Search Results for: DNA

O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.
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Secret Museums

Christian Ohde/McPhoto/ullstein bild via Getty Images

B. Pietras Creative Nonfiction | Summer 2019 | 16 minutes (4,291 words)

 

I was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have seen pornography?”

There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin. Tense, wary of a trap, we watched one another out of the corners of our eyes. Did he really expect us to answer honestly? And what would happen if we did?

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Grieving, but Calmed by a Different Kind of Storm

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Stephanie Land | Longreads | April 2020 | 12 minutes (3,059 words)

 
Almost a month into COVID isolation, I curled up on my bedroom floor under the window I’d opened to rid the room of my children’s lunch aromas — the ketchup and chicken nugget smells that relentlessly crawled up the stairs every day before noon. John Prine’s “Souvenirs” drifted out of my laptop’s speakers, drowning out the blaring screens full of TikToks and my youngest’s kindergarten Zoom meetings that were even more ridiculous to see in real time. On my own screen was the ever-faithful blank document, its cursor drumming, reminding me of my inability to produce, my failure to do my job that day. At least I showed up. Kind of.

I fingered the carpet inches from my face, watching the dog hairs vibrate as I breathed in and out. It was the hair of our newest dog, the husky. Everything in our bedroom seemed coated with a layer of it. Last fall, my husband and I drove nine hours down to Salt Lake City to adopt her on the same morning the pregnancy test came back positive. The twins would have been somewhere around 24 weeks by now. As big as eggplants. Imagine that.

***

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore. It happened in that moment between turning off the car and opening the door when the panic attack occurred. This was only a few days after we’d returned from our honeymoon. I was on my way home from the therapist’s office. I’d made a frantic appointment after I woke up to a message from an acquaintance that began, “Thought you might want to know” and continued with the information that my abusive ex was in town. This was the man who’d strangled me and kept me imprisoned in his anxiety for a year after that — yeah, that one. Someone saw him in town the night before at a bar. “He was with a girl,” the messenger said. “They looked pretty cozy.”

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore.

My panic attack wasn’t about that specifically, though in some way I guess it was. I’d ended the appointment with my therapist by admitting I was too embarrassed to go out in my small town because I’d gained 25 pounds in the past year. “I can’t look people in the eye,” I’d said, “because I just start telling myself what they must be thinking.” My ex’s snide attitude toward anything but his idea of a perfectly fit body was at the root of this. He had been my daily critic of what I wore, ate, and the progress I’d made, through exercise, to shrink my body to the smallest size possible. It was my ex’s words, but in other people’s imaginary voices.

For the six months before that, since people started referring to my first book as “critically acclaimed,” every time I saw myself on a television screen doing an interview with a morning show host, I saw my ex watching it just long enough to turn to the person next to him and say, with arms crossed, “Look at how fat she is.”


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For 15 minutes that August afternoon, I gasped for air with the windows still rolled up, hot tears falling on my bare thighs, before I felt safe enough to drive home. I’d offered to pick up a few things for dinner, and now I’d be forced to admit I hadn’t been able. That I’d had a panic attack in a grocery store parking lot because I couldn’t go inside alone, fearing I’d run into someone I knew, or didn’t know. A lot of people had approached me in that grocery store since my book came out. Some wanted to tell me their story, often with tears in their eyes, then ask, “Can I just give you a hug?” I felt pressured to say yes. Now I’d admitted out loud what I imagined them thinking, and that seemed to make it real.

After that, whenever I had to go somewhere in town, my husband always came with me. He was a good buffer for those situations — something to physically put between myself and the person who wanted to talk to me. Every person who made eye contact became a potential “fan” who’d ask for a hug, only now I saw it as a potential threat. An imaginary mockery of my appearance, an invasion of my private life, the one I kept close since the swarm of interviews started the year before.
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The Streaming Service of the Moment

Courtesy of Getty Images

Disney launched its new service, Disney+, on March 24th, the same day as the lockdown began in the United Kingdom. As Sophie Elmhirst wryly notes in her piece for The Guardian, the launch falling upon the day that 66 million were told to stay at home for 23 hours a day, must have resulted in “a quiet elbow bump in a meeting room, perhaps.” Elmhirst herself was quick to sign up in the service as a source of her entertainment for her children. 

