Pain
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Song of the Day: “Hurt”
“I hurt myself today,” Johnny Cash sings in one of the last recordings he made, his poignant cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” The song couldn’t be more appropriate now, during this week of confusion and heartache and regret.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Anuk Arudpragasam
Anuk Arudpragasm discusses his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage, the bombing of civilians during the war in Sri Lanka, documenting war crimes, and powerful Tamil women.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Surprising the Psychic
Coming up Swords, a Nine: nightmares and anguish; the Ten: rock bottom; and Death: with her audible reminder the card was in “the place you are now.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pain Scale Treaties
Perched on the shoulders of generational trauma sit these two theses: suffering begets cruelty begets suffering begets cruelty, and pain is empathy’s catalyst.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Infarct, I Did
This essay is not about love. Love doesn’t enter into it. We are talking mechanics. Four chambers, ventricles and atria. The mammalian heart, and thus, the bat heart, and thus, the human heart.
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De La Soul and Snoop Dogg
As part of the lead-up to De La Soul’s next album And The Anonymous Nobody, the group has released a new single featuring Snoop Dogg. The album is set to come out via a crowdfunded, independent release on August 26th and…
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Frigid
My first gynecologist tells me that my vagina is on the smaller side of the normal range. I use this as a justification for why, at eighteen, I still can’t get a tampon in more than a quarter of an…
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Literature Out of Pain in Afghanistan
As part of Electric Literature’s The Writing Life Around the World series, Fazilhaq Hashimi discusses the influence of pain and social activism on the literary landscape in Afghanistan: In Afghanistan, we do not write for fun, passion, or money but to…
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On Pain
There is pain in the Kentucky mountains. Some people’s bodies throb with the ache of repetitive injuries. I am here, they yell to a cloudless sky. Look at me. I am hurting. I am in pain.
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Dispatch from the Carnival #4: Taking in the Sword
What is this body if you take its power over you away? In the torture arts, you are both the creator and recipient of your pain.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, what if your Christmas tree ornaments could tweet. Then, in the Saturday film review of Wild—the film adaptation of Dear Sugar columnist Cheryl Strayed’s eponymous novel—Kenny Ng praises Strayed’s “realness” and “punk aesthetic” while tempering expectations for the film.…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Lava Lamp of Pain
Pain moved into my body five years ago. It wasn’t the whack of an anvil or the burn of a scraped knee. This pain sat warmly on the surface of my hands, and reached up to my elbows like evil…