Search Results for: The Nation

Arundhati Roy: 1.3 Billion on Lockdown on Four Hours’ Notice

A labourer wearing a facemask rests next to parked bicycles used to transport materials in a wholesale market during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Kolkata on April 6, 2020. (Photo by Dibyangshu SARKAR / AFP) (Photo by DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images)

At The Finanicial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy reports on India’s ill-considered and anti-humanist response to COVID-19. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, offered four hours’ notice before the country of 1.38 billion people went into lockdown, where the monied sheltered in place, displacing 460 million migrant workers. Suddenly without jobs in a country without public transportation, the workers attempted to walk hundreds of kilometers to their home villages before the country halted their movement, forcing them into perilous limbo in makeshift camps.

The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Read the story

The Danger of Desire

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
Read more…

Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Stefano Mazzola / Awakening / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new. Read more…

A Long, Lonely Time

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Seidlitz | Longreads | March 2020 | 11 minutes (2,999 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

There was nothing better to do during the Sunday thunderstorm. I had never seen it, and my mother insisted. A slate of clouds had spooked the February sun from sight a few hours too early. New York dripped like Vancouver, where we had lived by the ocean when I was small. Tinny droplets thrummed the roof. We stretched out together on the olive-green sofa. Her fingers threaded through my dark curls. I remember little of the movie. I remember the warmth more than anything. The orangey glow haloing Demi Moore as she tracked a penny along the doorframe. Heat emanating off my mother’s chest. Embers sputtering in our fireplace. I don’t know where my father was. Moore’s amber eyes glittered, incandescent with awe, when her spectral beloved usurped her coin-pushing, the doorframe a Ouija board animated by yearning, devotion. I remember knowing then, with a certainty I have not felt since, that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold, ineluctable and everlasting, that awaits us.

* * *

A few months after my mother died, I asked my father about their wedding song. I had seen enough movies to expect any newly anointed couple to inaugurate the ballroom reception with a waltz.

My father gripped the wheel of our Honda Pilot with one hand, the other drumming the black driver’s door through the open window. We were singing along to a scratched-up Darkness on the Edge of Town CD, my favorite of Springsteen’s. My father insisted The River eclipsed it in emotional intelligence, that on The River Bruce howled and hummed a hunger so raw, unconquerably raw, that nothing that came before it could compare. But I held true. His guitar on Darkness, I felt, told the deeper story: Rumbling through this promised land, tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


“I want to get married to this song,” I said.

“No, no. It’s much too fast,” he said. “You need something to sway to.”

“‘Racing In The Street’ is kinda groovy?”  He shot me a sidelong glance.

“All right, all right,” I said, lowering the volume knob. “So what, instead?”

His brow furrowed. At once, together we realized the real question into which I had stumbled. We were quiet.

After a stretch of silent highway, I whispered in as steady a voice as I could muster, “What was you and Mom’s song?”

His eyes fixed on the road ahead of us. He sucked his upper lip through his teeth. “Unchained Melody,” he said. “From Ghost.”

* * *

My parents were married in June ’96, in the backyard of the yellow Dutch Colonial where my father grew up. She was beautiful and he still had all of his hair. In the framed photo on the dresser in my childhood bedroom, my mother leans against my father’s lapel with a sprawling bouquet of pale pink and white roses. Ivy spills out from beneath the satin bow that holds the stems. Her sweetheart gown is sleeveless, secured by a strip of organza encircling each arm; her chest bereft of jewelry, only her protrusive collarbones accessorize her décolletage. (She was 114 pounds on her wedding day, she made sure to remind me any time she bemoaned the weight that collects with age. I read in a magazine that you gain one pound every 10 years, she groused once, grimacing at the scale.) Her brown curls were swept off her face and gathered loosely beneath a beaded brooch which fastened her veil in place, exposing her Grace Kelly widow’s peak, dark eyebrows, and rosacea. All of which I inherited.     

So, they danced to “Unchained Melody.” Darkly funny, prescient. (What ruthless narrative parallelism!) It’s as though they had, paranoid or prophetic, preordained a soundtrack for grieving.

