The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
“Tip the waitress or barman well, ‘cause you’re going to need their toilet.”
Taxi drivers made strides this year at the PEN World Voices Festival.
For a handful of weeks, a group of long-standing New York City taxi drivers have been meeting to poetically reflect on their adventures shuttling passengers throughout the boroughs.
...moreOver at the New York Times “Draft” blog, Benjamin Nugent, author of Good Kids, breaks down the romantic notion that locking yourself away in the “primeval hush of the Midwest” is a certified boon to your writing.
Instead, Nugent discusses the “Victorian foil” of monomania and the way that too much alone time can actually be detrimental to the creative process:
...moreWriting a book consists largely of avoiding distractions.
“That red convertible we were so proud of looks as though it is about to be struck by a meteor. And every moment — the prom, the dance recital, the snowman’s construction — is painted now with bright yellows and rich reds and burnt oranges, the colors of our storm-tossed autumn.”
Sandy has curated a photography exhibition on New Dorp Beach in Staten Island.
...moreChris Colin recounts the saga of an unpaid Craigslist I.O.U., which becomes an obsession that forces him to confront his own non-monetary debts.
“I didn’t care about the money. I cared about the abuse of this rare bit of fellowship.
...moreWant a free writing lesson?
Colson Whitehead has some helpful tips over at The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. If you missed it, be sure to read Nancy Smith’s Rumpus interview with Whitehead right here.
...moreThe New York Times shares some sad news: Gabriel García Márquez has dementia, according to his brother Jaime.
“He is no longer writing and is simply living this stage of life in peace… He reads every day and is with his family.”
...more“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
At The New York Times, Tim Kreider laments the busy trap of 21st century America and advocates for idleness.
...moreThe New York Times reported yesterday on the notable difference between independent bookstores in France, and their struggling American counterparts.
The article describes the way in which government intervention and price fixing for French-language books has buoyed printed literature in the era of the e-book.
...moreAt The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King, calling it a “comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.”
For more on the novel, which is due out on June 28th, don’t miss Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s interview with Eggers.
...more“Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.”
Constance Hale continues her New York Times series with a lesson on the sound of the sentence.
...moreAt The New York Times, Rumpus columnist Steve Almond argues that liberals are treating “for-profit propaganda as news” to the detriment of our political system.
Almond makes a strong case for ignoring the demagogues and instead seeking out those who want to find common ground.
...moreAt The New York Times, Constance Hale continues her writing lessons series with an exploration of the appropriate uses and pitfalls of the notorious passive voice.
“…Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice.
...moreRumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist rocks the New York Times Modern Love column.
“That online conversation was our last. Once he signed off, he was gone for good. At that moment, those children we had planned died, or were never born, or could have been born if things had gone differently.
...moreConstance Hale’s New York Times series of writing lessons continues with wisdom on verbs.
“Verbs kick-start sentences: Without them, words would simply cluster together in suspended animation. We often call them action words, but verbs also can carry sentiments (love, fear, lust, disgust), hint at cognition (realize, know, recognize), bend ideas together (falsify, prove, hypothesize), assert possession (own, have) and conjure existence itself (is, are).”
...moreAt The New York Times, author and Rumpus contributor Jami Attenberg writes about the the disorientation and fear that came when, after a break-up, her ex-boyfriend started a site about her.
“Creating the blog might have been his grasp at taking control of our story, but it was also his attempt to speak to me in my language, or on my platform anyway.”
...moreIn recent months, we’ve had a couple top-notch essays about both the power and addictiveness of friendship. This weekend, at The New York Times,William Deresiewicz took up the topic, focusing on friendship “between the sexes.” Deresiewicz touches on the “surprisingly political” history of male-female friendship, how ideas about narrative influence what relationships are represented in media, and cultural attitudes toward love not “based on sex or blood.”
“We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind.
...moreAt The New York Times, Constance Hale contributes a series of writing lessons. Her latest entry, “Desperately Seeking Synonyms,” zeroes in on the complexities of nouns.
“The best writers combine killer nouns and adjectives, and they can make dawn — or any other sky — surprising.”
...moreAt The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, revealing the “cumulative welling up” he experienced while reading.
“…There’s nothing cloying about Wild. It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide.
...more“It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.”
At The New York Times, Jhumpa Lahiri reflects on the centrality of the sentence in her reading and writing processes.
...moreIt is mildly surprising that the New York Times didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “My Debt to Ireland” as fit to print in its Sunday magazine on a date closer to March 17, and, actually, it’s sort of a shame, because Sullivan’s piece undercuts a certain mythology many Irish-Americans keep about Ireland the country and Ireland the nation.
...moreThis weekend, Anthony Horton died in a fire in a New York subway tunnel. Horton, who had made a home in the tunnels, was the co-author of Pitch Black, a graphic novel “based on his life underground.” The New York Times reflects on his life and shares an excerpt of the novel, co-written by Youme Landowne.
...moreIn reviewing RENEGADE: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer,” Jeanette Winterson explores mythmaking in cultural criticism, unearthing who and what gets ignored in the process.
“There is beauty as well as hatred in “Cancer,” and it deserves its place on the shelf.
...more“So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
...moreThe New York Times dissects the advent of the novel to television adaptation with a focus on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Craig Fehram breaks down the differences between television and movie adaptations in arguing that “where a movie means paring a novel down, a TV show can mean breaking it wide open.”
In an earlier essay at Salon, Laura Miller also took on the novel-TV marriage, asserting “while not exactly soul mates,” the two “have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film.”
(Via Vintage and Anchor)
...more“The author’s jaunty voice [is] Beat-poet cool…Mohr nails the atmosphere of a San Francisco still breathing in the smoke that lingers from the days of Jim Jones and Dan White, a time when passionate ideologies and personal dysfunction intermingled and combusted.”
The New York Times reviews Josh Mohr’s Damascus in their Fiction Chronicle.
...moreGeorge Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore, passed away yesterday. Of his 98 years of life, 60 were devoted to his bookstore (the sister shop to San Francisco’s City Lights) described as an “offbeat mix of open house and literary commune.”
...more“As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything now, and it sells it all aggressively. Maybe Amazon doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe because it’s simply too big to care.”
The New York Times tackles Amazon’s latest “promotion,” (which we recently condemned), collecting the reactions of writers and booksellers.
...more“Teeming yet not hyperactive, full of emotion without being mushy, elegant yet intimate, this is a book that gets into your head and makes itself at home there.”
That is praise from The New York Times’ review of Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love (November’s Rumpus Book Club pick).
...more“Mr. Coelho continues to give his work away free by linking to Web sites that have posted his books, asking only that if readers like the book, they buy a copy, “so we can tell to the industry that sharing contents is not life threatening to the book business,” as he wrote in one post.”
Paulo Coelho partially attributes his success to sharing his own contents for free, and he easily markets his latest novel Aleph via Twitter.
...moreFossils found in a South African cave may be “the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans,” argue the scientists who discovered the bones, citing the combination of apelike and human features in the newfound species—dubbed Australopithecus sediba.
Some scientists disagree that the fossils represent a transitional link between the australopithecines and humans, suggesting instead that the discovery provides important evidence of the extensive diversity of australopithecine apes and the difficulty of determining which is actually the ancestral species.
...more