November 2011
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This Is Your Brain on Jokes
“Well, anytime you find yourself making an error, it’s a downer initially. The initial emotional response to any discovery of error in your understanding of the world has got to be ‘uh oh.’ But in humor, the brain doesn’t just…
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The Rumpus Review of The Clock
Moms are full of all sorts of pithy sayings that mysteriously trickle down through time. Being an impatient child—who has grown into a reasonably impatient adult—I remember my mother often advising me that “a watched pot never boils,”
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The Neighbors’ Troubles
Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Josh Rolnick’s debut collection, Pulp and Paper reveals the crisp details that line the crises of our daily lives.
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Did someone say jetpack murder? Captain Kangaroo and the Panda (yep). Here’s some really scholarly creepiness: late medieval cadaver tombs. I know this is late, but man this color footage of the 1939 Thanksgiving Day Parade is something else. Maybe…
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Kafka Was a Legal Secretary
“It’s the stuff of dreams: proof that those evenings spent hunched over a desk, typing furiously might, just might, not be in vain; that Paul Giamatti’s character from Sideways does not represent an undiscovered middle-aged writer’s inevitable fate.” The Atlantic…
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Norman Mailer on Marilyn Monroe
“But when the portraits are all juxtaposed with Norman Mailer’s muscular descriptions of the traumas of her childhood, the whole thing is just too brutal. Mailer relates how, by Monroe’s own admission, her grandmother tried to suffocate her with a…
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Catholics in Literature
“Yet despite such a rich Catholic literary heritage with many contemporary admirers — one can’t help thinking of how passionately the MFA/Creative Writing/Workshop establishment venerates the stories of Flannery O’Connor — there has not been a new generation of Catholic…
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Kerouac’s First Novel Now Published
“The 158-page The Sea is My Brother, a tale of two young men serving on a voyage from Boston to Greenland, has been known about for some time, but is being described by Penguin, its publisher, as ‘a unique insight…
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Thanksgiving Weekend Rumpus Roundup
In cased you missed these over the holiday weekend: A Rumpus original essay on Freddie Mercury. The latest Albums of Our Lives: Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Sugar compiles 94 ways of Saying Thank You from Rumpus readers for her #90th column.
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TIME Difference
Americans are oftentimes painted as ethnocentric and unaware of global issues, and this interesting photo, comparing cover images of Time Magazine for U.S. residents versus the rest of the world, isn’t helping.