The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Hello
All those prank calls were partly a way of taking control of the unknown, the ambiguity of that space between “hello” and whatever comes next.
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Join NOW!All those prank calls were partly a way of taking control of the unknown, the ambiguity of that space between “hello” and whatever comes next.
...moreIn clinging to a set of memories that fade more every day, maybe I’m also clinging to an idyllic version of my own past.
...moreNow he started to cry and couldn’t stop the tears. He’d found a way to beat his hunger until the next meal, and he didn’t know when that would be. Hunger, his acts from hunger, made him cry.
...more“He was my real dad,” she says. “I just happened to have two.”
...moreFirst, Grant Snider considers New Year’s resolutions in his inimitable way. Then, Barbara Berman draws a connection between two recent poetry collections—famous German playwright Bertold Brecht’s posthumous Love Poems and The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby. Each poem in the latter makes sense of scents in a […]
...moreThat scene at Antone’s plays out one of my biggest fears: that when women aren’t in the room, straight men shift their conversations.
...moreMusic-obsessive activity, in general, appears to be about music. You could, on the surface, mistake it for being about music. But in fact what it is about is memory and love.
...moreRichard Linklater’s Boyhood has received a lifetime’s worth of press, but over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wai Chee Dimock grasps its literary paralells; alternating between analysis and essay, Dimock considers the film alongside J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same title. He also touches on Coetzee’s plotting, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and the emotional weight underlying […]
...more[Boyhood] focuses on the fact that we should be paying more attention to ourselves, right here, right now. It isn’t asking that you be heroic, but it does ask you to be brave enough to live your life, and elevates the everyday to a higher, more melodic plane.
...moreBoyhood (2014), which was filmed over a 12-year period, may be the film that completes [Linklater’s] vision. It is without action, a plot, or any of the elements you’ve come to expect from a movie.
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