Search Results for: City Pages

The Whistleblower in the Family

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Pearl Abraham | Michigan Quarterly Review | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,007 words)

“The power of narrative stems from the narrator’s ability to be there and then, as well as here and now.”

— C. Fred Alford, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power

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In 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, my father, a man with rabbinic aspirations, was deep in his own pickle, indicted for conspiracy and fraud in the federal summer school lunch program.

Nixon was brought down by Deep Throat, the pseudonym given the informant who passed information to Washington Post journalists about his administration’s involvement in what came to be known as the Watergate Scandal. My father got off somehow.

With him in court for one of his hearings, I suffered his ashen face, then his palpable relief when the case was deferred or dismissed, I’m not now sure which. I also don’t know whether his case made headlines the way rabbinic and priestly scandals do these days, “Five NJ Rabbis Arrested for Fraud and Conspiracy” a recent one.

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I Was a 9-Year-Old Playboy Bunny

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Shannon Lell | Longreads | September 2017 | 9 minutes (2,345 words)

 

My first sex partner was a homemade three-foot-tall Raggedy Ann doll lovingly stitched together by a distant relative. She wore a tangled mess of red yarn hair sewn in loops around her head like a halo. A cornflower-blue smock hugged her stuffed body in all the right places. Her undergarments were bloomers made of white fabric with eyelets and lace at the bottom. When stripped naked she was smooth, supple, alabaster cotton. She had adorable black button eyes and a sewn-on smile: permanently enthusiastic. I may have preferred Raggedy Andy — it’s hard to tell when you’re 8 — but he belonged to my big sister. I was left to love the one I was with. Full disclosure: At some point I did have a tryst with Andy. But under his denim overalls, confusingly, he and Ann were anatomically identical. Like many girls who played with dolls, this would prove to be my first disappointing encounter with male genitals.

I shared a room with my sister until I was 14. That’s when my parents could afford a bigger house. For 12 years our family of five — parents, sister, brother, and me, the youngest — lived in a modest three-bedroom home in a cookie-cutter neighborhood on a street called Serene. Our family was the median of every statistic: middle class, middle America, moderately educated, mildly religious.

Before my parents could afford to give us our own beds, and during my late-night love sessions with Ann, I took to sleeping on the floor for privacy. It felt like the right thing to do. And besides, my sister was always brooding for a fight.

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It Takes a Village: A ‘Village Voice’ Reading List

(Drew Angerer / Getty)

Say goodbye to those red sidewalk boxes — and a slice of American literary greatness. Since 1955, the Village Voice has been a ubiquitous part of New York City culture. In a half century it was transformed from a counterculture rag to a longform powerhouse rooted in the character and the color of the city.

This week, the current owners of the Voice announced the end of the era: The free print edition of the paper is finished. Once available on every street corner, it will now be online only. In their write-up for The New York Times, John Leland and Sarah Maslin Nir mourn the paper’s once inescapable presence: “Without it, if you are a New Yorker of a certain age, chances are you would have never found your first apartment. Never discovered your favorite punk band, spouted your first post-Structuralist literary jargon, bought that unfortunate futon sofa, discovered Sam Shepard or charted the perfidies of New York’s elected officials.”

The Village Voice was the first paper you grabbed on the way to the subway, the last thing you grabbed at night for the long ride home. It redefined the alt-weekly and introduced readers to a new kind of journalist and critic. If the Voice was the first place you were published, then you were on the way to a brilliant career. Here are some of our favorite moments of brilliance.

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How to Stop Apologizing for My Stutter, and Other Important Lessons

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rachel Hoge | Longreads | August 2017 | 17 minutes (4,315 words)

 

Róisín would do all the talking. She’s the chapter leader of the support group in Brooklyn, and accustomed to the microphone. She’d wear jeans and a tunic, glasses, her hair twisted in a clip. The only odd thing, to me, would be her mouth. It would be loose, relaxed—an intentional muscle movement, perhaps a symbol of acceptance after years in the self-help community that my strained jaw wouldn’t recognize.

There are 100 people in the conference room, 100 people waiting for her to begin. Half are in their 20s, from places like Boston or New York. Some have never been farther south than Illinois. Some are from Iceland, Serbia, and beyond. All convene in a hotel on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia—the blistering peach pit of the South.

