The Longreads Blog

Gabriel García Márquez on the Solitude of Writers and Dictators

AP Photo/Prensa Latina via AP Images/Celso Rodriguez

In the winter of 1981 Peter H. Stone interviewed Gabriel García Márquez for The Paris Review. The interview took place over three afternoons in the studio behind García Márquez’s home in Mexico. Although García Márquez’s English is “quite good,” he spoke mostly in Spanish:

INTERVIEWER

You often use the theme of the solitude of power.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The more power you have, the harder it is to know who is lying to you and who is not. When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that’s the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality; everything is in concert to isolate him.

INTERVIEWER

What about the solitude of the writer? Is this different?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

It has a lot to do with the solitude of power. The writer’s very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it, in an ivory tower, as they say. Journalism is a very good guard against that. That’s why I have always tried to keep on doing journalism, because it keeps me in contact with the real world, particularly political journalism and politics. The solitude that threatened me after One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t the solitude of the writer; it was the solitude of fame, which resembles the solitude of power much more. My friends defended me from that one, my friends who are always there.

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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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When Two People Decide to Live Together and Combine Their Bookshelves

Alexander Chee has a delightful essay in the Morning News about the way we view our personal libraries and what happens to our books when we attempt to combine our bookshelves with our partners:

One of the funniest and most interesting questions you can ask a group of couples at a party is whether or not they have combined their bookshelves.

I discovered this once I began asking it, looking for advice from others who might have done this. Most often, thus far, in my highly selective, completely unscientific research, the answer is no. Reasons get thrown around, and one is common. “I told her,” a friend said, who had just completed this process, “‘That stack of doubles by the entrance, that you will not get rid of, that is your doubt about our long-term future.’” He laughed as he said this.

Doubles, inside this world of library marriages, is the seemingly easy problem of when each member of the couple has one copy of the same book. But as I laughed at my friend’s remark, I remembered, uneasily, that I own doubles, sometimes triples, of some books, without even including Dustin’s books.

There was a period of two years in the ‘90s when I moved pretty constantly between sublets here in New York. I put my books in storage so I wouldn’t have to move them every few months. When I missed them, I would go to my storage space and visit them. It felt a little like they were in jail, though it was me who’d done something wrong—I hadn’t found them a permanent home. Soon I found myself in used bookstores, buying what I called “reading copies” of favorites.

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‘In That Moment, My Heart Dropped’: Rilla Askew on Writing, Race, and Riots in Tulsa

Here’s a powerful story from Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah, about race and growing up in Oklahoma. Askew spoke during our night of storytelling with This Land Press in New York City.

The full talk is below, and you can see all our storytellers at our YouTube page:

Revisiting Frida Kahlo’s Style and Cult of Personality

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the traumatic trolley accident that hospitalized artist Frida Kahlo and inspired, perhaps cruelly, her artistic path. Despite her global popularity, there’s still more to learn about this extraordinary artist. For five journalists, exploring the textiles of Frida Kahlo’s homeland gives her rich legacy a new texture. Julie Schwietert Collazo reports at Contributoria:

[Frida Kahlo’s] persona was created, in large part, through the clothes and accessories in which Kahlo chose to outfit herself. Kahlo was never one to blend into the scenery. “Everything about her, from her hairstyle to the hem of her dress, breathed a kind of roguish glee…” wrote her stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera, in the book Frida’s Fiestas. “Roguish” and “gleeful” might not be the first adjectives that come to mind as a viewer looks at one of Frida’s self-portraits; though there are photographs and videos of Kahlo smiling and laughing, in nearly all of her paintings she depicts herself soberly, with a steady, often hard gaze and a serious expression.

But her clothing and accessories – rich, textured velvets and silks; bold, hand-coloured and embroidered threads; and statement pieces of jewellery made of local materials such as coral, jade, and volcanic stone – they all did seem alive. From the day of her wedding to Diego Rivera, wrote Guadalupe Rivera, Kahlo decided to dress herself “in the Oaxaca style… heavy with embroidery, ribbons and floral motifs….” The clothing, most of it handmade by indigenous communities from the isthmus of Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca, set Kahlo apart from her contemporaries, who were increasingly moving away from traditional Mexican dress and were instead embracing “modern” European designs (think, for example, of a Chanel suit).

