Blog Archives
Considering The Catcher
J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951. Two years later the author retreated to rural New Hampshire where his reclusive lifestyle and diminished writing output found a legend growing up around the author that nearly eclipsed the fame — and infamy — of his first book. Catcher‘ celebrated its 65th [...]
Black Rimbaud
Bob Kaufman was a Beat poet who might be thought of as the Anti-Ginsberg: The Howl author’s legendary hustling made sure that the world new his name along with those of contemporaries like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and it’s not overstatement to say that Ginsberg was every bit the carny-huckster-PR man that he [...]
Blooming Finnegan’s
Happy Bloomsday! On June 16 we commemorate the calendar date of James and Nora Joyce’s first romantic date. June 16 subsequently became the date on which the events in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place. Joyce was an early 20th century modernist, but his wildest visions have been celebrated as psychedelic masterpieces by underground countercultures [...]
Creating Cthulhu
90 years ago, in the summer of 1926, H.P. Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu.” The three part story mixes an essay structure with narrative elements, and Lovecraft himself didn’t consider it one of his best. But Conan creator Robert E. Howard considered the tale to be a classic, and Michel Houellebecq rates the story [...]
Fools Giving
Happy Fools Day! I didn’t have a blog post ready to share this morning when I found a notice blinking in my inbox. In the Robert Anton Wilson Group on G+ a trickster who calls himself Satyr Barbarosa gifted us this YouTube treasure of the audiobook of The Eye in the Pyramid, Book One of [...]
Legend Falls
I was taken by surprise over the weekend by the news of the death of Jim Harrison. Harrison was a Michigan literary legend whose poetry and championing of the novella form won him wide, high praise. Harrison’s Legends of the Fall was his best known work, earning big screen treatment with a script by Harrison [...]
The Man in White
Today we celebrate the 1931 birthday of author Tom Wolfe who became a hero of the counterculture with the 1968 publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — an experimental report on the drug culture surrounding Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe is a New Journalism pioneer whose use of fictional devices in his [...]
Factotum @ Forty
I like to think of Factotum as Charles Bukowski’s war novel, but Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, is rejected from the draft and spends WWII at home. Here’s the wiki… Set in 1944, the plot follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s perpetually unemployed, alcoholic alter ego, who has been rejected from the World War II draft and [...]
Anderson/Burroughs
In the 1970′s few women were allowed in William Burroughs’ clique of male friends and colleagues. I’ve seen lots of lovely pictures of Burroughs with Patti Smith and I’ve read that she had a crush on the writer. According to this new BBC program, another woman who had access to The Bunker – as Burroughs’ [...]
