The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
At The New York Times, author and Rumpus contributor Jami Attenberg writes about the the disorientation and fear that came when, after a break-up, her ex-boyfriend started a site about her.
“Creating the blog might have been his grasp at taking control of our story, but it was also his attempt to speak to me in my language, or on my platform anyway.”
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Since the early 1980’s, the 51 year old Scottish musician/writer/provocateur Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, has been releasing music (his latest album, Hypnoprism, was his 18th) to varying levels of critical and commercial success. Since the 1990’s, he has been blogging in various forms, most notably on his old LiveJournal called Click Opera, which Warren Ellis called “probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web” and of which novelist Dennis Cooper said, “It doesn’t get any better than Click Opera.”
At The Bold Italic, Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton provides us with an illustrated guide to San Francisco’s favorite bloggers. Featured on her list is our own Isaac “Motherfucking” Fitzgerald, also known as “a walking, writing, rump-bumping, well-read bear hug.”
...moreToday should be pretty alright, I think.
“Where do libraries and e-books meet?”
Yes, this article is really called “Jay-Z is Not a Proudhon of Hip-Hop,” and if you read the comments, your head will explode.
Sylvia Plath used to illustrate her dreams.
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How a Brooklyn musician uses Tumblr to cover a song a night (roughly) and write accompanying life stories.
“After years of finding children’s books tucked away in authors’ bibliographies (Graham Greene wrote children’s books!), followed by quick disappointment (how can they be out of print?), I realized that I was having this same frustrating revelation over and over. And when I would bring these discoveries up with my friends, they would have the same reaction (John Updike wrote children’s books!
...more“[The] image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die.
“In their sweep and scorn, however, [statements like 'the parasite is killing the host'] seem as outdated as they are defensive.
...more“There can be no argument that the blog format gives ‘now’ the pride of place; novelty leads, and the past recedes into a string of ‘older posts’ links and archives pages. But it is a mistake to think that blogs therefore discard the past…
“It’s reasonable to suspect that a medium organized by reverse chronology may not be the place to turn for the virtues of the timeless.
...more“We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone… In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, the sociologist Claude S. Fischer argues that our customary mode of discussing new technologies leads us astray by casting the technology as the protagonist and the human user as a victim.
...moreGreetings, world. Blogging will be light today. Your humble Sunday editor is in Monterey celebrating the life of a friend who recently passed. But to keep you with stuff to look at until tomorrow, here’s a brief roundup of some of links from the book blogs from this past week.
Dan Brown may be invading the cover of your book, whether he has anything to do with what you’re reading or not.
Speaking of book covers, another reminder that authors have no control over these things.
...moreScott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who has written a fascinating history of blogging (in time, we’ll be interviewing him about his book), recently wrote up his thoughts on Twitter in two posts: how Twitter differs from blogging, how it has changed blogging, and where he sees the platform going from here.
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A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which, incidentally did not appear to include much in the way of poetry.
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Shirin Neshat is consistently astonishing. In Art in America, Eleanor Heartney talks with Neshat about her ongoing project of lyrical short films, and now a feature, based on Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur‘s magical 1989 novel, Women Without Men.
...moreSometimes, the book blogs seem resigned to the idea that we’re entering some terrible dystopia, shaking their heads sadly as the businesspeople in charge douse the future in gasoline and dance around with a matchbook in their mouths. No longer. Today, the book blogs are accepting the future and figuring out what to do about it.
...moreGood news! Your humble Rumpus Sunday editor, who was locked inside the Public Storage in North Berkeley for the better part of last night while helping his nine-months-pregnant friend move, has been rescued by the cops! And today, I’m excited about life and the book blogs because I’m free, so free, and because this week, the book blogs are a little bit brilliant.
...moreThe book blogs are in a tizzy! One second, it doesn’t look good for literature. The cancer has spread. The postmortem is imminent. But then all of the sudden they are saying everything is fine and pointing us in the direction of some really cool stuff, like kids who read and write and stories embedded in web sites!
...moreThe new “ladyblog” Double X, an offshoot of the online magazine Slate, just launched in Beta, with former Jezebel editor Jessica Grose one of the women at the helm. Oddly enough, one of the first entries is a piece called “How Jezebel is hurting women.”
Author Linda Hirshman argues that while the Jezebel writers look “a lot like the natural heirs of feminism,” and “are clearly familiar with the rhetoric of feminism,” the behavior they chronicle in their posts is dangerous to the movement, and the message:
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