Posts by author
Caroline Kangas
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Fiction-as-Detroit Conceit
“[W]hy bother trying to attract Starbucks to Gratiot Ave? Let us brew our own, stronger coffee.” At The Millions, Alexander Nazaryan makes an optimistic call-to-action for literature and the publishing industry. Rather than trying to make millions (see: auto industry,…
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Cut and Paste with Intention
However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control. Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting…
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When are they going to start playing the cut-off music?
Winning tips on speechifying from the New York Times Opinionator. Teddy Wayne expands on the classic tools of Public Speaking 101 with heartfelt advice like: Imagine everyone in the audience naked. Empathetically conjure up the array of body-image issues they…
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Modern Marginalia
Two recent innovations for the digital conversation within electronic books. In his column, One More Thing, Baratunde Thurston proposes: What if you could download books that had been pre-annotated? I would pay extra to read Freakonomics with commentary by Paul Krugman,The New…
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Untangling the Vernacular Web
In 1973, anthropologist Clifford Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he discusses the idea of the vernacular web—a mess of interactions affecting how we understand our world. Now, folklorist Robert Glen Howard thinks he’s found that tangle of signification: the…
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Michelle Orange’s NYC Book Launch
Hey Brooklyn friends! Come to the Powerhouse Arena (37 Main Street) this Wednesday, February 27th from 7 – 9 pm for the book launch for Michelle Orange‘s This is Running for Your Life. She will be joined in discussion with James…
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A 20th Century Pied Piper of sorts
Fade in: small, American Midwest Town. Melton Barker walks into town, film kit in tow. So it went in at least 40 towns across the country, starting in the 1930s and through the 1970s. Barker would enter a town looking…
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Whale: 1685, Kitten: 1
Ever thought, “I know Herman Melville was talking about a whale but how much, really, did he talk about a whale?” This cool page will answer your question with its graphical representation of word distribution throughout Moby Dick. The creator Adam Pearce was…
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Intertextual Cityscapes
According to his website, Matthew Picton is interested in “humanising the city by deconstructing the clean, uncompromising aesthetic of the cartographic city plan and imbuing it with the unique history and culture of each place.” Deconstructed, his works — bird’s…
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Literary Love/Death Match
For our LA buddies in need of plans for Valentine’s Day/just another Thursday night, check out Rumpus contributors Kyle Kinane and Melissa Chadburn in the inaugural Los Angeles Literary Death Match. The event also features Moshe Kasher, Teddy Wayne, Zarina Zabrinsky, Jim Gavin…
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An Ode to Anne Sexton
How could one resist such a title as Bitches and Sad Ladies? Rowan Hisayo Buchanan writes a Last-Book-I-Loved-esque piece in Tin House, musing on the often smoothed over, simplified statuses of women and women writers. “…[C]ompared to some of the perfect corpses favored…
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The Believer’s new podcast: The Organist
“From philosophy to daytime TV, from poetry to martial arts, the show scrutinizes and interrogates the world with an affectionate and rigorous intelligence.” Join us in welcoming The Organist, a new podcast from The Believer and KCLW. The show is an…