Search Results for: DNA

A Woman, Tree or Not

Mohammad Alizade / Unsplash, Getty Images, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Terese Marie Mailhot | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,419 words)

I never became a woman formally in my culture. The ceremony I had once believed was promised to me didn’t come. I can’t tell you much about what a woman’s coming of age ceremony entails — not because I don’t know, but because we keep some things secret, in case the government comes after us again. The federal governments in the US and Canada implemented policies to annihilate Indigenous languages and cultures. The policies forbade many of our most significant practices. To become a woman, I’ve had to search for the truth and ritual that should have been handed down to me openly, from a grandmother and mother who had both learned to value and teach in quietude. They taught me that there is nothing stagnant about a secret; it grows and wills itself into the light, every time.

My grandmother didn’t speak much because she favored implicit instruction. She worked in the nursery school I went to, and, when she was not there, a well-meaning white teacher named Ms. Hardy used to drag us by our arms back to class. My grandmother used her gentleness to show me the possibilities of love. People who knew her might think she showed affection to us grandchildren with pinches and food, but I think of other things. When she dressed me as a child, I remember how she helped me put my tights on. She bunched each leg slowly to put my toes inside — toes she had trimmed and rubbed her thumbs along. My tights never tore and I was always clean during that time before she passed. After she died, my mother was always in a frantic rush without her help and guidance. Sometimes I tried to wear tights, but they split in the hem, or my toes caught the nylon. I could never exact her slowness. My mother valued speed — she was a bolt of a woman.

When I get my son ready for daycare, I whisper him awake. I distract him with jokes and silly voices as I dress him, and although my hands are quick, I believe he will remember them as warm. In this way, kindness can undo years of subjugation — it can turn the tide of inherited grief.

My grandmother went to St. George’s residential school as a child, which was notoriously brutal to Indians. She did not speak our language out loud, nor did she pray in our language — she prayed to Jesus in English. She learned how to pray kneeling before a Matron in a dormitory for Indian girls, who were most likely separated into groups 1, 2, or 3. They wore stiff, thin, green uniforms. In my research, I’ve seen film footage of little Indian girls filing out of the school, following their caregivers, and I can’t see any nylons or stockings; I wonder if anyone showed my grandmother gentleness. There are stories from survivors of residential schools who recall wetting their beds night after night, and then being ridiculed by the Indians and whites alike as they hung their clothes and bedding on the line the next day. The children learned military-style marches, and how to stiffen their backs at “Attenshun!” They slept in rooms under lock and key. I don’t know how anyone could herd children this way without losing their soul. In some cases, children said they felt like employees or worse. They were given work assignments like “barn-boy.” Girls had kitchen assignments, and, when they stole cookies or apples, they were punished with ridicule and abuse. When I review testimony from Native people about this time, I always look at their eyes. Kindness can survive cruelty. It’s a lesson my grandmother taught, and never had to speak. She never needed to say what happened to her, we knew not to ask. I wanted to ask her how she became a woman, but I feared the answer.

Some children were brought there in the backs of trucks. Some children wanted to be there with their cousins, and some Indian Agents convinced parents they were harming their children if they didn’t send them away to school. Some children were given Nlaka’pamux names before they left. My grandmother’s name was Little Bird. I resist telling you in her language for political and personal reasons. I don’t know what you’ll do with deep insights into my culture, and I don’t pronounce names well.
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Tennessee Williams’ Paintings Explored Being Gay in America

KEY WEST, FLORIDA, USA - 1982: American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983)in the swimming pool at the house he owned in Key West shortly before his death. Photo by Derek Hudson/Getty Images

At The New York Times, Michael Adno examines the paintings of American playwright Tennessee Williams, who used the visual medium to explore what it meant to be gay in America during the ’70s.

In Key West, friends would find Williams in front of his typewriter, encircled by manuscripts, paintbrushes and unopened mail. Throughout the 1970s, tourists walked past the house, where he sold paintings — sometimes not yet dry — over his fence. More than once, he arrived at a dinner with a fresh canvas under his arm as a gift.

Because of his paintings’ haphazard distribution, no one can say how many exist. In the nine works in the Jewish Museum show, “Tennessee Williams — Playwright and Painter,” references to Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens mingle with religious iconography and his own characters. There’s even a portrait of the actor Michael York, who starred in Williams’s “Out Cry” in 1973.

