The Longreads Blog

What Happens If I Don’t Like Fiona Apple?

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)

Even the way I first listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters was oppositional. It wasn’t intentional. I knew I needed about an hour to listen to it all the way through. I knew I couldn’t really do anything else in order to give it my attention. So I took Fiona Apple’s inside record outside. At four in the afternoon in Toronto, the sun was piercing and it was open-coat weather, a strange way to listen to Apple’s nicotine voice and bedroom lyrics. Walking in the middle of a day so bright I needed to squint even through sunglasses, “Fetch the bolt cutters/I’ve been in here too long,” bounced out of my headphones, a jazzy paradox. As everyone knows by now, the album was made by a shut-in, a “messianic figurehead,” according to the New Yorker, who hadn’t produced an album in eight years. A backstory all the better for conjuring the image of a mythical genius at work on an inevitable masterpiece.

I didn’t get it.

Claustrophobia is the overarching theme, even if it isn’t, of the album that came out of Apple’s exile. And during a crisis in which we all feel that same thing, it was inevitable that the concept would eclipse the music itself. It’s also understandable that not answering Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ call would feel particularly alienating — Slate music critic and Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste author Carl Wilson, who I contacted for this column in befuddlement, said that even he was surprised by how much attention Apple’s fifth album was getting. But in the present atmosphere, with physical connection forbidden, every other kind of connection becomes that much stronger. A man singing on his balcony in Rome unites a building, and a woman pounding on a piano in her home in Venice Beach unites the rest of us. Most of us. In normal times, having the dissenting opinion is a point of pride. In pandemic times, where all you want is to not be alone, it’s a cause for concern. Which is why it felt so important to figure out why I didn’t much like Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

* * *

Technically I started listening to Apple’s album before that walk. Motivated by the unanimous praise, I went to YouTube and played the first track, “I Want You to Love Me.” But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit. Later, in a more studious frame of mind, I persisted. And after about 20 seconds, that sound liquefied into a cascade of piano trills which would be familiar to any ‘90s Apple-ite. At the risk of sounding reductive, this is kind of how Fetch the Bolt Cutters goes if you aren’t feeling it; verses of relief surrounded by weird shit that plays like the opposite of an actual melody. In between hangs the kind of Apple-isms that have always clanged in my ear — mouthfuls of the kind of poetry that was once limited to high school but now stalks us all on Instagram — not to mention the insufferable repetition of words and phrases and the obnoxious holding of never-ending notes like “youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” At the end of “I Want You to Love Me,” Apple discharges a lengthy, high-pitched throat warble that reminds me of Andie MacDowell’s dolphin-like vocalization in the 1991 Bruce Willis flop Hudson Hawk, a squall that causes Sandra Bernhard to sneer listlessly, “Just shoot her.”

I’m not going to make you suffer through much more of my non-critical thinking around music, but there’s definitely a sensation with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, if you listen to it from start to finish, of a knot being untied, of the songs relaxing into something more digestible as you pass the halfway mark (Editor’s note: “Are the songs relaxing into something more digestible, or are you relaxing into the songs?” Author’s note: It’s not me, it’s her). What doesn’t morph is the subject matter, which, restricted as it seems to Apple’s interpersonal grievances, seems all too confined for a project that was already confined in its production. The whole thing just struck me as too insular for how sweepingly it was being lauded. And despite the claims at raw unprocessed sound, those dog barks on the title song are so strategically placed I was more tickled by the actual dogs barking behind the fence I passed while listening to it. But then you can’t deny the added texture Apple’s voice has acquired with age and her own liberation from her old song strictures. The song I momentarily hated the most on the album, for the opening repetition of its title (“Ladies,” sixteen times!), is also the one I liked the most. Despite the clunky lyrics — “ruminations on the looming effect and the parallax view” — some subterranean motor seems to power this track through the history of music, from folk to rap to whatever, sailing between genres like there’s nothing to it. When people talk of genius, when Pitchfork gives the album 10 stars, I hear a glimpse of that here.

