Arthur Lubow looks at Adam Zagajewski, calls him “the last of his kind.”

Lily Hoang at HTMLGIANT wonders about the discussion surrounding Tao Lin: “I do, however, care about the evident boredom people display in their comments about him. Why do you care? Furthermore, why the fuck do I care that you care? Aren’t there fundamentally more interesting and worthwhile things to discuss?”

Via Barbara Jane Reyes, this post from Niki Escobar talks about misogyny in the open-mic scene as well as online.

Reb Livingston calls out a magazine for selling review copies, and good on her for doing it. That’s some bullshit.

Twitter recommendation for this week is Matt Cozart. He’s funny and active and communicative.

Brian Spears

Jane McGonigal argues that we need to play more games to improve the world.

Eric Mead talks about the placebo effect through the prism of magic.

Sean Carroll discusses the arrow of time.

Ken Kamler tells the story of a man who survived 36 hours buried in the snow on Mt. Everest.

Mark Roth works on suspended animation as a way of helping trauma patients.

To translate is to carry across. The poem translates Jammes’s wordier one, but in North’s hands the original is carried across the river and then miles down the road. The nouns and colors and desire are still there, but they’ve been pared down, inverted, rendered sharper and more disparate. He hasn’t just boiled the soft edges off the source text; he’s cut out the connective tissue as well.

What’s left is new. Jammes’s “One would hear there, in the afternoon, the ringing of vespers,” becomes, simply, beautifully, “Late afternoon bells.” The swoon of “How I would love you there!” is snipped, and we get the daffier and far less obligatory “I would love you there!” In the original, the grapes—“the color of transparent stone”—are a little cloying; North’s grapes, in contrast, are “transparent as stone”—so that the opacity of stone, and by extension everything else we take for granted, is called into question.

I love how North makes a summery lyric out of talk and jargon like “all over” and “ventricle” and “I’m positive.” His effects feel pretty close to magic:

Shadows piled on all the leaves.
What I said about noise: the burning sun.
Shadows: from the hazel trees.

Here, the music—tinkly, falling, four-beat lines bookending a graver rising one—is joined to an associative logic in which shadows are massy, one speaks a sun in response to “noise,” and trees mysteriously generate shadows without necessarily casting them.

And the way the poem speaks the beloved into being! The conditionality of the scene—would, would,would—has by the end given way to a lush physicality. The poet says he “can’t make [her] come to life,” but his description of the taste of her lips belies the claim. In language, he builds himself a love.

Men make 1500 sperm a second. Apparently.

Felix Baumgartner wants to break the sound barrier without a plane, or any vehicle for that matter.

Finally, jetpacks. Next, I want a flying car that collapses into a briefcase.

Researchers think they’ve found the gene that stimulates regenerative healing.

You can have your name put onto Japan’s solar sail if you sign up by tomorrow.

If you’re really interested in writing about sex work by people in sex work, Antonia Crane has a series you might enjoy, for starters, and you can always browse our sex section as well.

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.

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

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.