The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
I like to imagine that they are waiting for us. I like to imagine that they check the reservation (“Burton, for three, are you sure?”), that they bite their nails and tap at their watches and wait breathlessly for us to enter.
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Susan Wright, activist, writer, and founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, sits down to discuss the recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders updates, and what they mean for the kink community.
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It is not a coincidence that among the synonyms for “practice” is “ritual,” and for “ritual,” “practice.” When you do a thing over and over—even if it is only so banal and small as lighting a cigarette—it will assume a shape and a meaning, a weight and a force.
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I asked Boco, “What was the coast guard like?” He said it was lonely.
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The client, C. Drew, an attorney, requested an investigation into the extraordinarily high number of violent incidents involving his teenage daughter, N.
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These are memories, packaged, dusted, shrink-wrapped, and worn. How strange are they for the man to whom they belonged?
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With her haunting voice looped in a wordless glossolalia over pianos, keyboards, and other instruments, Julianna Barwick makes music like no other artist working today.
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GRAIN OF SAND #1
★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing a grain of sand.
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The author of the stunning collection Spectacle explores connections between visual art and the written word, experimental writing, Virginia Woolf, cowardice, and more.
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Your physical appearance does not define you.
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Lately, over crumb-laden dinner tables and cups of coffee and on windy hillsides I ask friends, family, and peripheral acquaintances whether or not they write in a journal.
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Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones, sits down to discuss human attitudes towards animals, copulation hats, chasing Martha Stewart across the tundra, and the historical relationship between Thomas Jefferson and mammoths.
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The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.
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Writer, performer, educator, and activist David Henry Sterry talks about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the American sex industry, and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex.
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Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist.
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In Charles Moore’s iconic black-and-white photograph, Coretta looks on stoically, lips parted, hands clasped in front as her husband, Martin Luther King, has his right arm bent behind his back by a police officer in a tall hat.
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“Women are bitches,” says a young man as he sits down. Apparently a woman at the bar wouldn’t give him her number. He’s talking to the man sitting on his left in spite of the fact that I am sitting two feet to his right and at the same table.
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Ariel Schrag first achieved recognition in her teens, when she began writing the autobiographical comic books Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise
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But grace is what I found in River Inside the River. Grace in abundance.
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I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I can almost forget why he was there.
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In an exclusive interview, The Rumpus sits down with the very funny, very feminist Sandra Bernhard to talk about comedy, mothers, life on the road, and, of course, San Francisco, where she’ll be performing this week.
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MOTHER’S DAY 2013
★★★★★ (0 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Mother’s Day 2013.
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It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape.
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A day of celebration for many, Mother’s Day is a more complex holiday for people who have lost their mothers–or their children.
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My grandparents, Luigi and Elena, were married on February 14th, 1947, in Italy, where there is no such thing as Valentines Day.
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I’d been down that road a million times before and had learned the hard way that unless you had some kind of special line just for them, it never paid to give a client your phone number.
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Writer Maria Konnikova explores the mechanisms behind how a sharp mind works, through an investigation of one of literature’s premier duos—Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Watson.
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Kevin Thomas reviews Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan, Rumpus Comics style:
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If you are dreaming a lot about animals, you might get Alzheimers (and other signs).
Maybe aliens are just energy conscious. Maybe a lot of things.
So it’s settled then: Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids (yet)(duh).
Who doesn’t love early automatons?
Here is your vending machine based art installation for the day.
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Why are barns painted red? Because of dying stars.
Very important news: yesterday the world’s biggest crocodile turned 110 (maybe).
On the other side of feelings about the world, welcome to the age of beard billboards.
Soviet board games of the 20s and 30s. more Soviet design, MORE MORE.
Now let us all experience the moon landing in real time.
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We, as a species, have built one large scale dam a day for the last 130 years (on average).
Here are some books with awful original titles.
I’m not going to pretend to understand this huge breakthrough in prime number mathematics.
How do you build a hotel library?
About once a year I let myself link to something Disneyland related (like this copy of the original Disneyland prospectus).
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