That’s the tension. If I just thought everyone had bad taste, or was dumb, I wouldn’t be tortured by disliking Fetch the Bolt Cutters. My lack of connection to it suggested I was missing some substantial sliver of intellect, which is something I can’t abide as someone who never really feels smart enough. So I groped for a music critic to explain it to me. But if I felt alienated from this particular cultural event, critics didn’t seem too concerned about inviting me in. “She sings, scats, lightly raps — and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination,” Jenn Pelly wrote at Pitchfork. Wait, what? That isn’t critical analysis, it’s critical flexing. At The New Yorker, Carrie Battan’s use of the term “feral authenticity” to describe Apple’s oeuvre — based on her penchant for avoiding the public —  recalled my mother’s duo-syllabic reaction to Apple (“hippie”) but not much else. So, I emailed Carl Wilson. Then I called Wilson; that’s how desperate I was for Wilson to explain what was wrong with me. “I feel a little stymied by your question,” he rightfully responded, “how can I tell you how to like something you already know you don’t like?” 

But then he proceeded to write the kind of email that should have been an article, the kind of explanation that’s the reason Wilson is my favorite music critic. That space between the music and the person listening to it? He writes the bridge. Wilson explained that the reaction to Fetch the Bolt Cutters felt “disproportionate” because of Apple’s absence for so long and because it is “of the moment in its theme and feel.” That includes its lyrics on the sort of gender issues we are currently confronting — not to mention Apple’s transcendence of musical boundaries, mixing disparate genres from cabaret to hip-hop — and that raw home-recorded style that opposes today’s ubiquitous hyper-produced singles. Wilson also noted the self-selection of music critics. And that most of the reviews I read on Apple’s album were by white women, on a beat that has famously had a dearth of female voices as a whole, does imply her music still hasn’t shaken that decades-old Lilith Fair connection. 

“Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan back when — like you, I kind of felt that she was good but not great, maybe a little too self-conscious and strained to be great,” Wilson explained. But then he heard Apple’s fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, in 2012. That’s when he thought she had finally self-actualized (upon his suggestion, I listened to that album too and, indeed, the last track, “Hot Knife,” would not sound out of place on her new record). On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Wilson noticed the piano that Apple forefronted in the past melded into layers of rhythm and percussion and vocals, her monotonous deep bluesy voice fracturing into a wider range of pitches. “To my ears that’s really opened up the space in her style, which I used to find too suffocating,” he wrote. “It has an immediacy that I find really rare in music right now, allowing by turns for both vulnerability and rapture.”

After all of that, Wilson’s final words could have very well been all he had written: “[M]aybe you just find Fiona Apple a bit much.” The irony is that the same thing I critique her for — for being too solipsistic, for making it all too self-centered — is the same reason I can’t hear her straight. My reactions to art are as impulsive as my consumption is lonely. It’s why, ultimately, I can’t trust critics’ taste though I can trust their analysis, and why I can’t trust the artists themselves, only their art and my own experience of it. If you think about it, it’s a little crazy to believe in your gut when your gut is at least in part influenced by exposure: “acquired taste” is a thing for a reason. And yet I always seem hellbent on independently deciding on the quality of everything. If nothing else, I am entirely secure in my judgment, because, the thinking goes, I may not know much about anything else, but I know myself perfectly. 

I know, for instance, that I have a particular aversion to hippies, and that during the making of this album, Apple chanted around her house with various other musicians, banging on a box of her dead pet’s bones. I know I am intimidated by the blues and by jazz and reject them because of how stupid they make me feel, a symptom of my more general difficulty with engaging in art I don’t at least marginally understand. I know I have a particular aversion to beautiful women in the arts, because it’s never just about the art. I know this particular beautiful woman has dated powerful men — most notably the director Paul Thomas Anderson, as he got more and more famous — and that never means nothing, good or bad. And I know I resented Apple as a teen for being publicly tortured when she was publicly everything girls like me tortured ourselves for not being — good enough, but, more importantly, the right package to cover up for it (as Apple herself sings: “I resent you for never getting any opposition at all.”) I know all of this, but I feel it more.

