“Overnight the discussion of Birgeneau’s letter has focused on its willingness to defend beating in the name of non-violence and its fetishization of non-violence as such. In agreement with those points, I’m also interested in Birgeneau’s falsification of the history he references and, positively, in the tensions it suggests when we don’t accept such a […]
...more“Issue two of LUCKY PEACH (the new food/writing quarterly from McSweeney’s, David Chang of Momofuku, and writer Peter Meehan) hits newsstands on November 15,” and there’s a launch party at Heart in San Francisco! For $12, you get a copy of the magazine, as well as food and drink! Sneak peek: sweet treats by Momofoku […]
...moreLove and Shame and Love (this month’s Rumpus Book Club selection) is having a Novel Launch TONIGHT from 7:30-9:30pm at The Booksmith (1644 Haight Street). There is free food and drink, as well as a lively reading! Find out why Daniel Handler described Orner’s new book as “epic like Gilgamesh and epic like a guitar […]
...more“Now don’t get us wrong — of course we believe that the stuff in their heads is much more important that the shape of their heads (or the shape of their bodies, for that matter) but that doesn’t mean we can’t applaud them for excelling in multiple areas.” The Atlantic compiles “The Greatest Literary Figures […]
...more“A question raised almost at once (and periodically revived) was why Nietzsche was proving so popular here: ‘What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?’ Ratner-Rosenhagen wonders. Nietzsche became the exemplar for those seeking, in Emerson’s words, ‘not instruction, but provocation’; not intellectual […]
...more“Eliot and Dostoevsky were nearly exact contemporaries. Born within two years of each other, they died less than two months apart, Eliot in 1880, Dostoevsky in 1881. For both of them, the period from 1860 to 1880 marked their most significant stretch of writing, when they reached their maturity as artists. “The contrasts between them […]
...more“Here in China, nearly 195 million people are hooked on a kind of literature that is virtually unknown in the West, but that is rapidly transforming its authors and a new breed of online media companies into the publishing stars of the future. Web literature or ‘original fiction’ as it’s called in China is a […]
...more“Instead of a sustained narrative, hundreds of snapshots from Alexander’s past are pieced together—though ‘snapshots’ suggests something static, and each of these eye-blink vignettes is animated by yearning and often by cries of desire or despair.” The Wall Street Journal reviews this month’s Rumpus Book Club Selection: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner. […]
...moreMajority of protesters are not Republicans, nor are they Democrats: “70 percent of Occupy Wall Streeters label themselves ‘independent.’” There are also more children now, and they are there to learn. Occupy Wall Street, the coloring book. Mother Jones answers questions you have about bank transfers. Fear not, the First Amendment holds for protesters. But […]
...more“Advice about writing is more importantly writing itself, and it defines its own rules and strictures as much as it instructs its adherents directly. In the words of these masters we find the strength to go on.” This Recording compiles writing advice from literary greats.
...moreOur own Kevin Thomas has posted an insightful #OWS comic over at OccupyWriters.com. You can check it out here. Enjoy!
...more“Now a pair of books—Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (Columbia University Press, 2011) and Antoine Compagnon’s Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale (Gallimard, 2009)—have revisited the relationship of Stein and Faÿ, offering the fullest account to date of their professional and personal ties.” […]
...more“Back in the seventies, feminists touted the slogan ‘the personal is political,’ arguing that women had been trained to dismiss their own struggles as personal matters with no greater meaning. If women could share stories, they would find patterns. They could be allies instead of rivals.” NY Mag studies how blogging has helped feminism.
...moreNYPD reportedly telling drunks to “take it to Zuccotti.” Some banks are renouncing their plan to charge debit cards. Winter is coming… and also #OccupyWallStreet has “custom made bicycle generators that charge batteries.” Not only did the protesters’ permit application get ignored by the city, but police brought in bulldozers to break up Occupy Richmond. […]
...more“Hornby said: ‘The Ministry of Stories has had a happy, healthy and exciting first year, and there has been overwhelming interest from children, parents, schools and volunteers. We want to establish ourselves even more firmly in the community, involve even more local writers, artists and musicians, and hopefully inspire other Ministries up and down the […]
...more“Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilised taste, the crux of Groucho’s humour was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste. ‘I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,” he once said to a host, ‘but this wasn’t it.’ And: ‘I remember the first time I had sex—I kept the receipt.’ And: […]
...more“Author Steve Almond shows Marc that writers can be just as tortured and self-doubting as comedians. The two of them discuss the highs and lows of a writer’s creative process.” Marc Maron, Rumpus friend (who has been interviewed on Rumpus Radio), features Rumpus columnist Steve Almond in his latest WTF Podcast. Steve Almond’s segment starts […]
...more“In some ultimate and unknowable sense, love might be an affair of pheromones just as it might be the marriage of true minds; love might be life’s grandest illusion just as it might be its realest thing. The point for Eugenides’s plot is that no amount of semiotic analysis can ever offer us an answer […]
...more“After the march on Chase, I returned to Liberty Square. I was participating, at last, but the nature of my participation remained vague. In the early stages of a movement, it’s important to simply show up and be counted. Few things are more threatening to an oppressor – if I can be so pejorative when […]
...more“I wanted to write about having children and how we dealt with having children, and that really wasn’t what the book turned out to be about at all. The book was, in a lot of ways, about my getting older. And I started feeling as if I hadn’t dealt with Quintana as a separate person, […]
...more“Luminous Airplanes has a singular form: the novel, complete in itself, is accompanied by an online “immersive text,” which continues the story and complements it. Nearly ten years in the making, La Farge’s ambitious new work considers large worlds and small ones, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.” […]
...more“This stupid little Facebook photo is not only ill-informed, it’s harmful. Nothing on it has anything to do with reality. It has everything to do with a false rhetoric that’s being promoted by people who either don’t know about the realities of higher education in this country, or don’t care.” Persephone Magazine pits the infamous […]
...more“Founded by Kristina Kearns, Ourshelves was inspired by all the talk of the publishing industry’s impending death and Kearns’ personal desire to preserve books. ‘I wanted to create something between a bookshop and a library,’ Kearns said.” Today, Mission Mission announced Kearns’ plans for “10 free sister libraries in safe houses, shelters, and student centers […]
...more“What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of survival. They are not supposed to soil public space […]
...more“So instead we’re talking flawed main characters, neither villains nor anti-heroes, whom the author has deliberately, even perversely contrived as hard to like.” Lionel Shriver, director of We Need to Talk About Kevin, discusses the unique value and craft of the flawed main character.
...more“Pitchfork: Is the car generally a place to write for you? TW: A good one. You’re enclosed, you’re alone, you’re quiet. Perfect. There’s a feeling of a vanishing point. And you’re moving, like a song moves as it’s going through the tape machine. It’s like combing your hair with the highway.” Pitchfork interviews Tom Waits, who […]
...more“For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at […]
...more“The exhibition references the phrase ‘here be dragons’ used in medieval times to denote unexplored territories, where mapmakers placed sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. Like cartographers centuries ago, the artists in this exhibition map both the real and the imaginary.” Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton is one of many artists […]
...more“The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor. And why embarrassing? Because the Doors […]
...more“‘I’m so moved by the artistic bravery here, like this guy who plays a screeching violin,’ he said. ‘I don’t get it, but still I’m inspired to go home and try harder. So much about being a writer isn’t about talent, it’s work ethic. What do you do when no one else is watching, you […]
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