Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin

Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group called, rather enigmatically, Led Zeppelin. If their LP is anything to go by, he has discovered a worthy successor to the defunct Cream.

They’re all in their 20s and extravagantly hirsute in the current manner. They started as a group in November last year and the LP now released is the product of their first improvisations together. They rely on formalised beginnings and endings and leave the rest to the mood of the moment, and they are complete masters of their material. They bend and twist the simplest of lines into architectural caverns of sound, careful but throbbing with violence. Their music crouches like a giant panther and shudders like a mighty jet waiting to leap down the runway.

Tony Palmer writing about the role San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium played in promoting Led Zeppelin during the band’s early days. Palmer’s article was originally printed in The Guardian on March 9, 1969; an edited excerpt was reprinted on their site this year.

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The Murky Origins of Burma’s Capital City

The city’s origins are clouded in rumour and speculation. Some describe it as a vanity project of Than Shwe, the former military leader of the country. Many believe the “audacious” name given to the city might reflect “illusions of grandeur or … perhaps another sign of [Than Shwe’s] possible dementia”, according to one 2006 US government diplomatic cable, released in the trove of documents published by Wikileaks.

Other theories have pointed to an increasingly paranoid junta wanting to move the capital away from the sea, fearing an amphibious US invasion. Instead, the seat of military and political power now sits closer to the restive regions where separatist movements and ethnic groups are pushing for greater rights for bitterly oppressed minorities, including the Karen and Rohingya.

The regime, and Than Shwe, pitched the move to Naypyidaw as akin to building a new Canberra or Brasilia, an administrative capital away from the traffic jams and over-population of Rangoon. Not many believe this story. “By withdrawing from the major city, Rangoon, Than Shwe and the leadership … sheltered themselves from any popular uprising,” suggest activists Benedict Rogers and Jeremy Woodrum in their book Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant.

Matt Kennard and Claire Provost writing for the Pulitzer Center about Naypyidaw, the eerie, master planned capital of Burma. Located in the middle of one of the world’s poorest countries, grandiose Naypyidaw was built on a massive scale and is seemingly devoid of people.

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The ‘Second Great Chocolate Boom’

The ‘First Great Chocolate Boom’ occurred at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. The industrial revolution turned chocolate from a drink to a solid food full of energy and raised incomes of the poor. As a result, chocolate consumption increased rapidly in Europe and North America.

As the popularity of chocolate grew, production spread across the world to satisfy increasing demand. Interestingly, cocoa only arrived in West Africa in the early 20th century. But by the 1960s West Africa dominated global cocoa production, and in particular Ghana and Ivory Coast have become the world’s leading cocoa producers and exporters.

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The world is currently experiencing a ‘Second Great Chocolate Boom’. Rapidly growing demand is now not coming from ‘the North’, but from rapidly growing developing and emerging countries, including China, India and also Africa. The unprecedented growth of the past decades, the associated urbanization, and the huge size of their economies have turned China and India into major growth markets for chocolate. While consumption is highest in China, and the growth is strong, the country with – by far – the highest growth rates in chocolate consumption is India. In addition, significant African growth of the past 15 years is now also translating into growing chocolate consumption on the continent where most of the cocoa beans are produced.

Johan Swinnen and Mara Squicciarini writing about the economics of chocolate for the Oxford University Press blog.

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Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?

With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanfordthe work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available.

Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. He was a “swamprat Rimbaud,” “one of the great voices of death,” and “sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern.” He shot himself in 1978, just shy of his 30th birthday. Reviewing the new collection for the New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote about the enigmatic nature of Stanford himself, as well as why his work has been so difficult to find:

Even before his death, Mr. Stanford was an emerging cult figure among Southern writers, the kind of man whose life is difficult to untangle from his work. He was charismatic — “as beautiful as the sun,” in the words of the Arkansas poet Carolyn (C. D.) Wright, who was also among his lovers. He was prolific, writing 11 books before his death, one of them a 450-page narrative poem, and leaving behind a steep pile of unpublished work.

