Search Results for: New York Times

In a World Full of Cruelty and Injustice, Becoming a Mother Anyway

LAPI / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Eliza Margarita Bates | Longreads | July 2019 | 26 minutes (6,506 words)

“How are you doing, emotionally?” the nurse asks. Her name is Yanna and she has given me her cell phone number so I can call her any time I need anything. Her voice is young and gentle. She knows everything about me — my illnesses, physical and psychiatric, my dosages of prednisone and Paxil, my weight. It’s all in my chart.

“I’m OK,” I say, not really knowing.

I’m in a drugged haze. I can’t stand up all the way, so I am leaning on Jacob, hunchbacked, as Yanna guides us to the elevator. I swipe my wristband to make the elevator come and we ride it down one floor. I follow the procedure outlined in a video that plays on loop for washing my hands, up to the elbow, slowly, slowly, before going through the double doors. When I walk into the room, I am confused. Glass boxes are scattered about, beeping, arranged seemingly without order or symmetry, but with enough space in between to allow for privacy. It takes me a moment to I realize that in each of the boxes, under wires and flashing monitors, is a baby. I start sobbing. Jacob holds my elbow to keep me upright. Yanna rushes over with a tissue, and then leads us to our own glass box.

***

At Auschwitz there is a snack bar, a vending machine, and sort of bookstore/gift shop where they sell postcards. It is a total mindfuck.

Here, you can see tourists taking photos of the former gas chambers; here, a mountain of eye glasses removed from the faces of children, mothers, grandparents, and the jerk who lived down the street before one and all were sent to die together in the gas chambers. And, here, a little way away, you can purchase a candy bar or a stale, shrink-wrapped pastry to munch on while you browse books on Nazi doctors performing experiments on disabled children.

Or you can buy a postcard. “Hey, Ma. Thought you might like this picture of a death camp. It made me think of you and, you know, being Jewish.”

Of course, I buy a postcard. How could I not? I buy three, actually. I don’t send them. I tuck them into the spine of a notebook and misplace them after my return. I buy the one with a photo of the arch that says, “Arbeit macht frei,” work will set you free. The other two, I don’t remember. I think one is of gas barrels, and another may be of starving survivors after the camp is liberated.

I hadn’t planned on going to Auschwitz. Too dark and depressing. And there so many other genocides and atrocities to learn about closer to home. But then the election happens just a couple weeks before we leave for the trip and, like buying the postcards, it seems like something I can’t not do while in Poland. I have to see where all of this could be headed.

My husband Jacob is performing at a jazz festival in a town called Bielsko-Biala. I join him there so we can take advantage of the free hotel and free ticket to Europe. I don’t see much of the town because our hotel is on the outskirts and the bone-chilling November air doesn’t inspire exploration. We are less than 45 minutes from Auschwitz.

The hotel has a casino on the second floor, a glass elevator, and a mirrored lobby. To the left of the elevator there is a restaurant and bar. In the restaurant, along with the rest of the band Jacob is touring with, we drink vodka and eat borsch on our first day in Poland. We can’t stop nervously making Nazi jokes. We all feel a little on edge being here, where the largest population of Ashkenazi Jews once lived, the site of Hitler’s most efficient genocide.

“Excuse me, waiter,” one of the Jewish band members says, after a couple rounds of vodka, raising his arm up in a mock Nazi solute, then pulling it down with his other hand. We titter and drink. The Polish waiter has his back to us and thankfully doesn’t see.

Jacob is in rehearsal all the next day. I am left alone with nothing to do. So I go to Auschwitz.
Read more…

On, In, or Near the Sea: A Book List

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Alison Fields | Longreads | July 2019 | 7 minutes (1,753 words)

My peak beach read moment came in 1999. I sat third in a line of chaise lounges — my grandmother Nana, my Mom, me, my younger sister — beside the pool at the Lowcountry beach resort we’d visited every summer since time immemorial. All four of us were sun drunk. Three of us were at least tipsy from cabana cocktails. Nana, Mom, and my sister glistened with Hawaiian Tropic — a trio of golden-tanned nereids in black swimsuits and designer sunglasses. I was lobster pink, slathered in 50+, and cowering under long-sleeved shirts and towels like I was going out for a part in a zero budget Lawrence of Arabia because genetics are cruel.

