The Longreads Blog

Improbable Seductions: The Unsparing Eye of Mary McCarthy

For those interested in origin stories, posthumous literary gossip, and New York City in the 1930s, look no further than Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs (1992) – a candid and lively account of McCarthy’s early writing career and the intellectual and political scenes that fueled it. McCarthy’s observations are sharp and often quite searing; she spares no one, not even herself.

We had fun in the New York Public Library reading-room, doing our research in back issues of magazines and newspapers and using lined cards to copy out quotations, some of them unbelievable. Peggy Marshall came from a Mormon family in Utah or Montana; she was about ten years older than I, around thirty-three, and was divorced from her husband; they had one little girl, whose custody they shared. Peggy, I soon discovered, did not have much energy; she was having an affair with a labor writer named Ben Stolberg, and both of them would lie on a sofa or daybed in her living-room, too tired to do anything, apparently too tired to go to bed and make love. Nor can I remember her ever cooking a meal.

Neither was very attractive; she was blond, grayish-eyed, and dumpy, with a sharp turned-up nose, and Stolberg was blond, blue-eyed, and fat and talked, snorting, through his nose, with a German accent. I don’t know what view Stolberg took of himself, but Peggy, to my horror, saw herself as seductive. Once, when we were talking of Ben and whether he wanted to marry her, I saw her look in the mirror with a little smile and toss of her head; “Of course I know I’m kinda pretty,” she said.

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Trouble Between the Buns at Whataburger

Photo by Rick, Flickr

There’s nothing simple about selling simple burgers for a living. The decades-long relationship between Whataburger’s parent company and the Andrews family’s successful Whataburger franchises soured recently, when the Andrews’ company filed a lawsuit, claiming Whataburger violated an agreement. In Texas Monthly, Loren Steffy writes about the bad blood and changing corporate culture at Texas’ second-largest homegrown restaurant chain.

When most Whataburger customers walk into the restaurant, they have no idea if the place they are eating at is a franchise or a corporate-owned branch. And as long as they can still get their Green Chile Double Whataburgers or Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits, they probably don’t care. But the rift between the Andrews family and the burger chain they helped build represents a struggle between the past and the present, and between two families who have known each other for a long time. “It’s a little like a public divorce—neither side walks away looking good,” says Michelle Hartmann, a Dallas attorney who specializes in private-company litigation. “It hurts the brand ultimately.”

This is a terrible time to risk messing with the Whataburger brand. The Texas burger landscape is more competitive than ever, thanks to an influx of regional mini-chains such as Austin’s P. Terry’s, the Metroplex’s Twisted Root Burger Co., and Houston’s Becks Prime and smaller national chains such as Smashburger, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Whataburger is bigger than all of those, and that may be the point. It isn’t a small business anymore, and to keep ahead of the competition, it may have to start acting its size. Its competition is McDonald’s and Wendy’s, not a boutique operation with three locations that offers grass-fed-bison burgers topped with arugula on a gluten-free bun.

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Franklin, Reconsidered: An Essay by Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore | Introduction to The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin | Everyman’s Library | September 2015 | 18 minutes (4,968 words)

 

Below is Jill Lepore’s introductory essay to the new Everyman’s Library edition of The Autobiography and Other Writings, by Benjamin Franklin, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky Read more…

Revisiting the Vibrancy of Deaf Culture: A Reading List

Updated 7/17/18: Over the weekend, an astute reader noticed a reading list I wrote in 2015, “Deaf Culture and Sign Language,” which purported to celebrate Deaf culture, didn’t feature any pieces written by d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing authors. I apologized. I should have elevated the stories of Deaf people directly, rather than those speaking on their behalf. My editors and I decided the best course of action was to update this list to make it more representative and inclusive, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to rectify my mistake. Many thanks especially to Sara Nović for her advocacy and reading recommendations and to Katie L. Booth for her idea-bouncing and guidance.

