Search Results for: Alexander Chee

Mountains, Transcending

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ailsa Ross | Longreads | August 2019 | 22 minutes (6,062 words)

It’s the winter of 1923 and a five-foot tall woman is shooting at brigands in Tibet. She’s surviving a blizzard by eating boot leather. She’s accepting a maggot-dancing stew from a drug-addled butcher and having a face-off with a snow leopard.

This woman is Parisian opera singer-turned-anarchist Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, and she’s kicking through Tibet’s wild hills and steppes as she strides on foot across the Himalayas from Kanchow to Lhasa.

Alexandra’s starlit memoir recounting her adventure is no Thoreauvian nature journal. This is a tale that demands to be read in a cool bed while the night paws at the windows — or in my case, by the fire while my dad watches Come Dine With Me repeats on a black January afternoon.

I started reading My Journey to Lhasa because I love adventure stories. And while I’ve never pushed myself to extremes, still I felt a kinship with Alexandra. “Ever since I was five years old,” she wrote, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.” She didn’t dream of towns or parades, but a solitary spot where she could “sit alone, with no one near.” As a child, her nannies often found her crouched behind bushes or hidden up trees in Paris gardens.

Quiet spaces — I’d needed those since I was a teenager.

I was most in search of a quiet space while teaching in Seoul in 2012. I was twenty-four and tired — of living in that crunching city of 26 million, of being in a job I was no good at, of lying awake in the self-hating 2 a.m. dark with a burnt throat from smoking cigarettes on the kindergarten rooftop. I wanted to feel clean again, like a child who’d spent the day by the sea. Read more…

An Ode to Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’

MTV, Sony BMG

I don’t quite remember the first time I heard Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” It had to be at some point in 2006, when the record was in the midst of a meteoric 42-week rise through the Billboard Hot 100 charts, but the pop ballad with a catchy beat and tantalizing first line (“I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined”) could have wiggled its way into my hippocampus even earlier and I wouldn’t have realized it. “Unwritten” was arguably the song of the 2000s; the record was inescapable, and even as background music, I’d start to hum along subconsciously, stimulating the cerebellum before I caught myself right before the chorus kicked in 47 seconds into the track: Read more…

Lumbersexuality, a Sport and a Pastime

Illustration by Homestead

Jonny Diamond | LongreadsJune 2019 | 22 minutes (5,308 words)

The sound is the first thing you notice, deep and hollow, burnished steel hitting chewed-up white pine. It’s not quite the warm, resonant thok of an axe in the woods, but the nearest forest of any significance is 50 miles up the Hudson River. This is Brooklyn, one very long bow shot from the Gowanus Canal.

It’s a chilly Monday night before Thanksgiving and Kick Axe Brooklyn is surprisingly full. Around two dozen people cluster in groups of six or eight across several “ranges,” tidily built versions of the old roadhouse bar-band cages, target at one end, party at the other. There doesn’t appear to be any flannel in the crowd (for now) but there are at least three reasonably grown-out beards in plain sight. One of the beards puts his beer down next to a basket of plastic Viking helmets and walks forward to pick up an axe from a squat round block of maple (each range has one of these blocks, to which the axe is returned after it is declawed from the wood).

Nobody pays much attention as he squares himself to the softwood target 16 feet away, holding the axe — specifically, an Estwing hatchet weighing about a pound and a half — with both hands and raises it above his head. Then, in a surprisingly fluid motion, he steps toward a faded red line on the floor and releases the hatchet in the direction of several concentric red and black circles painted on the wood, axe head over handle, where it strikes fast about six inches to the left of the bull’s-eye. He shakes his head, pulls the axe from the wood, and goes to collect his beer.

Scenes like this occur with increasing frequency in cities across North America, from Toronto to Austin to L.A., as axe-throwing clubs attempt to create their own niche and fill it, something like a laidback millennial bowling alley except with deadly weapons. For some, particularly since the election of Donald Trump, the physicality and latent violence of axe throwing has served a therapeutic purpose. As Megan Stielstra wrote in an essay last year for The Believer, “I threw axes throughout the fall, waking up every morning to new impossible cruelties. … I kept trying to pass the axe to my husband, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘You need it more than I do,’ he said from behind the yellow spectator line.”

Aside from its salubrious value the basic appeal of axe throwing is not complicated: Like bowling or billiards or darts, it is a way to give loose structure to any given social gathering. When I ask Kick Axe’s Nathan Oerstler if he’s ever had to deal with any drama among the beer-drinking axe throwers, the recently promoted “axe master” (up from “axe-pert” — there is no pun left unmade at Kick Axe, as the name might suggest) demurs, explaining that most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy. Kick Axe opened in December 2017 and is more flannel-inflected theme park than bar, its employees communicating via headset about what targets need replacing, which axes need sharpening. This level of organization makes sense when you consider the hundreds of pounds of deadly steel flying through the air at any given moment, but axe throwing wasn’t always this professionalized: In fact, the origin of the axe-throwing social club is basically a bunch of bored Canadians in the mid aughts, standing around drinking beer and chucking hatchets at backyard waste wood.

As Backyard Axe Throwing League (BATL) founder — and one of those bored Canadians — Matt Wilson recounted, people kept showing up to throw axes in his backyard, so he had no choice but to grow. And so they did: The BATL, which has 10 locations in Canada, has since expanded into the U.S. with spots in Chicago, Nashville, Scottsdale, Houston, and Detroit. This unlikely success story has spawned competitors: Ontario’s Bad Axe now has 15 locations across the U.S.; the aforementioned Kick Axe also has locations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and is opening more in Florida and Texas; and there are at least a half dozen independent axe-throwing venues across the country (including Massachusetts’s Half Axe, whose name heralds the end of the useful axe pun, or at least demarcates its nadir).

Whatever side of the border these clubs are on, most of them affect a shaggy, woodsy aesthetic, a little plaid here, some taxidermied animal there. One could say the same thing of many of their patrons, from Calgary to Orlando: red-and-black Buffalo check accenting high-cut oxblood Red Wings; gray chambray tucked into vintage denim; Carhartt jackets over Carhartt vests over old Woolworth’s shirts.

Most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy.

This aesthetic — lumbersexual, which entered the mainstream vernacular in 2014, at a site called GearJunkie, and was just as quickly derided on Gawker and in The Atlantic — is certainly not limited to axe-throwing clubs (one could make the case that axe throwing as a pastime has arisen, inevitably, from the aesthetic). But as a loose set of fashion signifiers, lumbersexuality has been around in some form or another for a generation, competing with any number of the self-consciously vintage looks manifested in hipster culture.

As with so many of the aesthetic strands that make up any given tangle of contemporary style-consciousness, lumbersexuality’s origins can be found on the margins, one more example of straight culture borrowing heavily from gay culture, with half the commitment and none of the risk. Beards and bears and woodsy scruff have now fully entered the mainstream as the contemporary lumbersexual reappropriates the same tropes of classic American masculinity so long adopted and amplified in LGBTQ spaces. But even the original tropes themselves — of paternal strength and rugged stoicism — are products of male fragility.

As Willa Brown points out in the perfectly titled article “Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents,” the endless talk in the past decade of a crisis of masculinity is part of a long tradition in the patriarchal American imagination. In Brown’s oft-cited 2014 account for The Atlantic, the nostalgia-ridden aesthetic of the lumberjack has always been an outsize performance instigated by the insecurities of straight, white men, be it 1905 or 2005. But where Brown saw an imminent expiration date for the lumbersexual, it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

As traditional hierarchies very slowly flatten into a more equitable distribution of power across society, the current crisis of masculinity is finding extended life in the backwaters of the internet. And while the real crisis of masculinity is male violence against women, the proliferation of pseudo-intellectual charlatans simultaneously seeding and harvesting the anxieties of young men for their own uses isn’t helping.

Male fragility isn’t going away. Nor is the flannel. Because there’s another performance happening here: different stage, same costume.

***

Back-to-the-land nostalgia has existed in the United States for almost as long as there’s been a United States, at various points manifesting as religious isolationism (think saucer-eyed Protestant sects one valley over), transcendentalist escapism (rich white guys reading poetry in the gloaming), and communitarian anti-capitalism. Its latest incarnation — rooted chiefly in an environmentalism that gestures at change through practice rather than policy — has been about bringing the virtues of the land back to the city, reimagining the frontier as urban rather than rural: a bespoke localism that animates everything from figurative fireside hobbies like pickling and needlepoint to larger-scale industry like rooftop farming, craft-brewing, and restorative, salvage-based building.

But in the same way the “frontier” of the 18th and 19th centuries was a romantic way of describing a slow genocidal war of settler colonialism, so too did gentrification’s border zones, through the mid 1980s to the late 2000s, serve as locations of displacement much more so than the idealized renewal imagined by urban planners. From its early days, gentrification was similarly romanticized with the language of westward expansion, those in its vanguard heralded as “settlers” and “urban pioneers.”

For good or for ill, these “pioneers” — comprised largely of artists in search of an affordable life in the city, abetted by canny real estate speculators — wore the mantle proudly as they built out semi-legal living spaces in (often but not always) sparsely populated post-industrial neighborhoods, sometimes squatting entire buildings. They were essentially homesteading — stealing power from the grid rather than rendering tallow, jury-rigging plumbing instead of digging wells — leading precarious DIY lives based on many of the virtues of the old frontier: resilience, independence, ingenuity, competence.

There was among this early, punk-inflected group of gentrifiers — buried under layers of rebellion and irony — a quiet reverence for working-class utility, often expressed in an aesthetic straight from their stepfathers’ closets: old beat-up boots, blue short-sleeve work shirts (bonus points for actual name tags), paint-spattered coveralls, and … flannel.

This commodification of rural life and labor feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit.

Much ink has been spilled on the mass-cultural half-life of flannel, but it wasn’t until the Seattle grunge scene exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s — with a look that had begun with bands like Minutemen and Minor Threat a decade earlier — that flannel would achieve its high fashion ascendancy, showing up in collections by designers like Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood and never really going away. The aesthetic and political interplay of these subcultures — gay, punk, DIY — would continue through the early 2000s as a youth culture raised on environmental angst looked further into the past for alternatives to the increasingly apparent cruelties of late capitalism, withdrawing to a kind of privileged moral quiet room in the handmade, the local, the slow.

Here then was a hardworking, readymade look, an identifying aesthetic with a notional connection to virtues of self-sufficiency, sustainability, the wild, and, if not out-and-out Luddism, at least an appreciation of analog competence.

But what happens when the performance overtakes the performer, when the flannel habit intensifies from urban axe throwing to rural woodcraft? What happens, in other words, when you finally buy an axe?

Well, it depends on the axe — and the performer, for that matter. If you’re Justin Timberlake, in his Man of the Woods era, the axe in question comes with a private Montana “ranch.” Timberlake, who grew up in suburban Memphis, has lately been performing a return to nature, (nature in this case being the exclusive 15,200-acre Yellowstone Club, a 21st-century millionaire land rush catering to those who want the gated community without having to see the gates). The streamable georgics resulting from this relocation — manifested as the 16 tracks on his February 2018 album, Man of the Woods — reveal little of Timberlake’s relationship to the actual woods (or mountains or fields or wilderness) and present more like a checklist of urban-versus-rural cliché, the kind you might find in the playbook of any halfway decent political operative aiming to divide and conquer. Here are some lyrics from the album’s seventh track, “Supplies”:

’Cause I’ll be the light when you can’t see

I’ll be the wood when you need heat

I’ll be the generator, turn me on when you need electricity

Some shit start to go down, I’ll be the one with the level head

The world could end now, baby, we’ll be living in The Walking Dead

Translation: My hard-won know-how (money) will save us when the poors run out of stuff. (Also, a cavil, but one doesn’t “turn on” a generator like a lamp, one starts it like a lawnmower … and “start me up” would have worked here!) In track 11, titled, naturally, “Flannel,” he sings:

Right behind my left pocket

That is where you’ll feel my soul

It’s been with me many winters

It will keep you warm

Ooh, here’s my flannel

The character’s in the way you wear it

Translation: I wear grandpa shirts and grandpas are good guys. Then, on track 14, “Living Off the Land,” we hear that:

You have to be comfortable with yourself

because that’s all there is

There’s you and nature

Soon as you think you got it all figured out, you know,

the wilderness will figure some way to teach you a lesson

As I’m alone in the forest, I’m one with my surroundings

and there’s a lot of peace in that solitude

I’ll be a mountain man ’til the day I die

 

(Living off the land)

And I break my back

And I work all night

[. . .] I’ll be damned, sometimes it’s hard,

the backed-up bills on the credit cards

Translation: One time I got a little lost on the way to Bill Gates’s cookout. It was tough. And these are the more thematically substantial tracks!

