The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
In the current age of Twitter and Facebook, some authors seem just one click away–a kind of celebrity that is still accessible to the common fan.
Frank Cassese tells a story in Guernica about when he received a postcard from David Foster Wallace in response to the manuscript he had sent.
...more“Maybe I don’t need to be worried, he said. You’re too weird for anyone but me to want.”
An excerpt from Rumpus contributor Jennine Capó Crucet latest novel, Magic Relic City, is featured in Guernica this week and edited by Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay.
...more“In line in the cafeteria, at his favorite table in the library, on the last block before the block he lives on, the inside of Boy’s head is one blank notebook page after another.”
At Guernica, Roxane Gay guest-edited Rumpus contributor Saeed Jones’s short story “Boy, A History”, a bleak tale of one high schooler’s plight in discovering his sexuality.
...moreHere’s hoping more people read the concise and precise interview about translation up on Guernica between Erica Wright and Marilyn Hacker.
When we talk about someone being a prolific translator, Marilyn Hacker — who is a fantastic poet, let’s not forget that — is the poster child: “In the past five years alone, she’s brought the work of Hedi Kaddour, Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marie Etienne,” plus (as Hacker notes), Amina Saïd and Habib Tengour.
...moreIn commemoration of Banned Books Week (September 30th – October 6th), Guernica will be posting interviews with authors whose work was deemed too controversial. The site will also post essays that explore numerous censored texts:
“In recognition of this week, against censorship, and in support of writers and readers, the Guernica Daily will be publishing interviews with authors whose books have been banned or challenged and essays on works of fiction that have been oft removed from schools, libraries and book stores.”
You can read Katie Ryder’s full introduction to next week’s postings here.
...moreEveryday Africa is a Tumblr that compiles pictures – altered via iPhone applications such as Instagram and Hipstamatic – of life in Africa. The project was started by a group of photographers looking to prove that these apps can be used in photojournalism.
...more“I’m sure someone out there has a workable solution. But what do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz. I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.”
As the second anniversary of Harvey Pekar’s death approaches, Guernica shares an excerpt from his posthumous graphic novel, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me.
...moreGuernica examines the intersections of science, emotion, and memory by way of an exchange between novelist Rivka Galchen and neuroscience professor David Linden, featured in the Rubin Museum’s Brainwave series.
“As Linden explains in his book, ‘memory retrieval is an active and dynamic process.’ Thus recollecting past experiences—reliving them again and again or retelling them to others—subtly modifies the memories we keep.
...moreZadie Smith discusses the gap between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world, as well as the need to bridge “the language of development and the language of the rest of us.” The recognition of that disparity led to the creation of Writers Bloc, which seeks to insert novelists into the conversation around universal education.
...moreGuernica has an extensive interview with South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who elaborates on life as a woman poet and the state of feminism in Korea. Hyesoon discusses the role of the grotesque, the human body, and exposure in her poetry.
...moreGuernica interviews Lagos Photo Festival founder Azu Nwagbogu about the goals of the festival, and the growth of photography as a social tool in Nigeria.
“The problem of Africa really is the Afro-pessimism, where we show the hopelessness of the African situation.
...more“It’s as though the great New York-centric moment of openness after 9/11, when we were ready to reexamine our basic assumptions and look each other in the eye, has returned, and this time it’s not confined to New York City, and we’re not ready to let anyone shut it down with rubbish about patriotism and peril, safety and sanitation.”
This Guernica essay looks at Occupy Wall Street in the context of the decade since September 11th, framing the current movement as a divorce between “Ms.
...more“The guidebook I researched last winter was never published, put on hold when the Arab Spring surged into Libya that February. I was writing a guidebook to a country that no longer exists; a country where busloads of Italian tourists gathered around hotel buffets; where billboards advertised the Qaddafi brand—forty-one years, they sang, the leader’s face peering down at the cars on the highways like that of a god who thought he created them.
...moreGuernica Daily just kicked-off a new flash fiction series “designed to showcase up-and-coming writers and artists.” Check out the first entry of the series and consider flashing them your own piece?
...moreIn his show Photographs with an Audience, Clifford Owens occupies a barren room with some lights, a camera, and his seated audience members. Participant answers to a series of questions determine who will be incorporated in each photograph.
“By plucking members of the audience from anonymity and probing them in front of a white void, Owens brushed aside lifestyle brands to engage both the subject’s actual self and the fear or desire of alternative paths.
