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Rumpus Articles
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Alleged Artists Allegedly Using the Allegedly-Stolen Pencils
You remember how Damien Hirst sued a 17-year-old kid, Cartrain, for having used an image of “For The Love of God” in a work, and in revenge, Cartrain pinched some pencils from Hirst’s installation “Pharmacy”? Cartrain was arrested and is…
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Your Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know what to do with. Often in what I write, there’s …
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Poets Misbehaving In New York
At The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet. More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry. “I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican…
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #23
It’s the good ones who smart, and the dumb ones who play it safe.
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The Millions Judges The Millenium (So Far)
At The Millions, a handful of writers are throwing down their two cents for the best books of the Millenium so far. Among the more moving reviews is Bret Anthony Johnson’s elegiac take on McCarthy’s The Road. I think, in…
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Three Writers Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants
Amidst all the bad news afflicting writers these days, especially good writers (not Dan Brown), it’s refreshing to see that an organization of smart, cultured rich people has an uncanny tendency to acknowledge the hard work that good writers are…
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Gorey Stuff
Edward Gorey‘s refrigerator door contained Eclipse coffee syrup, an unopened bottle of mayonnaise, and a couple of High Lifes. Books cluttered his tv room. His license plate read OGDRED. Explore Gorey’s house through the vast collection of still photos from…
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Random Media Notes
The FBI destroys Walter Cronkite files. Nick Denton tweets about the secret behind Gawker’s biggest successes. A new study shows that print and online ‘could work in tandem.’ “France to Possibly Introduce Warning Labels for Airbrushed Photographs” Can Time Inc.…
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The Plight of the Eloquent
At the beginning of Avenue Q, the Broadway Musical notorious for its puppets who say and do dirty things, the fresh-out-of-college Princeton glides onto the stage (as well as puppets can glide), assumes a singing position, and earnestly asks the…
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Books, Movies, Magic: The Rediscovered Genius of the Automaton
I recently read “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a sort of hybrid graphic-young adult novel by Brian Selznik that tells a fictionalized story revolving around Georges Méliès, the frenchman who was the first filmmaker to employ cinematic tricks in narrative.