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From Stephen Elliott
Have you made your summer plans yet?
Well add Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to the list on September 27th and 28th for the Pygmalion Literary Festival, happening for the first time alongside the Pygmalion Music Festival (in it’s ninth year).
Amazon has been putting out feelers in communities that are doing just fine with out them, thank you very much.
First, Kindle Worlds is Amazon’s attempt to commodify fan fiction starting with Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries but with plans for many more “Worlds.”
And in a more recent, mind-boggling move, Amazon representatives have begun calling independent bookstores with the proposal of selling Kindles in their locations.
...more“You decide you cannot fault these people for making you angry and miserable, but you feel crazy: half mad at yourself, half mad at these cheer-leeches.”
So says Lucy Schiller in her essay on being a barista in San Francisco, the first in a weekly series of original long form essays appearing on The Riveter Magazine‘s site.
...moreAll-powerful algorithms strike again!
This time, they bring visualization of relations between all genres of music from Chinese Traditional to Dirty South Rap to Turbo Folk.
Each genre includes a sample of its stylings with further breakdowns of the artists in that genre algorithmically arranged as well.
...moreSteve Almond, a longtime Rumpus columnist and the original Dear Sugar before Cheryl Strayed took over, is sharing his two cents again!
This time he’s giving advice every Monday at WBUR in Boston on their site Cognoscenti. The most recent column includes tips on how to inform a “friend” of their body odor and when to start a family.
...moreJoin the Center for the Art of Translation and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in their celebration of Italy’s ”Year of Italian Culture in the USA.”
They will be bringing Italy to San Francisco through a reading from the recent FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry. The event features ”spirited readings from editor Geoffrey Brock and translators W.
...moreMiranda July’s new project, We Think Alone, sends the personal emails of ten people to your inbox every Monday from July 1 through November 11.
Miranda describes the project:
...moreI’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better.
Peter Orner‘s first book, Ester Stories, has been re-released with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson.
We’ve come to know Peter’s storytelling mastery through the Lonely Voice column here on The Rumpus. The Chicago Tribune noted themes of “distortion, echo and yet clarity of memory.” And, as Margot Livesey wrote in her review of the book when it first came out in 2001, these are all essential ingredients which tell the story of his “real” subject, “the human spirit in all its vexed yearning.
...moreWith the recent announcements of two male gay professional athletes, there has been a general feeling of widening acceptance for the LGBT community.
But, just as the election of a black president does not mean the end of racism, these two cases of acceptance do not mean the end of homophobia.
...moreDo they have a drink together? Are they both fully formed, real people? Does it even matter?
The conversation sparked recently by Claire Messud continues in a New Yorker forum, including responses from Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen.
...moreFor an artist, saying no to anything but the art is strength training for the muscle required to say yes to work, yes to creation.
At Medium, Kevin Ashton tells a story of saying no: “A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing…The professor contacted 275 creative people.
...moreWe love our Funny Women, and Jezebel does, too!
They’ve republished Elissa Bassist’s satire, “Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel.” But you saw it here first.
...more“I mean, surely not every human emotion can be rendered in a few dozen repeated, low-resolution images. And yet…”
Recently, A.D. Jameson asked the question “Are Animated GIFs a Type of Cinema?” Landon Palmer continued the conversation, and now even the New York Times Magazine is adding their two cents on the subject.
...moreWhat if, instead of crude, crass graffiti, walls were painted with poetry?
This reality has already started in Camden, New Jersey where words from Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Ballad” were printed on the face of a rundown, boarded up building.
...moreOnly once you’ve climbed the steep slope and emerged onto level ground do you begin to feel how much you’ve been hurting up till then.
Haruki Murakami, author of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, who has run thirty-three marathons in the past thirty years, is “a citizen of the world, who calls himself a runner.” At The New Yorker he shares his thoughts on the process of healing from the recent bombings and his daily tribute to Boston–going for a run.
...more“Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him—that’s why he had fifteen girls taste the food before he ate it himself.”
