GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
I saw Kathy Acker’s name fly by in a tweet yesterday. Her name carries power for those who remember it. Alternative and transgressive literature blossoms in today’s Internet-powered cultural scene, but there … Read the rest
Update, March 13 2015: Daevid Allen has died, according to a message from his son.
Daevid Allen, a brilliant songwriter and archetypal hippie prog-rocker who co-founded Soft Machine in 1966 before reaching his peak as the mad visionary genius of Gong, has announced that he is dying of cancer… Read the rest
A strange kind of anxiety can occur when attending a concert by an artist like Bob Dylan. I was struck by a sense of this anxiety as I stepped into Constitution Hall in Washington DC last night. I began to worry that it would impact my enjoyment of the show.… Read the rest
If you’re on the east coast of the USA these days, you might catch a painted bus called Furthur running up and down the seaboard. This colorful vehicle is named after the original Furthur that took novelist Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs and the rest of the Merry Pranksters … Read the rest
Don Carpenter was a writer’s writer. Born in Berkeley, California in 1931, he grew up there and in Portland, Oregon, served in the Air Force during the Korean War, and returned to earn a B.S. from Portland State and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State. In 1966 … Read the rest
(Literary Kicks is twenty years old today. This fact has left me speechless, so I asked Jamelah Earle to send some retrospective thoughts. — Levi)
When I was 16, I was on my high school forensics team. This was not in any way related to anything you might see on … Read the rest
Furthur, Further … that literary device on wheels, that great American rolling metaphor.
Fifty years after novelist Ken Kesey gathered his friends into a painted bus and drove a jagged route from California to New York City, the novelist’s son Zane Kesey is hitting the road again, in a new … Read the rest
I recently heard about a British Library project to reassemble and digitize a 17th century illustrated edition of the Ramayana, a classical Hindu epic. This sounds pretty cool, and it reminded me of a different edition of the Ramayana that I once owned myself.
This was just a cheap … Read the rest
He was the oldest of the major Beat Generation writers. That’s why William S. Burroughs is today the first Beat writer to celebrate a centennial.
Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914. He arrived on this planet the same year as the First World War.
Some people don’t call Burroughs … Read the rest
