A few weeks ago, I went to a dermatologist to have something on my nose removed. He said less than two sentences to me, asked me one question he didn’t listen to the answer to, ignored my protests, had a nurse hold me down, stuck a large needle in my nose with no warning, and then dug the thing out with a scalpel even though the anesthesia was barely working.

He removed it with no scarring, and insurance paid for it, so I guess I can’t complain too much, but man, did he have to be such an asshole?

Why are so many doctors such jerks? Most likely, it’s because of the way they’re trained to think. But now, it seems, some  are trying to remedy the problem by getting doctors to read literature. (via) …more

“I wept. For, however beautiful the sunlight, I had disrupted the natural order of things.”

A.N. Devers tweets a short story about Daylight Savings.

Hey! You! I love doing these political links, but no one clicks on them. So I want to hear from you: What kind of political links do you  want to see? What are you interested in? I will scour the Internets for you if you tell me.

“Is the Pope toast?”

Josh Marshall invents a term for a “literary form” known as “Gonzonia,” those political fundraising “emails with a lot of exclamation points and bolds and underlines and even double underlines when the rush of regular old underlines wears off for over-use.”

In case you missed it because all the American media is talking about is this Massa fellow, there’s some crazy stuff happening in Thailand right now.

The Root lists people they’d “like to remove from Black History Month.” So does John McWhorter at TNR. (via)

Here is “why American health care costs so much.”

“I feel like an alcoholic pushed into a permanently stocked bar, and I can’t even taste the merlot because I’m trying to down a tequila and sip a martini at the same time. I’m dying to return to the mono-media of paper and glue. But I’m just not sure that I’m strong enough to resist the lure of that Dickens in my pocket; the new Jim Crace short story nestling in that mega-zine; the stream of Pepys updates scrolling down my screen.”

Over at The Guardian Books Blog, Molly Flatt points to a new Stanford study and a TED talk by Barry Schwarz that show the downside of all the choices technology and modern society have given us. She calls it “always-something-better-out-there syndrome,” and she wonders if it’s killing the joy of reading.

“When is it okay to write about heartbreak?” (via)

“Edward Gorey”  covers the classics. (via)

At Jacket Copy, all things publishing-oriented at SXSW.

The British love words so much they had a festival!

Margaret Atwood is going to sing in a musical about hockey! (via)

Lately, it’s been so crappy out I’ve been wondering what I did to offend the fates, but I think they’ve now forgiven me, because it is a beautiful spring day. …more

Hey fellow nerds, guess what? Every Popular Science has gone online! All 137 years. And it’s free! And it’s searchable! It’s much better than watching the Oscars. I promise.

I did a search for “Rumpus” and came up with this picture from 1947. Also, there were instructions on how to use the already existing plumbing from a “powder room” to make a bar, without losing the powder room. All of that seemed about right.

And then I decided to search for the phrase “uh-oh,” because that could only end well, and I learned what kind of man uses Vaseline Hair Tonic.

What can you find?

(via Boing Boing)

The Northern California Book Award Nominees have been announced, and we’re thrilled to have reviewed, interviewed and excerpted a bunch of them here at The Rumpus.

The Rumpus Interview with Catherine Brady, author of The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories.

In the Eye of the Hurricane — The Rumpus review of Southern Cross, stories by Skip Horack.

A Window’s For Looking Into — The Rumpus review of The Mansion of Happiness, a poetry collection by Robin Ekiss.

No One Is Innocent — The Rumpus review of The Vagrants, a novel by Yiyun Li.

Our supersized Combo with D.A. Powell, complete with an interview and an original poem.

And last but not least, an excerpt from Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

Going after evil on the Internets, vigilante style. (via)

India’s “best-known contemporary painter” moves to Qatar because of threats from hard-line Hindus.

Some folks are saying that African poverty is … declining! (via)

“There is a human rights crisis in the US that can no longer be ignored – millions of Americans are unable to secure one of their most basic rights: the right to adequate housing.” The UN goes after the US on affordable housing.

“It is difficult, therefore, for me to imagine that he became so excited when my mother told him I was about to be born that he momentarily misplaced his keys.” Omar bin Laden writes about his father Osama.

“Susie (Orbach) calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don’t for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints.”

“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”

“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever. But I didn’t think any of that would work. The pain would come back again and again if I didn’t live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable. I’d rather have died.”

— A few selections from a pretty brilliant interview with Jeanette Winterson at The Guardian

Someone bought Agatha Christie’s old “battered” trunk for a hundred quid at auction, and in it, she found some  jewels, most likely from the great mystery writer’s infamous collection. (via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind)

Someone made a font out of Franz Kafka’s handwriting! The post is in German, but even if you don’t speak the language, it’s kinda cool to look at. (via Quarterly Conversation)

Got writer’s block? This list of “unusual firearms” should do the trick.

A look at romance novels from the perspective of evolutionary biology. (via Bookninja)

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel talk with Rain Taxi about how we define science fiction. (via Mumpsimus)

And finally, a Cambodian reflection on Virginia Woolf.

Just so you know, Sunday is a good day to catch up with what Rumpus Books has been up to this week.  …more

BookFox notes an interesting pattern:

“In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors.”

This seems to be a no-brainer for traditional journals. They can publish riskier stories while maintaining their print journal as their publication of record. They can attract a broader audience, who may then purchase print. They can tap into the social networks of new writers while staying safe from stodgy critics who might not like stories that branch out from the norm.

But, as BookFox points out, there’s a few big downsides to this, the most important of which is the fact that it allows these journals to seem like they are supporting emerging writers without putting their full weight behind them. …more

Here’s lots of good info on the situation in Chile, and here’s some more. We’re all thinking of folks down there.

Who wants a Sumatran tiger for a pet?