Maybe it didn’t feel like that for everyone. Maybe the parents who secretly love the home schooling vibe, the timetables and worksheets, the children sitting happily at kitchen tables, tongues sticking out of the side of their mouths as they complete little astronomy quizzes while the parent stirs a healthy stew, maybe they didn’t sign up for Disney+ a full week before it launched. For the rest of us, hurling fish fingers into the oven with one hand while trying to tap out a piece of work with the other and break up a fight with a toe, the relatively low cost of a Disney+ subscription (£5.99 a month) when contemplating the long, long, just so very long, period of time ahead of us, felt like a sensible investment.

Rewatching the old classics, Elmhirst soon realizes that she signed up for the service for herself just as much as for her children. In times of uncertainty, there is comfort in the familiar.

During that seventh Bolt viewing, I realized why the kids wanted to keep watching the same movie over and over again. There’s the expert appreciation for a fine piece of computer animation, no doubt, but there’s also the deep comfort to be found in repeat viewing. Even multiple screenings in, they both covered their eyes in terror during a chase scene. The fear was real, but it was that pleasurable kind of fear you know will pass. There’s no uncertainty, no risk. You know, for a fact, that everything will be OK. It’s fear with a happy ending.

Despite the current crisis Disney probably will indeed be OK. However, it’s current reality is very different from its normal fairytale image. 

Rightly, the company isn’t high on anyone’s worry list. But it’s striking how far the current reality of Disney is from its well-tended corporate image. In late March, various news outlets published pictures of Disney’s closed theme parks – empty car parks, rollercoasters, cafes, golf courses, and a lonely-looking Millennium Falcon at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. The photographs are somehow more sinister than those of empty cities that have been doing the rounds. Cities, at the best of times, are conflicted and messy, beautiful, and cruel. They rarely pretend to be anything they’re not, unless there’s an Olympics going on.

Disney, on the other hand, is always pretending to be something it’s not: it is a highly efficient profit machine that presents itself as a place where a merry band of misfits conjure happiness.

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The Bigamist’s Daughter

Steve Chenn / Getty, Photo Illustration by Longreads

Robin Antalek | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,599 words)

In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and that woman was pregnant as well. My father’s new wife had left her family and three small children, and then she and my father had created a subset family, making us a complicated algebraic formula, resistant to logic. He and his new wife lived together somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, commuting distance to their jobs in Manhattan, where they had met. For a while they lived in his red Volvo wagon that smelled of his ever present Camel cigarettes.

Once, way before my brother, he drove us in that same red Volvo wagon down the wide tree lined Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to a pre-war apartment building overlooking Prospect Park for a visit with his parents. The adults gathered in a room with windows that offered a view of the tops of the trees while, at 3, I remained in the kitchen with the housekeeper and a parakeet in a cage in front of a window that looked out onto a brick walled airshaft.

The bird turned its back on us while I ate Milano cookies. When dinner was ready the housekeeper took my hand in hers and led me into the big room. I was too full to eat the bright pink roast on the broad, gold-rimmed dinner plates, or sip from the tiny glass of tomato juice resting on a paper doily on a miniature plate. I know the attention on me was uncomfortable and confusing. My feet dangled from the chair in patent leather shoes and I was reprimanded by my father more than once for kicking the bar that stretched between the legs. Tucked in the large bureau behind me was a Batman and Robin coloring book, a gift chosen I supposed because of my name, not gender, along with a fresh pack of crayons, promised to me only if I ate my entire dinner. Later I am shattered, inconsolable, my face rubbed raw against the shoulder of my father’s tweed coat as he carries me from the apartment, a piece of meat still lodged between my cheek and molars.
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This Week In Books: The New Lord and Lady of the Apartment

Me, doing the laundry. (OMIURI SHIMBUN/AFP via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

This week I figured out that the best way to hang-dry our sheets is over the closet doors. From across the room they look like a pair of dangerously large jellyfish landing on a dead coral reef.

