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From Stephen Elliott
The new media landscape might tear writing as we know it apart—or it might give us opportunities to find thrilling new niches.
Tomorrow night in NYC, join writers and editors from Columbia University, Tin House, and more to hear how they’ve “carved out a new media approach to old school storytelling,” and how you, too, can “find your niche.”
See their Facebook event page for more details.
...moreHenry Miller hated Brooklyn almost as passionately as he loved Big Sur and dirty sex. In “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” Alexander Nazaryan takes a look at Miller’s lifelong contempt for the borough.
In a 1975 documentary, Miller refers to Brooklyn as:
...morea place where I knew nothing but starvation, humiliation, despair, frustration, every god damn thing—nothing but misery.
Monday 5/13: Real-life storytelling monthly The Shout is back at the Grand Lake Coffee House. Featuring Rachel Gill, James Monroe Iglehart, Craig Mclughlin, Marc Gwinn, Daniel Herrera Castro, and the first of six willing attendees. Sliding scale $5+, 7:30.
Tuesday 5/14: Green Apple Books and Asymptote co-host a reading by Arturo Mantecon, translator of the Spanish poete maudit and dissident Leopoldo Maria Panero.
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Happy Mother’s Day. And a big hug to Dawn Cave, the mother who gave us the King of The Bad Seeds.
Thank you, Dawn, and thank you, Calliope. Calli-a-who?
Calliope was the mother of the greatest musician of all time, Orpheus.
...moreMonday 05/13:
Emily Books presents “What is the Queer Novel?” featuring a reading and discussion with Sarah Schulman and Barbara Browning. Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm, free.
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes a killer line-up featuring The Rumpus’ Roxane Gay, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, Leigh Newman, and Michael Heald.
...moreWe hope you were so busy taking your mamas out to brunch and showering them with love and appreciation that you simply had no time for The Rumpus this weekend.
We celebrated Mother’s Day with two very different interviews that ended up being the same in many ways.
...moreOr just impossible addresses, like “the one addressed to the house ‘down the street from the drugstore on the corner’ or one intended for ‘the place next to the red barn.’”
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Just in time for, uh, yesterday: did you know that the founder of Mother’s Day fought to have it abolished?
Split in half food is a good thing to photograph.
Abandoned Star Wars sets are too.
Headlines of the future today!
...moreNo? Why not?
We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio.
...moreBeneath Hemingway’s estate in Havana, Cuba, 2,000 documents were left forgotten and unpublished in his damp basement.
The estate, neglected because of its tricky location, was becoming increasingly decrepit until 2004, when Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway’s editor, founded the Finca Vigia Foundation.
...moreAlrighty, folks. Tony Millionaire’s alt-comic Green Eggs and Maakies is officially up for pre-order. Millionaire’s illustrations have appeared in everything from The Believer to the New Yorker, and Maakies even had a small stint on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
For those who haven’t heard of Maakies, it’s essentially a dark comic about a drunk, Irish monkey named Uncle Gabby and his partner, Drinky Crow, who go on debauched misadventures involving booze, suicide, violence, and the occasional sexually transmitted disease—basically all the necessary components for a captivating story.
...moreFourteen Hills is one of our favorite Bay Area literary journals, and you won’t want to miss their release party for issue 19.2 at 7:00 pm on May 15th, at the Verdi Club.
The release party will include readings from past contributors, musical performances, and a raffle where you’ll have a chance to win a Rumpus Gift Pack, which includes a Write Like a Motherfucker mug, a copy of Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries, and a Sugar Says poster.
...moreThe next Letter in the Mail, going out May 15, is from Alexis Smith!
Alexis is the author of the novel Glaciers and a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing. She grew up in Alaska and Washington state, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her son.
...moreAs Elissa Bassist’s recent Funny Women column “The Next Great American Woman’s Novel” reminded us, books by women tend to get treated a little…differently from books by men.
What would it look like if male authors’ novels were treated like Bassist’s hypothetical feminine masterpiece All the Single Ladies Just Wanna Have Fun?
...moreYou will be missed western black rhino.
No, glass really isn’t a liquid.
Not to keep being a bummer, but the Toba super-volcano probably didn’t happen either.
Now let’s talk about the occult and the father of rocket science.
...moreWe love our Funny Women, and Jezebel does, too!
They’ve republished Elissa Bassist’s satire, “Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel.” But you saw it here first.
...more“I mean, surely not every human emotion can be rendered in a few dozen repeated, low-resolution images. And yet…”
Recently, A.D. Jameson asked the question “Are Animated GIFs a Type of Cinema?” Landon Palmer continued the conversation, and now even the New York Times Magazine is adding their two cents on the subject.
...moreWhat if, instead of crude, crass graffiti, walls were painted with poetry?
This reality has already started in Camden, New Jersey where words from Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Ballad” were printed on the face of a rundown, boarded up building.
...moreSome good news: Disney isn’t going to trademark Dia de los Muertos after all.
Wired worms its way farther into my heart via a list of recent awesome dinosaur discoveries.
Vintage science ads huzzah!
Peter Lipton photographs endangered and soon to be extinct Ecuadorian amphibians.
...moreAt The Barnes and Nobel Review, Maud Newton interviews Naomi Alderman, winner of the Orange Award for New Writers and co-writer with Margaret Atwood of The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, a recently published e-novel only available on Watt.
...moreToday, The New Yorker Page Turner blog highlighted Abigail Welhouse’s Rumpus interview with Luis Negrón!
Thanks, The New Yorker! We love you back!
...more“Tip the waitress or barman well, ‘cause you’re going to need their toilet.”
Taxi drivers made strides this year at the PEN World Voices Festival.
For a handful of weeks, a group of long-standing New York City taxi drivers have been meeting to poetically reflect on their adventures shuttling passengers throughout the boroughs.
...moreIf you enjoy the coffee Dan Weiss brews every morning, you should hear the music he makes by night.
His band, longtime Rumpus favorites The Yellow Dress, are playing an album-preview show tonight at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, along with spooky folksters Low Magic and East Bay DIY hip-hop/R&B band Jaberi & Deutsch.
...moreOakland art gallery MOCO, a vital and exciting venue for visual and performing art outside the mainstream, turned one last Sunday.
Unfortunately, there was no celebration: a few days earlier, the gallery’s owner, Eli Reyes, was the victim of a brutal hit-and-run attack that broke her femur and landed her in intensive care.
...moreWhat’s it like sailing a top the Arctic?
What’s it like, swimming below the Arctic?
Our solar system is actually pretty weird.
Unwanted moles are basically the best archaeologists.
Now let’s all take a moment to appreciate how totally great Ray Harryhausen was.
...more...moreElla snorted a last bit of smoke from her nose, like a dragon, and flung her butt in the creek. “That’s not a job, Soph. That’s slavery. There are child labor laws. I bet you could call social services on your mom and they would take you away like that.” Ella snapped her fingers.
Attention, New York readers who love literary criticism and women and literary criticism by women: come to SHARP: A Discussion of Women and Criticism tomorrow night at 7:00 at the Bookstore Cafe!
The event will feature female critics, including Rumpus contributors like Michelle Orange and Michelle Dean, in conversation about “the women they’ve been inspired by, the challenges of being a woman of sharp mind and pen, and the question of whether women have a distinct purpose as critics at all.”
See the event pages on Housing Works and/or Facebook for more details.
...moreIf you haven’t heard already, tech writer Paul Miller is back on the internet after a year of WWW celibacy. In his conclusive journal entry on The Verge, he’s not waxing ecstatic on the virtues of being wireless, but instead ruminating about how a year devoid of virtual communication burnt a hole of loneliness in his social life.
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