“Sylvia” (2004)

  I watched this partly out of HSC-related duty, but also out of interest. I have to say I was very impressed by its accuracy and fairness. The lead review (at the moment) on IMDb pretty much sums up my reaction.

In 1998, "Hilary and Jackie" explored alleged episodes in the short life of cellist Jacqueline Du Pre and her pianist, now also conductor, husband, Daniel Barenboim. Despite very very good acting the film was largely a descent into the basement of scurrilous storytelling by relatives of the dead musician. Whatever the truth of the claim that she bedded her sister’s husband, the movie said nothing about the couple’s meteorically brilliant early careers. It was slanted voyeurism writ large.

Director Christine Wells has taken a very different and insightful tack in exploring the life of poet Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, a poet with laurels garnered while Ms. Plath was still starting up a not very steady ladder to recognition.

Plath, an American, met Hughes in England. A short courtship was followed by marriage and then two children. The relationship was tumultuous and eventually it foundered because of Sylvia’s underlying emotional instability followed by her husband’s desertion to another woman…

Wells takes a sympathetic view of Ted and Sylvia, not joining in the political debate over feminism and Sylvia’s supposed maltreatment by Ted. Sylvia in this film is brilliant but also terribly brittle and her inner demons are not caused by a brutish or callous husband. As Platrow portrays her, I believe accurately, Sylvia was seriously and chronically depressed with life events worsening but in no regard initiating a downward spiral. Today she would probably thrive and be both prolific as a poet and happy as a person if successfully maintained on an effective anti-depressant.

Ted, played by Daniel Craig, is a bit transparent – loving but somewhat distanced by his own quest for fame. He hectors Sylvia to write more, annoyed that she bakes instead of composing verse while on a seaside vacation. He’s supportive but also blind to the deepening reality that he is dealing with a woman who needs help, not critical comments about non-productivity.

The supporting cast is fine but this is Paltrow and Craig’s film. She has a strong affinity for England and its culture (I believe she has moved there) and she gives the role deep conviction and understanding. It happens that she somewhat resembles Sylvia but the true recognition is internal and intellectual. And emotional, let’s not omit that…

"Sylvia" sets the record straight as Paltrow acts the part of a woman – mother as well as poet – who slowly loses control of her life while her husband reacts first with confusion and later with the self-protective armor of withdrawal.

Hughes went on to publish many fine poems and he became poet laureate of England, a post he definitely wanted and enjoyed (Hughes was one of the very few modern and relatively young intellectuals who was a convinced monarchist).

Not long before succumbing to cancer, Hughes published "Birthday Letters," an attempt to show through years of verse the nature of his relationship with Sylvia. Whether viewed as an apologia or a last record – and chance – to give his side, it’s an impressive work. And "Ariel’s Gift" by Erica Wagner is must reading for those who want more than a film and sometimes potted articles can provide. It analyzes the poets’ relationship through the prism of Hughes’s writings, most unpublished before "Birthday Letters." A recent book, "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Portrait of a Marriage," by Diane Middlebrook, is also recommended…

The movie is M15+ in Australia.

It would also perhaps be a good supplementary for “Belonging”.

Adapted from a post on my personal blog.

 

Someone has posted on Ted Hughes (HSC Module C)

And I am very grateful, for one. See Fulbright Scholars some notes. Thanks to Mel McGuinness, who has in turn kindly referred students to this blog for Frankenstein and Blade Runner.

I propose to say something about Module C myself shortly.

Update 24 June

Some references I have found.

• Sylvia Plath Info – a blog. See especially posts tagged Birthday Letters.
• More on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath  — From the Archives of The New York Times.
• Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer by Nadeem Azam – a Tripod site, so beware pop-ups!
• Jeanette Winterson is still moved, ten years on, by Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters – The Times 11 January 2008.
• And a sad fact from March 2009: Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide.

 

Reading “Jane Eyre”

For someone I am helping I found these:

On this site this post on Wuthering Heights gives some ideas on genre and background. There is heaps on The Victorian Web. See also this City University of New York site – it includes a chapter by chapter analysis.

