Beat Generation
Workshopping
by Levi Asher on Friday, December 25, 2009 02:13 pmAmerican, 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. The further adventures of my life (working for A&E Network/History Channel, hosting the LitKicks 24 Hour Poetry Party, turning LitKicks into a blog, joining the Litblog Co-op, working for Pearl Jam, jumping aboard the Twitter revolution, getting married) will have to wait for the sequel.
So, what's next for the draft I've just completed? I'm very happy with the response I got from many of you, and I certainly think I've got a mandate to prepare a book proposal and seek a publisher. Some may ask, do I even need a publisher? Haven't I published it already, and isn't the book biz a total clusterfuck right now? Yes and yes, but even so I want to give this a try, and I wouldn't mind working with an excellent editor to bring out the very best in this material. My search for a publisher may also prove entertaining in its own right: I wrote the book out here "in full view", and I plan to handle the next steps the same way. Thanks again to everybody who posted comments, suggestions, feedback or advice, and you'll be hearing more about this soon.
2. I've got some busy days ahead -- as I work on this book proposal, I'm also hoping to relaunch Literary Kicks in Drupal. I've barely begun the work so I don't know if it will fly or not. Stay tuned, I hope.
I'm also planning to shut the site down for the rest of the holidays, and will shortly be putting up an Action Poetry Random Poem Selector like we like to do every year around this time.
Okay, enough about LitKicks ... here are a few more literary links you might like:
3. An informative look at the circumstances behind Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
4. PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah calls sentencing of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo a "mockery" and a "scandal".
5. Beat-related videos by the excellent Laki Vazakas.
6. Was John Keats killed by a bad review?
7. Arthur Conan Doyle as Metafictionist.
8. Wizzywig, a hacker memoir by Ed Piskor.
9. Yay! Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is heading our way soon.
10. A word cloud representing Houghton Mifflin's Best American Short Stories series.
11. Drawings from Moby-Dick.
12. Very nice: Pride and Prejudice in emoticons.
13. You know that Joseph Conrad classic. The N-Word of the Narcissus.
14. And, just to prove I have some Christmas spirit, here's a Christmas memory from Henry David Thoreau (via @geoffwisner).
So, what's next for the draft I've just completed? I'm very happy with the response I got from many of you, and I certainly think I've got a mandate to prepare a book proposal and seek a publisher. Some may ask, do I even need a publisher? Haven't I published it already, and isn't the book biz a total clusterfuck right now? Yes and yes, but even so I want to give this a try, and I wouldn't mind working with an excellent editor to bring out the very best in this material. My search for a publisher may also prove entertaining in its own right: I wrote the book out here "in full view", and I plan to handle the next steps the same way. Thanks again to everybody who posted comments, suggestions, feedback or advice, and you'll be hearing more about this soon.
2. I've got some busy days ahead -- as I work on this book proposal, I'm also hoping to relaunch Literary Kicks in Drupal. I've barely begun the work so I don't know if it will fly or not. Stay tuned, I hope.
I'm also planning to shut the site down for the rest of the holidays, and will shortly be putting up an Action Poetry Random Poem Selector like we like to do every year around this time.
Okay, enough about LitKicks ... here are a few more literary links you might like:
3. An informative look at the circumstances behind Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
4. PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah calls sentencing of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo a "mockery" and a "scandal".
5. Beat-related videos by the excellent Laki Vazakas.
6. Was John Keats killed by a bad review?
7. Arthur Conan Doyle as Metafictionist.
8. Wizzywig, a hacker memoir by Ed Piskor.
9. Yay! Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is heading our way soon.
10. A word cloud representing Houghton Mifflin's Best American Short Stories series.
11. Drawings from Moby-Dick.
12. Very nice: Pride and Prejudice in emoticons.
13. You know that Joseph Conrad classic. The N-Word of the Narcissus.
14. And, just to prove I have some Christmas spirit, here's a Christmas memory from Henry David Thoreau (via @geoffwisner).
