What was the most memorable or personally affective reading you’ve been to?

Understand, David.  I don’t give a shit who writes and who doesn’t.

-Robert Penn Warren to David Milch, context here. (thnx, M. Bell)

List of 2010 NEA Grant Award Recipients have been named. Any thoughts?

A reader of my earlier Patricia Highsmith-related murder post forwarded a picture of Highsmith topless.  NSFW, obvs.   I was not aware that that existed.  (Thanks, Nicole.)  Enjoy your weekends, everybody.

Johannes Göransson posted an excellent rumination about the Gurlesque on his blog, including considerations of Kenneth Anger, Lara Glenum, Jack Smith, kitsch, and other: “It’s interesting to me how descriptions of kitsch and trash almost always come in lists. Whether it’s Rimbaud’s “Parade,” Walt Whitman, Ginsberg, Clement (and Arielle!) Greenberg: The “poetic crap” (Rimbaud) always come in these long lists. It’s as if there was an implicit notion of montage in the junk. No wonder Dada, Cornell, Rauschenberg etc etc made collages and assemblages out of this excrement. Our idea of kitsch is already as a pile of crap that we have to wade through. It lacks hierarchy or narrative. We have to wade through it. Just a bunch of excrement.”

If websites were books and if movies were video games and if you got 11:24 to spare cos you subtle like that.

Have you ever seen a child actress sitting crosslegged on a bed and looking right?

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How 3.6 zettabytes of data get consumed.

Server’s being weird last 24 hours or so. Sorry for any tech difficulties…

Two excellent new texts to check out around the web this week: (1) Matt Kirkpatrick’s “Light Without” at Web Conjunctions (from a manuscript of texts that is, as a whole, just a braineater), and (2) Kristen Iskandrian’s excellent story, “The Geology,” this week at 52 Stories.

Kirkus Reviews: dead and gone.  Wow.