I often wonder how they came to select it. They would’ve been standing in the tiny kitchen of their cramped Greenwich apartment, staring at the pile of papers — drafted guest lists, caterers’ business cards, venue release forms — scattered across the dinner table. My father might say, Deb, no self-respecting man likes the Dixie Chicks. (This was, of course, pre-Iraq.) One hand on her hip, the other propped against the counter, she’d hiss, Sarah McLachlan is not a Dixie Chick. Whatever, he’d grunt. Let’s do “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and call it a day, he’d say, slugging his Lagunitas. Probably she would mutter under her breath, I knew I should’ve done this with Karen, which would, understandably, really set him off. Your yuppie sister doesn’t know Lou Reed from a broken dishwasher. And they would be fighting already, even though they weren’t married yet, which is when domesticity really goes sour, I guess. At least she doesn’t listen to Blink-182 when she vacuums. It’s like living with a 17-year-old. Even without children to fight about, there are always living disputes. At least I vacuum, all you do is complain! and, realizing his gaffe, he’d gush, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Deborah. I love you, falling to his knees before her, taking her hands and cupping them against his cheeks. She’d sigh. She was always sighing. I love you, too. What about something from a movie? It would be immediate. Self-evident as if it were divinely sanctioned. In unison: Ghost?

I remember feeling certain then that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold which awaits each of us, inevitable and everlasting.

Prior to Ghost’s popular ascription of mourning to its lyrics, “Unchained Melody,” I imagine, was romantic: about heartbreak among the living, about infatuation, about leaving girlfriends behind to go on tour, about a distance that is literal and bridgeable. It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her:

Oh, my love
My darling
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

Their countertenor melodies permeating the soil over which her ashes have been spread, electrifying each scorched cell, piecing them back together the way I have often dreamed, resurrecting her.         

* * *

It occurs to me now that my father may have been onto something about The River, that perhaps “Racing in the Street” isn’t the ideal first dance song after all, but instead “Drive All Night.” Its revolving drumbeat, slow and certain, Bruce’s longing gravelly and bare. Baby, baby, baby, I swear I’ll drive all night again / just to buy you some shoes, and to taste your tender charms / and I just want to sleep tonight again in your arms.

My parents took me to see him when I was 7. I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music. To my dismay, Madison Square Garden’s pounding speakers and towering bleachers, which elevated around and above me tens of thousands of strange, middle-aged headbangers, proved too overwhelming; I spent the better part of the evening curled under the stadium seats with a tray of greasy chicken fingers, clinging to my mother’s legs and failing to stave off my first panic attack. I don’t remember if my parents held hands or murmured the E Street Band’s cloying refrains in unison or exchanged inside jokes regarding all the past shows they’d been to, decades before my time, when Bruce could still somersault across the stage. I can’t remember if they kissed or cried. I can’t remember if they ever touched at all.

In the desperate bowels of stagflation, Springsteen saw a dark fissure in our country’s consciousness and filled it with effervescent synthesizers, optimistic choruses, a new national anthem. Clarence Clemons’s bright sax buoyed bleaker tableaus on timeless chart-toppers like “Dancing in the Dark,” Danny Federici’s honky-tonk keys and organ on “Glory Days.” This sound, the sound of a better future, propelled the Boss to commercial success.

I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music.

This sound, the sound of a better future, is absent, achingly so, from the Righteous Brothers’ oeuvre. Their greatest hits are elegiac. They reminisce about the better times of yore with no eye toward proaction. Their songs about “glory days” lack Bruce’s cheeky irony. Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, they sing on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Cause it’s gone, gone, gone
And I can’t go on.

* * *

My mother died six years ago in October. She was struck and killed by a car crossing the street in front of a Mexican restaurant. I’d turned 15 two days before. At her funeral I sang “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” by Bob Dylan, the Jeff Buckley version. When Jeff sings Dylan’s song the words lose their edge; they bleed into something pulsing and vulnerable. The way Dylan’s relationship-dirges croak with characteristic gruffness safeguards them against that sort of frailty. Don’t get me wrong, of course Dylan feels, and he feels consumingly, gutturally, but he manages to expel his woe by growling. Rather than bowing, succumbing to anguish like Jeff seems to, he gnashes his poetry through his teeth like some animal. The hurt filters outward, not inward.

Blood On The Tracks, which is, in no uncertain terms, one of the desert-island greatest heartbreak records of all time, quakes with this grit throughout. The stories he tells, purported to illustrate the collapse of his marriage, would be almost unbearable if not for the way he barks to banish emotion. Each verse on “Simple Twist of Fate” is more agonizing than the last, cataloguing the gradual demise of an affair, and relies on the modulated last long vowel sound of every penultimate line for catharsis.