One might find more insight into how the Big West has rubbed off on the Big Pop Star with a quick look at the wilderness-adjacent merchandise from the Man of the Woods Collection, one item for each of the album’s tracks. These include nods to practical Americana like a wool Pendleton blanket, a tin of beard butter, and a trucker vest; objects from the collection that correspond to the tracks above are:

Track 7: A strongbox

Track 11: A flannel shirt, obviously

Track 14: A Best Made Co. felling axe, with custom-painted handle

These items, along with a cooler, a jean jacket, a bandanna, and more, were all available for sale at a Lower East Side pop-up shop the week the album was released, a kind of company store for Timberlake Inc.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to “influencers” under the banner of authenticity. But as obvious a target Timberlake is for derision, he’s more of a symptom than he is a cause, one more in a long line of mythologized white men, from Paul Bunyan to John Wayne, out there taming the wild as they tame themselves (but not too much), spokesmodels in the endless ad campaign for America that began with Horace Greeley telling us to go west and live off the land.

And that’s the dream we’re still being peddled, embodied by the upsold axe. That the axe in question is hanging on the wall of a pop-up store in downtown New York creates a particular kind of dissonance: Timberlake Inc. is almost too perfect a microcosm for the stylized repackaging of the outdoors, for the yearning after a frontier that never really existed and the rural “working-class” sensibilities that accompany it. This commodification of rural life and labor — its ruggedness, its whiteness — feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit; at worst, it perpetuates pernicious stereotypes, both racist and classist, about natural purity and rural misery, a paradox in service of the powerful.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to ‘influencers’ under the banner of authenticity.

But life adjacent to wild spaces — and the work that sustains it — can be good, regardless of your politics. The braiding of masculinity and wilderness is as old as the American frontier, but it’s worth considering how we might untangle the two, worth considering how we might live with the forest world — and all it has to offer us — without destroying it.

***

But maybe you’re not a rich, world famous pop star with a flannel fetish (if you’ve read this far, it’s likely you are not). Sure, axe throwing seems like a fun thing to try, but lately you’ve been spending more time upstate (whatever state that might be) car camping, or staying with friends who’ve left the city; there are campfires, fireplaces, wood to be chopped, logs to split. You are thinking of buying an axe of your own.

Where to start?

There are three basic types of axes you might acquire: a hatchet, for light camp use limbing branches and making kindling (12 to 18 inches long, around 1.5 pounds); an all-purpose camp axe for clearing saplings and light splitting (20 to 28 inches, around 2.5 pounds); a felling axe for chopping down trees (30+ inches, between 3 and 4.5 pounds). Within each of these basic categories there are dozens of varieties, based largely on the regions from which they originate: the Allagash Cruiser, the Hudson Bay Camp Axe, the Dayton Railsplitter, etc.

Whatever you’ve chosen, the first thing you’ll notice is the weight: a multipurpose Swedish forester’s axe — weighing three pounds — is a manageable tool, useful on smaller trees and for light splitting. You’ll probably pick it up by the end of its American-hickory handle using your dominant hand. If you’re lucky, it comes to you as an already well-used and well-loved tool, the wood worn to a tacky smoothness by years of sweat and sap and the occasional reapplication of linseed oil. It will feel heavier than three pounds should.

Next, you’ll probably hoist the heavy end up into the other hand, striking a slightly awkward pose halfway between lumberjack and serial killer.

Perhaps the light will catch the burnished cheek of the blade, and you’ll reach a tentative finger to the hardened edge, which, if properly sharpened, can dry-shave the hairs from your arm. You’ll continue to feel that weight, three pounds starting to feel like 30, and you’ll begin to wonder: What can I chop with this? The axe is one of the oldest tools we have, designed, essentially, by gravity (which does most of the work anyway) — when you pick it up, you’ll want to let it fall.

Let’s say you’re in the woods — on a weekend camping trip or at a friend’s woodsy cabin — so there’s a lot it could fall on. For a first swing, a nice, newly down log is good for practice — in a wild forest, there should be plenty of recently downed deadfall not yet rotten.

You stand square to the log — imagine it as Eastern red cedar, for its intense scent and lurid scarlet heartwood — and raise high the axe. The weight will do the rest. If the swing is true, there will resonate from the tree — through still-growing sapwood to the compressed cells of the dying core — a deeply satisfying, percussive boom, scattering birds and startling deer. The first swing invites another, and then another, until a deep ringing rhythm echoes through the forest. It’s hard work, but in its repetition it is meditative.

That sound, of axe on wood, calls back to a hundred generations of humankind, invites considerations of how our ancestors might have understood their place in a world covered by forest. Sitting there, axe across knees, taking a breather, it’s not so hard to imagine them.

Shaggy Briton woodsmen in the vast pre-Roman forests of Cumbria, gripping their sacred Langdale axes, with glimmering heads knapped from the rare volcanic greenstone mined from the Pike of Stickle.

A barefoot Japanese carpenter moving gingerly across a hinoki cypress swinging his heavy, long-handled masakari, leaving palm-size chips of wood as a massive six-by-six beam reveals itself from the 16-foot log.

A pair of Basque foresters, generations ahead of the chainsaw, laboring astride two great beech trees pulled from deep within the Irati Forest, locked in a traditional aizkolaritza, a village-wide test of strength, precision, and endurance to see who might hew the finest, fastest timber.

