Search Results for: Capital New York

Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel

Peg Skorpinski / Hogarth

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,830 words)

Namwali Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, tells the story of several families living in Zambia, encompassing over a century of their interwoven lives. The novel takes its title from a region located near Victoria Falls (otherwise known as Mosi-o-Tunya, which translates to “The Smoke That Thunders”), which is also where the novel begins. Along the way, The Old Drift touches on many moments in history, from the Second World War to Zambia’s foray into space exploration.

But Serpell isn’t content to simply tell the story of a nation through several generations of its residents. Instead, her narrative extends into the near future, and each of its sections is paired with a short passage written by a strange collective voice — one which doesn’t seem to be human. It’s a bold narrative choice, but it’s one that pays off brilliantly at novel’s end.

Serpell’s bibliography covers a broad range of styles and territories, from the theoretical to the metafictional. Her first book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, explored the works of writers like Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Ian McEwan. She’s contributed the introduction to Penguin Classics’ edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross. And her short story “Company,” published in the “Cover Stories” issue of McSweeney’s, reimagines a Samuel Beckett narrative along Afrofuturist lines — a process that Serpell described in one interview as “a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.” Read more…

And They Do Not Stop Until Dusk

"Rats" (Ildikó Regényi / the György Román Estate)

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | March 2019 | 14 minutes (3,722 words)


“I beheld thee rich in sorrow,
Graceful in the bloom of youth,
Where, like gold within the mountain
In the heart lies faith and truth,
On the Danube,
On the Danube, bright and blue.”
—Karl Isidor Beck, “On the Danube”

“At last I penetrate into the distance, into the soundproof blue of nostalgias.” —Jean Arp

*

I have an adolescent memory of walking along a lake near my Massachusetts home and finding a child’s blackened shoe caught in the murky inch of water at the shore. I knew that not long ago a pilot had died crashing a single-seat Cessna into this same lake, and I had lately been looking at piles of shoes as part of the school’s Holocaust curriculum. The combination of these two facts — totally unrelated — filled me with deep dread, and I turned around and hurried back to my family.

Artist György Román’s childhood was characterized by such dread. The painter was born in Budapest in 1903 and suffered a bout of meningitis in 1905 which left him deaf and temporarily paralyzed in both legs. As a result, “his mind was swamped in the chaos of meanings around visual images,” writes Marianna Kolozsváry in her monograph of the artist. (Kolozsváry’s father was one of Román’s first collectors.) Although Román regained use of his legs, he was deaf for the rest of his life.

Out of vivid dreams and passive observation of the surrounding world, Román formed his own vernacular of symbols and omens. Cats, monkeys, carnivals, and men in mustaches were imbued with evil intentions and disease. The glowing red signage of shops and brothels were both indistinguishable and sinister. Toy soldiers were the protagonists of this world.

The Hungarian actor Miklós Gábor wrote of Román’s work, “He paints dreams, but he is not a surrealist. He paints naively, but he is not a naive painter. He is a clever man, but not intellectual. He sees nightmares, but he is no expressionist.” Read more…

The American Way

All photos by Alice Driver

Alice Driver | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,502 words)

Dusk is closing in. As we drive along the border in El Paso, Texas, ShiQian, a sound engineer from Beijing, sings, “Where the road is dark and the seed is sowed / Where the gun is cocked and the bullet’s cold,” as he plays his guitar sitting in the back seat of our rented van. Liu Xiaodong, the Chinese painter who has organized this eight-day 1,530-mile border trip in conjunction with Dallas Contemporary museum, sits in the passenger seat, looking out at the border wall and wondering out loud in Chinese, which his assistant for this trip, Marco Betelli, who is from Italy but lives in China, translates into English: “Is this the wall Trump says he is building?” I explain that the 18-foot-high metal fence we are viewing that separates El Paso from Juárez was built in 2008. Yang Bo, a Chinese filmmaker, documents all Xiaodong’s international projects on migration. He sits in the back seat next to ShiQian filming everything as Flavio del Monte, an Italian who serves as Xiaodong’s artist liaison at Massimo De Carlo Gallery, drives. From the back seat, ShiQian’s voice rings out with warmth, “Now I been out in the desert, just doin’ my time / Searchin’ through the dust, lookin’ for a sign / If there’s a light up ahead well brother I don’t know,” as we hug close to the border, to a wall that exists in some places and is absent in others and to the Río Bravo — the “fierce river” — which is little more than a trickle running down a concrete channel.
Read more…