Unfortunately, you can’t think yourself out of the way you feel.  “A lot of the record is about feeling confined, emotionally and societally,” Wilson explained, “and about thinking of ways to liberate yourself.” But had Fetch the Bolt Cutters not alienated me musically, everything around it would have. I’m skeptical of blanket accolades; that something can appeal so globally suggests a lack of originality. And I can’t escape (liberate myself from?) the fact that being told another artist has achieved perfection is, as they say, triggering. The idea that someone has unlocked everything they are capable of and created something that is so purely them that it transcends time and space, God-like, to become an indisputable piece of perfection — it’s the thing every artist wants, for all their neuroses and all their intellect and all their values to coalesce into this object that by virtue of being so essentially them is essentially the rest of us as well. It’s incredibly rare, but you see it in work like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, for instance, or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, both of which have had the added advantage of being recognized for their greatness. But this rarity makes each new proposed addition to the canon seem less believable than the last. 

More than that, though, it plagues every other artist. Every time we hear that someone else has achieved mastery, or at least been recognized for achieving it, we’re reminded that we haven’t and likely never will (let alone be acknowledged for doing so). That’s the deepest feeling of isolation for an artist of all of them, that chasm between them and immortality. That’s the one they fear most that they (I) will never breach.  

* * *

I listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters on a Spotify mix, so the album ended and then rolled into “Criminal,” Apple’s Grammy-winning 1997 single and perhaps her best known. Hearing that smooth lyrical piano and that even smoother voice felt like slipping into sweats after a long day in a pencil skirt; I think I may have sighed aloud. (Apple wrote “Criminal” when she was 17 and maybe that says something: that my music appreciation is stuck at that age.) The song, about how bad she felt for getting things so easily by virtue of her sexuality, recently resurfaced in Hustlers, with Jennifer Lopez making her entrance as stripper doyenne to Apple’s adolescent croon, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” That was another piece of popular culture that was unanimously praised that I was only so-so about. The difference is that I felt no tension there. I know films, and I could explain why I didn’t like Hustlers much. Because of that, because I had a reason, I allowed myself to dislike it. And until my editor mentioned it, I didn’t think that had anything to do with my gender. But now I’m starting to think it does — men never seem to require permission to opine, they don’t feel the need to be informed to do so. Which is not to say I shouldn’t — it’s to say they should. Because it means meeting a piece of art halfway, respecting the spirit in which it was made, and respecting the artist who made it.

As much as I continue to feel dissatisfied with my response to Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I’m less troubled after speaking to Wilson and researching Apple herself. A Rolling Stone profile from 1998 reminded me that when she was a kid, she carried around this quote by Martha Graham: “No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” It’s the same quote I used in a column last August. And according to her New Yorker profile from March, Apple continues to display a photograph of Graham on her piano, the one she played on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. So even if I couldn’t connect to that album, I could, in a way, connect to the woman behind it, another isolated artist, unrested, just trying to keep marching.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Fear of Suffering Alone

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Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | May 2020 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

My ex and I used to watch the Doomsday Preppers reality show on the National Geographic channel together, and talk about how crazy those people were at the same time that we made mental notes about their good ideas. After watching enough episodes, we finally put together some basic earthquake supplies (the most likely disaster to hit us in the Pacific Northwest); we bought a rectangular plastic bin and filled it with freeze-dried foods, a first aid kit, hand-cranked radio, flashlight and extra batteries, extra clothes and shoes, our camping gear, some toilet paper, and a few random extras like playing cards and my expired pain meds from my cesarean (they could come in handy). We filled a couple jugs full of water and tried to remember to switch it out now and then. I put shoes under our beds (in case windows break, you need to be able to walk out of the house and not cut your feet), and continually reminded myself to get an extra pair of glasses (because without my vision, I’d be screwed and helpless). We would have gotten a very poor grade as preppers, but we did enough to feel a little better about our situation. And I knew that no matter what, we’d be in it together. That gave me comfort. I would not have to go through such a crisis alone.