Tireless Henderson Islanders squaring off Pacific rosewood, adzes made from giant clamshells, chewing out chocolate shavings from the dark heartwood. 

A thousand miles and a thousand years separate these moments of labor, and at the heart of each, the same basic motion: Pick up the heavy thing and let it fall; let the weight do the work, or at least half of it.

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence; it lets us measure our labor swing by swing, as we gather fuel for heat or timber for shelter. To look at a stand of trees, axe in hand rather than chainsaw, is to understand it not as a resource for the coming weeks or months, but for subsequent years and generations. And though the axe confers an intoxicating dominion, over woodlot and wood target both, it is a tool that invites a way of seeing that is very old indeed. The various eras of human prehistory seem named for dynastic families from alien worlds — the Mousterian, the Denisova, the Aurignacian. It is the Acheulean in which early stone hand tools begin to flourish, particularly what is now referred to by paleoanthropologists as the “hand-axe.”

The Acheulean “hand-axe” is not an axe in the modern sense; really, it’s just a big rock with two chipped-off edges, bits of flint “knapped” away to create a biface the better to dig or cut with, to remove bark from a tree or, even, to fell that tree by hand. Perhaps, also, the better to kill with, human history providing no shortage of reminders that any distinction between tool and weapon derives from delusions of civilization. 

The finer specimens of these hand-axes, unearthed across Europe and Africa, from the Fells of Cumbria to the river gorges of the Olduvai Valley, have the shape of great and heavy tears. For centuries, British farmers, turning one up with plough or spade, thought of them as thunderstones, specially formed rocks either dropped from the heart of terrible storms, or seeded deep beneath the earth by lightning strikes, gifts of creation, that man might make better dominion of a world made just for him. 

Hand-axes represent the evolution of a very basic technology, and one can imagine that moment when the blunt rock was discarded for the edged rock, followed quickly by the thought, in not so many words: “What if I made this even sharper?”

And so these rough-hewn stones-as-tools, ranging in size from an iPhone to a toaster, underwent refinement over scores of generations — and with that refinement toward balance and symmetry, they began to take on value, both material and spiritual. Hand-axes, their abundance and quality, became a symbol of wealth, a currency; and those created from rarer elements (the deeper in the earth the better) were revered as religious symbols, not to be used as tools, but rather thought of as we now think of art. As French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan puts it, in contemplating the unlikely craftsmanship of such early humans:

It seems difficult to admit that these beings did not experience a certain aesthetic satisfaction, they were excellent craftsmen who knew how to choose their material, repair defects, orient cracks with total precision, drawing out a form from a crude flint core that corresponded exactly to their desire. Their work was not automatic or guided by a series of actions in strict order, they were able to mobilize in each moment reflection and, of course, the pleasure of creating a beautiful object.

Though Gourhan is writing about human beings 10,000 years ago, he could be describing a certain strain of contemporary axe maker, for whom an axe is just as at home on a pristine West Village gallery wall as it is in the back of a woodshed.

About a decade ago, Peter Buchanan-Smith, a Canadian designer living in New York City, found himself in need of a hatchet to make some kindling. Looking to grill a choice cut of meat over a hot, wood-fueled fire, Buchanan-Smith found himself unimpressed by the cheap, poorly made imports at nearby hardware stores (dull edges, synthetic handles), so he expanded his search for a better, American-made tool.

The story might have ended there, but shortly after Buchanan-Smith finally did get his hands on a decent axe, he decided to customize the handle in colorful stripes: and just like that, the Best Made Co. was born. (Buchanan-Smith declined to talk to me for this story and is, I’m told, transitioning away from the company.)

Things happened quickly from there. Buchanan-Smith, who’d won a Grammy for his art for a Wilco album cover and who’d done design work for Isaac Mizrahi and David Byrne, was well known among New York’s art and design community, and very soon after the first axe was painted, it was hanging on the wall of Partners + Spade in Manhattan. That was in May 2009; a month later, in anticipation of Father’s Day, the fledgling brand sold out its stock (100 axes) in an hour.

The past decade has been a good one for Best Made Co. with the opening of a flagship store in lower Manhattan, followed by a 2,700-square-foot showroom in L.A.; and on top of their apparent domination of the bespoke axe market, the company has gone all in with a full line of forest-forward gear and apparel. So, if anyone has a full view of the aesthetic arc of lumbersexuality, it’s Buchanan-Smith, who’s described his ideal customer as “Alaskan Charles Eames (rather than Brooklyn Grizzly Adams).” And while someone who relies on tools but also likes good design is certainly cooler than dresses up like someone who relies on tools, it helps that the former usually has a little more money to spend than the latter.

One might wonder how great the difference could be possibly be from one axe to the next, but it only takes an afternoon at the wood pile to appreciate good steel as opposed to bad: the former holds its shape longer, has a stronger edge, stays sharper, and is less prone to chipping or breaking, all of which makes for a safer, more efficient axe. It is taken for gospel — at least on the internet of old guys and their tools — that the older the axe, the better the steel.

You are thinking of buying an axe of your own. Where to start?

If you’re looking, it’s not hard to find someone in just about every rural county in the country with a grinding wheel, a set of files, and a strop, who will take your grandfather’s axe and return it to its former glory. And for every one of those guys there are a hundred others hanging out in online forums asking one another the best way to rebevel the edge on a timber-hewing broadaxe or how to de-pit the cheek of a 100-year-old New Jersey pattern felling axe. (To its credit, Best Made’s L.A. store has a counter devoted to restoring and refurbishing old tools, from cast-iron pans to axes.)

Navigating sites like BladeForums.com and TalkBlade.info, a theme begins to emerge: New, mass-produced things are bad; old, handcrafted things are good. And while there’s an awful lot of grumpy conservatism burbling through these forums, spiked with a mild dose of over-the-counter libertarianism, if you squint past the bumper-sticker usernames and shallow isolationism, the underlying politics run parallel to much of the contemporary green movement, from the embrace of all things local to a rejection of late-capitalist disposability. Granted, from the conservative direction these politics are rooted in a nostalgia that veers into apocalyptic nativism, but it is bewildering to see how similar in outlook — when it comes to craftsmanship, consumerism, conservation — so many people are who otherwise identify with different ends of the political spectrum.

