This is me on the turret of James Joyce’s breakfast castle at Sandymount Strand, south of Dublin.
It took me a long time to visit Dublin. Or to Europe. I was born in New York City, and like many people in tihs city I don’t often get a chance to go anywhere else. Purely by chance, I flew to Europe for the first time in my life in late 2019, just before the pandemic, and it feels ironic that I finally got my butt across the Atlantic Ocean just around the time that the world was getting ready to shut down.
The world is a bit of a mess right now, but that doesn’t mean I have to be. I’ve spent the last few years trying to expand my horizons and do things I’ve always wanted to do and never done before. I’ve been trying to take some wise advice: “get out of your own head”. And maybe I can use this as my happy excuse for the fact that I don’t write new blog posts here on Litkicks as often as I used to. I used to be crazy prolific. I haven’t been spilling over with words lately like I used to. And when I have something to say, I enjoy saying it with my voice on a podcast instead of tap-tap-tapping on a blog.
Maybe this is just natural exhaustion, since I’ve been running this website since July 23, 1994. Keeping Litkicks alive on the web has meant dealing with lots of technological changes. I just ported the entire thing (including 26 years of articles, message boards, etc.) to WordPress. Here’s a Twitter thread about the technical side of this, if you’re interested. I’m still working on this latest software migration, and I’m also curating thousands of pages written by myself and others over the years. Thanks for sticking around as a Litkicks reader and a Litkicks friend during this latest transition. We have a lot more writing to do.
If you want to know about why I used to go by the name Levi Asher, and I now use the name I was born with, Marc Eliot Stein, here’s something about that.
And if you want to journey back in time and see the way this site has looked over the years, here’s a bunch of previous versions of this “About” page: