When I think of Coleridge, I think of those momentary sparks of intuition I have experienced, when my brain seemed to grasp a clear and divine truth. It's like seeing something from the corner of my eye; when I turn to look more closely - it's gone! If others do not share this impression, that is all right, because subjectivity was a major tenet of the Romantic Movement, of which Coleridge was a founding member.
October 2005
by Bill Ectric October 1st, 2005 5:53pm
by Levi Asher October 2nd, 2005 8:27pm
Yay for Stephen Metcalf, who reviews Rick Moody's Diviners in today's New York Times Book Review. I don't agree with a thing Metcalf says, but it's a damn well-written review, with lines like this:
Meanwhile, Moody has continued turning out these terrifically weird sentences, long incantatory jags of deadpan logorrhea.
or, the opener:
Like pork bellies or certain newfangled mortgages, the work of Rick Moody is as well known for its derivatives as it is for the underlying product.
by Jamelah Earle October 3rd, 2005 5:00am
Meanwhile, Moody has continued turning out these terrifically weird sentences, long incantatory jags of deadpan logorrhea.
or, the opener:
Like pork bellies or certain newfangled mortgages, the work of Rick Moody is as well known for its derivatives as it is for the underlying product.
Let me begin this review by saying that if there were awards for being an ADD poster child, then I'm sure I'd have a shelf covered with trophies. Concentrating on a single task for longer than two minutes is something I just don't do, so reading an entire novel in a single day in (mostly) one sitting isn't something that happens very often in the life of Jamelah. Yet that's exactly what I did yesterday with Neil Gaiman's latest, Anansi Boys, and here's why.
by Beth Vieira October 4th, 2005 1:00pm
My background is in the classics; my degree as an undergraduate was in Greek and Latin. We had to read texts line by line at a snail's pace, looking up every word so it seemed, scanning poetry, investigating unusual grammatical points, or textual cruxes, or philological articles about diction and cultural meaning.
by Bill Ectric October 5th, 2005 12:27pm
A recently rediscovered classic of American non-fiction, The Klan Unmasked by Stetson Kennedy, is currently making the rounds in Hollywood, and not for the first time.
by Levi Asher October 6th, 2005 6:33am
City Lights is calling for a worldwide celebration on the 50th birthday of Allen Ginsberg's epic existential protest poem Howl, which debuted to the world at a legendary San Francisco poetry reading on October 7 1955.
by Levi Asher October 7th, 2005 11:08am
I asked poet Michael McClure, one of the five performers at the seminal 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading, if he had any thoughts to share on the event's 50th birthday. He sent me some notes that he's going to deliver at HOWL REDUX in San Francisco's Herbst Theater tonight at 8 pm as part of the city's LitQuake Festival.
by Levi Asher October 9th, 2005 9:18pm
I wonder if there's some kind of inter-office rivalry going on at 43rd Street in the eponymous Times Square, because it seems every section of the Sunday New York Times has been scooping the New York Times Book Review on literary stuff.
by Levi Asher October 11th, 2005 6:56am
Stevadore sends us the news that Anthony Hopkins will play Ernest Hemingway in a film called "Papa". The film will depict the friendship between Hemingway and a young Korean War correspondent who looked up to him. They meet in Havana (Hemingway's home base, in the years just before Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution), and Hopkins apparently gets to act up a storm in depicting the despair of an aging writer contemplating his eventual suicide.
by Levi Asher October 12th, 2005 8:12am
1. The news that an author named John Banville has won the Booker Prize left me cold, maybe because I've never come across this book (or any other Banville book) in my rounds of bookstore browsing. I was mystified by this until a note in the Literary Saloon cleared it up: this widely-acclaimed book isn't even going to be available in the United States until Spring 2006.
by Liz October 13th, 2005 7:29am
The Poetry Society of America and Hunter College presented a tribute to the poet June Jordan last week at the Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse in New York City. The tribute included readings of Jordan's poetry by various poets including Jan Heller Levi, Donna Masini, Bob Holman and Cornelius Eady. They spoke of Jordan's powerful personality, poetry and activism and read her work affectingly to a full auditorium.
by Levi Asher October 13th, 2005 8:22pm
Harold Pinter, the British playwright who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was savaged as an idiot and a fashionable phony when the play that made him famous, The Birthday Party, opened in London in 1958.
by Jamelah Earle October 14th, 2005 6:02am
Over 300 years after its publication, John Milton's Paradise Lost will be coming to a theater near you in 2007. No director or actors have been chosen for the project, but since there's not a single part in the story that Tom Hanks would be perfect for, they'll probably cast him as Satan. Forrest Gump: Prince of Darkness. I can see it now.
by Levi Asher October 15th, 2005 10:01am
With this column, we initiate a new series of book reviews here at LitKicks. If you would like your own work reviewed, please read the note at the end of this article.
by Levi Asher October 16th, 2005 8:42pm
After a lifetime of not being sure whether or not I liked the work of John Updike, I've gradually come to the conclusion that he will one day be remembered as the Henry James of our generation. Since that revelation I've appreciated his occasional published pieces much more, and I was very glad to see him turn up on the cover on today's New York Times Book Review with a consideration of a thick and provocative new coffee-table art book, New Art City by Jed Perl.
