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A ‘Constellation of Meaning’: The Rumpus Interviews George Saunders

Last week, Maria Bustillos released a blockbuster Humanities Kit in which you can experience George Saunders teaching Anton Chekhov for yourself.

In Kate Harloe’s interview at The Rumpus, George Saunders reflects on the creative process for his new novel, Lincoln In The Bardo, bold compassion as the right course of resistance under a Trump presidency, and how his interviews, notes, and scenes coalesce into the “constellation of meaning” that inform his nonfiction work.

Rumpus: There are so many characters in this story. Did these characters flow out of you during the writing process or were they more of a conscious creation? Did you think, “I need a character that represents this or experiences this kind of suffering?”

Saunders: No, it was definitely the first thing. My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it’s like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

Rumpus: I don’t want to leave the topic of your book, but I love what you said about starting a piece with as few conceptual ideas as possible. Do you approach nonfiction the same way? For the New Yorker story you wrote about Trump, for example, did you begin with a similar kind of open-mindedness?

Saunders: It’s a different form of that. With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are. In the Trump piece, I knew I didn’t like Trump and I confessed that to myself and also to my interviewees. I’d always say, “I’m a liberal and I’m left of Gandhi and I don’t like Trump and this article is me trying to understand why you do.”

My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they’re writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I’ve got all these notes and I’m trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don’t even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It’s a slightly different process, but still there’s mystery because when you’re bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

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Resonant and Beautiful: The Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’

Photo by Omar Chatriwala (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Hazlitt, Mehreen Kasana reveals the many true and beautiful meanings that you’ve never heard of behind “takbir” — the term for the expression of Muslim faith, “Allahu Akbar” — which translates literally as, “God is great.”

When you enter “the meaning of Allahu Akbar” in Google, the first search results take you to Jihad Watch, Breitbart and Urban Dictionary. Jihad Watch tells you that Allahu Akbar is “the ubiquitous battle cry of Islamic jihadists as they commit mass murder.” One of the definitions on Urban Dictionary, home to some of the internet’s most passive aggressive users, states Allahu Akbar is “what is said by people beheading hogtied victims ‘in the name of God.’” And Breitbart, the ominous prophet of doom and gloom for the average conservative, insists that Allahu Akbar means “Allah is greater than your God or Government.”

Takbir—that is, Allahu Akbar—is a strange thing. It is Arabic for “God is great.” But to the westerner who consumes the world through purposefully tailored headlines, deliberate SEO and sequential images meant to invoke fear, takbir is a terrifying thing. To the westerner, it’s something ISIS members scream before bloodshed and al Qaeda members chant before deploying an IED. It’s that scary announcement from the brown man with a beard that hides his mouth, obscuring his face, making it impossible for you to trust him. It’s code for “we’re implementing sharia here,” according to astute Republicans who can’t pronounce Iran or Iraq without butchering it (figuratively and literally) but are adamant on presenting a singular, restricted and unimaginative interpretation of an expression millions of Muslims use in millions of ways.

But to the average Muslim, takbir generously lends itself to numerous occasions and emotions.

Consciously, I heard takbir for the first time when I was four, maybe five, in northern Virginia when my mother prayed in front of me. I watched her kiss the earth with all the love in her being. Before she knelt in prostration, she whispered something. She came up once more, whispered it again, then gently knelt in humility. Her forehead touched the ground, the tip of her nose softly grazing the prayer rug, her eyes closed in unwavering thought. To a child, this graceful movement was spellbinding. I strained my ear to hear her again. “Allahu Akbar.”

But takbir is introduced to us before we can even attach meaning to spoken word. When we are born, the azaan—call to prayer—is performed to us at a pitch softer than cotton. The day I was born, I had already been introduced to this expression that would later on become my refuge in times of despair, my cry in times of joy and yes, my roar in moments of indignation. My father softly recited “Allahu Akbar” in my ear when I came into this world.

Born after eight miscarriages, I was my parents’ miracle.

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Phones Over Food: Why Mobile Phones Are More Important to Refugees

Photo by MONUSCO Photos (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Economist reports on how refugees prize mobile phone connection — even over food. Phones are their primary way to stay connected with family at home as they enter “informational no-man’s land,” not knowing who to trust or where to go. Phones help them stay motivated with photos of family and successful migrants, and offer a means to contact smugglers to help them with their journey.

