The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

What is the relationship between poetry and the selfie? This was one of the questions I sent a number of poets working in different modes. I said they could answer the question, or not, or if they wanted they could include some other type of text. I said they could interpret the term “selfie” as they saw it. – Kate Durbin
Duckface and surprised-face as the masks of comedy/tragedy. – Ana Božičević
At LitHub, Kate Durbin presents several dozen selfies–not her own, but those of contemporary poets, like Eileen Myles, Luna Miguel and Dodie Bellamy. She received faces, clouds and cityscapes, portraits of confusion and contentment. Their reflections (literal and literary) are tender and hilarious.

The period known as “Classic Hollywood” began in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with the gradual consolidation of the studios, and ends at a nebulous point in the 1950s. In the earliest days of the so-called “movie colony,” you could get a job in the moving pictures if you a) had a great face (Clara Bow); b) did an effective job of using exaggerated face and hand motions to make up for the lack of sound (Theda Bara); c) had a special vaudevillian talent, like slapstick comedy or dancing (Buster Keaton); or d) were in the right place at the right time (Loretta Young).
You could have a thick accent, you could barely speak English, you could have classic British elocution — it didn’t matter, because with silent film, the audiences would never hear your voice. Most stars came from nothing or next-to; very few had anything that we’d consider an education. In many ways, it was fame at its most democratic.
—Anne Helen Petersen writing for Buzzfeed about the actor Mark Wahlberg, and how his career has borrowed from the old Hollywood playbook.
“I started in Woodbury and then my parents divorced and we moved to Syosset, next door. They separated when I was in sixth grade, got back together, then separated again between eight and ninth grade, I think. Everyone in my neighborhood, they’d start out living in a big house and then their parents would divorce and they would move to a condo a mile away. The condos were filled with all the divorced families. I found a poem recently that I wrote when I was 15, called ‘Divorce.’ I wrote it when I was a dishwasher at a comedy club on the weekends. It’s so funny but it’s so sad. It predicts my entire life.”

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)
Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

I was about six months younger than everyone else in my class, and so for about six months after it began, for six months after my friends had begun to develop (that was the word we used, develop), I was not particularly worried. I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like everyone else’s. They didn’t. “I want to buy a bra,” I said to my mother one night. “What for?” she said. My mother was really hateful about bras, and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. “Why not use a Band-Aid instead?” she would say. It was a source of great pride to my mother that she had never even had to wear a brassiere until she had her fourth child, and then only because her gynecologist made her. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone could ever be proud of something like that. It was the 1950s, for God’s sake. Jane Russell. Cashmere sweaters. Couldn’t my mother see that? “I am too old to wear an undershirt.” Screaming. Weeping. Shouting. “Then don’t wear an undershirt,” said my mother. “But I want to buy a bra.” “What for?”
I suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing, has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with becoming a woman, than anything else. Certainly more than getting your period, although that, too, was traumatic, symbolic. But you could see breasts; they were there; they were visible. Whereas a girl could claim to have her period for months before she actually got it and nobody would ever know the difference. Which is exactly what I did. All you had to do was make a great fuss over having enough nickels for the Kotex machine and walk around clutching your stomach and moaning for three to five days a month about The Curse and you could convince anybody. There is a school of thought somewhere in the women’s lib/women’s mag/gynecology establishment that claims that menstrual cramps are purely psychological, and I lean toward it. Not that I didn’t have them finally. Agonizing cramps, heating-pad cramps, go-down-to-the- school-nurse-and-lie-on-the-cot cramps. But unlike any pain I had ever suffered, I adored the pain of cramps, welcomed it, wallowed in it, bragged about it. “I can’t go. I have cramps.” “I can’t do that. I have cramps.” And most of all, gigglingly, blushingly: “I can’t swim. I have cramps.” Nobody ever used the hard-core word. Menstruation. God, what an awful word. Never that. “I have cramps.”
—The late, great Nora Ephron, writing for Esquire in May 1972. “A Few Words About Breasts” later appeared in Ephron’s classic 1975 essay collection Crazy Salad.

Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)
Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.
Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond. Read more…

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:
Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.
John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

My therapist hasn’t called me back. Let me clarify: my potential therapist. I read her LinkedIn profile. I read her website. I tried to find her Facebook page. I left a voicemail on the office phone number. And then I received a call from a number I didn’t recognize, but it sounded like a butt-dial, so I don’t think it was her. But still, that was two months ago. “Just call her back!” you say. Hmm, no, I don’t think so, because what if the butt-dial was her way—subconscious or no—of rejecting me? Like I said: I need therapy. So do the folks included in this week’s reading list. We’re going all over the world: from improv classes, hospitals and living rooms in Belgium, New York City and Minnesota.
“Psychiatric Community Care: Belgian Town Sets Gold Standard.” (Karin Wells, CBC News, March 2014)
“The Geel Question.” (Mike Jay, Aeon, January 2014)
Since the Middle Ages, Geel has been a safe haven for the mentally ill. Now, its numbers are dwindling. Will this beacon of family-based psychiatric care survive? Read more…
An interview with Kay Cannon, Pitch Perfect screenwriter, on how her a cappella comedy might be changing the definition of cool.
You must be logged in to post a comment.