Alternative Reality: ‘Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself’

Wiley Bridgeman, left, of Cleveland, embraces his brother Ronnie, now known as Kwame Ajamu, as they walk from the Justice Center in Cleveland following Bridgeman's release from a life sentence for a 1975 murder. The two brothers, who were exonerated after spending decades in prison for a 1975 slaying, have sued the city of Cleveland and the detectives who investigated the case. The federal lawsuit suit, filed Thursday, July 2, 2015, names three Cleveland police detectives and a sergeant and the estates of a sergeant and three other detectives who have since died. (AP Photo/Phil Long, File)

Kyle Swenson was a young reporter at the Scene, Cleveland’s alt-weekly, when he started investigating the wrongful conviction of three black men who were imprisoned in the 1970s for a murder they didn’t commit. The men — Kwame Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson, who served a combined 106 years behind bars — were exonerated in 2014, thanks in part to Swenson’s reporting, which informs his new book on the subject, Good Kids, Bad City. Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, recently returned to the pages of the Scene with a long essay, included in the list below, that looks back at the conviction and indicts the city he once called home.

Swenson’s reporting is a testament to the value of local newspapers, as Alec MacGillis, who covers politics and government for ProPublica, points out in his largely positive Times review of Good Kids, Bad City. “One can’t help wondering what life-shattering injustices might go unaddressed in the future,” he writes, “for lack of a curious reporter to take a call or open an envelope.”

MacGillis, who lives in Baltimore, knows about the contraction of the local news industry firsthand. Two years ago, Baltimore’s City Paper, founded in 1977, was shuttered by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Weeks after its closure, a pair of enterprising editors founded the Baltimore Beat, a print alt-weekly. But the paper couldn’t support itself through advertising revenue and it closed four months later. Now, however, the Beat is back, resurrected as an online-only operation in early March. (One of the outlet’s first new feature stories is listed below.) It is being run as a non-profit, and its editors — Lisa Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg — say they hope, eventually, to revive the print publication.

It’s an audacious act, starting a print publication in 2019 — and recent attempts haven’t boded well for the industry. The Knoxville Mercury, for instance — founded after the city’s longstanding alt-weekly, Metro Pulse, was shut down — closed in 2017 after just two years in print. But there is something about paper, it seems, that lends gravitas and legitimacy to a media outlet.

At the beginning of March, Indianapolis’ alt-weekly, Nuvo, announced that it would no longer be publishing a print edition, and a number of editorial employees were laid off, including Nuvo’s editor, Laura McPhee. Fortunately, the publication will live on as a website, and it will refashion itself as a member-supported non-profit, which sounds promising, despite the staff cuts. 

Still, I get anxious when newspapers trade in paper for pixels. That’s not because I’m a print nostalgist; it’s because these decisions can portend disaster. I think, for example, of The Village Voicethe ur-alt-weekly, which stopped publishing its print edition in September 2017. Though the Voice continued to do good work online, it seemed to me that, without an accompanying print product, it was like a neutered beast. A year later, the Voice went out of business, thanks to the brilliant business mind of retail heir Peter Barbey, whose name I curse every time I pass a New York street corner only to find Time Out and AM New York. 

It’s depressing to me that the city I live in no longer has an alternative newspaper, though I take comfort in the fact that a number of alt-weeklies around the country are still publishing good stuff, including the The Stranger, the Metro TimesOrlando WeeklyTriad City Beat, and Monterey County Weekly — all featured in this reading list.

 
1. “Out For Justice is Out For Change” (Lisa Snowden-McCray, March 8, 2019, Baltimore Beat)

Lisa Snowden-McCray, the editor of the newly revived Baltimore Beat, profiles an organization that advocates for the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated, who often have trouble transitioning from jail. Out for Justice is led by Nicole Hanson-Mundell, who spent a year in jail. This legislative session, in Annapolis, the organization is advocating for “two bills urging state lawmakers to support pre-release centers for women,” Snowden-McCray writes.

It’s tireless, often thankless work. But Hanson-Mundell recognizes how important it is. That’s why it’s so important that the pre-release legislation gets passed.

“How can I deny a woman who just came home and she needs housing? I can’t say ‘Miss, I don’t provide direct services, you have to go somewhere else,’” she said. “I have to tap into my resources and find out who offers housing to newly released women with children. I have to use my connections and advocate for her.”

