Daniel Gumbiner, Author at The Rumpus

Other

Anything to be Liked, to be Reassured

This Recording has a feature on Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter correspondences circa 1930. Fitzgerald appears insecure, liquored and thoroughly nostalgic while Zelda’s letters detail her consumption of sedatives…

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Other

Re: The Rest of the World

A grounding letter to the editor by Tony Skalicky of Jersey City, NJ, regarding David Pogue’s review of David Kirpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, reminds us that, “Until Facebook starts growing…

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Features & Reviews

On Saving Letters

PBS Newshour’s Zoe Pollock holds an epistolary interview with New Yorker editor Ben Greenmen concerning his new collection of epistolary fiction, What He’s Poised to Do. Things get epistly real…

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Features & Reviews

The Ascetic Fetish

Check out Flavorpill’s list of the 20th Century’s “most reclusive authors.” Is anonymity, as Salinger once said, “a writer’s greatest gift?” How limiting is the idea that writers are, by definition,…

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Features & Reviews

Standardized Redactions

“What could be the purpose of an exercise testing students on such a lacerated passage — one which, finally, is neither mine nor true to my lived experience?” -Annie Dillard…

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Other

A Man We Would Very Much Like to Cut Our Hair

Swan Songs offers three vignettes of America’s increasingly scant tradesmen. From Mr. Rogers ex-barber to the last standing champion of mechanical based typesetting, the Americana-drenched series from True/Slant makes us…

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Features & Reviews

On Beating Writer’s Block

“It operates in marginal subcultures and it stars determined though hapless dreamers… It pits the art of violence against the violence of art.” Katherine Dunn – who ostensibly dematerialized after…

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Michael Chabon on Mavi Marmara

“This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of Goodbye, Columbus from the uncanny experience. The…

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Features & Reviews

The Diaries of Cesare Pavese

“I should be perfectly happy if it were not for the fleeting pain of trying to probe the secret of that happiness, so as to be able to find it…

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Politics

BPGlobalPR

“Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.” “You don’t go drilling 5000 feet underwater with the…

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DHS Does Not Approve

“I had wanted to make an interpretation of me giving all of myself to my work… I wanted to convey that the cans were exploding with color, and that’s how…

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