Search Results for: The Nation

The Startup Stampede to Warby Parker Everything

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Do you love your Warby Parker glasses? Do you love how you never had to leave the house to find the right style of frames for your face? I do, and I actually love leaving the house. At Inc., Tom Foster examines how the direct to consumer (or DTC) movement started, and talks with some of the entrepreneurs trying to tap the market.

Many new DTC startups are hatched by digital natives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which educated such innovators as Elon Musk and Warby Parker’s co-founders. The list of product categories that entrepreneurs are trying to give the Warby Parker treatment is enormous: bras, sofas, napkins, and razors. Like everything in the capitalist jungle, not all of these companies will survive. But the ones who become the next Warby Parker, now worth $1.75 billion, could become tomorrow’s legends at Wharton.

The appeal of the DTC movement goes like this: By selling directly to consumers online, you can avoid exorbitant retail markups and therefore afford to offer some combination of better design, qual­ity, service, and lower prices because you’ve cut out the middleman. By connect­­ing directly with consumers online, you can also better control your messages to them and, in turn, gather data about their purchase behavior, thereby enabling you to build a smarter product engine. If you do this while developing an “authentic” brand─-one that stands for something more than selling stuff─you can effectively steal the future out from under giant legacy corporations. There are now an estimated 400-plus DTC startups that have collectively raised some $3 billion in venture capital since 2012.

If Wharton has become the spiritual center of the DTC startup movement, David Bell is its guru. A tall and tousle-haired Kiwi who comes off more like an edgy creative director than a professor, Bell has advised the founders of and invested in most of the DTC startups with Wharton roots. An expert in digital marketing and e-commerce, Bell first got a taste for investing when Jet.com founder Marc Lore (another Wharton alum, now at Walmart) invited him to put early money into his first startup, Diapers.com. When the Warby Parker founders were still in school and conceiving their company, the professor helped them refine its home-try-on program, arguably the key to getting people to purchase glasses online.

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Forgetting the Madeleine

Frances Leech

Frances Leech | Longreads | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,315 words)

 

I have friends in Paris who are now 4 and 6 years old. When I ring the doorbell at their apartment, I hear a clamor of footsteps and shouts of “Frances” and “Frances-madeleine” as they fight to open the latch, just within reach of small arms.

“What did you bring?” asks the boy, searching me for a telltale tin or box.

Tu es une PATISSERIE,” says the girl: you’re a bakery, or a baked good. I do not correct her.

Then they remember: “bonjour,” “bonsoir,” a kiss on the cheek. They pull me away like tugboats to see their room. At one birthday party they kidnapped me so fast that the adults did not find me for half an hour. I was busy being dive-bombed by toddlers and pretending to be the wolf.

They are curious about many things: trains, love, my cat whom they have not yet met, all of the cooking that happens in their narrow kitchen. They know if they ask “what is it?” they will receive un petit bout: a morsel of chocolate or a scrap of herbed fat, something to test for themselves. Or someone tall will hoist the child up to watch bubbling sugar turn to caramel — from a safe distance — before chasing them out. “Go play with your kitchen!” They have a wide selection of plastic fruit, vegetables, pizza, cakes.

“What did you bring?”

This particular afternoon I only brought a pan. I showed it to them.

“Can you guess what we are making today? It begins with an M…”

“MACARONS!” The boy loves them, for their melting sweetness and array of colors. Whenever I make a butterfly or flower in pastel colors, I save one for him.

“No, it begins with an M and it’s also in my name.”

“MARIE!”

“No, that is maman. It looks like a shell but you can eat it.”

I find madeleines are often bland rather than exceptional, whether it’s the spongy ones in supermarket packets or the pâtisserie ones that are prettier than they taste. I’d rather dip a boring digestive biscuit in my tea and know what I am getting. I’d rather be named after an éclair. But I will make madeleines for these two French children. I can’t resist their big eyes and round cheeks, and neither can their local baker’s wife: she always slips them a chouquette or a little cake when their parents pop in to buy bread.

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A Pyramid Scheme for the Social Media Generation

Moritz Vennemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

The movie Wolf of Wall Street launched an untold number of copycats, inspired by protagonist Jordan Belfort’s self-made riches, undeterred by his downfall, and using Instagram and Twitter to sell their scam.