Nana wasn’t much of a reader. Her preferred tomes were pricing guides for antique Japanese porcelain and the Horchow catalog. That year, however, she’d packed a paperback copy of The Starr Report amidst her Breton tees and linen shorts. Nana was a vocal critic of the Clinton administration, a fact that surprised no one as her personal politics ran slightly to the right of Divine Right Monarchy. I supposed she thought the book would bolster her already outspoken arguments. All of us knew better than to ask. We had a gentleman’s agreement with regard to politics on family vacations, the central conceits of which were: 1. Don’t bring it up and 2. When Nana does — and she will — change the subject as quickly as possible.

In that moment by the pool, I was lost in a dream of Conquest-era Mexico, wading through a particularly muddy chapter of Terra Nostra, and I could tell Nana was on the verge of saying a thing. My sister had put on headphones and securely hid her face in her college summer reading. Mom, reading an epistolary novel about Empress Josephine, was sitting next to Nana, so she was the most easily available when Nana finally sighed dramatically and tapped her Virginia Slim impatiently against the resort-branded ashtray.

She said Mom’s name about three times. Mom might have been engrossed in her book, but Nana was persistent. When she knew she had Mom’s attention, she shoved The Starr Report toward Mom and tapped a manicured fingernail against the page.

“Honey, would you mind telling me what this is?”

There was a long pause. I listened to the splashing of swimmers in the pool, the ice clinking at the bar, the wheels on a catering tray bound for some beachside fête. I wondered Are they playing the Cardigans at the tiki bar? Mom’s pause stretched, long enough for me to realize with dawning horror that whatever text had stymied my then seventy-three-year-old grandmother was probably not a legal term.

“Anybody want another round?” I stood up and asked.

Nana waved me off, looking expectantly at my mother. Mom gave me a pleading look and told me to add the drinks to her tab.

As I walked down the boardwalk toward the bar, I could hear Mom in the same halting, careful words I remember her using when she explained certain things to me, “Well, Mother, when a man and a woman love each other very, very much . . .” I made a mental note to order Mom a double.

***

Two things I like: 1. Sitting on, in, or near enough to the sea that I can sense it, and 2. Reading books.

My inner pirate captain is a bit of a librarian. And my inner librarian is only ever a breath away from raising the sails and lighting out for ports unknown. She knows that nothing improves the reading of a novel like a salty breeze and sand on the toes, even if said salt and sand are sticky murder on a paperback. I suppose there are people that go to the beach without a book. Those people are perverse. What do they do instead, exactly? How much bocce can a human play?

This time of year friends ask me for beach books because I read more than is probably healthy. Sometimes people even want to know, specifically, what I will be reading at the beach. That’s a gamble, because it’s basically just my TO READ stack and there be monsters. Case in point: I spent the vast majority of a week at the beach some years back with Britain in Revolution, Austin Woolrych’s history of the English Civil War (the book was excellent).

I think I do okay with recommendations. The better I know you, the closer I’ll get to the mark. But critical to the whole endeavor is what you mean by Beach Book. Some people define the genre as a slightly better class of an airport bookstore read — something breezy, either plot-heavy, funny, or both, not too serious, not too academic. Some people see the Beach Book as literal — a book set on or near a beach. Sometimes these two categories overlap and that’s awesome, but you have to be very, very careful or you’ll summon Nicholas Sparks, the literary equivalent of the dude who brings a Filet -O-Fish to a Lowcountry Boil.

For today, I’m going with the second category. Books about beaches, seas, sand, and coastal destinations to accompany the end of the summer season and the first stirrings of the fall.

Let’s start close to home. Many of us end up at the beach on family vacations, always awkward, which Colson Whitehead’s sly, autobiographical Sag Harbor pretty much nails. While vacationing, questions of love and class can arise, especially if there’s marriage on the horizon as is the case in Dorothy West’s The Wedding. In Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach, friendships (and friendships with a romantic possibility) blossom around the various impediments of small-town prejudice and adolescence.

Oceanside theme parks and roadside attractions give tourists the chance to mingle with full time carnival-types, like Karen Russell’s Bigtree dynasty at their alligator wrestling park in Swamplandia, or at the eponymous, possibly haunted North Carolina theme park in Stephen King’s slim, enjoyable Joyland. Hotels can also occupy the seaside, and JG Farrell’s extraordinary Troubles offers a darkly humorous critique of colonialism and its obliviousness in face of revolution within a sprawling, cat-infested resort on the Irish coast. If you prefer your seaside hotel on the fancier end, and for your mysterious IRA man to have ‘80s hair, there’s Jonathan Lee’s haunting High Dive.

