Not Dark Yet

I considered going dark today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with Boing Boing, Reddit and Wikipedia), but I decided not to for two reasons. First, I don’t think little sites like Litkicks will make much impact at all by going dark. You’ve got to be pretty huge to pull something like this off effectively. Second, my favorite President has already signaled that he will veto the bad bill, so I’ll save my protest for the next good cause. And here are some literary links, many of which seem to revolve around the classics:

1. We were with her a quarter of an hour before Eliz. & Louisa, hot from Mrs Baskerville’s Shop, walked in; — they were soon followed by the Carriage, & another five minutes brought Mr Moore himself, just returned from his morn’g ride. Well! — & what do I think of Mr Moore? — I will not pretend in one meeting to dislike him, whatever Mary may say; but I can honestly assure her that I saw nothing in him to admire. — His manners, as you have always said, are gentlemanlike — but by no means winning. Most of the letters in the new collection by the genius of Steventon, England, Jane Austen, are not this juicy, but the mundanity of the writer’s daily routine is also valuable to read about, and the sickness-to-death letters towards the end are quietly, tragically moving. Jane Austen’s Letters, the Fourth Edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye.

2. James Franco, who was pretty good as Allen Ginsberg in Howl, has made another film based on the life of a 20th Century poet: The Broken Tower, about Hart Crane. Slate isn’t impressed, but I’ll give it a chance.

3. Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary De Rachewitz is trying to make sense of her father’s fascist past while protesting an Italian neo-fascist party that has attempted to adopt his name.


4. Undead is a brisk exploration into the life and meaning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with an emphasis on Stoker’s Irish roots (Irophile Frank Delaney’s specialty) as manifested in the groundbreaking Gothic tale.

5. The Quixotic Search for Cervantes’s Bones, by Kristopher Jansma

6. If I had time I’d read Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson, a thick new biography, if nothing else than for the context into the Guy Fawkes gunpowder plot of 1605 which he was at one time implicated in. Alas, I have too many other books to read, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

7. Katharine Weber does yoga.

8. Forgotten Writers: The Novels of John P. Marquand. Never heard of the guy. Which I guess is the whole point of “Forgotten Writers”.

9. Henry Miller & Anais Nin Share Dream Diary Advice. The title says it all.

10. Rex Pickett, who made pinot noir existential with Sideways, talks about his new novel Vertical, a follow-up featuring the characters from Sideways.

11. John Irving’s new novel In One Person: A Novel is excerpted here.

12. Alan Moore is featured in V for Vendetta: The Man Behind The Mask.

13. A Baltimore, Maryland theater group called the Mobtown Players are putting on Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (a favorite play of mine, which should be revived more often).

14. Orhan Pamuk and Kiran Desai make a very nice couple.

15. Book Boroughing is a new literary events listing site for New York City.

It’s not dark yet. But it’s getting there.

12 Responses

  1. love’n the links, (esp.
    love’n the links, (esp. nin/miller)……”wireman poetry night” wants u levi…..

  2. I’ll be back at “wireman
    I’ll be back at “wireman poetry night” (in Frederick, Maryland) as soon as I find some free time … thanks!

  3. She should just have the
    She should just have the would-be Ezraites memorize the Cantos, without translation, in their entirety to prove their loyalty. It would keep them busy and out of trouble.

  4. re: SOPA, an old friend sent
    re: SOPA, an old friend sent me an interesting link in email today, of a text file on the subject released by The Pirate Bay on their site. i found it sensible -and funny.

    http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt

    my old friend also sent a related link, but i did not choose to click through the covering advert that otherwise obscured the article:

    http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2139808/pirate-bay-breaks-silence-pipa-sopa

    (i trust the pirate bay’s site more than the inquirer’s, and text files more than web pages…)

  5. I’ve contacted my
    I’ve contacted my representatives in the House and Senate to express my opposition to SOPA and PIPA and I strongly encourage everyone to do the same.

  6. Bill, like you, I’ve also
    Bill, like you, I’ve also protested SOPA and PIPA on twitter, google plus and linkedin. I think this time those in favor of the freedom of speech and free internet will win, largely because of the backing of large and powerful companies like Google. But they’ll keep up the pressure; I’m quite sure they won’t give up easily and will propose this repressive bill again in the future.

  7. Levi Congress doesn’t have
    Levi Congress doesn’t have enough power to turn the internet off. I know you you’d probably build a computer out of vacuum tubes (bigger then the Empire State Building of course) just so you could go on facetube.

    The lights aren’t going to go off. The country is maturing. I work for the Constitution Party getting signatures sometimes when they bitch about the founding Fathers not approving I am amazed.

    How could Jefferson Washington Hamilton Burr Madison Adams be anything but proud?

    They just finished a building big enough to be in Manhattan a few blocks from my house. It’s not huge. It’s a very large four story building on the Sioux River. Four stories doesn’t sound like much but if you stack it up in threes it would still be a large twelve building.

    (my point is even in the Dakotas we have city sized structures).

    Sioux Falls is much larger then Lowell MA anymore.

    I want to play “There is a light that never goes out” at this point but I forgot my guitar.

    Portland pretty big. Denver pretty big.

    There are both nearly the size of Minneapolis St. Paul.

    Minneapolis Detroit Milwaukee Buffalo Chicago Pittsburgh Columbus Cleveland big places for Sal Paradise.

    Denver bigger then Pittsburgh. Phoenix.

    That all happened in our lifetimes. I think you can find sleepy cow towns in Wyoming but only movie stars live in Montana.

    It all has changed. When you talk about the light going out I just ponder how Newt Gingrich won South Carolina. South Carolina hub of high tech industry. Take that Charlotte.