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside

Here his cadence breaks down into even more of a spoken drawl, then ascends the scale as he bellows: To which he just could not relate. He nearly yells the latter syllable of relate, as if he were an ancient funeral wailer. This purgation is absent from Jeff Buckley’s soft, wounded crooning. Dylan exorcises his woe; Jeff doesn’t seem quite as conquering.

“Mama, You Been on My Mind” opens, Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’ …  and his voice wavers, cleaves as though he is about to cry. He continues in a whimper, the crossroads I’m standing at, or maybe it’s the weather or something like that / Oh, but Mama, you’ve been on my mind.

I sang Buckley’s version because I do like it better, but mostly I sang Buckley’s version because he sounds like he’s crying the whole time. I knew I would probably be crying the whole time.

You know I won’t be next to you you know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

* * *

A year after my mother’s funeral, insistently independent and 16, I spent Valentine’s Day at a friend’s house. Reclining against quilted throw pillows, I inhaled buttery crackers smeared with baked Brie, swipes of fig jam — effectively feigning epicurean sangfroid. If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth. Somehow the warm wheel of cheese made loneliness feel farther away. Jay’s TV room swelled with laughter and the warmth of sardined bodies all crowded against the arm of the couch closest to the screen. I sat beside Jay, admiring their resemblance to their mother, against whom they were nestled, who, equally striking, gave Jay their emerald eyes, the warmth in their auburn waves. The three of us were watching When Harry Met Sally.

Young Carrie Fisher lectured, All I’m saying is that somewhere out there is the man you are supposed to marry. And if you don’t get him first, somebody else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that somebody else is married to your husband. I winced. I was entangled then in something that resembled a relationship, but the movie made me cry for the only boy I had ever really loved. It had been nearly a year since our last wistful, forbidden kiss, the sweet-sour ale taste of his tongue only teased by his breath during our hushed conversations, our faces always too near for ex-lovers. He had a girlfriend then, one whom, to my schadenfreudic surprise, he would proceed to date for only three apparently unspectacular months, before ex-post-facto-dumping her by publicly asking another girl to prom. 

If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth.

Someone knocked at the front door, rousing me from my reverie, before entering. Jay’s father shuffled through the foyer, cane and newspaper in hand. Jay’s mother, his ex-wife, stood to greet him. Gingerly, he kissed her on the cheek. So stunned by the unlikely tenderness of their exchange, I nearly forgot myself, had to blink away inappropriate tears. That he could show affection to an old love even after they’d parted legally and domestically seemed unfair to me. Why my father couldn’t still touch my mother, couldn’t show her he loved her even after his affair, even after the years of therapy, after everything, wasn’t just. He could never atone; they could never overcome as Jay’s parents had, not even as friends. Recovery halted abruptly. Penance did not. 

* * *

My parents had never got around to formalizing their divorce. After my mother found out about his infidelity, my father slept in the guest room alone for six months.

He had been away, on a business trip in Phoenix, Arizona. She had called him in the morning from New York. The voice that answered was alien. Certainly it belonged to her husband, but it was constricted, fraught with something indiscernibly foreign. Before she could ask him if everything was alright, she heard another voice in the room — a woman. 

It’s on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s anomalously inward-facing record, uncharacteristically centering disappointment over hope, which he released in 1987 after his separation from Julianne Phillips, that he sings of the doubts and estrangement of married life.

Now look at me baby
Struggling to do everything right
And then it all falls apart
When out go the lights
I’m just a lonely pilgrim

Perhaps my parents would have divorced had they had a few more years. They did not have a few more years. After the accident, my father began to screen the regular calls from their couple’s counselor, Cynthia, until finally the insurance company informed her that one of her clients had died. Cynthia stopped calling. My father never returned to therapy.

As I watched Jay’s father lower his lips to the rosy flush just beneath his old lover’s cheekbone, I couldn’t help but burn with envy.

Bruce continues: Tonight our bed is cold, lost in the darkness of our love. God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

Is Harry bringing anybody to the wedding? Meg Ryan’s query reminded me to check in on my father. He was home alone. I had deserted him in the drafty house he and my mother had designed together some decade earlier on his first single Valentine’s Day in 22 years. Not out of malice, but because I couldn’t stomach the burden of his grief atop my own. Because I was terrified to see him cry. Terrified to cry in front of him.

He was under the covers with a bottle of wine watching Schindler’s List on HBO, he told me. I thought of him in the spacious master bedroom. The cold side of the king-size bed. UNACCEPTABLE, I texted back.