Moving to a more tropical locale does not guarantee a more peaceful plotline. Proximity to both spectacular island sunsets and titans of Reggae do not prevent against the violence and conspiracy at the heart of Marlon James gorgeous, epic A Brief History of Seven Killings. The ghosts of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic haunt the landscape in Julia Alvarez’s fictionalized recounting of the Maribal sister in her In the Time of the Butterflies. And the generations of Indonesian women inhabiting the lush, fictional port city of Eka Kuniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound survive decades of war and political upheaval amid a landscape buffeted by trade winds and a bit of magical realism.

Islands have always been ripe for troublemakers and hijinks — actual pirate captains, not just imaginary ones ideated in suburbia. Richard Hughes’ deft, surprising (based on a true story!) High Wind in Jamaica, with its pint-sized pirate ship mutineers is just about the best thing ever. Anyone who finished Lord of the Flies back in the day will not be surprised to see kids going very dark in tropical environments. Ugly things can even happen in suburban, post climate-crisis, dystopian Florida in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Things get a little weird in Florida, as in Lauren Groff’s marvelous short story collection, Florida, and really, really weird in Jeff VanDerMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy.

We’ve always known the sea is home to monsters. Sometimes the literary ones have their own perspective on events, such as in Madeline Miller’s wonderful, magical Circe. Some of those who spend their lives conjuring monsters from the deep have their own particularly monstrous ideas. Certainly that was the case with HP Lovecraft, and Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a great novel that tries to make sense of that. On the other hand, sometimes monsters end up being something quite unexpected, as in Sarah Perry’s gorgeous The Essex Serpent, a historical novel about science, faith, and love. Rarely do monsters end up being as wholly and completely hilarious as they do in Mat Johnson’s richly-imagined Pym, which takes on both Edgar Allen Poe and Little Debbie Cakes in its satirical journey through the (very) cold heart of American racial politics, past and present.

Of course, it’s never the destination when it comes to sea voyages, as much as the journey. I like journeys that say something about both the people making them and the world they are traveling through. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies assembles a fascinating, multinational cast of characters to sail upon ships carrying indentured servants between India, and continues them through the next two books of his Ibis trilogy. Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage recounts the horrors of the slave ship from the unlikely perspective of a newly freed slave who boards for its last journey. The title character of Esi Edugyan’s masterful Washington Black begins his journey in Caribbean slavery and then travels a path through several continents and scientific discoveries.

Seaside journeys also offer people an opportunity to meditate — sometimes philosophically — on their various troubles, as is the case in Rachel Cusk’s Faye Trilogy or John Banville’s grieving narrator in The Sea. Dealing with romantic disappointment might provoke an escape to the seaside, even if it happens that your ex is already there, as is the case in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. It’s also possible you might be forced to leave your seaside home, and there’s usually a price to that. Just ask the Little Mermaid or Antoinette in Jean Rhys’ dreamy Jane Eyre “prequel,” Wide Sargasso Sea.

Finally, if you’re the sort of person that demands a dense history to while away your days, might I recommend David Abulafia’s The Great Sea, a survey of the Mediterranean from antiquity to present. It’s well-written, informative, and offers a wider lens view of one of the world’s most fascinating places than, say, your fourth reread of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or that copy of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins your friend from book club loaned you. Though, indeed, both of those are peak beach reads.

Don’t forget your sunscreen, and happy reading.

* * *

Alison Fields is a writer in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Editor: Katie Kosma

‘I Surprise Myself With This Refusal To Let Go’: Kate Zambreno on the ‘Ghostly Correspondence’

Illustration Ver Sacrum, 1901, Number 4: "Duchess and Footboy" by Kolo Moser for the poem "Vorfruehling" (Early Spring) by Rainer Maria Rilke. (Imagno/Getty Image & Harper Perennial)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,601 words)

 

