Search Results for: Army

Slavery and Freedom in New York City

"A Ride for Liberty," by Eastman Johnson (1862).

Eric Foner | Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad | W. W. Norton & Company | January 2015 | 31 minutes (8,362 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book Gateway to Freedom, by Eric Foner, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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The history of slavery, and of fugitive slaves, in New York City begins in the earliest days of colonial settlement. Under Dutch rule, from 1624 to 1664, the town of New Amsterdam was a tiny outpost of a seaborne empire that stretched across the globe. The Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade in the early seventeenth century, and they introduced slaves into their North American colony, New Netherland, as a matter of course. The numbers remained small, but in 1650 New Netherland’s 500 slaves outnumbered those in Virginia and Maryland. The Dutch West India Company, which governed the colony, used slave labor to build fortifications and other buildings, and settlers employed them on family farms and for household and craft labor. Slavery was only loosely codified. Slaves sued and were sued in local courts, drilled in the militia, fought in Indian wars, and married in the Dutch Reformed Church. When the British seized the colony in 1664, New Amsterdam had a population of around 1,500, including 375 slaves. Read more…

The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War

Saad Hossain | Escape from Baghdad! | Unnamed Press | March 2015 | 23 minutes (6,311 words)

 

Below are the opening chapters of the novel Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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A NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY AT THE END

There is a glossary of mostly factual terms and names at the end of the text (“factual” being a relative idea open to loose interpretation (“loose interpretation” meaning we’re aiming for a 50% chance of something on the page tallying with someone else’s verified opinion.)) So, if you find yourself wondering: Who’s Moqtada Al-Sadr again? Or what does JAM stand for? Or, bless you, IED? Just refer to the helpful, mostly factual glossary. Read more…

Autograph Collecting as a Feat of Historical Inquiry

The graphing community [“graphing” is a term for the craft of autograph seeking] is one of uncommon depth, into which people have spent decades carving their fiefdoms and burrowing out their niches, whether that be players in the single-A Midwest League or members of the Whig Party. Flam’s fellow grapher Rich Hanson supervises inspections at a meatpacking plant in Monmouth, Illinois by day and occupies his nights and weekends by graphing minor leaguers in the region, a pursuit he supplements by also collecting the signatures of American authors and of Civil War personalities. He’s got Johnny Clem, a drummer-boy for the Union Army who enlisted at age 12, and James Shields, who challenged Abraham Lincoln to a duel that never came to fruition. Their scrawls are perhaps more aptly described as signatures than as autographs, since they were left behind incidentally rather than at the solicitation of a fandom.

Indeed, Flam’s and Hanson’s collections are feats of historical inquiry, of the innately human impulse for record-keeping more so than celebrity worship. Whereas the cachet of a Derek Jeter autograph, for example, is attributable to the same preoccupation with fame that brought us paparazzi, these graphers follow more in the tradition of Herodotus or Audubon. That is, they aspire above all to documenting the simple fact of their subjects’ existence (grandiose accomplishments aside) at a certain point in time. How else can one explain three decades chasing the Burlington Bees’ backup right fielder who will play out his career in obscurity?

John Stillman writing for Vice Sports about the weird, noble world of true autograph collectors.

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Interview with a Torturer

S-21. Photo by lecercle

Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille | Translated by John Cullen | The Elimination: A survivor of the Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields | Other Press | February 2013 | 44 minutes (12,355 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Elimination, by Rithy Panh, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

A Very Naughty Little Girl

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rose George | Longreads | March 2015 | 21 minutes (5,358 words)

 

 

She was a name on a plaque and a face on a wall. I ate beneath her portrait for three years and paid it little attention except to notice that the artist had made her look square. There were other portraits of women to hold my attention on the walls of Somerville, my Oxford college: Indira Gandhi, who left without a degree, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel prize-winner in chemistry. In a room where we had our French language classes, behind glass that was rumored to be bulletproof, there was also a bust of Margaret Thatcher, a former chemistry undergraduate. Somerville was one of only two women’s colleges of the University of Oxford while I was there, from 1988 to 1992, and the walls were crowded with strong, notable women. (The college has since gone co-ed.) Read more…

‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

Fact-Checking ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’

[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his fair share of LSD, and seen lives destroyed by heroin. What he didn’t know he borrowed from underground publications like the Berkeley Barb, passing on tips that hadn’t been fact-checked. As it turns out, one cannot get high by eating banana peels that have been boiled and baked, or smoking crushed peanut shells. (Powell was right, however, about nutmeg’s hallucinogenic potential.) Nor had the city’s sewer system been taken over by “New York white,” the giant marijuana plants said to be the result of people flushing seeds to avoid arrest. “The sewer plants usually reach a height of between 12 and 15 feet and are bleached white because of the lack of sunlight,” Powell wrote, in the authoritative voice that permeates the book.

He researched the other sections at the main branch of the New York Public Library, flipping through the card catalogue and returning with books such as the U.S. Army Field Manual for Physical Safety and Homemade Bombs and Explosives. He holed up in the building for months, reading about wristlocks and tear gas and nitroglycerine. Most of the book is a cut-and-paste creation; when Powell’s voice does emerge beneath the technical-manual speak, it’s usually in the form of a cocky young man trying to sound streetwise beyond his years. About explosives, he wrote: “This chapter is going to kill and maim more people than all the rest put together, because people just refuse to take things seriously.”

Gabriel Thompson, writing in Harper’s about The Anarchist Cookbook and it’s author, William Powell. The book was published in 1971 when Powell was an angry and disaffected nineteen-year-old; today, he is a sixty-five-year-old grandfather. Powell has spent much of the last four decades fighting to take the book out of print. For further reading, check out Powell’s 2013 op-ed on the topic, which ran in The Guardian.

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Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer

There’s that urge in adolescence when you feel like you discovered something, maybe a song, a book, or a painting, that resonates so deeply within you, to protect it, and keep it secret and close, so that you feel like you have claim of something wondrous and all your own. And if you share the secret, or if others discover the artist, you may later state that you were listening to the music first, or reading an author first, as if your personal first spark determines the authenticity of an artist. It does not end up being an attractive trait, because we should share good art, because we shouldn’t be snobs, and because artists are responsible for their talent, not the consumers of the work. Luckily, it’s an impulse most seem to grow out of, except for in extreme cases, particularly if that person continues to fly under the radar of mainstream culture for an unexplainable amount of time. Read more…

Hooah to All That: On Leaving NYC for a Writing Life in a Military Town

Photo: "Choke" by Gisela Giardino on Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in Afghanistan. This may be a journey I’m undertaking, but on many days it feels like a destination in which I am stuck: I’ve arrived, and this is it, this is all.

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The Army – and this, I’m sure, will be a real shocker – is a lot about fitting in: Wearing the right clothes, having the right values. Tossing around one’s real opinions can be a dangerous activity here, and, so, to a certain extent, we all play-act out of a pressing need to survive; we hide the parts of ourselves that we think may be indecent or suspicious. Writing feels like one of these things, a kind of taboo, a questionable waste of time. Sometimes, I feel as though I’m back in high school, hiding my bad poetry away in my math folder, afraid that people might find out who I actually am.

Simone Gorrindo writing in Vela Mag, on leaving New York for a small, conservative military town and the dissonances between the writing life and being a soldier’s wife.

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