He was enigmatic in a hundred ways. He didn’t do readings. He didn’t teach. He didn’t like big cities. As a baby, he’d been abandoned at the Emery Home for Unwed Mothers near Hattiesburg, Miss. His well-to-do adoptive father built levees along the Mississippi River’s tributaries. When [Lucinda] Williams met Mr. Stanford, he was working as a land surveyor.

Since Mr. Stanford’s death, his cult has grown, but it’s never come close to metastasizing. In large part, that’s because his work has been hard to find, issued by tiny presses and often out of print. The long-awaited publication this month of “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” gives us a chance to see him whole.

Several years ago, Ben Ehrenreich wrote about Stanford for Poetry Magazine. His searching and searing 6,000-word piece is both a profile of Stanford and the story of Ehrenreich’s own quest to unravel the man behind the myth. Not only is it a beautiful read but it also offers the most comprehensive portrait of Stanford’s life available online. Below is a short excerpt:

Some lives are too easy to read backward. Frank Stanford’s is one of those: the last page is now read as the first page—sometimes as the only page—and the first becomes illegible without the last. You may already know how Stanford’s story ends; I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t. Let it suffice to say that a literary reputation once glittering with promise has faded into a myth that grew larger than the man himself—the hard-living, fast-loving Ozark sage, spawn of Lao-Tzu and Whitman by way of Vallejo and Breton.

What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanfordedited by Michael Wiegers and with an introduction from former Texas Poet Laureate Dean Young—was published by Copper Canyon Press on April 14. NPR described the release as “the big event in poetry for 2015.”

See the sources:
1. “The Long Goodbye” (Ben Ehrenreich, Poetry Magazine, January 2008)
2. “Review: ‘What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford’” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times, April 2015)

How To Be, In Silence

Dalai Lama at Thomas Merton's grave. Photo by Jim Forest, Flickr

The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she reflects solitude’s crisis: the challenge of being, unmasked.

“I wanted to be quiet in a nonquiet situation,” the composer John Cage wrote in 1948, while he was still formulating a solution that would eventually lead to his famous innovation of writing music with no notes at all. In 1949, the most famous monk of the last century — Thomas Merton — lamented that even cloistered religious people had become too conscious of what their renunciations might do, keeping silence as a form of payback for all the clatter in the world, instead of accessing the real self that was no self, that couldn’t show off by fasting or rising at midnight to sing. In 1961, as part of a dialogue with the Zen master D.T. Suzuki, Merton found it necessary to remind the era’s many spiritual seekers that Paradise, if not Heaven, was a place on earth that could only be achieved by ceasing the constant reactivity that had become the human condition, “the emptiness and purity of heart which had belonged to Adam and Eve in Eden,” where they sought “paradise within themselves, or rather above and beyond themselves.” This was the same goal the secular pilgrim Cheryl Strayed sought when she walked 1100 miles alone up the Pacific Crest Trail in 1994. She found liberation from self while lost above the treeline, shouting into silence she ultimately couldn’t affect, realizing, was she wrote in her memoir, “Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

Ann Powers, writing for NPR about how musicians confront solitude. Her piece uses recent albums by Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens as a lens to explore the subject.

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The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

America’s Journalism Scandals Can Be Divided Into Three General Categories

Photo by Bob Mical

Now that the facts have been laid bare, “A Rape on Campus,” published in November, joins America’s rogues’ gallery of journalism scandals. For ease of reference, the scandals can be divided into three general categories (excluding the recent phenomenon of television figures telling tall-tale war stories).

The first two are straightforward. There is pure fabrication, for which high-profile culprits include Jayson Blair (The New York Times), Stephen Glass (The New Republic) and, going back a little further, Janet Cooke (The Washington Post). And there is the act of plagiarism (culprits too numerous to list).