***

Politics doesn’t come up much at my return visit to Kick Axe for the opening of spring league night — it’s likely that the ideological spectrum here is similar to any Brooklyn bar on a Monday evening, which is to say not as liberal as Twitter would have you believe. I sit back and watch 76 amateur axe throwers crowd around league master Anthony Oglesby, who stands upon a stump introducing new rules and reminding competitors of the old, part carnival barker, part vice principal.

There is more flannel in this crowd than the last time I was here, more self-conscious woodsiness expressed through beards and boots, so I’m not exactly sure where Melanie Serrapica fits in. In her late 20s, Serrapica is wearing a semiformal low-cut red dress, and if it weren’t for the custom-painted hatchet she holds lightly in her right hand, its handle a gradient from lustrous black into midnight blue, I’d assume she’d entered the wrong bar.  

“[Axe throwing] is a great way to blow off steam after coming from work, where you want to throw things at people but aren’t allowed,” Serrapica deadpans, despite having to yell over the anticipatory din of her fellow axe throwers. Her friend Sara Morabito nods in agreement. “We’re two nerds who don’t do things other than conventions,” she says, gesturing to her fiancé Chris Knowles. “This was the first athletic thing where we were both like, ‘We’re really good at this.’ It’s a great thing to do together.”

Like Serrapica, Morabito and Knowles fell hard for the pleasures of axe throwing, and also have their own custom axes (hand-painted by fellow league member, Tommy Agniello) — unlike Serrapica, they have yet to name their axes. “Yeah, I named it Axe-Po,” Serrapica says. “You know, like B-MO from Adventure Time?” (I don’t.) As the subject turns to axe care and sharpening technique, I ask the trio why they think axe throwing has become so popular. Chris (who favors a double-grit sharpening puck for maintaining his blade) gets to the heart of it: “It’s something that feels masculine and outdoorsy, and I think people are looking for that.”

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence.

 

You don’t need a gender studies degree to understand that ideas of masculine and feminine exist on a spectrum that doesn’t map across a male-female binary; in fact, the league crowd is as diverse in gender as you’d expect of a bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night. As I circulate among teams with names like Inside the Axer’s Studio, Axes of Evil, and Well, Axetually, interrupting people as they get in a few more practice throws before the competition starts, one name keeps coming up: Rebecca. The best. Unbeatable. Rebecca is the best axe thrower. “Number one last season, and the season before.” Nobody knows if she’s coming tonight, nobody seems able to spot her or her girlfriend in the crowd. Someone thinks she might have moved upstate, “to be closer the woods,” and I can’t tell if they’re fucking with me. She’s already a legend, the more so in her absence.

People are drinking — each league night has its own beer sponsor — and it gets noticeably louder as the new season begins, the title wide open and up for grabs in this new and Rebecca-less reality. Soon into it I notice a woman pressing a call button next to her range, an intense look on her face: It’s too early for a wood replacement on the target, so she’s looking for a judgment. An axe-pert calls the league-master over, and all parties approach the target, like lawyers approaching the bench, to peer and point at an axe stuck just off the bull’s-eye. League-master Anthony waves over at Kick Axe’s manager, Nic Espier, who, with his suit and his earpiece looks like he’d take a bullet if ordered to, goes over to settle the issue.

“Seven points decided last year’s title,” he tells me, after judging in favor of the button-pusher. “These guys look like they’re having fun, but they take it pretty seriously.”

The pleasures of axe throwing or wood splitting or tree felling aren’t for everyone — nor, indeed, are they available to most. But it would be a shame to dismiss these things we yearn for — open spaces, wilderness, a particular kind of labor — simply because we’ve had them so relentlessly repackaged and sold back to us.

So let the axe be many things — tool, work of art, diversion — but let it also be a way back into the forest. Let this very old machine remind us of our limits and show us not what is ours to use, but ours to preserve.

***

Jonny Diamond is a writer and editor who splits his time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Geist, Hobart Pulp, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book-length object history of the axe, part investigation of its symbolism in America’s westward expansion, part interrogation of contemporary tropes of masculinity and wilderness. He is the editor-in-chief of LitHub.com

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

For the Thirsty Girl

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,387 words)

“She’s got the nerve to say / She wants to fuck that boy so badly.” These are the lyrics to the titular track from Third Eye Blind’s 2003 album Out of the Vein (stay with me). They are written by Stephan Jenkins, who has admitted his three-year relationship with Charlize Theron acted as inspiration. Whether or not that particular song is about her, one thing is clear: Charlize Theron knows she wants to fuck a specific boy, even if she is uncertain who that boy is. “I’ve been single for ten years, it’s not a long shot,” she said recently in some interview, dorkily referencing the title of her new film, which is about a presidential hopeful who falls for Seth Rogen (why not?). “Somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up.”

Charlize Theron is thirsty. That surprises people. And by people, I mean me. How is it possible that Charlize Theron has to desire at all, considering she is so desired herself? (Doesn’t one negate the other?) You could sense an army of unworthy men clutching their collective pearls in response to her statement. That this statuesque blond with the kind of face you only see carved out of marble not only has to, God forbid, ask for it, but that she can speak like a sailor about it, shatters the pristine image of beauty — no wants, no desires — she otherwise projects. Theron’s words jolted us back to her humanity. The balls she asked for were the balls to approach her with desire, knowing that she has the power not to desire in return. Charlize Theron is dictating the expression of her thirst, but also the man who is worthy of it.

