The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.
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As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.
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The earliest piece of advice my mother ever gave me was simply this: “Marry a man, Amy. Not a monkey.”
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A glance, an explosive connection, or a kiss that brings on a divorce. Decisions to stay or go. A diagnosis dictating a body’s abrupt end, slow decline, or unexpected recovery.
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Going through dating profiles is like reading the same book over and over again. Everyone is happy and loves to laugh. Everyone likes beer and coffee and rain. They all spend their weekends hiking and camping.
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There’s a soundtrack for when I’m about to fall in love with a girl. That precious gap of time between getting to know each other physically and mentally before diving in the pool of vulnerability and embracing love and commitment.
Laying in bed, talking, cuddling, kissing, ravishing.
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She paid for the rose, took it from me and placed it carefully on the ground in front of the cart. Smiling faintly, she ground the flower into the concrete, smashing it hard with the thick heel of her black boot.
...more“She had big brown eyes, long eyelashes, and a light brown mane and tail. It may not seem possible but I saw a shy smile on her lips. She tried to make believe that she didn’t notice me.”
At BOMB, an illustrated short story about a man falling in love with a horse, by artist Myron Kaufman. The story, Horse Scents, and its author, are introduced by filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, Myron Kaufman’s son.
...moreMcSweeney’s interviews Rebecca Lindenberg about her first book Love, an Index, making poetry out of Facebook statuses, “maximalism,” and more.
“I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say.
...moreSativa January’s story, “The Phlebotomist” is about love, marriage and swingers, published on Our Stories, an online journal that publishes the best fiction on the web. Here’s an excerpt:
“But as Linda ripened and cured, marriage did something: It made her dowdy.
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Sometimes the boy you love introduces you to the man you fall in love with. The boy and the man are not the same person. This is not intentional.
“Nothing links up, nothing makes sense, there’s only feelings and actions as you’re lost to something bigger than yourself. There is no cause. In that way, and perhaps in that way only, it’s like love.”
Conner Habib writes a beautiful blog entry on the complexities of a past love and domestic violence.
...moreJonathan Franzen dispensed some optimistic guidance in a NY Times Op-Ed essay, an adaptation of his recent commencement speech to Kenyon graduates.
He covers techno-consumerism, the environmentalist anger that once confined him to his room and his bird-watching revelation that assuaged his real life qualms.
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“When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”
-In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
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I don’t remember what I was doing when my aunt called to tell me my father was dying.
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was the first book I read by British novelist Barbara Comyns. I knew nothing about Comyns at the time: I picked up the novel exclusively because of the title, which struck me as promising and intriguing.
I’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue between the two books can be quite illuminating.
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Dear Sugar, Sugah, Sage,
I’m a spry 47 year-old feisty broad. For the past three years I’ve been deeply in love with a woman. The timing of our meeting was atrocious.
...moreIn his late thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a series of emotional and mental breakdowns, many of which he wrote about in a series of random essays and observations collected under the title, The Crack-Up.
At the beginning of the self-titled essay, he writes:
“Of course, all of life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.
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About a year after the breakup, I started keeping a text message journal.
“Edmund Wilson encouraged his second wife Mary McCarthy’s first forays into fiction by shutting her in a room for three hours and asking her to write a story.
Author Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman, a literary critic and writer for The New Yorker, devised strict writing schedules for her.
...moreFriday, we linked to GIANT’s list of reasons writers should not date other writers, but Evan Maloney at The Guardian goes into the flip-side of that question: Can a reader date a nonreader?
“What difference does it make in a relationship if both partners are notorious readers, or if one partner reads voraciously while the other has no interest in literature?
...moreIt doesn’t take a Harvard-trained therapist to know that with love comes madness, obsession, jealousy, mind-fuckery, fear, panic and a healthy dose of psychosexual terrorism.
Maybe these symptoms aren’t manifested in such harsh terms for everyone, but there’ s no denying that love is hard and can make you lose your head.
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Two Latin American novels, published in English for the first time, stake out radically different artistic territory.Next week, 600,000 pages of manuscripts, letters, drafts and journals will be put online from canonical British authors like Oscar Wilde, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and others. Included will be correspondence between Wilde and many of his lovers, including Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie.” The Marquis of Queensbury, Bosie’s father, despised Wilde, and Wilde ended up in prison for two years because of legal turmoil stemming from the relationship.
...moreIt is spring, and the book blogs are horny! Will they be the type to lock themselves in a room with a suitcase full of porn? Or will they find someone who looks lonely and hit on them, not leaving the poor person alone until they agree to make out?
Below the fold, find out what happens when the book blogs get sexy, plus The Rumpus in The New Yorker‘s Book Bench, how book blogs come in waves (No, not like that.
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A few days ago in Morning Coffee I linked to this: “Emotionally Unavailable Until Famous.” What was interesting about this short piece, the decision made by the author to love and be loved, is that it speaks so much to the artistic urge.