Rumpus Original Fiction: Maybe There’s This Dragon?
Maybe I’ve been here too long. Maybe I’ve finally accepted that the apartment is somehow aspirational. Maybe there’s this dragon. ...more
Posts Tagged: metaphor
The Rumpus Interview With Danielle Trussoni
Danielle Trussoni discusses her new memoir, The Fortress, black magic, the cult of marriage, and the dark side of storytelling. ...more
My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
Autumn is the season of change and, some say, death, as the leaves turn, the air cools, and the nights lengthen. Likewise, Halloween is not just a holiday for costumes and candy but also, at its untouched roots, a day for remembering loved ones passed.
...moreA Story to Use and Reuse
At Necessary Fiction, Anna Rowser’s story “Breaking Down” effectively uses the subject of recycling as a metaphor to subtly explore what the narrator wants, needs, uses, reuses, and casts off both physically and emotionally. It’s fiction that makes you rethink what you’ve been throwing away:
...moreDespite her best efforts, she was doing little to hold back that day when there would be no more land left to fill.
This Week in Short Fiction
This week at Recommended Reading, PEN America offers an excerpt from Brazilian author Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, which is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being that this is so far the only opportunity to read part of the Portuguese-language novel in English translation.
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The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can be damn tricky to write well.
...moreLiving with the Cloud
How did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral—all vapor and crystal?
The New Yorker explores how the metaphor of “the cloud” is shaping how we experience the Internet.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Güeros
It’s a literal confrontation of his metaphorical fear, a visual take on Rilke’s words: to view Güeros is to see a “thing poem” on the screen, to witness something like “The Panther” materialize. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
There are countless metaphors for love: a rose, a flame, a garden, a loaded gun, a battlefield. We’ve heard them all—or so we thought. This week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland editor Lisa Locascio recommended Amelia Gray’s story, “The Swan as Metaphor for Love.” The title sounds lovely, evoking peaceful lakes and graceful swan necks bent toward each other, beaks kissing, to form the shape of a heart.
...moreHow to Chart a Course Through the Metaphors in Your Mind
Why do we refer to our minds in terms of seas and cartography, anyway? Find out by consulting your sextant and the first online metaphor map. The chart boasts over 14,000 metaphorical connections, sourced from 4,000,000 lexical data points by a few Scottish researchers who now (presumably) have some excellent new phrases for spinning yarns and embroidering thoughts at dinner parties.
...moreCrafting a Metaphor
...moreOne thing you learn very quickly as a metaphor designer is that your language and your culture’s resources aren’t infinite. Nor are they as versatile as you might hope. The richness of the semantic resources that a designer can muster always encounter friction from the human brain’s built-in biases and preferences, as well as cultural defaults that block certain kinds of understandings.
I Am the Modern Man
A new website called Poetry for Robots seeks to find out whether robots can learn human poetic language. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s theory that despite humanity’s near-infinite capacity for creating distinct metaphors, we still use the same ones over and over again in literature, like comparing eyes to the stars.
...morePlaces Where Art is Made
We often look to metaphor for guidance in our constant search for the how and why of writing. In an essay at The Millions comparing writing to running, Nick Ripatrazone explains that training is not just an analogy for his creative process but an essential part of it:
...moreTraining sharpens ideas by cutting away the chaff that tends to accumulate during that long time on the trail, where the mind can wander; training blurs those ideas to the surreal places where art is made.
Similes for Sale
You could spend hours being creative and find out that half of your ideas are on the Internet already. So why bother pursuing new ideas when I can sell you some that are “lightly used”?
Should you ever feel uninspired or too tired to focus on your writing, Caren Lissner has the cure: a Metaphor Merchant, at your service, over at McSweeney’s.
...moreTreatment as Metaphor
In our daily efforts to stay healthy, to invent solutions for staving off death, have we already put ourselves in treatment for diseases yet to come? Conner Habib writes about his cancer diagnosis over at The Stranger, challenging Susan Sontag’s argument against seeing illness as a metaphor by revealing the ways in which we can’t help but give it meaning:
...moreWe reach out to the hand that promises to pull us to shore.
A Dog Named Human
...moreFor me, the perfect metaphor for rethinking our relationship to other species comes in the form of a dog named “Human,”owned and “curated” by French artist Pierre Huyghe, in his retrospective currently on view at LACMA. Ironically enough, such a simple act of naming invites deep rethinking of our own human position in the world.
Women Dying from Being Women
Anne Boyer writes about the history of breast cancer for The New Inquiry.
...moreThere is no disease more calamitous to women’s intellectual history than breast cancer: this is because there is no disease more distinctly calamitous to women. There is also no disease more voluminous in its agonies, agonies not only about the disease itself, but also about what is not written about it, or whether to write about it, or how.
The Rumpus Interview with Richard Ford
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Ford discusses his new book, Let Me Be Frank With You, how metaphor shapes our world, and why he doesn't like the idea he has a battery to recharge. ...more
The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines. ...more
You Are What You Review On Yelp
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, linguist Dan Jurafsky analyzes the metaphors we use to describe different kinds of food. Turns out humans are pretty optimistic:
...moreThe Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and comes up in all sorts of nonlinguistic ways as well.
From Metaphor to Consciousness
Neuroscientists are examining metaphors and finding that they’re essential to language. Modern brain scanning has allowed scientists to look at brain activity as the brain employs metaphors from language. What has been found is that the brain interprets metaphors literally. For instance, metaphors based on actions involving the body activate areas of the brain that normally activate when the body is in motion.
...moreWeekly Geekery
The marriage of metaphor and your mind.
Coming to terms with Nothingness.
The revealing science of word choice.
Time-lapse video and how we document the world around us.
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