Williams’s preoccupation with the eternal questions of love and death hang over his work. The novelist Edmund White, whose name has become synonymous with gay literature, believed that Williams’s plays “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” were — in a veiled way — expressions of gay desire. Though these Broadway-bound works couldn’t risk dealing with these themes head-on, short stories like “Desire and the Black Masseur” certainly did.

“I think he was the first to write about that explicitly,” Mr. White said in a telephone interview, adding that this work made gay life more visible to him — and to America — when he was growing up in the 1950s. “Certainly, as a young gay kid, I turned on to that work tremendously.”

Beyond his plays, Williams’s paintings were a means to delve into subjects like what it meant to be a gay man in America.

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A New View of Crime in America

Pat Sutphin / The Times-News via AP

Fox Butterfield | In My Father’s House | Knopf | October 2018 | 37 minutes (7,317 words)

 

Tracey

A Fateful Compulsion

At precisely 8:00 a.m. on August 10, 2009, a solitary figure emerged from the front gate of the sprawling Oregon State Correctional Institution. The man looked small set against the immensity of the yellow-painted prison complex, sheathed by coils of gleaming razor wire. It was Tracey Bogle. He had just finished serving his full sixteen-year sentence for the attack on Dave Fijalka and Sandra Jackson, and he was carrying a large plastic trash bag that held all his worldly possessions: a well-thumbed Bible, a few other books, his copious legal file and a change of clothes. Tracey was wearing black slacks and a dark collared shirt that had been donated to him by two volunteers from the Seventh Day Adventist Church. They had also given him $25, the only money he had.

No members of Tracey’s family were waiting to meet him. His brothers were all in prison themselves. His two sisters were leading vagabond lives, doing drugs and panhandling where they could. His mother, Kathy, was about to go on trial and then go to jail too. So Tracey had asked me—knowing that I was working on a book about the Bogle family—if I would pick him up. He needed a ride to the halfway house for newly released sex offenders where he would be required to live by state law, and he needed to be driven to meet his new parole officer and to a state office to get his allowance of food stamps so he could buy food. He also had to report to the Oregon State Police office to register as a sex offender.

At first I was reluctant. As a correspondent for The New York Times for thirty-six years, I had followed the paper’s strict code of not becoming personally involved with a source to get a story. But Tracey had no one else to turn to, and I knew from reporting on criminal justice for the past fifteen years that the odds of a newly released inmate making a successful transition back to life outside prison were bleak. In fact, a comprehensive national survey of state prison inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that two-thirds of the 600,000 inmates released every year are rearrested within three years, and three-quarters of all inmates are rearrested within five years. Our prisons have become a giant, expensive recycling machine that feeds on itself. Repeated findings by criminologists about this high level of failure had led one leading sociologist, Robert Martinson, to conclude, “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitation efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.”

Martinson’s conclusion was so damning that it soon became known as the “nothing works” doctrine in trying to rehabilitate inmates. Later research by other criminologists questioned Martinson’s findings, but the “nothing works” notion helped lay the groundwork for America’s great social experiment with mass incarceration in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as the way to solve our crime problem. So I thought that picking Tracey up on his release from prison and following him around for a week or two might give me an insight into why so few convicts were able to make a successful reentry into civilian life.

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On Subtlety

AP Photo/LM Otero

Meghan O’Gieblyn | Interior States | Anchor | October 2018 | 13 minutes (6,551 words)

 

I.

In ancient Rome, there were certain fabrics so delicate and finely stitched they were called subtilis, literally “underwoven.” The word—from which came the Old French soutil and the English subtle—often described the gossamer-like material that was used to make veils. I think of organza or the finest blends of silk chiffon, material that is opaque when gathered but sheer when stretched and translucent when held up to the light. Most wedding veils sold today use a special kind of tulle called “bridal illusion,” a term I’ve always loved, as it calls attention to the odd abracadabra of the veil, an accoutrement that is designed to simultaneously reveal and conceal.

 

II.

Doris Lessing once complained that her novel The Golden Notebook was widely misinterpreted. For her, the story was about the theme of “breakdown,” and how madness was a process of healing the self’s divisions. She placed this theme in the center of the novel, in a section that shares the title of the book, which she assumed would lead readers to understand that it was the cipher. Rather than making the theme explicit, she wanted to hint at it through the form of the novel itself, “to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.” But in the end, her efforts did not translate. “Nobody so much as noticed this central theme,” she complains in the introduction to the 1973 edition. “Handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.”

