Do you like my new Netscape color scheme? It’s not too radical — although I’ve been doing some experimenting in the past couple of weeks, and some of you may have seen some pretty ugly pages flying by. I finally settled on a simple blue/green against a white or black background, blue to match the Paul Verlaine graphic at the top of my front page, and green
for the glass of absinthe Verlaine is drinking in that picture, and also in honor of Michael McClure‘s statement that “the Beat writers are the literary arm of the ecological movement.”

I must admit, though, that I am color-blind (red-green color blind, to be exact, which means I see colors, but slightly differently). So if anyone really HATES my colors let me know — I’m trying to be correct here, but this is kind of like putting on a shirt and a tie for me — I think it’s right, but I’m not exactly sure.

Anyway, I’ve been working hard on LitKicks lately, and there are several new things here. Probably the two I’m most pleased with are the extensive new bibliographies of published writings about Kerouac and Kesey, both of which were created specially for LitKicks by contributors. There’s amazing stuff here — I never knew, for instance, that John Updike actually stooped so low as to make fun of Kerouac in The New Yorker (man, I hate that guy.) There’s a chronological list of reviews of Kerouac’s books, and it’s
fascinating to observe the ebb and flow of mainstream literary interest in his works over the years. The Kesey bibliography
also contains fascinating entries I’d never known about. Thanks to Sherri and Martin Blank for sending these to me!