If the original iteration of “thirst” was a plunging desperation, this one is an uplifting affirmation. NPR traced its root, “thirst trap,” back to 2011; but Jezebel actually defined the singular “thirst” first in 2014, as lust “for sex, for fame, for approval. It’s unseemly striving for an unrealistic goal, or an unnecessary amount of praise.” This was the definition picked up in 2017 by The New York Times Magazine, imbuing thirst with negativity. But in the intervening years, women got a hold of it. These women, objects for so long within an atmosphere of men’s ambient lust, emerged to twist thirst from a cloying wish into full-bodied desire. Out of the wreckage of male toxicity, they used thirst to mark the men who remained worthy. There’s a reason Theron is still single — few men can step up. What’s more, in a world run by female desire, some are terrified of being left unwanted if they do.

* * *

It’s hard to get a clear picture of female desire across a history mostly seen through the male gaze, afflicted as it was with the rare myopia that focuses only on the virgin and the whore. So you had virtuous, prim, usually classier orderly women who were worth marrying, and sinful, messy, gutter-dwelling hysterics who were worth a quick screw, and that’s it. If a woman expressed desire and wasn’t faking it for money, she was a deranged man-eater, like a witch or a harpy. Men’s lust was natural, women’s was the most unnatural. Eventually, fandom offered a means of escape. “While it was risky for individual women to lose control or to surrender to passion, there could be safety in numbers,” wrote Carol Dyhouse in Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire. So women swooned all over the place for Franz Liszt in the mid-19th century before having a collective orgasm over Vaslav Nijinsky, then Rudolph Valentino — the first man (the first person) for whom the word “sexy” was deemed worthy of use. What these men had in common was fluidity — of gender, of sexuality, of race. “I hate [him],” cartoonist Dick Dorgan wrote of Valentino. “The women are all dizzy over him.” Real men hated this new masculine ideal because real women wanted it and they couldn’t deliver. So they took sexy back. The Hays Code put women who wanted sex in movie jail and in their place installed women with whom men wanted to have sex.

The new “sexy” icon became Marilyn Monroe, described by Molly Haskell (From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies) as “the lie that a woman has no sexual needs, that she is there to cater to, or enhance, a man’s needs.” It is a meandering but fairly unbroken line from Monroe to reality star and one-time child bride Courtney Stodden, who has not only physically fashioned herself into her idol, but also appears as troubled. In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, the now 24-year-old pitied her boyfriend for not cashing in on his expectations. “He thought he was going to get in a relationship with this hot young celebrity who’s all sexual and fun,” she said. “He gets in there and I don’t have sex, I’m a mess, and I’m crazy.” So, not really much change from the original dichotomy, the one which limits big-busted babes like her, like Kim Kardashian-West, to conduits for sex. The latter can launch her career off a sex tape, while Jennifer Lawrence, the slapstick virginal non-bottle blonde, can almost be undone by a couple of photos. And forget being a woman who has sex with more than one man; Kristen Stewart had to apologize publicly for that, forced to do a glorified perp walk in a world where husbands have had mistresses longer than Edward Cullen has been undead.

Almost every article I read about female sexuality cited Freud — specifically his inability to figure out what women want. It says a lot that on this subject we are still deferring to a psychoanalyst who predates women’s liberation. It served men like Freud and those who followed him to theorize that women had a lower sex drive (unproven and kind of the opposite), were more romantic than randy (unproven and kind of the opposite), because it meant women could not use men for sex the way men used women. Yet, as Psychology Today reported back in 2013, “If women believe that they will not be harmed and that the sex will be good, their willingness to engage in casual sex equals that of men.” Relax, bros, rape culture keeps that in check. “It is anti-sex and anti-pleasure,” writes Laurie Penny. “It teaches us to deny our own desire as an adaptive strategy for surviving a sexist world.” And now you can stop relaxing; since women have begun dismantling that world, they have also begun releasing their desire — these days better known as thirst.

Some men think the objectification of women has simply turned into women’s objectification of men, but that’s not what thirst is: Where the male gaze limits women to the flesh, the female gaze fleshes men out. Famous guys provide an aspirational model, with women filling in the holes with their wants, showing real guys how to enhance themselves to satisfy women like Charlize.

We have women of color to thank for pushing men to meet us halfway. Their brand of lady thirst went mainstream in 2017, the year ELLE announced “the Golden Age of Thirst Journalism,” and BuzzFeed got celebrities to read “thirst tweets” — their fans’ horny messages — and launched the “Thirst Aid Kit” podcast. That show centered on the famous crushes of hosts Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, from established hunks like Chris Evans to pensive actors of color like John Cho. “We are two straight black women talking about lust and desire and sexuality,” Adewunmi told Salon last year, “and all these expressions of humanity [are] not something that has traditionally been given to black women.” In their wake, black Canadian writer Kyrell Grant quietly articulated the concept of “big dick energy” (in reference to recently deceased chef Anthony Bourdain). “It’s a phrase I’d used with friends to refer to guys who aren’t that great but for whatever reason you still find attractive,” she wrote in The Guardian. But while black women are stereotyped for being game, they aren’t expected to set the rules. The Cut sought to profit off the term without crediting Grant, effectively muting her, though it was writer Hunter Harris whose desire was more directly silenced.

Vulture’s resident thirst critic — “i have something adam can drive” — was suspended by Twitter last week amid protests by fellow writers. “JUSTICE FOR HUNTER HARRIS, a thirst maestro and one of the funniest people on this hellsite,” Alanna Bennett tweeted. I DM’d Harris for the details of her suspension and she told me that a photographer had issued a copyright complaint about an image she used last summer in a tweet on the “secret romance” between Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio (she can’t remember the exact words and, because Twitter removed it, she can’t check). Around the same time that this happened, Quinn Hough, the editor of a tiny online film and music publication, Vague Visages, went viral (in a bad way) after pulling a strong anti-thirst stance on Twitter. The tweet in question has since been deleted, but Hough told me via email that he’d written “a poorly worded thread after seeing tweets from young critics that I thought were excessive and wouldn’t necessarily be acceptable in a professional environment.”