Fifteen minutes later his BMW pulled in front of Jay’s house. I stormed down the porch steps, “Schindler’s List! Are you kidding?”

“Yeah I know,” he raised his hands in shame, surrender. “I know.”

“Dad, you can’t be that guy,” I spat, dropping into the passenger seat.“Well, you aren’t leaving to be with me,” he hazarded. “Right?”

“No.” I lowered my gaze to the floor. “No, of course not.”

Unable to reestablish eye contact, I switched on the radio.

Lonely rivers flow, to the sea, to the sea. “Unchained Melody” blared through the car stereo. Scarcely another beat played before I slammed the power button, slumping back into my seat.

“Hannah, why’d you shut it off?”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad,” I snarled.

Without another word, he revved the ignition and sewed us into the night.

On the sleepy freeway we drove in silence for a long time. Through the moon-blackened windshield I watched skeletal trees bend by, lanky brown smudges against the pitch dark. Brake lights splashed red against the glass. At long last, after steeling myself for confrontation, I spared a glance at my father. His knuckles, bound around the steering wheel, glowed white. He was like an owl, impossibly still, his head motionless between his shoulders. All of a sudden, a swell of tears freed themselves from his eyes. I had seen my father cry only once, at the funeral. The disloyal streams slipped across his cheekbones. Swiftly, he pawed at his face, clenched his jaw, returned his fist to the wheel as though nothing had happened.

I flipped open the center console and fumbled through it for a few moments before extracting what it was I went looking for. The plastic case bore cracks on the spine from a shelf life as old as I was. I fed the scratched treasure of a disc into the CD slot.

Track 10. Play.

Three triumphant piano keys, a G chord.

Well they’re still racing out at the trestles, but that blood it never burned in her veins. Without moving his head, the corners of my father’s mouth twitched. A smile. It was ours, he knew, this familiar anthem beating through the car. With our lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost … The descending riff, the cymbal crash. He was grinning now. For wanting things that can only be found / in the darkness on the edge of town.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

* * *

Hannah Seidlitz is an NYU MFA candidate and amateur semiotician living in Brooklyn. Her work appears in LitHub, Electric Literature, QZ, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

“The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,706 words)

We’re delighted to bring you a brief excerpt from “Chatterbox” — chapter 2 of Rachel Vorona Cote’s excellent book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today.

***

We’ve been fortunate to publish Rachel Vorona Cote in the past. Check out The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music.

The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).
Read more…

Finding Signs of Hope in Surprise Sugar Maples

Susan Krawitz | Longreads | March 2020 | 4 minutes (915 words)

It wasn’t the threat of a maple syrup shortage that got me into the woods with a power drill, hammer, makeshift buckets, and spiles, but my daughter’s request to tap some trees. The sun was out but the sky was cloudy, and the blue behind them looked bruised. And though the woods were quiet, the road I live on was far less so. There were dog walkers, joggers, and some people on bikes; a classic midsummer scene, but a very unusual one for an end-of-winter Monday. Local residents are very resident now, and so are the usually weekender ones. Alone together, we are hunkered down on this rural Catskill hillside, and in that suburb, in those cities, all across the world. We are buckling in for who knows how long, and finding ourselves with too much to think about, and all the time in the world to do it. So we walk, we bike, we tree-tap.

I should have tapped far earlier, as the sap run is nearly done. But I have a challenged history with maple sugaring. This property holds lots of red maple trees, but only one lone, sad specimen of the sugar kind, and the difference in sweetness between the two means far more effort, more boiling time, and less product at the end of it all. I ask myself every year if it’s really worth it, and many years that answer is oh heck, no.

It was a fairly warm day, so after setting a few taps, we trekked a bit further into the woods, exploring. There are huge thriving oaks there, and large pines as well, and also lots of ash tree skeletons, because the emerald green ash borer has recently decimated this tree tribe. But on the stone wall that divides my property from the next, I found the surprising sight of an ash waving live buds at the ends of its branches instead of dead knuckles.

Two months ago, I’d say finding this tree was like stumbling onto a trunkful of gold. A very recently updated metaphor would be spotting two 12-packs of toilet paper on a supermarket shelf.
Read more…

This Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation

Aaron Foster / Getty

Dear Reader,

A thing about me is that I’ve been depressed for awhile. Staying inside a lot. And now, Melancholia-like, real life has begun to mirror my mental state: my outer and inner worlds are on a collision course, and it’s not as clear as I’d like it to be which is drawing in the other.