2. “This Is the Final Thing You’ll Ever Need to Read About Howard Schultz” (Rich Smith, February 27, 2019, The Stranger)

The Stranger has no kind words for Howard Schultz, who, as you probably know, is entertaining a bid for the presidency, much to the chagrin of, well, pretty much everybody. Rich Smith describes the former Starbucks CEO as “Seattle’s most successful bean juice salesman” in this deft takedown.

He has no idea who we are as a country now, no idea how Trump became president, and so much palpable fear that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to tax his Frappuccino dividends at a reasonable rate that he’s willing to hold the country hostage unless a moderate wins the Democratic nomination.

So much for hometown pride.

3. “Defiling the temple” (Jordan Green, February 21, 2019, Triad City Beat)

Triad City Beat, which covers North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad — including the cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem — has a long story on Kenneth Fairbanks, a pastor and community leader who was also involved with charitable work in Nairobi. “But four criminal indictments allege that for much of the time Fairbanks was operating his ministry, he was also sexually abusing children,” including his own daughter, Jordan Green writes.

While Kenneth Fairbanks’ supporters cast him as a victim of familial treachery, his daughter, Christa, alleges that he sexually abused her for years, along with other girls, while isolating her to exert control and extorting her silence by admonishing her against ruining God’s plan for their family.

4. “Speed Trap” (Xander Peters, February 20, 2019, Orlando Weekly)

Orlando’s alt-weekly takes a sobering look at meth abuse in Florida, particularly among gay men. Xander Peters’ piece centers on a 29-year-old meth addict named Matt, who declines to give his last name. He got into the drug through Grindr, the dating app.

Matt’s genesis story isn’t uncommon in the community of men who have sex with men, or MSM. LGBTQ-focused dating apps have tried to suppress drug abuse in recent years, even banning certain terms such as “PNP” (“party and play”) and the capitalization of certain letters in members’ bios, such as the capital letter T (“Tina.”)

The depressing kicker to this story leaves little hope that Matt will ever overcome his addiction.

5. “Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself” (Kyle Swenson, February 20, 2019, Cleveland Scene)

Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, reckons with the lessons from his new book, Good Kids, Bad City, which examines the story of three black teenagers in 1970s Cleveland who were wrongfully convicted of murder, imprisoned for decades, and then exonerated.

“Good kids, bad city.” I am defensive about the title. The title implies values—the kids are good, the city is bad. I know Cleveland is a proud town but touchy, easy to injure; as I wrote, I had an invisible Clevelander in my head, belligerently asking why I had the temerity to slap the label “bad city” on the town. Was that fair? What makes a place bad, or good? I spent many an hour not writing, arguing with this invisible but touchy Clevelander, justifying the title.

Swenson more than justifies the title in this engaging and thought-provoking essay.

6. “How adult nights at Detroit’s roller rinks are keeping black skating culture alive” (Imani Mixon, February 20, 2019, Metro Times)

As a recreational activity, roller skating is a vital part of black social life in Detroit, according to Imani Mixon’s illuminating piece for Metro Times. I particularly enjoyed Mixon’s description of “Detroit-style skating,” which I knew nothing about.

Detroit-style skating is characterized by its smooth rolling motion that is heavily influenced by the Motown sound that was gaining traction around the same time that skating became a popular pastime. According to skaters who have been on the scene for decades, Detroit skaters don’t ever really stop rolling and if they do, they use the rubber toe stops on their skates, another signature marker of a Detroit skater. The basic move that every Detroit skater has to learn, whether solo or in groups, is the half-turn, which involves turning a smooth 180 degrees for a few beats then turning back in place to continue on the original skating path.

7. “Monterey Bay fishermen catch salmon as far away as Alaska. A proposed copper mine there poses a local threat” (Matt Koller, February 21, 2019, Monterey County Weekly)

Matt Koller does a good job laying out how a proposed copper mine site known as the Pebble Deposit could very well imperil the livelihoods of Monterey fisherman who spend their summers in Alaska’s Bristol Bay angling for sockeye salmon. The mine, if approved, risks contaminating the bay with discarded waste rock.

Fishermen have always accepted a certain degree of risk. But the salmon are certain. A renewable resource, they will keep returning to spawn. Yet Bristol Bay fishermen, including those from Monterey Bay, see the presence of the Pebble Mine—which seeks to extract a non-renewable resource—as a threat to their industry because it has the potential to alter these natural cycles in a fundamental way that will not balance out in the end.

The mine, Koller writes, threatens “the last great sockeye salmon run in the world” as well as “an entire way of life.”

