Kick Out The Bottom:
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Praise for Kick Out the Bottom
"Yes, 'kick out the jams' was one generation's provocation, but Mortenson and Kramer inhabited in their youth a heady mixture of punkish aesthetics and neo-hip mysticism. They give us a Detroit that was on the edge of massive re-transformation even as they were themselves on their way to new modes of living. The inner-city education of these two somehow circles around the personality of a suburban quasi-guru. They've never been the same, and neither has Detroit."
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen
George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature
The Pennsylvania State University
"Kick Out the Bottom captures the authors' yearning to invent a new world and a new sense of personhood from the bottom up. In Rilkean fashion, Kick Out the Bottom explores characters who are willing to change their lives as they endure an archetypal search for meaning via self-estrangement on the way to self-recomposition in Detroit, a post-apocalyptic Parisian bohemia itself experiencing transformations."
- Daniel Morris
Professor of English, Purdue University
editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
"Kick Out the Bottom is the future of literature, or, to appropriate from the Detroit that the book transcends, we may ask, 'Is there a Kick Out the Bottom in your future?' Christopher Kramer and Erik Mortenson ask us why the one-person memoir should be the norm. As two people who find themselves in a new and undefinable Detroit, Kramer and Mortenson share a common language, and, after all, we all borrow from one another. Why must memoir writing be such a lonely task? Perhaps more important, however, as Kramer's and Mortenson's previously lost-to-history mentor advises, 'Why not kick out the bottom and come out the other side?' What comes out is a veritable 'new tense, one that looks backwards but strives to contain a lost moment's impact as it bleeds into the present of the telling.' In many ways, Kramer and Mortenson may have achieved the first post-Walter Benjamin memoir worthy of Benjamin and his theory of temporal intimacies. "
-Stephen Paul Miller
Professor of English, St. John's University
author of Being with a Bullet
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen
George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature
The Pennsylvania State University
"Kick Out the Bottom captures the authors' yearning to invent a new world and a new sense of personhood from the bottom up. In Rilkean fashion, Kick Out the Bottom explores characters who are willing to change their lives as they endure an archetypal search for meaning via self-estrangement on the way to self-recomposition in Detroit, a post-apocalyptic Parisian bohemia itself experiencing transformations."
- Daniel Morris
Professor of English, Purdue University
editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
"Kick Out the Bottom is the future of literature, or, to appropriate from the Detroit that the book transcends, we may ask, 'Is there a Kick Out the Bottom in your future?' Christopher Kramer and Erik Mortenson ask us why the one-person memoir should be the norm. As two people who find themselves in a new and undefinable Detroit, Kramer and Mortenson share a common language, and, after all, we all borrow from one another. Why must memoir writing be such a lonely task? Perhaps more important, however, as Kramer's and Mortenson's previously lost-to-history mentor advises, 'Why not kick out the bottom and come out the other side?' What comes out is a veritable 'new tense, one that looks backwards but strives to contain a lost moment's impact as it bleeds into the present of the telling.' In many ways, Kramer and Mortenson may have achieved the first post-Walter Benjamin memoir worthy of Benjamin and his theory of temporal intimacies. "
-Stephen Paul Miller
Professor of English, St. John's University
author of Being with a Bullet