For The Guardian, Symeon Brown exposes this subculture of social media charlatans dubbing them”the wolves of Instagram.”. Posting photos of themselves in fancy clothes with luxury vehicles, they sell an image of self-made success  to entice followers to invest in a shady financial product called a binary option, which has been outlawed in some countries. But these influencers are just the marketing outreach for larger companies, and a lot of their personal wealth exists only online and in their imaginations. A binary option isn’t trading. It’s gambling, and it’s rigged against the neophytes, who are often vulnerable young people with little money to waste.

The mystery is how such complex products became an internet youth craze. And this is where the wolves of Instagram swagger in. Oyefeso described himself as a social media “influencer”, which means he and others like him can use Instagram and Twitter to sell the trading platforms a supply of teenagers and young adults with limited knowledge of the money markets and a hunger for success.

This is how it works. Oyefeso posts images of luxury goods he claims to have bought with his winnings. He gives the pictures hashtags such as #richkidsofinstagram and mass-follows young people online. One teenager told me he and his friends were drawn in by the sight of a young black man who grew up on a council estate similar to theirs, driving a Rolls-Royce. As soon as anyone follows Oyefeso back, he slides into their DMs with a message: “I’m offering a great opportunity to earn £100-400+ per week from trading, no experience required, all done from home and only requires 15-30 min per day.” If you’re young, poor and want to defy the odds against you, the next question is: where do I sign up?

What wolves like Oyefeso fail to declare is that each of the trading platforms you sign up to (with a minimum deposit of £250) pays him around £40-80 – and that recruitment, rather than betting on these predatory financial products, is the way he makes his risk-free money (Oyefeso maintains he’s making money from trading). Young people join the platforms, make a few trades and can lose anything between £250 and several thousand pounds, then realise they can make it back by repeating the trick: becoming a paid marketing affiliate masquerading as a successful trader. It looks like a vintage pyramid scheme, rebooted for the social media era using a model of e-marketing that has boomed over the last 20 years.

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“This Is Our Regional Refugee Crisis”

Marchers in Minnesota protest Trump's immigration policies and call for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) for countries like El Salvador and Haiti. (Photo by Fibonacci Blue via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))

Rosi fled El Salvador after being threatened by members of the Barrio 18 gang and came to the U.S., eventually having a daughter here. Immigration-rights activist Allegra Love took on her asylum case — it was a weak case, but prosecutorial discretion gave locals officials to close it out and Love was hopeful. Then Trump’s administration changed the rules, and Love withdrew as Rosi’s attorney; since she isn’t fleeing persecution based on her identity and immigration prosecutors no longer have the same leeway, her situation puts her in a no-woman’s-land of U.S. immigration law. Justine van der Leun, writing in VQR, reports Rosi’s story.

At the same time, people who exist in between categories—needing help but not qualifying for asylum—are left in limbo, and are eventually forced to disappear or are caught and deported. Among them, anyone who fears for his or her child’s life, or has nothing to eat, or wishes to reunite with his family, may well return, repeatedly, crossing a national border no matter the danger, no matter the agents, no matter the fence.

“This is our regional refugee crisis,” David Baluarte, Associate Clinical Professor of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law, told me. “But we would rather view it in terms of a security crisis. That’s politically useful, and it plays into concerns Americans have about shifting demographics, and what we are doing with public resources.”

This is how Rosi and many thousands like her found themselves in an impossible bind. And while Love appreciated how punishing Rosi’s circumstances were, she also knew that Rosi didn’t have a winnable case. Love couldn’t take on such a loss. It was particularly hard for her to come to this conclusion because, as she explained, “I can’t say no. And I love, like, everyone.” But she already had too much on her plate.

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I Dream of Content-Trash

Longreads Pick
Author: Zach Webb
Source: The Baffler
Published: Apr 25, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,787 words)

It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

Death Row / Interscope Records, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,912 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In the entirety of 1990, exactly one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. This was “Ice Ice Baby,” and the LP whence its dope melodies came, To the Extreme, also ruled the Billboard album charts for the final eight weeks of that year — knocking off the previous number one, another rap record, Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. (It turned out that if U were Vanilla Ice, U could, in fact, touch this.) As the nineties rush-rushed in, aching to break out of the previous decade’s noxious forcefield of Aqua Net, one thing was clear: American Top 40 radio was ready for hip hop — so long as it was squeaky clean, or, failing that, performed by a white guy with the wackest eyebrows in history.

By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted almost beyond recognition. Synth-pop was the stuff of nostalgia nights; rock was emitting the first gurgle of its death rattle (which sounded like this); and what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in “mainstream” (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.

