Search Results for: The Nation

The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole

Carrie Frye | Longreads | December 2014 | 16 minutes (4,064 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

 

As a child, Horace Walpole frequently heard it said of himself that surely he would die soon. Born in England in 1717, the last of his mother’s six children, he was fragile and prone to illness from birth. Two siblings before him had died in infancy, and so in the family order it went: three older children, loud, healthy and opinionated; two grave markers; and then young Horace toddling up behind—half child, half potential grave marker.

Naturally, his mother, Catherine, spoiled him. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was the King’s prime minister. This often kept him away from home, as did a long-time mistress who acted, more than his wife did, as his hostess and companion. For her part Catherine had her own dalliances. It was that sort of marriage. The Walpoles of old had been middling country gentry—ancient name, quiet prosperity—before Robert had come along and, through a blend of shrewdness and charisma, wolf-halled his family into riches and the nobility. When Robert was young, the hope for him was that he might one day make a fine sheep-farmer; he died the first Earl of Orford, after a 20-year run as prime minister, a colossus of English history.

His son Horace worked himself into history another way. In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there.

Then one summer, sitting in his castle’s library, he wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. Its setting was a medieval castle, not unlike his own mock-castle in many of its details, but grown, in the way of novels and dreams, into something grand and imposing. There the villainous Manfred schemes to block the return of the castle’s rightful heir, a young man named Theodore. Commonly pegged as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto turns 250 this year. It’s a strange, great, terrible, campy novel, slim but with some paragraphs so long and dense that you have to slash your way through. If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s Castle. (Presumably with some lightning flickering dangerously nearby.) Read more…

York & Fig: At the Intersection of Change

Longreads Pick

An examination of how the neighborhood of Highland Park in Los Angeles is quickly gentrifying. The team at Marketplace interviewed current and former residents, business owners, and investors and developers to paint a full picture of what’s occurring.

Author: Staff
Source: Marketplace
Published: Dec 1, 2014
Length: 36 minutes (9,005 words)

Pack Your Bags! Five Stories About Why and Where We Move

Photo: TheMuuj

Last week, I became Someone Who Lives in Sin with Her Boyfriend in a Downtown Apartment, whereas before I was Someone Who Chose to Do a Service Year in Baltimore and Therefore Lives with Her Parents Long After. Luckily, my parents live 20 minutes away; circumstance leads me to move in spurts, a box here, a shelf there. My new place is lovely—third floor, historic, quirky—and frustrating, but it is mine (ours), and no one else’s, and there is power in something coming true that I thought, in my darkest moments, might never happen. Moving is on my mind, so here are five essays about relocating, repacking, and rearranging.

1. “Moving For Love: The Modern Relationship Milestone.” (Ann Friedman, The Cut, April 2014)

From Mars to Madison, Wisconsin, “following” your partner across town or across the country can foster resentment or strengthen your relationship. Ann Friedman, one of my favorite journalists, explains how shifting societal norms and evolving technology encourage folks to take the plunge or remain long-distance.

Read more…

The End of the Trail

Longreads Pick

The strange saga behind The End of the Trail, one of the most recognizable sculptures of Western art, and the “odyssey of chutzpah and horse-trading” that brought it to Oklahoma’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Author: Mark Brown
Source: This Land Press
Published: Dec 3, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,162 words)

Leaving Fraternity Culture Behind: Our College Pick

This week, Wesleyan University administrators banned social events at a fraternity through the end of 2015. This rule came some months after the school decreed that all recognized fraternities must become co-educational within the next three years. Wesleyan administrators say they are acting in an effort to reduce the number of campus sexual assaults: “any campus-based organization that has sponsored events that create conditions with a higher risk of violence, including sexual assault, also will be held accountable.”

In an essay he wrote about leaving his fraternity, Wesleyan University senior Scott Ellman considered his school’s sexualized culture and his own discomfort within it: “I’d only recently begun to consider my complicity as a fraternity brother in the greater context of sexual violence in the American higher education system and how its corresponding language is deployed on college campuses across the country.”

Why I Quit My College Fraternity

Scott Ellman | Mic | July 11, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,238 words)

Meet the Kids Who Don’t Want Toys For Christmas

Photo: ThinkStock

It had been only two days since Ruth Soukup had re-organized her daughters’ room, and there were still a few toys on the floor that her kids, then three and six years old, refused to pick up. “I would say to the girls, ‘If you can’t take care of your stuff, I’m going to have to take it all away,’” Soukup recalls. It was an empty threat, until that afternoon when Soukup realized she genuinely “wanted it all gone.”

Very calmly, Soukup started taking everything except for furniture out of their room and amassing their toys into a gigantic pile.

