The Longreads Blog

Phone Call in The Age of Coronavirus

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Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | May 2020 | 6 minutes (1,765 words)

When I imagine the call, it comes on a landline. Not a cell phone. A land line like the one propped on the little table in the hall outside my parents’ bedroom on 22nd Street, on the second floor landing. Beige with a rotary dial. Not installed on the wall but sitting fat and secure on the table where a chair joined it, perfect for those long conversations my older sisters had with their friends, the phone that rang in the middle of the night with the news my father’s only uncle had died. My father stumbled out of bed to answer its loud and insistent rings. My mother and my sisters and I followed the ringing, unheard of at that hour, assembling by our father as he heaved himself into the chair after hearing the news. I was 5 years old and it was the first important phone call of my life. The image of my whole family hovering around the phone was engraved forever as the way one receives the surprising news of death.

Recently, after years of not thinking about the phone call I imagined I might receive some day, I thought about it again. I used to torture myself by pretending it was his voice I heard on the line, saying the name he alone knew, the name he had given me because he thought it suited me better than the one I wore so heavily. And now I wanted to hear him say that name again, one last time. The global spread of the Coronavirus, our shutdown in Washington where I live, the way fear hangs in the air has perhaps triggered its return. Doctors are making their wills, never a good sign, and we’re being told it’s time to talk about death. For some of us may have run out of time to do those last things we thought we might do. In my imagination, the call still comes in on the beige phone of my childhood even though I haven’t owned a landline for 10 years. Those models are museum pieces, shoved away in attics as relics along with bone china tea sets. My husband never did sign on for the transition to cell phones. He missed the physical presence of the landline in our lives, claiming he couldn’t hear the voice on the other end as clearly on a cell phone. About three years ago he finally broke down and got one installed in our condo unit only to discover no one ever called him on it. This new version of the landline didn’t look at all like the phones of old and it didn’t operate like one either. It was much more machine-like with buttons to hit and complicated functions. Though it sat on his desk where he could readily answer, it never rang. The world had moved on. Eventually he got rid of it, the expense of the landline wasn’t justified, he said.


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Cell phones, so thin and light and little, don’t seem fitting for momentous calls, for life and death communications, for last words, or even if the calls aren’t literally life and death, they’re emotionally weighty, too weighty to receive or conduct on an iPhone or flip phone. For calls of that sort, a landline is required, or so my psyche thinks. I never picture receiving the call walking idly about my neighborhood and hitting accept on my cell phone. Or perusing lettuce at the grocery store. Or even on a picturesque trail looking out at the ferry gliding on its way to Seattle. It would be awful to get such a call as I’m imagining in public, standing in line to board that ferry or waiting for an order of coffee. Imagine being at the drugstore, a place as soulless as Walgreens, and getting the call. Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy. Cell phones have destroyed the sense of the occasion of a call, the magnitude of picking up and hearing a familiar voice on the other end who has something significant to say. Truth be told, I don’t receive many calls anymore from anyone. Mostly reminders that my prescription is ready or my dental appointment has to be rescheduled. The exceptions are rare and they don’t compare favorably with important calls I’ve received in my life on a landline, like the call telling me my father had died. Now that is a call I will remember until I die.

Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy.

The call came in the middle of the night just like that call about my father’s uncle when I was 5. It was early March, cold and wintery, the river that ran by our house was churning with chunks of ice, and the heat had been turned off. I know this because my husband and I had buried ourselves under a down comforter and two large dogs. Richard got up to answer the call — he was surprisingly quick about it having been woken from sleep. I immediately knew the news was bad and it was for me. No one calls in the middle of the night unless they have to. Oddly our phone was beige just like my childhood phone and sat on the dresser in our bedroom. Did I deliberately pick that model, the instrument carrying the news of death, or was it an accident of fate?