Now, we are all going through a crisis, and I have been separated from my husband for five months. He moved out of our house on December 1st, a few months after we made the mutual decision to split. I have not once regretted this decision, which took many years of unease and heartache to finally reach, and I even started dating someone fairly quickly, enjoying my newfound freedom.

But now, we are going through a pandemic.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A general view shows the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship at Daikoku pier cruise terminal in Yokohama on February 24, 2020. - Despite a quarantine imposed on the Diamond Princess, more than 600 people on board tested positive for the coronavirus, with several dozen in serious condition. (Photo by Philip FONG / AFP) (Photo by PHILIP FONG / AFP via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Doug Bock Clark, Thomas Lake, Leslie Jamison, Paul Thompson, and Jude Isabella.

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1. Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess

Doug Bock Clark | GQ | April 30, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,638 words)

“At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, one ill-fated cruise ship became a symbol for the panic and confusion that would soon engulf the globe. Doug Bock Clark uncovers what two harrowing weeks trapped aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ felt like — for unsuspecting tourists, for frightened crew members, even for the captain himself.”

2. 46 Years in Prison, and a Plan to Kill the Man Who Framed Him

Thomas Lake | CNN | April 23, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,600 words)

“Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolors. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.”

3. Other Voices, Other Rooms

Leslie Jamison | New York Review of Books | April 23, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,922 words)

Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. What makes the exhibit fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.

4. “Queens Get the Money”: The Story of Mobb Deep’s ‘The Infamous’ at 25

Paul Thompson | The Ringer | April 24, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,343 words)

Paul Thompson, a deft and versatile writer, delivers an engrossing and utterly entertaining profile of Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, the 25-year old album that would vault rappers Prodigy and Havoc — one a Queensbridge native, the other a NYC nomad — into the stratosphere of rap amid the Big Apple’s glory days holding the mic.

5. The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey

Jude Isabella | Hakai Magazine | April 22, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,500 words)

“The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.”

Following the North Star

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Shaheen Pasha | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,587 words)

I received the call at work from Tariq’s brother. I knew him briefly, had seen him as a kid, but aside from a few conversations here and there, we were virtual strangers. I couldn’t really even picture his face as his voice came across the line, hesitant, slightly unsure, a little defiant. It’s hard to imagine I had such a powerful connection to one man, and yet his brother, the person closest to him, was more of a name than a person.

“Tariq has been arrested,” his brother said to me, before his voice choked up into sobs, all his bravado vanished. I sat down in my chair with its slightly wobbly back, and dropped the handbag I had just hung on my shoulder, ready to catch my bus home from Jersey City.

“What did they arrest him for?” I said, my voice oddly calm even though it felt like my throat was closing. Drugs, maybe? He didn’t do hard drugs, that I knew. But maybe he had been caught up in the overly zealous drug war at the turn of the new millennium, when marijuana was considered the gateway to all evils.

Or maybe it was a fight at a club. That would make sense. Tariq thrived on a good fight, weaving in and out like a boxer, assessing his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses. It was something we argued about incessantly when we were together. One of many things.

But I knew before he even said it. Somehow, I knew. I had seen it in a dream, a sick twisted nightmare I’d had as a teenager in my dorm room all those years ago. Tariq had woken up and put his arm around me as I whimpered in my sleep. “Hey, you okay?” he said, still half asleep. I nodded and buried my head against his chest. “Just a bad dream,” I said. “I don’t really remember.” He was asleep, anyway, before the last words left my mouth.