“A Rape on Campus” falls into a third category: lack of skepticism.

It is the most complicated of the three, and in many ways the most insidious. It is a crime no single journalist — reporter or editor — can be completely inoculated against committing.

—Jonathan Mahler, writing in The New York Times about the newly released report dissecting Rolling Stone’s story about campus rape, which the magazine has now retracted. The 12,600-word report was commissioned by Rolling Stone and authored by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

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What It’s Like to Be an FBI Agent in a Border Town

Laredo, Texas. Photo by philipbarrett2003, Flickr

Lawson moved out of his extended-stay hotel and into a house in Laredo, not far from some of the Treviños’ extended family, he says. He came to appreciate the camaraderie of working the border, a destination so low on agents’ wish lists that the bureau lets them transfer wherever they want after five years. Most of the agents were young and single, since no one with any seniority lasts, and the bosses nurtured a culture that felt more like a cop shop than a federal bureau, with a loose dress code and looser language. They played poker and went to happy hour when they could.

The FBI agents felt some kinship with those from the other federal agencies in Laredo, which all share an office. There was also competitiveness, though. They were all chasing Zetas, whose fight with the Gulf Cartel had grown so violent that agents sometimes went to the border to listen to gunfights.

Joe Tone, writing in the Dallas Observer about how the Feds took down a drug cartel’s horse-racing empire.

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Understanding the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ of Error

The human lapses that occurred after the computerized ordering system and pill-dispensing robots did their jobs perfectly well is a textbook case of English psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of error. Reason’s model holds that all complex organizations harbor many “latent errors,” unsafe conditions that are, in essence, mistakes waiting to happen. They’re like a forest carpeted with dry underbrush, just waiting for a match or a lightning strike.

Still, there are legions of errors every day in complex organizations that don’t lead to major accidents. Why? Reason found that these organizations have built-in protections that block glitches from causing nuclear meltdowns, or plane crashes, or train derailments. Unfortunately, all these protective layers have holes, which he likened to the holes in slices of Swiss cheese.

On most days, errors are caught in time, much as you remember to grab your house keys right before you lock yourself out. Those errors that evade the first layer of protection are caught by the second. Or the third. When a terrible “organizational accident” occurs — say, a space shuttle crash or a September 11–like intelligence breakdown — post hoc analysis virtually always reveals that the root cause was the failure of multiple layers, a grim yet perfect alignment of the holes in the metaphorical slices of Swiss cheese. Reason’s model reminds us that most errors are caused by good, competent people who are trying to do the right thing, and that bolstering the system — shrinking the holes in the Swiss cheese or adding overlapping layers — is generally far more productive than trying to purge the system of human error, an impossibility.

Dr. Bob Wachter writing in Backchannel about the errors that led a young patient to receive a massive overdose of antibiotics at one of the nation’s best hospitals. The above excerpt is from the third installment of a multi-part series called “The Overdose.” The series has been looking at the nature of error in tech-driven medicine.

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The 1944 Court Decision That Changed Hollywood

Olivia de Havilland in "The Dark Mirror," 1946. Photo by Jack Samuels, Flickr

The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history:

Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who spent most of his career at ICM before defecting to William Morris in 2007, taking with him such clients as Denzel Washington, Steve Martin and more. [Ed] Limato was under contract to ICM but when the agency tried to diminish his status, he argued, in effect, that his contract was “illegal” because it violated California’s strict “seven-year rule” for personal services contracts. That law dates back to actress Olivia de Havilland’s lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the 1940s for repeatedly extending her contract with the studio after “suspending” her for rejecting suggested roles. In 1944, the California Court of Appeal ruled that de Havilland — or any other actor, director or other talent in the entertainment industry — could not be subject to a contract to perform personal services beyond seven years from the beginning of the deal. The so-called “de Havilland law” fundamentally changed Hollywood, brought about the end of the old studio system and allowed talent agencies to amass power.

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