I had to get up out of bed to speak into the phone. Not easy and convenient like a cell phone that I could reach while staying under the covers. In the dark I could barely make out Richard’s shape. I heard his voice — It’s your sister Carol. That’s all he had to say and I knew. He didn’t have to say It’s about your father. I threw off the blankets, dislodged myself from the pile of dogs, and found him to take the phone. Nearly naked and shivering I heard her voice. There was no chair to fall into. I stood to hear her say Marcia, Daddy’s gone. It should require some effort to take such a call. You should have to get from one place to another and it shouldn’t be easy. You should have to run down the stairs to answer the call or stumble across the room in the dark hitting your hips on the edge of the dresser. It should leave a mark, a bruise that will take weeks to fade and remain sensitive to the touch.

There are many momentous phone calls I imagine I might receive, frightening calls I dread receiving, terrible test results, something happening to those I love, calls I don’t want to get on my cell phone or pick up as voicemail. These are inevitable and they await me. I doubt that I will escape them. But the call I imagine, the call I’ve thought about receiving is from the man who first stirred me, a troubled man I knew a long time ago before there were cell phones, a time when talking on the phone for us was rare and memorable because I was keeping our relationship secret from my parents. I feared that once our relationship became known, it wouldn’t withstand their disapproval. I was 17. Some might say 17 is too young to have a significant relationship but I would say they are wrong. With him I felt vulnerable and real. At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me. And that wasn’t the case as I grew older. For a short space it didn’t matter how we spent our time as long as we were together. But the days between the sweet and the bitter were brief, between the hours of early fall and the dark end of the season. All that was pure affection between us was driven underground in the cold that came. We were doomed from the start, though I didn’t know it — that was something it took time for me to see. We didn’t last, or I should say our relationship didn’t overcome the obstacles put before it. But we did last in my heartbrainbody. He vanished into his life and I vanished into my life without a word passing between us ever again. I know nothing about what became of him. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me.

I used to periodically let myself descend into a kind of sad daze, a timeless daze, imagining that someday he would call me. Something would make him call me. Perhaps he’d have something specific to say to me. That he sometimes was overcome with remembering me, someone would remind him of me. I don’t know what he would say although sometimes I imagined him asking if it was too late. And of course it was. It had been too late for a very long time, but I still wanted him to ask. I wanted to hear him say those words. I wanted to be curled into a chair with the telephone cord wrapped around my fingers and hear his voice one more time. I used to rehearse what I wanted to say to him if I ever got the chance. I suppose I wanted to put something right before it was too late. Though I know it’s impossible for one last phone call to put anything right, to untangle what has tangled, to repair what has broken, to forgive. Mainly there’s just an ache of the unfinished. I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

It comes in on the beige phone that sits on a table like the one in my childhood but it isn’t inside. That’s the thing about creating your own dream — you can take a landline sitting on a table and move it to where it could never be. I want the phone and table to be sitting in the middle of a deserted beach. I hear the ring though it comes from far away. I run through the country fields of my youth and along the back roads he and I used to take on his motorcycle. I hear the pit-pat of my boots slapping the ground like panted breath. I run and run until eventually I can see the green sea spread before me and then the table with the phone. I run down steps onto the hard packed sand of the beach. I hear the ring ring ring ! I am close now.

* * *

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu

Editor: Krista Stevens

What Do We Do Without Live Music?

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People find their joy in many ways: a nice weekend dinner, family time at the park. The pandemic has brought those lost joys into sharper relief. For Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield writes about the way the pandemic has removed live music from the center of so many listeners’ lives, and how he’s dealing with its absence.

Music is more than sound. We measure our years, even our weeks, by the shows we see. Music is also relational. We experience it with other people, including strangers joined in sweaty community at cramped music venues. This communal experience is part of what Covid-19 has taken away. To compensate for live music’s absence, Sheffield remembers past concerts. He enjoys livestreams and Neil Young’s weekly Fireside Sessions, and he listens to a lot of live albums.

