Search Results for: D Magazine

‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James

Mark Seliger / Penguin Random House

Adam Morgan| Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (1,962 words)

I understand why Marlon James calls his new trilogy “an African Game of Thrones” — it builds the right expectations for an epic fantasy with dozens of characters spread across warring kingdoms. However, judging by the first book in the series, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, another apt comparison, especially when it comes to style and structure, might be “an African Gormenghast.”

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series (1946-1959), if you’ve never read it, is a dense literary labyrinth that makes A Game of Thrones and its sequels look downright old-fashioned. The story of a wealthy heir who lives in a vast, crumbling castle, Gormenghast has never been wildly popular thanks to its challenging style, but it does hold cult status among scholars and writers like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Sofia Samatar, even Harold Bloom. “Reading it at the age of 13,” Samatar has written, “I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica, Marlon James didn’t have access to many fantasy novels, but he did stumble upon Gormenghast as an adult. “It was like a blueprint for how the fantastical grows up,” he says, echoing Samatar, adding that it’s the one book that “continues to rule his life.”

Perhaps that’s why Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes so many narrative risks. It’s a sprawling series of stories within stories that fold back on themselves, a hypnotic spoken-word fable full of sex, violence, and magic. It’s not quite what you’re expecting — and it’s all the better for it. Read more…

Every Day I Write the Book

Santiago Felipe / Getty

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,035 words)

Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed. At the local movie theater, I had the misfortune of catching the 1968 youth exploitation drama Wild In The Streets, in which anyone over 30 was forcibly retired and those over 35 were rounded up for re-learning camps. Seeing this flick at an impressionable age, I wasn’t worldly enough to reject its ideas or realize it was a youth fantasy as perpetuated by the suits. I thought it was a true harbinger of things to come and was horrified by every melodramatic moment. The movie haunted my adolescence, and I went to school sensing that hitting 30 was going to mean the end of meaningfulness, so I’d better live and achieve to the max until I was ready to be carted away.

Listen to Michael Musto read “Every Day I Write the Book” on the Longreads Podcast.

Well, I’m 63 and not only not retired or in an internment camp, but I’m actually doing pretty well. I have a weekly column on a popular site called NewNowNext.com, I get freelance offers (like this one), and I’m asked to appear on TV and in documentaries to give my opinions on various pop cultural topics through the years. What’s more, having produced four books, I’m often asked by agents and publishers to crank out some more. Shady Pines is not beckoning me in the least — but I wish I’d have anticipated that fact, not only as a kid, but in my late 20s, when I thought I had already peaked as a writer. Yes, I felt like a has-been at 28!
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‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,177 words)

 

I first stumbled across Reema Zaman on Facebook where each week she posts Love Letter Monday in which she discusses her life, both the hardships and successes, in an unabashedly self-loving manner. At first it caught me by surprise. I was so unaccustomed to hearing a woman speak well of herself — it felt, well, wrong. But soon enough I found myself sneaking back as if the words were contraband and the act of reading them a necessary revolution. The posts also contain an outpouring of love for the reader. A clarion call for women to turn “wound into wisdom” and “pain into poetry.” To be the authors of their own lives.

Her new memoir I Am Yours continues the call. In an evolving age-specific voice, Reema guides the reader through her life from a childhood in Bangladesh and Thailand with a domineering and unpredictable father, through anorexia and rape while living with roommates in Manhattan and navigating an often degrading and even dangerous life as an actress and model, to emotional abuse while living in a dilapidated barn in the middle of no-cell-phone-service woods with her then husband until, at age thirty, she at last lands a room of her own.

Reema’s prose is as ablaze as her heart. Lyrical, precise, in places frothing with desire or rage or faith, Reema’s unbridling of her tightly-watched self-suppressed voice is not an easy task. Yet it’s an essential one. These are hard stories, let loose at last with grace, sagacity, and dollops of clever humor. At its heart, I Am Yours is a story of hope. Read more…

The Lost Boys of #MeToo

Lee Roth / AP, Herman / Corbis, Dave Hogan / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,500 words)

At the end of An Open Secret, the 2015 documentary by Amy J. Berg about child sex abuse in Hollywood, a card reads: “The filmmakers emphasize that this is not a gender based issue. We chose to tell these specific stories, but they are representations of a greater issue that affects both boys and girls.” It was an odd thing to read after watching a 99-minute film — one that could not secure a distributor and was self-released on Vimeo — in which no girls were mentioned. Whether or not it was intentional, the statement had the effect of equating the two genders, erasing any nuance that might exist in a male victim versus a female victim. It leaves the impression that the abuse we predominantly talk about  which, in our current climate, targets girls and women  is the standard. So the way girls and women are mistreated and how they react to this mistreatment is how all of us do. The fallout from Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and R. Kelly is the fallout from Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer and Gary Goddard. Read more…

Almost Undefeated: The Forgotten Football Upset of 1976

Meg Oliphant / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | February 2019 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

Mitchi Collette has been playing football, in one form or another, for 46 years. The 5’7” spitfire with grey, spiky hair is the co-owner and coach of the Toledo Reign, a team in the Women’s Football Alliance.

