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Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

Ain’t No One Here But Just Us Chickens

chickens
Inquisitive Hens by Peter Cooper (CC By 2.0).

Now for the chicken. Like love, I found it when I wasn’t even looking. I was in Brattleboro, Vt., with my wife at a writer’s conference. My wife grew up in Brattleboro. I got to see her old haunts, her house, imagine what it might have been like to be her as she climbed trees, broke things, created fictional characters with a friend (hillbillies not unlike the one she would eventually marry). We went to visit some old friends of hers, Annie and Rob. They have a small farm where they grow vegetables, raise a few sheep and pigs — and, of course, chickens, many, many chickens. They order the chickens from a company which does that sort of thing (news to me) but they only ordered hens because roosters were trouble. Somehow a rooster got mixed up with the hens in the last order and they really wanted to —  What’s that you say? You have a chicken you’re interested in killing? What a coincidence: I’m a man who’s interested in killing a chicken!

Thus it was arranged.

— Daniel Wallace killed a chicken — and it didn’t really change him. He reflects on the strange ease of poultry murder and the inevitability of death in this fun but sobering piece in the Bitter Southerner.

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Living and Dying in Cancer Alley

oil refinery
Oil Refinery by Rob Weir (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Nothing comes easy in places like Standard Heights or St. Rose or Alsen. The streetlights turn yellow then red then green again. The trees lose their leaves then grow them again. The plant lights come on at night, the steam rises, the toxic flares flash, the heavy odor moves through the house like a thin curtain lifted off its rod, the brown dust falls on the cars. Even when you take a second to remember the smell or to see the rusting tanks through the fence, a hundred daily chores come ahead of picking up the slingshot and aiming at Goliath.

“You know yourself,” Spears tell me. “With a big company like Exxon, you can’t fight a case so you gotta go along with them. I’m not down on Exxon because I use their gas, so what can I say? We need it. I wish they could straighten up the odor thing, but I don’t know. The only thing I see, we gotta live with it till we die. I’ll be here till 5. Every day of the week except Sunday.”

— David Hanson, writing for the Bitter Southerner, helps residents of Standard Heights, Baton Rouge, tell their story of a town next to an Exxon plant — explosions, sinkholes, toxic sludge, and an everyday life that has to go on, regardless.

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Poor Excuse for Justice: A Rape Recanted, a Victim Re-victimized

He had a term for what he was about to do: “rape theater.” Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia. Where do you go when you’re 5 and already thinking about handcuffs? he would ask himself. He was only 8 the first time he broke into a home. It was such a rush. He had broken into more than a dozen homes since.

Now he was 30, an Army veteran — infantry, two tours in South Korea — who had enlisted in the Reserves, only he hadn’t appeared for duty in months.

In the kitchen, he went to the knife block and removed a black-handled blade from the top row, far left.

In the living room, he removed the laces from her black tennis shoes and put the shoes back. One detective later wrote in a report, “The shoes were lying next to each other near the end of the couch and the bedroom door, on the soles as if placed there (not disturbed).”

He was just being neat and orderly, the way he was with everything.

He threaded one of the shoelaces through a pair of underwear.

Then he walked to the bedroom.

-A description of a horrific attack by a serial rapist—whose victim the police refused to believe—from an in-depth investigative report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Marshall at ProPublica and The Marshall Project.

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Being a Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence

When I am fourteen my classmate’s mother is killed by her boyfriend. He stabs her to death. In the newspaper they call it a crime of passion. When she comes back to school, she doesn’t talk about it. When she does mention her mother it’s always in the present tense – “my mom says” or “my mom thinks” – as if she is still alive. She transfers to another school the next year because her father lives in a different school district.

Passion. As if murder is the same thing as spreading rose petals on your bed or eating dinner by candlelight or kissing through the credits of a movie.

Anne Thériault, on The Belle Jar, traces a lifetime of gendered violence, assault, harassment, and threats starting at age six in this brutal but important read.

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Temptation, Purity, and High-Stakes Evangelism in a Texas Town

Johnny was more honest than most about his salvation. Other teens said they’d felt so lost in the secular world that they’d attempted suicide. When pressed for details, they produced accounts of the angry boredom of being sixteen in the suburbs: “attempted suicide” meant driving too fast, going for a too-difficult dive, getting dangerously drunk on dad’s Jack Daniel’s. One boy told me had resolved to strangle himself and would have, too, had not Jesus invisibly pulled the boy’s hands from his Adam’s apple. For Johnny there had been no special signs, no spiritual lows. It was simple as this: he was on a ski trip, and Jesus got him—shouldered into Johnny’s heart and said, “You’re mine, buddy.” It felt “wicked awesome,” better than eight girls in a Hummer all at the same time.

Jeff Sharlet, in Lapham’s Quarterly, on a day spent with the sexually pure teens of Battlecry Honor Academy in Garden Valley, Texas — where he learns that renouncing your sins doesn’t mean redacting their memories.

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The Secret Life of Cheese

Photo by Kenneth Lu.

There probably is no scientific explanation for Andrea and Giannetto’s love for caligù despite its harsh flavor, hairy texture, and visceral origins, nor the wider world’s continued love affair with cheeses and a host of other acquired, often challenging tastes. Instead, the transition from survival foods, eaten as a matter of necessity, to delicacies, preserved as a matter of identity, is just one of those muddy habits of the human psyche. History transmutes survival into culture, one of the most widespread and effective acts of alchemy we know how to work upon ourselves, using nothing but the blunt force of time and repetition.

