At Lit Hub, Morgan Jerkins reflects on the importance of researching and telling her family’s story, as seen in her new book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. “The closer I moved towards my subjects and their homelands, the more intimate the book became,” Jerkins writes. “The more I researched, the more I knew what was at stake. I knew methodological data was not enough. To detail Black living and death, I needed a gumbo of tools: journals, articles, scholarly interviews, oral history, and personal history. I didn’t ignore the omissions—I exposed them. I confessed my frustration and I spoke of the foundation for these omissions. Then I kept going because I had to.”
Morgan Jerkins on Exposing History’s Omissions
“There’s a quiver in the dead flesh.”
Recommended Viewing: Robert Bly reads his poem, “The Dead Seal at McClure’s Beach.”
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Murakami’s Jazz
Haruki Murakami’s love for jazz is no secret – he used to own a jazz bar, he’s written full essay collections on the music, and his books are peppered with references to jazz songs and musicians. How fitting, then, that there’s finally a playlist of jazz songs mentioned in Murakami’s writings. Pair with our many past essays on Murakami.
Retrofitted
Ever wondered exactly what “mod” is? A new book by Richard Weight (reviewed in The Guardian yesterday) sets out to answer that question.
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Bad News/Good News
N+1 – we repeat – is not putting its archives online, as we surmised from a too-quick perusal of its new website. (We regret the error. Post in haste, repent at leisure.) But it might, for $75,000.
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Hemingway Double Shot
Got a couple thousand bucks lying around? You can place a bid on one of Ernest Hemingway’s love letters. Or, for a more modest price of “free,” you can read Tim Weed’s rumination entitled “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana.”
Pablo Neruda Was Murdered
Following the recent exhumation of Pablo Neruda, “there is new evidence showing he was likely murdered by agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet.” A judge has subsequently ordered a hunt for the poet’s killer.
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Visionary, Part Deux
“A chemist colleague of mine runs a seminar in which art and science are brought together. And one such session was devoted to olfaction. And there was an olfactory physiologist from Columbia and a friend of his, a parfumier. Forgive my French accent. And the parfumier had made something unlike anything ever encountered on earth. And it had a very strong smell which aroused no associations and could not be compared to anything. One realized this was absolute novelty.” The Rumpus interviews Oliver Sacks about his new book, Hallucinations.