Ministry called one of their live albums In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up — I always love the bitchy tone of that. Showing up is what the live show is all about: We go to be part of that crowd. I started by going to all-ages hardcore matinees on weekend afternoons — that’s where I began learning to handle the chaotic presence of strangers, before I was mature enough to learn any other way. All the people I used to hate at shows, I miss them now. Yes, even you, the douchebag who can’t turn off your goddamn phone because you need to video every moment. Here I am now, scrounging for YouTube scraps and cursing you for not getting better footage. (Seriously, nobody got any video of Stephen Malkmus doing the Cars’ “Good Times Roll” on the 2001 Jicks tour? You people, honestly.)

I keep listening to live albums these days, just because it’s therapeutic to hear a crowd making noise. I’m getting to know the Grateful Dead’s spring ’77 tour all too well. Like the Dead, Taylor Swift had summer stadium shows I was already looking forward to. I revisit shaky fan-cam video of Taylor and relive the night I first saw the Red tour, in 2013. When Taylor busted out the drum solo in “Holy Ground,” the little kid behind me yelled, “She’s rocking out, Mom! She’s rocking ooouuut!” I will think about that moment once a week for the rest of my life.

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RIP Little Richard, the ‘Self-Proclaimed King and Queen of Rock & Roll’

CIRCA 1956: Musician Little Richard performs onstage in circa 1956. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

Richard Penniman, best known to the world as Little Richard, passed away on May 9 at the age of 87. In 2015, David Ramsey wrote this lyrical profile of Richard for Oxford American in which he notes that Little Richard’s big break came after he recorded “Tutti Frutti,” a song reworked from a bawdy “ode to sodomy” played in the “dodgier clubs” of the chitlin’ circuit. The song’s lyrics were rewritten and recorded with 15 minutes left in the session. It was a “wild, sexy nonsense song that changed music forever.” “I created rock & roll, didn’t even know what I was doing,” Richard said.

Little Richard has always been attuned to signs. At the height of his fame, on tour in Australia in October 1957, he saw a big ball of fire in the sky above the stadium. This was his second vision of fire. On the flight over, the glow of the engines appeared to him as flames and he pictured yellow-haired angels holding the plane aloft.

The message, to Little Richard, was clear. He had to leave show business, quit singing the devil’s music, and get right with God.

“It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads,” he later told his biographer, Charles White. “It shook my mind. . . . I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’” And he did. He ditched the tour—leaving half a million dollars’ worth of canceled bookings, with multiple lawsuits to come. The change in plans kept him off a scheduled flight that crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Lord wasn’t messing around.

A star who mistook a satellite for a ball of fire. And we might pause here to note that whether or not it was a message from God, something like a miracle was afoot. A freaky-deaky bisexual black man who grew up poor in the Jim Crow South in Macon, Georgia, singing a wild, sexy nonsense song that changed music forever, everywhere—even in a packed stadium halfway around the world, as shrieking Australian teenagers nearly started a riot, scuffling to touch the man’s discarded clothes. Fire in the heavens and fire on earth.

For all of us, actuarially speaking, sooner or later the end is nigh. So let us dance: black and white, man and woman, believer and heathen. And everything in between. Let us dance, all of us, while we are still able, while we still can.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Shawn Yuan, Marty Munson, Anna Merlan, Lauren Collins, and Drew Magary.

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1. Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup

Shawn Yuan | Wired | May 1, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,696 words)

“The dawn of a pandemic — as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet.”

2. What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America

Marty Munson | Men’s Health | April 30, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,255 words)

“The first five minutes — especially when it’s below 60 — can be so painful and you think, I don’t want to do this. But when you’re swimming in training, within ten minutes, your body goes numb and there’s this adrenaline and a thrill. I don’t understand it, but it’s incredible.”

3. I Tried Hypnosis to Deal with My Pandemic Anxiety, and Got Something Much Weirder

Anna Merlan | Vice Magazine | May 5, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,565 words)

“When I stepped through the door, I told him, I found myself in a room entirely lined with aquariums, in which large, spotted, neon-colored fish were floating. It felt peaceful, I told Brown. ‘There’s some purpose here. I’m not worried about the fish, they’re being taken care of.'”

