“As with Joyce’s Dublin, place isn’t simply geographical–it is inherent in the working-class culture in which characters live. The tension remains across stories because it is, at root, based in economics and class status.”
“Every time he saw another building in Pittsburgh being spray washed to remove the decades of soot… he would think of their legacies being slowly erased.”
A celebration of Ed Ochester’s life and legacy reveals how a poet from Queens transformed Pittsburgh’s literary scene.
“I was young, full of creative energy, filling black notebooks with pressed ballpoint ink. Time dilated because I was unbothered by the reality of lugging my dirty laundry down to the laundromat every few weeks or eating rice and beans day after day.”
By Timothy R. Grieve-Carlson “Ihave a question,” said the gentleman who approached me after I gave a tour at the [...]
“I thought I would not miss him. I was wrong.”
The more of Wilson’s plays I read, the more I appreciated The Piano Lesson for its stark symbols and robust characters: Boy Willie and his determination to buy the land his ancestors had slaved on; Berniece, resolved to keep the piano and build a life for her daughter in Pittsburgh; Sutter’s ghost haunting the house, the family, the instrument, from the top of the stairs.
For starters, we need to talk about suicide. We need to not be afraid to say the word “suicide,” because the word “suicide” will not kill anyone. We need to clean up societal problems that increase the likelihood of suicide, not just push the responsibility for prevention onto the mental health profession. We need to worry less if a homeless person wants to live by choice under a bridge and more about the social bridges of connection, kinship, and community collapsing all around us.
the Parker Sub doesn't want those things. It likes simple. Plain. Which is why it's something a simple and plain man has to ask for. But I am a Parker. And I do want those: the pepper, the onions, the upgrades. That’s because I see our sub as a project, not a perfected object.
Unexpected guidance came in the form of a job with yet another Detroit legend, James Osterberg, who if you know anything about rock music, you recognize as Iggy Pop.
If we are going to care about the environment and preserve natural spaces in the so-called “rust belt,” then we must love rust. We must practice terranexus and accept and even love the chaotic intersection of civilized and natural worlds.
Those who did it from a distance erased the people’s language. Once they could claim their fiction of terra nullius they flooded in close and put up fences. They erased the history of their conquest and they erased the lake’s history too.