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How Patty Hearst Went From Kidnapping Victim to Armed Guerrilla

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley, CA apartment by members of an urban guerrilla group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Two months after she was abducted Hearst— the granddaughter of the real life “Citizen Kane,” publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst—had joined the SLA, adopted the the name “Tania” as her nom de guerre and was robbing a San Francisco bank with a M1 carbine. Hearst’s kidnapping and subsequent conversion riveted the nation—Was it Stockholm Syndrome? Brainwashing? The last gasp of sixties radicalism?

In October of the next year, Rolling Stone featured an explosive cover story, “Tania’s World: An Insider’s Account of Patty Hearst on the Run.” Below is a short excerpt from Howard Kohn and David Weir’s account of her life as a fugitive with the SLA, detailing her moment of conversion:

Patty was shown a long list of the Hearst family holdings — nine newspapers, 13 magazines, four TV and radio stations, a silver mine, a paper mill and prime real estate. Her parents clearly were part of the ruling elite. That’s why they had quibbled over the ransom money. That’s why they had handed out turkey giblets instead of steaks during the food giveaway that the S.L.A. had demanded. Money meant everything to the economic class of her parents. And the only power that could fight that money was the power that came out of the barrel of a gun. It was a political philosophy that had bored her when Weed and his doctoral student friends had discussed it in their Berkeley apartment. But Cinque’s rough eloquence was more persuasive than the abstract talk of graduate students. The S.L.A.’s motives made sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hearst wealth to more needy people. It was her parents — and the economic class they represented — who were to blame for her misery and the misery of countless others.

The S.L.A. members encouraged her radicalization. They hugged her, called her sister and ended her loneliness. Patty’s conversion was as much emotional as political.

Seven weeks after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the S.L.A. Despite their new respect for her, most of the S.L.A. soldiers were opposed. Patty would deprive them of mobility because her face was so easily recognized. She could not be counted on in emergencies. She did not have the guerrilla training the others had.

But Cinque wanted her to become a comrade in arms.

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‘It’s Yours’: A Short History of the Horde

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads | February 2015 | 10 minutes (2,458 words)

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates started blogging for The Atlantic on August 4, 2008. His first post was titled “Sullivan… McArdle… Fallows… Coates???” and it laid down his terms from the start: “My only rule, really, is simple,” he wrote. “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.” He’d been hired to fill the slot left in the magazine’s roster of bloggers by Matt Yglesias, and he addressed how he’d be coming at the role differently. “Matt has a fairly amazing ability to comment, from a left perspective, on a wide range of issues… Knowing my own limits, I’ll take a different tack. On things I’m not so sure on, I’ll state my opinion rather gingerly and then hope my commenters can fill in the gaps.”

The blog would soon be widely lauded for the keenness and clarity of its ideas, the power of its language, and for its unexpected ability to host real, substantive conversations in the comments—an extreme rarity on big-name websites. Coates, then a relatively unknown writer, would go on to win a 2013 National Magazine Award for “Fear of a Black President,” an essay published in The Atlantic’s print edition, while a selection of nine posts from his blog would be named a 2014 finalist in the National Magazine Awards’ “columns and commentary” category.

So how did Coates foster a comment section in which—wonder of wonders—intelligent adults thoughtfully share ideas and knowledge, and where trolling, rudeness and bad faith aren’t tolerated? I asked Coates and other players in the blog’s success—editors, moderators and commenters—to look back on what makes it work. Read more…

A Three-Part Series on the Plight of the Black Middle Class in America

In January The Washington Post published a powerful three-part series looking at the plight of the black middle class in America. The series focuses on Maryland’s Prince George’s County—the most affluent majority-black county in America, as well as one of the counties hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis. At the heart of the series is a singular, vexing question: “Why don’t black middle-class families enjoy the same level of economic security as their white counterparts?”

