the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face

* The Guardian catches up with old Gainsbourg flame, Jane Birkin excerpt:

"Jane speaks quickly as if fearful that, like Serge, she might run out of time. Her sentences crash into one another. She's self-deprecating and eccentric as only an Englishwoman can be. But she is also Bohemian and expansive, a free spirit the British couldn't handle. When she famously sang with orgasmic abandon on Serge's hit single 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus' in 1969 the BBC promptly banned it. 'It wasn't a rude song at all,' she says now. 'I don't know what all the fuss was about. The English just didn't understand it. I'm still not sure they know what it means.'

"She fled this country 35 years ago after causing a minor scandal by being the first woman in a British film to show her pubic hair on the big screen as she cavorted with David Hemmings in Blow Up . She departed - already a single mother after a year-long marriage to composer John Barry - and swiftly became a central figure in Paris society, replacing Brigitte Bardot as Serge's lover. In England she is barely recognised in the street; in France, everyone knows her. In 1981, she scandalised a nation once again - this time France - by leaving Serge (with whom she had a daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) for director Jacques Doillon when she was already pregnant with his daughter, Lou. When Serge died in 1991, she left Doillon and became the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame."

* Midnight on Them Spurs, a new short story by Steve Almond.

* Amy Sedaris is on the shortlist to replace Craig Kilborn as host of The Late Late Show.

* "Revenge is golden. Silence is shit." -- Patti Smith