The Longreads Blog

Dispossessed: Haunted Houses of the Great Recession

In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work:

My wife and I walked, zombie-like, through home after home, throughout that stifling summer, into homes that had been closed against the light but bristled with claustrophobic air. We took to nicknaming these places: the Flea House, after whatever it was that bit our realtor; the Burn House, with its charred patches of wall and blackened carpets; Tony’s House, after the name on the novelty license plate still stuck to a bedroom door, a detail particularly creepy amid the otherwise empty gloom of the house, as though Danny Torrance would big-wheel down the hall at any moment.

For the most part, these homes were on regular streets, among other unexceptional homes. It was strange to find them in Los Angeles; the haunted house is usually built outside of some small town, a nightmare in the wilderness that beckons just beyond some tiny hamlet. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as Eleanor Vance makes her way to Hillsdale, Illinois, she’s told not to ask about Hill House: “I am making these directions so detailed,” Dr. Montague writes to her in a letter, “because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.”

It’s a common trope: the unaware traveler and the wary, even hostile townspeople. Why, in all these stories, do the poor townspeople hate the haunted mansion? Well, because they’re poor. They can’t afford to move away, to uproot their families, even after some rich eccentric has unleashed an unspeakable evil just beyond the town limits. “People leave this town,” a Hillsdale resident tells Eleanor, “they don’t come here.” The archetypal haunted house story is often really about class, about the rich who don’t understand the land or the people or the history and blunder into the landscape, attempting to buy their way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals nearby. The town grows resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly—haunted by forces beyond their own control.

Read the story here.

Photo: US National Archives, Flickr

Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List

As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your suggestions, if you’d like. Or comment below.

1. “The Myth of the Absent Black Father.” (Tara Culp-Ressler, ThinkProgress, January 2014)

Black dads are indisputably present and involved in the lives of their children. Don’t believe the stereotypes spewed by the media, or insinuated by President Obama, or written in all caps on Facebook by your Tea Party neighbor.

2. “The Impossibility of the Good Black Mother.” (Tope Fadiran Charlton, Time Magazine, January 2014)

Charlton relates the struggles and stereotypes of being a young, black mother in predominantly white spaces: “The curiosity that strangers are so often eager to satisfy when they see me with my daughter is profoundly shaped by stereotypes of Black womanhood. Am I the babysitter? The nanny?”

3. “Growing Up Black in the Whitest City in America.” (Mitchell S. Jackson, Salon, March 2014)

Historically, Portland’s black population has not exceeded 5%. What this means, writes Jackson, is gang warfare inevitably claims the lives of people you know intimately.

4. “I Am, I Am, I Am: Writing While Black and Female.” (Vanessa Willoughby, The Toast, January 2014)

Willoughby slays in this wonderful piece about identifying as a black, female writer in a white-dude-dominated industry. She’s working on a novel, and if this incisive, insightful essay is any indicator, you won’t be able to miss her.

5. “Homeward Bound: Searching for the Island of Black Queer Mixed Femmes.” (Kim Katrin Crosby, Autostraddle, December 2013)

“I have always been a traveler, particularly as an immigrant and as a person with family hailing from Venezuela to Dominica to South India, ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘belonging’ have always been complicated concepts. But as femme genius Yumi Tomsha says, we mixed folks are ‘layers, not fractions.’ These complications find their solace in my bones, my laugh, my irreverent queerness and my sensitive stomach without even trying.”

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Image from “The Residue Years” Documentary By Mitchell S. Jackson

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A New York Times Reporter's Discovery About Pakistan and Bin Laden

In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood. Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior American officials later told me that the information was consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.

Carlotta Gall, in The New York Times, investigating whether Pakistan knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding inside the country. Read more on Pakistan.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Read more…

'You Hollywood Idiots!' George R.R. Martin on Collaboration and the Creative Process

I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and of course it doesn’t look like that. But that’s fine. It does take a bit of adjustment on the writer’s part but I’m not one of these writers who go crazy and says, “I described six buttons on the jacket and you put eight buttons on the jacket, you Hollywood idiots!” I’ve seen too many writers like that when I was on the other side, in Hollywood. When you work in television or film, it is a collaborative medium, and you have to allow the other collaborators to bring their own creative impulse to it, too.

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, in an in-depth interview with Vanity Fair’s Jim Windolf, about the HBO show, his progress on completing the seven-book series, and working inside and outside Hollywood. Read more on Martin and Game of Thrones.

An Interview With a Therapist Who Was Once Insane

Michael Hobbes | Longreads | March 2014 | 10 minutes (2,425 words)

 

Joe Guppy is a writer, actor and psychotherapist living in Seattle. Thirty-five years ago, he was 23 years old and a mental patient. He spent 10 weeks in a mental hospital and another 10 weeks in a halfway house after Atabrine, an old-school malaria medication, gave him visions that he was living in hell and that his family was trying to kill him.

