1. The Beat Poetry Happy Hour will take place at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City this Thursday, April 17 from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, featuring Tao Lin, Zachary German, Clarissa Beyah Taylor, Larissa Shmailo, Joy Leftow and, of all people, me playing bongo drums. How, you may wonder, did I end up playing bongo drums? Well, it has something to do with a recent Bowery Poetry Club Beat Poetry Happy Hour I attended.

[Editor's Note: it's Yiddish Week here at LitKicks. Today we've got a review of Michael Chabon's new novel and an account of a recent Chabon reading by our West Coast friend Cal Godot. Tomorrow we're looking at Yiddish itself, and examining why it's suddenly become the trendiest new language since PHP. -- Levi Asher]

The Yiddish Policeman's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

PEN World Voices is a series of more than sixty encounters with writers from around the world, most of them taking place in small rooms before small audiences. But Wednesday night at Town Hall in Manhattan's theater district is "the big show", star-studded and sold-out, and host Salman Rushdie seems almost apologetic about this in his introductory remarks from the Town Hall stage.

I've just seen T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock performed before my eyes, complete with spilling reams of paper, booklights, hats, coffee cups and spoons and three human beings who danced and acted the poem out, section by section, in a studio in midtown Manhattan.

I attended an interesting display of speed poetry last night at the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York featuring two acclaimed practitioners of the verse form, Paul Muldoon and Brad Leithauser. An eager audience of literati, blogerati and peoplorati had gathered to watch, quietly munching on grapes and cheese or sipping wine, as the two poets nervously typed into laptops connected to QuickMuse.com. The odd experiment made for a good evening of spoken word, and the finished poems aren't bad at all.

1. Turner Classic Movies (the one cable channel movie I'd keep if I could keep only one) just ran an old chestnut from 1943, The Human Comedy, William Saroyan's story of a couple of sweet kids named Ulysses and Homer growing up in inland California's raisin country, starring Mickey Rooney. The movie is corny as hell but I loved every minute.

Leslie Harpold, a widely loved blogger and internet artist, died of bronchitis last week. Leslie was known for sites like Smug.com, an early proto-blog, and her other past projects included Hoopla.com and MotherFucker.com (I don't think she ever did anything with this domain name, but she was very proud to have owned it).

British novelist Ian McEwan appeared before a large and appreciative group of students and literary New Yorkers at Hunter College on the Upper East Side this evening. He read an amusing and touching selection from his upcoming novel, On Chesil Beach, which will be published in the U.K. in April 2007 and in the U.S.A. two months later.

It's sad when any bookstore closes. But all bookstores are not the same, and I had vastly different reactions when I heard that two independent New York City bookstores, the Gotham Book Mart and Coliseum Books, are both closing down.

1. I attended an outstanding group reading last night at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. The theme was Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and the event was sponsored by a group called Seeds of Peace. The event began with a bang when Leora Skolkin-Smith read a surprising personal document, a passionate love letter an anonymous Muslim teenager in Beirut had written to her Jerusalemite Jewish mother in the 1930's.