LIT Alive!

Gary Shteyngart connects 1980s New York with contemporary Atlanta

(Updated March 2025)

The New Yorker doesn’t feature fiction set in Atlanta very often, but it did so this June with “The Luck of Kokura” by Gary Shteyngart. Barry Cohen, the protagonist of the story, is a hedge fund manager who flees a complicated life in Manhattan and probable insider trading charges, riding the “Hound” (Greyhound bus) to Atlanta and crashing the apartment of a former employee who lives there. “Crashing” captures the spontaneity but not the flavor of his stay, as the former employee Jeff Park lives in a “palatial” 4,000-square-foot luxury condo downtown with a “frigate-size couch” and a button-operated Lutron window shades, wears Lanvin sneakers ($500+) and a “seven-figure” Rolex watch, drives both a Ferrari California and a Bentley ($200,000+ apiece) and parks in special VIP zones for luxury cars. Barry’s own obsession with luxury watches seems the ultimate in conspicuous consumption in an era when time is incorporated into cell phones.  Some Atlanta-New York comparisons seem odd (comparing the BeltLine to the High Line seems a stretch), but a focus on Atlanta’s money and ostentation seems right on. As does its focus on inequality, the haves and the have-nots, those who are lucky and those who are not.

Shteyngart’s opening reference to a Keith Haring painting hanging in Jeff Park’s Atlanta apartment and the premise of the financial trader in free fall immediately evoke the 1980s and, at least to me, the blockbuster novel that satirized that era, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987).  Continue reading Atlanta and the Bonfire of the Vanities

A white American and a Nigerian read Jean Toomer’s Cane 

(Updated December 2020 and March 2025)

I picked up Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) to listen in on words from an old rural black Georgia that was still touched by slavery. What I found was an appreciation for black beauty.

The Norton Critical Reader edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. informed me that Toomer was not an insider to old rural black Georgia culture. A mixed-race middle-class Washingtonian, Continue reading The last sweet scent of cane

Geoffrey Chaucer meets Atlanta parade artist Chantelle Rytter

(Updated March 2025)

If there was ever a time to speak of communion – with each other, with nature, with country – that time is now. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the first poets to write in English (rather than the elite Latin or French), shows us a way to come together in community in Parliament of Fowls, his exquisite tribute to love and mating.

I was reminded of Parliament early one morning last year while driving through my neighborhood with the windows rolled down.  A raucous chorus of birds called out, and I turned to see a crowd of them gathered on a lawn as if holding an assembly of some kind. The fact that it was near Valentine’s Day made it all the more fitting.

Chaucer’s poem celebrates birds of all kinds who convene annually on Saint Valentine’s Day in the garden of the Goddess of Love’s temple to pick their mates.

Continue reading Parliament of [F]owls