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Searching for a Future Beyond Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg
Jose Luis Magana / AP Photo, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

 Jacob Silverman | Longreads | May 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

 

 

For the better part of two decades, an important set of assumptions has underwritten our use of the internet. In exchange for being monitored — to what degree, many people still have no idea — we would receive free digital services. We would give up our privacy, but our data and our rights, unarticulated though they might be, would be respected. This is the simple bargain that drove the development of the social web and rewarded its pioneers — Facebook, Google, and the many apps and services they’ve swallowed up — with global user bases and multi-billion-dollar fortunes. Read more…

Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…

Captive Audience

Lucas Mann | Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV | Vintage | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,553 words)

Hi (: I am ______, I am a 17 year old with a story.

I want to quit feeling like I am not important. I want to be somebody in my life, I do not want to be remembered as some face in the yearbook, I want to be heard. Currently, I make youtube videos, and I have 317 subscribers. I know it is not a big number, but I am finally being heard by some people and I love it. I just want to make people happy, in any shape or form. Putting a smile on people’s faces is my dream! If I could be casted on this show, my life would be complete. I just want people to know me more than just some girl who likes makeup. I want people to know who I am. My family is not against this, but they do think I should focus on school, which I agree with but this is my dream.

Height: 5 feet 5 inches
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Dream: This.

Please help me reach for the stars, this is my dream and if it comes true, I can’t even imagine my life. Help me out (: Help me be heard.

— from the Casting Call Hub website http://www.castingcallhub.com

I have, for a long time, suggested that we get rid of cable. I have even suggested that we throw out our TV altogether so that we may eat at our actual kitchen table and play more Scrabble. I’d say these suggestions come biannually, on average — they used to be more frequent, then ebbed, and are now increasing again. They have been going on for the better part of a decade. They arise, as most of my impulses toward change do, out of feelings of shame. They arise when we open up our home and visitors see the way we live — by which I mean what we watch and the frequency with which we watch it — and make remarks that I take to be scornful:

I cannot believe you guys have all the channels.

Or: How can someone retain so much information about Bravo?

Or: How do you do it? If I had cable, I think I would forget how to live. It’s just too easy to let your mind get lost in the slush and forget to look up.

It seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored.

The relationship between television and life is loaded. The relationship between television and love is, perhaps, even more so. Life, the way I think the term is most commonly used, is about action. Go out and live is the kind of thing that people say to those they deem flawed — ride something, climb something. Engage. Or it can be used as an insult to those who have nothing valuable to offer: get a life.

Love, the way I think the term is most commonly used, necessitates the same action. Loving passively is as shameful as living that way. When we love fully, we are doing something to make that love valid; it’s a conscious process, it’s active. Two people see each other in a way that elevates the act of sight to a challenge that must be confronted. Two people refuse to take their eyes off one another; that’s the idea. When we love fully, we are meant to engage.

*

For a long time, when you would refuse to give up television, I would pretend to be grudgingly acquiescent, as opposed to relieved. You would placate me and say that our watching was your fault, that I was merely implicated by association, the same way it is when I buy ice cream and offer you some — those aren’t your calories if you didn’t seek them out. We would, as a way to avoid any long-term legislation, briefly turn off the TV and spend the following hours in a sort of mutual meditation, leaning over the table at dinner, sometimes by candlelight, taking in the contours of the face in front of us, as though it had changed from the previous day, and the one before that, and the countless expanse of days that stretched out behind us (nearly every day of our adult lives), making us forget what it felt like to not know that face.

The literature of love, both the bad kind and the good, hinges on this type of sustained gaze. And, though the word boredom rarely comes up, it seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored. I’m thinking of Keats here, in one of those gorgeous poems to Fanny that I once read aloud to you in college, the last time neither of us owned a TV. I read to you of Keats wishing only to be:

. . . gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast. . . .

People used to live at such a slow, sensual pace. This is the kind of thing I still say on the nights when the TV is off. Nostalgia is all wrapped up in slowness. How long we used to linger. The capacity we used to have for sustained care, sustained concentration, sustained quiet.

My favorite book about love is John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Berger wrote it in 1984 — an early–MTV era book — but he wrote with a slowness that implies timelessness, that makes a piece of writing feel resonant, or maybe the word is authentic. He was an aging icon in the French Alps then, describing the way his life had moved, the way he’d seen the world change, but at its core the book is a missive to his lover.

He writes of when he is without her, thinking of her, how she shifts in his imagination:

In the country which is you, I know your gestures, the intonations of your voice, the shape of every part of your body. You are not physically less real there, but you are less free.