Since the 2009 publication of her first novel O Fallen Angel, Kate Zambreno has had one of the most fascinating careers in American letters. Her work has included harrowing explorations of alienation (Green Girl) and evocative forays into literary and cultural history (Heroines). The year 2019 has brought with it two new books from Zambreno: Appendix Project: Talks and Essays, an addendum to Book of Mutter, her 2017 collection of writing on grief; and Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing, which places a series of short autobiographical fictions in the same volume as several longer works of nonfiction, mainly art and literary criticism. The bifurcated structure of Screen Tests hints at something profound and disorienting about the not-so-clear dividing line between narrative and reality: many of the short fictions, or “screen tests” à la Andy Warhol, in the book’s first half feature real people — Zambreno herself, as well as writers and artists ranging from Amal Clooney to Susan Sontag. The screen tests grapple with their subjects’ work while addressing questions of identity and community and continuity; the critical essays in the book’s second half seem to echo themes that emerged in the screen tests. That the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurred here is precisely the point.

Zambreno’s work offers readers an intellectually rigorous experience alongside the thrill of discovery. She has several other books in the works which will also explore fiction and nonfiction in equal measure. Her next novel, Drifts, will be released in 2020, and she’s working on a book about writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, To Write as if Already Dead. Zambreno talked with me earlier this month about Screen Tests, the challenges and pleasures of writing about visual art, reading the same books over and over again, and satirizing her own role as a “minor author.” The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…

Understanding Craig Stecyk

Photos by Susanne Melanie Berry

Joe Donnelly | L.A. Man | Rare Bird Books | April 2018 | 42 minutes (8,454 words)

 

Decades ago, Craig R. Stecyk III tagged the walls near his seedy surf spot at Pacific Ocean Park, then a crumbling pier of abandoned rides and amusement parlors straddling the Venice and Santa Monica border. Among the graffiti were the terms POP and DOGTOWN running horizontally and vertically in a cross, a rat’s head in the skull’s position over crossbones, with the warning, “death to invaders.” At first, these markings were little more -than youthful insolence, meant to stake territorial claim for his band of surfers and skateboarders, many of whom were recently glorified in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. In the ’70s and ’80s, though, through enterprises like Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Surf Shop, Dogtown Skates and Powell Peralta skateboarding company, these images would become among the first widely disseminated skateboarder graphic art; the first icons of a radical, street-savvy youth culture that reflected the attitudes of Stecyk and his Dogtown peers. Meanwhile, in magazines like Skateboarder and Thrasher, Stecyk’s photos and essays about the scofflaw Z-Boys skateboarding team created and spread the Dogtown myth to eager adolescents across the country.

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This (Wo)Man’s Work

Bulat Silvia / Getty, photo collage by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  11 minutes (2,804 words)

What is it about my work that makes it so much less esteemed than so many men’s? Was it not produced with enough sweat? With enough brain power? With enough complaint? What is it that gives a man sitting in an ergonomic chair, staring at a computer screen, typing on a laptop, so much more gravitas? Maybe he’s not doing it with a fan pointed at him, like I am. Maybe he doesn’t have a bottle of water next to him. Or is it the bouquet of flowers on my desk? Does the smell transfer to my work? Is labor produced in a sweet-smelling room less insightful? If you shut your eyes and I put my work in one of your hands and a man’s in the other, will you be able to weigh the difference? What if neither of us have done anything yet? Will you be able to weigh it then?

“1 in 8 men believe they can make a better film than Andrea Arnold,” one person tweeted last week. I laughed. It was a quip amalgamating two stories that dominated social media that same week, both impressively undermining women’s work. One was a survey of 1,732 Brits conducted by YouGov that found that 12 percent of the men believed they could win a point off Serena Williams, a tennis champion who holds the most Grand Slam titles combined — singles, doubles, mixed doubles — of any player currently on the pro tennis circuit. The second was a report from IndieWire, citing a number of anonymous sources, that claimed the second season of Big Little Lies, directed by British auteur Andrea Arnold, was ripped out from under her and put back in the hands of first season director Jean-Marc Vallée to do with what he pleased. To be clear, Arnold is an Oscar-winning filmmaker who has claimed the jury prize at Cannes three times. Vallée is not. Like him, she has directed episodes on four TV series. But there’s one key thing that Vallée had that she didn’t: an established rapport with Big Little Lies creator David E. Kelley.

Oh, male bonds; so reserved and yet so unconditional. This is the kind of alliance that has Eddie Murphy backing John Landis to direct Coming to America a year after Landis was charged with involuntary manslaughter (he was acquitted). This is the kind of camaraderie that has Prince Andrew attending a welcome-back-to-New-York party that registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reportedly threw for himself. These are extreme examples, but in essence, they show men supporting men they like, no matter the quality of their work, what they’ve done. 

