June 2010
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Kathleen Heil: The Last Book I Loved, Out of Sheer Rage
It seems only appropriate that I put off writing this essay for several months despite the fact that sitting down to write it sooner really wouldn’t have been that hard, not coal mining-hard as writers always say, and here am…
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“How do you envisage the ideal reader of your own novels?”
“I don’t envision any ‘ideal readers’—or any readers at all, I suppose. My imagination doesn’t work in that way. My concentration is turned inward, upon the work itself—beyond its perimeters, I can’t speculate.” Rhoda Feng interviews Joyce Carol Oates. (via…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #17: Nicholas Rombes in Conversation with Joseph Sullivan
Joseph Sullivan works as a user experience designer for a large trade association in Chicago. “A user experience designer,” he said, “used to be called an information architect. Someone recently defined the job as ‘building structures,’ and that’s about right.…
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10/40/70 #14: Blair Witch and House of Leaves
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine the Blair Witch Project and compare it with the novel…
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Manning and Lamo, Wikileaks, and the Public Interest
In 2007, an American Apache helicopter operating in Iraq killed 12 Iraqi citizens, including two Reuters journalists. The event was kept from the American public for months, the film footage of the attack classified.
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For the Record…
Jolie Holland and Rick Moody are still having a conversation in the comments section of the latest Swinging Modern Sounds.
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“Oh Poverty”
“A decade of working my ass off as a writer and look what I’ve got to show for it. “And please don’t say books. On a shelf. In a library. In a warehouse. In a used bookstore. In someone’s basement.…
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“Of All the Dead People I Know,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Karyna McGlynn
Of All the Dead People I Know I can’t imagine any of them hanging out. They are in arcadia with their laptops but there are no outlets, and they are playing a video game in which they can never move…
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Time Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the watching future-self unable to keep her from finding the closet…
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The Road to Echo Park
“Now seems as good a time as any to take stock of my road to publication as some of you who are reading this may be unpublished writers who want to glean some small kernel of reality that you can…