4. Missed Calls

Lauren Collins | The New Yorker | May 4, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,423 words)

Lauren Collins’ father died in March of leukemia as the pandemic began to unfold, forcing her to learn to grieve in a time of enforced isolation. This essay is a remembrance of her father and an exploration of grieving from a distance.

5. I’m On a Pancake-only Breakfast Diet and I Wish I Started This Sooner

Drew Magary | SF Gate | May 4, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,979 words)

“MY NAME IS DREW AND I LOVE PANCAKES.”

How Covid-19 Could Reshape Urban Life

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Since the early 2000s, national trends had people leaving the suburbs to return to city centers, lured by the multiple social, economic, and cultural advantages of density. Live music, a nice Friday dinner out, visits to museums and farmers markets, even a subway ride — there was so much to do. With the closures of most businesses, the elements of urban life that made cities vibrant have disappeared. For GEN, Steve LeVine examines the many ways Covid-19 could permanently alter America’s urban landscape, and the way we live in it. This includes the shrinkage of cities due to lower immigration rates, a loss of innovation because of shrinkage, and the migration of manufacturing to cheaper sites outside city limits. As far as urban comforts go, even if stores reopen, who will have money to spend? And will potential shoppers avoid crowded places? As MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson tweeted: “Without an effective testing and tracing infrastructure in place, ‘re-opening’ is just a synonym for ‘second wave of the pandemic.’”

One conspicuous fallout is a potentially final blow to Main Street — the future likelihood that, when you walk or drive down your favorite roads, many of the shops and restaurants you love won’t reopen. In an April 22 note to clients, Barclays said Covid-19 had accelerated what it calls the “retail death curve,” the shift of business to e-commerce. Over the coming five years, 30% to 40% of still-existing physical shops will close, the bank said. Neighborhood shops hoping to survive may have to feature cashierless technology resembling Amazon Go, vending machine sales, and kiosks offering grab-and-go clothing combinations such as T-shirts, jeans, and jackets.

It will be the same with restaurant takeout and delivery. Restaurants will be far from finished as an urban thing. Some restaurants will vanish, but others will arise in their place. Dining out, however, may no longer be the main alternative to cooking at home. The winners will be Amazon and Uber, Walmart, DoorDash, and Target, whose boom in delivery will grow at almost everyone else’s expense. Other emerging businesses, perhaps to support the unicorns, will be reliable, close-at-hand farms growing enough food so the nearby city needn’t worry about future pandemic disruptions, said Alice Charles, a cities analyst for the World Economic Forum.

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American Tests

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Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words)

I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York City’s alternate side rules? Or that once, after a bottomless brunch, I’d sung loudly on the subway, not caring that someone shouted the suggestion I “stick to shower singing”? My appointment was for noon, and now it was 6 p.m. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hunger had receded, replaced with anxiety and a thudding headache. All afternoon I’d rocked myself for comfort as people streamed in and out of the interview rooms.

It was 2012 and immigration didn’t feel as fraught as it presently does, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. Getting a new appointment would take four to six months.

Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings. Behind the desk sat an overburdened federal worker. She was petite like me, but her caramel skin color contrasted my darker one, a hue my mother once described as the green-black color of boiled cowpea leaves.

“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman told me. “We misplaced your file.”

I was about to take my citizenship exam.
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This Week in Books: Several Nihilistic Frenchmen

Portrait of the French writer Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). (Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I feel like most of my reading this past week was preoccupied by power: who has it, who can get it, and what it looks like. The overall arc of the revelation seems to be that no matter how acutely we are aware of the answers to the first and second questions (1. the rich; 2. the rich), the answer to the third can still feel surprising: what power looks like, in the end, is nothing more or less than the ability to keep buying food at jacked up prices during a food shortage. “Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops,” writes Camus in The Plague. “The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing.” “We’re all in this together” becomes a pipe dream for Camus in The Plague almost as quickly as it did for us in 2020; it turns out maintaining normalcy during a crisis is the ultimate show of elite strength — even, or especially, at the expense of the rest of us. In that vein, I found Samuel Rutter’s manual for living a 19th-century decadent lifestyle, as described in the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans, to be particularly bonkers and provoking; a perfect covid read. After all, a morose eccentric living alone in the countryside and indulging in simple pleasures may feel relatably disheveled and melancholy during quarantine, but of course by the very fact that he can afford not to work, we know he must be quite rich. Only the rich get to drop out of society with everyman style. Sooner or later, for most of us, the other shoe will drop.