The Awakener by Helen Weaver
by Levi Asher on Monday, December 7, 2009 07:45 pm
Nineteen years ago, a French translator and one-time publishing industry insider began writing a memoir of her time as Jack Kerouac's girlfriend in the mid 1950s. Helen Weaver had been affectionately immortalized by Kerouac (who, of course, wrote about every significant person in his life) as Ruth Heaper in Desolation Angels. Weaver spent a long time preparing her side of the story, and in the meantime many of Jack Kerouac's other lovers published memoirs: Off The Road by Carolyn Cassady, Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, You'll Be Okay by Edie Kerouac-Parker, Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats by Joan Haverty Kerouac.
But The Awakener by Helen Weaver turns out to be worth waiting for. When the book begins, Weaver is a cheerful editorial assistant at Farrar Straus whose parents wanted to spoil her with luxury and good manners, but who instead chose to spoil herself with wild experience, cheap wine and bohemian style. She meets Jack Kerouac about a year before On The Road made him famous, and is immediately knocked out by his good looks. They bond easily but she can't endure his alcoholic inconsideration and eventually kicks him out of her apartment, at which point he hooks up with Joyce Johnson and the book's direct connection to Kerouac ends. But the story goes on: Weaver becomes briefly involved with Lenny Bruce, works with Susan Sontag on a groundbreaking edition of Antonin Artaud's poetry, finds peace as an astrologer, Buddhist and occasional activist. A smart confidence underlies her bemused feminine understatement, and this book is a summation of a deeply thoughtful life.
Some facts that surprised and pleased me as I read this book: that the original Broadway cast recording of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady played a big role in Weaver and Kerouac's romance; that both Kerouac and Lenny Bruce, despite their much-documented excesses, managed to be sensitive and tender in her presence; that as a respected literary translator Weaver made it a game to find a way to place the title of a rock and roll song into every book she produced. The primitive rock and roll scene of the mid-1950s is a touchpoint for Weaver's life, and for her book: she was in her early 20s when Elvis Presley hit the scene, and most of her peers were too sophisticated for the new fad. Weaver, pointedly, was not.
The Awakener includes a funny later scene at Allen Ginsberg's apartment with ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, and an enjoyable account of the 1994 Beat Conference at New York University, where she reunited with many of her former friends and rivals for the last time. There's also much commentary on Buddhism, the Beat religion, which she only comes to accept later in life but seems to understand well.
The Awakener (the title refers indirectly to Kerouac's posthumously published Buddhist text Wake Up) is also valuable for calling attention to the often forgotten novel in which Weaver is fictionalized. The five Jack Kerouac novels that form the great core chronology, in my opinion, are On The Road, Subterraneans, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels and Big Sur. Desolation Angels may be the most life-affirming of all Kerouac's works, and The Awakener nicely echoes this all-embracing and positive tone.
Parque Gulliver
by Levi Asher on Friday, December 4, 2009 01:36 pmBeat 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.
3. Amazingly, the Velvet Underground will be reuniting at the New York Public Library, though I'm not clear if this will be a talk, a musical performance or both. It's sad that late sweet-toned lead guitarist Sterling Morrison will be missing, but it's a nice surprise to see the reemergence of Doug Yule, who is widely disliked for replacing the great John Cale on bass after Reed kicked Cale out, but who helped them record their best album.
4. Jerome's Niece, a Buddhist poetry blog.
5. Onetime Heeb writer Jason Diamond offers a "Kaddish for Jewish Zines".
6. In the end, after a sluggish start, Electric Literature's much-discussed experiment with Twitter fiction turned up an excellent Rick Moody story about relationship anxiety, thwarted love and people who cling to their phones on dates. An excellent Rick Moody story, that is, but not necessarily an excellent Twitter story. Moody focused on the 140 character limit, but I think Twitter's most distinguishing feature is not its character count but its pacing and easy interpersonal immediacy (note: you can follow me on Twitter here). It became clear why Moody missed this when he revealed in an interview that he'd taken on this project because Electric Literature had asked him to, not because he had any actual interest in Twitter. There are many writers who do get Twitter -- say, Colson Whitehead, who is marvelous at it -- and I hope Electric Lit will turn to one of these writers for their next foray. Overall: great publicity, moving story, well done all around.
