Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Naked People with Snakes
The Believer this month has a really good interview with designer / painter / comic arts legend Gary Panter — best known as the guy who did the sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, somewhat less well-known for his Jimbo comics, and…
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Robin Hemley’s Round File, in Verse
In the latest issue of Ninth Letter, Robin Hemley has a poem called “Rejected Book Ideas” that almost reads like a McSweeney’s list. It begins as follows
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Saturday Morning Links
Let’s begin with some cool art. Here’s a selection of extraordinary early 20th-century book covers from Japan, courtesy of A Journey Round My Skull. Benjamin Franklin advises: don’t start flamewars. Speaking of 18th-century bloggers, Samuel Pepys is still at it.…
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Swoon Invades Venice
While we’re on the subject of the Venice Biennale, New York Magazine has an interesting article about the artist Swoon and her latest project, The Swimming Cities of Serenissima: a fleet of boats made from New York City trash, which…
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{sound of cicadas}
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.
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John Wesley in Venice
You look at a John Wesley picture and you feel a thousand things at once. As a part of the Venice Biennale, Prada, or the Prada Foundation, is presenting a retrospective of the American pre-pop master’s vivid work (The Daily…
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Morning Coffee
The best thing about being alive and on the internet in 2009 are photoblogs of diy urban archaeology. The Kingston Lounge is one such site, focusing on decaying old hospitals. Or how about this photo gallery of the abandoned SFO…
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An Oral History of Myself #7: Fat Mike
In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words.
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Unpublished foreword to William Wantling’s 7 on Style [circa 1974]
His writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he continued to write very well.
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Caleb Crain Makes His Blog a Book
I’ll confess that I’d never heard of the wonderful blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything until it made an appearance in book form. Yesterday I saw Levi Stahl’s post on Conversational Reading about the book that its author, Caleb Crain, made…