8. “The Story of Chaney Lively” (Laura McPhee, February 21, 2019, Nuvo)

For one of its final print cover stories, Laura McPhee — until recently the editor of Nuvo — pieces together what little information there is about Chaney Lively, the first free woman of color in Indianapolis. She arrived in 1821, in what was then a frontier town, with Alexander Ralston, a Scottish surveyor “tasked with laying out the new city.” Chaney, 21, was Ralston’s housekeeper, though she had originally been his slave, most likely purchased in Louisville. Ralston died six years later, at which time Chaney inherited land.

When Chaney moved into her own home in 1827, there were less than 60 people of color—men, women, and children—living in Indianapolis out of a population of a little more than 1,000. She was the only Black female head of household in the 1830 census, and the first woman of color to own property in the city, most likely the first person of color, male or female, to do so.

In the process of excavating details about Chaney’s life, McPhee also paints a stark portrait of African-American life in Indianapolis before and after the Civil War.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.

America’s Post-Frontier Hangover

'American Progress' (1872), by John Gast, depicts settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. (Fotosearch / Stringer/Getty)

Will Meyer | Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,498 words)

In the small New England town where I live, Hadley, Massachusetts, the common lies a few miles from the mishmash of corporate chains that make up the town’s economic center. A quiet residential neighborhood surrounds the common. It is a grassy patch, left vacant most of the year, save for occasional festivals and craft fairs; open space to be utilized as needed, hardly disturbed otherwise. Adjacent to the college towns of Northampton and Amherst, not much happens in Hadley. I go for walks around my neighborhood most days and seldom run into many people. The common feels like an oasis, a fleeting yet contained sliver of vastness.

In 1995, the Hadley Historical Commission installed a plaque on the side of a rock, near the end of the common, between where it meets the main road and a paved rail trail. The plaque commemorates the “17th Century Palisade,” a wall that was “3 fingers thick and 8 feet high” in 1676, 100 years before the American revolution. The “fortification,” the plaque states, “was one mile long by 40 rods wide.” Most saliently, however, “Hadley was then a frontier outpost which felt threatened by Native American attack.” In other words, the settlers built a wall (around the corner from where I live now) both to assert their settlement and ward off perceived threats — namely the brown-skinned Other the United States was founded, at least partially, to pacify and remove. Read more…

Los Angeles Plays Itself

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

David L. Ulin | Sidewalking | University of California Press | October 2015 | 41 minutes (8,144 words)

 

“I want to live in Los Angeles, but not the one in Los Angeles.”

— Frank Black

 

One night not so many weeks ago, I went to visit a friend who lives in West Hollywood. This used to be an easy drive: a geometry of short, straight lines from my home in the mid-Wilshire flats — west on Olympic to Crescent Heights, north past Santa Monica Boulevard. Yet like everywhere else these days, it seems, Los Angeles is no longer the place it used to be. Over the past decade-and-a-half, the city has densified: building up and not out, erecting more malls, more apartment buildings, more high-rises. At the same time, gridlock has become increasingly terminal, and so, even well after rush hour on a weekday evening, I found myself boxed-in and looking for a short-cut, which, in an automotive culture such as this one, means a whole new way of conceptualizing urban space.

There are those (myself among them) who would argue that the very act of living in L.A. requires an ongoing process of reconceptualization, of rethinking not just the place but also our relationship to it, our sense of what it means. As much as any cities, Los Angeles is a work-in-progress, a landscape of fragments where the boundaries we take for granted in other environments are not always clear. You can see this in the most unexpected locations, from Rick Caruso’s Grove to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Chris Burden’s sculpture “Urban Light” — a cluster of 202 working vintage lampposts — fundamentally changed the nature of Wilshire Boulevard when it was installed in 2008. Until then, the museum (like so much of L.A.) had resisted the street, the pedestrian, in the most literal way imaginable, presenting a series of walls to the sidewalk, with a cavernous entry recessed into the middle of a long block. Burden intended to create a catalyst, a provocation; “I’ve been driving by these buildings for 40 years, and it’s always bugged me how this institution turned its back on the city,” he told the Los Angeles Times a week before his project was lit. When I first came to Los Angeles a quarter of a century ago, the area around the Museum was seedy; it’s no coincidence that in the film Grand Canyon, Mary Louise Parker gets held up at gunpoint there. Take a walk down Wilshire now, however, and you’ll find a different sort of interaction: food trucks, pedestrians, tourists, people from the neighborhood.

