(Please welcome Mark Cohen, author of Missing A Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim and proprietor of the culture blog Stumbling Into Jews. -- Levi)

Author and literary critic Seymour Krim has fallen off today’s Beat bookshelf. But when he let loose in 1957 with his slanted, rankling, fight-picking essays in the Village Voice he was a Beat, because what else could he be? Especially when he saluted Jack Kerouac's On the Road as his escape hatch from literary criticism, his pre-Beat beat. And then in 1960 he edited The Beats and appeared in The Beat Scene. Still, his first and most celebrated book of essays, the 1961 Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, made it clear he was less a Beat than one of the establishment’s casualties (unless that’s one category of Beat). With its foreword by Norman Mailer, and back cover summary of Krim’s publications and death-riddled family history, Nearsighted Cannoneer is torn between sticking its tongue out and making excuses for what the reader will find inside. Krim mined that inner tension his entire writing career, which produced two more collections of essays, garnered him a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, and brought him teaching posts at Columbia and Iowa. Since his death in 1989, Beat anthologies have ignored him. But he still has impressive fans, including James Wolcott, Phillip Lopate, and Vivian Gornick, who called Krim "a Jewish Joan Didion."

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:

LitKicks is on vacation (with some new software under construction) until the new year, and nothing's going to bring me back today, not even a NYTBR featuring the latest J. M. Coetzee plus Rick Moody on Led Zeppelin. Instead, here's our annual Action Poetry end-of-year retrospective. Please click to read a randomly selected poem. See you in the new decade!

This weekend's New York Times Book Review tries a fun musical experiment, inviting singers Suzanne Vega and Nellie McKay to review two Beatle books, respectively, Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin and John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman.

1. S. A. Griffin, a Los Angeles poet, actor, beatnik and longtime friend of LitKicks, is going to be filling the shell of a bomb with pages of poetry and touring the USA with it in 2010.

It's a funny thing about book reviews. It's been documented by publishing industry researchers that a negative book review can sometimes bump sales as well as a positive one, and good writers have bemoaned the fact that a great review, even a great front cover review in the New York Times Book Review, might not help sales at all. Of course, publisher incompetence can help cause the latter situation, as was recently revealed in a rather shocking New York Magazine interview:

1. A Gulliver playground in Valencia, Spain.

2. Beat poet Andy Clausen on YouTube.

Eco-Libris, a company dedicated to positive environmental practices in the book publishing business, is currently sponsoring a Green Books Campaign, a blogger event designed to call attention to green publishing in which 100 blogs will simultaneously review 100 green-published books.

I was wondering if Sam Savage's worthy The Cry of the Sloth would get attention in the New York Times Book Review (Savage's earlier Firmin did not). The novel only gets a paragraph within Joseph Salvatore's "Fiction Chronicle" in this weekend's Review, and Salvatore finds that "as rich as the humor is, such satire does not finally sustain the novel".

Four new books I'm happy to recommend to you:



Unwanted Hopeless Romantic Morons by Geoffrey Alexander Parsons