Daikichi Amano is interested in icky, slimy, and gooey. His creepy–even disgusting–photographs depict supple young bodies marred by subterranean decay at the mouths of leeches and the tentacles of cephalopods (which, according to one interview, the crew eats after the shoot to avoid the cruelty of wasting the animals). There is an overall sense of clamminess; Amano’s artistic roots are in pornography, but these images are the opposite of inviting. And yet I can’t look away.

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Alyssa Monks paints women through the distorted lens of water, and her newest round of work puts them in the steamy cage of the shower, where their breasts and bellies brush up against foggy glass doors and they become entangled in shower curtains. Often seen from behind a viscous film of plastic, these women look part tortured and part rapturous. Is the shower a cell or a refuge? It’s unclear, but either way, what Monks is doing to these water-women feels more like embalming than painting. …more

For National Poetry Month, Poems Out Loud is featuring people reading their favorite poems aloud. The construction worker who describes his job as “a lot of digging” loves Walt Whitman, and not just because he writes about “common Americans” and “physical labor.” Another man falls in love with poetry when he first encounters Sylvia Plath, even though she was a “well-heeled New England” woman, and he’s a Jamaican immigrant.

The artist Justine Lai depicts herself having sex with each US president, painting them in order. She’s gotten as far as Ulysses S. Grant. (NSFW)

A blog about how famous books got their titles, peppered with amusing and surprisingly sexual anecdotes. John Cleland’s title Fanny Hill is dirty, but not for the reasons you might think. Marie Stopes’ 1918 Married Love might be the most sexually influential work of the 20th century, but its title is classic double speak that could have come right out of 1984. Speaking of which, Orwell couldn’t settle on a title, and changed it from 1980 to 1982 before finally settling on 1984. But the title story that takes the cake is Valerie Solanas’ 1968 Scum Manifesto, in which “scum” was taken to be an acronym for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men.’ Solanas denied this was the case, but her insistence that “rational men want to be squashed, stepped on…treated as the cut, the filth that they are,” suggests otherwise.

A Flickr set with visualizations of word frequency.  The word “crisis” has surpassed “hope” on only a handful of occasions — one of them is right now. Trends also show a general increase in the mention of superheros over time. Pictured is “Communism” (bottom) and “terrorism” (top) since 1981.

“Darwin was a prude” for failing to consider the possibility of female promiscuity, an omission that delayed the study of sperm competition for 100 years. But don’t blame him — his sexually repressed daughter combed her daddy’s texts for references to sexual impropriety, which she swiftly struck out.