Imagine how men who have done nothing so problematic are treated by their male friends. Imagine if literally any women were treated that way.

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A Minor Figure

Ada Overton Walker, 1912. (Library of Congress)

Saidiya Hartman | An excerpt adapted from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval | W. W. Norton & Co. | 25 minutes (6,922 words)

The small naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. Looking at the photograph, it is easy to mistake her for some other Negress, lump her with all the delinquent girls working Lombard Street and Middle Alley, lose sight of her among the surplus colored women in the city, condemn and pity the child whore. Everyone has a different story to share. Fragments of her life are woven with the stories of girls resembling her and girls nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment. The newspaper article confuses her with another girl, gets her name wrong. Photographs of the tenement where she lives regularly appear in the police briefs and the charity reports, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. The caption makes no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar; it is how the world still remembers her. Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail that I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city. Had the photographer or one of the young men assisting him in the studio recorded her name, I might have been able to find her in the 1900 census, or discover if she ever resided at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, or danced on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre, or if she ended up at the Magdalene House when there was nowhere else to go.

Her friends refused to tell the authorities anything; but even they didn’t know how she arrived at the house on the outskirts of the Seventh Ward, or what happened in the studio that afternoon. The Irish housekeeper thought she was the black cook, Old Margaret’s, niece, and, neglecting her work as they were wont to do had wandered from the kitchen to the studio. Old Margaret, no kin to the girl, believed that Mr. Eakins had lured her to the attic with the promise of a few coins, but never said what she feared. The social worker later assigned to the girl’s case never saw the photograph. She blamed the girl’s mother and the slum for all the terrible things that happened and filled in the blanks on the personal history form, never listening for any other answer. Age of first sexual offense was the only question without certain reply.

From these bits and pieces, it has been difficult to know where to begin or even what to call her. The fiction of a proper name would evade the dilemma, not resolve it. It would only postpone the question: Who is she? I suppose I could call her Mattie or Kit or Ethel or Mabel. Any of these names would do and would be the kind of name common to a young colored woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are other names reserved for the dark: Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit — names imposed on girls like her that hint at the pleasures afforded by intimate acts performed in rented rooms and dimly lit hallways. And there are the aliases too, the identities slipped on and discarded — a Mrs. quickly affixed to a lover’s name, or one borrowed from a favorite actress to invent a new life, or the protective cover offered by the surname of a maternal grandmother’s dead cousin — all to elude the law, keep your name out of the police register, hold the past at a safe distance, forget what grown men did to girls behind closed doors. The names and the stories rush together. The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city. Read more…

When to Throw a Goodbye Party

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Joy Notoma | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,746 words)

I didn’t want a goodbye party. They always make me lonely because I can never connect with people as deeply as I want. I didn’t feel I needed one. I was happy with one-on-one time with friends during the last months before I left Brooklyn to move to Benin.

These were the days when the busyness we habitually shield ourselves with melted away. The excuses we usually find to not get together suddenly weren’t good enough; we attended to those last moments religiously, knowing that coffee dates and weekend hangs would soon dwindle to once-a-year affairs, and those even only if we were lucky. We had already seen enough life changes among us to know the fragility of our bonds — many of them were already mostly memories steeped in nostalgia for days bygone, coated with the sweetness of stories told and re-told, but brittle beneath the weight of our everyday realities. We could look at each other, our eyes shrouded in shame with the knowledge that we weren’t present for the other’s most recent tragedy, but nonetheless carrying the trust of friendship’s creed: I love you though I am not always there and if you really really really need me, I’ll do my damndest to hold you up however I can— present or not. Through this creed, we forgave each other’s absences through divorces, first years of motherhood, and even a suicide attempt. Somehow, that creed meant something even if in reality, we had not been there for each other when we were really really really needed. And then when it was decided that I was moving, all the hurts of previous absences were less important than the one that was pending.

But during my final days before I moved to West Africa, to a country that many of our friends will likely never visit, we stopped time to shore up the bonds, to declare love, and to lavishly heap that coveted resource, time, upon each other. There was no other way. We sat and laughed and celebrated and mourned the time we spent and did not spend together. I was sure that these moments with each of them were enough for me. I knew that a party would sully it.