Last week I told my boyfriend I sometimes have this vertiginous feeling that I caused the pandemic by becoming too socially isolated. I was joking, but not really joking. Yesterday when we were looking out the window at the absolutely nobody going by, I said, “What if we imagined this? What if there is no pandemic, and we’ve just convinced ourselves we have to stay inside?” He responded that he does sometimes worry that we are in a Take Shelter situation. That I, like Michael Shannon in the 2011 thriller directed by Jeff Nichols, convinced myself a storm was coming and prepped our shelter for no reason (I was worrying about corona weeks ahead of the curve), but because I turned out to be right (a total fluke), I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

Honestly, reader, it’s not out of the question. I told him so, and he said that’s fair because it really does seem like a bad idea to go outside, like, ever again. I hear that brave people are out there doing things like gathering PPE donations for frontline healthcare workers or taking groceries to the isolated elderly or just working their regular jobs at the grocery store, which it turns out are wildly dangerous. I keep trying to psych myself up to do something useful like that, but then another formless day peels off its skin, and I find I have achieved nothing. The best I can say for myself is that I am not one of those people at the park making things worse.

Most of this week’s book roundup is about the virus. The whole world is about the virus. I am so sorry.

1. “America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe” by J. Hoberman, The Paris Review

Film critic J. Hoberman points to political differences between Camus’ The Plague and Elia Kazan’s unacknowledged film adaptation Panic in the Streets as a demonstration of how pandemic response can inspire solidarity or descend into authoritarianism.

2. “‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’: A Story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic” by Katherine Anne Porter, The New York Review of Books

NYRB has printed an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a short novel (originally published in 1939) set during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and based on Porter’s own experience with the disease. It is an unsettling read for anyone contemplating dying in the Javits Center next month.

3. “The Anger of the Sick” by Davey Davis, The New Inquiry

Davey Davis reviews Blackfishing the IUD, a weaponized memoir which its author Caren Beilin hopes will destroy the IUD the way the documentary Blackfish destroyed Sea World; Beilin seeks vengeance against the IUD because her use of the device left her with an autoimmune disorder. Davis writes that what separates Beilin’s memoir from others in the ‘sick woman’ genre is her explicit call to action; to defeat the IUD, we must first overturn a medical system that doubts women’s pain. This review was published last month, but it seems prescient now, written at the cusp of the moment before the political anger of the unwell becomes everyone’s anger.

4. “What China’s Literary Community is Reading During the Coronavirus Pandemic” by Na Zhong, Lit Hub

One of the strangest consequences of the pandemic is that at any given time, you can have the uncanny realization that you know exactly what most of the people you know (and billions of others you don’t) are doing right now: sitting around at home, trying to figure out how to think about (or not think about) the coronavirus. Na Zhong has put together a list of books that a few members of China’s literary community are anxiety-reading right now. It’s weird to think that their motivations to anxiety-read about a) other plagues or b) World War II dovetail so perfectly with my household’s anxiety-reading compulsions this past week; I’ve been covering the plague angle while my boyfriend has World War II cornered for now.


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


5. “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era” by Joshua Keating, Slate

Joshua Keating writes that Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is the book that’s been on his mind these days, because so far his experience of the pandemic has not been sickness but rather (reminiscent of Ogawa’s surreal novel) the erasure of items from everyday life. “The losses start small and insignificant. At the local coffee shop, the first thing that disappeared was the table holding the lids and the self-serve milk. Then half the tables vanished. Then all the tables. Then the whole shop closed. Then you hear that the employees were laid off … Perhaps you, like me, thought last Saturday that it would be OK to have a couple of friends over to the house as long as you were reasonably cautious … By Sunday, that was off limits. Today, the idea is unthinkable.”

6. “An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma” by Patricia Hampl, The Paris Review

Patricia Hampl writes that a book she loved 25 years ago, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue about expatriate life in Italy, has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. “I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks.”

7. “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, The Point

Helena de Bres writes about the books that she turned to for comfort during a period of personal isolation she faced as a child, and how books (generally pessimistic, sad) aren’t really comforting her at all during this period of universal isolation. Instead it’s the unbridled optimism of those crazy people who keep going outside that she’s been motivated by, because she realizes how precious those ridiculous optimists are. We must preserve them.

