Recent Posts
Literary Kicks
Return To Blog Listing
Litblog focusing on postmodern fiction, spoken word poetry, alternative and experimental literature of all kinds.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'classics'
Big Thinking: Thoreau and the Economy
In several posts between now and the end of the 2008 USA Presidential election on November 4, LitKicks is going to attempt a new meme, a new venture. How can we use the wisdom of classic literature...
And Now For Something Completely Different…
So, what’s in your reading queue?...
Infernal
1. A pretty good animated and modernized movie version of Dante’s Inferno has been running on the Ovation cable network. It’s based on the excellent comic book version (set in squalid Lo...
Unto this Last: John Ruskin’s Economic and Political Writings
(19th-Century British art critic John Ruskin has made several appearances on LitKicks. Here, Michael Norris introduces us to a surprising side of Ruskin not widely known today: his economic and polit...
Milton, Disaster, and Ryan Adams: Ten Links
1. The American John Milton: Robert Pinsky on Milton’s lasting influence. With some paragraphs on blank verse and W.E.B. DuBois. This is my kind of nerdy dream article. 2. For you Samuel Pepys f...
Reviewing the Review: August 24 2008
Middle East politics takes the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Kenneth Pollack, a so-called liberal intellectual from the Brookings Institution who urged the Bush administra...
Would You Go to a Cookout With Vincent Price?
1. Let’s just start out with the awesome, shall we? A little tour through Vincent Price’s cookbook. “There is nothing more soul-satisfying than the first succulent bite into the juic...
If My House Were on Fire…
Hello, LitKicks. This week you’re stuck with me. Let’s have a kegger. Okay, just kidding. But only because I’m too lazy to figure out the logistics of such a thing. Anyway, fellow bi...
The Alzheimer’s Poetry Slam
The best poetry slam I’ve been to this year was in a room full of Alzheimer’s patients at the East 80th Street Residence in New York City. I sat in a circle with more than twenty senior c...
Nine Links for Friday
1. There’s an excerpt of My Name Is Will (a novel of sex, drugs and Shakespeare) on NPR.org. I mention this mainly so that I can segue into this: Shakespeare got to get paid. 2. What classic wor...
Five Books I’ve Read While I Was Supposed To Be Reading Ulysses
Hey, remember when I said I was going to read Ulysses? I have to say I’m still not quite ready to admit that this book has kicked my ass. (I maintain that it’s really not that hard once I...
Sick, Sick, Sick
1. We don’t hear enough about cartoonist Jules Feiffer these days, so this interview is a nice refresher. (Via Slut). 2. Hamlet, who was also sick, sick, sick, will never go out of style. ...
Jesus, Etc.
When I told Levi I was going to write about some memorable characters from literature, I thought I had several of them in mind. Because I’ve read a lot of books, and I mainly won’t read a ...
Pinky in Istanbul, Macbeth in Moscow
1. Carolyn “Pinky” Kellogg is in Istanbul! Nice to see a busy blogger getting away for a literary journey. 2. Arthur C. Clarke has died. I mainly know of Clarke for living in Sri Lanka ...
Capitaine Achab
French film maker Philippe Ramos has recently released a film titled Capitaine Achib (Captain Ahab). It’s the story of Herman Melville’s obsessed sea captain, from the time he was a young...
Of Broccoli and Books
When I was a kid, I was a notoriously fussy eater. I did not like foods that were too green, foods that were mushy, foods that looked weird, foods that smelled weird. I’m not entirely sure if I had...
Five Favorites from African American Lit
Five favorites from African-American literature: 1. Native Son by Richard Wright Native Son was the first bestseller written by an African American author, and tells the story of Bigger Thomas, an u...
Jamelah Reads the Classics: Ulysses, Part 2
Progress: pathetic and sad. Since the last time I wrote about my experience reading this book, I’ve been busy. I got distracted by… things. And my reading time ended up falling by the w...
With Rimbaud In Hell
I made a trip to the Maison de la Poesie in Paris on a recent evening to see a staging of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). The performance room was in the basement...
Mysterious Strangers
1. When a friend pointed me to The Mysterious Stranger, I could make no sense of what appeared to be an odd piece of animated YouTube weirdness involving Mark Twain and Satan in a “Davey and Gol...
In Search of Beowulf
I first discovered Beowulf when I was around ten years old. On rainy weekends, when my brother and I started to wreak too much havoc inside the house, my father would round us up and read us poetry. I...
Five Hot Fictional Characters
1. Hector - The Iliad Out of the classical epics that have to do with the Trojan War, there are several characters that could potentially go on this list of hotties, because let’s face it R...