The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Yesterday, I read about Patricia O’Brien’s choice to submit her widely rejected sixth novel under the pseudonym Kate Alcott in the New York Times, the unprecedented success it resulted in, and felt the need to assert myself. My name is, has always been, Kathleen Alcott.
They’re all means of transportation, if in various states of disrepair:
Insert your own words in the spaces below to make a wacky story!
The verandah was large and layered with many different coats of peeling white paint.
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They were rusted and unwieldy, heavy like useful things just aren’t anymore. Carved shakily into the left blade of my father’s scissors it read in magic: COPY BOY.
Set in New York City, Another Country presents a group of friends and artists struggling not to be wrenched apart by race, sexuality and ambition.
The novel begins with Rufus, a bright and kind black drummer from the South, who has forsaken his musical promise and sanity in the name of loving a white woman.
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Kathleen Alcott: Where is the Internet?
Jeeves: Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for writing. Perhaps I’ll answer your question with a question of my own: Where the hell have you been?
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The books I love are those tangled and overflowing: their magic is the product of the trust the author puts in his talent
Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is nothing less than brimming, and it writhes in beauty from first to last; it is difficult to deconstruct its brilliance, which is many-branched.
...more“Have you ever been to American wedding?/Where is the vodka?!” screams Eugene Hutz of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello.
In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Hutz discusses the inspiration behind the song “American Wedding.” Commenting on the U.S.
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God, he was smart! He had a mind like a hummingbird, he had read every book there was to read, his tongue was sharp, he was funnier than anyone else at the party.
...morePianist and New Yorker Thomas Bartlett was raised in rural Vermont by two devoted intellectuals. For the most part self-educated, save a few failed attempts at public high school and 1.5 semesters at Columbia, he is perhaps the most famous person you’ve never heard of.
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I always blanch when someone tells me — and always so assuredly, it seems — “ I just don’t really like poetry.”It’s more people, more otherwise avid readers than I would like to think.
It’s a matter of personal choice, sure; as much as I try to like reading philosophy I can’t say I do. But these people who “don’t really like poetry” seem to see it as an art form that’s too indulgent or selfish or extraneous; they feel they can relate more to characters in storylines. I, on the other hand, turn to poetry when I need something to relate to. I was feeling that need when I passed Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs in a window; I was heartachin’, broke, and a line from a poet I hadn’t read in years kept crossing my mind:
...moreAuthor and ex-soldier for the publishing world, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker Daniel Menaker attempts to break down the industry’s struggle into variables of audience, cost, risk, and heart in his recent essay, “Redactor Agonistes.”
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