The Longreads Blog

The Music Teacher That Changed Your Life

If you ever learned an instrument as a child, you remember the lessons, the teachers, the feelings of failure and frustration from not positioning your fingers correctly or bombing a recital, and hopefully you remember the ecstasy of playing powerful music. In the Spring 2014 Issue of The Gettysburg Review, Aviya Kushner writes about the impact Chopin had on her life, starting as a young girl, and carrying her into her adulthood trying to make art for a living.

I remember only two rules from my childhood—brush your teeth and practice the piano. I played scales, Hanon exercises, little pieces, and eventually, preludes and études. Sometimes it sounded so bad I couldn’t stand to listen. I rarely played a piece perfectly, but I somehow played through many of the classics of music. I plodded through Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, and the easier impromptus of Schumann. I struggled and slowly made it through the rhapsodies of Liszt.

And then, when I was a high-school student, Mrs. Berkwic introduced me to a composer I could finally play. For a while, I thought I was in love with Chopin. I related to his tempers, his swing of mood, the way a mazurka would leap from slow and stately to racing and furious. It was the way I felt then, crying one minute and laughing the other.

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How Harper Lee Helped Bring Back ‘Bloom County’

Berkeley Breathed is responsible for one of the more delightful things to happen to my Facebook feed in some time: The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, who created “Bloom County” and characters like Opus the penguin, has revived his beloved comic strip after a 25-year hiatus, posting new installments on his Facebook page.

In a new interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air”, Breathed says he has author Harper Lee to thank for the decision. He was stunned when Lee’s supposed second novel was published earlier this year as Go Set a Watchman:

BERKELEY BREATHED: I watched slack-jawed in horror as they threw one of the 20th century’s most iconic fictional heroes, Atticus Finch, under the bus. At the time — and this was a couple of months ago — it made me think that there would have been no “Bloom County” without “Mockingbird” because I was 12 I read it, and the book’s fictional Southern small town of Maycomb had settled deep into my graphic imagination and informed it forever. If you look at any of my art for the past 30 years, there’s always a small-town flavor to it.

So this summer, just a couple months ago when “Go Set A Watchman” was causing an uproar, I went back to my files and I pulled an old fan letter from years ago. It says (reading), “Dear Mr. Breathed, this is a plea from a dotty old lady and from others not dotty at all. Please don’t shut down Opus. Can’t you at least give him a reprieve? Opus is simply the best comic strip there is and depriving him of life is murder – a hard word to describe an obliteration of your creation. But Opus is real. He lives. -Harper Lee, Monroeville, Ala.”

And now Opus lives again.

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I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo

One of Odysseus' men transforming into a pig. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Essig | Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig | Basic Books | May 2015 | 20 minutes (5,293 words)

Below is an excerpt from Lesser Beasts, by Mark Essig, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

Built in about 2550 bc, the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet tall and comprises some 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 13 billion pounds in aggregate. Archaeologists still argue over whether those stones were moved into place using levers, sledges, or oil-slicked ramps. Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids involved a feat of social engineering just as impressive as the mechanical: Egyptian authorities had to feed a workforce of thousands of people for decades at a time. Read more…

Into the Woods…With Mom’s Cookies: Kathryn Schulz on the Problem with Thoreau

Only by elastic measures can “Walden” be regarded as nonfiction. Read charitably, it is a kind of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau. Read less charitably, it is akin to those recent best-selling memoirs whose authors turn out to have fabricated large portions of their stories. It is widely acknowledged that, to craft a tidier narrative, Thoreau condensed his twenty-six months at the cabin into a single calendar year. But that is the least of the liberties he takes with the facts, and the most forgivable of his manipulations of our experience as readers. The book is subtitled “Life in the Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude.

In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal. He made that walk several times a week, lured by his mother’s cookies or the chance to dine with friends. These facts he glosses over in “Walden,” despite detailing with otherwise skinflint precision his eating habits and expenditures. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother and sisters (who brought along more undocumented food) and downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time. This is the situation Thoreau summed up by saying, “For the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. . . . At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man.”

-At The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz examines our long-standing high regard for philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, his reflections on two years in which he supposedly lived sparsely and purely in a rustic cabin—a “memoir” which turns out to contain assorted fabrications, and reveals the author to be kind of a jerk.

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The Secret Life of Cheese

Photo by Kenneth Lu.

