The Longreads Blog

‘Apostrophes’: Nikole Hannah-Jones on Race, Education and Inequality, at Longreads Story Night

The video above is an incredibly moving piece by The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, filmed at our Longreads Story Night in New York City. Our thanks to Hannah-Jones, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, and all of our special guests for an amazing night. We’ll share more clips from Story Night soon, and you can see all of our videos on our YouTube page or Facebook.

Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Hollywood, 1923. Photo: Library of Congress

Judith Freeman | Pantheon Books | December 2007 | 38 minutes (9603 words)

Judith Freeman traces Raymond Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and his introduction to Cissy Pascal, the much older, very beautiful woman who would later become his wife.  This chapter is excerpted from Freeman’s 2007 book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which Janet Fitch described as “part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part séance.” Freeman’s next book—a memoir called The Latter Days—will be published by Pantheon in June 2016.

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Exorcism and the Catholic Church

Although there are several types of exorcism, the one most commonly imagined in popular culture is the solemn or “major” exorcism, a ritual to rid a possessed person of the demon or demons that inhabit their body—not merely a prayer for spiritual healing. Solemn exorcisms can be performed only by Catholic priests, and only then with the express permission of a bishop. Exorcism is not one of the seven Catholic sacraments, but the ritual is sacramental, meaning that the rite’s success is not dependent on the formulaic approach common to Catholic sacraments, but rather the exorcist’s faith and the authorization of a bishop.

In light of the Vatican’s concerns over heightened demonic activity around the world and the apparently urgent need for more exorcist-priests, training courses have been offered to equip the next generation of exorcists with the spiritual knowledge they need to expel demons from their non-consensual hosts. More than 170 priests and laypersons alike gathered in Rome for the most recent course, which was held at the Sacerdos Institute, an organization of priests affiliated with the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, an educational institute of the Catholic Church. The course, which costs around $330, covers numerous topics, including the theological, liturgical, and canonical aspects of exorcism, as well as its anthropological history, its potential place within the criminal justice system, plus medical and neurological issues surrounding demonic possession.

—Dan Shewan, writing for Pacific Standard about the business of exorcism. The casting out of demons has also become a lucrative cottage industry outside of the Catholic Church, with dozens of self-styled exorcists plying their trade across America, as detailed in Shewan’s piece.

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Musical Genius Is a Gendered Idea

But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that… good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, so American and vital and wise in their manly scratchiness, like unshaved bristle and whiskey and dirt. Man voice make music good. Woman voice music bad: Too high. Too sharp. Too warbly. Sounds like birds, screams, mother. It speaks volumes that men always seem to love PJ Harvey, she of the deep timbre.

Male reviewers also compare [Joanna Newsom] to other female artists to demean her further. The AV Club called her a “unique hybrid of Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone,” while on Pitchfork, Richardson equated her to Joni Mitchell: “Newsom can sound a fair bit like her with her more richly textured voice” (not really, but ok). He continued: “One significant difference between Newsom and Mitchell is that the latter, especially early in her career, was writing songs that would sound good on the radio. For better or worse, Newsom is not a pop singer—that’s just not what she does.” I suspect in Richardson’s view this is mostly for worse (“I don’t want to overstate this record’s accessibility,” he wrote of “Have One on Me.” But how can music be inaccessible? All you have to do is listen.) The Kate Bush and Bjork comparisons are endless, and one can safely infer that these reviewers enjoy her predecessors more. Most puzzlingly, a recent Fader piece compared Newsom and Joan Didion: “‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ Joan Didion, a smart Californian just like Newsom, once wrote.” Two white people with female anatomy from California, so they’re basically the same. The woman who produces peerless modern music is simply not allowed to stand on her own.

In The Awl, Leah Finnegan uses the originality and artistry of harpist Joanna Newsom to call attention to the gender biases and skewed, often low expectations that underlie many male critics’ perception and assessment of music.

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The Early Days of Midnight Movies

Prior to the ’70s, midnight shows were the realm of the occasional horror release and exploitation distributors who used the slot to attract night owls to seedy fare. But the midnight movie as we know it — as a Friday- and Saturday-night staple featuring cult films — came into its own as the ’60s turned into the ’70s.