They are all connected by the way they speak.

“Welcome to Take it to the Ssssssstreets,” Róisín would say into the microphone. Everyone would clap. “Thank you for p-p-participating in one of our most p-p-p-popular workshops. I’ll give a brief explan-explan-explanation, then we’ll bbbbbreak into small groups and head outside.”

Outside. Julia and I are already there and having our own unofficial panel. We call it Pool Time. We call it Necessary. We’ve spent three days in big groups, small groups, chatty groups, quiet groups. There are 800 people at the National Stuttering Association Conference. Most of them stutter, like us, but there’s also speech language pathologists, researchers, scientists, family members, significant others. More people than we could ever interact with, more names than we can remember. The conference has been held for over three decades, but Julia and I are both first timers.

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The Arsonist Was Like a Ghost

An abandoned house in Accomack County, Virginia. Beginning in 2012, dozens of fires were set in the area, where the poverty rate is around 20 percent. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Monica Hesse | American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land | LiverightAugust 2017 | 17 minutes (4,100 words) 

In the middle of the night on December 15, 2012, Lois Gomez sat up in bed. She thought she heard something. She listened. Nothing. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she hadn’t heard anything. She went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was two or three in the morning, only a few hours before her shift at Perdue and her husband’s shift at Tyson. Now she definitely heard something. A banging on her front door — which in itself was odd; friends and family knew they always used the side entrance — and someone yelling: “Your garage is on fire! I’ve already called 911!”

She stood frozen in the kitchen trying to process the information. Christmas lights, she thought. Her outdoor Christmas lights were halfway up, but she and her husband had recently decided to visit his family in Texas for the holiday and she’d been trying to figure out whether to bother with the rest of the decorations, which were meanwhile stored in the family’s detached garage, which was now on fire. Christmas lights, along with the expensive music equipment for her son’s rock band.

It had been a rough couple of months. For one thing, she wasn’t getting along with her next-door neighbors. She’d been close with the woman who’d owned that house before, Susan Bundick. They brought each other dinner sometimes, or stood and chatted in their backyards. But one Sunday afternoon, Lois was outside emptying the aboveground backyard pool to close out the summer season, and she saw the police were at Susan’s house. They told Lois her neighbor had died. Now, Susan’s daughter lived in her mother’s old house and things weren’t as pleasant. Tonya was fine, kept to herself, but Lois had a few run-ins with Tonya’s new boyfriend, a squirrelly redheaded guy whose name she didn’t know. He’d done a few little things, like dumping a bunch of branches on their lawn instead of disposing of them like he was supposed to. Once he’d accused her of making racial slurs against Tonya’s kids. The accusation was ridiculous. Lois’s husband was from Mexico, and her four grandchildren were partly black.

She’d also been having nightmares about the arsonist. In one dream, she went into her kitchen late at night and saw someone racing through the yard, an intruder wearing dark-colored sweat pants and a hoodie. “What are you doing?” she called. The figure turned and looked at her but she still couldn’t see his face, and he eventually disappeared behind her detached garage. She woke up and realized it wasn’t real.

This night wasn’t a dream, though.

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New York in the 1970s Gave Us Hip Hop, Madonna, and the Chip on Trump’s Shoulder

Image by Bin im Garten (CC BY-SA 3.0)

New York’s chaotic 1970s — when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy and crime rates reached record highs — have been mythologized as the last great period of unfettered, gritty creativity before yuppies, and later hipsters, ruined everything. It’s a complicated narrative, and the election of Donald Trump, a city-hating city-dweller, makes it even more so. Here’s a man who’s unquestionably among the most provincial New Yorkers of all time, yet he’s just as unquestionably an iconic one. And his rise to prominence came about right at that moment when New York was (supposedly) at its worst and at its best. Michael Kruse, writing at Politico, dives into what we might call Trump’s Studio 54 period, the years when desperate politicians allowed Trump to build an impressive real estate portfolio underwritten by huge tax breaks, and when public (specifically, Manhattan elite) derision shaped his politics of resentment for decades to come.

