“All the rage and mourning and angst works to exhaust you; it eats you alive with its relentlessness.” The New York Times‘ Jenna Wortham on self-care during a summer rife with violence against people of color.
Black Bodies Matter
Poetry of Misplacement
Recommended Reading: Daisy Fried’s poem in the new issue of Grey Magazine, “Where Not to Put Things.” “Failed poems about sex, ball of yarn/twists from pink to green/to tangerine.”
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The Gray Salt Sea, The Wine-Dark Sea
Writing for Lapham’s Quarterly, Caroline Alexander takes a deep dive into Homer’s “wine-dark sea” to uncover the origins and meaning behind the poet’s “incomprehensible” phrase.
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Analyzing the Scumbag Brain
Jessica Love explores a little of the science behind every weary reader’s nemesis: zoning out.
Mad Money
Modern day celebrities aren’t the only victims of Photoshop. Paula Byrne, a Jane Austen biographer, believes that Austen has been “airbrushed” on her £10 Bank of England note. The portrait makes her look like “a pretty doll with big doe eyes” and diminishes her reputation as an author, Byrne argues.
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Unofficial
For Perry Link, it was embarrassing to read Eileen Chang for the first time, because her work revealed things about China it took him too long to learn on his own. In The New York Review of Books, he writes about how Naked Earth, which the magazine’s publishing arm is republishing in June, cut through the jargon of Chairman Mao’s regime. FYI, Jamie Fisher wrote an essay on the book for The Millions.
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Shhhh!
The sound level of a typical quiet bedroom measures 30 decibels, but what if you still can’t concentrate on your reading? Well, maybe you should move to Minneapolis and use Steven Orfield’s “anechoic chamber,” which at -9 decibels is officially the quietest room in the world.
DeWitt Talks Lightning Rods
Recommended Weekend Podcast: Helen DeWitt talks with Anne Strainchamps about her novel Lightning Rods, which we at The Millions loved a lot.
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