I did remember. Good God, I’ve never forgotten it. A courtroom. A jury of mostly white men and women staring at me. A faceless man, some kind of a lawyer, standing in front of me. Me in a box, trying not to look at Tariq as I testified on his behalf. “Please don’t give him the death penalty,” I said to the stone-faced jurors in my dream. “I can’t imagine a world that he’s not in.”

It was a vision that came to pass a handful of years later, in 2005, down to the slightly sweaty wood paneling under my fingers as I gripped the edge of the witness box to keep them from shaking. But I didn’t know it at the time of the dream. Maybe I wouldn’t have told him then even if I had known. It was the first time and, as it turned out, the last time we had ever spent the whole night together. Good Pakistani Muslim girls didn’t spend the night with a boy, after all. I felt daring, rebellious and completely happy. I didn’t want to taint it with the imagery of a ruined life. I wanted our perfect night to remain just that.

So I just watched him sleep. He looked younger than his 19 years when he slept. All the hardness that would sometimes creep across his face was gone in his sleep. He even smiled a little, untroubled by nightmares.

I should have told him.

I should have told him.

“Double homicide.” His brother’s voice snapped me back to the present. His voice suddenly collapsed within itself, shaky breaths substituting words, creating a language of grief that could only be understood by the two of us.

In books, I’ve always read that the world stops when a person delivers horrible news. Time stands still. You can feel the air. Everything goes on hold. That’s not the reality, of course. My co-worker shouted a goodbye to me from across her cubicle as she packed up her computer. Phones rang, people laughed. Life went on.

Except it never really did for me again. Not in the same way. That call changed everything. It initiated me into a painful fraternity of those impacted by the trauma of mass incarceration. And 17 years later, the pain lives on and nothing has gone back to the way it was before. What would have happened if I hadn’t stopped to pick up the phone? I was already walking away from my desk, pulling out crackers from my coat pocket to curb the new nausea of my first pregnancy.

I wonder if life would have taken its natural course. Tariq and I had broken up two years earlier, when I was 22. It was sad and heart-wrenching at the time, but not unexpected given how young we were. Our relationship would have been a memory of first love to be cherished and stored away. A tale to tell my Pakistani-American grandkids in my old age when it was long past scandalous.

I was now married to a Pakistani-Canadian man who had swept me off my feet in a matter of months. It was a suitable relationship with a suitable young man who ticked off the boxes of propriety in my Pakistani immigrant community: Muslim, educated, handsome. And, to top it off, we were in love. It was a new relationship filled with promise.

I was pregnant with our first child. She was a little speck of a human being inside me. I’d been consumed with delight since I had seen those two blue lines just two weeks earlier.

Career, marriage, baby.

Done, done, done.

Normal. Mundane. The life I had been planning since I was a little girl.

This phone call was not part of the plan.

The first shrill ring. Let it go to voicemail, I said to myself walking away. I’ll tackle whatever it is when I come back to work tomorrow.

A second ring, slightly more demanding in tone, if that’s possible. I hesitated. What if it’s my husband or my mom? Nonsense, they’d call you on your cell phone. You’ll miss the bus.

Third ring. What if something is wrong? Sigh. I walked back to my desk and picked up the receiver.

As it turned out, something was terribly wrong.

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What ‘Tiger King’ Gets Wrong About Tigers

The Netflix series 'Tiger King' has become popular watching during the COVID-19 outbreak. (LM Otro / AP Photo)

Netflix’s “Tiger King” series may be the most popular documentary ever made. Sixty-four million people have seen it, and Joe Exotic is now a household name. Unfortunately, the show fails to explain what’s actually happening with captive tigers living in the U.S., leaving out vital information while getting lots of other things wrong.

Over the last few months, Longreads worked with reporter Rachel Nuwer on a podcast, “Cat People,” to expose the legal loopholes governing big-cat ownership in this country. We just published a special bonus episode with Nuwer, walking through exactly how “Tiger King” misleads its viewers, and what the show’s massive popularity means for big cats.