 

There are people, of course, who will argue that divergent readings are a sign of a work’s complexity. But whenever I return to Lessing’s account of her novel’s reception, I can’t help but hear a note of loneliness, one that echoes all those artists who have been woefully misunderstood: Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a protest against abstract math. Georgia O’Keeffe insisted that her paintings of poppies and irises were not meant to evoke female genitalia (flowers, her defenders keep pointing out, fruitlessly, are androgynous). Ray Bradbury once claimed at a UCLA lecture that his novel Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship, but the dangers of television. He was shouted out of the lecture hall. Nietzsche abhorred anti-Semitism, but when Hitler came across a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he interpreted the image of the “splendid blond beast” as a symbol of the Aryan race. One wonders what might have happened had Nietzsche simply written: “lion.” Read more…

To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story

Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)

 

The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.

I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.

Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.

I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.

When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…

Charting the Love — and Betrayal — in Our Stars

Illustration by Helen Li

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

 

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

 

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

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Shelved: Bill Evans’ Loose Blues

Bill Evans. David Redfern / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,248 words)

 

“Loose Bloose” has a beguiling head riff. Such motifs are played at the beginning, or “head,” of a jazz or rock song. They’re typically repetitive and simple enough for musicians to remember — an arrangement kept in one’s head, not written down. Pianist Bill Evans changed that. The head riff on “Loose Bloose” is too complex to not have been notated. Played in unison and in octave harmonies on piano and tenor saxophone, it is somehow both intimate and imperious. It moves with the strange grace of a mantis. It is a part of Evans’s legacy that is without either parent or descendant.

That is partly because “Loose Bloose,” and the album with which it nearly shares a name, was shelved. Thought lost, Loose Blues remained in vaults for 20 years. It was created during a time of grief and addiction, formed from necessity and ambition, and frustrated by financial limitations. It was conceived by a man in the middle of an intensely creative period, only to be released after his death; recorded by a group of ad hoc players not fully prepared for its compositional intricacies; and produced by a man who didn’t fully believe in the project.

Recorded in two days in August 1962, Loose Blues was the product of extraordinary recording activity for a normally reticent artist, one who took almost two years to record a second solo album. “The burst really began,” remembered producer Orrin Keepnews, “when Evans surprised me by announcing that he was ready to record with his new trio; eventually it meant that he was in three different studios on a total of eight separate occasions between April and August 1962, creating four and a half albums’ worth of solo, trio, and quintet selections.”

“I don’t know how impressive that sounds to anyone else;” Keepnews wrote in the Loose Blues liner notes, “to me, who was on hand for all of it, it is still overwhelming.”

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The New Feeling

TonisPan / Getty

 

Anna Moschovakis | An excerpt adapted from the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love | Coffee House Press | August 2018 | 11 minutes (2,908 words)



The story she was reading was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become “agitated” by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been “texting loudly.” Popcorn had been thrown.


She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folk singer arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.


“He was a good, genuine person,” it was said of the deceased.

“He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.”

“Fate brought these two people together—it was ridiculous.”


None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy seals on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.


She stared at the spot and then back at her thumb, where fresh blood coagulated. She thought again of the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the expressway, from which she could hear the variegated moan of afternoon traffic. She was having a hard time getting up.


Charles Cummings, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who left the theater with the victim’s blood on his clothes, said he was shocked and saddened by the incident, which took place on his sixty-eighth birthday.


“I can’t believe anybody would bring a gun to a movie,” said Cummings.

“I can’t believe I got shot,” said the victim before he died.

The recipient of the texts was the man’s three-year-old daughter, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Read more…

An Inclusive Guide to Lingerie and a New Take on Self-Care

E+ / Getty Images, Ten Speed Press

 

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | September 2018 | 17 minutes (4,454 words)

In 2014, the U.K.-based entrepreneur Ade Hassan launched Nubian Skin, a line of nude hosiery and undergarments especially for darker skin tones, with product photos on Tumblr and Instagram. Hassan told Forbes she’d started the brand out of personal frustration —while working in finance, she couldn’t find lingerie or hosiery that complemented her skin or fit her wardrobe. Within days, audiences flooded Nubian Skin’s social channels. Then a number of new brands followed Hassan’s lead, offering nudes for dark skin in lingerie and other product categories, too, like skin care, cosmetics and swimwear.