With women being the ones who thirst tweet most visibly, Hough’s comments were interpreted as an attempt to police women’s desire. “I just get very angry at any kind of sex-shaming because I’ve been told my whole life that if I express sexual desire, I’m a slut or dirty,” Danielle Ryan tweeted in response. “It really comes across differently to women.” While Hough’s site may be small, he still acts as a gatekeeper in the world of criticism, a conduit to larger more established outlets. His discrimination against what appeared to be young female writers, was a microcosm of a wider systemic double standard, particularly when he claimed, “Critics can say anything they want, but expressing sexual desire for subjects will minimize their chances for a staff position somewhere.”

This is where Hunter Harris resurfaces. The simultaneous timing of her suspension with the Vague Visages pile-on acted as a trigger for women accustomed to being muted, turning a copyright notice into a symbol of the suppression of black women’s desire. Meanwhile, other Twitter users expressed their delight at Harris’s expulsion. “It’s sad that @vulture encouraged her psychosis, but will probably be looking to dump her, now that @hunteryharris got her twitter account suspended,” wrote one guy who goes by Street Poetics (“PhD in These Streets”). A man he referenced in that same tweet, Jurg Bajiour, responded, “It’s true. @hunteryharris seemed to want to show me that it was *her job* to endlessly horny-tweet about actors.” (Harris denies this).

The missives were rich considering male film critics readily maintain staff positions despite waving around their boners in their actual reviews. “I didn’t miss Lynda Carter’s buxom, apple-cheeked pinup,” New York’s David Edelstein wrote in his Wonder Woman review. You may remember him also writing of Harry Potter, “prepubescent Watson is absurdly alluring,” in a review that originally appeared in Slate in 2001 and resurfaced after his Wonder Woman hard-on. Compare this to famously thirsty film critic Pauline Kael, whose books boast titles like I Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious. In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta has this rawness to such a degree that he seems naturally exaggerated.” There is a lot of sex here, but Kael is not the subject, Travolta not the object, and it layers rather than reduces. In fact, Female Film Critics’ Twitter poll on critical thirst — “What do you think of ‘thirst’ in film criticism?” — which followed the Vague Visages controversy, attracted 468 votes with a runaway 44 percent responding, “A grand tradition (Kael!)” Still, Hunter Harris admits she felt odd being erroneously credited as its icon. “i dont want to be like a martyr for the horny cause lmao,” she told me via DM, “but it is very nice that ppl are defensive of woc being openly desirous !”

* * *

While thirst is most common in the field of Hollywood celebrity — ground zero for idolatry — it has recently moved into politics, a place where masculinity has increasingly become a bone of contention. At one time we thirsted for Justin Trudeau’s “it’s 2019” yoga moves; more recently that thirst turned toward an emo crossdressing Beto. “Ojeda and Avenatti as candidates are like the guy who thinks good sex is pumping away while you’re making a grocery list in your head wondering when he’ll be done,” political analyst Leah McElrath tweeted in November 2018. “O’Rourke is like the guy who is all sweet and nerdy but holds you down and makes you cum until your calves cramp.” While politicians have an extensive history of abusing their positions for their own sexual gratification, this explicit dispatch from the beltway still left a number of us open-mouthed. Yet this is where we are — in the context of a presidency rife with toxic masculinity oft expressed in terms of sexual harassment, good sex acts as an analogy for progressive politics.

Over the past couple of years, women have also elected Noah Centineo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeff Goldblum, and Mahershala Ali as worthy of their thirst. Like the men who have historically inflamed female desire, they represent an aspirational form of masculinity, one which counteracts the retrograde misogyny trumpeted by the president. The thirst women express for these men’s physical form is informed by the men’s insides as much as their outsides. And the strongest men do not shrink at the prospect of not measuring up, but adapt the way women always have. In this new world, on the red carpet for their shared movie, Long Shot, Charlize Theron’s Alexander McQueen gown is matched by Seth Rogen’s Prada suit. “I was highly aware I was going to be standing next to Charlize for a lot of pictures,” Rogen said at the time. “I always have that image in my head of Beyoncé next to Ed Sheeran in a T-shirt, and I don’t want that.” Finally, it’s no longer about what a guy wants.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Stalin’s Scheherazade

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Brian J. Boeck | an excerpt adapted from Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov | Pegasus Books | February 2019 | 29 minutes (8,255 words)

Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.

His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.

How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history. Read more…

‘Just Assimilate Her Into Your Family and Everything Will Be Fine…’

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Nicole Chung | All You Can Ever Know | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,439 words)

 

My parents’ story together began in the spring of 1973 when they married and struck out west. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-two, and they’d been dating a matter of months when she told him she was leaving Cleveland, a city she had never much liked, for Seattle — where she had always planned to live, and where her own mother had spent the war years, living with her aunt and her uncle, the Swedish fisherman. My mother had not inherited much from her mother, save her red hair, quick temper, and stubborn attachment to the green beauty of provincial Washington State, so different from the smoke and cement of Cleveland and the small farm community outside it where her family lived. She had been to Seattle, carted along on cross-country road trips in the family station wagon, to visit her great-aunt and great-uncle, and she’d never forgotten the pine-scented air or the snow-tipped mountains wreathed in clouds, the hilly city lapped at its edges by a cold saltwater sound. Now she had gotten into nursing school out there — so, was he coming with her or not?

Though their families charged them with desertion, the move had its appeal: they were each one of five siblings, high in the birth order, and in different but defining ways their parents had been hard on them. More than three hundred people attended their wedding. Back then, it was still a little unusual for a Hungarian boy from one neighborhood to marry a Polish girl from another. There were fisticuffs at the reception, and it was generally agreed that the bride’s relatives both began and ended the fight, but everyone was laughing by the time they farewelled the couple.

They did move out west, but not to Seattle; not yet. A printing company had offered him a job in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island in the Alexander Archipelago. She found a job at the local hospital. They rented a basement apartment in a cottage on the edge of the Inside Passage, where they could step outside and watch eagles wheeling over the ruffled water. For a pair of born-and-bred Clevelanders, Ketchikan was almost too quaint to be believed with its fishermen and modest tourist trade, its streets and wooden pilings slick with rain one hundred and forty days out of the year. It was not quite the change she had envisioned, but a chance it still was, to escape Ohio and try on a different life. They liked it there, and felt like pioneers.