Power didn’t only come up this week in reviews of books by dour Frenchmen, either! It’s there in Maisy Card’s description of the way she felt, while conducting archival research for her debut novel, when she read accounts of enslaved women and girls who found ways to rebel against servitude and sexual violence (“They were victims of course, but it was also comforting to know that, as brutalized as they were, many of them still found the strength to disobey”); it’s there in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, which explores the twisting violence enacted by “federal language” against Native people during the Termination era, a time when the government tried to eliminate tribal existence through bureaucracy and mandates; and of course it’s the constant thread woven through a New Yorker review of the latest book by Mike Davis, whose City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear seemed to presage the Rodney King Riots and the Woolsey Fire respectively, and whose The Monster at Our Door, about the potential for an avian flu pandemic, apparently scared him so badly that he couldn’t keep a copy in his house. Davis’ latest, the memoir-ish Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, is intended as a guide for young radicals, although its lessons are somewhat crushingly framed as a tutorial on failure: “I realized eight years ago… that the experience of that generation had to be recovered, and recovered in a way that would provide lessons and balance sheets to the current generation of activists… To understand what people fought for and what strategies they used and why, at the end of the day, we were defeated in every important sense.”

The fact that nearly every article in the newsletter this week seems to be about power could of course just be my own preoccupations at work, but I also can’t shake this feeling that a leaf has been turned, and we are on a crash course with something brand new — or perhaps very, very old. So much of what has happened lately has been completely unfathomable (even at the same time that it was totally predictable, if that makes any sense at all) but I simply can’t wrap my head around this thing where people are forced to go back to work when the virus is still widely circulating and untraced. This seems untenable? I know Americans are a surprisingly meek people when it comes to doing the bidding of our bosses, but it seems like a bridge too far, even for us.

I think something’s going to happen to stop it. Or maybe I just hope it does.

1. “A Dandy’s Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation” by Samuel Rutter, The Paris Review

Samuel Rutter scours Joris-Karl Huysmans’ classic of French decadent literature Against Nature for advice on how to live the way we must now — that is, like we are eccentric recluses “[taking] pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.”

2. “Pointing the Finger” by Jacqueline Rose, The London Review of Books

Jacqueline Rose revisits Camus’ The Plague and re-examines old arguments about whether it is lax in assigning blame. “Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him.”

3. “Artforum” by César Aira, Lit Hub

An excerpt from César Aira’s Artforum. And yes, the entire excerpt is about how one man’s copy of Artforum magazine has gotten very, very wet.

4. “Holy Simplicity: On Louise Erdrich’s ‘The Night Watchman’” by Thomas J. Millay, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This review of Louise Erdrich’s latest novel The Night Watchman situates the book in its historical context of the Termination era, when the federal government attempted to erase Native identity and nationhood by “giving” Native Americans citizenship. Reviewer Thomas J. Millay writes that the novel draws a purposeful contrast between the plainspoken language of the story’s protagonists — members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa or Ojibwe Indians — and the deceitful speech of the federal government. “Federal language twists and turns, appearing good on its surface but in fact initiating great evil.”


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5. “Maisy Card: ‘There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.’” by Mickie Meinhardt, Guernica

Mickie Meinhardt interviews Maisy Card about her novel These Ghost Are Family, which is based on 12 years of archival research about her family’s history in Jamaica and the legacy of slavery. “I can easily make a character’s anger my own, and I’ll find myself walking around with those feelings after working on the book, as if I forgot that I was writing about fictional people.”

