'Singles Going Steady'
More than a greatest hits package, The Buzzcocks 'Singles Going Steady' makes a strong case for that band being the best of the original British Punk scene—and certainly the one whose work has aged the best.

Oates is right—I could argue all day about why the contemporaneous New York School and Confessional poets are more important to me now than the Beats, but I would never argue that the Beats were without value in and of themselves, and since they were the gateway to my own love of language generally and Poetry…

Yeah, yeah—and Thoreau went home from Walden to his mama every night. You do realize that the ability to trot out nuggets of common knowledge in an effort to appear iconoclastic to the uninformed is not considered a super power, right?

Bukowski, like Burroughs, is a literary side show. I'm not saying they don't have merit, but they are each famous as much for their boho biography as they are for their work, or their contributions to the stream of American literature. In the case of Bukowski, you could even argue that he did some calculable damage.…

I agree, Richelieu. I got the Kerouac box set back when I was in high school, and it's full of great moments. I think a lot of mystic hooey is made of the association with Jazz and Poetry (and since I haved an MFA I am speaking from the inside), but Kerouac did have a command of an almost hypnotic oral cadence,…

That's a joke, right, Sugar? Tell me that's a joke.

"If you can't get into WSB, you really don't deserve to have your opinion about Lit respected much"

'On theRoad' is one of the examples along with 'Catcher in the Rye' and others, of a book with a specific window of opportunity agewise. If you get to it too late, it will never mean much to you, but if you hit the sweet spot with it—that point of adolescence where one's own longing for independence and individuation…

B Town for the win?

It's wicked close in hyea—Could one of you, ah, crack the winda so as to make, the arier area?

Crunchy—What's your entree into the 'Gatsby' with your students? It depends on their age and background, but I taught it to a racially mixed group of 11th graders in North Carolina and I had to focus on the bootlegging/gangster aspects of the "American Dream" in the book to get students interested and it really…

When I read the bit about '1984' I immediately thought two things:

As "blazing" as the stories in the Bible can be, the problem is that the same ones keep getting filmed over and over. I would suggest that this is especially true of the Gospels and the Exodus story. The real juicy meat of the Old Testament remains un-filmed and (therefore) unknown even to most Christians. For…

'Siddhartha' is absolutely not the life of the Buddha. I read it thinking that it was and I was disappointed. In fact the Buddha is a character in the book and I think he's discredited. I have to agree that the life of the Buddha may not be the most active, but it has a great visual potential. Beyond that, I think a…

As dense as it is, Ellison's 'Invisible Man' has a great number of sections that would make great visually-oriented set pieces. But I have to disagree about the choice of leads—the protagonist shouldn't be too charismatic or striking. In fact, in light of the novel, he would have to be about as nondescript as…

If I felt like I was really missing something I would.

The definitive version is Orson's radio version.

The book on tape version of 'Motherless Brooklyn' was read by Steve Buscemi. Consequently I would not be able to see that movie with anyone else in the lead.

So much to talk about here
But I want to mention that for a project in my Melville class in grad school in '96 I wrote up a film treatment of 'The Confidence Man'. I wanted Jim Jarmusch to direct and Tom Waits to do the score, but the important thing was in the casting of the man himself, and how his transformations…

Just another touch of AfroFuturism.