January 2006
by Caryn Thurman January 2nd, 2006 3:14pm
As we're recovering from the holidays and winding down the new year celebrations, the LitKicks team is looking forward to an interesting and busy year in 2006. In addition to our own personal resolutions for the coming year, we thought it would be a good time to ask ... What are your literary resolutions for 2006? Though we definitely want to know what you are reading, we also want to know what you have brewing on a larger scale in the literary realm. Are you planning to re-read some favorite authors?
by Jamelah Earle January 3rd, 2006 1:21pm
Let me begin this by saying that everything I write after what I'm about to tell you next is entirely secondary to Tolstoy's classic, Anna Karenina. There are several things that people may point out about this particular Russian novel, but they're not that important. What is important? It's simple, really: the most essential fact about Anna Karenina is that Jesus Lord, this book is long. It is so long, in fact, that I have not finished reading it, and may not ever finish reading it.
by Levi Asher January 3rd, 2006 10:22pm
I got the Complete New Yorker for Hanukkah. This impressive eight-DVD set contains digitized facsimiles of every page in every weekly issue of the New Yorker from 1925 to 2005. That's quite a mound of cultural signification. The boxed set is shaped like a monolith, and at first it feels like one too.
by Caryn Thurman January 4th, 2006 8:16am
The Aspen Times reports that Anita Thompson, widow of Hunter S. Thompson, is set to co-edit a new magazine focusing on the Woody Creek, Colorado community. The magazine's exact format and content isn't quite known yet, but it should be interesting to watch this develop. The new publication, titled The Woody Creeker, will begin in February.
by Levi Asher January 5th, 2006 7:39am
1. When I heard about the discovery of a long-lost Lord Byron poem, I immediately thought of The Aspern Papers, a great novella by Henry James about a scholar who learns that an ancient lady living with her neice in Venice was once the lover of romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern (who seems to have been based on Byron).
by Levi Asher January 8th, 2006 8:07pm
As I begin a new year of weekly encounters with the Sunday New York Times Book Review, I'd like to re-affirm what I am doing with each week's entry. My presumption is that the critics who write for the New York Times Book Review are writers, and I am interested in judging them on this basis. I am not interested in the office politics on 43rd Street, nor am I paying a lot of attention to the weekly league tables regarding which writer got a full two-page review on 10-11 and which got stuck with two paragraphs on 29.
by Levi Asher January 9th, 2006 8:45pm
The second installment of Art Spiegelman's new work-in-progress appears in the Winter 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. This isn't just any Spiegelman series, though; the cartoonist is writing his complete autobiography in comic form. The first installment appeared in the Fall 2005 issue, and is available online. The series will eventually be published as a book.
by Levi Asher January 11th, 2006 8:50pm
1. West Virginia USA quarters are out, and (SPOILER ALERT) the designs for all the 2006 quarters have been released on the US Mint's website. Once again, literature doesn't get a quarter. It's not like I really expected Hunter S. Thompson's craggy face to decorate the Colorado quarter, but I can hope.
by Levi Asher January 13th, 2006 2:34pm
1. I used to be totally up on Beat Generation news, but lately I have go to places like Syntax of Things to get my updates. (Anything you need to know about literary state quarters, though, I'm your go-to guy).
by Levi Asher January 15th, 2006 6:33pm
The New York Times Book Review needs to publish a good slash-up job at least once every few weeks -- if nothing else, just to satisfy us bloodthirsty readers and keep us from subscribing to Vanity Fair. This week delivers a good mugging, although you're likely to miss it if you habitually skip over reviews of Anita Brookner books.
by Levi Asher January 17th, 2006 8:55am
I spent some time yesterday reading Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail for the first time. It's a powerful document, and among other things it shows us the depth of King's personal scholarship. He cites two modern existentialist philosophers, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and quotes St. Thomas Aquinas and T. S. Eliot. Intrigued by this, I did some further research into King's intellectual roots, and found a vast array of influences.
by Levi Asher January 18th, 2006 12:29pm
Ed Champion provides an amusingly detailed description of a recent David Foster Wallace reading in Haight-Ashbury.