How strong a gaze; how long lasting — until his love (who remains unnamed throughout) becomes the image of herself, a creation of his mind and memory as much as the person he knows. There is a bending of reality in this sentiment, and in turn a sort of dehumanizing, but in Berger’s hands it doesn’t feel gross. Instead, it is a way of seeing I aspire to. It’s the elevation of a person to art: to speak to the one I most care for and hopefully witness a grander sentiment (Love! Timeless love!) whisper out from the intimacy of that address. But Berger wrote these words long before anyone ever wrote the word mansplain, and I wonder now if he might ask for a do-over And I wonder, too, if I should try to find a better way to capture and perform my own love. You don’t need me to tell you what’s there, what’s been there, like it’s a show that only I’ve been watching. And yet I do, uncertain, trapped in my own voice, hoping you see at least a sliver of yourself in the portrait, frozen in sustained care.

We went to the Alps once, with your sister and a bunch of other leather-clad Europeans. All that money blown to spend New Year’s partying at high altitudes. Everybody else went skiing, but you knew I couldn’t, so you let me avoid the embarrassment by staying behind in the cabin. I spent a week binge-watching over bad Wi-Fi, and that experience of waiting for the screen to unfreeze while cold rain pecked at the windows of a moldy chalet only ratcheted up the claustrophobia. I watched. Sometimes I walked until I got bored, then returned to the screen again. I waited to hear you come in the door, and we’d put our cheeks together so I could absorb some of the cold from you.

On New Year’s Eve, after a long party, we lay in bed unable to sleep. The shadows of the mountains were maybe visible through our window, framed in moonlight, but we weren’t looking. We watched each other’s faces and waited for the laptop to buffer. Finally, we were able to watch The Real L Word, a show about actual lesbians in LA, developed to capitalize on the success of a show about fictional lesbians in LA that I never had any interest in watching. It’s a program we’ve only ever sought out in transit — in a motel in Pennsylvania, mid-move, U-Haul packed in the parking lot, dog whimpering at the sound of trucks passing outside, or in a semisecluded corner of O’Hare Airport on a night when all connections were grounded for tornadoes.

Sometimes it’s nice to match moods, to decide on that mood matching together. There’s a restlessness to The Real L Word that appeals only in restless moments. There’s a pulsing crassness to the way the most intimately personal is made to feel branded. The women fuck desperately in some scenes, and with the lights on, no pretense that they’re unaware of the cameras. They look up, let us see their faces, and then plunge their heads back between legs. In the nonfucking scenes, every word they say is loaded with as much pressure as sex; anything said about anyone can be taken as a slight. It’s easy to get a sense that they don’t know one another at all, or maybe they really do and this is how shallow knowing someone actually looks when there’s a camera around — another loaded thought.

Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility.

We were on the futon in the dark, in the Alps, listening to the party die down, and there was Whitney on screen, fucking white-dreadlock Whitney, celebrity makeup artist-cum-minor-celebrity, confessing in the confessional room after a pretty graphic tryst with her on-again-off-again.

Lust is easy for me, she said in front of a bright-red curtain, for some reason. Love is hard. Lust is exciting. Love is scary.

We looked at each other, like always. We didn’t say anything, but let Whitney’s cutaway lines hang between us as a question or an invitation. I saw your face, pale, and my face reflected in your dark eyes. It doesn’t take much to approximate profundity. At least not to me.

***

I’ve written about a lot of things, or it seems that way to me, but ultimately they’re all kind of the same thing. I write about loneliness, or dissatisfaction, or incompleteness. I have tried, in different (though not very different) ways, to make sense of the things that hurt. What is harder, and what I have avoided, is trying to honor the truth of everything that doesn’t hurt: that I am not alone; that (although I am reluctant to say the phrase exactly because of Jerry Maguire) I am closer to feeling complete because we are together; that often, in our little house in front of our big TV for hours until my eyes begin to sting, I am satisfied.

This is hard to reread after writing it. It seems an impossibly small statement to make, one meant to be offered only semisincerely, and a bit drunkenly, at special-occasion dinners.

Barthes says that love, as a subject, has been driven to the backwater of the “unreal.” Then, he strives to distinguish between unreal and disreal. The unreal is the fantastical — Tristan and IsoldeIt’s a Wonderful Life, that kind of thing. In its grandness and sincerity and removal, the unreal is easier to explain, always familiar. And so it’s the love story that is easiest to find in any book or movie or TV show, allowing the audience to linger in swelling impossibility.