The Associate Press reports the story of ninety-five year old Margot Woelk. She was the only one of the fifteen who managed to survive and has finally shared a secret that, before now, she had even kept from her family.
...moreRoxane Gay isn’t just for adults.
Rookie Mag’s online issue, currently themed “Age of Innocence,” just posted the new(ish — the original was published in Prairie Schooner) beautiful story on teenage love and two different “first” times. So far the teen press can’t stop raving: “This is taking me forever to read because it’s so good I keep pausing so I can save the rest for later.
...moreIt’s probably no surprise that a group of translators would be masters of language.
Last week, the new Center for Literary Translation was opened in Trinity, Ireland. The Irish Times interviewed a few of the translators there for the event (Hungarian András Imreh, Russian Grigory Kruzhkov, and Italians Anna Ravano and Francesca Romana Paci) and what follows is just lovely.
...moreThe site is live but DPLA appears to just be the beginning.
An idea almost three years in the making, imagined first by the leaders of 42 of America’s top libraries and research institutions has now come to fruition. The Atlantic asked the project’s executive director a few questions.
...moreThe stage was set: CUPSI 2013, College National Poetry Slam Finals, Barnard College, April 6th.
Rachel Rostad performed her piece “To J.K. Rowling, From Cho Chang,” which addresses the stereotyping of Asian women in Western art: “Let me cry over boys more than I speak.
...more“Before kittens ruled the Internet, puppies reigned in print.”
Slate provides an in-depth investigation into the classic dog vs. cat battle through competing media. On one hand, the puppy print preference seems to come from getting into the heads of dogs, that they are more approachable as creatures and storytellers.
...moreTwo Marguerites share this day as their birthday.
Marguerite Duras, who said, “When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life,” was born today in 1914.
Also born today in 1928 was Marguerite Ann Johnson, better known as Maya Angelou.
...moreThe life of a writer is rarely depicted as glamorous.
We do it because we must. But sometimes we also must do other things like eat, and pay for shelter over our heads, or support those dependent on us. In the age of of information inundation, with high reader demands and little money to go around, the situation is bound to get tense.
...more“[W]hy bother trying to attract Starbucks to Gratiot Ave? Let us brew our own, stronger coffee.”
At The Millions, Alexander Nazaryan makes an optimistic call-to-action for literature and the publishing industry. Rather than trying to make millions (see: auto industry, boomtime Detroit) refocus in on the craft and the reason people flock to literature (see: innovation, community).
...moreHowever crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control.
Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting news updates, or liking songs on Facebook, the internet serves as a new scrapbook of sorts.
...moreWinning tips on speechifying from the New York Times Opinionator.
Teddy Wayne expands on the classic tools of Public Speaking 101 with heartfelt advice like:
...moreImagine everyone in the audience naked. Empathetically conjure up the array of body-image issues they must have dealt with, especially in adolescence.
Two recent innovations for the digital conversation within electronic books.
In his column, One More Thing, Baratunde Thurston proposes:
...moreWhat if you could download books that had been pre-annotated? I would pay extra to read Freakonomics with commentary by Paul Krugman,The New Jim Crow with notes from editors at The Nation, or the Bible annotated by the creators of South Park.
In 1973, anthropologist Clifford Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he discusses the idea of the vernacular web—a mess of interactions affecting how we understand our world.
Now, folklorist Robert Glen Howard thinks he’s found that tangle of signification: the Internet.
...moreHey Brooklyn friends!
Come to the Powerhouse Arena (37 Main Street) this Wednesday, February 27th from 7 – 9 pm for the book launch for Michelle Orange‘s This is Running for Your Life. She will be joined in discussion with James Lasdun, author of Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.
...moreFade in: small, American Midwest Town. Melton Barker walks into town, film kit in tow.
So it went in at least 40 towns across the country, starting in the 1930s and through the 1970s. Barker would enter a town looking for a cast of children for his new movie The Kidnapper’s Foil, offering some screen time — for a small fee, of course.
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