Horrible news.

[UPDATE: Pardon my laconic post. The news of these two deaths (Duncan and her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake) hit me as I was about to embark on a restful weekend. My immediate reaction was to beat myself up relentlessly on Friday night for not doing more or for not communicating enough to her that her zaniness was peachy keen. Theresa and I had exchanged quite a few emails after the two of us duked it out last December in an Elegant Variation thread, where I encouraged her to maintain her hearty enthusiasm for reporting breakfast. She responded that she was planning to extend her ebullience to lunch and dinner. Whatever her problems, what I do know is this: I observed in Theresa another giddy and idiosyncratic soul — someone who was good for the artistic community by way of her cockeyed perspective. And I’m very sorry that I never got the chance to meet her. If this horrible conclusion says anything, it is this: We must embrace those who are different.]

[For additional reading, see Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire. And on the film front, watch Janet Frame and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table.]

I wrote a lengthy feature on confessional writing that appears in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Many thanks to the writers who talked with me for the piece and who put up with my laryngitis. I did try to include everyone, but alas, I ended up talking to far more people than I probably should have. So I’m sorry if you didn’t make it in.

[UPDATE: Ms. Bussel and I talked for close to 90 minutes for this piece and she’s offered some additional perspective on her blog: “Me, I’m much more PG than I am NSFW, and yet by dint of what I do for a living, most of what you’ll stumble across on line is about matters sexual. But talk to me at a party and I’ll quiz you about your babies or your workout routine or your creative endeavors. I’ll ask you about your bad dates and favorite cupcakes. Sure, Martha and I probably horrified some of the Etsy folks with our sex talk, but I don’t think that’s a me thing, it’s a comfort with the topic, amongst friends.”]

BBC: “A Canadian team has created a computer program that can win or draw any game, no matter who the opponent is. It took an average of 50 computers nearly two decades to sift through the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions to come up with the solution.

Ladies and gentlemen, Phil Spector’s hair.

Daily Mail: “For when a budding author sent typed chapters of Jane Austen’s novels to 18 of them, changing just the titles and characters’ names, only one recognised her words. Another managed to recognise they were ‘a really original read’. But the rest simply rejected them or never responded, according to the man who posted the manuscripts, David Lassman.”