The Longreads Blog

‘Perhaps Lucia Berlin Will Begin to Gain the Attention She Deserves’

Lucia Berlin, 1962. Photo by Buddy Berlin, © Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin

Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress site has excerpted the first story from A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, the newly released collection of short fiction by the late Lucia Berlin–who died in 2004, and was largely overlooked while she was alive. In the book’s foreword, author Lydia Davis writes, “Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.”

Angel’s Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fourth Street. Shabby shops and junkyards, secondhand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene. Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angel’s. Teenage Chicana brides go to Angel’s. Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday. Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets. I like to wait and see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers. Tina, Corky, Junior.

Traveling people go to Angel’s. Dirty mattresses, rusty high chairs tied to the roofs of dented old Buicks. Leaky oil pans, leaky canvas water bags. Leaky washing machines. The men sit in the cars, shirtless, crush Hamm’s cans when they’re empty.

But it’s Indians who go to Angel’s mostly. Pueblo Indians from San Felipe and Laguna and Sandia. Tony was the only Apache I ever met, at the laundry or anywhere else. I like to sort of cross my eyes and watch the dryers full of Indian clothes blurring the brilliant swirling purples and oranges and reds and pinks.

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Coming Sept. 24: A Special Longreads Live Storytelling Night in New York City

Save the date! On Sept. 24, Longreads is presenting a night of live storytelling with the theme of “Change: stories about change and the stories that have changed us.” Our storytellers include:

Nikole Hannah-Jones (New York Times Magazine)

Burt Helm (Inc.)

Jessica Gross (journalist and Longreads contributor)

Rembert Browne (Grantland)

Jessica Pressler (New York magazine)

John Herrman (The Awl)

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Thursday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
The Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St
New York, NY 10012

This is a free event. See our Facebook event RSVP page.

The Lost Summer

Elissa Strauss | Longreads | August 2015 | 15 minutes (3,841 words)

 

Below is the story of a single mother and her daughter. Names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect their identities.

 

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OLYMPIA

By the time Olympia picked up her 6-year-old daughter Raina from the babysitter she was tired. She works a 10-hour day satisfying the various needs of two young siblings in Brooklyn’s affluent neighborhood of Cobble Hill, shepherding them to and from various classes, camps and playdates, making sure they get food when hungry, rest when tired and are properly stimulated when bored. Read more…

Hollywood Gets Authenticity and the Pentagon Gets Publicity

Jamie Tarabay explored Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon in a recent piece for Al Jazeera America. The Pentagon has a devoted “entertainment-liaison officer” who acts as a Hollywood point person and helps decide which projects get Pentagon support (in the form of expertise, equipment, and locations). According to scholar Lawrence Suid, the Hollywood military relationship relationship dates back to 1910 and was “cemented” with the 1927 film Wings. Suid characterizes the relationship as one of “mutual exploitation”:

Suid coined the phrase “mutual exploitation” when he first stumbled onto the U.S. military-Hollywood connection. “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why,” he recalled. “And when I was getting my film degrees it suddenly occurred to me that people in the U.S. had never seen the U.S. lose a war, and when [President] Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”

Each side, Suid said, benefits from this arrangement. The U.S. military gets incredible publicity and recruitment advantages, and the film industry gets equipment, locations and authenticity.

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The Controversy Surrounding Science Fiction’s Most Prestigious Award

At Wired, Amy Wallace reports on the controversy at the Hugo Awards, which has been plagued by accusations by a faction of mostly white male authors who call themselves “Puppies” and argue that storytelling has taken a backseat to identity politics:

Though voted upon by fans, this year’s Hugo Awards were no mere popularity contest. After the Puppies released their slates in February, recommending finalists in 15 of the Hugos’ 16 categories (plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), the balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?

With so much at stake, more people than ever forked over membership dues (at least $40) in time to be allowed to vote for the 2015 Hugos. Before voting closed on June 31, 5,950 people cast ballots (a whopping 65 percent more than had ever voted before).

But were the new voters Puppies? Or were they, in the words of George RR Martin—the author of the bestselling epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted into Game of Thrones—“gathering to defend the integrity of the Hugos”? On his blog, Martin predicted: “This will be the most dramatic Hugo night in Worldcon history.” He wasn’t wrong.

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Yogurt for the Soul: Grace Talusan on Cultured Milk as Her Personal Salve

Over at The Butter, Grace Talusan has published this moving essay about becoming obsessed with making yogurt from scratch–while on a Fulbright Scholarship in her native Manila–as a way to distract herself from feeling helpless in the face of poor children she came upon who were living in horrible conditions, plus her own infertility and other personal woes:

With writing, I often make the mistake of confusing my work with my self-worth. I fear coming across as stupid or cliché. I berate myself for wasting precious time by not working enough, or by working too much on a piece that goes nowhere. And if the piece does get finished and shared somehow, so what? I remember handing my immigrant father a book that contained one of the first essays I published. He asked how much I had been paid. “Fifty dollars. And this contributor’s copy. It’s an honor to be published. Hundreds of other writers were rejected,” I started to say, but then I trailed off, demoralized and ashamed. I was sure that my father, who worked seven days a week, would not understand how a person could work on creating something for dozens of hours over several months for such meager rewards. He probably thought I was foolish for working myself ragged at several part-time jobs in order to support my writing time. And what did I have to show for all this effort?

