This Week In Indie Boosktores
A century-old Greek bookstore has closed due to the debt crisis.
Colleges are giving up on campus bookstores, sending students to Amazon instead.
You too could start your own bookstore.
...morePosts Tagged: detroit
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Sara Benincasa
Comedian Sara Benincasa opens up about her latest book Real Artists Have Day Jobs, adjusting to success, Venn-diagramming love, and the loss of Morley Safer. ...more
Visible: Women Writers of Color #1: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told. ...more
Places to Call Home
...moreRather than being shot at, my new fear would be of seeing the officers unleash violence upon a helpless body, having to watch within the confines of my approximated uniform, padded with a bullet proof vest, which would incontrovertibly claim me, identify my orientation toward the police and not the helpless body, drown me out even though I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t be screaming, I am the kind of person who screams.
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Angela Flournoy
My ambition is personal. I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. ...more
Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons #9: Vickie Stringer
Vickie Stringer talks about her first novel Let That Be the Reason, her Triple Crown Publishing venture, life in prison, and making hip-hop literature. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
Author Matt Bell talks video games, fiction, nonfiction, politics, empathy, and his new books, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Scrapper. ...more
(Don’t) Stick To What You Know
At the Atlantic, Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, discusses her struggle with writing about Detroit without having lived there, and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work helped her give herself permission to write outside her own experiences:
...moreIt’s not about having a background that lines up with the characters you’re writing about, I realized.
The Rumpus Interview with Marge Piercy
Dara Barnat talks with Marge Piercy about growing up in Detroit, making a kind of Judaism through poetry, and living close to the natural world. ...more
Little Free Libraries Come to Detroit
Detroit has been trying to remake itself as a city that welcomes creative people, particularly writers, such as with the Write A House program that grants writers a house in the city. Now, Detroit is getting twenty Little Free Libraries, the first of which have been installed in the city, reports the Detroit News.
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Detroit New Hollywood Vegas: Notes from an Extra
Juliette Lewis will decide to stage dive onto just me. Later, Drew Barrymore will make Alia Shawkat cry in front of a hundred extras. Later, Juno will face-plant. Hard. ...more
Homesteading Detroit
Detroit has a large inventory of vacant homes. Two years ago, Toby Barlow thought a great way to repopulate the city–and get new taxpayers–would be giving houses away to writers. Write a House plans on giving away its first house this year with Billy Collins and Major Jackson judging applicants’ writing.
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Detroit: America’s Ciudad Juárez
Even before there was a war in Ciudad Juárez, I remember that Juárez had the feel of a war zone. It wasn’t until I visited Detroit for the first time that I rediscovered this feeling all over again. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Frank H. Wu
Frank H. Wu, the Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings College of the Law, talks about writing, race, assimilation, his hometown of Detroit, and the similarities between the Vincent Chin and Trayvon Martin cases. ...more
Former Detroit Autoworker Named Poet Laureate for 2011-12
Philip Levine, at 83 years old, has been named the Poet Laureate for 2011-2012. As a former autoworker from Detroit, his poetry draws largely on his working-class Jewish background. Deemed “America’s most acclaimed working-class poet,” his work expresses the “simple truths” of everyday life in post-industrial America.
...moreFetishizing Ruins
“So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.”
At Guernica, an insightful article about the ruin-craze, especially the Detroit ruin craze.
...morePolitics Sunday
“One in four Americans is employed to protect the rich.”
Here’s an underreported story: Dominicans are coming to the aid of Haitians, despite a less-than-idyllic history between the two countries.
VICE is taking a ton of heat for its treatment of Liberia in “The Vice Guide to Liberia.”
A very cool looking architectural installation that covers an abandoned Detroit home in ice.
...moreMorning Coffee
NY Times on how your brain physically manifests abstract ideas and the Tanzanian Spray Toad.
The Hubble has detected an alien spacecraft (or just a comet or something, whatever).
The universe is hella closer to death than we thought. (via Gerrycanavan)
“Don’t you ever link to anything nonscience related?” Here are some pictures of a frozen house in Detroit.
...moreMorning Coffee
Don’t tell anyone, but today is the last day of the year.
Other rad things you can make out of books.
Sema Bekirovic takes some pretty impressive pictures.
Romeo and Juliet as you misremember it.
...moreLazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff
About a week ago Vice published an amusing article by Thomas Morton about what happens when journalists from outside Detroit come into the city to do a story: they cover their preconceptions, shoot “ruin porn,” and miss actual stories right under their noses — and in the case of the Michigan Central Depot, right behind their backs.
...moreAn Agrarian Revolution In Detroit (And Oakland)
“Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise.
...moreBlue Collar: A 1978 Film for 2009
While catching up on my long-neglected film reading, I found this fascinating article by Saul Austerlitz about Paul Schrader’s debut film, Blue Collar, which stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as auto-plant assembly line workers driven to robbery by frustration and deprivation.
...moreDetroit’s Beautiful Ruins
A haunting essay/slide show about Detroit.
The day before I arrived, the frozen body of a man was found in the elevator shaft of an abandoned warehouse; only the feet were visible, the rest of the body being entirely encased in ice.
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