Recommended Reading: Amy Woolard’s poem “Things Go South” at TriQuarterly. “Here, the apple don’t fall/From the tree. Here, whatever you/Find lying on the ground is yours./A scratch-off waiting to strike.”
Poetry from the Road
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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Scrappy Little Nobody
Anna Kendrick (Into the Woods, Pitch Perfect) is releasing a collection of essays, Scrappy Little Nobody, this November. If it’s anything like her Twitter, I’m sure we’ll be laughing. For fans of Kendrick, check out our own Sonya Chung’s review of Up in the Air.
Believers
Recommended Reading: David Means on his religious beliefs and his Hystopia, one of the most anticipated books of the year.
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
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A Brief History of Gay Liberation
“If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—‘Love Wins,’ ‘It Gets Better,’ and ‘You Can Play’—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s radical roots risk being expunged from memory.” On Jim Downs’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.
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Literary Culture in Boston
Boston has announced the country’s first “Literary Culture District,” marked by memorials to Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath. It also includes some arguably less interesting sites – the buildings that used to house The Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown and Company, for example. Caroline O’Donovan writes critically about the new district for The Baffler and concludes that “we’ve allowed glib cultural ideals to occlude economic realities, and tourism tax dollars to triumph over a candid conversation about the origins of art and the sustainability of its production.”
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