1. “The American Dream Shatters in Prince George’s County” (Michael A. Fletcher, January 24, 2015)

“But today, the nation’s highest-income majority-black county stands out for a different reason — its residents have lost far more wealth than families in neighboring, majority-white suburbs. And while every one of these surrounding counties is enjoying a strong rebound in housing prices and their economies, Prince George’s is lagging far behind, and local economists say a full recovery appears unlikely anytime soon.”

2.“In Fairwood, Dreams of Black Wealth Foundered Amid the Mortgage Meltdown” (Kimbriell Kelly, John Sullivan, Steven Rich, January 25, 2015)

“On some blocks in Fairwood, nearly every house went under. On Burkes Promise Drive, an arcing street of broad lawns, 20 of the 34 homes fell into foreclosure. Neighbors awoke each day to the tell-tale signs: rental trucks in driveways and piles of old furniture, strollers and garbage bags dumped on the curbs.”

3. “Distressed Family Swamped by an Underwater Home” (Kimbriell Kelly, January 26, 2015)

“A decade ago, Comfort and Kofi were at the apex of an astonishing journey they had made from Ghana in 1997, when they had won a visa lottery to come to America. They did not know it at the time, but they were also at the midpoint in their odyssey from American Dream to American Nightmare.”

The Post has also provided a short explanation of how they gathered and analyzed their data, which can be found here.

In Order to Grieve, Helen Macdonald Got a Hawk and Practiced Disappearing

Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment. The only way to tame them is through positive reinforcement with gifts of food. You want the hawk to eat the food you hold – it’s the first step in reclaiming her that will end with you being hunting partners. But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together. I thought, once, that you did it by being infinitely patient. But no: it is that you must become invisible. You’re trying to get her to look at the steak, not at you, because you know – though you haven’t looked – that her eyes are fixed in horror at your profile. All you can hear is the wet click, click, click of her blinking.

To cross this space between fear and food you need – very urgently – not to be there. You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as an angry high court judge. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a fraction, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it. And so, remaining invisible, you make the food the only thing in the room apart from the hawk; you’re not there at all. And what you hope is that she’ll start eating, and you can very, very slowly make yourself visible. Even if you don’t move a muscle, and just relax into a more normal frame of mind, the hawk knows. It’s extraordinary. It takes a long time to be yourself in the presence of a new hawk.”

From a Telegraph excerpt of writer Helen Macdonald’s bestselling UK memoir, H is for Hawk, which was awarded the Costa Book Award last week, as well as the Samuel Johnson Prize. The memoir documents her attempt to train a goshawk, a notoriously difficult and deadly raptor, as a way to ameliorate the pain of unexpectedly losing her father. The book comes out next month in the U.S. through Grove Press.

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What It Means for an Object to Be ‘Context Free’

In a recent piece for ViceJules Suzdaltsev discussed the ubiquity of white plastic chairs and what that ubiquity means for world culture amidst rapid globalization. Below is a brief excerpt about from the piece:

But unlike similar global objects like lighters, televisions, paper clips, cigarettes, transistor radios, and AK-47s, these chairs are “context free.” MIT’s Director of Civic Media Studies, Ethan Zuckerman, explained the significance of the monobloc on his blog a few years ago: “Virtually every object suggests a time and place… The shape of electrical outlets, labels on any consumer products, fabrics, clothing all [are] clues as to whether a photo was taken in the 1970s or last week, in Sweden or Schenectady. The Monobloc [formal name for this type of chair] is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are.”

Humans are separated by our various contexts: wealth, age, race, gender, geography, religion, sexual orientation, height, weight, etc. Manmade objects almost always follow those divides—certain people own certain things, certain possessions signify wealth or poverty or some subcultural cache. Yet the monobloc stands alone, as a singular object, unrelated to its surroundings, and yet distinctly unavoidable and non-biodegradable; perhaps immortal.

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