Sometimes Hekmatullah, a 32-year-old Afghan, has to choose between food and connectivity. “I need to stay in touch with my wife back home,” he says, sitting in a grubby tent in the Oinofyta migrant camp, near Athens. Because Wi-Fi rarely works there, he has to buy mobile-phone credit. And that means he and his fellow travellers—his sister, her friend and five children—sometimes go hungry.

Such stories are common in migrant camps: according to UNHCR, the UN’s agency for refugees, refugees can easily spend a third of their disposable income on staying connected. In a camp near the French city of Dunkirk, where mostly Iraqi refugees live until they manage to get on a truck to Britain, many walk for miles to find free Wi-Fi: according to NGOs working there, the French authorities, reluctant to make the camp seem permanent, have stopped them providing internet connections.

Phones become a lifeline. Their importance goes well beyond staying in touch with people back home. They bring news and pictures of friends and family who have reached their destination, thereby motivating more migrants to set out. They are used for researching journeys and contacting people-smugglers. Any rumour of a new, or easier, route spreads like wildfire. “It’s like the underground railroad, only that it’s digital,” says Maurice Stierl of Watch The Med, an NGO that tracks the deaths and hardships of migrants who cross the Mediterranean, referring to the secret routes and safe houses used to free American slaves in the 19th century.

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What It’s Like to Drown

Photo by 29cm (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Fenella Souter reports in detail on what it’s like to drown through the harrowing personal experience of a woman named Merav. In a bid to show off to her boyfriend 40 years ago, Merav jumped into the surf at Gunnamatta Beach in Victoria, Australia, and lived to regret it.

Her first wave is an angry, spine-jarring dumper that hurls her down and holds her down. The returning rush of water sucks her back out, still under, while one of the many fierce rips that run out from this beach takes her in its grasp. When she finally pops up, choking and spluttering, disoriented under a leaden sky, sand in her ears, bikini top hanging around her neck, she’s at least 25 metres from where she went in.

The situation is suddenly crystal clear to her.

An unpatrolled beach, deserted, at 4.30 in the afternoon. A sea whose fury she has seriously underestimated. A boyfriend who can’t save her. She can see his flailing arms, his mouth moving. “Right then and there, I thought, ‘I’m not going to get out of this.’ I didn’t lose all hope, because the will to survive is so much stronger than that but I realised it was so much more dangerous than I had thought. I was already struggling to keep breathing.”

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Giving the Ultimate Gift: Granting the Wish to Die at Home

Photo by Alexandre Dulaunoy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Australian, Andrew McMillen writes on palliative care as a critical service, and of the “power and the grace” required to care for those who are terminally ill and grant their final wish: to die peacefully, at home.

On an adjustable bed in a room towards the front of the house is Tony Huelsmann, a retired dancer, choreographer and dance instructor whose skills were once in high demand at schools throughout Melbourne and Brisbane. Sandra was one of his dance students. He was 30 when they met, seven years older than her, and it was love at first sight.

Born in Germany, Tony has spent much of his life in Australia. Now 80, he is dying from complications associated with several internal and ­external cancers, including a rash of angry red squamous cell carcinomas that have colonised the skin of his swollen upper thighs. These painful sores require daily dressings, performed by a personal care worker, while Karuna’s rotating ­roster of nurses help with symptom management, bed-baths, toileting and bedding changes, as well as emotional support for both husband and wife.

Since May, Tony’s world-spanning life has been confined more or less to these four walls while Sandra cares for his every need. At night, she snatches sleep where possible. It is their wish for Tony to die at home and they are both determined to see this wish fulfilled.

“A good palliative care nurse should be invisible,” she says, while navigating her hatchback between house visits. “You’re there to help them negotiate the process with friends and loved ones. The Dalai Lama says compassion should be selfless: it’s not about you, it’s about them. You’re a springboard. But it’s a real dance: you’re not a robot, and you go in with your whole self and heart open. We’re all emotionally involved, and the moment you’re not – when it becomes mechanical – I think you should quit.”

