In anticipation of this summer’s place issue from the Oxford American, I re-read a 2017 essay that dances with the idea that just about everybody wants to enjoy Southern culture, but not too many people are so eager to claim all of Southern heritage. And isn’t that — “the duality of the Southern thing,” as Patterson Hood called it — how we deal with so much of our culture in this country? Without further ado, Zandria F. Robinson’s “Border Wars.”
I did plenty of other reading this week, too, including my first real deep dive back into the always-excellent historical-cultural-international writing at the Scholar’s Stage in a few years, but the words that probably moved me most this week were from two relatively recent records: Willie Nelson’s First Rose of Spring and Brandy Clark’s Your Life is a Record. Enjoy.
Colin Steele 