6. “We’re All Living in the Bathroom Now” by Annabel Paulsen, Electric Literature

This reflection on what Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom (an incredible novella about a man who lives in his bathroom and refuses to ever leave it) can teach us about quarantine is, you may have noticed, the THIRD time a sort of nihilistic Frenchman has appeared in the reading list this week. Which is pretty remarkable considering I haven’t even mentioned the Houellebecq thing.

7. “Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe” by Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear reviews Mike Davis’ movement history Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties and asks him, the oracle of L.A. apocalypse, what to worry about next. The answer is less than reassuring for Angelenos, I assume: “Davis kept worrying it over, the alternative ending that might reorder everything again. ‘What if the big one happened now?’ he said. I’ve already plundered my earthquake kits for face masks and hand sanitizer. And now Davis has said my midnight fear out loud.”

8. “The Stages of Not Going on T” by Danny M. Lavery, The New Inquiry

A gorgeous piece of writing excerpted from Danny M. Lavery’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You. “Oh, I don’t want to go on T. That’s not what this is. I can see where you got the idea, I suppose, but I’m afraid hormones simply aren’t for me. I don’t even want the ones I have! I’ll never go on testosterone, but it’s simply wonderful for you. You look great. Better than ever, honestly. If I were stuck in a room for the rest of my life and could only look at one thing for some reason, it would be you (I hope that’s not weird to say), but that’s really not the same thing. I just want you to go on hormones and for me to be able to watch you do it.”

9. “Making My Moan” by Irina Dumitrescu, The London Review of Books

Irina Dumitrescu reviews a very scholarly sounding book of absolutely incredible medieval smut, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “Gloriously, the poem ‘I pray yow maydens every chone’ features a merchant offering his podynges (‘sausages’) to a group of young women. ‘Will ye have of the puddings come out of the pan?’ he asks, and they reply firmly: ‘No, I will have a pudding that grows out of a man.’”

10. “Are We Seeing a New Movement to Organize Publishing?” by Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

An interview with Amy Wilson, who runs the Twitter account Book Worker Power, which she made as a more direct-action oriented response to the emergence of the popular satirical Publishers Weakly account. (You can read an interview with the anonymous people who run that account on Electric Literature. I believe they gave this interview just before their first two cancelings, which came in kind of admirably quick succession.)

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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And Then We Grew Up

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Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2020 | 11 minutes (3,116 words)

“I envy you,” my cousin told me once, as we were sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in the Ohio woods, eating peach pie. “You have a word.” That word was WRITER. My cousin, who’d bounced around jobs in her twenties and thirties, envied the way my word so neatly answered the questions of career and identity, the way it brought me into focus. I may not have had any money. I may not have had any idea if the project I was working on would ever actually be seen by someone other than myself, but I had a word.

Every once in a while, I go through a spell of applying for jobs. Teaching jobs. Tech jobs. Utterly random jobs. I google “how to write a cover letter.” I fantasize with both fascination and horror about showing up at an office and chatting about The Handmaid’s Tale over tepid coffee in a communal space. Then inevitably I imagine that moment when a stranger asks me what I do and I can no longer supply my word as an answer. It is incredibly disarming, even just in my interior dreamscape, not to have that word. It has been an anchor for my personal sense of validation, my identity, my way of relating to the world for so long. What would it mean to give it up? To hand over all my art monster ambitions and renounce the often cruel bargain of personal stability for creative nobility?

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How China Censored Citizens and the Press on COVID-19

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As Shawn Yuan reports at Wired, the Chinese government knew that a new SARS-like pneumonia had appeared in late 2019, yet they worked hard to keep this deadly virus a secret from their population and the world. As citizens shared accounts of the devastation with one another on social media, as reporters wrote and published stories about the outbreak, the Chinese government’s censors vigilantly deleted their posts and their accounts. Why? To conceal the extent of the outbreak and the inadequacy of its response, so that China could portray itself as a benevolent savior to its people and a generous friend supplying medical equipment to the world.