But the disreal, Barthes argues, is where love belongs. The disreal is lived experience, the flickering, perceived moment, unsayable — if I utter it (if I lunge at it, even with a clumsy or overliterary sentence), I emerge from it.

My problem is that I am immersed in it and because I’m immersed in it, I can’t think of anything else to utter. We are in one place: our home; we see one person: the other. What else is there to say? I want to believe that I’m not interested in fantasy. I am interested in the disreal, not the unreal, both in the art that I seek and the love that I live. But if you look at any life long enough, with enough vested interest, how do you not begin to push toward the fantastical?


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Whenever you catch me looking at you, you say, What are you looking at? Which is a really loaded question. You know what I’m looking at — you, the person in front of me; what else could I be looking at? But what you’re asking for is the difference between image and interpretation — is what I see more interesting than what is really there, or what you think is really there? And all I can ever say is nothing. And then you roll your eyes and we become exactly what the world would expect us to be. And now I’ve gone from Roland Barthes to a sitcom punch line. I turn back to the TV.

***

It’s hard to trace an exact history of the “reality show.” The term is often applied retroactively — roots can be found in The Real World, back in the mid-nineties, or Cops in the late eighties, or in early eighties variety shows like That’s Incredible! or the seminal seventies docudrama An American Family. One thing remains consistent: it’s always been a tortured lineage, a confounding term.

The best parsing of the language I’ve read is this, from a book called Trans-Reality Television: “Reality show” as a phrase is self-confessing.

In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.

I like that the implication isn’t that we who watch so faithfully are being bullshitted, but rather that we are willfully bullshitting ourselves to get what we want. We are promised a dynamic that cannot actually ever exist, and we accept that.

More than accept it. The genre means a lot to us, to me. I’ve never expressed that sentiment with even a gesture toward sincerity because it’s embarrassing. But I think I mean it. Sincerely. At least for now I do.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

Far more than I’ve read Berger (or Barthes or Sontag, or any of the others on the grad-school syllabus that I claim shaped how I see the world), far more than we have walked through museums together (and really, how many times have I had the patience for more than one wing and the café?), far more than we’ve sat and listened and harmonized to the songs that we so seriously call ours, we have watched and internalized and discussed televised showings of spectacular reality. The Real Housewives of Atlanta (and New Jersey and New York and Beverly Hills and, to a lesser degree, Miami and Orange County), Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Real World, Road Rules, The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Love and Hip Hop, Sister Wives, Basketball Wives, Breaking Amish, Storage Wars, My 600-Pound Life, My Big Fat Fabulous Life, Shahs of Sunset, Married to Medicine, Botched, Say Yes to the Dress, Deadliest Catch, Million Dollar Listing, Intervention, The Little Couple, Vanderpump Rules — there are many more that I’m forgetting offhand, and there have been many that came and went and briefly held some importance for us, and there are many more being produced right now that we will soon adopt. These are the narratives that have underpinned our lives. These are the types of stories that we choose to live alongside.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. A part of what — and, more important, how — you remember.

***

We’re on your bed next to the window in your dorm room and we’re nineteen. I’m running my hands along your tattoo, your first one, and you tell me to stop because you don’t like your body, and I tell you that I do. You don’t believe me.

We ask for everything about each other, the kinds of details that other people wouldn’t know, as though that will confirm the importance of our conversations. My first memory was of a red vacuum cleaner on the gray carpet of my mother’s apartment on East Sixth Street. I was scared of the noise it made. It was a cramped basement apartment, and every sound was loud. I was frightened often. This was Alphabet City in the late eighties, and outside our windows I could see and hear the pacing boots of methadone patients waiting for their morning fix.

“Oh, I can picture you,” you say. “Were you blonder? Were you chubby?”

I was, both. And I want you to picture me that way: a cherub in a hard, looming world.

I do remember the vacuum cleaner, and that the carpet was gray. I have heard about the methadone clinic from my mother, mostly cheerful stories about me getting free lollipops. I don’t remember it, but I can picture it now, too.

You are running your fingers through my hair and smiling at what isn’t an outright lie, just an interpretation, the beginning of a character that I would rather you see, another in a quickly building collection — Q: How many partners have you had? A: Plenty. Q: Wait, did you come already? A: {Indecipherable, hopefully erotic grunt}.