7. There will not be a Literary Kicks Best Books of 2009 list. Please excuse my grumpiness, but I mostly find these aggregate lists annoying and unremarkable. I do like to read personal lists of lifelong favorites by smart readers, but I don't care for annual lists or lists put together by groups.
8. Henry Rollins visits Bhopal, site of a chemical plant disaster 25 years ago.
9. For database techies, here's NoSQL. Elsewhere, here's just plain No.
10. I don't agree with this. I'm amazed at how good "The Office" manages to be, season after season. Sure, there are ups and downs, but this is one of those rare shows -- like "Twin Peaks", like "The Honeymooners" -- that represents television's ascent to the realm of literature. I will watch it until Jim and Pam drop dead.
Thursday Thoughts
by Levi Asher on Thursday, November 19, 2009 10:49 pmBeat 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.
3. Sarah Palin's new memoir appears to be a hit, enraging many Americans who dislike her, but I think it's time for many of us to lighten up about this clever charmer. Palin is clearly not qualified to be President -- but then neither was George W. Bush and he actually got elected, whereas Sarah Palin does not seem interested in playing it safe and is really very unlikely to even get her party's nomination in 2012. I strongly disagree with almost everything she stands for, but I think it's a waste of effort for liberals to focus their anger on the one funny and brash big talker in the conservative gang, instead of on the countless bland mumbling nobodies selling similar platforms, like Mitt Romney, Joe Lieberman, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Dick Cheney.
I do thank God that John McCain and Sarah Palin did not win the last election, but I honestly believe that Sarah Palin was the less dangerous part of that ticket, if only because she appears to have no foreign policy agenda at all, unlike John "blood and guts" McCain, who wanted to be a war hero so bad he probably stormed the beaches at Normandy every night in his dreams.
Anyway, I do think a Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Sarah Palin cage match is great idea. And Tom Watson also semi-defends Sarah Palin here.
4. The American Library Association is looking for your essays about libraries.
5. Electric Literature will be tweeting a new work by Rick Moody. I have watched a few "tweeted novels" fly by, usually in disjointed reverse-chronological sentence fragments that repel any attempt at reading. Will these apparently clued-in folks find the formula that works? Hint: we write our tweets forward, but we read them backwards. Hint #2: if you're tweeting a novel and you can't make your sentences work at 140 characters or less, you're really not tweeting a novel.
6. I like these classic British rock stamps a lot.
7. A robotic version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, on the other hand, just creeps me out.
8. Despite being billed as "best writing tips ever", Allen Ginsberg's newly published writing tips aren't quite as great as his friend Jack Kerouac's. But they are pretty good.
9. Maud Newton is related to Pretty Boy Floyd.
10. Was Nietzsche pious? Maybe so, maybe so.
11. Frequent LitKicks contributor and Proust expert Mike Norris on being an ESL teacher in Paris.
12. Some good literary agents who are looking for new writers.
Les Mouches
by Levi Asher on Monday, October 26, 2009 10:56 pmBeat Generation, Being A Writer, Comedy, Comix, Economics, Events, Existential, Internet Culture, News, Poetry, Psychology, Publishing, Summer Of Love, Visual Art
1. A creepy publicity stunt involving flies carrying little paper advertisements at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Doesn't this make you feel bad for the flies?
2. San Francisco Beat/hippie poet Lenore Kandel has died at the age of 77. Here's an appreciation of her work by John Yates.
