The Mysterious Miss Austen
A look at Jane Austen’s quiet, discreet life as a writer:
“In July 1809, the Austen women left Southampton to take up residence in Chawton, a small village about fifty miles from London. A cottage with six bedrooms and a sizable garden had become available on Edward’s estate and he offered to fix it up for them. The move put Austen back in the Hampshire of her youth: It was only twelve miles to Steventon, where James lived, and one mile to Alton, where Henry had a branch of his bank. At Chawton, Austen’s sole chore was to make nine o’clock breakfast, which consisted of tea and toast, leaving her free to write the rest of the day. The cottage seems to have provided Austen with the conditions she needed to thrive as a writer once again, and she immediately began revising Sense and Sensibility. Her nephew gives what has become an almost legendary account of her habits:
“‘She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by the servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her only family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which would easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming in.'”
Return to River Town
A writer returns to Fuling, China more than a decade after he lived there as a Peace Corps volunteer. He witnesses major changes:
“The writer’s vanity likes to imagine permanence, but Fuling reminds me that words are quicksilver. Their meaning changes with every age, every perspective—it’s like the White Crane Ridge, whose inscriptions have a different significance now that they appear in an underwater museum. Today anybody who reads River Town knows that China has become economically powerful and that the Three Gorges Dam is completed, and this changes the story. And I’ll never know what the Fuling residents of 1998 would have thought of the book, because those people have also been transformed. There’s a new confidence to urban Chinese; the outside world seems much less remote and threatening. And life has moved so fast that even the 1990s feels as nostalgic as a black-and-white photo. Recently Emily sent me an email: ‘With a distance of time, everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.'”
Death in Singapore
An American electronics engineer is found dead in Singapore. Police told the family it was a suicide, but they believe their son was murdered:
“Shane had died a week before he was to return to the US. The police said he had drilled holes into his bathroom wall, bolted in a pulley, then slipped a black strap through the pulley and wrapped it around the toilet several times. He then tethered the strap to his neck and jumped from a chair. Shane, 6ft 1in and nearly 200lb, hanged himself from the bathroom door, the autopsy report said.
“So the Todds, along with two of Shane’s younger brothers, John and Dylan, were unnerved by what they didn’t see as they crossed the threshold. The front door was unlocked and there was no sign of an investigation – no crime-scene tape, no smudges from fingerprint searches. ‘The first thing I did was make a beeline for the bathroom,’ Mrs Todd recalled. She wanted to see exactly how Shane had died – and she saw nothing that fitted the police description. The marble bathroom walls had no holes in them. Nor were there any bolts or screws. The toilet was not where the police had said.”
Michael Jordan Has Not Left The Building
The former basketball star, at 50 and not ready to retire:
“Once, the whole world watched him compete and win — Game 6, the Delta Center — and now it’s a small group of friends in a hotel room playing a silly kid’s game. The desire remains the same, but the venues, and the stakes, keep shrinking. For years he was beloved for his urges when they manifested on the basketball court, and now he’s ridiculed when they show up in a speech.”
“His self-esteem has always been, as he says, ‘tied directly to the game.’ Without it, he feels adrift. Who am I? What am I doing? For the past 10 years, since retiring for the third time, he has been running, moving as fast as he could, creating distractions, distance. When the schedule clears, he’ll call his office and tell them not to bother him for a month, to let him relax and play golf. Three days later they’ll get another call, asking if the plane can pick him up and take him someplace. He’s restless. So he owns the Bobcats, does his endorsements, plays hours of golf, hoping to block out thoughts of 218. But then he gets off a boat, comes home to a struggling team. He feels his competitiveness kick in, almost a chemical thing, and he starts working out, and he wonders: Could he play at 50? What would he do against LeBron?”
How to Start a Battalion (in Five Easy Lessons)
“If there is one thing we appreciate it is a faction that splinters into smaller factions.” A report from inside Syria:
“We in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism. Some attribute it to individualism, others blame the nature of our political development or our tribalism. Some even blame the weather. We call it tasharthum and we loathe it: we hold it as the main reason for all our losses and defeats, from al-Andalus to Palestine. Yet we love it and bask in it and excel at it, and if there is one thing we appreciate it is a faction that splinters into smaller factions. Yet even by the measure of previous civil wars in the Middle East, the Syrians seem to have reached new heights. After all, the Palestinians in their heyday had only a dozen or so factions, and the Lebanese, God bless them, pretending it was ideology that divided them, never exceeded thirty different factions.
