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Rumpus Articles
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A Second Class Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
Hermione Lee’s marvelous biography of Virginia Woolf tells us that Woolf applied the same clear-eyed and unstinting analysis to her father, Leslie Stephen, that she did to most of her subjects, subjects that tended to be Victorian, domestic, and preoccupied…
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Alive in San Francisco: Western Addition
For many of my SF friends, the amazing skateboard artwork of Ian Johnson is probably old news, but I just discovered his jazz portraits this weekend on the blog Hell Yeah Dude. If I had $225 to spare, these would…
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Luke’s Caveman Link List
There are many theories about how man is separate from the animals. The most recent one is that fire was the difference—not in a Ringo Starr fights the other tribe way, but in a new way: cooked food. Cooking let…
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The IT Auteur: The Rumpus Interview with Josh Weinberg
Josh Weinberg is a Denver-based tech support geek turned independent filmmaker who released his first web-based comedy video The Website Is Down: Sales Guy VS. Web Dude last spring to coast-to-coast reverberations of laughter.
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle: One Woman’s Reading History
When I started reading as a child, it was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.
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Scram Magazine
Scram, started by Kim Cooper in 1992, is a magazine “dedicated to unpopular culture.” They have some blogs, and they also have published a few books. They “chronicle the neglected, the odd, the nifty and the nuts.” So, we’re comrades.…
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Music on the Internet?
Last December in their annual music issue, Oxford American lamented the demise of music criticism. But nonetheless here’s a collection of music related internet findings: Douglas Wolk discusses The Celestial Jukebox. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (doesn’t punk, by nature,…
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The Naked City
Randall Mann’s second collection of poems explores desire and death in the City by the Bay.
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The End of Mass Media
“Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place,” writes Crichton, “and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress over the…
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True/Slant/Hmmmm
It’s worth applauding the creative efforts behind True/Slant. It’s a website founded by a former AOL executive who’s hired 65 “knowledge experts.” “Knowledge experts,” in this context, means professional journalists or commentators, some of whom work for the New York…
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Tips for Poets Inspired by Another Dead White Male
In order to become an epic poet, Milton believed he must also refuse “lustral waters.” In other words, aspiring artists must remain chaste.