3. Carl Jung's awesome visual side.
4. A detailed financial biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (And why not? Money was certainly among his major themes).
5. East Village poetry legend and perennial Presidential candidate Sparrow and LitKicks poet Mickey Z. are creating a poetry anthology together and they say:
Calling all feminists, wizards, Queer theorists, ex-Black Panthers, Christians, Green activists, avant-gardists, Kabbalists, vegans, Hawaiian nationalists, kickboxers, Punks, Hip Hop evangelists, New New Leftists, pink-haired emo warriors, organic gardeners -- submit your work for "The Big Book of Revolutionary Poetry," edited by Sparrow and Mickey Z. Send up to 3 poems to: sparrow44@juno.com or info@mickeyz.net
Go for it, I say.
6. Guernica Magazing is turning 5! Jonathan Ames, Howard Zinn, Katie Halper, Mia Farrow and David Byrne will be joining the party this Wednesday, October 28. Wish I could make it (but I can't).
7. The eternal philosophical battle over the real-life ethics of German intellectual Martin Heidegger goes on. Personally, I don't agonize over Heidegger's Nazi past, because I never thought much of his work. You can find the same message -- the utter immediacy of existence -- in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or Sartre, and with a lot more finesse and humor.
8. Building a brain inside a supercomputer. And here I am just trying to get Drupal to work.
9. I recently posted about Fall 2009 books I'm looking forward to; little did I know that Orhan Pamuk and Kurt Vonnegut books were coming out too ...
10. Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid is rocking the cash registers. My stepdaughter reads these books and I think they're hilarious.
11. I love this, from McSweeneys: YouTube Comment, of e. e. cummings?.
12. HTMLGiant on Glimmer Train: "Winning one of their ubiquitous contests is like winning $2 on a $2 scratch ticket or a free small soda during McDonald’s Monopoly promotion." They also admit that Glitter Train was once "a decent, if not rather traditional literary magazine". I used to read them, but I don't read print literary journals much at all anymore.
13. If you've been reading my memoir, some of these events will be familiar: A History of the Internet from 1969 to Today.
14. Speaking of bygone times, one-time high-rolling community website GeoCities is shutting down. Caryn is sad about this, and xkcd posted a tribute.
211th Chorus
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:53 pm
1. Jack Kerouac died forty years ago today. I'm not doing much to commemorate the occasion, though I am hoping to see the new film One Fast Move Or I'm Gone soon. If I were in Lowell, Massachusetts I'd go on this walking tour tonight, if I were in Northport, Long Island I'd check out Patrick Fenton's tribute play, and if I were in San Francisco I'd go to The Beat Museum this Saturday at 11 am for a walking tour with John Allen Cassady. But I'm not in any of these places, so I think I'll just recite Kerouac's poem "211th Chorus" and hope for the best:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures,
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills --
All the endless conception of living beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind --
Poor! I wish I was free
Of the slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead
2. Ian Pearl, brother of literary/mystery novelist Matthew Pearl, has written a riveting Huffington Post article about his outrageous experience with the health care insurance system our Republican Party wants so badly to preserve. Pearl has muscular dystrophy, and his article is called "I Am Not A Dog".
3. On a completely different note yet again: Barnes and Noble presents some new competition for the Kindle: The Nook.
Relics: Jim Carroll's Funeral Card
by Levi Asher on Monday, September 21, 2009 07:14 pm
1. Catholic boy to the end ... from Cassie Carter's long-running fan site, here's Jim Carroll's funeral card.
2. Hemingway does Hemingway: actress Mariel Hemingway intends to create a movie based on her grandfather's gossipy classic A Movable Feast (via The Millions).
3. St. Francis College in Brooklyn is hosting a conference on Walt Whitman and the Beats and has issued an open call for papers.