If he had expected New York to grant respect the way it had handed out tax breaks and opportunities for sheer publicity, he was mistaken. Critics in the pages of the Times called him “overrated” and “totally obnoxious.” It bothered him that he could put up such a glossy building and still be so readily dismissed as an arriviste. “If I were Gerry Hines in Houston,” he told Marie Brenner for a profile in New York magazine in 1980, referring to the billionaire real estate entrepreneur in Texas, “I would be the most important man in the city—but here, you bang your head against the wall to try to get some nice buildings up, and what happens? Everybody comes after you.”

But Trump attacked New York, too. He had, for instance, valuable art deco friezes jackhammered off the face of the Bonwit Teller building during its demolition—even after he had promised to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a literal and visceral assault against the exact sort of New Yorker who found him so distasteful.

They were “nothing,” Trump said. They were “junk.”

They were not, said a man from the Met. “They were irreplaceable architectural documents.”

“Obviously,” huffed an editorial in the Times, “big buildings do not make big human beings.”

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The Tears of Denis Johnson

Illustration by Julia Carusillo

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is one of those books people collect in multiples, saving extra copies to give to friends. I used to joke about handing it out in place of Halloween candy. Fortunately, Johnson wrote so much more: two collections of plays, three books of poetry, two short story collections, nine novels, a novella, and a book of reportage. He was dedicated to his vision of the writing life and embraced the mystery of the creative process with his students. After his death on May 24, there was an outpouring of appreciation for Johnson’s life and work from readers and writers, students and friends. We’ve asked for further thoughts from some of the people he reached through his books, his friendship, and the classes he led at various universities. We hope this collection adds further warmth and insight into the extraordinary work Denis Johnson gave to the world.  —Aaron Gilbreath

Jonathan Galassi

Denis Johnson’s editor, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In the end, for me at least, Denis was unknowable. We worked together in two different phases on a lot of books, but somehow I always felt he was over there and I was over here. It didn’t seem personal, more existential. He had a genial surface, a sunniness and generosity and humor that were joyful to experience. Who wouldn’t have loved basking in that warmth? But other waters were always running in Denis, and I don’t think many people, except his wife Cindy, got a look into them

Our work together was usually easy. Denis wasn’t interested in editorial intervention, nor did he need it. But I learned that he could take what might have been an offhand remark much too deeply to heart. I believe Denis was greatly vulnerable always, and I suspect this was part of why he kept his distance from the saturnalia of literary life.

Denis told his students at Iowa that they should want to be Shakespeare, the only thing for a writer to want. That he certainly wanted it for himself and his work — not only in fiction and poetry, but in journalism and drama — shows the relentless drive of his ambition. Ambition is the noblest quality a writer can have. Fighting all the impediments to it, internal and outward, is the writer’s daily task. Jesus’ Son is about the force of addiction and the only thing that can overmaster it: the ecstatic experience of God. Train Dreams is about solitude. I think it’s arguable that these books, which are among his great achievements, speak to two poles of his experience. Readers will keep coming to them always, which tells you that here, as elsewhere, he hit the nail on the head.

Lynne Tillman

Novelist, essayist, cultural critic

Denis was gentle, funny, good-hearted; a sweet, impish, and concerned man. You wanted to be around him. Maybe because in his early years he lost time to drugs, he felt life was precious. You felt that reading him, felt it being near him.

I was fortunate to meet Denis in 2011 in Kyoto. We were doing a week-long gig together. Riyo Niimoto, a writer and journalist, was teaching at the Kyoto University for Art and Design where he had recently started the first MFA writing program in Japan. He wanted Denis and me to discuss our writing with Japanese novelists and our experiences teaching in MFA programs. Denis hadn’t visited Japan since he was eight or nine, when his family lived there for a few years. He was full of joy retrieving Japanese words, pieces of his childhood. He was writing about it in his mind, you could see that. Denis embraced every experience, he was always observing life, and his beautiful sentences rose and fell with its rhythms.

Writing was everything to Denis. Writing and his wife, Cindy, his children, his close friends, they were his life. He had no time for bullshit. Award-winning, acclaimed, sure, but Denis was resolutely straight ahead. Writing was a calling, not a career.

I didn’t know Denis’s cancer had come back. We were talking by email about friends’ dying. His last sentences to me, sent on April 10: “Another day this side of the grass — I’ll take it. And it’s the only day there ever was — today. Every breath is sweet. Love, DJ.” It kills me — this glorious, graceful man gone from our world. A magnificent American writer. One of our best, ever. Denis Johnson had it all, and he took it to the limit.

