“Literary Kicks,” says the guy where I pick up my mail, looking at my address on a package. “What is it, sneakers?”

“Books,” I say to him. “Books. I’d probably make a lot more money if it was sneakers.”

With that said, here are the latest literary links, for your edification and enjoyment:

1. Novelist and critic Walter Kirn, who has suddenly begun live-blogging the Bible, ponders the Tower of Babel.

2. Alan Cumming will star in a one-man performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

3. Check out The Books They Gave Me: A Tumblr for images of books given by former lovers. No, I’m not going to make a Herman Cain joke.

4. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, not so surprisingly, turns out to have been a natural artist.

You’ve probably noticed that I write about the Occupy Wall Street movement a lot lately. Yeah, so I do. Here are your #occupy #ows links for the week:

5. Keith Gessen, whose satirical political novel All The Sad Young Literary Men was reviewed in these pages in 2008, has written a really good piece about his experience getting his ass arrested in front of St. Paul’s Church near Zuccotti Park.

6. Poet Robert Haas, meanwhile, got beat up in Berkeley, California.

7. Comix hero Alan Moore contemplates the V for Vendetta mask phenomenon he inadvertently created with his V for Vendetta. I haven’t read V For Vendetta but I did read his earlier Watchmen and was very impressed.

8. Packing for the Revolution.

9. Of course, the most dangerous large protest movement currently taking place in the world right now is in Cairo, Egypt, a revival of the springtime Occupy Tahrir Square movement that toppled Hosni Mubarak and inspired the USA version. If you only have time to watch one Occupy movement, this is probably the one to watch.

Sneakers, the guy says. I should’ve just sold sneakers.