Lectures I Will Never Give
Mary Ruefle wasn’t good at teaching on the fly so she wrote a series of lectures for her poetry classes. This is one of them.
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rumpus reprint
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Getting Made (in honor of Ronan Louis and Emily Rapp)
The Rumpus joins yoga teacher Jennifer Pastiloff in remembering Emily Rapp’s son, Ronan Louis, whose brief, remarkable life ended in the early morning hours on February 15.
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The End of The World
On the last day of the world, I forgot to set my alarm.
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Introducing 90 Days 90 Reasons
This time the bumper stickers are few. The HOPE posters are hard to find. There are no songs by will.i.am.
We are three months away from the presidential election, and there is a stunning lack of energy displayed by likely Obama voters.
...moreSunday Fiction: Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog (excerpt)
When I awoke, I did not recognize the window. The snow had stopped and moonlight slanted through the glass. I could not make out the words, but I heard my father’s voice filling up the house. I tiptoed down the back staircase that led to the kitchen and stood in the slice of shadow near the doorjamb. My grandmother was telling my mother to pack her bags. He was a degenerate, she said—she had always seen that in him. My mother said, ‘Why, Zachary, why are you doing this?”
...moreThey All Stand Up and Sing
I was somewhere in a big room in an old apartment in New York. The room was in a brownstone, or limestone, and had what appeared to be twenty-foot-high ceilings. There were baroque moldings around the ceilings, around the tops of the radiator covers and on the mantelpiece.
...moreMy Little Brother Ruined My Life
“Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s 14 years old now, almost my height, 5′ 8″, creamy white skin, and a small, German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family.
...moreSynecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script
What follows is the introduction to Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script, by Charlie Kaufman:
Composing the Wilderness: An Essay on the Nested and Dynamic Model of Nature, Humanity, and Technology
In July, 2010, I delivered a keynote address at Goddard College’s MFA Writing residency in Port Townsend, Washington, on the theme “Composing the Wilderness.” This essay is included in an anthology of addresses given by Goddard College MFA faculty, to be published in early 2011.
Where did all the music go?
Breaking it down.
THE OLD GUARD
Just want to return to the old days. What are the old days? The nineties.
Yes, the CD replacement business still existed, you could only buy albums, which were exorbitantly priced, and Napster had not yet arrived on the scene.
...moreDinaburg’s Cake
A short story from Doug Dorst’s latest collection, The Surf Guru, our Rumpus Book Club pick for July.
...moreThe Candidate In Bloom
A short story from Doug Dorst’s forthcoming collection, The Surf Guru, our Rumpus Book Club pick for July.
Underground America: Permanent Anxiety
“The Arizona law is not the problem. The problem is that we continue, on all sides of the political spectrum, to not listen to those most directly affected by immigration policy: immigrants themselves.”
The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You
What we’re witnessing in Arizona, and all across this country, is an ongoing moral tragedy.
All We Read Is Freaks
A truly amazing personal essay:
Emily Dickinson has had a death grip on my imagination since I first encountered her by way of a lisping, born-again, junior-high English teacher in Easley, South Carolina.
...moreHeart Radical: The Strange, True Flight of Airships
Barry Hannah passed away Monday, March 1, 2010. He was 67 and died of natural causes. The precarious state of his health — he’d battled cancer for some years — was a matter of ongoing concern amongst his wide circle of friends and admirers.
A Candy Box of History’s Sappiest Literary Lovers
Familiar figures among upper echelon literary lovelorn include Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fannie Osbourne, Gerard de Nerval and Jenny Colon, to name but a few. Their stories have all the poignancy, drama, humor and pathos of popular romance.
Merry Christmas
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Americans send out a billion and a half Christmas cards every year. That would have been my guess, give or take a quarter of a billion. Missing by 250 million is coming close nowayears, for what used to be called astronomical figures have now become the figures of earth.
Henry Miller in Lotos Land: Paint as You Like, and Die Happy
Thinking back on his first stay in Hollywood, Miller often reminisced about the Green House, “where I made so many watercolors, sold them for a song or for an umbrella I had no use for, but where I also made and found friends I never knew existed.”
Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
The year I met Steve Almond was also the year I picked up (Not That You Asked) and the year I read his gorgeous homage to Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.”
On the Importance of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling
A couple of years ago the memoirist and fiction writer Chris Offutt urged me to read Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, first published in 1966. As promised, it was the kind of infrequent reading experience that can only be described as a revelation.
Listen to Metal on Metal and Everything Will Be Okay
Just because you don’t succeed the way others define success, you’re not a failure. You just chose to take a different path. And who’s to say that’s wrong?
I just finished watching Anvil! The Story of Anvil.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Lydia Millet
When asked why I publish what I publish, I often reply—I publish in order to understand why I published. Until a book goes out into the world to be engaged with, tussled with, confronted, loved, argued over, no-one, not even the guy who edited, packaged, pimped it out to the reader he hoped he’d help find for it, no-one really understands what it is.
Why I Write (About Music)
I have two of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies index cards taped to my monitor. They are supposed to motivate me while slowly radiating guilt. Obliquely, I guess. One reads: Not building a wall, but making a brick (sands, time, hourglass, you see?) The other: What are you really thinking about just now?
I Just Want to See It Through: A Full Story from Out of Exile
Alweel’s smile shone and her voice chirped Arabic as she told her story deliberately and in deep detail. We took breaks for chocolate and tea after difficult episodes. It took two days for her to unfurl all of her experiences, reaching back to the village in South Sudan where she was born, to the Nile in Khartoum and then, years later, following the river north to Cairo. Listening to her speak, it was difficult to comprehend how this beautiful, gracious, intelligent woman had undertaken such a journey. But Alweel remains luminous.
Brotherly Love
My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him. Life radiated from the central pulse of his scrap-metal yard; the world beyond it seemed to make him defensive and nervous.
...moreGidget On the Couch
“The thing to remember is that, since 1957, surfing as something you buy has overshadowed surfing as something you do.”
An exclusive excerpt on the origins of surfing from the best of the Believer essays, Read Hard.
...moreWhy I Write
1.
I think I was 10 when I started writing poems. My father gave me his old manual typewriter and I banged them out, two, three a day, hanging them on my walls, surrounding myself with them, until my walls were covered floor to ceiling.
...moreWhy We Need Health Care Reform
Our nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.
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