A Flâneur in South Jersey

A summer of Walter Benjamin, karaoke, and obscure Iberian varieties.

I swear, I started off my summer with serious intellectual ambitions. I intended to hole up on a dry island with no bars and read big books. But restlessness, the wanderlust gene, or whatever impulse always drives people like me to travel quickly kicked in. And so I went wandering.

I would find myself at, say, a South Jersey local karaoke night, drinking…