Thirty years after he was released, Guppy decided to investigate his own case of mental illness. Through physicians’ notes, journals and interviews, he took stock of how he got sick, how he got better and what his story says about how therapy helps people heal. He is working on a memoir about the experience, and was kind enough to send me a draft and let me interview him about what he found.

Read more…

Remembering Is a Social Act

The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than You Think], I worried about that myself. I felt everyone else’s sense of, “Wow, I don’t really remember phone numbers anymore. Is that a metaphor or metonym for the overall inability for my brain to retain things?”

But the more I looked at the way memory works what I learned was the fragility of human memory is such that we’ve always been really terrible at the details of knowledge. We’re really good at retaining the meaning of something — we study something, we read about it, we talk about it with someone. We’re good at cementing the gist of something but we’re really bad at the details.

Historically, we’ve had all these ways of storing the details, the stuff we want to remember. We think of a lot of it as happening in paper — we write this knowledge down in books and we write in articles and we save them and store them so we can look at them — but the truth is that most of the knowledge we store outside of us is stored in other people, it’s this thing called “transactive memory” … we each rely on each other for these details. … We’re actually using each other to help remember these things because our brains are dreadful, dreadful at the details. This has been something we’ve done for hundreds and thousands of years; it’s why socially we’re smarter when we’re around each other. We’re not just social thinkers, we’re social rememberers.

Clive Thompson, on the You Are Not So Smart podcast (2013), talking about the limitations of memory. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: GallivantingGirl, Flickr

Conversations with My Deaf Mother

Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that she was not really deaf. She was a mischievous prankster, and what better way to keep everyone hopping than to pretend she was deaf, the way every child has, at one point or another, pretended to be blind, or played dead? For some reason, she had forgotten to stop playing her prank. To test her, I would slide behind her when she wasn’t looking and yell in her ear. No response. Not a shudder. What amazing control she had. I sometimes ran to her and said that someone was ringing the doorbell. She opened the door; then, realizing I had played a low trick on her, she would laugh it off, because wasn’t it funny how the joy of her life — me — had hatched this practical joke to remind her, like everyone else, that she was deaf. One day, I watched her get dressed up to go out with my father and, as she was fastening a pair of earrings, I told her she was beautiful. Yes, I am beautiful. But it doesn’t change anything. I am still deaf — meaning, And don’t you forget it.

André Aciman in The New Yorker, on communicating with his deaf mother (subscribers only). Read more from The New Yorker.

'The Only Things That Mattered Were Booze and Books'

There are times you see the rot you’ve always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I’d earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I’d ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing toilets–the very ones I’d puked into so many times–that was what I knew. The hurly burly of solitude that took me come each day’s midnight had stripped any cool I might still have owned a long time back. Night after night, in the chill of an empty school, my ambitions fell away like leaves from boughs in autumn. And wandering those halls, moving from bin to toilet to bin, the few kind trophies of memory that did remain floated by as evil nymphs–evil because angelic, angelic because there are in the corridors of my past those trophies were safe from deeper ruin. And like angels they were accessible in only the cruelest ways. What was the good in having something you could never hold?

-From Made to Break, a novel by D. Foy. Read more fiction.

A Magazine’s Assignment: Find Someone ‘Ugly’

Photo: Mike Sager and Warren Durso at the Standard Hotel, West Hollywood.

We like to occasionally ask some of our favorite writers to give us the backstory on a story they loved. Here’s veteran journalist Mike Sager telling us about his story “Ugly,” which ran in the May 2012 issue of Esquire.

Ugly

Mike Sager | Esquire | May 2012 | 23 minutes (5,858 words)

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When you get a phone call from your editor telling you he wants an in-depth profile of an ugly guy, you panic a little. You imagine yourself having to walk up to some stranger. “Hey, you’re friggin’ ugly. Wanna be in a story in Esquire magazine?”

Then you think of a really good friend of yours. Great guy. Not a pretty sight.

You try to imagine how the call will go.

You even make the call.

Then you chicken out.

And you start panicking again, just a little bit, remembering how long it took to find the right Beautiful Woman for the piece I think of as this story’s reciprocal. (“The Secret Life of a Beautiful Woman,” Esquire April, 1999, collected in Revenge of the Donut Boys). With Hollywood and environs as my hunting grounds, it had taken nearly three months to find a beautiful woman to profile. In the beginning the magazine wanted a blonde. I kept remembering this five by seven model card, this brunette with baby bear brown eyes. She’d haunted me through the entire search, through dozens of interviews with other women who weren’t quite right for one reason or another. As it was I insisted on picking the dark-haired woman. Her name was Brooke Burke. I guess you could say my story was her break, though she’d been working her butt off for years to get where she was. Read more…