The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Things move quickly in Tbilisi, when they move at all. The haggling takes ten minutes—the rent holds steady, but Dato will replace the washing machine and install wireless internet throughout the ezo—and when it is over, we drink.
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“Guns are not simply tools or commodities; they are instruments of social power.”
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I was stronger. By far I was the stronger of us both. A ballerina’s punch could’ve broken your nose, but I held back. We danced around the room like two tiny sparrows pecking at a fresh worm.
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The only time I can stand the sight of the bouquet of bullshit is early in the morning, before I flip on the lights. In the dark their perfection is only imagined, not confirmed by sight. This eases the edges like a pain pill dulls the healing muscles around the site of my incision.
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There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath but I don’t believe in trigger warnings.
...moreFeministing gives big love to this week’s must-read essay by Lidia Yuknavitch, “Explicit Violence.”
We love you back!
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In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you, I’m going to walk.
...moreOur thoughts are with the victims of today’s tragedy: 12 people were killed and 59 wounded by gunman at a movie theater outside of Denver, Colorado early this morning during the release of The Dark Knight Rises.
The suspected shooter, James Holmes, is an Aurora-local and former University of Colorado-Denver graduate student in the School of Medicine.
...moreOn June 11, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke, published Invisible Monsters Remix, a director’s cut of the novel in which “the reader is made to jump back and forth to different chapters rather than read in a linear way,” which “constantly reminds people that it’s a physical book,” as “it’s a story that only a paper book can pull off.”
In this interview, he talks about how he seeks a physical response to his fiction, and usually succeeds, as he “keeps “an assiduous count of his ‘fainters’” at readings, where “foyers have been filled with stretchers carrying victims of his gore-filled prose.”
“There is a lot of laughter in most of my stories that make people faint.
...moreThe death toll as of this writing is 91. According to The Guardian’s live coverage, “Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre has said some of those killed on Utøya probably died from drowning as well as from gunshot wounds.”
In a piece excoriating the Washington Post and Jennifer Rubin for their (as yet) uncorrected assumption that al Qaeda was behind the attack in Norway, The Atlantic’s James Fallows notes that per capita, Norway lost twice the number of people the US did from the September 11, 2001 attacks.
...moreAs is the case in any developing story, details are sketchy and limited right now, but here’s the basics in what’s happened in Oslo, Norway today.
16 are reported dead as a result of an explosion and a shooting. Police are treating the two a related, though the investigation is in it’s early stages.
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In a series of violent encounters, Peter Nathaniel Malae’s debut novel asks, What are we to do with men?
Alex Taylor’s collection of stories set in Kentucky channels Southern greats like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
“I tried to put a lot of humor in Knockemstiff because the things that happen in my stories—if there wasn’t any humor, by the time you finished reading the book you’d probably want to kill yourself.”
Prior to launching The Rumpus, during our test phase, we ran this incredible, thorough, and thoughtful review of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 by Michael Berger. Today seemed like a good day to bring it back. – SE
There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale. I read an