I'm still on vacation. But here are some links:

1. The image above is from a teaser promo for a new movie based on Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. I don't know what to think. You be the judge.

2. It was fifty years ago that Ernest Hemingway took his own life. David Ulin has some thoughts about Hemingway's impact (and lack of impact) today. Also, the FBI really was spying on him.

3. Words Without Borders' July issue is about The Arab Spring.

Here's some stuff I've checked out and liked lately:

It's annoying that Keith Richards is more widely known today for his long-past hard-partying rock star excesses than for being (still) a world-class musician and songwriter. I almost didn't want to read his extensive, acclaimed new autobiography Life because I'm not interested in hearing "the stories", and I certainly don't care about the legend. But I do care about the great music and career of the Rolling Stones, so I dove into the book, and was immediately captured by the author's warm, thoughtful voice.

Life is at its best when Keith Richards talks about the music, about rhythm guitar, about the wisdom of Chicago blues (as he understood it growing up in Dartford, a suburb of London). There are brilliant passages about the lazy guitar tricks used by Jimmy Reed, about the difference between six-string standard tuning and five-string open tuning, about what it's like to collaborate with the talented but egotistical Mick Jagger. Richards is laying down an ethical point of view in this memoir: he values friends (male and female) and close family (his parents and his children) above all else, he laughs at the trappings of fame (his disgusted reaction to Mick Jagger's recent knighthood is fun to read), he reads avidly and keeps a vast library in his own house, he works hard as hell to make every Stones record and concert as good as it can be. He also gave up heroin thirty years ago, and I hope this book will help people realize that junkie-hood was never the most interesting thing about Keith Richards.

NOTE: trying something new, I listened to this book on audio CDs in my car instead of reading it. I don't always enjoy the audio format, but Johnny Depp's well-considered impersonation of Keith Richards's distinctive slow drawl and chuckle makes this one work. Well done.

1. This image of P. G. Wodehouse's bookshelf is just one of the incidental delights to be found in the BBC's literary video archive, In Their Own Words. Other authors showing their remarkable presence in these historical broadcasts include Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark, William Golding, Robert Graves and E. M. Forster and J. R. R. Tolkien (via drmabuse).

(Just one minor note about the text accompanying the P. G. Wodehouse interview, in which the shy humorist plays incessantly with his pipe and tries to give honest answers to tough questions: Wodehouse did live in Eastport, on Long Island's East End, but Eastport ain't the Hamptons, not really even close. But what would the BBC know about Long Island?)

2. Jonathan Franzen's upcoming novel Freedom is getting major, major news coverage, including the cover of Time magazine (he's the first novelist on the cover of Time since Stephen King ten years ago). I haven't read the novel yet, but I liked his previous family saga The Corrections and am looking forward to reviewing Freedom for another web publication as soon as my review copy shows up. In the meantime, here's a piece from The Millions about all the other writers who have been on the cover of Time since the magazine was founded in 1923.

1. I love it that the "Penguin paperback look" has become a design meme. BoingBoing points out that a set of album covers by Ty Lettau of Sound Of Design resembles the retro Penguin look. This calls to mind a more explicit recent implementation of the same idea by LittlePixel (great work, but there are way too many Simple Minds albums here).

2. Some of my friends in the book business think literary publishing is about to crash like a lead zeppelin. There was a tremendous uproar in the book world today: influential literary agent Andrew Wylie (Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, the estates of William S. Burroughs, John Cheever, John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov) has made a bold, unprecedented e-books deal with Amazon that will give Amazon and its Kindle format exclusive access to many important e-book titles. Exclusive access has (thankfully) never not part of the literary publishing industry tradition, and the major publishers don't like being cut out of the profit equation, which is why CEO John Sargent of Macmillan (who is emerging as an unofficial spokesman for the publishing industry when it battles with Amazon) and spokesperson Stuart Applebaum of Random House are planning to put up a fight. Many of my twitter friends seem to be lining up on the Macmillan/Random House side, objecting to Wylie and Amazon's audacious move. Me? I'll walk the line a little longer. I like audacity, and God knows the e-book marketplace can use a kick in the ass.

1. After interviewing Philip Roth, James Marcus turned a culturally significant Roth utterance into an audio dance track (via Moby Lives).

2. Sarah Weinman unearths another writer in the Singer family, Hinde Esther Singer.

At least once a year, the folks at LitKicks corporate headquarters drag me out of my dungeon and demand my yearly report on the latest audio gems in the literary world. From spoken word to more traditional poetry readings, a verse takes on a life of its own when read by the voice that dreamed it up in the first place. I have a special affinity for the blending of poetry, personality and music, so it's my pleasure to bring you the 2006 Audio Roundup:

Ask a group of poets for their advice on how to read or write poetry and you'll likely get as many answers as there are poets. When these differences are distilled into poems, we end up with a rich array of work. Here are two poets on poetry just in time for the weekend.

In a recent online discussion of how to teach students haiku, someone pointed out this gem of a recording: Ginsberg on "writing slogans", haiku and more...

LitKicks is proud to present, for the first time ever, an original 1970 recording of Gregory Corso performing his classic poem 'BOMB', courtesy of Graham Seidman.

Graham Seidman is an artist who presents culture and history as beauty through his photography and mosaic presentations. As a Beat Hotel "alum", he has generously shared his memories and stories of Corso, Allen Ginsberg and others with the LitKicks community. Here Graham tells the story of how Gregory Corso visited Puerto Rico and recorded the reading of BOMB that we are proud to present in this feature.

1. I'd always wanted to see a production of Beat poet Michael McClure's controversial hippie-era-vintage play "The Beard", which was the subject of a famous Los Angeles censorship battle back when Ronald Reagan was governor of California (other famous censorship targets in that era included "The Love Book" by Lenore Kandel).

1. The Literary Kicks Summer Poetry Happening at the Bitter End in New York City turned out to be an amazing night -- read all about it and check out some pictures here.

Also, Bob Holman was nice enough to remember the event by putting up the words spoken by Charles Plymell here.