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A Chaos of Nonconformity
Ian McEwan joins a debate about the novel’s impact today A few months ago, a friend texted me News to You: Literature Isn’t Dead, Ann Patchett’s impassioned defense of literary fiction’s centrality to American culture today. The novelist, who runs the bookstore Parnassus in Nashville, Tennessee, was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by the…
Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)
Margaret Vetare, Herman Melville, and WNYC’s Public Song Project In May the singer-songwriter Margaret Vetare, a college friend, told me that she’d submitted a song to WNYC’s “Public Song Project” which showcases new recordings of songs made from works in the American public domain. The songs can be based on poems, books, films, existing songs,…
March!
Civil rights graphic memoir author Andrew Aydin says the way to take back power is with our feet and our stories The author Andrew Aydin was spotted Saturday, June 14th at the “No Kings” rally in Waynesville, North Carolina, where he was the final speaker at its protest against authoritarianism. He will also be speaking this…
Revelation
Flannery O’Connor’s fervid following Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) had her biggest-ever annual birthday celebration in Savannah, Georgia, last weekend, on the occasion of her 100th birthday. The Southern Gothic writer from Savannah was feted with three days of events, starting with soirées on Friday night and ending with a New Orleans-style procession through Lafayette Square led by…
Meridian: 6.(a) a place or situation with its own distinctive character; (b) a distinctive character
John Lewis’s funeral and the civil rights novel dedicated to him (Updated March 2025) I was just finishing John Lewis’s three-book graphic memoir March when on July 17th John Lewis died. The representative from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District (Atlanta; ours) for 33 years was expected to die of pancreatic cancer but he had also just…
Love in the time of coronavirus
Timely contents of a Little Free Library (Updated March 2025) Coronatime, life during COVID-19 pandemic, is transforming everything, multiplying the many forms of love. We are clinging to those we take for granted. Many of us are reaching out to long-lost friends and family members. Across the world people are singing in solidarity from their…
The never sufficiently praised Don Quixote of La Mancha
An egomaniac on the loose in the US and Spain (Updated March 2025) Thank you Salman Rushdie for finally getting me to read Don Quixote (1615) – Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation in particular. Your New Yorker story “The Little King” and the recently published novel Quichotte seduced me in by showcasing Atlanta and by inviting readers…
A Californian in Atlanta
Georgia’s “heartbeat” bill evokes Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) (Updated March 2025) After living in Atlanta for 14 years, I remain convinced that as states go, Georgia and California are about as far apart, physically and culturally, as you can get. The sweltering humidity of Hotlanta in July is completely unknown in…
Riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long
Sidney Lanier’s The Marshes of Glynn comes alive in music (Updated March 2025) I owe my budding awareness of the musician poet Sidney Lanier entirely to Meridian Herald’s Southern Folk Passion this past Palm Sunday at the Church at Ponce and Highland. But for stumbling upon Lanier on the group’s website before the concert, I…
Not like one of the family
Seeing and hearing black nannies (Updated March 2025) Kimberly Wallace-Sanders’ exhibit Framing Shadows at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library features 22 photos of African American nannies of white children from the 1840s to the 1920s, a family photo type found during these years in the eastern United States. It also displays novels that feature…
In and around the oak
Significant trees in honor of Earth Day (Updated March 2025) Last month I stumbled upon a memorial to “Big Al,” a massive willow oak on the Georgia Tech campus that spontaneously split and fell last autumn, shocking the community. Fall of a Champion was a student-produced exhibit on the more than 100-year-old tree that included…
Majestying in Buckhead
Out to dinner at King + Duke (Updated March 2025) What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Huckleberry Finn? It might be “floating down the Mississippi River on a raft,” or “friendship with Jim the runaway slave,” or maybe “smoking, cussing, fibbing… with a heart of gold,” or even “escaping…
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean
Romeo and Juliet at Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern (Updated March 2025) As Valentine’s Day looms, the thoughts of those so inclined naturally turn to one love classic above all, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In this romantic tragedy, young lovers – Juliet is not even 14 years old! – from feuding families – the Montagues and the…
Til it reaches the city of the sun
Reading Ovid in winter (Updated March 2025) There’s something very wonderful about the coming of winter, cold, and darkness. It allows a person to burrow in, curl up with the dog or cat, bask in the warmth of the hearth, and read things like Ovid. Culturally it’s the Season of Light. Falling close to the…
Back in the Wren’s Nest
Joel Chandler Harris turns 170 (Updated March 2025) My mother used to read to us, but she never read us Uncle Remus. We weren’t from the South and also she hated dialect. I can understand. With dialect, a reader doesn’t just listen to the writer’s words but has to enact them in weird voices. Not…
LIT Alive! 