4. I don't know what to expect from the new film version of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. I hated John Malkovich's overacting in A Portrait of a Lady, and I'm concerned that he'll turn this book's blank narrator into a volcano of emotion, as is his way. Still, I am looking forward to seeing the film and I hope for the best. Here are some reactions via Literary Saloon.
5. I'm skeptical when everybody gets excited about a newly found lost work by a great author, especially when very few of these people have read any of the already-published works by said great author. Still, Carl Jung's "Red Book" has a hell of a back story. Jung is a LitKicks favorite and I recommend him highly, though I think newcomers are better off jumping in with The Undiscovered Self or Memories, Dreams, Reflections rather than this new apparent beast.
6. Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Eve Ensler and Art Spiegelman will appear at a PEN America event to read from recently released USA government memos about torture.
7, Aquinas (via Books Inq.).
8. If Charles Bukowski were Charles M. Schulz.
9. A new book provides a sideways glance at Moby Dick by including only the parts a different "easy version" of the book left out. Let's just hope nobody gets a brilliant idea for "Moby Dick and Zombies".
10. Maud Newton gathers expressions.
11. Jamelah Earle evaluates words.
12. A new Jason Reitman/George Clooney movie called Up In The Air is based on a novel by Walter Kirn, one of the better regular critics at the New York Times Book Review.
13. Interesting thoughts about how a book's intended level of sophistication may affect its chosen point of view.
14. Like Fire is a new literary blog created by Lisa Peet and other refugees from Readerville.
15. Two months ago I wrote a post titled "Not the Jack Kerouac Estate Battle Again". If you didn't catch it the first time, I wrote this because a new court ruling has upset a long-running dispute about the Kerouac archives, and I just knew we'd be getting into it again. Since then, many interested parties have responded to this article's comments thread, including several notable individuals connected to Jack Kerouac in one way or another.
As I've said before, I don't take this battle as seriously as many of the principals do. With Jack Kerouac long safe-in-heaven dead, the battle has narrowed to a catfight over the disposition of his relics, and I've never been particularly interested in any writer's relics. Some observers locate the blame for Jack's daughter Jan Kerouac's troubled life and early death on this mess, but I don't see a clear connection there. Anyway, the conversation in this comments thread are fascinating in their own way, and I wonder if someday somebody will write a book about the Jack Kerouac estate battle. If they do, the discussion in this thread may provide some raw material. It's not a book I'd want to write, though I probably wouldn't be able to resist reading it.
Bright Star
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 07:22 pm
1. A movie about John Keats? I haven't seen it yet but I like the idea. It's called Bright Star, it's directed by Jane Campion, and you can see a preview here. I was starting to think we'd never hear about another classic British literary figure other than Jane Austen again.
2. The new journal Electric Literature has its own YouTube channel.
3. Richard Hell, long unhappy with the way his mostly-forgotten second Voidoids album Destiny Street turned out in 1982, has decided to completely remake the album. The new work, a powerful barrage of poetry and guitar, stands up well to Hell and the Voidoids's signature album Blank Generation. His angry and anguished take on Bob Dylan's "Going Going Gone" seems to encapsulate the album's underlying mood. I like it that Hell has the courage to speak up for one of his own lost masterpieces, to let us know that we might have missed something important if we missed it (as I had) the first time. I am sad, though, to learn from a related story that great Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine died, an apparent suicide, several years ago.
4. More sequels: Yoko Ono has released a new Plastic Ono Band album, Between My Head and the Sky.
5. More sequels! I don't know what to expect from Jay-Z's Blueprint 3, but Blueprint and Blueprint 2 are autobiographical masterpieces, so I'm expecting a lot. A friend of LitKicks will be contributing an article on the new Jay here very shortly ...
6. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City has a new cover. Same restaurant, no towers. I liked it better before.
7. Who was that girl Jack Kerouac noticed in Robert Frank's photo?
8. My kids are probably aged out of this one by now (or maybe not) but I am still glad to hear that Lemony Snicket is coming back.
