Search Results for: New York Magazine

The Moment When President Obama Realized He Needed Luther

-From Zadie Smith’s New Yorker profile of Comedy Central stars Key and Peele. Keegan-Michael Key reprised his role as Luther for President Obama’s weekend speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

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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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The Origins of Lilly Pulitzer

[Lilly Pulitzer] Rousseau’s story has been oft-told over the years: Born the middle of three daughters into a socially prominent family in Roslyn, New York, Lilly McKim attended all the right schools (Chapin, Miss Porter’s) with all the right people (Jacqueline Bouvier was a schoolmate at Miss Porter’s) before eloping in 1952, at age 21, with newspaper scion Peter Pulitzer. The pair moved to Palm Beach, where Pulitzer operated a successful citrus grove business, and his bride quickly had three children: Peter Jr., Liza and Minnie. The couple threw fabulous parties, famously tossing water on the tiled kitchen floor of their great big house overlooking Lake Worth so that everyone could do the twist after dinner. Lilly herself became known for “not giving a whit,” according to her longtime friend Susannah Cutts, accruing a menagerie of dogs, cats, monkeys and even a calf (“those awful animals,” Rousseau says now). But then, in 1958, Lilly’s sunniness began to fade. “I had terrible anxiety attacks,” she says, “so I went to the nuthouse.” The nuthouse was a psychiatric hospital in Westchester County, New York—“I can’t really remember how long I was there, but my cousin was there too, so that was nice”—and she returned home armed with but one piece of medical advice: Get a hobby.

“Peter said, ‘Well, why don’t you sell my oranges?’” recalls Rousseau, who promptly started pulling her station wagon up her tony neighbors’ driveways, delivering fruit. The stand quickly followed, though Lilly discovered her crisp white shirts and shorts were becoming ruined with juice stains. “So I went to the five-and-dime, bought some fabric, took it to the seamstress, and she did it up,” Rousseau says, noting that she wanted dresses that were “colorful and cotton and cool,” with slits up the sides for bending over. She even hung a few up in the stand, selling them for $22.50 a piece.

The town went wild. “I couldn’t keep up with all the orders!” she marvels. Soon Lilly was flying regularly to Key West, where she created the prints along with a “gay as your hat” designing couple who ran a textile business called Key West Fabrics.

Sarah Haight profiling designer and Palm Beach doyenne Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau in the December 2008 issue of W Magazine. Pulitzer Rousseau died in 2013.

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See Also: “Palm Beach’s Barefoot Princess” (Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, 2003)

Celebrating Singlehood and Reclaiming the Word ‘Spinster’

Photo: Willy Somma

Jessica Gross | Longreads | April 2015 | 19 minutes (4,797 words)

 

In 2011, Kate Bolick charted the sea change in our cultural attitudes toward marriage in her Atlantic piece, “All the Single Ladies.” Interweaving personal experience—she was 39 and single at the time—with reporting, Bolick posited that we are marrying later or not at all, with many women exercising their ability to have children without partners or, again, not at all.

The piece generated a huge response. In Bolick’s new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, she approaches single adulthood from a slightly different angle. The book is part memoir: Bolick describes breaking away from a serious, cohabitating relationship in her late twenties, exploring her ambivalence about partnership, and wholly reconsidering her view of marriage. Along the way, she presents the stories of her five “awakeners,” the historical single women who shaped her thinking. These were the essayist Maeve Brennan, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the columnist Neith Boyce, the novelist Edith Wharton, and the writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By considering these women’s biographies and cultural contexts, Bolick began to better understand her own.

I’ve been single for most of my twenties—I’m almost thirty now—and I’ve tended to think of it as some kind of flaw. Reading Spinster, I not only saw clearly this underlying belief, which wasn’t totally conscious, but also realized that being single was actually a choice I had made. Does that ring true to you as the heart of what this book is about?

