Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Starting off, I want to thank Jeremy Hatch or subbing in for me last week, both on this column and as Saturday Editor. Great job, dude. Seth Abramson writes a lot about MFA programs and, by extension, the PhD in…
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A Barricade of Books
Yiyun Li in The New Yorker: Despite my rudimentary understanding of the language, most evenings, after lights-out, I would sneak away to the platoon storage room, where I could take a leave from my small miseries—the bullying of the officers,…
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Vogon Poetry
I dare say I’m not the only iPhone owner who’s also a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–the book, not the film. Smartphones in general seem to be turning into the technology Douglas Adams envisioned all those years…
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Annie Bacon’s Folk Opera
Back in Santa Cruz, I marveled at Ukulele Dick and Oliver Brown, maestros of ukulele songsmithing and quirk. But sometimes a song is not just a song. Sometimes it’s an extended, operatic adventure, more like an urban folk ballad, played…
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Seriously?
Seems to me that the mockery from the general public for having stolen such a bad movie would be enough punishment. Jack Yates, 28, was sentenced to six months in prison today for making an unauthorized pre-release copy of “The…
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THE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: Synecdoche, New York
These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts. I…
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Brian’s Saturday Morning Links
Miss me? I expect I’ll be caught up from this move by sometime in mid-July, 2013. Bentham Science Publishers has a credibility problem. I think I saw that movie, almost 20 years ago. Sunspot simulation–the image is, if possible, even…
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An Oral History of Myself #8: Mr. Miller
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. What’s most interesting turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as…
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Monster Mashup
To continue on the subject of monsters and mashes for a moment: Last Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, Ed Park published his notes on Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes, which is a novel narrated by none other than Frankenstein’s…
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The Women of McSweeneys.net
“Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?” inquired Christopher Hitchens in “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair, January 2007. That’s a good question. And by that I mean, fuck you.
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St. Vincent
Annie Clark has yet to write a bad song. The strikingly beautiful (just check out either of her LP covers or do yourself an even bigger favor and go see her live) singer-songwriter began her career touring with the likes…