Author Archives

Sari Botton is a writer living in Kingston, NY. She edited the award-winning “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY” and the NY Times Bestselling “Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.” She is the essays editor for Longreads, and teaches at Catapult. She tweets at http://twitter.com/saribotton

‘The One Who Gives Birth to Herself’: Rachel Syme on Empowerment and Agency Through Posting Selfies

It’s difficult to select just one perfect quote as a representative sample of Rachel Syme’s excellent ode to the selfie, at Matter. She comes at the subject from so many smart angles that there are too many to choose from. A prolific self-portrait poster herself, Syme defends this hugely popular phenomenon–so frequently derided as narcissistic and shallow, especially in reference to women–as a respectable act of self-expression and self-determination:

We are living in times of peak-selfie, and therefore, peak selfie-hatred. When a phenomenon leaks so completely and quickly into the cultural water supply, people are bound to get freaked out…

Those who see selfies as signs of the end times are focusing on the outliers; the bad actors. The people who accidentally fall into a waterfall and die in the pursuit of the perfect shot. The kids who get addicted to the digital feedback loop and start relying on hearts to get up in the morning. The moms and dads who take selfies when they should be watching their babies; the seething loners who use their selfies as a way to spread hate (if this hate spills over into violence, then selfies will surely get the blame). But these types of delinquents have always existed: the teenagers who don’t pay attention in class, ​the bros ​who snooze through cultural events,​ the trolls who care about snark over compassion. ​There are always going to be tourists who shove themselves obnoxiously to the front of the line, people who put their needs over the needs of others, people who gawk at fires and funerals: these are not unique social problems created by the selfie or its accoutrement.

​What the critics don’t focus on is how to decode the language of selfies when they are being used correctly: what the people in them are trying to do with their portraiture, what big message each individual’s self-representational practice all adds up to in the end.

Read the story

When Your Name Precedes You: Jeannie Vanasco On Feeling Bound to the Dead Older Sibling She’s Named For

Painter on His Way to Work. Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Painter on His Way to Work. Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Every Sunday as he entered the church where his father, Theodorus, preached, Vincent van Gogh passed a gravestone marked VINCENT VAN GOGH.

The artist’s brother Vincent was born, and died, March 30, 1852. The artist was born March 30, 1853. I remember being sixteen years old in the Toledo Museum of Art, staring at his painting Houses at Auvers, when I heard a museum guide say this. Whether the knowledge affected van Gogh—that he shared both his name and birthday with a dead sibling—remains unknown, the guide said.

“Does anyone have any questions?” he asked.

My mind filled with loud, hurried thoughts and just as suddenly emptied, like a flock of birds scattering from a field.

I was sixteen, the age Jeanne would always be.

-From an essay at The Believer by Jeannie Vanasco, about the heavy psychic burden of her “necronym,” the name she was given in memory of the daughter her father had lost, and whose presence she always felt.

Read the story

‘Unyielding Boredom’: On the Slow Passage of Time Behind Bars

Photo via Flickr

It was an interesting microcosm of adapted culture and could be really inspiring. (Inspiring maybe because I’m a nerd and was so bored I had to do something with my own brain.) People will figure out a way to amuse themselves, to connect, to re-frame, to reconcile, to make a home in the most unlikely of places. I may have laughed more, and harder, there than anytime in my life. (Also, cried. Also, raged.) The process of the whole thing (according to Viktor Frankl) follows the stages of grief. It was fascinating to watch that go down over and over with new arrivals. Once you reach surrender, there is some psychological space. And for the people who had access, there were really interesting shifts of perspectives and growth.

-At The Weeklings, Sean Beaudoin interviewed ex-convict, prison reform activist and author Meg Worden about the twenty-three months she served at Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for transporting 5,000 ecstasy pills from New York to Missouri–an experience she says wasn’t entirely unlike what is depicted on “Orange is the New Black.”

Read the story

Searching for Meaning Inside a Tech Company’s First Bookstore

books

University Book Store—begun by students in 1900—is just up the road from University Village, and while they serve superficially different markets, it’s difficult not to see Amazon’s choice of location as yet another act of aggression toward indie bookstores, whose owners and employees are particularly suspicious of the company’s motives.