Collette is an effective coach in part because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be on the gridiron — she understands how to execute a play. The 65-year-old former outside linebacker knows what it feels like to put on the pads and the helmet and slam your full body weight into another person. She knows what it sounds like when bodies connect and the smell of grass and dirt when you’re thrown to the ground.

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Preparing for the Worst in Arkansas

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

When the shit hits the fan, will you be ready? The Arkansas Defense Force will be. An independent militia, these guys meet regularly to eat, share knowledge, and increase their disaster preparedness. When an ice storm hit Arkansas in 2009, some of them had enough food, water, and battery power to remain completely unaffected. They’re also prepared for invasions, gang war, and civil unrest, too. For the literary magazine TriQuarterly, Caroline Beimford spends time with the ADF, to understand their concerns, their philosophies, how they got into survivalism, and whether they are, as many people believe, just plain weird.

A series of tragic events involving his first wife and son also shed light on his belief in self-sufficiency and preparedness, as well as his suspicion of most government bodies. He was able to save his wife’s life during a road trip as the result of his basic medical training, and he claims his son was de facto kidnapped into the Oklahoma foster care system as the result of federal funding incentives. His focus now is to convert his parents’ 4.5 acres into a more secure, private compound. Though he currently resides in a trailer on the property and cares for his aging parents, he has plans to move the house back from the road, build a fence, and construct a gun range and several sheds so he can empty out the storage units he currently rents.

Still, according to Scott, the big picture is about helping people in “the now.” When he reads about men calling 9-1-1 when their cable goes out, he’s afraid for humanity. He sees himself as a protector of knowledge once broadly held but now fallen from favor with the rise of urbanization. A K-9 trainer and Search & Rescue member in Arkansas and Oklahoma (he was a first responder after the Oklahoma City bombing), Scott says he’s “less interested in volcanoes and more interested in real life.” Expanding on Werner’s classroom jokes about iPhones and GPS, he says, “If your phone dies and you get lost in the woods, I’ll come find you.”

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How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

Edward Gorey: A Highly Conjectural Man

Edward Gorey posing with a set piece he designed for the Broadway production of "Dracula," 1977. Jack Mitchell / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (2,151 words)

 

Edward Gorey’s small illustrated books, many of which are collected in his Amphigorey anthologies, are seemingly quite simple and often morbid. Children are befallen by terrible fates. Parents disappear and reappear too late. Danger lurks nearby, as dusk makes its way across the moors. All of this sinister mischief is told in black and white pen-and-ink drawings, with occasional color highlights thrown in (which somehow only serve to make the image more dreary and doom-laden). The characters differ little in appearance, and the prose — when there is any — is often a few rhyming lines near the bottom of the page. Looking closer, one can see the intricacy of the cross-hatching, the careful etching-like strokes that, alongside Gorey’s fragile humor, underpin the darkness.

Edward Gorey, like his art, was at once mercurial and precise. His interests, hobbies, dislikes, and habits are well documented, from his late-in-life love for TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,to his devotion to George Balanchine’s work with the New York City Ballet, to his undying love for the cats with which he lived. His physical appearance — over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a long beard, draped in a huge fur coat, with rings on multiple fingers and scuffed up white sneakers on his feet — is as much part of the lore of Gorey’s work as the nonsensical creatures who populate his illustrations. Read more…

Shelved: Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine

Paul R. Giunta / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2019 | 17 minutes (3,315 words)

 

The remarkable thing about Fiona Apple’s album Extraordinary Machine is that it’s actually two albums. Each has its own fans and critics; each was reviewed in the mainstream press; each is available to the casual listener.

Upon closer inspection, the story of Extraordinary Machine becomes a room made of mirrors: The album was shelved, perhaps by Apple’s label, or, according to her own admission, by Apple herself. That version of the album, produced by longtime collaborator Jon Brion, was leaked to the internet. It’s called the “Jon Brion version,” but in actuality is a pastiche of original sessions and new material. The official release was mixed without the presence of either of its two producers. The first version was shelved in part because Apple didn’t feel the songs were fully her own, and partly because her label didn’t believe it had commercial potential; the released version proved them right, at least by yielding no hit singles.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bryan Singer. (Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alex French and Maximillian Potter, Wesley Morris, Ruxandra Guidi, Robert Caro, and Mark Abley.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…