If you had the chance to teach (or take) a course called something like "THE BOMB" – A CULTURAL HISTORY, what themes, events, sources etc. would you think it could or should include?
This is the twelfth entry in my Links in the Time of Coronavirus series (?), marking a year since the beginning of the pandemic. And whether it was because the semester started again and I’m teaching three classes (and so I have had less time to “surf the internet” [i.e., despairingly look at my phone because there’s nothing else to do]) or because the first full month of the Biden administration was just, um, less filled with news, or whether we’ve reached a holding pattern with regard to the pandemic—just waiting for the number of vaccinated people to increase—there are fewer links here than at probably any point in the last twelve months. As such, I thought I’d start with a section that is usually down the page a bit. Less timely, perhaps, but there were lots of interesting things published over the past month:
Charles Yu, Mike Jaccarino, A. S. Hamrah, Eileen Myles, Judith Martin, Olivia Laing, Yinka Elujoba, Lauren Oyler, Jane Hu, Liane Carlson, David Owen, Christian Lorentzen, and Christopher Beha, “Life after Trump.”
“Blason I,” “Blason II,” and “Blason III,” poems from my current ongoing project, Postrock, have been republished in The Second Chance Anthology, which will appear from Variant Literature on August 1, 2020. (Order it here; read it here.) The anthology features “work that has been pulled, withdrawn, [or] removed without notice from” a number of different publications. I’m especially thankful to Tyler Pufpaff and the editors of Variant Literature for finding a new home for the orphaned writing of so many great writers.