The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
I’m a reluctant decorator. Maybe it’s because I’m really a poet, or maybe because I’m a slob. Either way, despite a life long fascination with my own personal mise en scenes I’ve tried never to let the professional impulse sink its fangs too deep.
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The response to the AIDS epidemic that ripped through the gay community starting in the early years of the Reagan administration can be best characterized by how most health and social issues are dealt with in contemporary politics today, with a marked lack of empathy.
...moreFor me, having been inculcated with pictures of a bloody, naked man nailed to a tree since I was five, any discussion of obscenity, homo-eroticism or sexual violence begins with Jesus, or at least the Jesus that hangs in churches, around necks and is furiously waved in the faces of “sodomites.”
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“The key is to remember a sex scene is a scene of dramatic action and psychological development. You need to pay attention to emotion and to a character’s self-awareness—or lack of self-awareness.”
I swear to God if I hear one more thing about Sarah Palin I’m going to snap, so this week, The Rumpus is giving you a roundup of political links that are a lot more interesting than anything ever written by or about her.
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A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
“I don’t know where we got the idea that helping sick people means keeping them away from the jaws of death at all costs…”
How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!