The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
HTML Giant‘s Tournament of Bookshit, now six months deep into its hilarious ramble, has just announced its Final 4:
Semi #1 – Alcoholism vs. “everybody has a story”, judged by Jennifer L. Knox.
Semi #2 – Calling anything you write a manuscript vs.
...moreThe ever-contentious subject of teaching creative writing is up for discussion. You can teach the elements, but there are always the “intangibles that cannot be taught.” Roxane Gay is inciting a discussion on HTMLGiant, laying some foundation for all of the student/teacher ideas into one mega-blog dialogue delineating the building blocks of creative writing.
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Blake Butler is the author of There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books, 2010), and Ever (Calamari Press, 2009).
Roxane Gay at HTMLGIANT has an interesting piece on the issue of clean, mechanically-sound writing, especially in the creative world, and muses on whether or not the ease of publication online now has made it too easy to be sloppy. She writes:
“I’m a big advocate for Internet publishing and online submissions but I worry that the instant gratification of being able to submit, and in some circumstances have your work accepted and published within the same week, and once in a while, the same day, has led to a climate where we don’t put as much care as we could into our writing.
...moreMitchell Heisman killed himself last Saturday, but what’s best known about him thus far is his 1,900 page suicide note. HTMLGIANT has excerpted a very small portion of the note. I wonder how long before someone puts together a performance reading of the thing?
...moreEverything about these quotes GIANT dug up by Klaus Kinsky is amazing.
At TMN, this is what happens when you interview someone you busted for plagiarism.
Here are lots of reminders that the bestsellers of the past are not always remembered in the future.
...more“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often works. One of the reasons I started the Q & A feature was to pull back that editorial curtain.
...more“If “all the world’s a stage,” then the internet is where we rehearse our lines, sharpening our tongues for a chance at real life.”
— Jimmy Chen over at GIANT takes a look at a chat roulette meeting between a Neo-Nazi and someone with an Israeli flag on their wall — a meeting that ended in a thumbs up — and wonders at the unreality of the online characters we create.
...moreMy relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china.
It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or David Foster Wallace or Marquis de Sade, and then it rubs off on me, and I end up whining and worrying and complaining more than they do, and then I stop liking myself.
...moreIt’s Saturday night and it’s poetry time. Who else is excited?
I always figured the Irish got excited about poetry. Roddy Doyle says otherwise.
I’m late to the game in discovering the Poetry Foundation’s podcasts, but I’m having some fun listening to them.
...moreEarlier this week, Sean Lovelace at HTMLGIANT asked about the last time you read a book you didn’t really want to read, and while I was coming up with my answer, it occurred to me that I haven’t finished anything I didn’t enjoy since I was in grad school.
...moreWith the year winding down, the book blogs have been ablaze with your typical speculations about the best of this and that.
But perhaps there are less obvious threads out there if we only knew where to look. . .
...moreHTMLGIANT is sponsoring (moderating? overseeing?) their Second Annual Indie Lit Secret Santa. All you do is head over there and sign up between now and December 15, then when you get your person’s name, send him or her a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag, which will hopefully arrive by December 25.
...moreWinter has finally come to south Florida, by which I mean it’s a nipple-hardening 51 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this and you can discern the locals from the transplants by the size (or lack) of the coats they’re wearing.
Quoting Catullus in a text message can get you into trouble, depending on what part you quote.
...moreAt HTMLGIANT, brilliant craft advice from a cartoon! “If you’re not popular, and you write a good poem, nobody gives a shit.”
The Guardian goes off on Martin Amis, complaining of “the continued endurance of a surprising tolerance for misogyny from vaunted men of letters who came of age as writers in an era when the loathing of women for being women – rather than for being crap writers, or unkind people, or whatever – was still legitimate.” Phew.
...more“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews or criticism that I read online seems not simply to fail to contribute to my understanding of the work under review, but actually to disrupt that understanding, or worse, to degrade the work.”
It’s still “Mean Week” at HTMLGIANT as Justin Taylor wonders whether book reviewers need to be held to higher standards.
...moreHere’s some interesting reading from the world of poetry this week.
Michael Schaub at HTMLGIANT picks up where the Poetry Foundation left off a little while ago about martinis and poets. You’ll like their entries.
This is a little dated by internet standards, but it’s still worth looking at: Calvin Trillin versifies about the Roman Polanski apologists.
...moreYour humble Rumpus Sunday Editor is smitten. Over the last couple weeks, the book blogs have been in form, publishing intelligent, hilarious, insightful, and riveting posts. In a word, they’ve been brilliant. Some, but most certainly not all, of my evidence is below.
...moreOver at <HTMLGiant>, Adam Peterson and Dave Madden talk about The Cupboard, “a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose.”
“…we do really take the ‘Pamphlet’ part of our name seriously. We want to produce volumes that have that spirit, however hard it may be to define.
...moreThis week, the book blogs have went and gone political! Maybe it’s that it’s the off year in the election cycle and they miss the rabid infighting and corruption, or maybe it’s the news that the Kindle has already become the next thought police and will soon start force-feeding you Soma, but for some reason, politics are everywhere.
...moreWe just really like <HTMLGIANT>. We don’t have to publish a whole essay about it; it’s just how we feel.
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