Do you have doubts about Mr Rochester? See this insightful and amusing hating Rochester post: A Monster is Born by Moira Briggs.

…When she finally accepted that no-one was going to touch The Professor with the proverbial barge pole, Charlotte tried again. This time she resurrected her favourite character from her Angrian stories – the arrogant, brutally handsome (yawn, yawn) Zamorna – and cross-fertilized him with her idealized mental portrait of Constantin Heger.

In the process, she created a monster.

She created Edward Fairfax Rochester.

I can’t remember when, exactly, it dawned on me that Rochester was odious, but I presume it was probably in my 30s, by which age my ‘slimeball detector’ was fully developed…

Enjoy.

 

NSW Module A English HSC Advanced: on not seeing the wood for the trees…

My coachee was unfamiliar with the expression “can’t see the wood for the trees”, so I explained that it means losing sight of the whole pattern because details grow and grow at an alarming rate. This is a state many HSC students find themselves in. So how to guard against it?

Photo by Neil Whitfield 2008: artificial forest at the Sydney Chinese Garden

Make sure you read and understand the course description. My coachee and I are working on the Frankenstein and Blade Runner pair. The first thing to note is that the module is called TEXTS IN TIME: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS. That is the wood.

This module requires students to COMPARE TEXTS in order to EXPLORE THEM IN RELATION TO THEIR CONTEXTS. It develops students’ understanding of THE EFFECTS OF CONTEXT and QUESTIONS OF VALUE…

Students examine ways in which social, cultural and historical context influences aspects of texts, or the ways in which changes of context lead to changed values being reflected in texts. This includes study and use of the language of texts, consideration of purposes and audiences, and analysis of the content values and attitudes being conveyed…

OK, that means:

1. You need to know what issues or themes of interest each text embodies. In our two, for example, one can think of: the moral/ethical issues in science and technology; the need for companionship or love; what it is to be human; what is “natural”… And so on. It does not greatly matter what the issues are, so long as they are important ones and are major issues in both Frankenstein and Blade Runner. Your teacher and your class will no doubt determine perhaps two or three big ideas to hang your readings on.

2. You need to appreciate what was being thought, said and done around the time each text was composed: 1818 in one case, and 1982 in the other. Consider also where each text was composed. How does what you discover about this explain why each text may have been composed? Be careful here. It can be tempting to write history or philosophy and forget about the actual texts. Not a good idea.

3. Having found an issue, explore where and how it is presented in each text. Don’t forget to be specific rather than general. Find key passages or scenes. Look closely at the techniques used in their making. Then ask “Why is this passage/scene like this?” What in the context may have shaped the way it has been done? What in the context made this issue of sufficient interest to the composer and his/her readers and viewers? Where does the composer stand on it? What does the composer regard as important, or troubling, or worth arguing for or against on this issue? Now you will be exploring values and attitudes.

4. There are also genre issues to think about: The Gothic, science fiction, dystopias, film noir… Why have these genres thrived at various points in history? Why have they persisted? What is the relation of our two texts to these genres?

It really is hard to coordinate all this thinking. Anyone who tells you the HSC has been dumbed down is just plain dumb! I know that I never had to do anything half as difficult in my final year of high school in 1959! The good thing is that the issues raised in these texts really are interesting – and important!

So, good luck. Also, any suggestions about how to organise the material in an exam-friendly way will no doubt be appreciated by others. You may use the comment space here for that, if you care to.

The truth is out there

Yes, you are also lucky. There is so much good material to explore, some of it suggested on my previous post on this.

Here’s another, and very recent. This week an article appeared in The Times in London: Lynda Pratt, “Who wrote the original Frankenstein?”

Frankenstein – that most resonant and enduring of early nineteenth-century fictions – was born in the febrile atmosphere of the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Bored by the unseasonably cold, wet weather, the Villa’s residents, Byron, John Polidori, Percy Shelley and the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, amused themselves by writing ghost stories. The other female member of the party – the pregnant Claire Clairmont – did not take part. Surrounded by three competitive males to whose conversations on “the nature of the principle of life” she was a “devout but nearly silent listener”, frustrated by her inability to “think of a story” (and perhaps also by her future husband’s determination that she should “obtain literary reputation”), one night Mary had a dreadful “waking dream”…

As Marilyn Butler so acutely observed, Frankenstein is “famously reinterpretable. It can be a late version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok, or what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman”.

