Strandbeest by Theo Jansen, courtesy of Gallerie Dennis Cooper

The Rumpus has a conversation with Banksy.

Here’s a Times article on testing Google’s new translation software (via Sara Faye Lieber’s facebook).

Jezebel has a sympathetic Q&A with a guy with a female-constipation fetish (believe it or not, this is actually SFW).

Julia Cohen posts poems by her 4th and 5th grade students.

Ron Rosenbaum, who you probably know better as Slate‘s resident Nabokov-obsessive, reviews Seth Rogov’s Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet for the Jewish Review of Books. Depending on your personal feelings about Dylan, this piece is either about as much or slightly less fun than it sounds like.(via Arts & Letters Daily.)

And in today’s installment of BANJO FEEVER, we’ve got Frank Warner and Pete Seeger on Pete’s old RAINBOW QUEST TV show, doing Frank Proffitt’s “Tom Dooley.” This was the first bluegrass song I ever got obsessed with. The version that caught my attention was Doc Watson’s, from a live album that I picked up because I wanted to hear a “more authentic” version of “Shady Grove,” than the Jerry Garcia / David Grisman version on their album of the same name, which I was already in love with.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATZrTibcFY