Excited to announce today a new monthly feature we’ve been drumming around for a while now, and finally ready to kick it off for 2010, HTML Giant Live Giants, a monthly reading series hosted right here on the site.
On the last non-Friday weekday of each month we’ll have a writer we love reading from their home, or perhaps surprise locations, via live streaming, 20 minutes or so followed by a chatbox-prompted q/a. With so many excellent people all over the place, and all the invites we get to readings that we wish we had a time/space portal for, we hope this will help fill some of that gap, and without necessarily putting on any pants.
The inaugural reading will be that fabulous Heather Christle. Mark your calendar to show up around here on Thursday January 28 at 9 PM Eastern and witness her incantations and brainspeaks. BYOB. No RSVP.
Today we celebrate the birth of the inimitable, incomparable, and indispensable 
There’s something about Samuel Beckett that makes photo- and/or bio-graphers want to take black and white photos of him. Things are more serious in black and white, a kind of pre-industrial grimness overlaid with existential severity. (Metallica’s Unforgiven video also capitalizes on this aesthetic, or “old dude in dark room.”) His predecessors (Kafka, Joyce, etc.), having lived during the time of black and white photography, are remembered that way for good reason — but it’s interesting when others promote irrelevant aesthetics which seek to implicate some underlining value of an author.