1. Isn’t this a great book cover? Woolgathering
The Hanuman book looked cool, but I think the newly republished New Directions version’s cover art may be even better. Shepherd, tend thy flock.
2. Occupy St. Petersburg? Bill Ectric draws some connections between Nikolai Gogol’s financial satire Dead Souls and more recent high finance scams.
3. Steve Silberman asks: What kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, really?
4. An account of a literary poker tournament that I’m sorry I missed, featuring Walter Kirn, Steve Martin and Rita Dove along with poker heavyweights Annie Duke and Phill Hellmuth. None of whom won.
5. Down These Mean Streets, a Spanish Harlem memoir by Piri Thomas, was one of the first grownup books I ever read as a kid. Piri Thomas died last week at the age of 83.
6. Shoah filmmaker Claude Lanzmann is publishing a memoir (it’ll be out in March) called The Patagonian Hare
7. The great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s son Mukoma wa Ngugi has written a novel called Nairobi Heat.
8. How Alex and Jane Comfort’s once trendy coffeetable book The Joy of Sex was illustrated.
9. A Haiku-inspired video poem by Jim Tilley.
10. Jasmin Lim is creating visual artwork based on the controversial novels of Laura JT Leroy Albert.
11. And now, I’m going to tell you about a project that will be running soon on Litkicks. Did you know that J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (in my opinion, Salinger’s best novel) was published 50 years ago? We’re going to pay tribute to the novel here, over the course of several posts and many days, featuring an artist/writer pair whose work you may have enjoyed on Litkicks here before. Coming later this month!
12. The ten oldest books known to man. Man, these books are old.
One Response
Interesting passage in the
Interesting passage in the Steve Jobs Buddhist thing:
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It’s intriguing, if depressing, to imagine what the digital world would have been like if Kobun had given Jobs the opposite advice, along the lines of Jobs’ own now-infamous challenge to Pepsi CEO John Sculley: “Do you want to sell stylish electronic gadgets for the rest of your life, or come with me and vow to save all sentient beings from suffering?”
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Yeah, but, as far as I understand it with Zen, why would one think that Jobs wasn’t doing more to “save all sentient beings from suffering” by selling stylish electronic gadgets?