The ‘60s saw a flurry of activity in underground film as Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and others made movies way outside the Hollywood system, films that took avant-garde forms and featured content too extreme for the mainstream. That didn’t mean there wasn’t an audience for them, though. Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls played New York for months, for instance, and in the latter part of that year, Mike Getz of Los Angeles’ Cinema Theatre — after having success in Los Angeles playing experimental films at midnight — hit upon the notion of sending a package of films on the road under the name “Psychedelic Film Trips #1.” They played at midnight across the country in theaters owned by Getz’s uncle Louis Sher, and they did well, making Getz something like the Johnny Appleseed of the midnight movie.

Keith Phipps, writing for The Verge about the rise of midnight movies as cultural institution, and the tradition’s uncertain future. For further reading from an unlikely source, the Wikipedia entry for “Midnight movie” is surprisingly great.

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The Life of a Teen Beauty Pageant Host

Has Zak Slemmer found his calling? He’s not sure. He loves Korea and politics, teaching and comedy—but he’s really, really good at hosting Miss Teen pageant contests. Laura Shin shadowed Slemmer for Narratively.

It’s the rehearsal for the New York City Miss Teen pageant. Though he is giving the same spiel for almost the 20th time, he makes it fresh, and people are not only paying attention but laughing. When [Jen] Klem, the pageant director, who participated in and won teen pageants herself, demonstrates the spins that the girls will do on the Xs marked onstage, Slemmer asks the audience, “Did she do this?”—and here, he walks bent over at the waist, head down like he’s hunting treasure, until he reaches the X, at which point he stomps his feet on it. Then he shows how he would do the spins instead—and does them while keeping his head aloft, eyes forward and tossing his head this way and that, as if it were a delicate, fluttery scarf.

Behind me a woman laughs, and a girl says, “He’s very funny.”

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‘The Good Is Elusive and Transitory in This World’

Photo: Courtesy Maira Kalman

Jessica Gross | Longreads | November 2015 | 19 minutes (4,880 words)

 

Few things remind me of how much beauty there is in the world as clearly and reliably as Maira Kalman’s work. An author, artist and designer, Kalman has written and illustrated dozens of books for children and adults, including The Principles of Uncertainty and And the Pursuit of Happiness, both originally columns for The New York Times; done sketchbooks and covers for The New Yorker; curated museum exhibits; illustrated Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Michael Pollan’s Food Rules—I could go on indefinitely. What unites her work is not only her aesthetic style—vibrant paintings, overlaid with whimsical lettering, usually involving a large dose of quirk and whimsy—but her determined discovery of what it means to be alive. Kalman’s work often begins with the reportorial, and she has a keen eye for minute, but transporting, details. In transferring what she sees to the page, she affords the reader entrée into her sense of wonder and studied optimism—and into the deepest existential questions there are.

I would have grabbed at almost any excuse to interview Kalman, but it just so happened that she was about to publish a book on one of my favorite subjects: dogs. When her husband, the graphic designer Tibor Kalman, passed away at 49, Kalman—who until then had been terrified of dogs—got an Irish Wheaton named Pete. It was an abrupt about-face, and nominally for the children; to her surprise, Kalman fell in love. In Beloved Dog, she presents a compilation of her pieces featuring dogs: a whole lot of them, it turns out. Read more…

If You Want to Be Productive, You Have to Rest

In a recent thought-provoking review of research on the default mode network, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California and her co-authors argue that when we are resting the brain is anything but idle and that, far from being purposeless or unproductive, downtime is in fact essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics—processes that depend on the DMN. Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future. We craft fictional dialogue to practice standing up to someone who intimidates us or to reap the satisfaction of an imaginary harangue against someone who wronged us. We shuffle through all those neglected mental post-it notes listing half-finished projects and we mull over the aspects of our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions. We sink into scenes from childhood and catapult ourselves into different hypothetical futures. And we subject ourselves to a kind of moral performance review, questioning how we have treated others lately. These moments of introspection are also one way we form a sense of self, which is essentially a story we continually tell ourselves. When it has a moment to itself, the mind dips its quill into our memories, sensory experiences, disappointments and desires so that it may continue writing this ongoing first-person narrative of life.

Ferris Jabr writing in Scientific American about science’s understanding of the role idleness, naps and rest play in maintaining a creative, productive mind. The article appeared in October 2013.

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‘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.

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