I recently spent about an hour with David Foster Wallace's new book of essays, Consider The Lobster, in a comfortable aisle at a Border's bookstore (apparently my free review copy was "lost in the mail"). I'm finding him far more palatable than I used to.
by Jamelah Earle January 20th, 2006 9:16am
I recently spent about an hour with David Foster Wallace's new book of essays, Consider The Lobster, in a comfortable aisle at a Border's bookstore (apparently my free review copy was "lost in the mail"). I'm finding him far more palatable than I used to.
Below is a list of ten arbitrary pairings. (Yet are they truly arbitrary? You decide.) Out of each pairing, pick the one that you like the best, for whatever reason. No need to explain, because power means never having to say why you pick Jay-Z. Or something like that.
Here goes:
1. Nietzsche vs. Jay-Z
2. The Squid and the Whale vs. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Moby-Dick
3. Moby-Dick vs. Moby
4. James Frey vs. Augusten Burroughs
5. Tom Hanks vs. Dan Brown
6. Shirley Hazzard vs. The Dukes of Hazzard
by Levi Asher January 22nd, 2006 8:16pm
Here goes:
1. Nietzsche vs. Jay-Z
2. The Squid and the Whale vs. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Moby-Dick
3. Moby-Dick vs. Moby
4. James Frey vs. Augusten Burroughs
5. Tom Hanks vs. Dan Brown
6. Shirley Hazzard vs. The Dukes of Hazzard
A book review should be well-written, but a poetry book review must be well-written. Why should we trust a poetry critic who can't turn out a great sentence? It's fitting, then, that one of the two worthwhile pieces in today's Sunday New York Times Book Review is Joshua Clover's study of the career of Charles Reznikoff, whose retrospective has just been published by Black Sparrow Press.
by Levi Asher January 23rd, 2006 8:16pm
Here's the second and final installment of my Best American Short Stories of 2005 review. I finished about two-thirds of the stories (I said I read Houghton Mifflin's BASS book every year, but I didn't say I finish it). Here are my findings:
by Levi Asher January 25th, 2006 7:43am
Film, News, Poetry, Psychology
1. Mark Haddon, who wrote the appealing autistic detective story The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is in the poetry business now. LitKicks approves of this entirely, although Ranting Ed has found evidence indicating the new book may not be so great. We'll have to find out for ourselves.
by Levi Asher January 26th, 2006 7:09am
Two weeks ago, we felt really proud that we managed to avoid adding to the media's repititive over-coverage of the James Frey memoir-hoax story. We figured we'd serve the literary community by talking about anything but James Frey (or J. T. Leroy), and that's what we did. Imagine our surprise at the new expose of acclaimed Navajo author Nasdijj, which brings the hoax craze into our backyard.
by Caryn Thurman January 27th, 2006 6:58am
(Well, besides the latest scandal expose, of course.) Give us the scoop on your latest picks, pans and plans. Slogging through a tough classic? Discovering a new favorite? Check in here with your latest reads or get some recommendations. And don't try to fake it, because we will find you out and you will face the wrath of Oprah. And no one wants that.
by Levi Asher January 29th, 2006 7:34pm
There are a few self-indulgent editorial routines I wish the New York Times Book Review would cut out. One that irks me the most is the "I'm not worthy" routine, which always rings phony. The Book Review really should have spared us Garrison Keillor's aw-shucks display in which Sam Tanenhaus's quotes the author deprecating his reviewing skills: "This is just plain old journalism, nothing so fancy as criticism. Criticism is the work of giants like Edmund Wilson ..." The revolting exhibit of puffy humility goes on for two long paragraphs.
by Levi Asher January 30th, 2006 5:30pm
Apropos of nothing, this is a good poem:
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
Thomas Gray, 1747-8
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
by Jamelah Earle January 31st, 2006 4:47am
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
Thomas Gray, 1747-8
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Kids these days. With their iPods and LiveJournals, their lives are simultaneously as foreign and familiar as ours were when we were teenagers. But here's the important question: what are they reading? Well, I don't know, but it could be one (or both!) of these books which I am going to review for you now.
Pretty Little Devils by Nancy Holder
Pretty Little Devils by Nancy Holder