1. “At Home in Deaf Culture: Storytelling in an Un-Writeable Language.”  (Sara Nović, Lit Hub, June 2016)

Sara Nović writes about living at the intersections of three languages and how different facets of her personality manifest in each one:

What does it mean to be a writer whose language negates the possibility of the written word? On one hand, perhaps this is part of its pull—I exist in the present in ASL because the anxieties of my work are bound up in another language. On the other, writing, books, the things I have loved most since I was small, are at odds with my body. On days like today, when writing is difficult, this feels like a loss. The one language in which I am fully comfortable I cannot write, not exactly. But without it I would certainly be a lesser storyteller.

2. “How the Deaf and Queer Communities are Tackling Oppression Together.” (Alex Lu, The Establishment, June 2016)

Alex Lu, a Deaf-queer academic, presents a compelling argument for the increasing interdependence of the queer and Deaf communities. I especially appreciated Lu’s analysis of the impossibility of (white, straight, cis) interpreters’ objectivity. Read more…

The Evangelical Fervor for Amish Romance

Photo: Marcy Leigh

There is an inherent paradox in the popularity of Amish-centric novels, or “bonnet books.” “Plain” communities, like the Amish, disparage modern capitalism and the trappings of wealth. But the authors of Amish & Mennonite romance novels aren’t apprehensive, apparently–they have millions of readers, and therefore, a great deal of money. Their admiration for the Amish lifestyle, then, goes only so far, and is superficial at that. In “More Titillated Than Thou,”  Ann Neumann draws on her childhood memories of Lancaster, the findings of inspirational-lit critics, and her knowledge of evangelical purity culture.

While some books may chronicle a young heroine’s agonizing decision to leave the Amish community (or join it), the choice is always an intensely personal one—a matter of knowing God’s purpose for her, not of mulling over the long-standing theological premises the community is based on, like nonresistance, pacifism, and conscientious objection. In actual Amish country, these demanding faith commitments count for far more than this or that individual believer’s spiritual journey. Many Amish and Anabaptist believers have paid for these theological premises with their lives—as children in these communities learn in their typically thorough religious instruction in Amish or Mennonite tradition. Even the everyday burdens of Amish life, such as birthing and feeding an average of seven children, are either unaddressed in Amish fiction or transformed glibly into blessings.

Many readers have told ethnographers or commented on blogs that they are drawn to Amish fiction because the books are “clean,” lacking even the most subtle forms of titillation, another accommodation to evangelical culture. Obviously, the nation’s 90 million evangelicals are having sex, but their community’s preference is to pretend that they don’t—and certainly not outside the bonds of heterosexual marriage. The preferred way to quarantine women’s bodies from illicit ideas and physical contact is not to address male-female power dynamics, provide sex education, or even bolster women’s agency, but to “protect” women, hide them away, and shame their sexuality. The world depicted in Amish fiction is a projection of these strictures. It is the ultimate purity culture.

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The Fierce and Misty Flood: Barbara Comyns on the Quiet Seduction

Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) follows the doomed marriage of two young, bohemian artists during England’s Great Depression. The excerpt below is a simple, gentle seduction; I love the way in which the protagonist, Sophia, swiftly and casually dismisses her husband and her own sense of identity. The scene strikes me as quietly wild. Its predictability is charming; its comedy, unassuming and disarming:

When we had finished eating and drinking, I played the portable gramophone. He had a lot of foreign records – chiefly Spanish. I hadn’t heard any before and played them every time I came. After a while I became bored with turning the handle, which fitted badly and kept flying out, so we just talked. I sat on the floor, very near the fire, and he sat in a low chair behind me, and I leant my back against him. It was so comfortable, I couldn’t bear the idea of going home and making the flat smell of polish. Then we became silent, and Peregrine came and sat on the floor beside me. Then he began to kiss me; at first I was shy and scared, although I realised now I’d been wanting him to do this for quite a long time. I forgot about being shy and kissed him back. Then I knew I had never loved Charles. I felt I was being carried away in a great, fierce, misty flood.

