"Situations have ended sad, relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine and Rimbaud
But there's no way I can compare all them scenes to this affair
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go"
   -- Bob Dylan, "Blood on the Tracks"

Congrats to everybody who knew the answer. Yes, as one deft commenter guessed, our wayward writers were French: they are Symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, who were staying at a hotel overlooking Grand Place in the center of Bruxelles, Belgium in July 1873 when their relationship ended ugly.

We had a lot of fun with the first Litkicks Mystery Spot, and more than half of you figured out the correct answer. Today's entry is a bit harder.

At a corner near the center of the Google Maps image above there is a strange plaque celebrating a literary moment in history that could not have possibly seemed worthy of celebration when it occurred. Two famous writers visited a foreign city together, intending to rekindle their troubled and illicit romance, but the getaway went badly. One of the writers wanted to leave, but the other did not want this to happen, and shot the first writer. The wound was not fatal, except to their friendship.

I'm really impressed that 104 of 148 commenters who guessed about the mystery literary photo I posted on Wednesday correctly identified The Great Gatsby as the novel in question. Four other novels that got some mentions were To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Reasonable guesses all, but the fact that the photo was taken in 1924 was the giveaway.

Can you identify the famous literary work represented in the photograph above? Here are a couple of hints:

• You have definitely read this novel. It's one of the most widely loved novels of all time.

• A person is killed, during one of the novel's climactic scenes, by the forked road near the top right of the photo.

Living in the Information Age, as we apparently do, one thing that's easy is finding things to read. We often think of reading in a traditional way -- sitting down with a book and turning pages -- but there's so much more than that. Even before the time when we pretty much always had a web browser open, there were plenty of things available for reading, from the backs of cereal boxes to the graffiti on bathroom walls.

First, it's a feeling. Then the ideas come, maybe fully-formed, or maybe in pieces, sliding ghost-like into your head and playing in front of the walls of your mind for awhile before disappearing again. You watch them, or listen to them, or watch and listen to them, thinking about how to turn them into words. Sitting at a desk chair with one knee drawn up to your chin, staring ahead at the blank document on the computer screen, waiting until you're sure you've got it before finally beginning to type.

So as I mentioned here, the results of the Poetry Foundation's mega-survey is now available on their website and offers all kinds of tasty nuggets about the American public's poetic habits and preferences. Well, while I certainly appreciate all their hard work, I think maybe a quick survey of the passers-by of LitKicks is in order.

Let's get 'er done, shall we?

1. Do you even like poetry or are you totally faking it?

Today's question comes to you courtesy of Singlemalt:

What do you want from a great author?

What do I want? Simple. Make me want to turn the page.

Ok, so I learned something, great. But make me want to turn the page.

He can really turn a phrase, is insightful, is witty. Terrific. But make me want to turn the page.