Cora Harrington, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lingerie Addict, called Nubian Skin’s launch an “inflection point” in the fashion business. She also said the industry still has far to go on inclusivity. In lingerie, large retailers like Victoria Secret continue  to uphold a thin, white, feminine of center ideal. Harrington is a Black queer woman with a glamorous afro and an expertise in undergarments. Her long running site of product reviews, primers, how-to’s, and delightful fashion editorials that she conceptualizes, art directs, and often models in herself, demystifies the craft and care of lingerie for a wide range of bodies.

In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie, Harrington’s first book, expands and formalizes her approach. It’s both a practical reference guide and a deep, probing history of bras, underwear, shapewear, hosiery, and loungewear — the five core categories of intimate apparel. Harrington dispels advice in a warm, inviting tone. She uses no gendered pronouns, and gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Sandy Wirt adorn the pages instead of photographs of bodies. Special sections give guidance on binding and how commonly used garment components can be difficult for bodies with skin sensitivities and conditions like fibromyalgia.

Dita Von Teese writes in the foreword, “lingerie allows for seduction of self,” that it doesn’t need to have anything to do with sex or partnership.  Harrington believes lingerie can be a place for play and self-exploration, a form of self-care. It is “the first thing you put on in the morning,” before attending to your day, and the last thing you take off at night. It should make you feel good.

My most recent bra fitting was at a shop in Soho a few months after I’d gained a bit of weight. It had been years, quite frankly, since I’d made the time for a proper fitting, and the time, care, and expertise of the shop attendant gave me a break from the body blues. Wearing something new and pretty and well-constructed can do that, of course, but it was especially meaningful in my personal time of transition. It made me feel that my new body wasn’t wrong, just different. I spoke with Harrington on the phone about her path, her expertise in lingerie, what she was going after in writing In Intimate Detail, self-care, and the future of the industry. Read more…

When It’s Time to Say Goodbye to the Old House

David Talukdar / Getty, Stuart Dee / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Siddhartha Mahanta | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,041 words)

 

At 11:53 a.m. on March 31, 2015, I received a text from Dad. “I just dropped off the keys to the house…and said a prayer one last time on behalf of the family,” it read. The house in question was the first concrete thing he’d bought in America way back in 1979, a modest, nondescript one-story suburban starter home we’d moved out of some 26 years and three months earlier, in the winter of 1989. He’d hung onto it, tending to it, landlording it, in hopes of one day gifting it to either me, my sister, or brother. This would not come to pass.

When I saw his text, relief washed over me. After a tortured year of preparing to put it on the market he’d actually gone and finally put it on the damn market. Of course, it wasn’t just that one year of re-carpeting, repairing faucets, replacing bathroom tiles, fighting with the homeowners’ association over loose gutters and paint colors. It was years of Saturday afternoons spent fixing leaky pipes, broken tiles, fritzing-out air conditioners, or trying, failing, and calling in a contractor, who often seemed to be a brown guy named Jim Patel.

From around age 10 to 14, I accompanied him on these trips. Dad would wear his Saturday man’s-work-attire: white polo, dark-blue work shorts, long white athletic socks, lumpy, nondescript running shoes, ill-fitting generic white cap. “It’ll be very quick, baba,” he’d say somewhat mindlessly, hopping out of the Chrysler Plymouth, slamming the door behind him, plastic Home Depot bag swinging from this hand as he bounded across the crunchy lawn. He treated the old house like a child he’d had to leave behind, but had never forgotten.

What’s to say of the unremarkable thing itself? A small dining room was separated from the living room by a waist-high, white brick wall. Along one side of the living room stretched a long window looking out onto the backyard and patio. An exposed white brick fireplace. Columns buttressing an intimate dining room, giving it someone’s notion of a backwoods lodge. An L-shaped hallway leading to two bedrooms and a master bedroom; an attic, its air thick with the expulsion of discarded memories, a graveyard of knicknackery and emotional flotsam.

For the ten years we lived in it, the old house was where Dad brought his grieving, cataract-afflicted mother from India — for him, a place of pain, anger, and loss — to live out her remaining years, haunted by the losses of her husband and several sons. It was the site of many a dinner party of uncles and aunties and screaming, runny-nosed, onesie-clad toddlers, everyone in their own way marveling (some with more braggadocio than others) at their great fortune at landing in vast, income-taxless Texas with its booming energy economy and cheap housing and quality public schools, its friendly, Christian neighbors, its public pools and Tex-Mex.

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