Is that a weird thing to think? Well, it gets worse. Because as I foisted those sheets unto their bleached white thrones, and regarded them as the new reigning lord and lady of our apartment, I felt a sudden terror not for myself (because I’m losing it) but the guys who work at the laundromat.

You see, I’ve been trying to think of everyone; to contact trace, as it were, the Danavirus, and catalog everywhere I habitually spread my (ew, this metaphor, what the hell) droplet$. And the laundromat, oh god, oh gods, oh gelatinous lords of the reef — I hadn’t thought of them yet! I’d been so fixated on developing a process for handwashing all our stuff in my kitchen sink that I had forgotten the dire economic impact that this, too, has wrought. The laundromat guys must be so worried right now! How can they possibly be making any money?? So, I worried a bit for them. I’m trying to figure out if they have a gofundme but I can’t find it. God, everything sucks.

I shudder to think of how much handwashing is happening in America right now. It’s not good. I am not good at it. Everything is stiff. It turns out washing machines have water filters in them, who knew! So now everything I own is hardened by the invisible minerals in the tap water (“We are learning much about the Invisible Enemy,” the soft, slug-like President of America whispers to me silkily from his hidey-hole in the crisped white reef), invisible minerals which I’m questioning whether I really should have been drinking straight from the tap for…. my entire…. life….

I know I sound like I’m spiraling, which is why I’ve decided this week to read A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s classic work of narrative nonfiction about the Black Death. So far the book has taught me that everything is going to be fine!

Haha, sike, no it’s not. You know, at the time, they didn’t call it the Black Death. They called it the Great Mortality. I’ve been wondering what this whole corona thing is going to be called one day — or even what it’s going to be called next month. In my roundup below, one of the articles, featured on Lit Hub, is called “How Did Writers Survive the First Great Depression?” which caught me off guard when I read it. I thought to myself, with a noticeable chill down my spine, “Oh, are we already calling this the Second Great Depression?” Then I belatedly realized the article is an excerpt from a book about the Great Recession — making it unclear whether the “second” Great Depression presumed by the article’s title is a Lit Hub editor’s gesture toward the current corona crisis or the book itself making a statement about the severity of the Recession. It was jarring, this realization that I personally do not have enough data to say for sure, off the top of my head, whether the second Great Depression has already happened or not; that historical time has become so warped in our supposedly post-everything future that the scale and scope of things is somewhat beyond me. It was like looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror and seeing my foremost reflection first, a half-second before I notice there are a dozen more just like it, going all the way back.

1. “From Now On, I Vow Only to Read Fiction” by Nausicaa Renner, N+1

“I admire those who are stable enough to keep reading essays,” Nausicaa Renner writes in this very good essay. “From now on, I vow only to read fiction.”

2. “Trout Fishing in America” by Greil Marcus, Bookforum

The great Greil Marcus interviews the great Percival Everett; it’s an unbeatable interview combo, beyond reproach. “I can’t look directly at a beautiful river—I find that I have to turn away and steal glimpses of it, because it’s too much for me.”

3. “I Love Paulette Jiles’s Novels. So Why Won’t She Talk to Me?” by Emily McCullar, Texas Monthly

I think at one point I was the kind of person who would have had some reservations about this kind of thing. I would have thought, maybe, that no matter how cranky and conservative and capricious Paulette Jiles is, it’s still sort of awkward to finish your profile of her once she’s cut off communication with you and insulted you on her blog. But now, in the Age of the Virus, I have shed many feelings and beliefs. My heart has been hardened (“by the minerals in the water,” the pale white President in the Reef whispers raspily to me while Lorrie Moore is soothed by the sound of it), and now, to me, it is noble and just to publish the profile of someone who has insulted you on her blog. News of the world, indeed.