Sam Messer

Painter, professor at the Yale School of Art

FEAR NOT are the words inscribed across the pinnacle of James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. In 1982, DJ and I drove from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC to see the throne. DJ had become obsessed with Hampton’s work after hearing me describe it as one man’s visionary sculpture of his dialogue with God, and he insisted we stop in Eloree, South Carolina, the artist’s birthplace. At the Stop-n-Go on the corner of Hampton Street, DJ asked everyone in the store if they had ever heard of the artist, but no one had. When we arrived at the Smithsonian and DJ finally saw the throne, he said, “I couldn’t take it all in, and I was a little frightened.” Hampton’s lifelong work about redemption, a whale-sized gold and silver tinfoil sculpture created all alone in his garage, brought DJ to his knees. That night in the motel DJ began writing a poem in the bathtub. Later, he bolted up in bed. “I have to go home right now,” he said. “It was too much for me.” So I drove him to the airport. As he got out of the car he snapped his fingers and said, “Fear not.” Five years later he finished the poem.

Marie Howe

Poet, author of Magdalene and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

When Denis Johnson came out with The Incognito Lounge in 1982, the world of poetry trembled. In that extraordinary collection is the poem titled “Now,” which is as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever read, and the central poem of my writing life.

The poem is an experience. It’s happening to the poet as he writes it ─ not a record of an experience, not a memory ─ the experience is occurring to him word by word ─ a stepping into space without a rope. A waking awareness, a contradiction of his own impulse (Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson), and a series of urgent questions lead him and us to the very brink of radical transformation.

Denis was the first sober writer I had ever met. He was almost bursting out of his skin with aliveness. I watched him in wonder. How could someone so alive walk into rooms without holding something in front of his face? The poem “Now” suggests how.

Alix Ohlin

Author of the novels The Missing Person and Inside

When I learned as a graduate student that I could take a workshop with Denis Johnson at the Michener Center, I was nervous to meet him and also electrified. Few books meant more to me at that time than Jesus’ Son and Angels. I loved his work because he didn’t write like anyone else — he was gritty and lyrical, sacred and profane. I guess it’s not surprising he didn’t teach like anyone else either. I think his process was intuitive, mysterious perhaps even to him. He was shambling, unguarded, and had no prepared speeches. He didn’t line edit your work or give lectures on structure, or whatever conventional workshop leaders might do — but a lot of the things he said have never left me.

Once, a young person in our workshop handed in a seemingly autobiographical story about a child. It wasn’t, to be honest, very accomplished. Denis’ main comment was “It’s good you’re writing about your childhood now, because when you’re older, you won’t be able to remember it the same way,” which struck me as both generous and nakedly sad.

When I went to his office to ask for advice on the novel I was just starting to write, Denis more or less shrugged at the impossibility of offering advice. “You have to learn to write this novel, and anything you learn won’t teach you how to write the next one.” It was infuriating to hear and also, I now realize, true. In class he talked about Raymond Carver, about what it meant to him to study with Carver at Iowa; how as a young writer, an undergraduate, he just wanted to be in the library where Carver had been, to sit in the same chair. He wept as he said this. Later that semester a friend of mine, a literary agent, came to town and wanted me to arrange lunch with Denis. When I asked him about it, he blanched. “Do I owe her money?” “No, you’re one of her idols” I said stubbornly, and insisted they meet. (This makes me cringe in retrospect — I wonder how often he must have heard that, and what a burden it must have been.) We took him to lunch. He ordered a cheeseburger, and when it arrived it was not done the way he ordered it. He wept a little at this too. It made me smile, and now it amazes me to remember it — how little armor he had, how he chose to live without it.

Kelly Luce

Fiction writer, author of Pull Me Under

I was lucky to be in Denis Johnson’s workshop at the Michener Center two years ago. He was an unorthodox and beloved teacher. That first day, he told us he was a crier. But we shouldn’t worry, it usually passed quick. He cried three times that semester: One over Mavis Gallant’s “The Latehomecomer,” one over how hard writing is, always, but how beautiful to get it right, and one I forget.