Yet the very familiarity of Frankenstein means that its complex pre- and post-publication textual history is often overlooked, and the actual process of composition of a fiction so centrally concerned with creation ignored. The novel’s textual instability is explored in the impressive introduction to Charles Robinson’s new edition. His honourable aim is not to give us another text of the novel we know – or think we know – but to strip away nearly two centuries of revision and appropriation in order to return to what he describes as the “original” Frankenstein. Or rather, since the “transcript of grim terrors” and the short versions of July and August 1816 do not survive, to reinstate the earliest recoverable version of the novel: the manuscript first draft composed between autumn 1816 and March-April 1817, which is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Robinson’s volume is the first ever edition of this manuscript (a facsimile, by the same editor, was published in 1996)…

The image, vividly evoked in Robinson’s introduction, of Mary and Percy passing the manuscript draft between them, each responding to the ideas of the other, is a powerful reminder that the popular myth of the Romantic author as an isolated, creative genius is just that – a myth. The Shelleys were part of a complex cultural network, involved in literary collaborations and (as the connections between Frankenstein and early nineteenth-century scientific debates illustrate) responsive to contemporary issues.

Frankenstein – in whatever form we choose to encounter it – is not alone in this. Other works central to British Romanticism, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (also first published anonymously), were brought into being by the creative interactions of their authors both with one another and with the political and intellectual climate of their age….

My next HSC post will introduce the concept of BELONGING and make a few suggestions…

 

Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein” — and “Blade Runner”

Henry Fuseli: Dream of Belinda

There is no lack of material on the Internet about this famous novel. Those of you doing the 2009-2012 HSC in NSW must compare it with Scott Ridley’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, which you will also find on this site. You must attend especially to the context in which each work emerged, issues of genre, and issues of language and technique, as well as of course forming ideas about the great themes each work embodies.

• The Literary Gothic is a site you will want to visit. See Shelley, Mary.
• My Hideous Progeny is a site devoted to the novel.
• You will find some essays by Kim A. Woodbridge of Maryland USA and others here.
• You will find quite a number of things via Google Books, for example Mary Shelley in Her Times edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Johns Hopkins University Press 2000).
• Mary Shelley: The Expert View comes from the BBC.
• The similarities between Frankenstein and Blade Runner are quite staggering, according to this site from Texas.
• This course-work site from a US university asks some interesting questions about Blade Runner, even if you may need some guidance with the pomo jargon…

Look at this essay: Frankenstein as Lucy (PDF).

Here is a beautiful site to look at: Nature, Beauty, and Power: The Romantics (Pitt State University). Another US university, Washington State, offers a plain no-nonsense introduction to Romanticism.

There is also Romanticism: an Overview on The Victorian Web. See especially Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) — A Summary of Modern Criticism.

Two YouTube videos follow; if you are at school these may just be blank spaces! Try at home.

Kenneth Branagh 1994

Opening of Blade Runner

See also Studying the Gothic, or Emily Bronte?.

UPDATES

1. The course material for this unit prepared by Melpomene Dixon for the English Teachers’ Association NSW is really excellent!
2. I have since done a follow-up post.

 

Blogging beyond the grave?

This will appeal to many teachers of English or History, as it did in this case:

That comes from a comment blog connected to:

See also on this blog: War Poetry.

 

Revenge Tragedy

One of the options in NSW English Extension 1 for the HSC is Revenge Tragedy; you will see an outline of the course there. From Euripides to High Noon is quite a jump, isn’t it, but I am glad to see that students have the chance to look at all those texts listed.

Revenge tragedy usually concerns an individual faced with the duty of revenge in a society where the law is unreliable and within the control of the powerful and protected.

In this elective students are required to study at least three of the prescribed texts as well as other texts of their own choosing. In their responding and composing they explore, analyse, experiment with and critically evaluate their prescribed texts and a range of other examples of this genre, which may include texts that extend or challenge the traditional conventions of revenge tragedy. Texts should be drawn from a range of contexts and media.

