Is your city lit?

Is your city lit?

Mine:
City: DC

Veeky Forums status: I meet some remarkably well read and intelligent people and a lot of uninteresting poly sci jocks who became lawyers. Mostly latter. Dated a qt Veeky Forums South American gf at one point. Been to a book club where I had to defend Joyce's Araby. Not NY, no thriving literary or art scene that I know of. (Unless I am looking at wrong places)

That's a nice cover that's all i wanna say.

hialeah

no

Most of the people I meet in DC either read stuff in their long-entrenched area of interest (like people who were religious studies majors continuing down that path), or namedrop a lot of stuff but don't actually read anything. Met someone recently who literally called herself a "creative type" and spent almost an hour trying to convince me that she's a sculptor, painter, novelist, playwright, etc.

Also I've noticed a weird near-fetishization of non-western culture/history; nobody cares about classic western texts (fiction or otherwise) but I've seen people at least appear super hyped about stuff from the Middle East.

DC meetup when?

>tfw loitering in the Politics & Prose coffeehouse, working on my pomo satire of post-industrial biosincerity and audibly sneering whenever I catch a middle-aged white woman reading Zadie Smith

Is politics & prose any good? I hear it mentioned from time to time, but it seems like it could easily be a hotspot for pseuds.

City: Paris
Veeky Forums status: of course

I was also initially impressed with the OP's image choice.

Yes, my city (Minneapolis/St. Paul) is lit as fuck. Like DC and Seattle, the city/metro regularly features in surveys/studies of the most literate/litearary urban areas in the country, based upon basic measurable such as bookstores per capita, libraries per capita, newspapers per capita and so on, plus squisher things.

I like to write about this topic so here I go again. I've said much of this in an earlier post a week or two ago.

I have a very good bead on where things lit are in the twin cities area. I can think of over fifty different locations of whatever type that I've been in/looked around, and so I'll give a very general sketch of these:

the universities of the area each has a library, which are feasible (if understandably restrictive) to borrow from, or of course at the very least visit.

the local municipalities also have a very robust library system, with about as many (a dozen+) locations, depending on how wide you want to cast your net.

Besides these, there are of course a few dozen B&N locations around the place (which actually turns out to be large percentage of the whole brand's brick-and-mortar now that I check), each more identical than the last. Still, I think it's worth mentioning that a big one is supposed to have been an early, important location outside the New York area, for what it's worth.

But now we come to the interesting stuff: the local bookstores, which often specialize in this-or-that. I have personally visited and (sometimes) made purchases at:

fine bookstores (2+)
occult bookstores (3)
a hardcore leftist-communist non-profit bookstore (1)
a wholly dedicated sci-fi/mystery bookstore, among the oldest sci-fi-"only" bookstores in the country (they have a newsletter, but honestly the store is quite ratty) (1)
a mystery-only bookstore, cute but small (1)
a paperback reseller that specializes in romance and other pulp that generally doesn't personally interest me, but I'm happy to know that it exists (1)
at least a half dozen (6+) other shops with a decent general inventory. I was in one of these once for my second time ever, and these two old people were having soup and talking about the time they had a Wittgenstein reading group where they'd read one section of Philosophical Investigations per week. Part of me wanted to insinuate myself into the conversation/get in on that, but I left it alone.

The more time I spend here, the more I realize that "the twin cities is Veeky Forums" is a legitimate statement.

...

>Current year
>Compensating losers still think that if you're athletic you're a dumb uninteresting "jock" by default