Blog Profile / Literary Kicks
| URL : | http://www.litkicks.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Literature | |
| Posts on Regator: | 936 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.4 | |
| Archived Since: | March 2, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Philosophy Weekend: Seasons
I can't write a Philosophy Weekend blog post this weekend. I've been working too hard on some tech changes to the site that will finally launch on Tuesday or Wednesday... and I'm also too broken up about the final show of the final season...Show More Summary
How Baz Lurhmann's 'Great Gatsby' Surprised Me
The odds didn't look good for the new film version of The Great Gatsby this weekend, I thought, as I donned my plastic 3-D glasses and entered the dark theater. I wasn't expecting to like the movie much at all. I don't love glitzy Hollywood spectacle, though I was willing to give the much-hyped new version of F. Show More Summary
Taylor Mead: A Bowery Glimpse
Droopy eyes under the hat. An old, creepy looking man leaning on the bar, crouching like a frail spider among a few smarmy-dressed women. The 50-ish ladies sneered at me when I wandered in off Bleecker and Houston streets on a Tuesday afternoon, but the spider just squiggled his mouth in a thoughtful glance toward me. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: Kierkegaard's Either-Or
The great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard never married, but he anguished for years over the existential personal puzzle of love and marriage, and transformed the question into a revolutionary book, Either-Or, published anonymously as Enten-Eller in 1943. This debut work immediately captivated readers, and would turn out to be not only his...
Fitzgerald's Lost Souls, or the Infernal Gatsby
If you're trying to analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age novel The Great Gatsby and you're not thinking about Dante's Inferno, you're missing an obvious connection. The connection is easy to spot and hard to dispute, though it rarely comes up in discussion of the book. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: Kierkegaard's Birthday
What do you buy a morose Danish philosopher who invented Existentialism for his 200th birthday? It doesn't really matter anymore, since Soren Aabye Kierkegaard is dead. He died at the young age of 42, already at this time a mostly broken man, an obsessive writer, a lonely bachelor, and a frequent subject of popular ridicule. Show More Summary
April 1993: CERN Opens the Web
All this spring and summer, we'll be hovering over the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web's breakthrough into mass popularity. This week presents another possible "birthday" date for the WWW craze: it was on April 30, 1993 that CERN...Show More Summary
The Vortex: Beats and Rock and Punk
Two excellent new books remind me of the vortex of interests that's always coursed beneath the surface here at Litkicks -- a vortex, in fact, that is central to the literary/artistic sensibility that has fascinated and informed me through my whole life. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: Derek Jarman's Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't have much of a Philosophy Weekend post for you this weekend. I'm working on some technical improvements to the website, and I'm also pondering some big themes for the next few weekends. But all I've got to show you today is a...Show More Summary
Jackson and Bukowski: Drunken Literature
Recently, I’ve been thinking about drunks. Specifically, I've been thinking about literature written by drunks and/or about drinking. The positive reaction to a piece on this topic called Ten Best Books by Drunks that I posted on Legs...Show More Summary
Huxley, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Bowles, Ginsberg, Burroughs: Literature of Substance
In his essay The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes his experiences after taking a dose of mescaline. At the end of the book, he makes this observation: That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Show More Summary
E. L. Konigsburg's Mixed-Up Files
E. L. Konigsburg, author of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, has died at the age of 83. This book had the best concept of pretty much any children's novel I remember ever reading: two spirited tweens (12-year-old Claudia and 9-year-old Jamie) decide to run away from their boring posh suburban home and hide out in the Metropolitan...
Philosophy Weekend: Denial of Death
(A few months ago, I received an email from an Australian writer named Tim Hawken who had a few article ideas for Litkicks. I published his Kant on Beauty and Heidegger on Art, and it was only after this that Tim revealed to me that he was writing these pieces under the stress of a family health calamity. Show More Summary
Dusklands: Coetzee's Essential Debut Novel
Because the enigmatic South African novelist J. M. Coetzee's first novel Dusklands is out of print, I always figured the book must have been a weak start to a great career. Dusklands was published in 1974, years before Coetzee started hitting his powerful stride with The Life and Times of Michael K. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: Can We Reinvent Our Money System?
There have been big headlines this week about an Internet phenomenon called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open source peer-to-peer virtual money system, unsupported by any government or bank or underground vault stacked with gold bars. It works on the basis of simplicity and transparency, and is backed only by the fact of its own existence. Show More Summary
The Clock Exploded: A Taste of Richard Hell
If proof is ever needed that some of our most talented creative geniuses keep a low profile, we only need to look to Richard Hell, an experimental poet, ex-punk star, novelist and now memoirist, who lives a humble but glorious life around downtown New York City and graces us with a new book every few years. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: What is the Meaning of Scientology?
(Here's another guest Philosophy Weekend post by Alan Bisbort, a scholar of the Beat Generation and American culture). Religious faith is not something one can rationalize, or shove into a semantic corner, or elaborate in words. It's about the mystery of existence, our place in the cosmos, the nature of life, the inevitability of physical death. Show More Summary
Why Watergate Happened: The Awkward Truth About the Mysterious Motive
Despite the enormous impact of the Watergate scandal, the actual purpose of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices has never been conclusively established.-- Wikipedia, The Watergate Scandal. I was thinking about this...Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: Heidegger on Art
(A few weeks ago, guest blogger Tim Hawken wrote about Immanuel Kant's aesthetic theory. Here's his second Philosophy Weekend piece, on a related subject. Hawken lives in Australia and is the author of 'I Am Satan' and 'Hellbound...
Thomas Mallon's Comedy of Watergate
Watergate is not a very distinctive title for a novel about the 1972-74 USA presidential scandal by Thomas Mallon. It was, however, a great name for the scandal. The term "Watergate" originally referred to the office-hotel complex in downtown Washington D.C. where, on a quiet day in June 1972, a gang of hapless spies with indirect connections to the...