The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
One of the first times I had a real conversation with Isaac Fitzgerald was a couple of years ago at Mission Creek Café on Valencia Street in San Francisco. It was a Rumpus volunteer meeting—the site had no employees at that point—and he was trying to convince me to edit a massive transcript he was supposed to be sculpting into a zippy little interview for editor-in-chief Stephen Elliott.
Got some time? This video og 83-year-old theologian and Harvard prof Gordon Kaufman is a long one, but it is a gem. His theology is that there is no anthropomorphic being, no force, no spirit god or gods out there: God is creativity.
...more
J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long.
Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos, documents, and ephemera that tell in fragments the story of Williams’ life.
...more
It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained. This is rural Kansas, where I grew up.
Artists are fickle, except when they’re not, and then their lovers are. Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova was born in Tatarstan, Russia to a family of intellectuals — as a kid she hung out with future poet Marina Tsvetaeva. (Tsvetaeva would write in 1938 “I have no need of holes / for ears, nor prophetic eyes: / to your mad world there is / one answer: to refuse!” and three years later hang herself).
...moreA book—that’s an artifact, often long, filled with deep analysis, and pages, and made of paper—by Francisco Goldman undoes an electoral campaign, triggers assassinations, and drags its author into a political minefield in Guatemala. But can the tome bring closure to the eleven-year old investigation into the murder of human rights champion Bishop Juan Gerardi?
...more
“Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel” is the name of Laurel Nakadate’s new show, opening this Thursday at Leslie Tonkonow in New York City. Nakadate’s work hurls us into discomfort and the awkwardness of lust—read about it in The Rumpus interview with Nakadate.
...moreNearly a decade after Ploughshares published it, Elizabeth Graver’s short story “The Mourning Door” remains shrouded in a slippery surrealism that’s at once impenetrable and, simultaneously, the source of the piece’s staying power. In it, Graver’s pregnant narrator discovers a tiny human hand in her bed.
...more
The Elements of Style, the classic writing handbook by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr., just turned fifty. The New York Times celebrated by posting the opinions of five “experts” on its blog about the book. All of them turn their nose up at the book’s style and substance and so… it’s no surprise the Times‘ coverage unleashed a backlash.
In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked).
...more
For 109 years, Florida has sent bad boys to the Florida School for Boys–for things like rape and assault, yes, but also for petty infractions like truancy or smoking in the bathroom, or sometimes because the state wanted an easy solution to a kid with no parents.
“Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place,” writes Crichton, “and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the Net.
...more
It’s worth applauding the creative efforts behind True/Slant. It’s a website founded by a former AOL executive who’s hired 65 “knowledge experts.” “Knowledge experts,” in this context, means professional journalists or commentators, some of whom work for the New York Times, the Financial Times, or Rolling Stone.
Decades ago, Hart Crane wrote “To Brooklyn Bridge,” his most famous poem. “And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced / As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,– / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!” Crane would be appalled to learn, then, that the Brooklyn Bridge will soon be blotted from view by an eighteen story commercial center.
...more
Matthew Zapruder proposes we meet the current explosion of variety coursing through contemporary poetry head-on with a new kind of criticism. Zapruder wants critics to talk a little less about what the poem said and a little more about how the poem said it.
Laurel Nakadate is a photographer and filmmaker from New York City.
Poetry readings are notorious for putting audiences to sleep. Which is why Poems Out Loud‘s devotion to the notion of experiencing poetry read aloud—and read well—is so thrilling. The site was inspired by Robert Pinksy’s just-published book Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is compiled by a team of high school students who spend the year reading everything they can get their hands on. The students debate the merits of the year’s crop of both fiction and nonfiction and, in the end, they come out with an eccentric anthology that you don’t have to read but should.
Monkeybicycle.net is the punchy literary magazine edited by Steven Seighman and Eric Spitznagel. The mag publishes writers like Tao Lin and Ryan Boudinot, and the piece on the site’s main page, “Wish” by Mike Valente, is representative of Monkeybicycle’s aesthetic. “Wish” is a jittery spoonful of surrealism that lives at the corner of poetry and prose, and it’s surely unsure which it wants to be.
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic was the last book I love love loved. It’s explosive, a text that’s sinewy and daring. It tears open the marks left on the narrator during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s.
In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life. Three waitresses at the restaurant where the man ate every day for eight years show up at his bedside.
Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s a meandering, dreamy piece drifting between nostalgia and a hard-nosed hope.
For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s Jewish counterpart is Yiddish–and it even sometimes sounds like it. Last March, Der Bote, then one of the last three remaining German language Mennonite periodicals on the continent closed its doors.
...more
Jeff Parker‘s narrator watches from a dryer as the woman he’s laid claim to slinks off (and into bed) with a stout beef named Brick. The narrator confronts his rival, who lies naked with the fine-bodied Patsy, by punching him in the face.
Thesley Beverly is the art czar, and maybe the heart and soul, of Pembroke, Illinois, population 2800.
...more
“Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit.” So wrote New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl six months ago in a review that’ll likely prove seminal.
Only a few genetic lines–the Hapsburgs, the Hans, the Roosevelts, for instance–have shaped geopolitics as much as the Bin Ladens. In his NYRB review of Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens, Frank Halliday details Coll’s methodical deconstruction of the inner workings both of this filthy rich family and the Saudi society that gave it wings.
The Internet was supposed to wash away the walls governments use to keep information from the people. But the Web is a resource and, like oil or art or love, corporate hands have capitalized in every way they can. While companies like Google and Microsoft help shuttle info at light-speed around the globe, they’re also helping repressive governments control the web.
...more
The San Francisco-based website