He said that if we didn’t feel like submitting stories to workshop, we didn’t have to. “What’s best is to just sit around and talk.” One day he brought in two metal balls and made us all hold them and decide which was heavier. The difference in weight was very tiny but we found we could usually tell the heavier one if we didn’t think about it too hard. Denis was DELIGHTED by this. We spent an hour holding the balls; he was practically bouncing off the walls with excitement at how much more our minds knew than our brains. And he never said, “This is like writing,” or anything like that. He was just awestruck. We left class early that day and walked over to Crown & Anchor where he ordered a burger and gave the name “Elvis.”

I submitted two stories to workshop that semester. One was previously published, but I wasn’t happy with it anymore and unsure why. He knew. It was the ending. Who knows more about endings than DJ? “This sounds very END-Y,” he said of the final paragraph. “But it’s not really an ending.” But he liked the story in general, which was good, because he HATED the next story I put up. It’s one of my most memorable Michener moments.

The second story was a shitty first draft with magic in it. I volunteered because no one else had anything. I thought I was being gracious. Denis hated that fucking story so much, it was shocking and, in retrospect, just as delightful as the metal balls. He hated it so much he gesticulated wildly with the pages, yelling “Is this your best work?” He knocked his Red Bull off the grand old table onto the blue carpet. I said, “It’s a first draft?” and blacked out. Afterward I tried to flee but fell off my bike in the road in front of everyone.

Another time he told us about going on a weeklong silent retreat. He thought he and his roommate liked one another and looked forward to talking. When the week was up, he eagerly greeted his roommate. His roommate quietly said, “I had a very expensive watch, and it’s gone.”

His joy and sorrow were on the surface. He didn’t give a shit about hiding them. So many of us hide them in public and call them back when we write. As if they will continue to respond!

Now I remember the third time Denis cried. He was talking about what makes a story interesting; how it’s the little things, how all the tricks we try as writers are often bullshit. And he wells up with tears and says, “There’s nothing more fascinating than watching a guy trying to untie a knot from his shoelace. Nothing.”

There’s something wonderful about a teacher who insists he knows as little, or less than you. It makes you feel like maybe you can write.

Alexander Chee

Author of The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh

In the spring of 1994, Denis Johnson was my workshop teacher and thesis adviser at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I remember he had the sort of charisma that is impossible to imitate or fake — everyone was either in love with him, or for the few who were not, annoyed that everyone was in love with him. He told stories of when he was a student there in poetry — of how this or that famous writer was not so beloved, he assured us, in workshop. But he made it more than gossip: “You don’t know what someone can do just from what they show you here,” he said of one poet who used to drive him crazy and was now one of his favorites. In that little anecdote was a story about the long game of writing, and the false intensity of a present that feels so permanent.

For me, he was important in several different ways. He was a poet who also wrote fiction, which I was too at the time—this was not so common then. I remember with one of my stories he said, “This has the feeling of a lit match carried through a storm.” He then spoke of the importance of guarding one’s original inspiration all the way to the end. That story was an experiment in writing about the queer punk scene in San Francisco in the early 1990s. (The writing of certain stories in the beginning of your career has the feeling of something that makes you as you make it — this was one of those for me.) It was not easy to present that kind of work in 1994, and so to be greeted like this by him alerted me to my own powers. It conferred the feeling of graduating from that place as nothing else did.

Emily Rapp Black

Author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World

I met Denis Johnson as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin where I was a student in fiction in the early 2000s. On the first day of class we were nervous and star struck, but Denis was friendly, chatty, kind, and more than anything else, he was open. Within the first hour, Denis read aloud from J.D. Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish. In the middle of the story he stopped and wiped his eyes, his voice cracking with emotion. “Isn’t that a beautiful line?” he asked. I wish now that I could remember which one.

He could have entered the space of eager graduate students arrogantly, even cruelly, and we likely would have accepted it. Certainly his epic reputation made many of us assume he would be anything but kind, least of all so emotional. Instead he read aloud from one of his favorite stories and burst into tears, as he continued to do throughout the semester. His great empathy and willingness to be vulnerable, not venerated and worshiped, made him a terrific leader of workshop. It is a model, I believe, of how to remain an artist — even when one becomes a kind of cult figure.

