In anticipation of the Republican and Democratic national conventions later this summer, Nathan Gelgud, one of the Daily’s new correspondents, will be posting a regular weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 DNC. Read More
Building a library in Saint Lucia.
This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Matthew St. Ville Hunte.
The first book I consciously acquired for what became my library was V.S. Naipaul’s The Writer and the World. I purchased it at a Nigel R. Khan Bookstore in the departure lounge of Trinidad’s Piarco Airport. This was 2004; I was flying home to Saint Lucia after I spent a summer working for an Afrocentric radical while finishing my junior year in college. At the time, I was drifting into a literary life, thanks mainly to the lack of a serious commitment to anything else. I set myself a program: I would read not just for pleasure or to acquaint myself with the best of what had come before me but to find out where I could fit in as a writer. Naipaul—jaded, deracinated, and irredeemably West Indian—seemed like a natural model. Read More
Tending my Internet archive.
J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1844, oil on canvas.
This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Wei Tchou.
My parents visited me a few weeks ago, when I was feeling blue for the normal New York reasons: another breakup, a looming eviction, the smell of dead rats wafting up from the basement of my building. (The exterminator hadn’t been by in a while.) My father brought along a few things to cheer me up. The two-and-a-half pound tin of “European Formula” Ovaltine turned out to be something of a ruse; he’s diabetic, so my mother doesn’t normally allow him that sort of indulgence. But he also brought three beautiful, hard-to-find bottles of baijiu, a high-proof Chinese liquor, along with a memory.
“I was reading through my date book from this time in 1983,” he told me. “Thirty-three years ago, I was receiving a notice every week to arrive in Philadelphia to be deported.” Read More