The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Already overwhelmed by thoughts of Thanksgiving?
Want a menu that teeters on the line of conventional and culturally innovative? Look no further than McSweeney’s Thanksgiving Gallimaufry! The online booklet features recipes from their cookbooks, At Home on the Range by novelist and Rumpus contributor Elizabeth Gilbert and Margret Yardley Potter, Mission Street Food and the quarterly food journal Lucky Peach.
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This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work. But your part of the contract is that you have to be the plow mule, or the mystery won’t show up. It might not even show up if you do your work. There’s no guarantee.
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When Rose was sixteen years old and five months pregnant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body.
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It’s easy to write off one author based on a best-seller. Call it jealousy, call it high-end literary disdain, call it whatever you want, but it’s easy to give in to the impulse to distrust something once it’s become popular. This indeed was my reaction to the author Elizabeth Gilbert, who I (as many others) first encountered by way of her memoir-cum-chick-lit classic Eat, Pray, Love.