By midday Friday, Tony has lost more strength and lucidity. Swollen from the waist down, he has little control of his body. Today, for the first time, he is unable to use scissors to cut the tape that his wife uses to dress his sores. When Karuna nurse Kate Hooper visits his bedside, Tony clocks her prominent baby bump. A man near death meets a woman weeks away from giving birth. Pointing a shaky finger, he smiles and rasps to her, “How long to go?”

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‘4 the Boys’: The Tunnel Creek Avalanche, Five Years Later

Photo by Sam DeLong (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Seattle Met, Eva Holland talks to the survivors and explores the aftermath of the Tunnel Creek avalanche — the tragedy that inspired “Snow Fall” — five years after a massive snow slide claimed the lives of three men.

“The Boys,” in this small, ski-crazy community, is shorthand for three well-known, well-loved local men who were killed in an avalanche at Tunnel Creek, in the Stevens Pass backcountry, on February 19, 2012: Chris Rudolph, 30; Jim Jack, 46; and Johnny Brenan, 41. The men were part of a large group of visitors and local legends who ventured out of the resort gates late on a Sunday morning and were caught up in a massive snowslide.

Avalanches kill an average of 27 people in America every year. This one attracted the attention of the national media. Good Morning America and Today came calling, wanting to speak to the survivors just hours after the slide. Magazines, including Outside and Men’s Journal, published major features on the tragedy. And, most famously, The New York Times spent months producing “Snow Fall,” an ambitious, multimedia feature about the avalanche that would go on to redefine how stories are presented online. Written by John Branch, it won a Pulitzer Prize, spawned hundreds of imitators, and is now taught in journalism schools.

That’s when the snowpack on the hillside let go.

It shed more than 2,500 feet in altitude in a matter of seconds, gaining mass as it went, ripping up trees and rocks along the way and reaching a peak speed of about 70 miles per hour. The New York Times estimated its weight at 11 million pounds.

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On Midlife, Failure, and Thwarted Ambition: Sarah Manguso and 300 Arguments

Photo by Kelly Teague (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Anna Furman interviews Sarah Manguso about the process of writing her new book, 300 Arguments, her writing influences, failure and thwarted ambition, and how Sarah’s sleeping post-inauguration.

I wrote 300 Arguments when I was in a bit of a midlife funk. I was thinking about certain types of failure that just sort of collect at midlife. The idea of midlife is itself a sort of a cliché; it’s a very conventional mode of thinking about the human lifespan. It’s an assumption, to start, that everybody has the same life span. But there really is something to getting to a point in life where major decisions have been made—maybe they’re not permanent but they feel permanent. You choose a vocation and the thing that you do all day long. You choose your people, and if you have a family you’ve chosen the people to include in your family. What felt really sharp to me at the time that I was writing this is that there’s this experience of failure that seems fairly generally applicable to being in one’s midlife. All of a sudden there are these desires that felt obsolete to me that I thought would always feel necessary. There were thwarted ambitions. You sort of realize that failing is a skill of general utility.

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Six Years Later, Over 400,000 Dead: The Graffiti Kids Who Sparked the Syrian War

Photo by David Holt (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Globe and Mail, Mark MacKinnon tells the story of Naief Abazid — who, at the urging of some older boys, graffitied a school wall on a lark in Daraa, Syria, at age 14. The “writing on the wall” enraged Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, and ignited the Syrian civil war — a conflict now nearly six years old — which has claimed over 400,000 lives, displaced nearly 5 million refugees, and has had lasting repercussions the world over.

At the start of it all, before the uprising and the civil war – and the refugee exodus and the terror and the hatred that have sprung from it – a 14-year-old boy stood giggling with a can of black spray paint, pointing it at the wall of his school in southern Syria.

Naief Abazid had no inkling that he was about to launch a revolution, or anything else that has followed. He was just doing what the bigger kids told him to. Trying to make them laugh. “It’s your turn, Doctor Bashar al-Assad, ” he painted, just under the window of the principal’s office of the all-boys al-Banin school in his hometown of Daraa. The date was Feb. 16, 2011.