“The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.” — Sidney Mintz at The Boston Review

A handy interactive guide to everything Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Sylvio Berlusconi has “allegedly” done wrong.

Whoops! Congress took away your civil liberties for another year. (via Maud)

And because I like you, a classic Believer piece: “The Last Antiwar Poem.”

“The people in uniform I talk to, they just want to serve without fear. For years now, gays and lesbians who are serving their country heroically in two wars—and even as a pacifist, I can’t deny their heroics—cannot say who they are. For women it is particularly brutal: many women are targeted for investigation under DADT, including straight women, because they refused the advances of a male soldier. The soldier then tells the command she must be gay, otherwise she wouldn’t have refused him. The policy is a tool of sexual harassment; I don’t know if people understand that.”

— At Guernica, Chris Lombardi interviews civil rights activist David Mixner about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

The author of the forthcoming My Life with the Lincolns asks what happens when you type Abraham Lincoln into Etsy. The answer is pretty awesome.

Anyone interested in fiction and the Internet should read this now.

Sappho and banjos! (via Bookslut)

“Why does everyone hate the small bookstore?” (via Bookninja)

In the age old rivalry between Batman and Superman, Batman comes out on top by $75,500.

Dear Martin Amis, Just stop. And no more palling around with Hitchens. Someone’s gonna get hurt.

This week, Rumpus books reviewed a book of alternate versions of The Odyssey, novels by Jillian Weise and Heidi Durrow, and a book of poetry by D.W. Lichtenberg. Also, we had an incredible interview with Paula Fox.   …more

Stop reading this and go outside and take a walk somewhere nature-like. Right now.

Okay, did you go? Good. Now you might actually pay attention to me. …more

If you haven’t yet heard about Goodluck Jonathan, the new President of Nigeria, you should read this article.

Why does everyone think artists are terrible at governing?

Andrew Sullivan posts the full report from the Office of Professional Responsibility on “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” otherwise known as torture. He also wants your help translating the legalese and getting the word out about what he calls “a critical piece of information for history and for future prosecution of the war criminals involved.”

In the department of good questions, “Why Do All National Anthems Sound the Same?”

According to Al Jazeera, there are now 120,000 refugees from the fighting in the Congo, and that number’s growing. That’s a lot of people.

Speaking of that last link, has anyone else noticed how exceptionally good Al Jazeera English’s international news coverage is? You should give it a chance, if you haven’t already.

Does saying this make me a terrorist? Let’s just ask the Pomona student who was detained by the TSA and the FBI at an airport for studying Arabic on a plane so he could translate Al Jazeera.

“Like most people, I would rather be someone else. The prose this other self would write would be sharp and coiled, deadly like a snake; not all soggy and attenuated like a garden hose, spritzing dewily, indiscriminately, over thorns and flowers. But it seems one can’t just choose to be a snake. Temperament, sensibility, culture—all come into play. To be Jewish, for instance, is to incline, from Eden onward, less toward the snake than the snake victim. Most of us, with the notable exception of Isaac Babel, lack that cold equipment, that steely, scrupulous will to violence seen in writers like Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy, and other Catholic rednecks. So the matter is not uncomplicated. Then too, given that any investigation of our personal linguistic patterns will inevitably be conducted within the confines of those patterns, there’s bound to be a certain maze-like, funhouse-mirror effect of not being able to see beyond the freakishly elongated reflection of our own heads.”

— Robert Cohen at The Believer in “Going to the Tigers”

At Maud, how much should philosophy and fiction have anything to do with each other?

If you liked Julie Klausner’s interview here at The Rumpus and want more, she has another interview over at The New Yorker Book Bench. (Spoiler alert: in the latter, Kermit the Frog is definitely discussed).

Curious about black metal and Satanism? Me too.

GIANT’s Justin Taylor is interviewed over at Paper Cuts.

Like Amazon, Apple will be using DRM when it sells its e-books. Translation: You don’t actually own the book.

At The Guardian, “Borges’s lost translations.”

In my (wow, it’s already been almost a) year here as Sunday editor at The Rumpus, I’ve never seen a week with so much incredible content. If you missed it, come take a peek. …more

Over at The Utne Reader, Keith Goetzman asks a question originally posed by John D’Agata, “Do we read (nonfiction) to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?” …more

A couple weeks back, I was in a bad way. I’d recently joined Twitter, was always on Facebook, and checked my email (and I don’t exaggerate) about 75 times a day. I couldn’t stand it, but I also couldn’t stop. I spent more than half my waking hours on a screen.

It’s not heroin. I should have been able to stop myself. But I couldn’t. Really. I wasn’t getting any writing done. I was ignoring my girlfriend and my friends. I was reading George Packer’s musings on how all this technology needs to stop and tearing up. I read this article about heavy web users being depressed. I agreed. I checked my email again.

And then, I found this essay at The Millions about a student who had to go to a corner of the Coop in Harvard Square where the wireless didn’t work  to get writing done, and, after chuckling at the irony, I decided to do what he did.  I had heard about a coffeeshop called Borderlands Cafe, affiliated with Borderlands Bookstore, that had opened just a couple months ago here in San Francisco.

Not only do they not have wireless, but they don’t have music, and everything is remarkably well lit.  …more

A new documentary paints Italy as “a democracy of boobs (in all senses).”

How does one “explain the gay” in terms of evolution? (via The Daily Dish)

“That’s not what countries think of when they go to war.” Why no one ever cleans up the environmental mess they make after sending their citizens off to kill each other.

These are the people trying to start the next war.

“Tell us: what is one of the pressing social and political issues of our time, and how would you address it?” For you writers, an essay contest at Dissent Magazine. (via @maudnewton)

“What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.”

— Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books blog on how a global marketplace is changing literature