4. “The Provincial Reader” by Sumana Roy, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Sumana Roy remembers growing up as a provincial reader in rural West Bengal, which reminded me a little of growing up in Ohio, back when most of my favorite books were garage sale paperbacks with the covers mysteriously ripped off. “In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas … This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm.”


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5. “How Did Writers Survive the First Great Depression?” by Jason Boog, Lit Hub

In an excerpt from the The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today, Jason Boog writes about becoming obsessed with authors who struggled to survive the Great Depression while he himself struggled through the Great Recession. “I paid 50 dollars to get a copy of Newhouse’s out-of-print novel so I could show it to everybody I knew. Like some misguided missionary, I’d show it to people and say, ‘See? See? He’s talking about us!’ His book felt like a bomb with a busted timer that had stalled back in the 1930s and had been stuck on a dusty shelf for 80 years, losing none of its dangerous potency. I wanted to fix the timer and blow something up all over again.”

6. “Lunar Phase” by Kamran Javadizadeh, The Point

Kamran Javadizadeh ruminates about what kind of book he would ideally like to be reading right now, and lands on the moon. “I find now that what I want out of reading is both contact and distance … I want something that makes me feel like I do when I listen to those lunar audio loops. Which is to say, both close to a voice and far from its source; securely connected, as though by an invisible cable, to a distant but steady point in space.” He writes that the only thing really doing the trick is James Schuyler’s 1974 poetry collection Hymn To Life. In an address to an inaccessible and distant beloved, one poem reads: “In / moon terms, you’re / not so far away.”

7. “‘Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited’ and the Inner Life of Catastrophe” by Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker

In light of the recent tendency to compare the coronavirus pandemic to the HIV pandemic, Garth Greenwell revisits Andrew Holleran’s 1988 Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (originally published under the title Ground Zero). “[Henry] James, Holleran writes, ‘claimed the raising of a woman’s eyebrow across the dinner table was more dramatic to him than the fall of Rome.’ The question of many of Holleran’s columns in the eighties was what such a writer can do when Rome actually falls.”

8. “Complex Messiah” by Ratik Asokan, Bookforum

An invigorating read about Heinrich von Kleist, a sort of batty early 19th century Prussian romanticist whose novella The Duel is lowkey one of my favorite books. I’ve always wanted to read his best known work, Michael Kohlhaas, and in this review Ratik Asokan writes that New Directions has just given us a robust new translation. “…The tales unfold with a wild, almost savage intensity, which contemporary readers found disturbing; infamously, Kleist’s hero Goethe dismissed the younger writer as diseased.”

9. “A Detrimental Education” by Zaina Alsous, The New Inquiry

Zaina Alsous interviews Eli Meyerhoff about his book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, an examination of how the older concept of “study” has been superseded by the more recent, capitalism- and colonialism-inflected idea of “education.” “With the formal end of slavery, racial capitalism shifted to wage labor contracts … So, in order to enable arbitrage of humans as capital, capitalists needed to create distinctions in the category of ‘the human.’ Stratified and hierarchical education produces differences among humans that, in turn, create arbitrage opportunities in fractured labor markets.”

10. “The Phony Warrior” by Yoshiharu Tsuge, The Paris Review

In an excerpt from The Swamp, a new collection from Drawn & Quarterly of work by the 20th-century comics artist Yoshiharu Tsuge, a samurai is disappointed to learn that a traveling ronin he meets on the road is both more and less great than rumor has it.

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Molly and the Unicorn

Rankin/Bass Productions / Topcraft / ITC Entertainment

Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words)

 

My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons: Terrifying burning bull! Handsome prince says “damn!” Unicorn!!! But no scene hit me with quite the power of the one where the sad old bag Molly Grue meets the titular (last!) unicorn for the first time.

