Rumpus Originals
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Letters, Characters, and Ten-Degree Shifts: The Rumpus Interview With Ben Greenman
Ben Greenman’s fiction is elusive stuff. His is a body of work that’s equally at home rooting narratives in history or playing textual games with the reader. Even his more historically-based work delves into unexpected societal corners, including post-Cold War…
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A MODERN READER #5: Fetishizing the Pastoral
Is it possible to pinpoint when a trend begins? When a seminal book, or movie, or article penetrates the mainstream? Really it never is a single specimen, but rather a choir erupts, as if the movie producers and publishers had…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #52
PATTY-CAKE ★★★★★ (4 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing patty-cake.
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Happy Labor Day!
Poor Labor Day. Gets no respect. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of celebrations. The runt of the holiday litter.
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THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing
“As those early days blurred into weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight. How could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? Where was our midwife now? Why, in the middle of this enormous…
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #30: The Football Hold
Hey Football Fans, Have you been watching a lot of NFL preseason games lately? Or have you, like me, mostly been watching breastfeeding?
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Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It instead feels rather gleeful.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chinaka Hodge
The shooting of Oscar Grant showed that Oakland is in serious need of a discussion on race. The poet and playwright Chinaka Hodge provided such a discussion in her groundbreaking play Mirrors in Every Corner
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10/40/70 #22: The Ghost Writer
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski.