Monday's Body of Work

Kerouac Finds His Inner Voice

We live in a time of intense self-examination. Our personalities are scrutinized, our traits boiled down, our lives plucked and analyzed like wonderfully strange flowers. But self-examination is nothing new. It’s been around ever since that first hunter looked at his spear and wondered if it were big enough. Sometimes, personal examination causes a kind of paralysis. Other times, though, it liberates us. Just look at writers. We are notoriously self-possessed and lurk for hours in the secret places of the brain. Perhaps Jack Kerouac spent too much time doing this. After all, he had trouble managing most everything else. The Cabell First Novelist Award has been announced — one of self-examination’s more lucrative rewards. To get to our core we must consider art, and ethics. Two new essays discuss this further. The Daily Sun reflects on the Nigerian poet Chris Okigbo. He was a brave and talented man. Readers should feel free to compare his life with their own. Finally, how our families make us what we are, and a new book on dancing, which is both the impetus for and the result of too much self-examination.  – Kevin Murphy

– Toward the end of writer Jack Kerouac’s life, the so-called King of the Beats was having trouble paying his mortgage. Upon his death in 1969, his estate was valued at $91- compared with around $20 million today. — Jack Kerouac in SF Gate

Unferth Reads Like Graffiti

– Deb Olin Unferth has won the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award for “Vacation” (McSweeney’s Press) from Virginia Commonwealth University, which comes with bragging rights and $5,000. — Deb Olin Unferth in Jacket Copy

– As the editor of a book review journal, I consider myself a servant with many masters. Without being servile in the callow sense of the word, I serve those authors whose work is under review; I do my best to serve well the writers who carefully pen our essays; and I serve you readers, trying to produce something of quality and trying to provide a rough guide to the perplexing forest of titles, authors, and publishers. — Editorial Ethics in The Critical Flame

– Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (1932–1967) was a Nigerian poet, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as the outstanding post-colonial English Language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century. — Chris Okigbo in the Daily Sun

Of Course You Like The Mona Lisa

– Duncan Watts was annoyed to see a rapturous mob swarming around Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre while many other magnificent works at the museum sat unviewed. A sociologist at Columbia University, Watts traced the Mona Lisa’s popularity to a series of events that brought attention to it, among which were its theft by an Italian patriot in 1911 and a refashioning by Andy Warhol in 1963. — Artistic Tastes in Psychology Today

– Some books are meant to be taken seriously, some are meant to make you take yourself seriously, and some to make you question the validity of seriousness all together. Jacob Wren’s Families Are Formed Through Copulation is all of these things. — Family Life in Bookslut

– The frontispiece of Shoot Me While I’m Happy reproduces a poster for a New York Tap Fringe Festival performance in 2005. Jane Goldberg, the self-styled Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side, is pictured as a sketchy figure with a big scribble of hair who promises to “Belly Tap for World Peace!” Goldberg, a feisty, funny character and long-time tap crusader, has written a remarkable memoir. — Tap Dancing in the Boston Phoenix

Video: Gregory Hines Tap Dancing