That night, just when Yue was about to log off and try to sleep, she saw the following sentence pop up on her WeChat Moments feed, the rough equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed: “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see dead bodies lying around without being collected and patients seeking medical help but having no place to get treatment.”

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her.

She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”

Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off.

The next morning, when she opened WeChat, a single message appeared: Her account had been suspended for having “spread malicious rumors” and she would not be able to unblock it. She knew at once that her late-night post had stepped on a censorship landmine.

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

While articles and posts that displease Chinese censors continue to be expunged across the Chinese internet, the messages that thrive on television and state-sanctioned sites are rosy: News anchors narrate videos of nurses saying how honored they have been to fight for their country despite all the hardships and video clips of China “generously” shipping planeloads of medical equipment to other countries hit hard by the virus are playing on a loop.

As the outbreak began to slow down in mainland China, the government remained cautious in filtering out any information that might contradict the seemingly unstoppable trend of recovery. On March 4, a Shanghai news site called The Paper reported that a Covid-19 patient who had been discharged from the hospital in late February later died in a post-discharge isolation center; another news site questioned whether hospitals were discharging patients prematurely for the sake of “clearing all cases.” Both stories vanished.

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The Function and Language of Ancient Sexual Texts

Kin Cheung / AP Photo

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought about a medieval classroom’s curriculum or what it might have been like to attend. Apparently they could be a lot more racy than you’d think. Chaucer’s story Reeve’s Tale, is about rape, for example. Poems about deflowered nuns and lascivious men whose sexual appetites earned comparisons to animals were read to children and adults. In a fascinating and fresh review-essay for the London Review of Books, Irina Dumitrescu looks at ancient depications of sexuality, and the idea of obscenity, through Carissa Harris’ book Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “In her meticulously argued new book,” Dumitrescu writes, “Carissa Harris shows that obscenity was used to convey vastly different lessons about sex and ethics in medieval literature. Focusing on sexual language in Middle English and Middle Scots, her study explores the way texts deployed for (heterosexual) erotic education often combined ‘the irresistible pull of arousal and titillation and the revulsive push of shame and disgust’.”

For much of the 20th century, academics argued that the concept of obscenity was born along with the printing press and state censorship of erotic material. One can understand where this idea came from: even a fleeting encounter with medieval art is likely to turn up lurid depictions of sex organs and bodily orifices. Take the naked man crouching at the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, his genitalia on full display. (In 2018, George Garnett achieved brief internet fame by counting the 93 phalluses, human and equine, shown on the tapestry, and documenting their states of tumescence.) Medieval manuscript pages often have a stately central text surrounded by rollicking activity. Nuns harvest penises from trees in the lower margins of a manuscript of the Roman de la rose, and a naked man presents his behind to be pierced by a monkey’s lance beneath the prayers of the Rutland Psalter. Pilgrim badges, popular medieval souvenirs made of cheap metal alloys, depict vulvas dressed as pilgrims, winged penises and female smiths forging phalluses. Erotic imagery is carved into stone corbels and on the undersides of wooden choir seats in medieval churches.

But none of this should be taken as proof that there was no concept of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The notion that some things are lewd or filthy is distinct from the desire to regulate them by political means. The influential seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville used the adjective ‘obscenus’ to describe the love of prostitutes and those parts of the body that excite people to shameful acts. In the 12th century, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux railed against heretics doing ‘heinous and obscene’ things in private, comparing them to the stinking behinds of foxes. In the Roman de la rose, the Lover upbraids the allegorical figure of Reason for using the word coilles (‘balls’). He argues that this isn’t dignified in the mouth of a courteous girl (an unwitting double entendre), but Reason defends her usage. God made the generative organs and women enjoy the pleasures these afford, whatever word is used to describe them. Not all medieval copyists of the Roman de la rose agreed with this argument: a number of versions leave out this passage. People in the Middle Ages certainly understood certain things to be filthy or shameful, but such topics could also inspire prayerful reflection or be used to explain the error of a poor line of verse.

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