“In Istanbul I asked a Syrian journalist and activist why there were so many battalions. He laughed and said, ‘Because we are Syrians,’ and went on to tell me a story I have heard many times before. ‘When the Syrian president, head of the military junta at the time, signed the unification agreement with Nasser, basically handing the country to the Egyptians and stripping himself of his presidential title, he passed the document to Nasser and said I give up my role as president but I hand you a country of four million presidents.’”
How Crazy Is Too Crazy to Be Executed?
A look at mental illness and the death penalty:
“The doctor would later testify that Andre was ‘really mentally ill,’ as if to stress that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill crazy person. And then there was this detail from the physician’s records: “Thomas,” he wrote, “is psychotic. He thinks something like Holodeck on Star Trek is happening to him.” If you don’t know what that is, and there is no good reason you should, a holodeck is a simulated reality facility—a place where nothing is real.
“Finally, the patient wanted to know whether he had volunteered for his life, or been forced to live it. Maybe that was the final straw. The doctor referred Andre to the hospital’s mental health unit and filled out an emergency detention order to hold him against his will. But while staffers waited for a judge to sign the order, Andre simply wandered off. The hospital called the police, but there’s no evidence that officers went looking for him at the home of Andre’s mother or any of his other relatives. The next time they saw him, he was walking into the Sherman police station to confess to killing his family.”
Don’t Be a Stranger
On the authenticity of online friendships:
“When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two strangers meeting online is still suspicious (with the exception of dating sites, whose bare utility has blunted most stigma). What’s more, online venues that encourage strangers to form lasting friendships are dying out. Forums and emailing are being replaced by Facebook, which was built on the premise that people would rather carefully populate their online life with just a handful of ‘real’ friends and shut out all the trolls, stalkers, and scammers. Now that distrust of online strangers is embedded in the code of our most popular social network, it is becoming increasingly unlikely for people to interact with anyone online they don’t already know.”
Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction
How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s:
“Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. ‘Too vile, too vulgar, too violent’ was the usual reaction, he later said. According to Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:
“Dear Fucking Cathryn,
“How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Anthologist (Excerpt)
This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes:
“Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms she can hear aloud, but not read on paper—and what is a poem other than the observer of something beautiful showing off? What is there to condense in a poem that hasn’t been done already? Why is poetry so highfalutin and important?
“The Anthologist follows a man who loves poetry but is struggling with it, or, more specifically, struggling to write an introduction to a poem anthology. He talks about poems as song lyrics, as logical progressions, and as the backbeat to all art. He answers the common questions surrounding poetry, and clarifies some of the deeper ones. If you are a writer, reading this book has a similar effect that reading High Fidelity does after a breakup.
“In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker accomplishes something amazing and resonant—reading it feels like having one of those really savory conversations with someone else, someone who ‘gets’ you like no one else at the party does.”
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When A 10-Year-Old Kills His Nazi Father, Who’s To Blame?
A 10-year-old boy suffers abuse growing up and murders his sleeping father, a member of the National Socialist Movement. What led to the killing, and did the system fail him?
“Inside the police station, Joseph sits in the interrogation room with a blanket on his lap and a McDonald’s meal on the table. Krista strokes his hand as Detective Hopewell interviews him. Joseph tells Hopewell that he was ‘tired’ of his dad hitting him and his mom. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ Joseph tells Hopewell. ‘It’s just that he hurts us.’
“He says his dad is cheating on his mother and he’s afraid if there would be a divorce, he would have to live with his father. ‘That really scared me,’ Joseph says. He tells Hopewell that Jeffrey threated to kill the family. ‘He hates everybody, even my baby sister. When someone says that about someone I really care about, I get really mad.’ Every day, Joseph says, he and his father ‘are hating each other more and more.’
“Joseph tells Hopewell that the night of the killing he woke up in his bedroom — ‘crazy in my thoughts. I think that if I shoot him then maybe he wouldn’t be able to hurt us… I started thinking I should end this father-son thing.'”
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