A party would force our conversations into five-minute segments while we shifted every few seconds because we aren’t sure when, if, how we would be interrupted. A party would make it strange if eyes spontaneously filled with tears…because who can handle all that emotion when there are other people to manage and attend to? A party would make me conscious of anyone who had the need to grab and hold me tight because of my obsessive worry over anyone feeling left out. Please, I would pray for the duration of a party, let me be all things to all people.

But then during my final week in New York, something began to change. I began to crave the uncanny thrill of a crossover episode — that rare intermingling when characters from the disparate corners of my life meet on neutral ground. Against my better judgement, I decided to have a party. I sent out non-committal sounding texts: “Are you free? Thinking of a little goodbye shindig.” The replies poured in. Everyone was free. A party was happening. And then in response to the anxiety of what I had done, I lost track of the texts and replies and began to forget who I invited and who I had left off the list. In the days approaching, I kept myself busy packing my apartment, getting rid of things, and contemplating the reality of my move.
Read more…

A Once and Future Beef

Still-life illustration of a plate containing a knighted cut of beef surrounded by Yorkshire pudding and a boat of gravy. (Illustration by Henry Stahlhut/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

Will Meyer |  Longreads | July 2019 | 10 minutes (2,501 words)

 

This year beef has become yet another proxy in the never ending culture wars. Such foot-soldiers as Sebastian Gorka and Ted Cruz have stoked the flames, claiming that Democrats are going to take hamburgers away and kill cows, replacing summer barbecues with Stalinism. Of course, Democrats have no such plans, at least not yet; at this point, the Green New Deal (GND) is merely a pipe dream and hardly an actionable reality. Still, the idea that beef could become contested is what provoked reactions. A fact-sheet about the GND mentioned the carbon emissions from the meat industry, and last year’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report specifically named animal emissions and land use as issues that need addressing in order to save the planet within its twelve-year timetable.

“The forecast is bleak,” Troy Vettese writes of the IPCC report in Boston Review: “[over] the course of the twenty-first century, as the global population balloons past ten billion, the Earth simply will not have enough land to expand production for crops, meat, dairy, forestry, biofuels, as well as for various schemes to reduce carbon dioxide, while simultaneously preserving biodiversity and safeguarding the food security of the world’s poorest people.” Half of the world’s habitable landmass, he notes, is used for agriculture. Of this, just more than two-thirds is used for grazing. Of the remaining third, a third of that is used for animal feed, and a fifth for biofuels. In short, a downright incredible amount of the world’s land is used for animal agriculture. And the market for cheap beef is rapidly expanding to include the growing middle class in places like India, China, and South America, further exacerbating the problem.

As the human species faces a fork in the road of epic proportions — with survival hanging in the balance — chances are we will have to confront not only the engines of industrial capitalism, but also the diet it has subsisted on. To do that, historian Joshua Specht has turned his attention to the making of what he dubs the “cattle-beef complex,” the industrial mechanism that birthed a Red Meat Republic; or so asserts the title of his new book recently out from Princeton University Press. The book follows the development of the modern beef machine from the second half of the 19th century until the first decade or so of the 20th. From frontier settlements and the dispossession of Indigenous land to the development of transportation technology and the rise of monopolistic “Beef Trusts,” Specht chronicles what amounted to a “democratization of beef” — wherein cheap and accessible beef for the many became a signal of American progress. Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause.

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.” Read more…

Shelved: Jimi Hendrix’s Black Gold Suite

Larry Hulst / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (3,275 words)

 

On a blustery winter day in February 1970, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burks entered a New York apartment on East 37th street. “Inside his manager’s neo-turn-of-the-century apartment, on a sofa near the radiant fireplace, sat Jimi Hendrix, in a gentle, almost reticent frame of mind,” Burks wrote. “The light snow had begun to fall. You could see that through the narrow slits where the curtain allowed the merest sliver of daylight and streetscene to penetrate into the gloomy dark room.”

Burks was brought in to provide the centerpiece for a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign: a feature story about the reforming of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. The group, consisting of Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell (both of whom were white) had disbanded the previous autumn. Since then, the rock ‘n’ roll guitar virtuoso had busied himself by befriending other African Americans: Trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and (according to Burks) “living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a band of avant garde jazz/space musicians under the general leadership of a flute player named Juma — and talking about coming up with something new.”

Read more…