Episode 5: What ‘Tiger King’ Gets Wrong About Tigers

The “Cat People” podcast series is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

‘Hand to hand to hand’: How Coronavirus Spread Aboard the Diamond Princess

This picture taken on February 24, 2020 shows crew members aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the Daikoku Pier Cruise Terminal in Yokohama port. - Hundreds of crew members aboard a coronavirus-riddled cruise ship in Japan began disembarking on February 27, the government said. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP) (Photo by KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

At one point Carnival Cruise Line’s Diamond Princess would have a greater number of Coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world outside China. For GQ, Doug Bock Clark reports on how the delayed, woefully inadequate response from Carnival’s management, the Japanese government, as well as the ship’s captain and crew helped the virus to spread.

And Japanese officials eventually acknowledged the quarantine was flawed.

They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess—a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.

For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first half of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with the coronavirus.

For government officials and corporate leaders, the question of whether it was fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passengers but not the crew was obscured by the priority to keep the ship operational. And so the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens of less powerful nations served those from more powerful nations, and the Diamond Princess remained a miniaturized version of the global order—because what other way could things go?

Before bidding goodbye to the ship, Arma had stood alone on the glass-walled bridge. The normally stoic captain was emotional. He had been with the boat since it was built and had guided it safely through every storm, until this one. He felt like he understood what he called her “beautiful soul.”

One last time, he switched on the P.A., in order to speak to the ship itself. It wasn’t her fault, he told her. He promised that they would see each other again, and he wished her a good night, his words echoing in the vacant galleries and cabins. They had done their best, he and his ship—and like all good captains, he was the last person to leave. As he strode off the gangway in his crisp uniform, he was the very image of debonair fortitude. Except his true expression was hidden behind a protective mask.

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Scrap the To Do Lists

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Like many people, Laurie Penny grew up with the concept that success is achieved through hard work. As she writes for Wired, this attitude — combined with the body’s physiological inclination to respond to threats with agitated alertness — has made productiveness the metric of choice for coping with the “clusterfuck of the Corona Crisis.” However, productivity does not provide a solution to this plight. This isn’t happening because you didn’t work hard enough, and it won’t be fixed by optimizing your morning routines and adopting a can-do attitude. In fact, this is a crisis that could overturn the whole social order. So, even though most of us are desperate to feel normal, we should give ourselves a break and stop trying to self-optimize to the background noise of roommates, kids, and our inner critics.

Right through the white-knuckle ride of my twenties and beyond, I clung to work as a way of protecting myself when I was scared, when I was hurt, when the future seemed to collapse on itself like a stack of marked cards. No matter how many marches I go to, there is some part of me that believes that if I can only self-optimize a bit harder then the world will right itself, no one I love will suffer, and death will have no dominion. So when the coronavirus crisis began, I started writing myself ambitious to-do lists on giant sticky notes—because when every cultural certainty starts collapsing in my hands like wet cake, writing ambitious to-do lists is how I calm down.

I would exercise in the mornings and write in the evenings. I would cook. I would sort out my finances. By week three, I would finally finish my book. I would organize my time so I had no time to feel any emotion other than manageable, everyday anxiety about my workload, with occasional breaks for feeling appropriately grateful that I still have a job I can do from home. Unfortunately, somewhere between writing those to-do lists and watching overpromoted incompetents invite their voters to kindly die to keep the economy going in the manner to which it has become accustomed, the entire concept of linear time seemed to disintegrate, which really played havoc with my calendar.

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In Search of Etty Hillesum

WikiCommons / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elizabeth Svoboda| April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,136 words)

It’s the eve of the summer solstice, a time when evening feels like high noon and people buzz with unearned adrenaline. I’ve spent all day on the streets of Amsterdam, but I still need to make one last pilgrimage — to the home of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish diarist and radical altruist whose finest hour came as she approached her death at the hands of the Nazis.