It was an incendiary political idea – suggesting that Syria’s Baathist dictatorship would be the next to fall after the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, written by an apolitical teenage prankster. Painted on a cool and dry winter evening, it would improbably set in motion a chain reaction of events that continue to rock the Middle East – and the world.

By most estimates, more than 400,000 people have been killed, and the war in Syria rages on, with the Assad regime now obliterating large swaths of the city of Aleppo. Millions more have been driven from their homes, with hundreds of thousands – including Naief – seeking refuge in Europe, inducing an epic clash of cultures on the continent and the startling rise of politicians from the anti-immigrant far right.

Naief’s graffiti has had an effect on our world similar to the assassin’s bullet fired in Sarajevo at the outbreak of the First World War. Without Naief’s act of teenage impetuousness – and the Assad regime’s violent reaction to it – would the extremist caliphate have been declared? Would the refugee crisis be on the scale it is now? Would the United Kingdom – spurred by campaign posters of streams of refugees heading north – have voted to leave the European Union? Would the anti-immigrant message of Donald Trump – who has spoken, without evidence, of possible “Trojan horses” among the Syrian refugees accepted into the United States – have resonated quite so deeply with the American electorate?

Naief Abazid – a short, thin young man with slicked-back black hair and a stubbly beard – is stunned by all that’s resulted from his impulsive act five years ago. “I was the youngest one in the crowd. They told me what to write,” Naief recalled, sipping on a coffee and sharing a McDonald’s pie.

“I only realized it was serious when I got to prison.”

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Where a Simple IV Could Have Saved a Life: Dying in Jail From Opioid Withdrawal

Photo by Aleksandr Zykov (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Mother Jones, Julia Lurie reports on a rising trend: death by opioid withdrawal in jail. Read about how addict shame and silence, jail short-staffing, scant medical equipment, and a general apathy toward inmates make a deadly combination.

When Tyler Tabor was booked in a jail outside Denver on a spring afternoon in 2015, he told a screening nurse that he was a daily heroin user and had a prescription for Xanax. A friendly, outdoorsy 25-year-old with a son in kindergarten, Tabor had started using opioids after he injured his back on the job as a welder. When he was arrested on two misdemeanor warrants, his parents decided not to pay his $300 bail, thinking he would be safer in jail and away from heroin for a few days.

Three days later, Tabor died of dehydration at the Adams County jail, according to a coroner’s report. The alleged cause: drug withdrawal.

During the evening shift at the Brown County jail in Green Bay, Wisconsin, there is one nurse—and no other medical staff—for roughly 700 inmates, according to nurses who worked at the facility. “I had people detoxing, I had people with chest pain, I had people getting into fights, I had emergencies where people aren’t breathing,” said Abby, who worked at the facility for nine months before leaving last fall. “I can’t assess somebody three times a shift when there’s one nurse for 700 inmates, and do a meaningful assessment, and also provide interventions when I have 20 people on opiate withdrawal.”

Abby says she bought her own medical supplies because the blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, and stethoscopes provided by CCS didn’t always work. She often found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place: There was no IV therapy in the jail, but sending inmates to the hospital was frowned upon. In order to send a withdrawal patient to the hospital, she said, the inmate would “need to be at the point where their vital signs were dropping, their internal organs were starting to become compromised.”

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I’ll See Your Troll and Raise You One Notable Woman Scientist

Photo by Christopher (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Backchannel, Andrew McMillen writes on how one young Wikipedia admin fights back at trolls by raising the profile of notable women in science, one new Wikipedia page at a time.

She’d been receiving vicious emails for a decade. Sometimes she sought solace by commiserating with friends, or by stomping off to do something else, or occasionally — after the cruelest messages—by lying on her bed and crying. Temple-Wood became a frequent target of abuse merely because she is the rare female Wikipedia editor who has been active on the site for years. She manages to let much of the harassment slide off her. But many women eventually find the bullying to be too much, and leave the site.

…Temple-Wood had an idea. For every harassing email, death threat, or request for nude photos that she received, she resolved to create a Wikipedia biography on a notable woman scientist who was previously unknown to the free online encyclopedia. She thought of it as a giant “fuck you” to the anonymous idiots seeking to silence her.

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