Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Prof. David Foster Wallace
We can approach the books from a variety of different critical, theoretical, and ideological perspectives, too, depending on students’ backgrounds and interests. In essence, we can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and…
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Keeping an Emojiary
We all know that keeping a personal journal is pretty good both to for our writing and to help clarify the mind and spirit, but that it also takes a effort to keep a journal regularly. To help with that, Albert…
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Story of an Artist
“You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again.” Although Lena abandoned her desire to be an artist in the strict sense, her definition…
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A Year in Isaac Fitzgerald’s Reading
The Millions asked Rumpus co-owner Isaac Fitzgerald about his favorite books from 2014. He picked, among others, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter and Saeed Jones’s latest collection of poetry. Read the reasoning behind Fitzgerald’s choices here.
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Rotating Writing 90 Degrees
At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook. I did this for only a moment before writing, as…
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Deep in Don DeLillo’s Underworld
I have fairly clear recollections of writing the book—the room, the desk, the painting on the wall, the feeling that after two years of work (of an eventual four years) I now considered myself a novelist[.] Stephanie Lacava had a…
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Mark Strand, 1934–2014
And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow. To pay homage to the passing…
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Following Ulysses
To what extent am I reading Ulysses by following Ulysses Reader? What does “reading” even mean at this point, given our near-constant engagement with text? Over at Full Stop, Dustin Illingworth describes his relationship with Ulysses Reader, a Twitter account…
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Fail Again, Fail Better
How it all got so bad is a blur. I blocked the door. I blacked out the basement windows. I remember myself curled in feral positions, sounds on repeat getting louder, climbing up and out of the window to piss…
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Discovering a Smart Poet
Smart was known, with his “disturbed mental state,” for his loud, feverish, constant praying, and you can read some of that catatonia in Jubilate, with its litany of “for”s and its incantatory quality. Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring…
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Talking About Joan Didion
I should say, rather than messed up, the novel reflected, in a distorted way the messed-up-ness of my life at that time. Rumpus contributor Nicholas Rombes is so fond of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays that he suggested to…
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The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword
[W]riters today are less likely to engage in open antagonism because the political risks are too great. Between trolls on Twitter, libel law and the pressures of political correctness, writers no longer dare to insult their rivals in the hyperbolically…