Blog Profile / Literary Kicks
| URL : | http://www.litkicks.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Literature | |
| Posts on Regator: | 935 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.4 | |
| Archived Since: | March 2, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
David Amram on Wonderama
While we're watching counterculture moments on television from the 1960s,here's something else I just stumbled across: the joyful jazz composer, performer and beatnik David Amram on the kid's show Wonderama. He demonstrates his favorite...Show More Summary
Why Am I Reading Harry Potter Again (and Again)?
The movies are over, J.K. Rowling has moved on to adult fiction, and yet here I am, lying curled between the couch and the heater, pinching the fat inner spine of The Goblet of Fire between my thumb and forefinger. This is my fifth time. Show More Summary
Dark Heat by Barry Graham and Vince Larue
I don't know much about the noir genre, but I checked out a new graphic novel called Dark Heat by Barry Graham and Vince Larue because I like Vince's beat-inspired writing and artwork, which often emphasizes themes from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. Show More Summary
A Little Emily Dickinson Music
Efrat Ben Zur, a talented young Israeli singer with a forceful style that reminds me of a lot of Natalie Merchant and just a little bit of Sinead O'Connor, has released an entire album of songs based on Emily Dickinson poems. Here'sShow More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: When Cognitive Bias Gets Scary
This surreal image is a real screenshot from a real website -- the victory website that went live after the polls closed on USA election day 2012, because apparently, stunningly, incredibly... Mitt Romney's staff was that sure that they would win. Show More Summary
A Midsummer Night's Beatles
A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the funnest play William Shakespeare ever wrote. It winds down, after several twisted noctural love stories resolve themselves, with a usually hilarious (if performed well) play within a play, staged...Show More Summary
Whore Stories, by Tyler Stoddard Smith
There are a lot of ways a book called Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession can go wrong. Fortunately, this brisk new study of the cultural history of prostitution by Tyler Stoddard Smith aims for big intellectual and sociopolitical connections, and finds quite a few. The book is mainly a collection of anecdotes about famous...
Please Write A Poem Today
Please write us a poem today. Anything you want to get out of your system? Any thoughts you want to send into the public stream, either about election day 2012 or whatever else is on your mind? The new integrated version of Litkicks Action Poetry is still not ready (it'll be here soon), but here's a simple thread for anybody with a verse or a rhyme or a message to share.
The Africa Scene
I'll be reading a lot of books from or about Africa this winter. I'm starting with Geoff Wisner's A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa. Then I'll be digging into In the House of the Interpreter...
Philosophy Weekend: Notes on an Insane Election Season
Shared Experience. For all their gross inanity, presidential elections in the United States of America are enthralling shared experiences, like sporting events or rock concerts. The collective mind buzzes and reacts as a single thinking...Show More Summary
Fleeting Tweets From Joyce Carol Oates
What a sweet surprise! The calescent American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has taken to twittering between novels, and she's awfully good at it. "A tweet is a synaptic leap with no neuron awaiting", she wrote on October 18, preceded by...Show More Summary
On The Road: Sal Paradise Hits The Silver Screen
The new movie called On The Road begins in an outdoor Manhattan parking lot. Sweaty rushed Dean Moriarty is seen in close-up, screeching big clucky cars into tight spots as customers grimace in disapproval. Dean's new friend Sal Paradise stands by, watching with admiration. Show More Summary
What Good Is A Penguin Random House Merger?
Penguin and Random House are merging. This is big news because Random House and Penguin are two of the biggest of the "Big Six" publishing firms that currently rule the book business (the other four are Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Hachette). Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: The Nanny State and the Nanny Job
No word has been thrown around more during the USA presidential election of 2012 than "jobs". The single greatest failure of the Obama administration, according to Mitt Romney and his supporters, is the unemployment rate. More jobs, we are told, will save the economy, and Mitt Romney has pledged to create 12 million new ones. Show More Summary
Gary Snyder, Peter Coyote, Joanne Kyger and Huey Lewis: Celebrating Lew Welch
"I'm looking to see if there's a guy who looks like Lew Welch in this audience," says poet Gary Snyder at a San Francisco tribute to Welch, the sensitive and complex Beat poet who was represented as the soulful, restless Dave Wain in Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur. It's a cutting thought, because Gary Snyder was among the last to see Lew Welch alive before he...
Drawing Finnegan
James Joyce's experimental masterwork Finnegans Wake gets a visual treatment by Jason Novak in the Paris Review. Novak wastes little time pondering the novel's meaning or plotline, noting that it "begins halfway through its final sentence" (indeed, it does). Myself, I've never been able to actually finish reading Joyce's grand gesture to introspective...
A Glimpse of Ray Bradbury (and Groucho)
Here's something unusual: a 1955 appearance by science-fiction author Ray Bradbury on Groucho Marx's famous TV game show "You Bet Your Life". Stocky and hearty, the 35-year-old author is at this time already a successful writer, but not yet a famous one. Show More Summary
Philosophy Weekend: The Randian Moment
Two and a half years ago, I watched the televised bipartisan Health Care Summit called by President Obama to help find a way to pass his embattled but vitally important health insurance reform bill (a few weeks later, Obamacare finally became law). Show More Summary
Hitchhiking With Vanessa
"A small crowd gathered around the dumpster in the rain. Word filtered back that the girl was a teenage hitchhiker. I remember thinking that it could be me, because I was also a teenage hitchhiker." That's Vanessa Veselka, up-and-coming...Show More Summary
Neil Young's Book Is Not A Great Memoir, But It's A Great Something
I dug into Neil Young's memoir Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream with a lot of anticipation, because he is one of my very favorite singer-songwriters, and because I've followed Neil's work long enough to know that a long session of candid and honest soul-searching with this brilliant and enigmatic rocker/hippie is a rare thing. I'm also excited to...