8. “English PEN Calls for Release of Ahdaf Soueif After Coronavirus Protest Arrest” by Mark Chandler, The Bookseller

A brief note and harbinger: “English PEN has called for the release of Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, who was arrested during a protest about the treatment of prisoners during the coronavirus outbreak.”

9. “Capitalism’s Favorite Drug” by Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

This one is about coffee — the illustrious Michael Pollan reviewing Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland — and honestly it isn’t supposed to be about coronavirus at all, but I read this line and I can’t stop thinking about the rich people who would rather send us back out to die than pay our bills for a little while: “The essential question facing any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has always and ever been ‘What makes people work?’” On Salvadoran coffee plantations, the answer to that question was: a hunger crisis engineered by the upper class.

10. “Anna Kavan and the Rise of Autospec” by Gregory Ariail, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This one isn’t about corona either. It’s Gregory Ariail’s review of the Anna Kavan short story collection published by NYRB this month, and how Kavan’s style (she lived in the first half of the twentieth century) defined a genre Ariail calls “auto speculative fiction” (as opposed to “autofiction”), which he describes as “a truly combustive marriage of opposites: the searing confessions of the inner life on the one hand, and speculative narratives that systematically violate natural laws and reject normative discourses on the other.” I won’t tell you which lines of this review remind me of corona; you can pick those out for yourself.

Take care of yourself,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
Sign up here

Albatross People

Arthur Morris / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Daileda | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (2,000 words)

My wife told me she had at last booked a flight back to Bengaluru and so I should relax that evening at our apartment. There I opened a book I was reading about birds, called The Thing With Feathers, by Noah Strycker. I was toward the end, on a chapter about albatrosses.

The wandering albatross looks not much different from a seagull, except it’s enormous. Its wings span 12 feet, twice my height. Wanderers need wings like this because they spend a huge part of their lives floating over the open ocean, plucking fish and squid from the water. They do this away from their mates, because keeping track of each other would cost precious energy needed to stay aloft. Each partner goes about their own life until, once every two years, they flutter back home to the little bits of land in the Southern oceans on which they nest. They greet each other with a dance and quickly go about building that year’s home. Though it takes nine months for an albatross chick to leave its nest, the parents won’t see each other much during that time, either. The baby needs food, and so they fly out in search of it over different parts of the sea. All that time away, and yet albatrosses almost always remain faithful for life.

Read more…

The Importance of Sports When Nothing Else Seems to Matter

PROVIDENCE, RI - MARCH 19: A general view as the Miami Hurricanes face the Wichita State Shockers during the second round of the 2016 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament at Dunkin' Donuts Center on March 19, 2016 in Providence, Rhode Island. (Photo by Tim Bradbury/Getty Images)

For the first time in more than 80 years, the men’s basketball NCAA tournament, which was scheduled to begin Thursday morning, was canceled. In the scheme of everything happening in the world at this moment, stopping March Madness is of little consequence, but in these uncertain times, losing that event has completely unmoored my well-being. Read more…

Why I’m Giving Myself Permission to Keep Writing at This Time

My great grandmother, Freida, two years before her death from Influenza, with my grandmother, Clarisse, as a baby.

The timing of the coronavirus pandemic has been convenient for exactly no one. For some writers’ careers, it’s been devastating. They’ve had their book releases eclipsed, their tours canceled, their sales thrown off by readers’ new economic precarity — several years’ worth of hard work and anticipation thrown, largely, down the drain, although some have been holding virtual book tours, and social media posts imploring people to support authors by ordering their books could help. (Please do this if you are able!)

If the pandemic continues in varying degrees through fall 2021, as some scientists are predicting, lots of other writers will be similarly affected, along with book stores and the entire publishing industry.

It’s been ill-timed for me, personally, too. It comes just as my agent has begun negotiating the contract for the memoir-in-essays I have been working on for years — my first solo book, after publishing anthologies. I have been playing what feels like the world’s longest game, being dogged but patient in my pursuit of a deal. I’m hoping the small indie publisher we’ve chosen to go with will be able to ride this out, and I’ll get to go forward as planned. But who knows?

It’s been challenging, though, to feel as if my publishing plans and my writing in general matter at all right now. In the midst of a global health crisis that is disrupting lives and killing people, it feels frivolous to even think about my book, continue with my newsletter, or write anything at all that is not virus-related. This, after decades of struggling to overcome a feeling common to many women: that my story doesn’t matter, and I don’t have permission to tell it.
Read more…