Lapham’s Quarterly

The forgotten history of World War I internment camps, and the story of imprisoned Austrian painter Paul Cohen-Portheim.

Memories of being a Southie kid and black in a mostly white neighborhood.

Reconsidering Virginia Woolf’s time-warping novel Orlando, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

How Mark Twain turned frontier humor into literature:

It wasn’t easy. The notion that literature could emerge from the frontier’s barbaric yawp encountered violent resistance from America’s literary establishment. It didn’t help that tall tales abounded in vulgarity, drunkenness, and depravity, not to mention perversions of proper English that would make a schoolteacher gasp. Proving the literary power of the frontier would be a central part of Twain’s legacy, and a pie in the face of the New England dons who had dominated the country’s high culture for much of the nineteenth century. He wasn’t immune to wanting their approval, but he came from a very different tradition. His ear hadn’t been trained at Harvard or Yale; it was tuned to the myriad voices of slaves and scoundrels, boatmen and gamblers.

Our latest Longreads Member Pick, by Noga Arikha, author of Passions and Tempers, on the the history of personal ads. The essay was first published in Lapham’s Quarterly.

From Charlie Chaplin to the pantomime clown Joseph Grimaldi, a look at the link between depression and comedy:

Chaplin had hoped to cultivate the mind of his young wife, which he found “cluttered with pink-ribboned foolishness.” According to Harris, this meant he read long, boring books out loud and rehearsed the tragic roles he harbored secret ambitions to play. Mildred once mistook something he said for a joke and began to laugh, but soon realized her error as he flew into a fury and called her names. When they divorced in 1920, on grounds of mental cruelty, she received $200,000. “It has been said that a comedian is only funny in public,” she complained to the Washington Times. “I believe it. In fact, I know it. Charlie Chaplin, who has made millions laugh, only caused me tears.”

A neurologist helps watch over her patient as she dies at home, and wonders: Do we ever not die alone?

In twenty-first century America, there is no such “how to” manual on dying. Nor does our state-of-the-art modern medicine offer much help.

Fact: Seven out of ten Americans wish to die at home, die the Good, the Valid, Death.

Jane abhorred whispering, so Steve and I included Jane in our discussion of the mechanics of her death.

Fact: Seven out of ten Americans die in institutions, intubated, infiltrated, invalidated.

“This is a treatable problem,” Steve said.

“Yes,” I said, “but she is going to be worse off afterward.”

Our relationships between food and death. A history of the last meal:

“In America, where the death rows—like the prisons generally—are largely filled with men from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, last-meal requests are dominated by the country’s mass-market comfort foods: fries, soda, fried chicken, pie. Sprinkled in this mix is a lot of what social scientists call ‘status foods’—steak, lobster, shrimp—the kinds of foods that in popular culture conjure up the image of affluence. Every once in a while, though, a request harkens back to what, in the Judeo-Christian West, is the original last meal—the Last Supper, when Jesus Christ, foreseeing his death on the cross, dined one final time with his disciples. Jonathan Wayne Nobles, who was executed in Texas in 1998 for stabbing to death two young women, requested the Eucharist sacrament. Nobles had converted to Catholicism while incarcerated, becoming a lay member of the clergy, and made what was by all accounts a sincere and extended show of remorse while strapped to the gurney. He sang “Silent Night” as the chemicals were released into his veins.”

A brief history of Shakespeare and alcohol:

“Shakespeare didn’t just enjoy the interplay of drinking, fantasy, and theater at his favorite taverns, he also enacted this productive relationship onstage. Shakespeare began his popular comedy The Taming of the Shrew with a curious framing device, one that bears little relation to the famous barbs of the lovers’ plot. The play opens with the drunken tinker Christopher Sly arguing with a tavern hostess. He has broken beer glasses and refuses to pay. As she heads to fetch the constable, Sly falls into a stupor; upon waking, he finds himself dressed and pampered as a nobleman. This transformation has occurred because a passing Lord, who stopped at the tavern for refreshment, saw the drunken Sly and came up with a plan for his own amusement: he would take the tinker to his ‘fairest chamber’ to be pampered with ‘wanton pictures’ and ‘rose water.’ Sly then struggles comically to adjust to his dramatically changed circumstances. The prologue ends as the Lord insists that Sly enjoy himself and take in a play.”

Our latest Exclusive comes from the editors of Lapham’s Quarterly. They’ve been longtime contributors to the Longreads community, and this week we’re thrilled to present “Working the Room,” a new essay on humor and the presidency by Michael Phillips-Anderson, from their latest issue, “Politics.” (If you like this, you can subscribe to their print edition here):

“In 1848, as a young representative from Illinois, Lincoln took the House floor in support of the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor. He mocked his Democratic opponents for not gathering behind a single candidate by telling a curious anecdote:

“I have heard some things from New York, and if they are true, we might well say of your party there, as a drunken fellow once said when he heard the reading of an indictment for hog stealing. The clerk read on till he got to, and through the words, ‘did steal, take, and carry away, ten boars, ten sows, ten shoats, and ten pigs’ at which he exclaimed, ‘Well, by golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs I ever did hear of.’ If there is any gang of hogs more equally divided than the Democrats of New York are about this time, I have not heard of it.

“When Lincoln finished with a remark, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘He looks up at you with a great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs.'”