If you’re not familiar with this movie, allow me to express my condolences. It’s a batshit Rankin/Bass adaptation of the Peter S. Beagle novel of the same name, and it’s about a unicorn — but it’s not the magical creature that I’m interested in here. The character Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman, a scullery maid we meet as the unicorn is being led to safety by an inept wizard named Schmendrick (ha!) for reasons I won’t go into now (but really, stream it, you won’t be sorry). Her reaction to encountering an honest-to-goodness magical beast isn’t fear, or awe. It’s grief-stricken rage. “Where have you been?” she howls. “Where were you when I was new? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?” Even as a child I knew anguish and sorrow when I heard it — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the word “melancholy,” but I understood that she was no longer the kind of woman to whom beautiful things happen, that to be a participant in a beautiful thing you had to be beautiful yourself. I felt that with every inch of my weirdo 5-year-old heart, and now, at 42, it resonates with a power that’s almost unbearable.

I am this, now. That feeling of loss, of being too old to be graced by magic — that’s no longer a hypothetical. My young maidenhood wasn’t spent sitting around under trees waiting for a unicorn to come to me, but I certainly looked for magic in places sacred and profane (mostly profane). I was blind to any beauty I might have possessed. I spent a lot of time apologizing for my body when I first started using it to have sex, a practice meant to head off any criticism my partner might have had, but which I now realize was insane and a perfect way to kill the mood. These days, I catch myself reflected in a window every now and again and feel uncomfortably sure that the tired-looking marshmallow with very dry hair squinting back at me no longer remotely qualifies as that kind of magic bait.

Mind you, youth doesn’t appeal to me, personally. Young men are sexual blanks to me — boring, unseasoned chicken breasts with nothing interesting to say. Give me your grizzled Gen Xers, your gray beards, your potbellies, your crinkled eyes. Give me your hearts heavy with regret, your gorgeous tattered men. I’ve always been more attracted to men at least a decade my senior, and once in my early 20s I slept with a man in his 40s because I wanted to see what that was like, to feel like I was giving my young body like a gift (for the record: it was lovely, bittersweet and poignant, yet deeply hot). Physically speaking, I no longer feel like a gift to anyone, not even to my own husband, a man contractually obliged to accept my body even if as a burden. In the increasingly rare instances where a comely stranger flirts with me, I hear Molly Grue’s voice: How dare you come to me now?
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“All The Best”: Rest Easy, John Prine

John Prine performs at John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on October 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Americana legend John Prine passed away on April 7th, 2020 from complications of Coronavirus. He was 73. Before he spent 50 years as a full-time musician, he was a mailman. He wrote songs as he completed his route, songs “about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” In this piece at Rolling Stone by Patrick Doyle, John’s widow Fiona and his son Jody remember Prine for his love of music, performing on stage, and his way of finding joy in the smallest things in life.

Prine said his grades were “too ugly” for college. After graduating high school in 1964, he took the advice of his oldest brother, Dave, and became a mailman. The pay was good, and so were the benefits. That life was upended when Prine was drafted into the Army in late 1966, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. But instead of being sent to Vietnam, he ended up in Stuttgart, West Germany, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. Prine played down his military service, describing his contribution as “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks.”

After the war, Prine returned to his mail route, which, it turned out, was great for writing songs. Wandering the Chicago suburbs, he wrote classics like “Donald and Lydia,” about a couple who “made love from 10 miles away,” and “Far From Me,” a ballad about the chilly, purgatory-like feeling that consumed him before his first breakup. “A lot of stuff I was writing about were things I saw and felt and didn’t hear them in songs,” he said. “It was about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” Prine’s most fearless song looked back on his Army days: “Sam Stone,” about a vet who came home from Vietnam and ends up with a heroin habit. “I was trying to say something about our soldiers who’d go over to Vietnam, killing people and not knowing why you were there,” Prine told Rolling Stone in 2018. “And then a lot of soldiers came home and got hooked on drugs and never could get off of it.”

