Rumpus Original
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My Favorite Clause: Ruminations on Stuart Dybek’s Penis
“Sauerkraut Soup” from Stuart Dybek’s 1986 debut collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins with a narrator waxing philosophical on the cathartic nature of bodily purge. “Puking felt like crying,” he tells us. “At first I almost enjoyed it the way…
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Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: The Rumpus Interview With Nancy Balbirer
Nancy Balbirer’s hilarious, soulful memoir about acting, Hollywood, art, fame, and misguided relationships, Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir Of Near-Fame Experiences is told from the perspective of a woman who was sure that acting would be her…
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Sex, Drugs, and Orchestra: The Importance of Metal Health and the New Iron Maiden Documentary
The Lucky 13 Saloon in Brooklyn is papered with horror movie posters and painted with a fine layer of filmy grit. A mutilated Chuckie doll straddles a Jaegermeister spout from which bartenders in leather corsets pour shots for guys sporting…
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The Fog of War
Robert Olmstead’s new novel demonstrates Robert E. Lee’s maxim: “It is well that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.”
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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Rumpus Interview With Rebecca Solnit
To read one of [Solnit’s] books is to slap your forehead and say, “How could I, and everyone else, have missed this?”
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Searching the Library of Babel
About six months ago, as I was nearing the end of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, I came across the chapter titled “Prologues to The Library of Babel.” The chapter began with a list of authors whose works were selected…
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The Wind Has Stopped Blowing (Your Pockets Are Filled With Wind)
It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained.…
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Douglas Rushkoff and Life, Inc.
“For me, the idea of selling out was the worst possible thing,” says Douglas Rushkoff during a discussion with friend and fellow writer Walter Kirn one recent evening at an independent bookstore in SoHo Manhattan.
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“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
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“And Then at the Boat Show,” a Rumpus Original Poem by John Gallaher
And Then at the Boat Show It is true, I feel, that I don’t think about plants as much as I should. Day after day, the explanation unfolds, at just the pace to keep you interested
