The Rumpus.net » Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, Other Fri, 25 May 2012 15:25:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Things Are Still Falling Apart http://therumpus.net/2010/03/things-are-still-falling-apart/ http://therumpus.net/2010/03/things-are-still-falling-apart/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=48350 Chinua Achebe was briefly interviewed in NYT Magazine last week. In the interview he talks about current Nigerian politics, focusing on the weakness of the  Nigerian Acting President, Good Luck Jonathan, who “suddenly doesn’t seem to bring good luck.”

Click here to learn more.


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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/03/things-are-still-falling-apart/feed/ 0 THE BOOKOPTICON http://therumpus.net/2010/03/the-bookopticon/ http://therumpus.net/2010/03/the-bookopticon/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:00:41 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=48345 “To become a literary star, having talent helps, but so does carving out a place in the tangled, incestuous web of the publishing world. Our interactive field guide illustrates how 10 young authors with potential best-sellers coming out this Spring and Summer fit into the firmament.”

Therefore, Vanity Fair has made an interactive map filled with names and books to help solve the aforementioned riddle. They call it: THE BOOKOPTICON.

Ridiculous? Yes. But it’s also sorta fun.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/03/the-bookopticon/feed/ 0 I Think, Therefore I Am Back In Business http://therumpus.net/2010/03/i-think-therefore-i-am-back-in-business/ http://therumpus.net/2010/03/i-think-therefore-i-am-back-in-business/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:00:05 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=46416 In what The New York Times‘ Patricia Cohen writes is “the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents[...] vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician.” Before the publication of his famed Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes was documented writing numerous correspondences, amounting to precisely 72 letters. Those letters were among the stolen documents.

Now, Descartes, “the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry,” is riding an astounding historical comeback, for a letter – penned by the philosopher  himself – blipped up on the radar of mathematical historians everywhere when it was recently discovered at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/03/i-think-therefore-i-am-back-in-business/feed/ 0 “Unoriginal Poetry Based on Junk” http://therumpus.net/2010/02/unoriginal-poetry-based-on-junk/ http://therumpus.net/2010/02/unoriginal-poetry-based-on-junk/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:58:18 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=44206 D.A. Powell wrote – a few years ago now – a column for The Poetry Foundation in which he dabbles with the idea of street poetry (think along the lines of the tape poetry of Elvis Christ).

Powell’s article was called “Conceptual Poetics: A Practicum.” In it he writes:

I love this idea of valueless, unoriginal poetry based on junk. I’ve been trying to write poems, and now it turns out that I could have just been assembling them. I mean, I’ve done some avant-gardist things in my time (let us call them, for lack of a better term, “poems”), but I think I spent way too much time worrying about making “sense” (who even knows what that means anymore?) So today, since I’m, like so many effete bourgeois Americans, absolutely burdened with leisure time, I went out to see how this concept of Conceptual Poetics might liberate me from the senseless drudgery of writing.

At the end of the article he posted a poem he made from pictures of verbalized street art he’d taken pictures of during a walk in San Francisco. You can view it here.

And again, congratulations D.A.!

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/02/unoriginal-poetry-based-on-junk/feed/ 0 A Book, A Library, A Murder http://therumpus.net/2010/02/a-book-a-library-a-murder/ http://therumpus.net/2010/02/a-book-a-library-a-murder/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:00:36 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=44190 Rumpus contributor Craig Fehrman has an article running over at The Hartford Advocate about the controversy surrounding Brain McDonald’s In The Middle of the Night. McDonald’s book is a true crime novel about a terrible murder that occurred in the town of Cheshire, Connecticut.

Apparently, the town librarian ordered the book for the library, and that didn’t bode well with a large portion of the townies. Fehrman writes an in-depth account of the diverse and conflicting opinions – delving into the political, constitutional, societal, and more.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/02/a-book-a-library-a-murder/feed/ 1 Alice, 106 http://therumpus.net/2010/01/alice-106/ http://therumpus.net/2010/01/alice-106/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:30:31 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=43579 At 106 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer is profiled in Haaretz. She is a musician, Holocaust survivor, and is also said to be the last living acquaintance of Kafka.

Kafka was a slightly strange man,” Sommer recalls. “He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.

To simply pull that quote, though, is to do Ms. Herz-Sommer a disservice. The confidence the spews from the way she talks about her life and music and children is, yes, inspiring, but more-so, unabashedly truthful. It’s not truthful in a mathematical sense (2+3=5, etc.), but the type of truthfulness that makes you shudder in simplistic bliss, glad that there is someone out there that makes confidence justifiable.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/01/alice-106/feed/ 1 “Uhhh… well, Gerard does all my paintings.” http://therumpus.net/2010/01/%e2%80%9cuhhh%e2%80%a6-well-gerard-does-all-my-paintings-%e2%80%9d/ http://therumpus.net/2010/01/%e2%80%9cuhhh%e2%80%a6-well-gerard-does-all-my-paintings-%e2%80%9d/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:30:32 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=43575 Our chums over at HTMLGIANT have blown the soot off an interview with Andy Warhol conducted by the Bay Times in 1965. In it, they discuss the difference between cutting one or two mushrooms (and the time the cuts take), the color of the interviewers eyes, and the non-definition of pop art.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2010/01/%e2%80%9cuhhh%e2%80%a6-well-gerard-does-all-my-paintings-%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 The Egg Came First http://therumpus.net/2009/12/the-egg-came-first/ http://therumpus.net/2009/12/the-egg-came-first/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:00:11 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=40252 The next time you crack an egg, either over the presumably safe stove in your cozy sublet kitchen, or with one of the (most-likely three) prongs of your smudged fork into the bubbled yoke of some over-easy-eggs at the neighborhood diner, you should think about H1N1 (swine flu, ya’ll) and how its vaccine is created. Not that there’s H1N1 in the eggs, because (most-likely) there is none.

Though, if you want to read about how the H1N1 vaccine is created, click here to read all about the fascinating process. It has to do with eggs.

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2009/12/the-egg-came-first/feed/ 0 Blinded By the… Glaucoma http://therumpus.net/2009/12/blinded-by-the-glaucoma/ http://therumpus.net/2009/12/blinded-by-the-glaucoma/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:00:45 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=40262 “There’s been a paradigm shift,” Ms. Levent continued. “People are starting to accept the fact that art and imagery are mental and not visual” and that “the heart of the creative work has nothing to do with sight. Artists’ choices are internal.”

The New York Times has an article about a gallery show consisting of work done only by the legally blind. The argument and consequential proof that art comes from within and can be produced without a visual is at once insightful and provocative when thought of regarding the obvious implications and parallels of the term ‘visual art.’

(An interesting topic to look at in conjunction with the blind artist is the anomaly of the blind gallery owner. My previous employer was one of those, a great poet/novelist/man by the name of Steve Cannon who runs the Tribes Gallery in Manhattan Lower East Side. Check out this video if you want to learn more about that.)

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]]> http://therumpus.net/2009/12/blinded-by-the-glaucoma/feed/ 0 Raymond Carver: Behind the Prose http://therumpus.net/2009/11/raymond-carver-behind-the-prose/ http://therumpus.net/2009/11/raymond-carver-behind-the-prose/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:00:42 +0000 Hans Kulla-Mader http://therumpus.net/?p=39304 In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Stephen King has written a review of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka.

King begins with a summation of Carver’s semi-amazing alcoholism and then moves on to a dissection of Carver’s relationship with his editor Gordon Lish.

It’s moving, the way King writes about Lish’s treatment of Carver and his work as if he’s mourning the ‘what could have been.’ Read more here.

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