/19:
Tracie Morris makes an afternoon appearance at the MoMA’s Guerilla Reading Series, curated by Kenneth Goldsmith. MoMA, 12:30pm, free with museum admission.
Thursday 06/20:
As a part of their Hopper Drawing exhibition, The Whitney brings in Anne Carson and Elizabeth Strout to read “Hopper-esque” works of their own. The Whitney, 7pm, $8.
The Steamboat! Literary Humor series and host Bob Powers welcome George Gordon, Blaise Allysen Kearsley, Starlee Kine, Rob Paravonian, and Adam Wade for a night of literature and wine-fueled hilarity. Greenlight Bookstore, 7pm, free.
Saturday 06/22:
Popsickle is back for the fourth year with their day-long poetry fest and reading mania. This is going to be awesome. I can’t even start to list all the things happening here. Some of the many, many readers include Michael Robbins, Anthony Madrid, Daniel Shoonebeek, Leigh Stein, Allyson Paty, Sasha Fletcher, Jennifer Tamayo, Anna Moschovakis, and tons of others. Do it. Launchpad, noon-9pm, free.
Sunday 06/23:
Let Me Be Clear features poems based on Bernie Sanders’ December 10th, 2010 speech. The poems were written at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility, published as a knock-off book by Ugly Duckling Presse, and the collection was edited by Cara Benson. This should be a really interesting reading. Go to this. Treat yo self. Zinc Bar, 5pm, by donation.
— 1 day ago (0)
60 plus years of 1984 cover design.
Perhaps you are need of some inspiration today; this is a story about a female amputee scaling Everest.
Headline of the day: “Mind-reading monkey brains look similar to ours.”
Atlas Obscura looks at pop culture gargoyles of the world.
Here are some pictures of frozen light houses. Do with them what you will.
— 1 day ago (0)