9. David Byrne on The Kindle Experience.
10. Richard Eskow on Ted Kennedy and Allen Ginsberg.
11. I've previously mentioned a book called Republic of Barbecue, an oral history co-authored by Carly Kocurek. The book is now out, and naturally is on twitter too. Definitely worth checking out.
12. The Centaurian, a long-running website devoted to the work of John Updike, sends a sudden farewell message.
13. Bellemeade Books, a worthwhile new blog with a classicist focus.
14. The Meaning of Tingo and the Wonder of Whiffling.
The Lunch at 50
by Levi Asher on Friday, August 21, 2009 04:25 pm
1. If you're in Chicago next week, you may want to join a 50th birthday party for Naked Lunch, the novel by William S. Burroughs that invented trippy postmodern noir way before Thomas Pynchon had the same idea. The Chicago birthday party (featuring folks like John Giorno, Bill Ayers, Penny Arcade, Peter Weller and James Grauerholz) is tied in to a new documentary movie, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, directed by Yony Leyser that looks quite good.
2. I'm also really looking forward to a documentary film called One Fast Move and I'm Gone about Jack Kerouac's crack-up novel Big Sur. The film's original soundtrack ought to be something special: a series of original compositions based on Kerouac's Big Sur by Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Son Volt's Jay Farrar. Song titles include "California Zephyr", "Breathe Our Iodine", "Final Horrors" and "The Void".
3. Charley Plymell on S. Clay Wilson.
4. Bill Ectric interviews poet and lyricist Pete Brown.
5. Paul Krassner writes about Woodstock in the Huffington Post.
6. Boing Boing on Alan Turing.
7. Kevin Birmingham's upcoming book about the writing of Ulysses sounds quite good.
8. You're a Good Man, Gregor Brown.
9. Xkcd ponders the Kindle.
10. Beauty Road-Test: KO Nailpolish by Laura Albert.
11. Fernando Pivano, the translator who introduced Beat literature to Italy, has died.
An Embarrassment of Archives
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 10, 2009 01:34 pmBeat Generation, Breakfast Club, Classics, Comedy, Existential, Film, History, Indie, Music, Nature, News
1. I think it's pretty amazing that Google is putting deep newspaper archives online, including not only the Halifax Gazette (1753 issue, pictured above) but the complete Village Voice, dating back to the 1950s. You know the phrase "An embarrassment of riches"? This is, to me, an embarrassment of archives, because I want to read it all but I just don't know where I will find the time.
2. Words Without Borders presents Into The Wild: International Nature Writing. Nice.
3. Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, on what it is about Dante.
4. Why Dante? Why Plato? Personally, I get much more out of Plato than Dante, but then I'm not Catholic. Nor Guelph.
5. Somebody's putting on a play about Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish (always a favorite poem of mine).
6. "Fingerblast" is a music video by Adira Amram, who is clearly channeling the "She-bop"-era 1980s.
7. Speaking of the 1980s, it's a fact that John Hughes was among the best comedy film directors of all time (though, let's be honest, he managed to be great exactly three times -- Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Ferris -- and was otherwise way too willing to churn out profitable but repetitive junk). I remember reading him in National Lampoon magazine before he switched to film, and I hope National Lampoon will consider publishing a retrospective of his early work there. Or maybe Google will eventually index the Lampoon archives.
8. Speaking of the 1980s, here's Mike Watt at the Bowery Poetry Club, remembering the Minutemen.
9. Jay Diamond appreciates Jay-Z.
10. Bobby McFerrin does something a lot cooler than "Don't Worry, Be Happy".
11. BLDG-BLOG-BOOK.
12. David Updike writes about his father.
13. I'm confused why, if great singer Nick Cave has written a book, he's now singing it. Maybe he knows what he's doing, but I don't, because to me this kind of kills the novelty of Nick Cave creating a book instead of another record.
14. Richard Nash on the end of indie culture. "Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won." Now what?