Read more…

Maybe What We Need Is … More Politics?

Alfred Gescheidt / Getty Images

Aaron Timms | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,514 words)

Alpacas are native to South America, but to find the global center of alpaca spinning you’ll need to travel to Bradford, England. The man most responsible for this quirk of history is Titus Salt. Until the 1830s alpaca yarn was considered an unworkable material throughout Europe. Salt, a jobbing young entrepreneur from the north of England, commercialized a form of alpaca warp that made the animal’s fleece suitable for mass production. Within a decade alpaca, finer and softer than wool, had become the rage of England’s fashionable classes.

Already by the mid-19th century industrialization had begun to disfigure the English countryside with “machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled,” as Dickens put it in Bleak House. The immiseration of the working classes was under way. Troubled by the emerging horrors of the new industrial age, Salt built a model village to house the workers he employed in his textile mill. Saltaire, with its neat, spacious houses, running water, efficient sewerage, parks, schools and recreational facilities, became a symbol of what enlightened capitalism could look like. It was also a model in the truest sense, serving as the inspiration for workers’ villages built later in the 19th century by companies such as Cadbury’s and Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturer that eventually became Unilever.

According to economist Paul Collier, these Victorian capitalists instituted a tradition that survives, however precariously, today: the tradition of “business with purpose, business with a sense of obligation to a workforce and a community.” Among the modern successors of this model of compassionate capitalism, Collier has argued, are U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and John Lewis & Partners, the British department store. In the 1940s Johnson & Johnson set out a credo stating that the company’s first responsibility was to its customers. Thanks to this credo, Johnson & Johnson’s management led a mass recall of Tylenol off supermarket and pharmacy shelves following a contamination scare in the early 1980s. Now standard practice, this type of product recall was uncommon for its time — and allowed the company to maintain goodwill with its customers. John Lewis, for its part, has prospered through difficult decades for brick-and-mortar retail largely thanks to its unusual power structure: the company is owned by a trust run in the interests of its workforce.

The thread uniting this strain of capitalism, Collier contends in his new book The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties, is ethics. An ethics of reciprocal responsibility and care — between owners, workers, and customers — has allowed different businesses to prosper in different eras without destroying the communities and environments around them. But very few businesses are run according to these principles today. According to Collier, it is to this model of reciprocal ethics that capitalism, having lost its way over the past four decades, now must return — and reciprocity must become the principle that guides human interaction at all levels of society, not just in the firm. “Our sense of mutual regard has to be rebuilt,” he says. “Public policy needs to be complemented by a sense of purpose among firms.” “We need to meet each other.” “A new generation needs to reset social narratives.” “Norms need to change.” Prescriptivism today, the future of capitalism tomorrow. Read more…

The Caviar Con

Wiki Commons / Thor via Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

David Gauvey Herbert | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (3,739 words)

Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop. They ignored him and continued to lay rods on the floor.

Reynolds, then 57, had seen plenty of Russians come through the shop, which sits on a quiet dam access road in Warsaw, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks. He was tired of them poaching the town’s beloved paddlefish. Sick of their entitled attitude, too.

So when he asked them to leave and they did not comply, there seemed only one option left. He removed a .40-caliber pistol from under the counter, chambered a round, and placed it on the counter.

“I fear for my life,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. He wanted to cover his bases, legally, for whatever came next.

The two men looked up, backed out of the store, and never returned.

It was just another dustup in the long-running war between caviar-mad Russians, local fishermen, and the feds that centers on this unlikely town in the Ozarks and a very curious fish. Read more…

Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in. Read more…

Writing for the Movies: A Letter from Hollywood, 1962

AP Photo

Daniel Fuchs | The Golden West | Black Sparrow Books | May 2005 | 42 minutes (8,396 words)

 

Dear Editors:

Thank you for your kind letter and compliments. Yes, your hunch was right, I would like very much to tell about the problems and values I’ve encountered, writing for the movies all these years. I’m so slow in replying to you because I thought it would be a pleasant gesture—in return for your warm letter—to send you the completed essay. But it’s taken me longer than I thought it would. I’ve always been impressed by the sure, brimming conviction of people who attack Hollywood, and this even though they may never have been inside the business and so haven’t had the chance of knowing how really onerous and exacerbat­ing the conditions are. But for me the subject is more disturbing, or else it is that I like to let my mind wander and that I start from a different bias, or maybe I’ve just been here too long.

Read more…