    New Orleans is Epcot Center.

    Of course New York grows. The whole country is. Someday a whole 1/10 of people won’t live in LA or NYC.

    People are leaving California. They come here to my prairie. That’s okay I never really did like the prairie.

    There’s is group called American’s Elect (look it up on google). I’m supposed to be working for them. I think the goal is to form a major third party.

    Trying to get Ballot Access in all fifty states. V is ???.

    It sounds good but having a group with no known platform getting ballot access in all fifty states makes me think of Natalie Portman.

    I date this girl ten years younger then me. I keep telling her about pre 9/11.
    I remember those days you were a programmer in the city and I worked on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis in a forty story building. Remember all that money Ashman?

    Maybe the light started going out when those planes crashed into the Trade Centers.
    I was actually a patient at the State Mental Hospital when I saw that (I only mention because this site is supposed be about beatniks). That first one I thought was the worst piloting I’d ever seen. How the fuck do you hit the Trade Center. I was stunned.

    Then the second one hit. I watched I was sure they weren’t going to burn down. They burnt down.

    Eight years of a terrible administration. Going on four of an administration that will look historically good (Reformed Health, got us of out of Iraq, eased the economy etc) but viewed as ineffective by most Americans.

    The GOP has no candidate at all. Newt Gingrich??

    Obama is an easy target. Some of it, quite frankly, is because he is half Black (I don’t think he’d take offense to that). He’s multicultural and we’re all getting to be that way.

    Skyscrapers in North Dakota, Black Presidents. Wow.

    Something doesn’t seem right. Right now we are functioning B plus as a democracy. Rich/poor gap widening in a scary sense but functioning

    More people fewer resources. Maybe Marx had it right. No one likes Congress, in fact no one even cares. They can’t take Facebook from us. Marc Zuckerberg has more power then Joe Biden (that merely means we’d prefer him to be our leader over John Boner).

    It happened in Rome. This switch a-roo. We lose democracy but we get to keep the internet.

    There is a light that never goes out, Ashman.

  8. …my burden is more than i
    …my burden is more than i can bear…appreciate the live dylan view/listen from dec 2010 …just goes and goes, like a flood….katheraine weber said it…drowning in a geyser…thanks for providing kicks of the literary kind…not dark yet cover from oct 2010>>

    http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=908060&songID=9815262

    …the web and actual accumulated speech (like the teas and owsers protestations) are the final methods of liberty cry…

  9. I don’t know Hypo. Maybe
    I don’t know Hypo. Maybe things are just changing. I guess the science fiction makes democracy via the internet more plausible.

    Remember “”The Matrix?”

    All of us tied into a hive. I think that we all are losing sight of the real world. Digital reality is getting closer. Does anyone pay attention to all the CO2 we dump in the atmosphere?

    A rational person, I believe, would take note the cost of humanity’s ‘progress’ is massive environmental degradation. Changing the planet quite possibly faster then the planet can.

    There is a cost to it. The climate changes and our ability to produce more food becomes limited. Even if climate change wasn’t a reality who have the simple there is more people and fewer arable regions to produce food.

    Here in American I don’t think is as astute. Sure we import DVD players from China but North and South Dakota could easily produce enough foodstuffs for 300 million people.

    My mom thinks she could find six on a half acre. I believe sure is correct. With a basic knowledge of agronomy six people per half acre many food crops would be yielded.

    Have you ever planted potatoes?

    Take NYC for example the number of people in the city exceed the food value of the land of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan and Queens.

    Still Minnehaha County South Dakota (my home) could produce enough to feed 15 million people. The problem is that most people don’t want to eat pumpkin five times a day.

    Why do you think the whole state of Iowa is a pig farm?

    When we consume animal products the corn that could go into our bellies is instead rerouted so people can enjoy bacon.

    I rarely eat pork but it sure tastes good sometimes.

    It happened in Ireland in the 1840’s. England’s demand for beef caused the death or relocation of half a nation. The choice was either have beef with afternoon tea or starve a few million to death and people choose filling their stomachs up with Corn beef.

    Hell eventually we even got around to feeding cows to cows.

    I’m not a Peta member and I do consume animals a few times a week. The point is feeding what could human foodstuffs results in few resources being able to feed more people.

    The green revolution is falling. Using chemical methods to increase the production was a good idea in concept.

    But in effect the revolution has caused decreased biodiversity and acreage available to till.

    80% of the corn is the same strain.

    What happens when a disease emerges that can affect that strain and equals decreased production?

    Have you read about the Zombie Bees?

    The reality of it all is digital means are not able to produce nutrition.

    Uneducated people tend to have many babies.

    More babies=10 billion.

    10 billion when there is only enough to feed six billion causes famine.

    Yeah the rich are taking more for themselves. Democracy usually causes increased education, decreased fertility and increases in available technology.

    The burden of democracy will show itself in the near future.

    If democracy fails anarchy will ensue.

  10. the Wealth topic (current as
    the Wealth topic (current as of 1/25/12) had me checking back into ezra pound, what with usury somewhat of a subtheme beneath the fascist anti-semitism bits, and whatever he had to say on wealth or property, and i was reminded he’d denounced the anti-semitism of his youth as moronic -virtually his entire adult life he so blanketly renounced -or so i gathered. (on usury itself, he later said what he should have condemned was Avarice.)

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Litkicks will turn 30 years old in the summer of 2024! We can’t believe it ourselves. We don’t run as many blog posts about books and writers as we used to, but founder Marc Eliot Stein aka Levi Asher is busy running two podcasts. Please check out our latest work!