While in Amsterdam years ago, I visited the hiding place of Etty’s young counterpart Anne Frank. Nowadays, you can’t just show up to see the Anne Frank House: You have to reserve your ticket in advance, and the lines snake around the block. Etty’s home, by contrast, is easy to miss, tucked into a row of humble red-brick flats on the first block of Gabriel Metsustraat. There are no lines, no advance reservations, and you can’t go inside, because it’s a private residence. All that distinguishes the building from its neighbors is a plaque by the front door: In this house, Etty Hillesum wrote her diary, 1941–1942.

On the second floor of Etty’s home, a generously paneled bay window opens onto the city. From this window, Etty would have had a sweeping view of the Museumplein, a rolling expanse of green that now hosts an ongoing parade of festivals and sporting events. As Etty’s world narrowed under an onslaught of Nazi decrees, she was able to drink in this view almost to the last, marred though it was by park benches on which no Jews were permitted to sit. Though most of today’s park visitors have gone home, the strains of a global summer anthem float across the open space: 

… All the bad things disappear

And you’re making me feel like maybe I am somebody…

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Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I read books by Pico Iyer and Donald Richie, novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and collected countless online stories about everything from Japanese architecture to history to customs. I wanted to understand more about this island chain that has been inhabited since at least 30,000 BCE. I wanted to know more about this aggressively innovative culture simultaneously committed to tradition, a country that is famously easy to navigate by train but difficult to integrate into as an outsider. I wanted to understand Tokyo, the world’s largest city, whose allure comes partly from its incomprehensibility.

My library was filled with anthologies on my other passions California, the American South, jazz. But while I had stellar fiction anthologies on Japan, like The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction and Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll, the nonfiction book I wanted didn’t exist.  I couldn’t find a single, English-language anthology collecting longform nonfiction about Japan. So I made it.

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Where ‘Strangers Whisper Secrets in Your Ear’

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At the New York Review of Books, Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (While the museum is closed, you can check out the exhibit online.) What makes this review fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.

By showing amateur home movies in one of the most famous museums in the world, “Private Lives Public Spaces” asks us to see not just the aesthetic richness of daily life, but also to see it as a parade of minor performances: vacation as a performance of leisure, a garden party as a performance of sociability, parenting as a performance of love. Is there anyone who doesn’t sometimes imagine an audience for even the most unremarkable moments of her life?

The exhibit spans two floors, and while the upper level contains work by professional artists working with 8 mm film—Andy Warhol, Peggy Ahwesh, Cindy Sherman—the lower floor has a stronger gravitational pull, bringing me back to the home movies. Placards that usually bear the names of famous artists display suburban-sounding surnames instead: Levitt family. Thompson family. Hubley family. Descending to this level feels like dropping into the subconscious—a place not of art, exactly, but the deep place art comes from. Each film channels the gaze of an amateur—which is to say, a gaze tuned like a radio channel to the affective nuances of daily living: amusement, awkwardness, delight, and the extravagant devotion of love. Love gets accused of blinding us, or dulling our gaze, but it can summon our vision most urgently.

These are the moments that affect me most in these movies, these flashes of secret interior life suddenly surfacing: a boy’s hopeless giggling; a woman’s undisguised pleasure at her bag of potato chips on the train; the awkward silence of a boy at the end of the bar mitzvah banquet table, his forced smile; a woman doing a stately waltz, in a baroque ballroom, turning suddenly to flash a sly, flirtatious look at the camera. This secret life dwells in each of us, mysterious, wild, intimate, and these moments of rupture expose what so much art is chasing after: glimpses of the subterranean desires and pleasures and sorrows that are constantly lurking behind our composed surfaces, veiled by the costumes of our facial expressions and our social media accounts, our etiquette and our armor. The crippling fear of exposure lives uneasily alongside its opposite—a primal longing to be seen.

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