It’s a magic that’s unconsciously taught to and practiced upon us when a fermented paste is smeared over our bread as children. Or when we drink a fermented, alcoholic swill as teenagers, emulating the adults around us. Or when we boast of our sophistication with pickled foods as adults. But it’s hard to work that same magic with traditions too far removed from our own times, origins, and experiences once a palate’s settled. That’s why, for many of us outsiders, eating a mouthful of caligù is an educational experience. It brings us back to the horrific roots of one of our most ubiquitous foodstuffs, giving us a sudden, stark window into the craft and evolution that stands between stomach milk and Kraft. But it’s not a taste we’re about to acquire for ourselves anytime soon.

— Mark Hay, writing in Roads & Kingdoms, travels to Sardinia to experience the (literal) underbelly of cheese, in an attempt to understand a hunk of rotten and fermented milk has become such a staple food for so many people.

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Are We Done Hating Television?

Image by Surtr.

In fact, perhaps ironically, if you doubt for a moment that there is still a cultural class distinction between television and film or television and novels, look to the eagerness of people who are enthusiastic about television to compare it to film or novels. It’s the new cinema! It’s the new novel! Is TV better than movies? Are movies better than television? Is this show so lovingly made that it can be called … cinematic?

If you ask these questions, let me ask you these questions: Is an avocado better than a hammer? Is a fish better than a skateboard? Who cares? Things are different from each other. Ranking a television comedy against a television drama is bogus enough without dragging movies and books into it. And yet: here we are. Not because these distinctions are particularly well supported by evidence, but because they are expedient, and because they help people organize their cultural worlds – which is a very understandable impulse growing out of the sad, beautiful fact that we’re all going to miss almost everything.

— NPR’s Linda Holmes, in one of a week-long series of essays on the state of television in 2015, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.

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Los Angeles Is Itself — and Everyplace Else

In memoirs, in documentaries, in conversation, people often describe pivotal, fear-triggering events as having “changed Los Angeles overnight.” After Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family, people in the city started to lock their doors “overnight.” I was at a Christmas party when someone said to me that on the eve of the O. J. Simpson ruling everyone in Hollywood became a gun owner overnight. Nothing in Los Angeles happens overnight, but this is how people like to talk. Why, I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with wanting the city to be either a dream or a nightmare, like in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Psychologically, there are two L.A.’s. One is where Naomi Watts gets to be the sunny aspiring actress Betty and have beautiful teeth and a gorgeous lesbian relationship with an amnesiac Laura Harring. The other is where Naomi Watts is Diane, with fucked-up teeth, an unrequited romantic obsession, and a bullet in her head. They’re both the same movie, and none of it makes any sense. But it says something about how the city sees itself: things are one way, or suddenly another.

Dayna Tortorici writes in n+1 on growing up in Los Angeles, a city everyone can identify — but that has no identity.

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Romantic Landscape: Going Mad in the Eternal City

Photo by Bert Kaufman ((CC BY-SA 2.0).

How terrifying. I’m glad you’re recovering, I write back. I’m at a dinner party in Rome and I think I’m having some kind of breakdown. I’m scared. I’m not sure who I am anymore and I don’t have a concussion to blame it on. Or Percodan. Can you email Percodan?

Sounds like we’re in the same place, he writes back. But listen: I know who you are. You are passionate and joyful. Try not to be scared. That is not your true nature.

It hits me like a slap that if my husband has ever said anything like that to me, I cannot remember it. That in fact his last words to me were along the lines of “You think you’re so put together and you don’t even see yourself. You’re a fucking trainwreck.” And that mine to him were “Thanks. Happy anniversary: enjoy your celibacy.”

I turn my face to the wall because I’m tired of crying in front of people.

Amy Glynn, in berfrois, takes us through an identity-shattering — and rebuilding — experience: the simultaneous decline of a marriage and withdrawal from psychotropic drugs in the dizzying, intense eternal city, Rome.

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Go West, Young Man!

But in an age of digital wizardry and ironic cool, such products—with their earnest storytelling and their utter lack of artistic pretension, to say nothing of skill––such products come as a breath of clean desert air. Here we see actual people working, struggling to create something they hope will be beautiful, struggling against the limitations of technology, of time and money, of personal disaster, professional incompetence, and random, catastrophic accident. In short, we see something approaching a human reality. And as the medium of film advanced over the next century, that reality is increasingly what gets left on the cutting floor––or in the “Delete”-cache. Films and television these days, and not only those with computer-generated images, are industrial products that by the time they reach consumers have been through rigorous quality control. What we have in The Lone Ranger is something closer to folk art. Commercial, to be sure, but more modest in its claims on the viewer; less tidy, and in the end, less totalizing.

Now. There are those who will laugh at the original Lone Ranger, as they laugh at The Great Train Robbery and at Ed Wood; i.e. with a smug sense of their own cultural superiority, an ironic sneer and a chortle of schadenfreude. To these debauched souls I have nothing further to say. For it is only the generous of heart to whom these folksy, obsolete entertainments will reveal their secrets. To understand them, one must be susceptible to that “double-vision” which allows at once a childlike pleasure in the story itself and a grownup interest in (and compassion for) the storyteller, hapless as he may be.

-Published in berfrois, John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimensional characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.

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