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Search Results for: Andrew Solomon
Behind the Writing: On Research
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Sarah Menkedick
Sarah Menkedick 
Type by Katie Kosma
Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)
In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.
Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.
It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.
What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
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Longreads On raising children with extraordinary talents:
When Kit was 3, a supervisor of his play group told May that he let other children push him around. ‘I went in one day and saw another child snatch a toy away from him,’ May said. ‘I told him he should stand up for himself, and he said: “That kid will be bored in two minutes, and then I can play with it again. Why start a fight?” So he was mature already. What did I have to teach this kid? But he always seemed happy, and that was what I wanted most for him. He used to look in the mirror and burst out laughing.’ May enrolled him in school. ‘His teacher told me that she wanted her other kids to grow up in kindergarten,’ she said. ‘She wanted mine to grow down.’
By age 9, he had graduated from high school and started college in Utah. ‘The other students often thought it was strange that he was there,’ May says, ‘but Kit never did.’ His piano skills, meanwhile, had advanced enough so that by the time he was 10, he appeared on David Letterman. Shortly after, Kit toured the physics research facility at Los Alamos. A physicist said that, unlike the postdoctoral physicists who usually visited, Kit was so bright that no one could ‘find the bottom of this boy’s knowledge.’ A few years later, Kit attended a summer program at M.I.T., where he helped edit papers in physics, chemistry and mathematics. ‘He just understands things,’ May said to me, almost resigned. ‘Someday, I want to work with parents of disabled children, because I know their bewilderment is like mine. I had no idea how to be a mother to Kit, and there was no place to find out.’
“How Do You Raise a Prodigy?” — Andrew Solomon, New York Times
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Longreads From Featured Longreader, Emily Douglas: Solomon brings us the agonizing dilemmas faced by women pregnant as a result of assault (some feel pressured into having abortion and experience that as a second violation; others carry pregnancy to term and struggle desperately to bond with their children). And he forces us to confront how foundational a trope rape is in our common history and mythology:
Classical mythology is full of rape, usually seen as a positive event for the rapist, who is often a god; Zeus so took Europa and Leda; Dionysus raped Aura; Poseidon, Aethra; Apollo, Euadne. It is noteworthy that every one of these rapes produces children.
“The Legitimate Children of Rape.” — Andrew Solomon, New Yorker
It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer
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Michael Gonzales
Michael Gonzales T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records
Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)
Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.
To Be a Lexicographer Is to Surrender to Folly
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Ben Huberman
Ben Huberman Image by GCShutter (via Getty Images)
The arrival in the past 30 years of search engines and vast databases of electronic texts has made dictionaries far more comprehensive, but also much more complicated to compile and update (not that the task was easy to begin with). Andrew Dickson’s Guardian piece on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary focuses on the tension between the cumulative, decades-long process of updating the OED and a world in which few people still pay for hard copies and Google reaps most of the ad revenue from online queries. What is it that keeps this endeavor chugging along? There’s institutional inertia at work, no doubt, but also something even more amorphous: the vocational resistance — one might call it love? — of lexicographers who have embarked on a journey whose end they know they’ll never see.
It takes a particular sort of human to be a “word detective”: something between a linguistics academic, an archival historian, a journalist and an old-fashioned gumshoe. Though hardly without its tensions — corpus linguists versus old-school dictionary-makers, stats nerds versus scholarly etymologists — lexicography seems to be one specialist profession with a lingering sense of common purpose: us against that ever-expanding, multi-headed hydra, the English language. “It is pretty obsessive-compulsive,” Jane Solomon said.
The idea of making a perfect linguistic resource was one most lexicographers knew was folly, she continued. “I’ve learned too much about past dictionaries to have that as a personal goal.” But then, part of the thrill of being a lexicographer is knowing that the work will never be done. English is always metamorphosing, mutating, evolving; its restless dynamism is what makes it so absorbing. “It’s always on the move,” said Solomon. “You have to love that.”
There are other joys, too: the thrill of catching a new sense, or crafting a definition that feels, if not perfect, at least right. “It sounds cheesy, but it can be like poetry,” Michael Rundell reflected. “Making a dictionary is as much an art as a craft.”
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