I was already thinking about Columbia University, where courageous students are calling out the college administration’s support for genocide in Gaza, when I heard Paul Auster had died of cancer at the age of 77 in his home in Brooklyn. Paul Auster was widely celebrated as a Brooklyn writer from the middle of his career to the end, and many of his later novels took place here.

Well, bravo to a writer who can capture a sense of place, and bravo especially to a writer who can claim two separate places as his literary home base! I first read Paul Auster in the late 1980s when he had just published three brilliant postmodern pseudo-detective novels known as the New York Trilogy. These stories captured in vivid street-level detail the collegiate uptown neighborhood of Morningside Heights where Columbia and Barnard sit on a cliff overlooking the southern edge of Harlem.

Paul Auster had been a student at Columbia, and lived there during his hungry writer years while working as a French translator, as he would later detail in several fractured memoirs. He was there for the famous 1968 Columbia University civil rights and antiwar student protests which are ironically memorialized by the University in 2024 as it calls in police to initiate violence against non-violent civil rights and antiwar protestors. As I write these words, here in broken so-called USA, rioting New York City Police troops are still initiating violence against non-violent protestors calling out Israel’s war crimes. There was a police riot attacking nonviolent protestors in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn last night.

In City of Glass, the first volume of the New York Trilogy, the tormented child-abuse survivor Peter Stillman walks and walks around lonely Manhattan, spelling out a word from the Bible with his steps. I remember how this book affected me, stirring connections that had been dormant in the matrix of my mind. I remember gradually realizing that the other two books in the trilogy weren’t going to answer the questions raised by City of Glass, though they were no less evocative and exciting, and I remember reading the first follow-up to the Trilogy, Moon Palace, another shaggy dog story, another captivating bundle of existential riddles, and wondering why he hadn’t just turned the trilogy into a quadrilogy. Some later Paul Auster novels had original narrative concepts, like 4 3 2 1, but they all seemed to me to reflect the finely shattered glass of his initial breakthrough work. The main thing I remember today about Moon Palace is that it was named for a Chinese restaurant whose neon sign could be seen on Broadway and 112th when visiting the Columbia campus.

I do love that original paperback cover of City of Glass – those slanting lines of light! that typewriter font! – and I still insist it’s Auster’s best novel (I also recommend his nonfiction works like Bloodbath Nation and Burning Boy). I never liked any other City of Glass book covers as much as this one, and I did not like the inevitable eventual graphic novel version, which should have taken its visual cue from the gorgeous first edition paperback cover instead.

I would also use the word “gorgeous” to describe the Columbia University campus. But I found it all locked down when I walked by a couple days ago, on a day that the school year was ending. A low-key tense paranoia seemed to hover around the security perimeters. I was not able to stroll onto the green.

I never took a class at Columbia, though I once enrolled in an excellent fiction workshop with Lynne Sharon Schwartz at Barnard across the street. That’s about the extent of my Columbia memories, along with a great show I once caught by the blues singer Dakota Staton at the West End Cafe. Beyond that, Morningside Heights is just another part of New York City that I don’t visit often – except for one other special significance. Columbia was the birthplace of the Beat Generation. My favorite writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg famously met in an apartment near Columbia University in 1944. Allen Ginsberg was a student at the time, a precocious bridge-and-tunnel kid from New Jersey whose clever literary notions impressed his professors. Kerouac had come to Columbia on a football scholarship from Massachusetts and had a rougher time than Ginsberg adjusting to the Ivy League. The two friends formed the nucleus of the Beat Generation after William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso joined them from downtown.

I’m not going to dwell on what Jack Kerouac might say about the antiwar protests on campus if he were alive in 2024. Kerouac’s nostalgic patriotism was easily offended, and he couldn’t see clearly enough to support the students protesting USA’s Vietnam War in 1968. But it’s a sure thing that Allen Ginsberg would be speaking out with everything he’s got, if he were alive today, against Israel’s brutal long occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and against the exploitation of Jewish history and fears of antisemitism by cynical Democrats and Republicans who take millions of dollars from AIPAC to ignore Israel’s war crimes, and against the latest horrible war and every other war.

I long ago read a book called The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary written about the 1968 Columbia University riots by a 19-year-old student named James Simon Kunen. It had a quote from Kurt Vonnegut on the cover but I remember finding the book disappointing because it didn’t help me understand the motivations and ambitions behind a serious protest movement, and seemed to express a disaffected ambivalence by the end.

When I talk to protesting Columbia students today, I feel no disaffection or ambivalence. They are well-informed about the war crimes they are pleading to stop. I feel inspired by the hope, courage and conviction visibile in many young faces as I walk up Broadway – these mockingjays and Marjorie Morningstars navigating between TV cameras and police barriers, carrying the weight of the world.

Of course, I’ve been absorbed in the protest movements myself through my work at World Beyond War, and I have a lot more to say on the World BEYOND War podcast. I haven’t had a chance to post links to this podcast in a while, so here are some episodes I’ve put out since the last Litkicks update that I think are worth your while.

I know some faithful Litkicks readers wish I still focused on poetry and fiction on this site, instead of podcasting about revolution and peace every month and dropping by with a rambling blog post update just to plug my episodes whenever I have the time. I understand. I’m flattered that people still visit Litkicks, and that people still care. Well, these politically-minded podcasts are where I’m at lately. I think about the balance of art and activism in my life sometimes, and wonder why I’m so much more involved with global politics today than when I launched this website nearly 30 years ago. But I don’t think it’s me who’s changed. Our political world feels a lot more hazardous and broken in 2024 than it did in 1994, and that’s why my focus has shifted. That’s why I used to publish blog posts and book reviews and now I record podcasts about war. I think Allen Ginsberg would understand, though Kerouac wouldn’t.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do to celebrate Literary Kicks’s 30th birthday this July, but I will try to write more often. Paul Auster’s death inspired me to look again at a list of my 15 favorite novels that I put up on this site a week after its launch. City of Glass was #1 on my list back then. Maybe I’ll revisit this list for 2024 as my next update, and maybe I’ll try to write more often now that this site is going to be 30 years old.

Farewell to an old friend and an old friend of Literary Kicks, Ken Jordan, who unexpectedly passed away in Brooklyn last week. I knew Ken in the early Silicon Alley days of the 1990s, back when the World Wide Web was small and he was working on the groundbreaking early music website Sonic.net. Ken then helped Marisa Bowe launch WORD, one of the very first really good online literary journals, which was represented in the anthology of primeval web fiction I co-edited in 1997, Coffeehouse: Writings From The Web. Like me, Ken Jordan was a dedicated journeyman of the online literary scene, and he had a special entree into the literary world as the son of Grove Press and Evergreen Review’s Fred Jordan. Ken and I talked often about the literary web during the dot-com days, and after WORD disappeared along with many of the original over-financed first generation web startups, I worked closely with Ken and a team of talented folks like Leslie Harpold and Rebecca Carroll to launch a huge online arts portal, except that we ran out of money. Later, Ken helped me get hired as the original web developer for Words Without Borders, a wonderful opportunity and my first-ever nonprofit gig. Ken never stopped building cool stuff and connecting with others trying to do the same. His last gigs included Evolver and Lucid News. He was a husband and father, and a wise, calm and truly nice person who just wanted to make sure the Internet would always have room for the literary underground. In this way he was carrying on his father’s important mission at Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. We’ll keep the struggle going in Ken Jordan’s honor.

Finally, much happier news! In my own family, in the borough of Queens, New York, this happened. I am a Zayde for the second time.