Still, when the transfer to Seattle came a few years later, they were ready to live in a city again, eager to meet new people. One Sunday, on a whim, they visited a little white-steepled church set into the hills above the neighborhood where they rented an attic apartment. It was nothing like the large, drafty old churches they’d attended as children in Cleveland; everyone wore jeans. The priest’s gentle Polish accent reminded her of her beloved grandfather, but it was someone else at the parish who commandeered their attention: a short, stout nun with blunt brown bangs peeking out from under her minimal wimple, a far cry from the strict, ruler-wielding sisters of their youth. They told Sister Mary Francis they had little interest in organized religion, let alone the church in which they’d both been raised, but the nun somehow convinced them to return. Soon my mother was leading a Bible-study group and my father was running errands for Sister Mary Francis’s elderly mother. They were back in the fold, with barely a token argument raised in their own defense.

This time, though, they were changed: they believed it all. They asked God to move in their lives. They saw his hand at work — in friends met, in jobs found, in day-to-day life — where they had never looked for him before.

Read more…

Eating Alone

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Stephanie Rosenbloom | Excerpt adapted from Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude | Viking | June 2018 |14 minutes (3,719 words)

Comptoir Turenne is on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century building with battered shutters in the Haut-Marais, on the less fashionable end of rue de Turenne. On the more fashionable end, Glow on the Go! serves concoctions like the Lolita with organic cherries and “superfoods adaptogens,” Baby Beluga sells bikinis and matching sunglasses for Capri-bound toddlers, and the windows of Delphine Pariente’s jewelry shop (now known as Nouvel Amour) advise: Soyez heureux, be happy.

Comptoir Turenne has no such panache. Its sidewalk views are mainly of a real estate agency and a men’s suit shop. It is not on “must-eat” lists. Visitors are not burdened by the ghosts of Hemingway and Sartre to have an indelible experience. All of  this makes Turenne a laid-back spot for breakfast pour un. You can sit under its cheerful red awnings, mere blocks from the action, and fancy yourself Parisian.

Portions, however, appear to be measured with Americans in mind. A croque madame arrived at the table looking as if it had been flown in from the Cheesecake Factory. A sunny-side-up egg was as big as a pancake. Beneath it, thick, crusty bread was covered in toasted cheese. Beside it, french fries were piled in a little deep-fryer basket. A salad was already beginning to migrate off the plate. There was barely room on the table for my café crème and the speculoos tucked between the cup and saucer.

When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world.

I eyed the speculoos. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story in Peace Is Every Step about being a child and taking half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes, to finish a cookie that his mother bought him. “I would take a small bite and look up at the sky,” he wrote. “Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers.”

I can polish off a speculoos in less time than it takes to say “speculoos.” Nonetheless, Nhat Hanh’s story resonates in an age when it’s not unusual for a meal to be eaten with one hand while the other is posting a photo of it to Instagram. Men in suits stopped for coffee and cigarettes. Children were being walked to school. For the solo diner, no view is better than the one from the sidewalk, even the one from Comptoir Turenne. When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world. Read more…

Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

AP Photo / CSA-Printstock, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

Read more…

Here is My Heart

 

Megan Stielstra | An essay from the collection The Wrong Way To Save Your Life | Harper Perennial | August 2017 | 27 minutes (7,366 words)

 

This is the first in a three-part series on gun violence.

In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.

In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.

In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear. 

 

* * *

Write your name here. Address, here. Here — check every box on this long list of disorders and diseases and conditions that are a part of your medical history, your parents’ medical history, your grandparents’ medical history and down the DNA. So much terrifying possibility. So much what if in our blood, our bones.

I checked two. Melanoma and —

“Heart disease?” my new doctor asked. I liked her immediately; her silver hair, her enviable shoes. Is that an appropriate thing to say to your doctor? I know we’re talking about my vagina but those heels are incredible. Later, I’d love her intelligence and, later still, her respect for my intelligence even when — especially when — I acted bonkers. She removed the weird, spotty growths from my arm and told me they weren’t cancer. She diagnosed my thyroid disorder and fought it like a dragon. She helped me understand my own body and demanded that I treat it with kindness, even when — especially when — I was stressed or exhausted or scared. It’s so easy to forget ourselves, to prioritize our own hearts second or tenth or not at all. Do you see yourself in that sentence? Are you, right this very moment, treating yourself less than? Cut that shit out, my doctor would say, except she’d say it in professional, even elegant doctorspeak and to her, I listen. Her, I trust. Every woman should have such an advocate and the fact that our patient/doctor relationship is a privilege as opposed to a right makes me want to set the walls on fire. Look up — see the wall in front of you? Imagine it in flames.

“Megan?” she said, and I pulled myself away from her shoes. “There’s a history of heart disease in your family?”

“Yes,” I said. “My dad.”
Read more…

The Cities in Me

Wikimedia Commons, Wagner Cassimiro via Flickr Creative Commons.

Sorayya Khan | The Aleph Review | February 2018 | 8 minutes (2,085 words)

 

Our latest Exclusive is a new essay by Sorayya Khan, published with the permission of The Aleph Review, which has the piece in print.

Naeem was 16 and I was 11, but the real difference in 1973 was that I knew his name and he didn’t know mine. Neither of us knew then that our shared life began on a yellow school bus in Islamabad, he in the back, me in the front. His single recollection is that I was the younger sister of a soccer teammate. I have two memories of him. My first is of his wide-open grin while he sits with friends in the last row of bus seats. Curly hair falls in waves around his face and he carries himself with a sixteen-year-old’s swagger that is electrifying to those of us whose feet barely reach the floor. To be grown like that one day! My second is of a photograph. He is on the front page of the school newspaper at a sports banquet where he has won an award. The paper is unnaturally white, the black and white photo too dark. He is dressed in a suit, holding a microphone, smiling shyly at his lucky girlfriend. Buried in a box, the folded newspaper accompanied him to all his cities, and then ours, before it surfaced in Ithaca with a bundle of a girlfriend’s drawings. My memory was accurate, except there’s nothing shy about his smile.

Read more…