by Levi Asher October 18th, 2005 7:59am
I believe in literature as a curative force in the world. I'll even go out on a limb and say I consider fiction, poetry and drama as some of the best hopes for resolving the psychological and sociological afflictions that plague the dysfunctional family known as humankind.
by Jamelah Earle October 19th, 2005 7:52am
Just when you thought it might be safe to believe that Shakespeare was Shakespeare again, there's a new book to set your naive, un-elitist head straight. The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, by Brenda James and William Rubinstein offers up the newest proof that Shakespeare was, in fact, someone else. Who? Well, it turns out that Henry Neville's claim to fame is not as one of the founding members of the Neville Brothers.
by Levi Asher October 19th, 2005 4:30pm
1. Nepophile Adam Bellow's National Review piece about Harriet Miers and the history of presidential cronyism is a fresh, informative read. But this line is disingenuous:
"Dynastic families are not like yours and mine (unless your name is Bush or Kennedy)."
Huh. Yeah, or Bellow. I notice he doesn't have to slave away on a litblog just to get his articles read.
by Dave October 20th, 2005 10:34am
"Dynastic families are not like yours and mine (unless your name is Bush or Kennedy)."
Huh. Yeah, or Bellow. I notice he doesn't have to slave away on a litblog just to get his articles read.
Trolling around the local Borders, I came across a new Stephen King book, The Colorado Kid. I hadn't read any reviews about it and the back cover didn't give many details about the plot. I had no idea what it was about, except that it was apparently a new noir detecive book by King.
I like King but I haven't read anything by him in years. But I picked it up and bought it. Just like that. It helped that it was only five bucks (it's a paperback).
by Levi Asher October 22nd, 2005 9:58am
I like King but I haven't read anything by him in years. But I picked it up and bought it. Just like that. It helped that it was only five bucks (it's a paperback).
Okay, confession time. As those who live in New York City know but others may not, several sections of the Sunday New York Times, including the Magazine, the Arts and Leisure section and the Book Review, actually show up on our doorsteps on Saturday morning. This provides useful material for tricks, like finishing the crossword puzzle by 9 am Sunday and phoning faraway relatives to brag about it. Yeah, we had an extra day.
by Levi Asher October 23rd, 2005 3:14pm
Well, poker is a writer's game, but this writer finished 246th out of 1400-something in the first PokerStars Bloggers Invitational Tournament. I went all-in with jacks up at the flop and lost to a flush on the turn. Next year!
by Levi Asher October 23rd, 2005 8:24pm
Jonathan Lethem is lashing out at pro-realist critics like James Wood in a fascinating Morning News interview, and I've got to jump into the middle of this fray.
The fashionable postmodernist speaks strong words, according to the account by Morning News writer Robert Birnbaum. Lethem answers recent criticism of his writing style by positing himself as a target of oppressive, wealthy literary purists:
by Levi Asher October 24th, 2005 8:14pm
The fashionable postmodernist speaks strong words, according to the account by Morning News writer Robert Birnbaum. Lethem answers recent criticism of his writing style by positing himself as a target of oppressive, wealthy literary purists:
Panta Rhei (Anemone Achtnich) reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest trade fair for books, multimedia and communication:
by Levi Asher October 26th, 2005 1:15pm
A bunch of people once asked me to name a living author who wrote like Jack Kerouac, and they promptly concluded I was insane when I named the hiphop singer Jay-Z.
by Caryn Thurman October 28th, 2005 4:57am
(U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is writing a series of columns that highlights poetry and its importance in everyday life. From time to time we'll share the reprinted columns here, and provide you a chance to add your comments. This short, crisp piece uses a spare amount of words and carefully chosen double meanings to quickly and solidly get the point across -- just as the subject of the poem might have done.
by Levi Asher October 28th, 2005 2:04pm
I'm having trouble keeping up with all the legal challenges Orhan Pamuk is facing in Turkey. Apparently Pamuk keeps giving interviews about the lawsuits against him, which only results in more lawsuits. It's kind of like that scene in Breakfast Club where the teacher keeps saying "You want another?" and Judd Nelson keeps saying "Yeah." As Molly Ringwald would whisper: Orhan, stop ...
by Levi Asher October 29th, 2005 8:08am
A disturbing report has just come in: tomorrow's New York Times Book Review has been invaded and occupied by the Times' News desk.
by Levi Asher October 30th, 2005 9:10pm
A few weeks ago we began inviting small publishers of any size to send us review copies of their work. We review anything from bestsellers to chapbooks at LitKicks, but we're hoping to focus more closely on a territory in the modern literary landscape that's neglected by most book reviews or litblogs: high-quality books from small or regional non-affiliated presses or individual self-promoting authors.
by Levi Asher October 31st, 2005 4:03pm
Here's a well-assembled list of poetry landmarks in America, courtesy of Poets.org. Okay, who's going to tackle the world's list? I'll nominate T. S. Eliot's bank, Lord Byron's battlefields at Messolonghi, and Sylvia Plath's kitchen to start with ...