San Francisco
It’s so pretty in San Francisco right now. All the clouds coming in above the blue and pink lights of the 500 Club. There’s the tattoo parlor and the laundrette and close by the bar with the bike rack...
View ArticleThe Drunk Whisperer
Argentina lost to Germany today and it made me sad. I didn’t know that I cared. But my roommate got Argentina’s national team logo tattooed on his forearm and because I care about my roommate I care...
View ArticleNotes on Susan Sontag, Yasir Arafat, and George Bush
I’m returning from doing readings upstate, once more along the Hudson. Worrying about my coffee spilling onto the brown leather shoes of the man next to me reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding The Pain of...
View ArticleTHE EDITOR’S DESK: Hope For Egypt
Yesterday there was a blog on HTMLGIANT about apolitical writers. I disagreed with it. First, because The Rumpus has had regular roundups of the news from Egypt. Second, because most serious writers I...
View ArticleAn Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words.***Mato — ActorI went to a Catholic school. I was a shy kid and...
View ArticleAn Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
Judy — MotherMy dad has a lot of money and he’s a lot older than my mom. She didn’t have any family and when she met him she thought she hit the jackpot. He was living with his mother, my grandmother,...
View ArticleMy Little Brother Ruined My Life
“Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s 14 years old now, almost my height, 5′ 8″, creamy white skin, and a small, German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family. He’s...
View ArticleThe Talent Myth
I don’t usually publish Daily Rumpus emails online but today I’m making an exception. This email was sent to subscribers on November 2, 2010.*****************The Talent MythYesterday I was talking...
View ArticleWhoops, I hired Isaac
This is The Daily Rumpus email from three years ago today when I announced to the world The Rumpus had its first employee.The Daily Rumpus 6-15-09, Whoops, I hired IsaacHi! So today is kind of a big...
View ArticleThe Problem with the Problem with Memoir
I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me if I’d seen this article on Gawker, Journalism Is Not Narcissism, by Hamilton Nolan. I hadn’t but I was aware of the argument. It’s an easy one to make,...
View ArticleSundance So Far
The World According To Dick Cheney is a very good, maybe great documentary. It isn’t The Fog Of War, but it has an element of that. And it isn’t Tyson, but it has an element of that too. If you walk...
View ArticleMistress
Mistress, the second in a series of short movies based on the novel Happy Baby, directed by Stephen Elliott. These shorts are explorations of characters that appear in the book but these scenes are not...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Interview With Michelle Orange
We sat on my bed, our backs against the wall, talking about her essay collection, This Is Running For Your Life.1. Setting Up The Interview, The Part About UsThe Rumpus: So… um… like what I’ll do is...
View ArticleSongs Inspired by and Played for Actors on the Set of the Motion Picture...
1. My Adidas – Run DMC: The kids are ten years old, smoking in a park. The Asian child says to young Theo, Mrs. Smith is fucking hot, I’m going to fuck her. Theo says, How are you going to do that,...
View ArticleThe Daily Rumpus, The Early Years
I started writing The Daily Rumpus email December 8, 2008, over a month before the actual launch of The Rumpus website (which happened January 20, 2009 while Obama was being inaugurated, as if a sneak...
View ArticleThe Saddest Story I’ve Ever Read
I was heading home from my girlfriend’s house and it was taking a while. She lived well south of San Francisco and it was a weekend so the trains weren’t running. Instead you had to go to the station...
View ArticleWeekend Rumpus Roundup
On this weekend in 1652, a law was passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies. Turns out that particular law didn’t cause much of a stir.Unfortunately, some of today’s legislation intended...
View ArticleBombing the Bookclub
We had a number of people quit The Rumpus Book Club today because I wrote in a Daily Rumpus email that Israel should stop bombing Gaza. One person wrote that I was “ignorant of the history.” But I’m...
View ArticleMistress
Mistress, the second in a series of short movies based on the novel Happy Baby, directed by Stephen Elliott. These shorts are explorations of characters that appear in the book but these scenes are not...
View ArticleAn Oral History of Myself #15: Neil Elliott
In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with. Because I left home at thirteen and spent four years in group homes, my social network was significantly wider than most people of that age. What’s...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....