Here’s the Facebook page for our June 4 Celebration of Written Correspondence in San Francisco. Please share. Thank you!

My husband Joe is someone who turns on the television when he comes into the house and leaves it on as background noise even when he’s not watching it. I am someone who wouldn’t have a TV at all, if I could help it. But Joe is a firefighter and a hard-working man, and I try not to begrudge him whatever he needs to unwind. …more

From time to time, I’m bummed that I don’t live in New York.  Tomorrow night, The Nervous Breakdown and Emergency Press take over NYC, and this ups my bumming considerably.  I really wish I could be there.  You should go.

This is one of the most fascinating Ted talks I’ve seen.  It’s about internet porn.  One of the wild things it covers is how they can’t find “control groups” for studies about the effects of internet porn on men, because there are no men who do not consume internet porn.  There’s an emerging contingent of ex-users, and that’s as close as they can come.  My son is four years away from the average start-age of consumers.  My son, for the record, is six.  Wow.

Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects, reviewed.

Wondering what to read next?  This list on Flavorpill of May picks couldn’t steer you wrong.

I’m in the process of reading correspondences between famous lovers right now.  De Beauvoir’s letters to Algren; the first volume of the roughly twenty million letters exchanged by Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz.  The thing about love letters is the limited language at our disposal.  If you’ve ever written or received a love letter in your life, there will be a line in one of these books that is identical to something you once experienced as singular to your love.  Actually, I’m being generous here: there will be more than one line–if there isn’t, you should publish a volume of your love letters; if there isn’t, you’re really onto something.  Another thing: love letters are prone to extoling that love will never end.  Maybe it depends on the definition of “end”–O’Keefe and Stieglitz remained deeply connected until Stieglitz’s death, despite betrayals and a waning of romantic passion; DeBeauvoir was buried wearing Algren’s ring.  Still, what I’m talking about is the way everyone promises forever–the way no one ever wants to cause pain–but forever proves a slippery thing and pain almost always results, even if it wasn’t “caused,” per se.  It’s hard not to find this (pick one: depressing/demoralizing/downright-alarming).  But hindsight is always 20/20, so when considering the letters of the dead maybe what’s important is that they’re intoxicating enough that none of this matters in the reading–that they’re inspirational despite any body count.  They circle around and stab intensely, if with wild futility, at why we live.  DeBeauvoir also wrote hers in English, which is both hilarious and impressive.  Watching her try to express the inexpressible in her second language is a bit like reading the Cliff Notes of a great mind, yet absurdly humbling too.  I went on a date with a French waiter once in 1990, managed to communicate with him for a few hours straight, and felt foolishly proud of myself for the next twenty years.  DeBeauvoir makes fun of the insularity of Americans when it comes to language.  She’s so right about this that she can make you blush all the way from 1947.

Elissa Wald is back on The Sunday Rumpus today with her short story, “Real Men.”  I really like Elissa’s work.  She’s a pervy idealist; she’s also funny.  She writes eloquently about way so many people experience the opposite gender as fundamentally, even if desirably, Other.  The fragile space around disparate capacities for intimacy is where Elissa’s stories live.  The level of intimacy that one person views as a base-line starting point in any relationship might be so overwhelming to another that it causes them to flee . . . or to pine forever.  That can be powerfully sexy, but also powerfully sad.

There’s a Midwest Writers Conference.  I didn’t know.  It sounds pretty good.

When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought what I wanted was to be pretty. I thought of it as an existential status, pretty. I thought: if I know all the right lipstick shades and I can walk in heels that will be it. I will have checked off all the boxes. …more

I read awhile back about Angelica Garnett’s death at MobyLives, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since. She was Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece, and until she was eighteen she thought her father was Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell. Her real father, her mother informed her, was the painter Duncan Grant, but Vanessa asked that Angelica not address this with Clive, and as the Guardian notes, “for some reason” Angelica never approached Grant either. Instead she’d end up marrying one of her true father’s ex-lovers, David Garnett, a man who upon seeing her as a baby wrote to Lytton Strachey that he already thought of marrying her 20 years hence. She had no idea of the novelist Garnett’s involvement with her father. As one of my mentors would say, oy. Oy.

This kind of story strikes me as unimaginable today. Family secrets are of course eternal, along with complicated personal entanglements. But artists don’t do quite so much communal living — at least, not that I’m aware of — and the discourse around mothering today is so fraught and complicated. To a lesser extent this is true of parenting writ large, but we can’t let the gendered nature of the stuff off the hook. It is terribly hard to imagine being a distracted, uncommitted sort of mother if only because it’s not the fashion to be. You don’t need me, a childless person, to tell you this, but of course there are reams of paper devoted to the intersection of writing and mothering, in equal measure complaining of how hard it is to do both and extolling the virtues of mothering. On fathering, not quite so much. …more

I will first shamelessly self-promote and link you to a piece I did for the Awl this week on Joan Didion’s early reviews. I’m going to let that substitute for this week’s History Lesson, as it’s Memorial Day weekend.

While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris.

…more

NPR shares a six-page excerpt from Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir. Here’s a conversation between Bechdel and the Paris Review.