I also credit Johnson with giving me the greatest editorial gift, although at first it felt less like a gift and more like a massive moment of embarrassment. One day he announced he had hired actors to read aloud our stories for workshop. Hearing my overly long, overly lyrical story go on and on and on for more than an hour (Four metaphors per page! Overkill!) while I slashed phrases and lines taught me an invaluable lesson: The best way to edit is to read aloud. To this day, I read everything aloud, from short stories to essays to entire book-length manuscripts. So thanks, Denis. You are missed, and you will be remembered.

Rebecca Bengal

Fiction writer and reporter

It was my first fiction teacher, Michael Parker, who turned me onto Denis Johnson in undergrad workshops in Greensboro, North Carolina. Jesus’ Son was the gateway, the pocket-sized paperback with the blackboard cover that I read behind the counter at the bookstore where I worked, a place where I shelved serial romance novels and saved copies of Shotgun News and Hustler for regulars. Reading Jesus’ Son, I felt as I had when I’d first heard the Velvet Underground, from whose lyrics Denis had stolen his title. These were perfect sentences that sliced straight through to the core. Here was a writer acknowledging the things I’d suspected to be true of human beings and the world, confirmed and transformed into bleak, electric language. The words were simultaneously blistering and healing; they stayed with me like scars.

A few years later I was on a plane to Austin, Texas, a place I had never been. We whipped through dense clouds, landed with a sickening thump, and hurtled along the tarmac. I was disoriented and green when I arrived at the Michener Center for Writers as a prospective student. Down the stairs came Denis, whose sentences I knew by heart. He introduced himself, as if he had to, and said, “I was thinking about making a pot of coffee. Want some?” We stood and talked in the kitchen and that day felt like a beautiful augur. In Austin, he was the first person who helped me.

Denis later returned as a visiting writer and I was a student in his fiction workshop. I had not expected the writer of Angels to wear Hawaiian shirts and drive a cherry-red convertible, but who was I to judge? I decided to think of it as a character he was maybe trying out, the Denis Johnson who lived in Austin. I knew that back in Idaho he lived in a remote part of the state near a place named for a local bar, the Good Grief. In class, he was grand and occasionally admonishing, prone to laughter and tears. He hired student actors to read our stories back to us, which I hated at the time. Sometimes he alluded to his past in a far-off way, or spoke of the war-torn places he reported from in Seek, or mentioned his teacher Raymond Carver. In private, talking over stories, he was serious, rigorous, and generous. We sat in his office at Michener and talked about language, the kind of words that exist between people thrown together in certain circumstances of place or misfortune; the kind of language that is never spoken aloud.

A few days after I first met him, Denis invited his students and the visiting prospective fellows over to dinner at his rental in South Austin. Denis and Cindy’s kids drifted in and out of the house, there were plates of spaghetti and salad, and there was a sort of languidness about everything. Off to the side of the kitchen, normally a pantry or a laundry room, was the place Denis wrote. The door had been left slightly open. When you are a young writer you are always looking for clues not only in how to write, but how to be. I remember seeing a small plain table, a stiff uncomfortable-looking chair, a pad of yellow paper, and a typewriter with an index card taped on the wall above. On it, I imagined the three rules he frequently dictated (“Write naked. Write in blood. Write from exile.”) or a quote from Whitman he often recited, though I didn’t let myself look long enough to tell. Some dirty clothes were tossed on the side of a washing machine. I saw Denis just a couple times after our workshop — the years in which he published Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke — and I still try to square the image of that red convertible with the idea of that stark, demanding little room.

Susan Steinberg

Fiction writer, author of Spectacle

In the early 1990s I lived in Boston and worked in a bookstore in Harvard Square. There was a night I went to a talk by T.C. Boyle, and during the Q & A someone asked what we should be reading. Boyle said Jesus’ Son. The bookstore I worked in was about to close down for good, so we didn’t carry Jesus’ Son. I couldn’t find it anywhere else and eventually I forgot about it. A few months later I was in Seattle helping my brother move and I was staying with a friend from college. There was a day my friend was at work and my brother and I were fighting, so I went for a long walk.