While the Prine family cannot have a public funeral right now, they are finding ways to celebrate him. “I’m going to wash all of his Cadillacs, park them all in the driveway,” Fiona says. “I would never let him do that.” Jody says he’s remembering his father by celebrating “the small stuff, because that’s what he loves, like a hot dog. Or an ice cream cone. We were having ice cream last night, just thinking about how, after a show, he’d always have ice cream and pretend it was someone’s birthday and get a cake.”

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My Body Is Not a Temple

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 10 minutes (2,540 words)

Your bread is making me sick. I don’t have to eat it. I see it. Everywhere. In every tweet, every photo, every message. It’s spread from all over my social media feed to all over my news feed. Always that round pebbly brown and beige crust. Rustic as fuck. Even if you can’t touch it, smell it, taste it, the starter is the proof. That cement-looking mix with the gas bubbles shoved into those mason jars everyone seems to have. When I see it, all I can think is: Desperation. I think: That bread can’t save you. You will die, maybe even sooner rather than later  — despite the bread. Because that bread is made of yeast. And that yeast is alive, just as you are alive. And just as your body does, it reacts to the world unpredictably. So, if it makes you feel better, write down the exact ingredients, the precise measurements, but your recipe can’t account for random events and neither can you. As uncertain as you are that that starter will turn into that bread is as uncertain as you are that your body will survive all of this. Neither is trustworthy.

I get it. I also operate according to the delusion that I can control my body. That I created the way I look. That I deserve all the credit and all the blame. That it has nothing to do with the food industry pushing synthetic shit down my throat or the healthcare system for ignoring that fact, or anything, you know, cultural or political. That the foundation for my well being resides entirely within the four walls of my flesh. It’s the physicality of it, I guess — I inhabit it, which automatically makes it seem as though I have authority over it. But that’s where the body, the reality of it, collides with the reality of a virus. The way you can’t see it; the way it invades you, invisibly. It exposes the human body for what it really is: something that is at all times at the mercy of the unknowable. But when have we not tried to conquer the unknown? It’s human to want to survive, but humans have also created conditions in which what we conceive of as the ingredients we need to survive — the natural world, a peaceful coexistence within it — is opposed to our daily lives.

* * *

“Humans currently find themselves in a kind of alternative world. Put more simply, everyone is out for themselves. They no longer notice all the things that are wrong around them,” says the pale cachectic man with the unfortunate bangs who lives in the cabin in the woods in the German crime series Pagan Peak. “People are constantly trying to wield power over others by exploiting them. Criminals, corrupt politicians, greedy managers, unscrupulous investors. The whole rabble. These people are causing the whole system to collapse. Everything’s falling apart. And what remains?” At this point the man has moved to his doorstep with the eastern European immigrant he is speaking to, both of them looking up at the stars as the snow surrounds them: “The woods. The sky. That remains.” It all sounds very Rousseau-ian (and Herzog-ian), until you realize this same man has spent the entire series killing one person after another — a “greedy manager,” a “corrupt politician,” an influencer, and even, inadvertently, a child — as a means of re-establishing, “order between man and nature.”

It felt uncanny to watch a show I initially knew nothing about hew so closely to the current moment. To watch a story about nature’s dominion over man, man’s belief in his dominion over nature, and death after death after death, as the same narrative unravels around me. Gregor Ansbach, the man exalting the natural world while executing those who populate it, is in tech, because of course he is: he is Jeff Bezos is Jack Dorsey is Mark Zuckerberg, wealthy white tech entrepreneurs convinced they can transcend the limits of the planet. Men whose ambition of immortality extends from their professional legacies to their own physiques. You knew the homemade artisanal bread trend came from Silicon Valley, right? “Ever looking for spiritual leaders to guide them out of moral bankruptcy, and to connect them back to the offline world they had previously abandoned,” Dayna Evans wrote in Eater in 2018, “the disruptors, engineers, and tech bros of Silicon Valley and beyond had found themselves a new prophet.” 

