I have to admit, I was curious as to what the sarcasm mark would look like, but I’d never use it. Rather keep everyone guessing.

Chaucer tweets the South by Southwest Festival.

Some film folks for tell The Guardian about their favorite scenes from film. No one mentioned the printer beatdown scene from “Office Space,” however, a gross oversight in my opinion.

The latest in fertility technology.

The Ridenhour Prize goes to a graphic novel for the first time, Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza.”

Ever wonder why some farts feel hot? I wouldn’t want you thinking I was getting highbrow or anything after that last link.

No? Why not?

We’d like to know the last book you loved. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved, along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements.

Email to: Isaac AT therumpus.net

New York Readers,

Do you have your tickets to the Rumpus mega-show on April 6 yet?

Featuring Sam Lipsyte, Colson Whitehead, Michael Showalter, Lorelei Lee, Dave Hill, Starlee Kine, Jeffrey Lewis, and Alina Simone. You’ll want to buy those tickets early, rockers. …more

Nicholas Sparks, author of such books as The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, was recently profiled by USA Today.

Why do we know this? Because the article has author and Rumpus contributor Joshua Mohr in a bit of a tizzy… and by “a bit of a tizzy” what we really mean is “begging to duke it out with the mega-best-selling author.”

In the article Sparks “compares himself to Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hemingway” and “slams Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as ‘pulpy’ and ‘overwrought.’” He also states, “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”

Well Mohr won’t stand for it, and he throws down the gauntlet: “Let’s tussle soon, you and me; before you write another thing.” It all makes for some fun Friday reading; it’d be even better if Sparks answered the challenge.

Though its final act revolves around a thoroughly aggravating plot contrivance (“Just tell him Deborah Kerr! TELL HIM!”) and there’s two dopey musical numbers by children’s choirs for no reasons whatsoever, An Affair to Remember is, without question, one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. If that last scene doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, it’s time to get the ducts checked by your optometrist. …more

Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy.

Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a nineteen-year-old in 1962 America, and the bevy of options and predicaments that came along with it–the social stigma of being an unwed mother, her humorous if stygian attempts to self-abort, and her final lone and costly trip by which she saved face. The title is sincere and ironic, revealing both Potter’s precarious position and her fortune at having survived a procedure by which, around that time, seventeen percent of women reportedly died yearly in the U.S. …more

While a lot of sites are covering the music, tech, film, and other happenings in Austin this week, only Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser of SMITHmag.net are capturing the essence of how many amazing t-shirts there are in Texas right now.

Please enjoy the fruit of their labors: “The Geek T-Shirt Photo Essay.”

WikiLeaks, “the Internet service that offers whistleblowers an opportunity to publish documents that expose corruption and wrongdoing by state and private actors,” has drawn the ire of many corporations in the past, not to mention “North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, and a number of private Swiss banks.”

Well now the the sunshine-spreading website can add a new member to its list of critics: The Pentagon.

How do we know this? Because the website recently published a “32-page secret Defense Department counterintelligence study of WikiLeaks, which suggests that the American military was preparing to (or perhaps even did) attempt to hack into and shut down the site.”

Get the full story here.

Artists: The Replacements

Song: “Alex Chilton”

“The best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader, ‘How would you cope in this situation?’ Or saying, ‘How would you feel about living in a world in which this these crimes are allowed to happen?’”

Author Ian Rankin discusses the “divide” between crime fiction and literature. (via Author Scoop)

Sara Faye Lieber’s essay “Bohemian Rhapsody” begins with a meditation on sleep, a most basic and necessary human activity, and goes on to describe how her own becomes impeded by an infestation of bedbugs.

With the critters steadily on the rise since the seventies, Lieber relates a striking and personal account of her experience, drawing unique parallels between the consequences of the bugs and her labor as an archive worker, digitizing (and seemingly minimizing) countless decades of encyclopedic information.

Forced to choose the most cherished of her possessions and trash the rest, Lieber ponders the value of information, its organization, and what, in the age where precious little is still precious, we would choose to save. Read it here.

Illustrations by Elzbieta Gaudasinska for The Sun has Fallen into the Sack by Jerzy Bieniecki (Poland, 1975).

As you can see, the book was actually published in English translation — but only in Poland. …more

Big Picture has a rad look at the buildings of the shanghai expo.

US vs UK book covers, no-holds-barred cage match.

I heart Japanese train station design.

There is no good reason not to look at pictures of the Great Western Alpaca Show.

The phrase of the day is “deadly insect ejaculate.”

Brigitte Aiton, Age 44
New York, New York

“How do you deal with the fact that the person you’re with might hate you?”

It was the first summer we were together. We were twenty-three years old. …more

After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned!

I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine rack should carry at least a couple copies. At least the ones in San Francisco do. But even then it can be hard to find. …more

“These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”

From Michiko Kakutani’s latest Times piece, “Texts Without Context,” in which she considers a number of recent books, mostly the ones that she finds to be “nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change,” focusing on Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier — with whom the Rumpus is arranging an interview at present.

“It is the official art of authoritarian governments, aimed at extending state control through propaganda. Totalitarian kitsch exists to glorify the state, foster a personality cult surrounding the dictator and celebrate ceaseless and irrevocable social and economic progress through images of churning factories and happy, exultant workers.”

I have long pondered the boundless evil of all things kitsch but now thanks to this article (via Bookforum) I have new reasons to fear it.

“How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call ‘unpleasantness’ is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience?

Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.”

At The Millions author Peter Straub makes a strong case for taking horror as seriously as anything else.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people’s boyfriends (or girlfriends, as the case may be). …more

“As lightbulbs are to the moon, first stories are to finished books.”

The Morning News talks with author Philip Graham about publishing his first short story, writing dispatches for McSweeney’s, and being edited by a former student.

Over at The Awl Choire Sicha talks with Paul Ford, the now-former web editor of Harper’s, about why he quit, what’s going on at the magazine (“Jennifer Szalai, a senior editor, who handled reviews, also quit this week”), his plans for the future, and his favorite Alex Chilton tale.

Footage shot by Thomas Edison. (via @ebertchicago)

Artists: Big Star

Song: “The Ballad of El Goodo”

R.I.P. Alex Chilton.

“Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge of the discussions.”

The eBook price war continues, and while Amazon has backed down in the past, it looks like the online store still wants to fight to “retain its wholesale pricing model…”

(via PW)

Dolphins are really tired of all this “trying to swim with them” crap.

Looking for a job?

Flavorwire wants to show you their favorite pieces of SoCal architecture.

Exploring the world of Arabic design. (via JourneyRoundMySkull.)

On the personhood of animals.

On writing about war:

This year, according to my careful calculations (or at least according to the bracket I just hastily filled out), Syracuse University will win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. …more

Well here’s some good news for all you short fiction writers: “The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again.”

“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

That’s what William Faulkner said in 1950 while accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, and he should know, because “even Faulkner had a day job.”

(For those interested, you can read Faulkner’s entire Nobel speech here.)