Speaking over her reading-stack-as-topography desk Cady outlined a history of other provocations by her city’s tech giant. Amazon staff have wielded clipboards in sign-up efforts directly outside of at least two of her store’s locations…

…Cady had already visited Amazon Books opening morning, as had some of her staff. They spoke about it with exaggerated grimaces, more dismissive than unnerved. “The selection is not bad,” Cady emphasized. Indeed, the store carries books by some prominent independent publishers—Coffee House Press, Europa Editions, Melville House—and the selection on their front fiction table would not have been out of place at many indie bookstores. The new Kenzaburo Oe was there, as was the new Mary Gaitskill, the new Joy Williams. It was not wildly adventurous but neither was it uninteresting.

-At The New Republic, Dustin Kurtz visits Amazon’s first physical store in Seattle’s University Village, and tries to puzzle together why they bothered, what their strategy is, and whether it’s worth the expensive real estate and $18-per-hour employee wages. He gives his visit a 2.5 rating.

Read the story

‘Don’t You Write Anything Happy?’: Chinelo Okparanta on Learning from Public Readings

Once, I did a reading in New York where an older lady came up to me afterwards and said, “Your writing is beautiful, and there’s no doubt you’re a great writer, but I’m sorry I won’t be reading any more of that story. That was just too painful for me.” Then, a year or two later, I did a reading in Florida where another lady raised her hand and asked, “Don’t you write anything happy?” After a couple more of those, it finally clicked. I realized that for many people attending a reading is like watching television at the end of a long day. They don’t want to be sad. They want to laugh. Chances are they’ll pick the sitcoms over the horror movies. This writing business is all about learning. So I learned. I learned that, while one’s larger body of fiction can have quite a bit of sadness and conflict and tragedy in it (and in fact, most good fiction does), in a reading environment, the average audience member seems able to tolerate only a little bit of sadness. They’d much rather the reading be sexy, funny, intelligent, and witty. But little to no sadness. Life is hard these days. There’s more than enough sadness in the world, so I certainly can’t blame them.

At The Rumpus, en route to the Wordstock Festival in Portland, Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta–author of the recently released novel Under the Udala Trees, and the 2013 story collection Happiness, Like Water–talked to Ryan Krull about waiting until stories feel ready to be written, trying not to bum out the people who come to readings, and Americans’ naivete about the dangers faced by LBGTQ people in other countries.

Read the story

‘Why I Created My Own World’: Mark Hogancamp on ‘Marwencol,’ The Fantasy Town Where He’s a Hero

Last week I listened to an episode of the “Snap Judgment” podcast profiling Mark Hogancamp, the artist behind “Marwencol,” an imaginary World War II-era town captured in photographs—an ever-changing diorama, with scenes starring Barbie dolls and army figures posed in miniature tanks, barracks and bars. One of the army figures is Hogancamp’s alter ego, a war hero. Read more…

‘The Biggest Test for Our Relationship Yet’: Catherine LaSota on Joining Her Husband at Burning Man

When we purchased our Burning Man tickets, Karl said to me, “All first-timers have a nervous breakdown of some kind.” We didn’t know that my breakdown would come on the first night.

Burning Man presents a lot of unfamiliar stimuli all at once. Hugs from everyone! Naked boobies everywhere! Manual labor in an inhospitable environment! By the end of my arrival day, after dealing with an afternoon-long headache, I started attacking a friendly fellow Ashram camper with my frustrations.

“Why do you even like coming to Burning Man? It’s hard, and I can’t find my toothbrush. Fuck this shit.”

Instead of telling me to stick it and going off to enjoy himself, this veteran Burner brought me some water, sat down with me, and chatted calmly until I was done bitching. He refused, in his gentle and persistent care of me, to let me feel like I was on the outside of this Burning Man experience.

My kind fellow Ashram camper asked me, “Why did you come to Burning Man?”

Karl looked at me, eagerly awaiting my reply.

