Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…
Dear all,
We hope this finds you safe and healthy and outraged. There are broken hearts all around, but hopefully change is in the air.
A few things to know about in the writing world. If you have other news/stories, please send them to: lesterliteraryupdate@gmail.com
Sincerely,
Lester
Freedom of the Press
A shout out to the reporters who put themselves on the line to help us all make sense of this, and who had their First Amendment rights essentially stripped as they tried to do their work. We deserve better than this:
Minneapolis, State Patrol sued for police violence toward press
Bookstores Destroyed
Sadly, Uncle Hugo’s was burned to the ground. Dream Haven was looted and trashed. Here are their fundraisers:
Official Help Save Uncle Hugo's Fund
If you know of others, please let us know.
There are also general funds for Lake Street, North, and Midway.
Readings, Listenings
The Tiny Media Collective That Is Delivering Some of the Most Vital Reporting from Minneapolis (New Yorker)
Minneapolis’ ‘long, hot summer’ of ‘67 – and the parallels to today’s protests over police brutality (The Conversation)
The Anthropocene Reviewed: You'll Never Walk Alone and Jerzy Dudek (John Green)
Poetry power: BBC correspondents read their favourites
Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford
Buford writes:
"The crowd is not us. It never is. Again two years before, this time April and May 1986: Saturday after Saturday, I was outside News International's printing plant in Wapping when hundreds of people were injured during crowd rioting. I thought I had witnessed a process by which previously rational adults--policemen, print workers with mortgages and pension funds and families--suddenly behaved in a highly irrational way. But I was wrong. The violence, I always read the next day, had been the work of outsiders, anarchists and agitators."