Yes, without a doubt. The book started for me when I was in my late twenties and living with my boyfriend and we moved from Boston to New York so that I could go to graduate school. I started wondering, what does a life look like if you’re not married? I was really struck to realize that there were no positive depictions of single women in popular culture. At that moment in time, in 2000, it was either Carrie Bradshaw or Bridget Jones. You were either frivolous and fabulous or desperate. And either way, you were definitely trying to get yourself coupled. Sex and the City was in a way celebrating singlehood, but it was also singlehood as long as it’s a way station to something else. And so it began that way, with becoming interested in at least learning more about a different way of being that I wasn’t seeing reflected around me anywhere. Yet I knew that culture had given us positive examples in the past, particularly during the second wave of the women’s movement. So where did that go?

It was during that sort of amorphous period of wondering that I came across Neith Boyce, who felt like a profound discovery: I hadn’t even known people were talking about this in the late 1800s. The clarity of her voice at a time that I thought of as being so repressive for women made me see how much we’re shaped by the time in which we live and the assumptions that we grow up with.

So that’s a long way of saying yes, but it was more this kind of internal questioning, and then smacking up against this external example from history. Read more…

The Astronauts and the ‘Nutella Incident’

Concept for NASA human Mars mission. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Their persistently cheery e-mail updates [from the crew in the Hawaii-based simulation] raise a question: Does a happy crew tell NASA anything useful? Binsted argues that upbeat blog posts don’t always tell the whole story. Small gripes often emerge in the post-study interviews, when subjects know that their replies will be kept anonymous. It was only at the end of one of the four-month food studies in the dome, for instance, that Binsted heard from everyone about the “Nutella incident,” in which a crew member arrogantly finished off the group’s monthly ration, reasoning that the team was scheduled to open a new bin the next day. Stuster’s work with isolated crews found many examples of trivial annoyances growing unbearable, such as complaints from one of Byrd’s Antarctic crewmen about another man’s “way of breathing, his belief in dreams, and his frequent use of the phrase ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Stuster’s latest study for NASA, on private journals kept by astronauts, fairly hisses in places with steam let off by astronauts irritated by overscheduling, by patronizing requests, and by pointless-seeming tasks coming from ground control, such as recording serial numbers on items of trash. In the Mauna Loa dome, crew members simply roll their eyes when Binsted’s far-flung volunteer assistants do something lame, like expecting an immediate response to an e-mail sent when everyone is still asleep, because the sender forgot that sMars, like Hawaii, is not on daylight-saving time. Binsted calls it “crew-ground disconnect,” and deals with the problem in ways that are summarized by her use of the term “mission support,” rather than “mission control.”

Tom Kizzia, writing in The New Yorker about how NASA is preparing its astronauts for the long-haul isolation and travel that a possible Mars expedition would require.

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Rest in Peace: Stories About Death Care

I. I’ve been thinking: What would my life look like if I were not afraid of death? Thinking too closely about not existing, not having a consciousness, sends me spiraling into a panic attack. Protestant Christians believe in an afterlife—a heaven, a hell. I did, too, for a while. I was confident, fervent, about heaven. I was no longer afraid to die. Now I’m not so sure. Nothingness scares me, but so does an eternity spent somewhere else.

A month ago, I shared a reading list about architecture. My pick from The Stranger was about Katrina Spade, an  archeologist from Seattle interested in environmentally friendly, community-centered death care: city centers dedicated to composting human beings and reuniting their bodies with nature. It’s called the Urban Death Project. A few days ago, Spade debuted her fundraising campaign to make the project a reality.

I studied artist Iris Gottlieb’s drawings of plants and fungi and Spade’s architectural plans. I liked the idea that the composting hubs would be unique to each city—much like libraries, which take on aspects of their communities while serving the same essential purpose worldwide, Spade explained. Reading the details of Spade’s proposal, I felt genuinely moved, and, for the first time in a decade, peaceful. Read more…

Tennessee Williams on His Women, His Writer’s Block, and Whether It All Mattered

Maureen Stapleton and Don Murray in The Rose Tattoo. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

James Grissom | Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog | Knopf | March 2015 | 26 minutes (7,038 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Follies of God, by James Grissom, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Dana writes:

“James Grissom wrote a letter to Tennessee Williams in 1982, when he was only 20 years old, asking for advice. Tennessee unexpectedly responded, ‘Perhaps you can be of some help to me.’ Ultimately he tasked Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—among them Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Marlon Brando—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered? This is Grissom’s account of their intense first encounters, in which Tennessee explains his thoughts on writing, writer’s block, and the women he wrote.”