“There’s so much she hasn’t told me, and so many big obligatory questions that I didn’t touch on in this book. Like, what has it been like for my mother to live with the pain of her husband’s suicide? I can’t ask her that. I can’t even raise that question in the book, because that’s too painful. So in a way the book is constructed around these big gaping absences.”

Cheryl Strayed was this week’s guest ethicist for The New York Times Magazine.

She responded to three queries–relating to sex, money, and infidelity–with that Cheryl/Sugar blend of wisdom and wit.

“She looks like a Babylonian Gorgon,” a reviewer once wrote of Alice Bag in a show review. Her then-band, the Bags, was at the forefront of the late seventies punk scene in Bag’s native Los Angeles.  …more

Rumpus columnist Nicholas Rombes served as today’s guest editor for London-based online magazine Berfrois.

Rombes curated an array of excellent pieces, including Rumpus editor Isaac Fitzgerald’s “In Love in San Francisco,” Peggy Nelson’s “Short Attention Span Theater,” and two poems by John Freeman.

When I was five years old, my grandfather Irving Rosenthal, who lived in the Bronx, came out to California to visit us. One morning I asked him for a dollar. …more

To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

…more

In a Letter of Note from earlier this week, Mark Twain replies to a librarian’s note concerning the Brooklyn Public Library ban on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in his characteristically wry and confounding way.

After the library found copies of  Twain’s most famous works in the children’s room at the library, Asa Dickinson, the man writing Twain, defended the books and admitted to having read Huck Finn to “defenseless blind people, without regard to their age, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Twain didn’t give the man much sympathy and explained the danger that uncouth reading subjects present to children: …more

Dan Weiss is off today, but we’re channeling him.

Smoke. Stone. Super Nintendo. Skin under a band-aid… 50 Shades of Grey.

Animals with fraudulent diplomas.

Yesterday, a giant solar-powered airplane departed from Switzerland in its first transcontinental flight.

Here are some vintage photographs that capture the special bond between ventriloquist and dummy.

A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Deep Trouble.”

Edited by Susan Clements. …more

“I went into this party wondering what kind of guys I’d be attracted to just on the basis of pheromone smell. Could I clear away all the flotsam in my heart – the fetishes for big noses and curly hair that I’ve had since high school, or my habit of falling for cocky artists and writers?”

At Salon, Rumpus contributor Lauren Eggert-Crowe writes about her experience participating in a pheromone party, a phenomenon at the intersection of science and speed dating.

The Toronto Star‘s well-designed archive of Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper articles for the Canadian paper provides access to evidence of the young author honing his spartan style and exploring his favorite themes.

One such exceedingly-Hemingway gem is from an article about getting a free shave from amateur barbers: “For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death.” …more

William Dereseiwicz’s luminous response to Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre recently printed by the Library of America, is a critique as much as it is hero-worship.

Dereseiwicz confronts Vonnegut’s novels from his earliest to his last, focusing on Vonnegut’s zenith in moral seriousness and the long, personal road to Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut played around with his essential question, the elegantly put “What are people for?”, in his early work, though he then lacked the artistic and rhetorical strength of the novels to come. …more

For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man from Colombia whose mustache is even more impressive than my father’s, a shy Chinese man who twice brought me folded paper fans, a thin young woman from India with acetic hair who rarely speaks, but whose murmured jokes can pitch the group into laughter. …more

Google recently commemorated the 78th birthday of electronic music pioneer, Dr. Robert Moog, with a doodle of Moog’s most famous invention, the synthesizer.

In an interview with the LA Times from 1981 archived in Rock’s Backpages, Moog recounts the unexpected success of his invention in 70′s pop music and reacts to “recent” synthesizer hits from Jeff Beck, Bowie, and Funkadelic. Even in 1981, only 17 years into its long history, the instrument had already gone through one cycle of ascendancy, decline, and resurrection in the music world. Moog, a great believer in the vitality and musical possibility inherent in his invention, isn’t afraid to get philosophical about its use, either: …more

In America, good dinner etiquette entails avoiding certain contentious topics, particularly politics. Whether it has more to do with possible digestive disorders developing from unpleasant –isms or a predilection towards harmonious dining, I do not know. …more

Granta interviews Tania James whose collection Aerogrammes and Other Stories is out this month. James discusses writing from a child’s perspective, scriptology, and the short form.

“Certainly novels can and should take risks but maybe I feel more freedom in the short story form because if it fails halfway in, I don’t feel an urge to toss myself out the window.”

Various Artists
We Are the Works in Progress (Asa Wa Kuru)

Songs that belong together make each other better. …more

“Pen & Ink,” a new project from Rumpus managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald and artist Wendy MacNaughton, is all about tattoos and the stories behind them.

Check out the Tumblr. And consider sharing your own tatted tale?

According to scholars, Homer never mentioned the color blue in any of his works; neither did the Bible, nor an abundance of ancient texts. Also, linguists have found a near-universal pattern in which languages developed color in stages, and blue was always the last to be named. Radiolab reports and searches for answers.

POLICE LOG COMICS:
March 4th Carmel Area

Another rad Rumpus Comic from Owen Cook.