The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
A sudden burst of improvisational creativity may feel almost supernatural in origin, but there’s a biological basis for it, say researchers.
How did they study it? By scanning the brains of freestyling rappers, of course.
...moreThey found that rapping memorized lyrics and rapping freestyle use entirely different parts of the brain.
“Someday they’ll say Bukowski knew. Lay down for three of four days to get your juices back—then get up, look around and do it… But who the hell can do it ‘cause you need a dollar.”
Open Culture shares a video of Charles Bukowski discussing how he deals with depression and renews creativity.
...moreWhen Martin Heidegger wrote his gargantuan Magnus opus, Being and Time, he posited that it was Angst, the fundamental human condition, that brought us into the most authentic relationship with our selves and our surroundings.
Angst, for Heidegger, is caused by coming face-to-face with the inevitability of our own death and is life in the state of agitation, unease—it’s the condition in which we realize just how strange the world is.
...moreA couple months ago, we wrote about Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and around the same time I read another interesting review of the book, by Caleb Crain. (I refrained from posting about it at the time to avoid Crain-overkill.) In it, he describes the growth of wages, and consequently, leisure during the industrial revolution, and then goes on to produce an amazing quote from Thoreau about money:
...more“We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.
...moreThe founding developer of WordPress — the open-source blogging software that The Rumpus runs on, as well as millions of other great sites (including the New York Times!) — was recently featured in Inc. magazine’s monthly column, “The Way I Work.”
Because of the magazine’s rules about the column — they’re authored in the first person but subjects don’t write them directly, and they aren’t allowed to vet them before publication — Mullenweg found his a little misleading and vague on points he wanted to be specific about.
...moreI’ve always been a sucker for writing prompts, even though they have a way of sometimes being cheesy, forced, and ultimately silly. But recently I came across this interesting product, a paper-based prompt generator that would seem to strike the right balance of specific detail and vague suggestion.
...more