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June 4 meets Facebook meets Letters In The Mail

Stephen Elliott — Sun, 27 May 2012 16:41:25 +0000

Here’s the Facebook page for our June 4 Celebration of Written Correspondence in San Francisco. Please share. Thank you!

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Angelica Garnett and the Cost of the Art

Michelle Dean — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:30:52 +0000

I read awhile back about Angelica Garnett’s death at MobyLives, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since. She was Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece, and until she was eighteen she thought her father was Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell. Her real father, her mother informed her, was the painter Duncan Grant, but Vanessa asked that Angelica not address this with Clive, and as the Guardian notes, “for some reason” Angelica never approached Grant either. Instead she’d end up marrying one of her true father’s ex-lovers, David Garnett, a man who upon seeing her as a baby wrote to Lytton Strachey that he already thought of marrying her 20 years hence. She had no idea of the novelist Garnett’s involvement with her father. As one of my mentors would say, oy. Oy.

This kind of story strikes me as unimaginable today. Family secrets are of course eternal, along with complicated personal entanglements. But artists don’t do quite so much communal living — at least, not that I’m aware of — and the discourse around mothering today is so fraught and complicated. To a lesser extent this is true of parenting writ large, but we can’t let the gendered nature of the stuff off the hook. It is terribly hard to imagine being a distracted, uncommitted sort of mother if only because it’s not the fashion to be. You don’t need me, a childless person, to tell you this, but of course there are reams of paper devoted to the intersection of writing and mothering, in equal measure complaining of how hard it is to do both and extolling the virtues of mothering. On fathering, not quite so much.

I can’t offer you any further information on the topic except to stand over here and say, it all seems daunting, this mothering and writing thing. Everyone wants you to devote yourself to both, and it seems you do too, which just all seems terribly exhausting. I want everyone to cut themselves more breaks and pour themselves more drinks and surrender to the impossibility of all of it. At least, that’s what I am doing at the moment, and the only thing I mother is my cat. She, by the way, thinks I do a poor job of it. C.f. this morning, when I got up to compose this post and she hadn’t any kibble left. She marched across my keyboard with evident dissatisfaction; I lost a whole paragraph in this post. I cursed at her and put her on the floor. Her ears briefly went back but then she settled and jumped back up next to me on the couch and began rubbing my arm. The short-term memory thing comes in handy, at times, as does my near-monopoly over the food stocks.

For her part, Garnett would, late in life, exorcise her Bloomsbury childhood via memoir. Her book was entitled Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood; it is not in print in the U.S. that I’m aware of. (I smell an e-book deal!) This, I think, must be the great writer-parent nightmare; the later memoir. Somewhere there are moms and dads who do not fuck you up, but I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s possible their kids don’t become writers and artists, a shame. Either that, or they bury their coffins in therapy.

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Saint Joan, J.Diddy, You Know What We Call Her

Michelle Dean — Sat, 26 May 2012 16:00:21 +0000

I will first shamelessly self-promote and link you to a piece I did for the Awl this week on Joan Didion’s early reviews. I’m going to let that substitute for this week’s History Lesson, as it’s Memorial Day weekend.

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Saturdays Belong To

Michelle Dean — Sat, 26 May 2012 15:21:20 +0000

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Strayed Ethics

Lisa Dusenbery — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:48:06 +0000

Cheryl Strayed was this week’s guest ethicist for The New York Times Magazine.

She responded to three queries–relating to sex, money, and infidelity–with that Cheryl/Sugar blend of wisdom and wit.

Rombes Rocks Berfrois

Lisa Dusenbery — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:39:04 +0000

Rumpus columnist Nicholas Rombes served as today’s guest editor for London-based online magazine Berfrois.

Rombes curated an array of excellent pieces, including Rumpus editor Isaac Fitzgerald’s “In Love in San Francisco,” Peggy Nelson’s “Short Attention Span Theater,” and two poems by John Freeman.

“I Am Greatly Troubled By What You Say”

Graham Todd — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:00:10 +0000

In a Letter of Note from earlier this week, Mark Twain replies to a librarian’s note concerning the Brooklyn Public Library ban on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in his characteristically wry and confounding way.

After the library found copies of Twain’s most famous works in the children’s room at the library, Asa Dickinson, the man writing Twain, defended the books and admitted to having read Huck Finn to “defenseless blind people, without regard to their age, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Twain didn’t give the man much sympathy and explained the danger that uncouth reading subjects present to children: “I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old.”

Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

Lisa Dusenbery — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:19 +0000

Dan Weiss is off today, but we’re channeling him.

Smoke. Stone. Super Nintendo. Skin under a band-aid… 50 Shades of Grey.

Animals with fraudulent diplomas.

Yesterday, a giant solar-powered airplane departed from Switzerland in its first transcontinental flight.

Here are some vintage photographs that capture the special bond between ventriloquist and dummy.

The Hemingway Papers

Graham Todd — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:30:09 +0000

The Toronto Star‘s well-designed archive of Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper articles for the Canadian paper provides access to evidence of the young author honing his spartan style and exploring his favorite themes.

One such exceedingly-Hemingway gem is from an article about getting a free shave from amateur barbers: “For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death.” Hilariously hyperbolic? Yes. Very, very awesome? Even more yes.

The website hosts 70 of Hemingway’s articles for The Star from when he was 20 to 24 years of age. The articles cover the gamut, from wartime Europe to the new exotic gambling games of the Toronto high society. In yet another highlight, Hemingway’s two most iconic interests, boxing and women, appear in an article aptly titled Prizefight Women about the first prizefight ladies were allowed to attend in Toronto. (Warning: Highly Provocative Maleness.)

It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

What About the Sky?

Lisa Dusenbery — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:00:49 +0000

According to scholars, Homer never mentioned the color blue in any of his works; neither did the Bible, nor an abundance of ancient texts. Also, linguists have found a near-universal pattern in which languages developed color in stages, and blue was always the last to be named. Radiolab reports and searches for answers.

The Rumpus.net » Other

June 4 meets Facebook meets Letters In The Mail

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Angelica Garnett and the Cost of the Art

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Saint Joan, J.Diddy, You Know What We Call Her

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Saturdays Belong To

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Strayed Ethics

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Rombes Rocks Berfrois

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“I Am Greatly Troubled By What You Say”

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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

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The Hemingway Papers

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What About the Sky?

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