“Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?” To quote Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Though not all writers agree.
On the Scroll
Catch ‘Em All
"I can locate the remnants of two or three abandoned cars that haven’t moved in a year, a couple of defunct pay phones, several tire piles, and at least one trashed couch that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere." Rob Walker on playing Pokémon Go in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.
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Voice to the Voiceless
"Even though journalism is a good profession, for me it was very constraining. It focuses on the surface, banalities, events, and I wanted to spend a longer time talking to people in depth, and to ask them about truly important things, like love, death, and war." This interview with Svetlana Alexievich at The Nation is fantastic. Check out our own profile/interview with Alexievich from earlier this summer.
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Dancing Feet
Fred didn't always have Ginger: The Boston Review looks at the many dance partners of Fred Astaire, as catalogued by Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced With Fred Astaire and The Astaires: Fred and Adele.
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I Have a Mortgage
"Over three decades of almost constant composing and recording, he would amass over sixty LPs, running the gamut from early records with his band the Mothers of Invention that helped to create the milieu we think of as the Sixties, to caustic send-ups of that same counterculture, doo-wop pastiche, tape cut-ups, film scores, gonzo cabaret, big-band charts, way out prog, show tunes, music composed entirely on and for the Synclavier digital sampler, full-score orchestral music, and thousands of scabrous, exploratory guitar solos." On Frank Zappa, music theory wizard and occasional public intellectual.
Campbell’s Bliss
Read new flash fiction from Bonnie Jo Campbell in Pank Magazine. Peek behind the page in our interview with the author.
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“An opus d’odure”
Heaven forbid someone ever draws parallels between your writing and that of “Robert Rabelais the Younger.” For his work, published in the nineteenth century, has been described as “the most appallingly bad epic poem to have ever been written in English, comprised of 384 interminable pages of doggerel verse devoid of any literary merit, an opus d'odure that screams stinkburger.” (And that’s one of the more positive evaluations.)