She took away all their dress-up clothes, baby dolls, Polly Pockets and stuffed animals, all of their Barbies, building blocks and toy trains, right down to the furniture from their dollhouse and play food from their kitchen. She even took the pink Pottery Barn Kids comforter from their bed.

Her kids stared at her. Soukup was surprised, too. She couldn’t believe how much stuff had amassed in her home, especially in lieu of her recent efforts to donate, de-clutter and organize.

“It was a shock, kind of,” Soukup says. “I thought, ‘What are we doing with all this stuff? How could I let that much stuff come into my house?’”

She was also stunned at what happened next.

Soukup had expected crying and wailing and protesting from her kids, but they were unfazed by the ordeal. They resolved to play without toys, saying, according to Soukup, “That’s okay, Mommy, we can just use our imaginations.”

– Are toys integral to child development or do they hinder creativity? Gina Ciliberto talks to parents who adopted a minimalist approach to gift-giving and child-rearing at Narratively.

Read the story

This Is Living

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Charles D’Ambrosio  | Loitering | November 2014 | 25 minutes (5,836 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

Loitering: New & Collected EssaysFor our latest Longreads Exclusive, we are delighted to share “This Is Living,” an essay from Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering: New & Collected Essays, published by Tin House. Subscribe to Tin House and check out their book titles. Buy the book

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money. Read more…

How to Fake a Medieval Fresco in Third Reich Germany

Down in the schwahl, Malskat and the Feys set to work, attempting to reclaim history by scraping away the paint with which Olbers had tried to recapture the past. But subtracting what their predecessor had done—whether on account of Olbers’ pigments or the Feys’ incompetence—left almost none of the original paint. A nearly 700-year-old national treasure had vanished, and Ernst Fey was legally responsible for the disappearance.

Most likely Fey was the one to think of a fix. Unquestionably Malskat was the one who achieved it. Over the next several months, the erstwhile housepainter whitewashed the brick, discoloring his lime with pigment to give the walls an ancient tint. Onto this fresh surface he painted freehand his own version of the murals. Necessarily these were based on Olbers’ 19th-century restorations, reverse engineered to approximate the early medieval originals by reference to period examples in the professor’s catalogues. Drawing his figures in earth tones, Malskat took up the spare 14th-century style with preternatural ease and an utter lack of inhibition. He rendered his father as a prophet, and gave Christ the face of an old classmate. For the Virgin Mary, he had to look farther afield to find a suitable model, choosing a woman already widely worshipped—the Austrian movie star Hansi Knoteck. (Apparently 20th century art forgers had a thing for actresses. For the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, it was Greta Garbo.) Ernst Fey then aged the contour drawings using a procedure he called zurückpatinieren—a fancy word for rubbing them with a brick.

Jonathon Keats writing in Art & Antiques Magazine about how Lothar Malskat crossed the line between art restoration and forgery in a bombed-out church in wartime Germany.

Read the story

Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction

Genre literature has power. Mainstream science fiction, historically, has a representation problem. (Why are there no black people in the future? Or, better yet, why is there only one black person in the future?! Did LGBTQ people disappear, too?) Where does that leave us? When I see a white-dominated cast in a sci-fi movie, or read a novel laced with not-so-subtle homophobia, it’s hard for me to believe that our imaginations cannot see beyond the basic power structures influencing our lives today and create something new. That’s why I’m intrigued by African sci-fi and Afrofuturism. I’ve included essays about women in sci-fi, as well as queer representation in the genre, because it’s a thrill to see traditionally marginalized groups take on a genre that has so much to offer them. Sci-fi should be for everyone.

1. “Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again).” (Rose Eveleth, The Atlantic, November 2014)

Women have been writing sci-fi for hundreds of years. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

Read more…

Interview: Former ‘Matilda’ Star Mara Wilson on Leaving Hollywood and Becoming a Writer

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | Nov. 2014 | 15 minutes (3,798 words)

In 1994, when she was seven years old, Mara Wilson appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric to promote a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, in which she starred.

Right away, it’s easy to see why Wilson, who’s also known for her work in Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, is a successful and endearing child actor. She wears a red-checked gingham shirt underneath a wooly red cardigan, and her feet stick straight off the armchair on which she sits, too short to reach the ground. Wilson is missing teeth, and despite lisping, her diction is perfect and she’s polite and sincere with Couric, who mispronounces Wilson’s first name. Couric asks Wilson if she’d like to be like Natalie Wood someday—Wood played Wilson’s role in the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. Wood started acting as a child, and in Couric’s words, grew up to be “a very famous, well-known, talented actress.”

Wilson hesitates, and you can see her thinking as she wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I might not want to be an actress all of my life.” Wilson says she wants to be a “script writer” and that while she hasn’t yet written down any of her stories, “I have a lot of them in my head.”

Read more…