The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Steven Amsterdam’s newest work, What The Family Needed, features a range of voices and perspectives, which will be no surprise to readers of his previous book, or to anyone who’s had a glance at his eclectic C.V.
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I was walking out of MIT’s gym at 11 pm when the loudspeaker came on, telling us that there was a gunman on campus and to shelter in place.
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SLIMER
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Slimer.
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Martha Bayne wrote a piece for The Rumpus about her unplanned pregnancy. Next thing she knew, she was being invited onto Fresh Air. That’s when things got sticky…
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What if instead you spent the rest of your days making flowers chains…
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Social workers in South Korea frequently refer to North Korean defectors as da-moonhwa, a broad label that means “many cultures.”
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The Place Beyond the Pines begins with a long tracking shot, and the shot acts as a summary of everything that’s good about the movie: its confidence, its ambition, and its meager but distinct accomplishments.
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One part of me will always be on my roof in the Sunset District, smoking with my human butt on a damp spot, my cigarette butt about to rest on a similarly moist shingle.
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“The Big Idea” features interviews with people whose lights stay on—writers, artists, scientists, activists, and others who take a long and broad view of an issue, problem, or concept, and pursue it over many years.
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He didn’t own a record player because he didn’t need to hear anything. He wanted only to maintain what the vinyl represented: ties to his childhood, ties to New York.
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Shortly after yesterday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon, my Twitter feed was thick with Bostonians seeking and sharing information: Copley station was closed, cell lines jammed, marathoners meeting on the Common. People wanted to know where it was safe to go, how to get home, how to find each other.
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What wearies me is how often I have found myself stunned and silent in recent years. What especially wearies me is having such a finely honed vocabulary for tragedy.
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I’m very excited to announce that Nelson Education is featuring my review of the alphabet in one of their upcoming textbooks.
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It takes two years before Bob shows his gun collection to me. The guns are in the corner closet of a room I’ve slept in over thirty times. He opens the slatted door with a key, and one by one, he pulls out latched wooden boxes, heavy velvet bags, and cardboard boxes of bullets
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“I never thought of myself as an outsider…[Y]ou would have to give advantage to this space where you’re not, to think of it as sovereign because you’re not there.”
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I was immediately captivated. Obsessed. It was the first time I’d seen a layered exploration of an American woman’s psychological response to the war on terror.
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We are terrified of racial guilt. But when we’re too afraid to actually deal with what’s happening in the world, to acknowledge our responsibility or what’s at stake, we will be doomed to miss the point over and over again.
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Writer and journalist Ben Yagoda addresses today’s recurring writing problems, how to be a sympathetic editor, and why it’s nice to play for Team Yagoda.
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Kevin Thomas reviews Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook, Rumpus Comics style:
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Roger Ebert had this elegance about him that made us all want to be like him.
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Sometimes I get this ragged wind in my chest. It’s a graveyard in there, too: instead of clothes holding my ghost shape, it’s my old self that calls out from beneath bone.
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Peter Rock discusses his fascination with the Church Universal and Triumphant, the evolution of his latest book, The Shelter Cycle, and writing well by getting deeply confused.
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My father laid his guns down on the kitchen table next to our box of Cocoa Puffs: the .38 from his ankle and the .38 from his hip, as flat and lifeless as my expression.
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The following piece was presented as “5 Poems and 3 Notes” in the panel “Post Black? Culture, Craft, and Race in Verse” at the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Writer and cartoonist Adrienne Celt imagines the complicated inner lives of animals in her comics.
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Jennifer Gilmore and Meg Wolitzer interview each other about their new novels, and how to live deeply in your book to avoid living deeply in your own life.
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In a borrowed bed, in a foreign room, I woke up to a cry, raw and guttural like a baby’s first breath. My bedside lamp was still on, and the mild darkness of morning stretched outside my window. I slept on a book for a pillow, and yesterday’s jeans rutted into my waist.
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Before you get back to the grind, savor these last bits of the weekend.
A comic by Yumi Sakugawa, which she described on Twitter in the following way: “My random idea for a metaphysical nudist desert retreat for grandmothers is finally in comic form.”
And an interview with Susan Steinberg about crossing genres, reversing VIDA stats, and the importance of bucking formula.
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Welcome to the week! good news: the world won’t be hit by a giant asteroid at the end of the month.
Happy 50th birthday chaos theory!
It is very sad that the world does not have this desert crossing vehicle in it.
Here is some art made from price tags for you.
Technology let’s us see how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly (thanks technology).
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Venezuela is out of toilet paper.
Behold the Alternative Limb Project.
If I’m reading this correctly, I could really use some electrical brain shocks.
And now you’re midcentury design for the day, available in school library poster or Buckminster Fuller book cover flavors.
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The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. (more…)
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