This moment is now personally significant, marking the first time I had walked alone aimlessly through a city I didn’t know. I ended up in a bookstore that had one copy of Jesus’ Son that I found while looking for something else. The next day I was in the Seattle airport. I was feeling bad about leaving my brother after our fight, I was feeling bad about a lot of things, so I started Jesus’ Son in a dark mood and read it in its entirety, sitting there, waiting. I’ve heard people say reading something great makes them feel less alone. But reading something great often has the opposite effect on me. With Jesus’ Son, I was acutely aware of my aloneness, even in that crowded airport. Coming out of the book, I remember looking up at the strangers around me. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but I’m thinking of a line from the first story in the collection: “…he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.” Something like frustration. Some beautiful awareness of our limitations. I still can feel it.

Jason Diamond

Editor at Rolling Stone, author of Searching for John Hughes

A few minutes after I saw the news that Denis Johnson had passed away, I took down Angels, his first novel, off my shelf and started to read it for the first time in over a decade. This is something I find myself doing whenever somebody whose art I appreciate passes. A few days earlier, I found myself revisiting Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger after Chris Cornell died, and I binged on more than a few of Nora Ephron’s films after her passing in 2012. This is how I cope.

Johnson’s books are scattered around my apartment. Like so many others, I read the stories in Jesus’ Son at the moment in my life when I found fiction really starting to impact my thinking. I’ve always kept a copy the way some people always have a Bible or specific bottle of Scotch in the house, but this night I decided to go back to the start of his career after reading a few of his poems to get warmed up. I reread the entire book in one sitting.

Angels was a novel that, when I read it at around 24 or 25, I told myself I had to read. Today, I realize maybe I was reading it the wrong way. I was under the influence of Jesus’ Son, and the idea that Johnson — like Lou Reed, who wrote the song the book gets its name from — was sketching a certain kind of person he had observed and wanted to write about; people living on the fringes, messed up people, criminals, junkies, and “weirdos,” as Matt Bell writes in his moving eulogy. I’d thought Johnson was commenting on those people, and nothing else. Like many other things in my twenties, I was so wrong. While he writes about people who are messed up, what becomes clear is that Johnson didn’t necessarily believe we were born sinners, his characters didn’t come out screwed up and weird. They’re victims of America, its weirdness and dysfunction; American dreams turned into nightmares.

Amy Gerstler

Poet, author of Dearest Creature and Scattered at Sea

When I first read Denis Johnson, his poetry and prose knocked the wind out of me in the best way, and his writing has never failed, upon frequent re-readings, to leave me breathless. On every level I love his work: the mind behind it, individual sentences or lines, how he humanizes “twistedness” and all that seethes within his characters, his dark grace in dealing with insane behavior and suffering (including the self-induced variety), his intensity on the page, his gift for making the strange relatable and the relatable strange, and the weird humor that gleams beneath.

I began with the prose. When Jesus Son came out in 1992, I was stunned by the stories’ mix of beauty and harshness, and the way he wielded images. Then I backtracked to the poems. After that, I had to ask myself, how the hell was this guy so good at both genres? Had anybody ever written about being high, caught the glory, hilarity and crazy desolation better than him? When I read his work, I re-learn that writing about extreme states or violence or being under the influence never need be limited to just that, but can be a deep dive into the hallucinatorily human, into our wildest capacities. His fiction goes way beyond ‘poetic prose’ for me. Car Crash While Hitchhiking and Emergency are two of my favorite stories, ever. I’ve never read a poem of his that didn’t give me a wonderful shiver.

Christian Kiefer

Novelist, author of The Animals

I’ve been looking over my friend Denis Johnson’s writing in the silence after his demise, marveling anew at the moments of grace in his work, the way he turns toward the spirit, the divine, just when it seems that to do so would be, is, utterly impossible. Yet is it not true that whenever we reach those moments in his books and stories and poems and plays, what we come to understand is that he has been quietly, deftly, directing us toward our own souls with every scene, with every sentence, with every word? So that when the great surprise comes and we stand face to face with that bright light that is — what? God? the universe? our very selves? — there is no great surprise at all. He has been telling us all along that it is coming: a reckoning which is, in the end, deliverance itself. Oh how he hands you the great gift you think is a bullet, a feather, a small smooth pile of pills like tiny blue stones, a whole collection of objects which, when you look later, is only your own heart held wild and beating in your hands. What a marvel you were, my friend. And so what a marvel you will ever be. Godspeed. In those darkest of nights I will forever think of your light. You saved me. God knows you saved us all.

