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How the Descendants of the Marquis de Sade Became Champions of His Once Taboo Legacy

The lurid works of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, who lived from 1740 to 1814 and died in a mental asylum, were banned in France until 1957, and the diabolical aura around his literary output has lifted only gradually. In fact, according to Hugues [a modern descendant of the Marquis, currently living in Paris], his ancestor’s very existence was erased from the Sade family memory. Hugues’ parents had not even heard of him until the late 1940s, when the historian Gilbert Lely turned up on their doorstep at the Condé-en-Brie castle, in the Champagne region east of Paris, looking for documents relating to the author. “For five generations, the marquis’ name was taboo in our family,” Hugues marveled. “It was as if there was an omertà (conspiracy of silence) against him! The family no longer even used the title marquis.”
Intrigued by Lely’s tale, Hugues’ excited parents, then young newlyweds, began to explore the rambling Condé castle, and soon discovered that a wall had been bricked up in the attic. When they broke through, they found a jumble of dusty valises filled with documents hidden some time earlier by ashamed family members—the Marquis de Sade’s letters, papers, even shopping lists scrawled on scraps of parchment.
“The letters showed Sade the man, how he was a decent human being,” Hugues said. “How he wrote touching love letters to his wife, his two sons, his daughter.”
From that day on, the Sade family dedicated itself to vindicating the memory of its forgotten ancestor, mounting a crusade that coincided with the loosening of censorship in France in the 1950s. Sade’s work became widely available in the rebellious ’60s, and the door opened for the once-disgraced marquis to become France’s most decadent cultural hero, a frenzied aristocratic libertine who is now hailed by some as a literary genius and martyr for freedom.

Tony Perrottet, writing in Smithsonian Magazine about the life and legacy of the Marquis de Sade.

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Life with Mental Illness: A Reading List

From the CBC documentary "Forever Child"

Below is a guest reading list by journalist Genna Buck. Buck wrote our recent Longreads Member Pick, “Autistic and Searching for a Home,” published by Montreal’s Maisonneuve magazine. She was generous enough to share this follow-up reading list—one story, one documentary, and three books—on what it’s like for those who suffer from mental illness, and for the families that care for them.  Read more…

Link Rot, or Why the Web May Be Killing Footnotes

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.

The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?

Jill Lepore, writing for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and the difficulties of preserving information on the Web.

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Slither and Hiss: Four Stories About Snakes

This week, I’m sharing four stories about snakes and the people who love, hate, and tolerate them in equal measure. But first, a haiku:

Scary, beautiful
Important to religion
Slithering and scaled.

1. “The Pentecostal Serpent.” (Asher Elbein, The Bitter Southerner, September 2014)

An Atlanta zoo. A dusty office at the University of Tennessee. The mountains of Appalachia. A small church in Alabama. How has the life of the handled snake touched each of these? Read more…

What It Was Like to Record Michael Jackson’s Voice

The Jackson 5 in 1972. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I was still in Detroit, and I got a call from Berry Gordy — he was out in California — and he said, “We signed these kids. We finished the album and listened to all the mixes, and I don’t like any of the mixes. I’ll send you the multitracks, and I want you to remix the whole album.” And I said, “Anything you want me to do?” He said, “No, do what you think is best.” It was The Jackson 5’s first album. I was in the studio, all by myself mixing. I’ll tell ya, the first time I heard Michael’s voice, my jaw hit the floor. “This little kid can sing!” But yeah, that’s how it started, and, like I said, that’s how he [Berry] trusted people. He trusted my ability to scrap all the mixes that he had, send me the multitracks, and say, “You do it.”

So the first time you heard Michael’s voice, would you say that you instantly knew he was the real deal?

His pitch was great and he had good emotion. He was like an adult in a kid body. He really impressed me. He wasn’t just singing words — he came from the heart. Once I moved up to L.A., I was with him a lot. Michael was a good kid; I really liked Michael. He would sit next to me in the control room and would ask, “What does this do? What does that do? Why does that happen?” He was very into the behind the scenes thing too. He was always fascinated by the equipment, how things were accomplished, and how you do it. He was very soft-spoken and very polite, until he got behind a microphone, and all of a sudden, bang — “Who is that guy?” I liked him a lot. He was a very nice person. He was genuine. It was not easy to be Michael Jackson. He couldn’t go anywhere without putting on a disguise, because he’d be mobbed. I heard one time he had never been into a grocery store, because he couldn’t even walk into a grocery store. Jermaine [Jackson] was telling me they went to a grocery store when they’d closed, and they flipped the manager a couple of bucks so that Michael could walk around. He couldn’t believe all the aisles and shelves of food — that blew his mind.

Russ Terrana, in Tape Op magazine, on his time working as Motown’s chief studio engineer.

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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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Finding Stories in Familiar Territory: An Interview With Miranda July

Photo: Todd Cole

Jessica Gross | Longreads | January 2015 | 14 minutes (3,540 words)

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Miranda July’s films, sculptures, books, and performance art pieces share not only a very particular, off-kilter aesthetic, but also a deep concern with human connection. An example of this can be found in her 2011 film, The Future, in which a couple navigates their relationships with each other, with their soon-to-be-adopted cat, and with their individual selves. July procrastinated on writing the film by visiting and interviewing people who’d listed items in the Pennysaver. That detour facilitated the screenwriting process—The Future ended up featuring one of the sellers she’d met—and formed the basis of another project, the book It Chooses You. July’s new app, Somebody, approaches human connection from a different angle: It delivers text messages to their intended recipients via the nearest Somebody-using stranger.

July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, centers on Cheryl, a forty-something woman hampered by compulsive thoughts and behaviors, a psychosomatic throat condition, and loneliness. She lusts after a man she’s met through work, and is constantly visited by the soul of a baby she had a strong connection with in childhood. Cheryl lives alone—until Clee, her boss’s blond, curvy daughter, comes to stay. Their relationship enters violent and erotic terrain, and rearranges Cheryl’s literal and internal worlds. We spoke recently by phone about her relationship with her characters, the evolution of her work, and where her novel came from. Read more…

Really Old Stuff: A Reading List About Our Prehistoric Past

Image: Lisa Weichel

Even with digital archives and electronic records keeping track of our lives, we often find it a challenge to piece together our own pasts, to say nothing of our parents’ or grandparents’. What, then, of the lives of humans and organisms whose only traces are already thousands of years old?

From an aspen colony that has been cloning itself for over 80,000 years to a coral reef fossilized eons ago, these stories bring to life irretrievable worlds and challenge our notions of time and durability.

1. “First Artists” (Chip Walter, National Geographic Magazine, January 2015)

Admiring intricate cave paintings in France, Germany, and South Africa, Walter explores how humans laid the foundation to visual art in “sporadic flare-ups of creativity” some 30,000-60,000 years ago.

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Seven Stories for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Below are seven stories about (or by) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exploring different facets of his life and legacy.

“Alex Haley Interviews Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Alex Haley, Playboy Magazine, January 1965)

King sat down for a series of interviews with the author Alex Haley shortly after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. They were edited and compiled into one interview that ran in the magazine the next year, which—according to The Daily Beast—was the longest interview King ever gave any publication. Read more…

A ’60s Poet, Mixing Images of Asia and Africa with Bohemian London

[Rosemary] Tonks’s first poetry collection, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, was published in 1963; her second and final one, Iliad of Broken Sentences, in 1967. She interweaves images of her years in Asia and Africa with snapshots of bohemian London: desert oases and mirages, jazz and cocktails. True to the first collection’s title, the poems carry a mood of chic urban dissipation. “For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness / I need the café,” she asserts in the opening of “Diary of a Rebel.” In “The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas,” the narrator complains wryly about a faux intellectual rambling on about opera and the “international situation”: He “digs himself into the sofa. / He stays there up to two hours in the hole—and talks.” Across the two books, lovers meet at dusk, flaneurs wander dusty streets, and conversations last all night.

In “Addiction to an Old Mattress,” the narrator’s imagination carries her from a dreary February in England to restorative warmth:

Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!
Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.
Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd
That’s fed on lemonades and matinees.

Though she’s stuck among the “potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know,” she describes herself as “powerful, disobedient.” But there is also a strong undercurrent of pain, exhaustion, fear, boredom, and real disillusionment in many of these poems. For a poet of “the modern metropolis,” as she once admiringly referred to Rimbaud, Tonks seems distinctly uneasy there. In “Story of a Hotel Room,” for example, a casual tryst proves emotionally dangerous:

Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection

In “Bedouin of the London Evening,” which lends the new collection its name, the poet concludes:

I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.

From an essay by Ruth Graham for Poetry Magazine, examining the career of poet Rosemary Tonks, and Tonks’ subsequent disappearance from public life.

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