Given you can look up Wikipedia or Answers.com for yourselves, and should for “Revenge Tragedy” and for each text, here are a few other suggestions.

The Literary Encyclopedia allows non-subscribers the first few paragraphs only, but it is still worth reading it.
The BBC’s Guide to Life, The Universe and Everything has a somewhat tongue-in-cheek account of tragedy, but there are some quotes there that could be good essay or discussion starters.
Is there such a genre? — Michael Bywater asks that subversive question, so look at his notes there. [July 2007: This site is being rebuilt. I will check later on to see if this excellent resource is restored.]
Rewriting Revenge by Gordon Carver reviews a production of Cyril Tourner’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.

The whoops and hollers of the dancers, the flashes of muscled legs, bare torsos, bare buttocks, and gold lamé thongs introduced the animalistic, highly exhibitionist, more-than-a-little homoerotic theatrical environment.

Sounds like a fun production!
Murder Will Out: Animated Tongues, Middling Values, and Elizabethan Urban Legend by Doré Ripley is a somewhat Marxist and historicist reading of the genre, focusing especially on Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, and Titus Andronicus. Worth a look.
Richard Keys, Curator Emeritus at Screensound Australia, has an interesting page on High Noon: “The year 2002 was the silver anniversary of the release of 1952’s High Noon. In this essay I will try to do justice to what is in my opinion one of the greatest American films.”
Theatre of Blood by Gary Kamiya is controversial and political, but it does indicate something of the place of revenge tragedy in our cultural heritage. You may or may not agree with him, but will find him interesting. Bush wanted his Iraq war to be a lofty Shakespearean history. He got a vicious, corpse-strewn revenge tragedy.

[COMMENT CLOSED because of spam. Please use the guest book.]

 

Studying the Gothic, or Emily Bronte?

I have had coachees doing this interesting genre, and I know others are. So here are a few good sites, once you have been sensible and checked Answers.com or Wikipedia.

Online Edgar Allan Poe Exhibition from Cornell University: Nevermore: The Edgar Allan Poe Collection of Susan Jaffe Tane, source of the picture above.
The Literary Gothic ‘is a Web guide to all things concerned with literary Gothicism, which includes ghost stories, “classic” Gothic novels and Gothic fiction (1764-1820), and related pre- and post-Gothic and supernaturalist literature written prior to the mid-C20. Its target audience is all students and fans of the Gothic, regardless of age, academic level, profession, or just about anything else.’
The Gothic: Materials for Study: “With this question in mind, we have assembled this compilation of Gothic “materials for study.” We imagine the project as a course reader for an undergraduate college course on the Gothic. The primary texts for the course include nine novels that we feel represent the”canonized Gothic”; novels whose popularity in both their time and ours attests to their appeal and longevity.” (University of Virginia).
The Victorian Web ‘is the WWW translation of Brown University’s Context 61, which serves as a resource for courses in Victorian literature.’ It is excellent.
Touched by the Hand of Goth: Classics of Gothic Horror Cinema, a good introductory essay by a Finnish student.
GOTHIC/HORROR FICTION QUIZ by Sara Martin. The answers are here.

Emily Bronte from CUNY Brooklyn is concise and very relevant to the kind of study required here in NSW. Follow the links there.

[SPAMMED. Please use the guest book.]

 

Now what do I know about Malouf and Wordsworth…?

In 2005 I had two students who were reading David Malouf — Answers.com or Wikipedia are both good places to start looking. One student was studying An Imaginary Life in the context of an “In the Wild” module also featuring Wordsworth. (He got Band 6 in the end.) Nature in Answers.com is worth a visit. So of course is Wordsworth The other was studying The Great World as part of a Year 11 unit on “Visions of Australia”. Here is a site that fits Malouf into a postcolonial context. Could be useful.

Here is a 1996 interview with Malouf in which he talks about “The Conversations at Curlow Creek, and other matters such as God and paganism and the sacred.”

In January 2001 Malouf spoke with Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National; from his collection of short stories, Dream Stuff, Malouf read from one of the stories, called ‘Closer.’ He then talked about that story and his work. (This is a full transcript.)