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

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

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

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The Art World: Like Time Travel for Women

It’s strange, in the years of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer changing comedy, and Tina Fey making room in TV, and Hillary Clinton making her cicada-like, quadrennial return, to pan the camera across the rigid men’s club of the arts. From the Chelsea galleries to the spring and fall auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which offer the gender composition of a pro football team) to the museums where schoolchildren walk hesitantly on field trips to see the visual products the culture has treasured. Where every other aspect of American life has changed, the Art World offers this wonderful scientific breakthrough of time travel.

Pat Lipsky, writing in The Awl about the difficulty of being a woman in the art world. Lipsky’s essay, which draws on her personal experiences as an artist coming of age in the ’60s, is beautiful, vivid, and deeply depressing.

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The Secretive Life of a Michelin Inspector

Sam Kashner delves into the mysterious world of Michelin stars in the new issue of Vanity Fair, talking to top chefs about what it takes to gain—and keep—the restaurant world’s highest honor. Although restaurant critics are often recognized, Michelin inspectors remain virtually unknown. Kashner spoke on the phone with one inspector (even he wasn’t allowed to know her name), who described her life on the road, eating at least 200 restaurant meals a year.

When you start as a Michelin inspector, your first weeks of training are abroad, she says. “You go to the mother ship in France. Depending on your language skills, maybe you go to another European country and train with an inspector there.” There’s no prescribed path to becoming a food inspector, “though inspectors are all lifers in one way or another,” she explained, and they usually come from families devoted to food and the table. “One inspector was a chef at a very well-known, three-star restaurant, another came from a hotel…. I think you’re either built for this or you’re not,” she added. “You have to really be an independent personality. You have to be somewhat solitary but also work as part of a team. You have to be comfortable dining alone. Most of the time, I think, inspectors all live in a perpetual state of paranoia. That’s the job: the C.I.A. but with better food.”

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Further Reading:

“Lunch With M” (The New Yorker, ’09)

John Colapinto joins an undercover Michelin inspector (code name: Maxime) for lunch at New York’s Jean Georges restaurant.

The Fears of Our Nation: President Obama Interviews Marilynne Robinson

The President: How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?

Robinson: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know.

But Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge.

The President: Well, that’s one of the things I love about your characters in your novels, it’s not as if it’s easy for them to be good Christians, right?

Robinson: Right.

At The New York Review of Books, President Obama interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, a conversation he requested to have after becoming a fan of her novels. As a companion to this interview, read her recent essay, “Fear,” a rumination on American history, religious history, guns, violence, war, and her deeply held Christian beliefs.

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When Coltrane Explored New Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

In the Seattle Weekly, Steve Griggs writes about John Coltrane’s first and only performances in Seattle, at the 225-seat Penthouse club, in 1965. Griggs provides a snapshot of the saxophonist’s life following his groundbreaking album A Love Supreme, during a period of artistic transition. Coltrane was usually in transition. He was expanding his sound again in Seattle.

Seattle disk jockey Jim Wilke sat near the stage that night, set to broadcast the first 30 minutes on KING-AM. His introduction of the show, broadcast from the club, went out over the airwaves like a countdown to liftoff. Meanwhile, Coltrane had hired [drummer Jan “Kurtis”] Skugstad, who had a studio with portable equipment, to record the evening’s performance. With all the club, radio, and studio gear, there were more microphone stands onstage than musicians. Coltrane briefly borrowed Wilke’s headphones to check the broadcast sound. Handing them back, he informed the DJ that the song was going to last longer than the half-hour broadcast. Meanwhile, Skugstad kept feeding fresh reels into his recorder, capturing every detail of the performance.

The first set on Thursday clocked in just shy of two hours, with the first number lasting an hour and a half.

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In Search of a Separate Peace: Five Stories About Communes

What is the purpose, the lure, of communal living? Why have the residents of different communes in United States chosen isolation over convenience? In these five stories, you’ll meet men and women—many, members in the LGBTQIA+ community—who have chosen, with mixed results, to dedicate themselves to their chosen families.

1. “They Built It. No One Came.” (Penelope Green, New York Times, May 2015)

They changed their names and called themselves the Harmonists, rescuing and repurposing Colonial-era dwellings in Pennsylvania. Their numbers never swelled more than two. Can Zephram and Johannes make peace with their failed enterprise? Read more…