However, I am not at all discouraged from failing at making yogurt. The failure doesn’t stop me from trying. I contemplate what went wrong and feel excited to try again. I know that each failure will teach me how to succeed…

…It isn’t until my niece asks me why I am always talking about yogurt that I realize how important it has become to me. An obsession, but also a distraction. A way to avoid talking about what happened to me one morning before brunch in an historical home in Malate. The taxi dropped me off on the corner beside a blue wheelbarrow, which was full of garbage and covered with a piece of cardboard. As the taxi drove away, I noticed empty the street was on a Sunday morning and then I turned my head to the wheelbarrow and spotted the bare legs of child sticking out from under the cardboard. My knees loosened and I grasped my friend’s arm because I was going down. Even though I hadn’t smelled decomposition, I was sure that child was rotting in the heat. But no, it was not as bad as all that. The child’s mother was asleep just behind the wheelbarrow, on her own piece of cardboard, with two other small children and a baby beside her. I felt ashamed of every complaint I had uttered in the country, and every privilege I possessed and would continue to enjoy. How could children be dead asleep on a sidewalk at high noon? What had they done the night before?

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Cloak-and-Dagger in America’s Cornfields

In Li’s luggage, [FBI] agents found two large Pop Weaver microwave popcorn boxes. Buried under the bags of unpopped snack kernels were roughly 300 tiny manila envelopes, all cryptically numbered—2155, 2403, 20362. Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye’s luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually wrapped in napkins from a Subway restaurant. Customs officers were dispatched to the gate area for the Beijing flight, where they found the two men and conducted body searches. Still more corn seeds, also folded into napkins, were discovered in Ye’s pockets.

Ted Genoways writing in The New Republic about China’s efforts to steal American food technology in order to increase its domestic corn production and reduce reliance on American imports. The story of agricultural espionage is a high stakes cat and mouse game reminiscent of Englishman Robert Fortune’s theft of tea seeds from China in the 1800s.

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Helen Gurley Brown’s Nemeses (and Collected Papers)

There is a fantastic piece on legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and her legacy (or more specifically, who owns Brown’s legacy) in today’s New York Times. Katherine Rosman unpacks the financial and cultural battle over Brown’s estate with nuanced, careful reporting, but she also doesn’t sacrifice any of the heightened details you’d expect from a Helen Gurley Brown story. Descriptions of the desk in Brown’s apartment and a Hearst retreat are particularly fun, but nothing holds a candle to the backstory on why Brown’s archive ended up at Smith College:

The archive was more Mr. Brown’s idea than his wife’s, Ms. Burton said. “Two of Helen’s nemeses went to Smith and David wanted her papers alongside theirs,” she said, referring to Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

I, for one, feel newly inspired to not just organize my “papers” but also up my nemeses game.

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Our Sex Education: A Reading List

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.

1. “John Oliver Eviscerates American Sex Ed–But the Reality is Even Worse.” (Dianna Anderson, Rolling Stone, August 2015)

Ready to get angry? In a recent Last Week Tonight segment, John Oliver lambasted abstinence-only sex education, which features celibacy as the only method to prevent pregnancy. Dianna Anderson, feminist blogger and author of Damaged Goods, goes in-depth on the sorry state of sex ed in the United States. Thanks to Title V, tens of millions of dollars are funneled toward conservative teaching methods that do more fear-mongering than educating. Recently, the House of Representatives ratified a bill that will give even more money to abstinence-only “education.” This is federal and state funding, not private revenue. And parents who want their kids to have a holistic, comprehensive sex education in their schools face a bureaucratic nightmare. Read more…

The Nature of a Narrative Line

September 17

Annie Dillard talks about how the narrative line has been devalued by modern physics. The narrative line to me is like a Mexican mural: flattened in perspective so all is present; cramped by detail, erotic, various, the flat depth held up in the imagination, its transience, and impermanence nakedly apparent. The narrative does not lead from one place to another, from the past to the future, but more deeply into the present, always the present and its sense of time is in tune with the human heart rather than the chessman’s calculating mind; present moves are a means to the future. The narrative line, then, is at rest and jostling at the same time. Like a sonogram of a pregnant woman’s belly: the fetus’ tiny heartbeat jostled by gas.

—Poet and essayist Gretel Ehrlich, in a journal entry from 1985. The above passage is quoted from Our Private Lives: Journals, Notebooks, and Diaries, a wonderful anthology of chapter-long selections from the journals of writers including Ehrlich, Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Norman Mailer, Oliver Sacks, and others.

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