Some time later, when I realised I had been unfaithful, I didn’t feel guilty or sad; I just felt awfully happy I had had this experience, which if I had remained a “good wife” I would have missed, although, of course, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. I felt quite bewildered. I had had one and a half children, but had been a kind of virgin all the time. I wondered if there were other women like this, but I knew so few women intimately it was difficult to tell.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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‘We Stayed Children’: Akwaeke Emezi on Growing Up in Chaos in Aba, Nigeria

Photo via Flickr

I spent my entire childhood in Aba, a commercial town in the south of Nigeria, where both my siblings were born. When I came back to the country after leaving for college, I knew from my first circling of the Lagos crowd that the location of my childhood would be ammunition against people who thought I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t Nigerian enough. No one could argue with Aba. It was my best card, even better than being born in Umuahia, where my father and grandfather were born. It made me authentic in a way that was absolute; you couldn’t question if someone who grew up in Aba was a ‘real’ Nigerian. No one could say anything. Aba didn’t match the background they assumed for me: that I must have grown up outside Nigeria, because I smelled too foreign, right down to my blood. The truth felt like a story. I wanted to tell them we never had running water, that the cockroach eggs gelled into the egg grooves of the fridge door, that the concrete over the soakaway broke open and stayed open. The smell became part of our air and when one of the little chicks fell into the hole, my sister called me wicked for not helping it out. I said none of this, though. I just smiled at their shock and listened to the jokes about how Aba people can make and sell a fake version of anything, even a glass of water.

What I did tell people was how impressive it was that my parents kept their children as sheltered as they did in all the chaos of Aba during the 90’s and early 2000’s, with the way the town felt and tasted lawless. We got piles of books to read, bought secondhand from the Post Office on Ikot-Ekpene Road or sent from our cousins in London or pulled from my parents’ separate collections, and that’s how my sister and I ended up believing in fairies in the midst of riots. We had cats spilling over our carpets, a dog with raw bleeding ears, and several Barbie dolls sent from Saudi Arabia, where my mother moved to in ’96. I didn’t know I’d never live with her again. When our turkeys got fowlpox, we caught them and pinned them under our feet and learnt that you could treat the pox with palm oil. When the dogs got maggots, we learnt that applying careful pressure to the sore made them fall white and wriggling to the sand. We learnt not to handle bitterleaf and then touch your mouth, or peel yam and then touch your eyes, because the first ruins your tongue and the itch of the second can blind you. We mimicked the priests during Mass at CKC, driving home afterwards past the bodies dumped outside the teaching hospital. We stayed children.

– From an essay by Akwaeke Emezi about growing up in the Nigerian town of Aba, chosen and edited by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, for a special literary supplement to the African lifestyle blog, Olisa. (h/t Mary Karr)

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Thelonious Monk on the Moment He Became Aware of the Police

During the 1960s and 70s, legendary jazz drummer Art Taylor interviewed his fellow musicians. The interviews are collected in the 1993 book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and it’s one of jazz’s greatest. The familial, casual conversations are also serious and insightful, full of history, portraiture, and revelations about race relations in America, and the lives of black musicians in a music industry run by white people. From Philly Joe Jones to Kenny Clark, Taylor knew his subjects because he played with them, so he asked probing questions. Here’s an excerpt of his 1969 talk with pianist-composer Thelonious Monk:

Monk: I don’t know. I was aware of all this when I was a little baby, five, six or seven years old; I was aware of how the cops used to act. It looked like the order of the day was for the cops to go out and call the kids black bastards. Anything you did, if you ran or something, he called you black bastards.

Taylor: That was their favorite lick.

Monk: Yeah, I remember that; it was the first thing that came out of the mouth.

Taylor: I consider myself lucky to have survived.

Monk: Sure you’re lucky to have survived, you’re lucky to survive every second. You’re facing death at all times. You don’t know where it’s going to come from.

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What Separated Los Angeles from Its River?

In the early twentieth century, a booming Los Angeles was separated from the river in three decisive steps. First, an aqueduct was built more than 200 miles north to  water to the city from the Sierra Nevada—a move mythologized in the movie Chinatown. Then, the city took control of all water rights on the river. Finally, the river was encased in concrete after rampaging floods in the 1930s; it became a drainage ditch, shunting water as quickly and efficiently as possible to the ocean.

Jon Christensen, writing about artist Lauren Bon for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Bon plans to “bend the river back into the city” with La Noria, a large-scale project involving an enormous water wheel powered by the river.

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