Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Morning Coffee
The Big Picture on the 2009 Venice Biennale. Andreas Gursky‘s photographs of enormous scale. More on Hemingway being a failed KGB spy. (bonus music link.) Brooklynites are an ingenious sort. Case in point: a swimming pool made out of dumpsters.…
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The Past and Possible Future of Wikipedia
The London Review of Books recently published one of the best single articles I’ve ever read about the history and possible future of Wikipedia, in a review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution. The LRB article, by David Runciman, starts…
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Decaying Socialism: Good For Struggling Writers?
Craig Fehrman’s post earlier today, The Freelance Life, got me thinking about something interesting I read in The Wreck of the Henry Clay last week. In a post from April 2003, entitled Marx’s Neurosis About Money, Caleb Crain quoted Edmund…
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Analysis Taken Too Far
I have to admit, reading an application of literary theory to something like a pop song gives me the giggles. Yeah, I’m a dork–this is a shock? So when I saw the title Perspectives on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a…
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Kevin Van Aelst
Kevin Van Aelst works in the media of the commonplace. The images in his fingerprint series, for example, are rendered on typewriter paper, or with cheese puffs, fragments of cassette tape, sugar, yarn, kite string or cat shit. Or mustard.…
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An Oral History of Myself #11: Ashley
I put myself in the group home. I was in the therapist office with my mom and I said, “I give up. I’m not going to try anymore,” meaning getting along with my mom, and he suggested the group home.
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Blogging for Book Deals
What do Look at this Fucking Hipster, Postcards from Yo Momma, Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, have in common (you know, aside being online sensations)? Book deals. Many bloggers, especially…
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The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour…
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The Freelance Life
The latest issue of the Oxford American includes their annual “Best of the South” package, but it’s also got an essay on the struggles of freelancing, a subject that knows no geographical bounds. For almost 20 years, Thomas Swick edited…
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The Digital Caste System
The arrival of the Internet and the wide dissemination of information that ensued has inspired the belief that technology may be able to break down hierarchies and allow for the equal access to and expression of information. In “The Not-So-Hidden…
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The Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919, Hill created an assembly line approach to writing screenplays: character…
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Auto-tune the News #6
Palin. Drugs. And a certain celebrity who passed away. The latest from The Gregory Brothers (read our mini-interview with the group here).