...moreThe “Social Media” exhibit is at New York City’s Pace Gallery until October 15th. Walking us through the installations, this piece ponders the way social media art works when taken out of its natural habitat—the Internet.
“It seemed to me that the only thing lacking were the proper tools of translation—this art was the internet (past tense) in translation.
...moreWe Are Wisconsin—The Wisconsin uprising in the words of the activists, writers, and everyday Wisconsinites who made it happen is a 300-page compilation of writings—from articles to tweets—that sprung from the Madison protest. This piece explores the impetus to archive and the questions raised in the book.
...moreWith 80% of the population expected to inhabit cities by 2050, governments may find ideas for reforms in examples of urban transformations elsewhere. This piece looks to Colombia, whose story of “political metamorphosis” is told in Bogota Change, part of the Cities on Speed film series.
...more“The occurrence of yet another freak earthquake in an unusual location is leading many anti-fracking activists…to wonder whether ‘fracking’ in nearby West Virginia may be responsible.”
This article discusses the link that geologists observe between fracking—specifically the step where waste salt water is re-injected “deep into rock beds”—and earthquakes.
...moreThere has been much analysis of the recently released blockbuster adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Help.
Last week Professor Melissa Harris-Perry began live-tweeting as she sat through the movie, concluding that it “reduces systematic, violent racism, sexism, and labor exploitation to a cat fight that can be won w/ cunning spunk.”
Articles in Entertainment Weekly, Colorlines, and Guernica have broken down the film’s “historical whitewashing” of the civil rights era, and offered suggestions for more realistic, less “tone-deaf” narratives on the subject.
...morePhones and other devices have given people the ability to record and expose police misconduct. Sometimes, these recordings provide evidence for bringing charges against brutality, such as in the case of Oscar Grant. However, as this article explores, existing wiretapping and eavesdropping laws are being used to make it illegal to record on-duty officers.
...moreThe art exhibition “Gaming in Waziristan,” in progress at London’s Beaconsfield Gallery, includes previously unseen photographs of post-drone strike moments in North Waziristan, along with 3D animation and moving images.
The project seeks to interrogate structures of power, the war apparatus and, as this article articulates, the idea that the drone is “a tool of sterile, precise and perfect extermination.” The piece offers an intriguing analysis of the ways that drones have altered Pakistan, displaced populations and, rather than furthering the “war on terror,” have simply contributed to its urbanization.
...moreIn the current climate of booming Indian fiction, six-time novelist, Amitav Ghosh, is interviewed on Guernica. His internationalist perspective comes from a background in journalism and his PhD in social anthropology from Oxford, all working in conjunction to uniquely inform his writing.
...more
This week in New York David Grossman translates with Paul Auster, Justin Taylor and Eva Tamladge exhibit tattoos for the literary inclined, Tao Lin reads, Guernica celebrates, Bill Bryson is Private, Rick Moody joins the Sunday Salon, Catfish is the SATURDAY MOVIE PICK, and James Frey combines Dante, literature, and ART.
Suzanne Menghraj at Guernica writes about disembodied heads and the presence of mind in the absence of brain:
“And yet here I am despite all the impossibilities, eerily enchanted by the thought of a mind having such control over its body that it might exercise that control without the necessary neural pathways, not to mention a few other essentials.
...more
This week in New York the sixth annual PEN World Voices Festival (PWVF) opens its week-long celebration of international writing with such notable literary figures as Sherman Alexie, Claire Messud, Yiyun Li, Salman Rushdie and Lewis Lapham among others (Full Schedule Here), Agriculture Reader holds a launch party, the Dead or Alive exhibition opens at the Museum of Arts and Design, Gossip perform, Stephen Colbert helps celebrate the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) continues.
“All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already ‘lost’ cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed.
...more“Over the last decade Hispanic immigrants have become the main focus of American hate groups. According to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, after September 11, 2001, the conservative media began discussing immigration as a national security issue, often using terms like “illegals,” “invaders,” even “potential terrorists” to describe undocumented immigrants.
...more
Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy.
Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a nineteen-year-old in 1962 America, and the bevy of options and predicaments that came along with it–the social stigma of being an unwed mother, her humorous if stygian attempts to self-abort, and her final lone and costly trip by which she saved face.
...more
This week in New York Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman talk, Guernica has a reading, Joanna Newsom sings and plays harp, Marcel Dzama appears, talks and signs books, The Moth has a Story Slam, Christopher Walken loses a hand and Zoe Kazan gives him one, and Atlas Obscura presents an international celebration of curious and obscure things.