1, A font face captures Franz Kafka's handwriting, which turns out be rather pretty in a Kafkaesque sort of way.

2. Tablet Magazine interviews eternal Fug Tuli Kupferberg and points us to his excellent YouTube Channel. I love the audience participation in this little-known literary facts video, in which Tuli reveals that T. S. Eliot was Jewish, that Walt Whitman was heterosexual, that Homer's Iliad was actually written by a guy named Iliad, and that when Dylan Thomas drank himself to death his drink of choice was strawberry milkshakes. All true.

1. What on earth are these little kids doing on this "Kiddie-A-Go-Go" 1967 TV show? Is it the Pony? The Frug, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, the Alligator? It's pretty cute and weird, whatever they're doing.

2. Friend of LitKicks (FOL) Tim Barrus at Electric Literature! What a combination.

(Here Michael Norris continues his exploration of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The previous installment on The Guermantes Way is here. Original painting "Oriane" by David Richardson.)

M.’s infatuation with Oriane, the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust's Guermantes Way, proves to be short lived. One day his mother tells him “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet Mme de Guermantes. You’re becoming a laughing stock.” And with that, he is cured of the malady of his obsession, much more easily than Swann was cured of his obsession with Odette, but once again Proust makes the comparison between love and disease. At this same time, Saint-Loup breaks with Rachel. He goes to Morocco to forget the affair, but sends M. a letter telling him that Mme Stermaria, a beautiful and desirable young woman recently divorced from her husband, is now available. This offers M. occasion for a new passion. He writes her a note, inviting her to dinner, and then waits in his room for an answer.

An amusing Chronicle of Higher Education article by William Major and Bryan Sinche calling for the delisting of Ralph Waldo Emerson from the literary canon has been making the rounds. I even linked to it myself, because I enjoy strong words like these:

1. Forest Hills. I don't know these people but I feel like I do.

Nice Reviewing the Review moment #1: last week I wondered why a reviewer mentioned a character named Maud Norton in Gail Godwin's novel Unfinished Desires without clarifying whether or not this was intended to refer to a well-known blogger named Maud Newton. Gail Godwin emailed me to explain that the name was not only a coincidence but an inspired one:

I chose "Maud" for this particular girl in Unfinished Desires because of Tennyson’s spooky poem: "Come into the garden, Maud; the black bat night has flown ..." And Norton, I don’t know why. Perhaps because, combined with Maud, it slid fairly easily off the tongue.

I still haven't mentally returned from vacation, still haven't gotten back into the LitKicks swing. I've been running around a lot, actually, as well as working hard behind the scenes on a new software platform for the site that has so far only succeeded in breaking the Action Poetry pages (they will be back soon, I promise). More soon! Till then ... links:

1. Thank you to my generous readers for allowing me to workshop my memoir on this site during the full course of this year. I quietly announced this project last December, and when I look back at my initial announcement I see how much my concept has evolved since then. For one thing, I originally conceived it as a 15-year memoir (1993 to 2008), but at about the halfway point I realized that the story would have a perfect arc if I ended it at 2003.

(Once again, a word from our crime/noir genre specialist Garrett Kenyon. -- Levi)

1. A Gulliver playground in Valencia, Spain.

2. Beat poet Andy Clausen on YouTube.