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Subverting Female Archetypes with the Clones of ‘Orphan Black’

Photo by BBC America

In its subject matter, “Orphan Black” broods on the nature-nurture debate in human biology, but in its execution, the show cleverly extends the same question to matters of genre. What does the exact same woman look like if you grow her in the petri dish of “Desperate Housewives” or on a horror-film set in Eastern Europe? What about a police procedural? The result is a revelation: Instead of each archetype existing as the lone female character in her respective universe, these normally isolated tropes find one another, band together and seek to liberate themselves from the evil system that created them.

By structuring the story around the clones’ differences, “Orphan Black” seems to suggest that the dull sameness enforced by existing female archetypes needs to die. Early in the first season, there is a serial killer hunting down the clones ­— it turns out to be Helena, the Ukrainian — who ritualistically dismembers Barbie dolls after dyeing their hair to match that of her next victim. It’s a creepy touch, but one that can also be read as a metacriticism of how women are used on TV: the punishing beauty standards to which they’re held, the imposed uniformity. (Need a new sitcom wife? Grab the prototype and change the hairstyle.) Our low tolerance for difference among female characters means that they will almost always be less interesting, less memorable and less beloved than their male counterparts. In this context, Helena becomes a kind of hero, slaughtering televisual conformity and constituting, in both her savagery and her warmth, a radical expansion of what women on television can be. And each character, including the criminally insane one, gets considerable attention and respect, even when it comes to questions about butter.

Lili Loofbourow, writing in the New York Times Magazine about the television show “Orphan Black,” and its star,  Tatiana Maslany. Maslany plays a horde of clones on the show, each with a different and distinct personality and look.

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Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?

With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanfordthe work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available.

Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. He was a “swamprat Rimbaud,” “one of the great voices of death,” and “sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern.” He shot himself in 1978, just shy of his 30th birthday. Reviewing the new collection for the New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote about the enigmatic nature of Stanford himself, as well as why his work has been so difficult to find:

Even before his death, Mr. Stanford was an emerging cult figure among Southern writers, the kind of man whose life is difficult to untangle from his work. He was charismatic — “as beautiful as the sun,” in the words of the Arkansas poet Carolyn (C. D.) Wright, who was also among his lovers. He was prolific, writing 11 books before his death, one of them a 450-page narrative poem, and leaving behind a steep pile of unpublished work.

He was enigmatic in a hundred ways. He didn’t do readings. He didn’t teach. He didn’t like big cities. As a baby, he’d been abandoned at the Emery Home for Unwed Mothers near Hattiesburg, Miss. His well-to-do adoptive father built levees along the Mississippi River’s tributaries. When [Lucinda] Williams met Mr. Stanford, he was working as a land surveyor.

Since Mr. Stanford’s death, his cult has grown, but it’s never come close to metastasizing. In large part, that’s because his work has been hard to find, issued by tiny presses and often out of print. The long-awaited publication this month of “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” gives us a chance to see him whole.

Several years ago, Ben Ehrenreich wrote about Stanford for Poetry Magazine. His searching and searing 6,000-word piece is both a profile of Stanford and the story of Ehrenreich’s own quest to unravel the man behind the myth. Not only is it a beautiful read but it also offers the most comprehensive portrait of Stanford’s life available online. Below is a short excerpt:

Some lives are too easy to read backward. Frank Stanford’s is one of those: the last page is now read as the first page—sometimes as the only page—and the first becomes illegible without the last. You may already know how Stanford’s story ends; I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t. Let it suffice to say that a literary reputation once glittering with promise has faded into a myth that grew larger than the man himself—the hard-living, fast-loving Ozark sage, spawn of Lao-Tzu and Whitman by way of Vallejo and Breton.

What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanfordedited by Michael Wiegers and with an introduction from former Texas Poet Laureate Dean Young—was published by Copper Canyon Press on April 14. NPR described the release as “the big event in poetry for 2015.”

See the sources:
1. “The Long Goodbye” (Ben Ehrenreich, Poetry Magazine, January 2008)
2. “Review: ‘What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford’” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times, April 2015)

The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…