Photo: Daina Beth Solomon, via LA Weekly

• On Robin Robertson, who writes poems “that are truly, mesmerizingly carnal. I know women and men who have sought out online recordings just to hear him recite, in a low Scottish burr, his twelve-line ode to an artichoke. Whether Robertson is writing about sex, violence or the sea—three subjects he keeps coming back to—he remains a poet of the body, with a fondness for consonant-­dense, guttural words that carry an almost physical presence on the page.”
• An LED sign in downtown Los Angeles was hacked in the name of literacy. Indie booksellers are reporting a noticeable uptick in sales.
• “In my judgment, there are between twenty and thirty editors and publishers in New York who—along with experienced and discriminating publicists, marketers, and sales reps—have over the decades regularly and successfully combined art and commerce and, in the process, have supported and promulgated art. They are in fact the main curators of our life of letters. They have somehow survived the grinding—tectonic—friction between creativity and business and made a go of both.”
• Joe Sacco on Charlie Hebdo: “Satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?”
• Have a look at the formidable geometry in these eighteenth-century forts, which represent “the classic century of military engineering.” “Engineers wanted to create overlapping planes of fire, so that defenders could cover every angle of approach from the walls of the forts.”