This Introduction to The Great World is concise but a reasonable start.

This is one of the best things I have found so far for both books. Film Australia (PDF) has published these “viewing notes” for a documentary on Malouf also called An Imaginary Life.

This New York Times review of the novel An Imaginary Life is worth visiting, as is this one of The Great World. (If the New York Times demand registration, remember it is free – and useful.)

If you want a rather turgid essay in pomo style on An Imaginary Life, look at “An Imaginary Life by David Malouf: The Struggle for the Sign, the Struggle for the Self”. Look too at “The Stranger in Three Novels by David Malouf” by Jorg Heinke, University of Kiel, Germany — even if it is oddly organised — or at least I think so.

On Wordsworth there is “Wordsworth’s poetry” by Anne Collins, from HSC Online. You could also do some very profitable time-wasting by doing a virtual tour of Wordsworth’s Cumbria. Then, and I do warn you in advance, look at William “The Interminable” Wordsworth (1770-1850) written by someone else who has found “The Prelude” to be great for insomnia…

Here is a beautiful site to look at: Nature, Beauty, and Power: The Romantics (Pitt State University). Another US university, Washington State, offers a plain no-nonsense introduction to Romanticism.

[COMMENT CLOSED because of spam. Please use the guest book.]

 

In search of Yeats

[July 2007 check: Some of the sites listed here when Ben and I were studying Yeats two years ago have gone, sadly. That’s the way of the Internet. I have deleted/replaced them.]

All my coachees are from HK or Chinese background, some more recently arrived than others. Two last year, Erwin and Ben, were both studying Advanced English in the HSC. One Saturday I promised Ben I would look around to see what I could find about Yeats, a poet I like but do not always understand…

Byzantium reads aloud brilliantly and leaves the reader awash in images: but what does it all really mean? Not so easy. And what are some of the various readings possible, if the poem is approached from a number of theoretical persepectives? Even harder… It was all too much for us when I was the age Ben is now and doing English II at Sydney University…

That rather splendid image is from Yeats Goes to Byzantium. In “Sailing to Byzantium: Adrift on Perfection”, Sonia Jain concludes:

…Byzantium cannot eternalize Yeats’ genius, for the reader must envision a city so basic that the very complexities that exist as a mere byproduct of the human condition fail to exist, and it is this very anomaly that reflects in the absurdity of the old man Yeats’ desire in quite literally “Sailing to Byzantium.” Yeats is faced with the biggest paradox, for he wishes to become the form that is essential to perfect art, yet despises the very senses without whose perceptions, perfect art could not exist.

I do wonder if “eternalize” is quite the right word…

Michael Fleming, “Myself That I Remake: Spiritual Renewal in the Life and Work of William Butler Yeats” is [was!] pretty good. A very different essay is this one [gone! But you have a bit below] on David Mitchell’s Number9Dream and some poems by Yeats:

…Issues such as chaos and order, questing; a search for definition through context. The ways in which both Yeats and Mitchell’s characters ultimately find this clarity must be explored. The Second Coming, published first in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ (1921) depicts Yeats’ chaos theory; the heralding of a new order and destruction of the old ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer’; an emblem of Yeats’ belief that upon every two thousand years a new world order would be enforced. The ‘widening gyre’ signifying his analogy of two overlapping inverted cones, humanity circumnavigating one until reaching its widest point and then exchanging realities with its coincident partner. The falcon, a symbol of purity and nobility ‘cannot hear the falconer’. – Semblances of the loss of communication between the old regulated and automated reality, the changing of context as the new order ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’ in a chilling moment of potential. Yeats acknowledged that this new rule would be neither better nor worse than its precursor, just dissimilar and for that matter fearsome, yet it is peculiar to identify the use of such images of pestilence ‘While all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds’. Having replaced the elegant falcon these vultures circle overhead presumably encompassing the carrion left in the wake of ‘The Second Coming’. ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’ – their flight symbolising the tightening gyre of the transition of orders. Jesus Christ gives way to some ‘rough beast’, ‘The twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.’

