Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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But What Do We Really Want?
If you haven’t read Daniel Bergner’s recent article in The New York Times Magazine, “What Do Women Want?” or better yet, his book, The Other Side of Desire, you should, if only to prepare for The Rumpus’s imminent interview with…
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Yoon
One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.
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Eliza Doolittle in the White House
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how he inhabits multiple voices. She reviews his first book Dreams…
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THE EYEBALL: Brazil
Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Here it is. –Ryan…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
I guess it just took a little time for the poetry blogs to realize that David Orr had been in the NYTBR smack-talking about the lack of greatness in poetry today, because this week, there were lots of responses, from…
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Maywa Denki
In 1993, brothers Nobumichi and Masamichi Tosa reopened their father’s failed company, Maywa Denki, as an “art unit.” They acted as “parallel-world electricians” and built a following as artists and musicians using extraordinary instruments of their own design. In 2001,…
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Poems for an Economic Collapse
Katy Lederer’s poems are both romantic and political in nature. With their attention to formal and lyrical concerns, these poems tackle the problems of desire when it coincides with money and passion.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #7: On Repetition
The intractable problem of the moment in the arts—in music, in books, in movies, in almost every area of contemporary culture—is the problem of inattention.
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“Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a crowd of Carhartt flannels.”
Jeff Parker‘s narrator watches from a dryer as the woman he’s laid claim to slinks off (and into bed) with a stout beef named Brick. The narrator confronts his rival, who lies naked with the fine-bodied Patsy, by punching him…
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Tips for the Downsized
Anyone searching for a primer on how to hide the fact from one’s family after losing a job need look no further than Tokyo Sonata, the newest—and timely—film from the genre-hopping Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
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The Rumpus Interview with Uwem Akpan
“After the phone call, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But on getting there, I couldn’t sit or kneel or pray, out of excitement.”
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Rural Art Hero
Thesley Beverly is the art czar, and maybe the heart and soul, of Pembroke, Illinois, population 2800.