“I came because it’s important to Karl,” I said, immediately sensing that this wasn’t going to be a satisfactory answer.

-Please, no one show my husband this Catapult essay by by Catherine LaSota about indulging her husband’s desire to attend Burning Man together. LaSota takes much better to the dusty, trippy “City in the Desert” than I likely would. If I were to attend. Which I will not.

Read the story

‘Skeptics Welcome’: Lily Burana on Being Both Christian and Goth at Heart

Halloween, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days represent a friendly (if bony, skeletal) handshake between Paganism and Christianity, an exaltation of escape and revelry, as well as somber respect for death and those whom it has claimed. I still love graveyards, rattling chains, black cats, black velvet, and all manner of spooky things. And I adore the blessing of sacred serendipity — that you can discover yourself while pretending to be someone else. That you can pray for a guiding angel and God will send Alice Cooper.

-From an essay by Lily Burana on The New York Times’ Women in the World page, about trying to reconcile her love of Halloween and all things Goth with her “surprisingly Jesus-y” faith, plus the time she asked for a sign from God that she was in the right church and looked up to see Alice Cooper dressed in “Goth golfer casual.”

Read the story

‘What If It Comes Out Shaped Like a Fin?’: Mike Albo on His Fears as a Sperm Donor

Mike Albo
Mike Albo. Photo by marqNYC

We ordered $14 glasses of wine and a small plate of “sour olives” that was as expensive as an entrée would have been in 1998. And because financially I still live in 1998, I quickly scanned my head to see whether my debit card could survive being gored of $60 for a dining experience that contained zero nutritional value. Then Caroline popped the question:

“Pat and I want you to think about being a sperm donor for us.”

This was the last thing I thought she was going to say to me. A donor. For one of my closest friends and her girlfriend. This was not something I had considered, ever. I was flattered and frightened, and, confronting a new paradigm, I was also speechless, like a 1500s Portuguese Marquis trying to get his mind around the concept that the world is round. Me? A child? A family? That stuff people have who wake up early in their heirloom apartments for their six-figure-income jobs?

As usual, I joked to cover my nerves. “The idea of having a baby freaks me out. I mean, what if it comes out shaped like a fin?”

“Then I’ll call it Fin,” Caroline said.

-From The Cut’s excerpt of Mike Albo’s funny, touching, all-around excellent new Kindle Single, Spermhood, about his experience helping a lesbian couple start a family. This is Albo’s second Kindle Single. In 2011, he released The Junket, which is loosely based on his experience being fired from his freelance job as a columnist for The New York Times for accepting a free trip.

Back then I got to speak to him at The Rumpus about his choice to publish with Amazon, and to playfully fictionalize his experience (in the introduction to Spermhood, he says he only very lightly fictionalized this time).

I personally hate reading books on a tablet, but I’ll make an exception for anything written by Albo, who always makes me laugh and think, and moves me.

Read the story

‘The Past Is More Now Than Usual’: Eileen Myles on Having Two Books Released with Mercury in Retrograde

I think there’s a very interesting poetry moment going on culturally now. Part of what I’m experiencing with this nice reception of this book is the way being a female poet is a certain version of coming of age — poetry is very diaristic, small pieces, an art form you can realize — you wrote poems when you were young — a quick, young, cheap available art form.

I’m getting a sense, because I’m meeting so many young people on this tour and a lot of them are writing poetry and a lot of them are female, and so there’s a way I feel there’s a revolution going on, like the road saga of the ’50s and ’60s for boys might be writing poetry for females right now. And I just love how poetry seems to be totally … the notebook is open — girls, and girlboys, young people and older people and all kinds of people are writing in it. Something special, mortal, cheap and fun, a new way of being smart and fast — it coincides with texting, and social media — it’s a leaky, glittering sort of form.

-At the Los Angeles Times, poet Eileen Myles speaks with novelist Alexander Chee about poetry in the digital age, writing her dog’s memoir, and her “retrospective moment” with the release of two books at once: I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 – 2014and a new edition of Chelsea Girls, her autobiographical coming of age novel, originally released in 1994.

Read the story