You say you remember almost nothing. You didn’t speak as a child, you say, like not ever, because you moved to different countries and had to start learning language all over again. You remember an overall feeling of loneliness, but hardly any images. Oh, here’s one, you say. Coming back from the beach in Italy, drinking peach nectar out of a carton — how sweet and thick and simple it was. Oh, and you had a boy’s haircut. Oh, and you were bullied for your weirdness, and your silence, so you preferred to be alone — most of the memories you have are of that pain. Oh, and one more thing: you were a liar. When you did speak, it was never the truth. And there was one particular lie you told that was too big, too painful, and you’ll never talk about it even still.

This scares me a little but mostly turns me on — a repressed past; an untellable secret; dark, brooding eyes under a strange, little-boy haircut, lonely, sucking nectar out of a carton. It becomes instantly important to know that there is something unknowable about you.

***

I keep thinking of your secrets and the lonely anger, and all those redacted memories for a while, and then I forget about them as other details emerge to pay attention to. But these plot points linger, always, making each new scene a little more enthralling, and then they resurface, brief, overpowering — reminders that we can see so much of each other, know each other as best we can, and yet always, underneath, there is the unknown.

A few years later, at a party in Brooklyn, you’re talking and drinking and laughing, and then suddenly you’re silent and flushed, looking over my shoulder, down a crowded hallway. You’ve seen someone from childhood, from an American camp you were sent to when you knew no English, and your face is the face of a silent girl, alone and enraged. At first you ask me to hide you, but then she comes up and says, “Oh my God, how crazy to see you! Remember camp? Don’t you miss camp?”

I watch you glare at her, silent for a moment, and then you crescendo into emotion. You say that you don’t miss it at all. You tell this girl that she had been so cruel — does she even remember what she did to you? She says, “No, not me,” and you stand closer to her, and say with a new force, “Yes, you.”

There are others around us at the party, turned stiff and awkward, but you don’t see anybody else. The camp girl says she doesn’t remember it the same way, but then she squeaks through an apology. You don’t accept. The crowd watches; I watch, and watch them watch you. I am transfixed — by your tears, by your rage, by this beautiful soap-opera haze that has fallen over the hallway.

On the way home you don’t bring it up. You are silent; you hold your body in what looks to be a performed, anguished seethe, and I keep stealing glances at you as we walk. Years have passed, and I still remember it, a vivid, pleasurable return each time — those mysteries in you, the pain turned to brief power, probably overblown in my mind but always potent.

* * *

Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, out in May from Vintage Books.  He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere.  He teaches creative writing at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and lives in Providence, RI, with his wife.

From Captive Audience by Lucas Mann.© 2018 by Lucas Mann. Reprinted by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

 

Listening to the Words of Puerto Rican Poet Julia de Burgos After Hurricane Maria

The flag of Puerto Rico. (Getty Images)

Artist and writer Molly Crabapple retraces the steps of twentieth century poet Julia de Burgos, who was born in 1914 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and lived and worked throughout the island, Cuba, and the United States before an early death in 1953. De Burgos is largely unknown outside of Puerto Rico; Crabapple weaves a story of the poet’s literary accomplishment and the origins of her feminist, nationalistic ideals, with that of Puerto Rico’s resilience in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

What was truly to blame for her decline? Was it thwarted ambition? Government surveillance? Poverty? Her knack for stirring up jealous gossip? The racism and sexism any brown woman would have faced? In New York, she worked blue-collar jobs: power press operator, sales clerk, seamstress. She stormed out of a factory after fighting with fascists, quit a newspaper because the director was reactionary. Her marriage collapsed in stages. She drank. She had boyfriends. This kind of hard-living, fast-loving bohemianism might have been acceptable for a Hemingway; not so much for a Puerto Rican woman.

In 1948, cirrhosis forced her into the first of a series of long-term hospitalizations. Famously, she put “writer” as her profession on the intake form for Bellevue. Staff crossed it out and wrote in “suffers from delusions.” In the hospitals, her skull was measured. She was experimented on, injected with hormones, confined to a wheelchair, exhibited to medical students. The nurses exclaimed over her kinky hair.

She kept writing. Every time she was offered a ticket back to Puerto Rico, she declined.

In 1953, six weeks out of the hospital, Julia de Burgos collapsed on a Harlem street near Central Park, and died. She was thirty-nine years old. She carried no ID and, with no one able to identify her body, was buried in a potter’s field on Hunt’s Island. After a month of inquiries, her friends in Puerto Rico located her, had her body exhumed, and brought her home at last to Carolina.

During my visit, I could not see the memorial De Burgos’s hometown had built for its most famous daughter. It was closed because of damage caused by Hurricane Maria.

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