Literary Kicks

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Beat Generation

Little Known Literary Facts

by Levi Asher on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 09:28 am
Beat Generation, Classics, Eastern European, Fiction, Kid Lit, News, Southern, Television, Transgressive, Tributes

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.

... read more and add your thoughts (5 comments)



Seymour Krim's Howl: I Was Not Destroyed, Mr. Ginsberg!

by Mark Cohen on Monday, February 15, 2010 10:34 am
Beat Generation, Being A Writer, Jewish, Lit-Crit, Poetry

(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."

... read more and add your thoughts (3 comments)



The Wow Effect

by Levi Asher on Thursday, January 28, 2010 05:57 pm
African-American, Beat Generation, Being A Writer, Comedy, LitKicks, Sports, Summer Of Love, Technology, Visual Art

... read more and add your thoughts (1 comment)



New York Times Gets Smaller

by Levi Asher on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 11:52 am
Beat Generation, Economics, Hiphop, Internet Culture, Love, Music, New York City, New York Times Book Review

1. So the New York Times is going ahead with a payment wall for its website. I still say this is a bad business decision. Newspapers have always made more money on advertising than on sales, and newspapers that force readers to pay for online content will significantly harm their advertising numbers without bringing in a lot of subscription revenue. The New York Times is about to get much smaller.

... read more and add your thoughts (5 comments)



Where I'm From 2010

by Levi Asher on Monday, January 18, 2010 08:04 pm
American, Beat Generation, Classics, Comedy, French, Hiphop, Music, New York City, News, Transcendentalism, Tributes

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

... read more and add your thoughts (2 comments)



On The Run

by Levi Asher on Monday, January 11, 2010 05:11 pm
Beat Generation, Classics, Events, Fiction, Internet Culture, Lit-Crit, New York City, Poetry

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:

... read more and add your thoughts (3 comments)



Workshopping

by Levi Asher on Friday, December 25, 2009 02:13 pm
American, Beat Generation, Being A Writer, Classics, Comix, LitKicks, Publishing, Technology, Transcendentalism, Visual Art
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.
... read more and add your thoughts (1 comment)



The Awakener by Helen Weaver

by Levi Asher on Monday, December 7, 2009 07:45 pm
Beat Generation, Biography, Religion

... read more and add your thoughts (15 comments)



Parque Gulliver

by Levi Asher on Friday, December 4, 2009 01:36 pm
Beat Generation, Classics, Comedy, Fiction, Internet Culture, Love, Music, News, Poetry, Religion, Technology, Television


1. A Gulliver playground in Valencia, Spain.

2. Beat poet Andy Clausen on YouTube.
... read more and add your thoughts (2 comments)



Thursday Thoughts

by Levi Asher on Thursday, November 19, 2009 10:49 pm
Beat Generation, Being A Writer, Classics, Existential, French, Internet Culture, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Visual Art


1. This expressionist portrait of Joyce Carol Oates is one of many interpretations of modern authors by Swedish artist Carl Kohler, who died in 2006.

2. If you prefer cute to modern expressionist, here's John Pupdike on Etsy.
... read more and add your thoughts (8 comments)



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