New York City’s municipal grid turns 200 this year. To commemorate, author and Year in Reading alumna Belinda McKeon notes the way New Yorkers utilize it as they “don’t wander so much as dart” from place to place.
An Irish Take on the NYC Grid
Bard-yoncé
Beyoncé collaborated with Forrest Gander, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, to write a poem called “Bey the Light.” You can read that over here. (Bonus: This isn’t the first time Queen B has teamed up with a prominent writer.)
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Irony and Equanimity
Recommended Reading: Critic James Wood for the New Yorker on one of the most significant literary heroes of the Holocaust, Primo Levi. The three-volume Complete Works of Primo Levi is out this week.
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Code-Switching Patchworks
Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”
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That’s What I Say
Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction in Clearwater, Florida in 1965. If John Jeremiah Sullivan is to be believed, it was a young woman by the name of Ginny French who inspired Jagger to write the song while lounging poolside the morning after a big performance. If music marginalia is your thing, be sure to check out The Millions’ own Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music column.
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Tochi Onyebuchi on Writing to Abate the Terror
Tochi Onyebuchi reflects on his role as a black writer during the protests against police brutality and the killing of black men and women.
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