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Tim Murr at Diabolique Magazine captures why Jim Thompson's writing is an inspiration and his life was a warning:

Fucked up and over at the miserable old age of 70, Jim Thompson died at home ... He got fucked over by Stanley Kubrick, and by Steve McQueen, and by Walter Hill, and yeah, probably by Sam Peckinpah, but certainly by the Writers Guild. Robert Redford may have paid him for a screenplay, but that movie was never filmed. And while the French had discovered Thompson and started providing some sustenance in royalty payments, in America, none of his books were in print at the time that he suffered several strokes from decades of drinking.

Elliot Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel) ended up the same way if I recall. Jean-Patrick Manchette didn't last very long. Writing is a rotten career career-wise. Nevertheless I refuse to buy in to the idea of the writer-as-victim peddled by so many in the industry. Ibid. that para from Nick Tosches' In The Hand of Dante posted here many times. Your loss is their business model.

Best articles skimmed this month: NYMag.com's Sophie Kemp on white T-shirts:

It does not matter if you are the kind of cool bisexual who goes on a European sex vacation with a they/them who has really tasteful stick-and-poke tattoos, or you really like Fever Ray. It is just corny no matter how you spin it.

Linking to her Twitter there. Asks Slate's Alex Kirshner of Elonville:

Twitter has always been a sewer. The prioritization of paid, right-skewing tweets merely asks what happens if people get tired of swimming in it.

Also reading, as one does, Derrida on cinema:

I have a passion for the cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no trace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I'm a pathological case.

Full doc (PDF) at Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, translated by Peggy Kamuf.

WordGrinder is a terminal word processor and I am tempted.