Lindsay A. Lauersdorf writes on “Yeats’s Symbols: Cycles and Antinomes.” [Gone! It was interesting too. 😦 ] Timothy J Lord examines the work of Yeats and another famous Irish writer in “The Mariner and the Sea: the dual visions of Yeats and Joyce”.

Here is a site [2007 added] where a poet, Brian Jones, looks at some of his favourite Yeats poems.

At a much simpler level we have this study guide: Summary of some W. B. Yeats Poetry.

On the Bored of Studies site a current HSC student posed this question, before indulging in a pithy four-letter view of Yeats’s work…

“Yeats’s poetry can be seen not only in the context of the socio-political upheavals of the early twentieth century, but also as a pre-occupation with his own unique philosophies and symbolisms. His values are inherent in a reading of the following poems:

“When You Are Old”
“Easter 1916”
“Wild Swans At Coole”
“The Second Coming”

Discuss your understanding of the historical, philosophical and literary values of each of the above works.

Some of you reading this out there might be very very amazed at what HSC students are expected to deal with in forty or fifty minutes. It really is, don’t you think, the kind of question that immediately leads to some Pooh Perplex level of response. Do look at Danny Yee’s review of The Pooh Perplex, a book every English teacher or student should read some day.

Later

And then I googled “Yeats + Nietzche” and got among others:

Maria Voelkel “Meditations in Time of Civil War”.

“Influences on Yeats” from The Yeats Society Sligo, Hyde Bridge, Sligo, Ireland.

“Magic Words, Magic Brush: The Art of William Butler and Jack Yeats” from the Kennedy Center. A set of lesson plans for secondary classes.

This unit on William Butler Yeats, the writer, and Jack Yeats, the painter, is dedicated to immersing students in a study of the brothers as voices of Ireland, and as two of the most renowned artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is dedicated also to evoking students to see how the outlook of an age controls cultural expression, and how this expression is articulated in similar ways throughout genres of art. To help effect these major goals, focus is placed on: the impact of geography, place, and family on both William Butler Yeats and Jack Yeats; the influence of personalities of the time period on the two artists; also, the ways both Yeats align, in philosophical construct and creative expression, with the dynamic changes that occurred in the last part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries.

“The darkness drops again”: Yeats, Nietzsche, Ginsberg from The Dark Age Blog which is Canadian, and linked to another rather interesting looking site which may also prove to be totally weird: The Coming Dark Age. I suspend judgement on both until I have looked into them more. But The Dark Age Blog is interesting on “The Second Coming” and the following couple of entries are also relevant.

Yeats’ famous poem, written just after the conclusion of the Great War of 1914-18, retains its popularity and power of dark enchantment down to this day. It may be the poem most commented upon to be found anywhere on the internet. In tone it is apocalyptic. In mood, it is darkly pessimistic and so it participates in the common mood of pessimism that prevailed in the West after the Great War. The Great War shattered the myth of progress — the widely held (and in some ways naive) optimism that history was simply the inevitable process of human progress. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned” was only an obvious fact to those who had lived through the conflagration. This myth of progress was one of the casualties of the Great War, along with so much else. As one literary critic pointed out, no utopian novels were written in the West after the war, whereas before the war they had been quite common. On the contrary, the mood in the genre became darkly dystopian, exemplified by Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, amongst other less well-known examples…

Of course it goes without saying to visit Wikipedia or Answers.com on Yeats, Nietzche, and so on and so on…

NEW 2007

George Orwell on Yeats (1943).

The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats — National Library of Ireland.

Profile of Yeats — an About.com site. Leads to more sites.

Modern Classics: William Butler Yeats — from the prestigious Poetry Magazine founded by Harriet Munroe in 1912.

W.B. Yeats: An Examination of Civilization and Barbarity by John McGuirk on Literary Kicks. “Literary Kicks was founded in July 1994 by Levi Asher, then a struggling writer bored by his tech job at the headquarters of the JP Morgan bank on Wall Street. Operated surreptitiously from Asher’s cubicle as he pretended to work on PowerPoint presentations, LitKicks quickly became a popular online destination and critic’s favorite, also gaining wide usage on college campuses around the world.” Interesting site.