Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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I Married a Novelist
“What’s it like to be married to another writer?” Someone asks this question, with varying degrees of fascination, every time I do a reading. It’s as predictable as the person who laughs in all the wrong spots, or the question about…
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The Rumpus Review of Tokyo!
There aren’t many three-part, thematically connected, self-contained, trilogy films (I’m trying to avoid that abused word “triptych” here).
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THE EYEBALL: Nude Caboose
Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Maddin, the great Canadian auteur and subject of previous Eyeball posts. We spoke for about an hour and a half; he was so generous and real that I ended up just wanting…
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Morning Coffee
1930’s Spanish low-budget Art Deco. Sometimes it’s hard to fight the temptation to turn this whole section into awesome pictures of typeface. Leaked audition tapes for the National Organization for Marriage’s new anti-Gay Marriage ad. Street With A View introduces…
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Poems Out Loud
For National Poetry Month, Poems Out Loud is featuring people reading their favorite poems aloud. The construction worker who describes his job as “a lot of digging” loves Walt Whitman, and not just because he writes about “common Americans” and…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Glass Castle
The problem with reading a modern memoir is that often they suck. The influx of reality shows and confessional writing (ahem, Tori Spelling) has placed an emphasis on story and less on literary craft. This is why when I read…
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Glenn Kenny on Editing David Foster Wallace
Film writer and former Premiere editor and critic Glenn Kenny talks about his experience editing David Foster Wallace for that magazine in the mid-to-late 90s and his friendship with the author in this wonderful interview at The House Next Door.…
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Looking for a Hole to Hide In
Illustrator Nat Russell can’t remember a time he didn’t draw. Taking in Peanuts and Mad Magazine like popcorn and then the works of printmaker Antonio Frasconi and Ben Shahn, Russell’s lines show their roots in those great illustrators as…
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Scrawl Girl
What does it mean to draw outside the lines? Allison Benis White sketches it out in Self-Portrait with Crayon.
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That Old Philogelos—Up To His Old Tricks!
Classicist Mary Beard has discovered a joke book from the 4th century AD, filled with rib-ticklers from the late Roman Empire. Just like today, the old egghead is a source of tremendous humor, along with other frequently targeted figures of…
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Border War Goes Both Ways
Last year, my pal James Verini wrote an extensive piece in Portfolio about the problem — and related policy hypocrisy — that allows the entire discussion of “border protection” to be exclusively focused on the drugs coming in (along with…