#staffpickoftheweek

--Belle Carlson, Penn C’19

This week’s pick-of-the-week comes from co-editor-in-chief Sarah Zandi:

Tame Impala’s album Currents isn’t exactly 100% new, but since I’ve been abroad in Edinburgh I’ve been listening to it on repeat. My first full day here I took a walk along the perimeter of Arthur’s Seat (Google it) listening to it for the first time in its entirety, settling into being abroad and significantly less inclined to cry about feeling lonely. If I were religious I would probably have called it a religious experience. It’s everything good and nostalgic about a John Hughes film, but never saccharine or overly-sentimental. It’s the moment before solitude edges into loneliness. It’s a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone. It’s the first hot night in summer. My favorite song? “Yes I’m Changing.” Listen or perish.

This week's pick-of-the-week comes from associate editor Dalton Kamish:

Kenneth Goldsmith and his conceptual poetry have been getting a lot of attention in the media this year, most recently related to his reading at Brown University last Spring, and the October 5th New Yorker profile on the poet. Cathy Park Hong, one of the poets interviewed by Wilkinson for the New Yorker piece, has a very important response to Goldsmith and his divisive poetry: 

"A new movement in American poetry, a movement galvanized by the activism of Black Lives Matter, spearheaded by writers of color who are at home in social media activism and print magazines; some poets are redefining the avant-garde while others are fueling a raw politics into the personal lyric. Their aesthetic may be divergent, but they share a common belief that as poets, they must engage in social practice, whether it is protesting against police brutality or calling out Goldsmith himself who thought it would be a 'provocative gesture' to recite an autopsy report of Michael Brown’s body at Brown University."

Our second pick-of-the-week comes from co-founder and co-editor-in-chief Sarah Zandi:

Co-Editor-in-Chief Amelia Goodman brings our first Flux Staff Pick of the Week:

David Sedaris makes me laugh out loud with everything he publishes, in the best way possible. This piece explores his thoughts on marriage, specifically how the fight for marriage equality reifies heteronormativity. My favorite line is:

The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden.