Search Results for: The Nation

Fairyland: Memories of a Singular San Francisco Girlhood

Alysia Abbott with her father Steve Abbott, 1983. Photo courtesy of Alysia Abbott.

Alysia Abbott | Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father | June 2014 | W. W. Norton & Company | 17 minutes (4,188 words)

After his wife died in a car accident in 1973, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moved with his two-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco, a city bustling with gay men in search of liberation. Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father is that daughter’s story—a paean to the poet father who raised her as a single, openly gay man, and a vivid memoir of a singular and at times otherworldly girlhood. As noted in The New Yorker, the memoir, which vividly recalls San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, “doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history.”  Our thanks to Abbott for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here.

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I called him Eddie Body. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.

A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.

Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay. Read more…

Ghost Workers

Longreads Pick

Despite being hailed internationally as heroes, frontline health workers have been sidelined in the 3.3 billion dollar fight against Ebola.

Author: Amy Maxmen
Source: Newsweek Europe
Published: May 19, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,540 words)

A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…

The Unlikely Union of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush

One year earlier, it had been inconceivable that Reagan’s and Bush’s destinies would seamlessly merge and propel them both to the White House.

In the Pennsylvania GOP primary, Bush uttered three words that almost doomed his political rise. At Carnegie Mellon University, he dismissed Reagan’s plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget as “voodoo economic policy.”

“That really pissed off Reagan,” says Richard V. Allen, who was the Californian’s foreign policy specialist.

A month later, Bush dropped out of the race. In his diary, he pondered, “What’s it going to be like? Driving a car, being lonely around the house?”

But on a July night when Reagan was nominated, fate intervened. At 11:35 p.m., a plan to pick Gerald Ford as his running mate collapsed during a meeting between Reagan and the former president.

After Ford left the nominee’s 69th-floor suite at the Detroit Plaza Hotel, Reagan explained to his inner circle, “All this time, my gut instinct has been that this is not the right thing.”

The room was silent until Reagan asked, “Well, what do we do now?”

“We call Bush,” said Allen, who had already put out feelers to see if the Texan could embrace the platform — voodoo economic policy and all. He could.

Alan Peppard writing for The Dallas Morning News about the events surrounding the 1981 attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo courtesy of Matthew Teague

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Tested Under Fire

Longreads Pick

A detailed account of the events surrounding the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan was shot, Al Haig famously declared that he was “in control,” but it was the vice president from Texas who calmly took control of the situation.

Published: May 13, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,625 words)

Q. Sakamaki and the Art of the Socio-Photo-Documentary

Homeless people line up for food on Christmas Day at the soup kitchen at La Plaza Cultural, on Ninth Street and Avenue C. December 1987.

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (3,806 words)

 

Photographer Q. Sakamaki was born and raised in Japan, but he moved to New York City in 1986, and has lived there ever since, covering the nightclub scene of ‘80s and ‘90s New York, documenting political efforts like the anti-gentrification movement, and capturing everyday life through striking street photography across the city.

New York is not his only focus. While Sakamaki has taken photographs around the world, from Burma to Haiti, China to Kosovo, Bosnia to Israel, Palestine to Liberia, and Afghanistan to Harlem, where he resides today—it’s his Instagram feed that has recently attracted many new fans. There, his daily, often-impressionistic images communicate a sense of profundity, even melancholy, in representing the quotidian.

Sakamaki’s photographs have appeared in books and magazines worldwide and have been the subject of exhibitions in New York and Tokyo. Among the many honors he’s received are four POYi prizes, two Overseas Press Club awards, and a first prize World Press Photo in 2006. He has published five books, including WAR DNA, which covers seven conflicts, and Tompkins Square Park, which documents the Lower East Side protests of the late ‘80s to mid-‘90s. Sakamaki is represented by Redux Pictures. We spoke recently about how he got his start and how he aims to combine identity with photography.

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I’ve read that you began your career in photojournalism covering the Tompkins Square Park uprising in New York City in the late 1980s—is that right? Did you take photographs even before that, if not professionally?

I photographed before, but it was more fashion photography [and] portraits. I was doing that and trying to get a job, when something started in the Lower East Side at Tompkins Square Park. It started before ’88, the summer of ’88, and then continued until the middle of the ’90s, depending on people’s definition of what is a movement. It was like a real melting pot, there. The only real melting pot I’ve ever seen in New York City. Not like here [in Harlem] today. But anyway, after [the Tompkins movement in reaction to gentrification and other labor issues], I decided I would like to cover more—I don’t like the term photojournalism. [We’ll return to this later.]

I used to be very political, when I was 13 or 14 year old. Then I loved fashion and entertainment in my late teens. So the Tompkins Square Park movement felt like something of a flashback. Until the mid-’90s I covered a lot of New York political movements, like the anti-gentrification movement. But then the Tompkins Square Park movement was gone—with Mayor Dinkins closing the park. People tried to keep it going, but in the mid-’90s, they couldn’t. So the mid-90s in New York started to feel very boring for me. I started to pay attention more to outside, worldwide. I went to many conflict zones, war zones—to Haiti, Cambodia, and Israel, Palestine, then Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia. Read more…

When Conservation Threatens Indigenous Peoples

But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced for the sake of environmental preservation, data from the UN and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on park footprints and population density estimate that the total number of removed people could be near 20 million.

These are our world’s conservation refugees—from the Dominican Republic to Kenya, Bolivia to Brazil. They are the Batwa of Uganda, who were forced out of their native forests when they were falsely accused of killing silverback gorillas. Many are now squatters without access to water or sanitation, living on the edge of parks that protect the great apes. They are the Hmong of northern Thailand, who were plunged into food shortage when the government, under pressure from the UN’s Global Environment Facility, created a national park system. This presaged the arrival of men with guns, giving them no option but to give up their way of life.

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky writing for Vice about the dark side of ecotourism and how it has affected Tanzania’s Masai people.

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Between Generals: A Newly Translated Short Story by Antonio Tabucchi

Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, via Wikimedia Commons

Antonio Tabucchi | from the collection Time Ages in a Hurry | Archipelago Books | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,194 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a newly translated short story from Time Ages in a Hurry, a collection by Antonio Tabucchi, as recommended by Longreads contributor A. N. Devers

“A result of living in a place as inescapably public as New York City is that its people are deeply private in public spaces — eye contact on the street and subways is actively discouraged and conversation between strangers is kept to a minimum — making it easy to forget that its greatest asset is the stories of its people. We’re reminded of this in “Between Generals” a quiet and nuanced portrait of a man by the late Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, in which we learn about the complicated history of one of New York City’s immigrants, a former Hungarian General who realizes he spent one of his best days with his worst enemies. Newly translated into English by novelist Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani  for Archipelago Books, Tabucchi’s stories in Time Ages in a Hurry are careful, nuanced, and smartly skeptical of memory and experience.

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The Rise of ‘Mama’

Photo: arileu

Elissa Strauss | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (4,006 words)

 

I first noticed “mama” while pregnant with my son in 2012. I was browsing on the internet—familiarizing myself the different types of mothers out there, trying to figure out what kind of mother I might become—when I noticed a number of alternative moms who referred to themselves as “mama.” This was the radical homemaking, attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding bunch, and “mama” was right at home with their folksy, back-to-the-earth approach to motherhood.

This use of mama can be traced back to women like Ariel Gore, who began publishing her alternative parenting magazine “Hip Mama” in 1993. Inspired by her experience as an urban single mom, the magazine became the source of parenting advice for riot grrrl types, tattooed and pierced women who wanted to find a way to embrace parenthood while simultaneously rejecting much of the bourgeois accouterment that comes along with it.

This fringe quality of “mama” stuck, leading to websites like the “Wellness Mama,” the home of a popular alternative lifestyle guru named Katie who is into stuff like, “cloth diapering, natural birthing, GAPS dieting, homeschooling, not eating grains, making my own toothpaste, drinking the fat and more.” For her, being a mama isn’t just about parenting one’s kids, but seeing parenting as a medium through which one can change the world.

“Here’s the thing, I can’t change the health of the world alone, but I’m absolutely convinced that as a group, women and moms can. … Not only are we raising the next generation, feeding them, teaching them, etc but we control the majority of food dollars spent around the world.”

She continues by explaining that being a “Wellness Mama” is a way for women to counter any criticism they might receive for being a stay-at-home mom. “I hope to make being #justamom just a little easier for you.” Mama isn’t just a pet name, it’s a manifesto. Read more…