A Sociology of the Smartphone

Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

Adam Greenfield | Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life | Verso | June 2017 | 27 minutes (7,433 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from Radical Technologies, by Adam Greenfield. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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They are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking.

The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age. Less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life. Very few manufactured objects have ever been as ubiquitous as these glowing slabs of polycarbonate.

For many of us, they are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around. We buy and sell things with them. We rely on them to document the places we go, the things we do and the company we keep; we count on them to fill the dead spaces, the still moments and silences that used to occupy so much of our lives.

They have altered the texture of everyday life just about everywhere, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals in their entirety, and transforming others beyond recognition. At this juncture in history, it simply isn’t possible to understand the ways in which we know and use the world around us without having some sense for the way the smartphone works, and the various infrastructures it depends on.

For all its ubiquity, though, the smartphone is not a simple thing. We use it so often that we don’t see it clearly; it appeared in our lives so suddenly and totally that the scale and force of the changes it has occasioned have largely receded from conscious awareness. In order to truly take the measure of these changes, we need to take a step or two back, to the very last historical moment in which we negotiated the world without smartphone in hand. Read more…

We Need to Talk About Uber: A Timeline of the Company’s Growing List of Problems

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Photo by Wang K'aichicn/VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a piece for the Financial Times titled “Fire Travis Kalanick,” Kadhim Shubber wrote of the founder of Uber: “One day we will look back at what will hopefully be the smouldering wreckage of Kalanick’s career and ask how a person so lacking in basic human and corporate ethics was allowed to run a company for so long.”

Founded in 2009, Uber was able to portray itself as an underdog “disruptor” into 2012, galvanizing support to beat back city lawmakers in Boston and Washington, D.C. who sought to impose regulations.

But then their practice of surge pricing during crises came under fire when ride prices doubled in New York City after Hurricane Sandy devastated the metropolis in 2012. When surge pricing reached nearly eight times the fare during a snowstorm in 2013, riders got angry.

At first, few reporters took to criticizing the company. When they did, Uber’s public relations machine responded by trashing those reporters in other outlets. When reports of assaults and misconduct by Uber drivers started to roll in, the company responded by claiming they were not responsible for the incidents because the drivers are “independent contractors.”

And since 2013, the missteps and scandals have only continued to pile up. Here is a not comprehensive timeline of all of the trouble Uber has gotten into to date:

January 2014: Pando reported that an Uber driver suspended after assaulting a passenger in San Francisco had a criminal record, including a felony conviction involving prison time. Uber has no explanation for why the driver cleared the background checks that California mandated they run. That same month, outlets nationwide report on the company getting hit with its first wrongful death suit stemming from a driver killing a 6-year-old girl in a San Francisco crash on New Year’s Eve. That driver also had a criminal record that included a conviction for reckless driving. Read more…

Getting Out the Message To Save Himself

Photograph by Grant Faint

Don Waters | The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain: Stories | University of Nevada Press | May 2017 | 25 minutes (6954 words)

From altar boys to inmates, ranches to hotels, the characters in Don Waters’ new collection of short fiction struggle with faith and meaning as much as the landscape of the American Southwest. In this story, “Full of Days,” the protagonist’s antiabortion billboard and surrogate daughter force him to reexamine his controlling behavior and own deep loss, in a city known for sin. Our thanks to Waters and University of Nevada Press for letting us share this story with the Longreads community.

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“So Job died, being old and full of days.”  —Book of Job 42:17

Marc Maldonado sensed the Kingdom of God within him on Sundays, driving sun-scorched trash-scattered freeways to his temple of worship, and he felt the emptiness of his own realm whenever he set the table for one, whenever he aligned his socks in the hollow dresser drawer. In this hot, high-voltage city, with its pulsing neon, with its armies of fingers slamming on video poker buttons, he felt the loving kindness, the light ache of breath in his nostrils, and he knew he was necessary.

On that day Marc drove the freeways, analyzing angles for the best possible exposure. The great desert opened to him as he cruised I-15 North-South, I-515 East-West, changing direction where the freeways intersected and formed a concrete cross. Read more…