A favorite novelist of mine, Sam Savage, is entering hospice. According to the Numero Cinq article revealing the sad news of his medical condition, he has suffered for decades with a blood disease called “alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency”. It never harmed his ability to write.
Savage was born in 1940 … Read the rest
I’m going to let other people remember David Bowie for his cultural importance — his brave and liberating embrace of sexual ambiguity, his clever shape-shifting, his sophistication as an actor, his sharp sense of pop art’s relationship to rock and roll.
He was truly great in all of these ways. … Read the rest
What’s it like to be a pacifist on Veteran’s Day? Well, I can only tell you what it’s like to be a pacifist with a father who is a Korean War-era veteran who helped to turn me into a pacifist … on Veteran’s Day.
These are some pictures of my … Read the rest
Henry David Thoreau and Walden came early into my life, thanks to my mother, a boldly independent career woman who must have felt oppressed by her era’s strictures of feminine married domesticity. She had a favorite quote from Walden that she would paraphrase liberally whenever the topic of housework came … Read the rest
It was very easy for me to meet Herschel Silverman, then a Beat/jazz poet of some renown, around twenty-five years ago when I began frequenting the downtown New York City poetry scene that swirled between St. Marks Church, ABC No Rio and the Nuyorican.
These were the years when Allen … Read the rest
The Internet Age turns 20 years old this weekend, on Sunday, August 9.
I’m not talking about the Internet itself, which was born in the late 1960s when two computers on two different university networks first exchanged messages, thus establishing a network between networks, an “inter-net”. I’m talking about the … Read the rest
(Please enjoy this delightful photo essay by Sherri Hoffman Hoye, who has been a friend of Litkicks for many years but has never felt inspired to contribute an article until she made a recent journey to a town called Red Cloud, Nebraska … — Levi)
I grew up in rural … Read the rest
(Today is the 21st birthday of Literary Kicks. I’m making it my new habit to celebrate these birthdays with memories from friends of the site, so here’s Tim K. Gallaher remembering way back when. Tim is a former member of the 1970s San Francisco punk rock band Church Police … Read the rest
One of the exciting things about the Beat Museum’s Beatnik Shindig which is happening next weekend in San Francisco is the activity it’s stirring up. The photo above, which has never been published before, shows a gang of unknown beatniks on a now-legendary Sausalito barge that became a group home … Read the rest
