“Every journal is a confessional. If it’s in the first person, it cannot help but be. Unless the author of it lies to himself—and that makes it even more of a confessional. For some reason, travel brings out confessions one would never make at home. I am trying to draw the rake of my journal over the landscape. Perhaps I will uncover something.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new collection of travel journals, Writing Across the Landscape, is out now. Travel on back to The Millions for Kate McCahill’s essay on traveling with books.
Salton Sea as Holy Land
Dr. Seuss Museum
We just got a new Dr. Seuss book; now we get a full Dr. Seuss museum, and it’s probably safe to bet it won’t look like just another children’s center.
Story Arcs
Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, researchers programmed a computer to identify the main arcs in stories. You could also read our editor Lydia Kiesling’s review of Vonnegut’s Letters.
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A Dissociated World
“We live, in short, with local exceptions, in a dissociated world held together by fragile links of utility and self-promotion underpinned by laws of mutual advantage—a materialist ethos and cosmos that cannot but influence cultural representations and, hence, art, including poetry.” On John Donne and the humanity in art.
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