August 1, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 8: The Court Objects to Allen Ginsberg By Nathan Gelgud Throughout the summer, Nathan Gelgud, a correspondent for the Daily, has been posting a weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 Democratic National Convention. Catch up with the whole series here. Read More
July 28, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer with a Thousand Julys By Lucy Sante I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life’s ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don’t have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when we insist on ice-cold beer to chill our body cavity, especially the spleen. Summer is when we go see particularly stupid movies because it would be unseasonal to have to think. Summer is when we get into fights with the neighbors over noise or property lines or because we should live next door as well as at our house. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down. Read More
July 26, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer Hours, Part 2 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1 of Vanessa Davis’s new column. Read More
July 25, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 7: Party Time with Dick Gregory By Nathan Gelgud Throughout the summer, Nathan Gelgud, a correspondent for the Daily, has been posting a weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 Democratic National Convention. Catch up with the whole series here. Read More
July 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Ad Me By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Growing up in the context of no context. A few years ago, my late friend D. G. Myers and I had a disagreement about the relationship between advertising and literary culture. Myers argued that the ads and articles in the Saturday Evening Post had a bearing on the stories F. Scott Fitzgerald initially published in the magazine, on the grounds that all three came out of the same cultural context. At the time, I was unpersuaded—the ads, I said, were just there to pay the bills—but I have come to see his point. Last week, I rewatched an episode of Reading Rainbow that I have long cherished. As the episode begins, LeVar Burton, the show’s host, appears alone on a smog-filled dock on Charleston Harbor. Wearing a trench coat and fedora in the style of a hard-boiled detective, Burton is on the trail of Big Mama Blue. Suddenly we hear someone singing opera, and Burton introduces Mystery on The Docks, by Thacher Hurd. The story, narrated by Raúl Juliá, is about an opera-loving short-order cook who saves a famous singer from gangsters. All the characters are rats. Read More
July 21, 2016 Our Correspondents Flannery’s Farm By Wei Tchou Andalusia and the ache of identity. Flannery O’Connor in the driveway at Andalusia, 1962. © Joe McTyre/Atlanta Constitution. You can judge how far outside of Atlanta you are by the gasoline prices. My parents kept calling them out every few minutes as we drove from their house toward Milledgeville to the farm where Flannery O’Connor once lived. Gas that was $2.26 in town became $2.11 just outside the city limits. The weather was less hot than usual, which is to say that while it was still awful and sticky, there was a breeze every now and then. Prices hovered around two dollars as we drove south, and the landscape shifted from tony suburbs to farmland. Soon forests of tall slender pine trees began filling our periphery, and my mother actually gasped when we encountered $1.96 a gallon. At $1.95, we reached Andalusia Farm. Read More