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Litblog focusing on postmodern fiction, spoken word poetry, alternative and experimental literature of all kinds.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'comix'
Workshopping
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...
Workshopping
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...
Human Nature
Some of my literary/blogger friends have taken to tweeting their literary links. Not me — I’m holding out for the blog format, just like McSweeney’s is holding out for newspapers. Here’s another roundup involving great writ...
Les Mouches
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...
Reviewing the Review: October 25 2009
International literature gets a decent workout in today’s New York Times Book Review. I’m about to dive into The Book of Fathers, a 300-year family novel by Hungarian favorite Miklos Vamos, and I’m encouraged to hear that Jane Smil...
A Bookstore Grows In Brooklyn
1. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, but I’ve never before had the pleasure of watching a bookstore get born. I met blogger/bookseller Jessica Stockton Bagnulo three years ago when we both joined the Litblog Co-op at the same time, ...
Thousand Page Blues
1. In between making videos for LitKicks and arguing with me about Roman Polanski, Jamelah Earle asked me to write a piece commemorating the 1000th front page feature for the wonderful “tribal photography” website Utata. I was honored t...
The Lunch at 50
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 (fea...
On Value and Price
1. I’m glad to hear the New York Times will probably not put its core news content behind a payment wall after all. Instead, they’re test-marketing some extraneous “gold” and “silver” plans that I hope New York T...
Comix For Bloomsday
1. For your Bloomsday enjoyment: comic strip artist Robert Berry is visualizing James Joyce’s Ulysses. This project appears to be off to a great start. 2. More Bloomsday action: Dovegreyreader on a new book called Ulysses and Us by Declan Kib...
Sacred Cows and Graphic Novels
(Today’s guest review is by Jay Diamond, whose latest blog is These American Roads). On a day like any other, I’m walking in the NYU village past all the advertisements — pasted, posted, and painted to walls, trash-cans, and even t...
Enter Sandman: Neil Gaiman at PEN World Voices
There’s a certain kind of author whose cool sneaks up on one so quietly, hastily, and tardily that the only legitimate response for the (otherwise) well-read savant may be to reject this problematic writer, now the ne plus ultra of the literary set...
Filming Further
1. According to Rolling Stone, Gus Van Sant’s film version of Tom Wolfe’s 60s-culture classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test will start shooting soon, and may feature Jack Black (bad idea) or Woody Harrelson (slightly better) as novelis...
Corso Makes The Cover
1. Beat poet Gregory Corso has made the cover of this week’s Economist. Some clever illustrator has formatted the opening of a recent Barack Obama speech about nuclear disarmament as an homage to Corso’s great 1958 poem Bomb (though I co...
Reviewing the Review: April 12 2009
When I read a book review I want to connect with the critic I’m reading, and I expect a reviewer to transmit some of his or her own personality, style and beliefs into every piece. This is why I came down hard last week on rock music writer Ala...
Of The Farm
1. It’s amusing to learn that Faber and Faber editor T. S. Eliot rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm, explaining to Orwell that he sided with the pigs. Since Eliot was a deeply committed political elitist, this position is at least cons...
Reviewing the Review: March 29 2009
It can’t feel good to go to work in the morning and find out you got a 5% paycut. So I’ll be extra nice to the folks at the New York Times Book Review, which is easy to do because this weekend’s issue is pretty good. I’m often...
Rotten to the Core
1. I applaud former AIG executive Jake DeSantis for having the nerve to whine in public about having to give back his bonus. But DeSantis misses the larger point: the era of bloated multi-million dollar bonuses for financial firm executives must end...
Corn Be Heavy Soon
1. I love it when people disagree with me about something and explain why, and even if offense is sometimes intended, I make it a point never to take it. David Pritchard is sick of me “beating the expensive drum” via my endless complaint...
Dostoevskaya Station
Links. Just links. 1. The Washington Post’s Sunday literary supplement Book World is indeed being discontinued. I’ll have something to say about this in my weekend write-up of the New York Times Book Review, aka “Last One Standing...
Lonely Highways
I stopped paying attention to run-of-the-mill Beat Generation product years ago, but every once in a while something truly original breaks through. Below are three excellent new Beat-related works that recently crossed my path. It took about two sec...
Book! Movie!
I’ve been reading about various literary film adaptations lately — Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Spirit, even a possible new Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann. This onslaught caused me to flash back to...
Reviewing the Review: December 14 2008
Some readers objected when I scoffed at last week’s Holiday Issue of the New York Times Book Review and said “I’m not going to sit here reviewing a bunch of articles about coffee-table books”. Just to be clear: I did not mean...
Ah Pook in Manhattan
1. I recently visited a gallery in downtown New York to see Malcolm McNeill’s Ah Pook Is Here, a vast, never-published collaboration with William S. Burroughs. McNeill was a young graphic artist coming up in swinging 1960s London when a magaz...
S. Clay Wilson Hospitalized
Legendary underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson was found lying unconscious on a San Francisco street, possibly the victim of a hit-and-run or a mugging. He is in serious condition (but improving) at San Francisco General Hospital, but will not be ...