But bread is no prophet, and it was never the point. The point is supremacy. If you can fix anything mechanical that comes your way, you can fix anything anatomical that does, right? The body is just a machine, yes? These men flex in confirmation by troubleshooting themselves just as they troubleshoot everything else; self-improvement through intermittent fasting, through silent meditation retreats, through fitness trackers. Having mastered the virtual world, the physical world they rendered redundant is now all they live for — these laymen we turned into Gods for creating proxy lives, have turned “real” life into a luxury only they can afford.

The shift toward more stasis, less action, more inside, less outside, more ordering, less making, has been a long time coming. It’s hard to know how much I have chosen this life of constant internal work — thinking, thinking, thinking — and how much I’m just succumbing to a general cultural gravitation. And yet those afforded the least time to cultivate lofty internal lives are now the ones rescuing everyone else. The doctors, the nurses, the pharmacists, the grocery store clerks, the delivery men and women, the sanitation workers. They are the only ones that we really need; the ones whose pictures have not been painted, whose music has not been composed, whose words have not been written, because of all the other work they have to do. The only work that matters, really. It’s emasculating, to feel like this — to be completely useless in the final analysis. For your only means of helping to be by doing nothing. 

At the same time, it’s hard to shake this creeping sense of betrayal. That one’s lifestyle is being pathologized. Those of us who live primarily a life of the mind — the academics, the writers, the coders, the designers, the people who work in their basements and living rooms even outside of a lockdown — have lately been lauded for our proficiency at staying in. But it’s a compliment that drips with denigration. It says your lifestyle suits a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic…but not much else. The question I keep getting, “How do you live like this?” implies that my life is the symptom of an illness. It does not imply that it is the symptom of an economy in part created by those same techies who originated it, who profit from the rest of us being unstable — working from home, all the time, no guarantees — and who clear the landscape of any other option. To be told that to protect ourselves within this isolation we must do everything we’re in the habit of not doing (standing up, working out, eating well) lays the blame at our feet. To be told this in the exact moment that old habits provide the only solace (dressing for comfort, comfort eating, even comfort watching) keeps us on the back foot. But, then, not budging is also our thing.

The return to old movies and television shows isn’t just because the production of new media is on hold. They are both a reminder of a world — a time — outside the pandemic, though even then it is near impossible not to infect the past with the present (social distancing most notably). We are going back to plague art for a guide, it seems, but we are also going back to other works that appeal to specific feelings provoked by the pandemic. At Vanity Fair, K. Austin Collins wrote about hearing someone sneeze within his general vicinity and then sprinting home to shower before throwing on The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 thriller about a research team in Antarctica riddled by an elusive alien infection. Of course, it’s the blood test, the “peak set piece,” he focuses on. “What’s clear is that for everyone on screen, the question of their own blood, and not just that of their compatriots, is a mystery. Their eyes shift from I know I don’t have it to, in the moment of being tested, Do I?” he writes. “The central condition of The Thing isn’t just the isolation or the infection, however. It’s the unknowing. The uncertainty one might have about even their own body.”

That’s it. That’s the thing (hah). The untrustworthiness. The lack of trust in anyone, including yourself. How unsettling. The most unsettling. What’s the point of having agency, of being self-actualized, when your physical self might betray the whole thing? Even despite the face mask and the hand sanitizer and the social distance and the exercise and the salad, so much salad. That very slight discomfort behind my eyes, the sinuses quick to congestion, the minor wheeze when I jog in the afternoons, the almost imperceptible dryness in my throat — is it the pollen in the air? The dry heat from the radiators? Or is it the thing? The thing that I expect to get but not really. The thing that I expect to kill me but not really. But will it? All that fast food I’ve eaten, all that exercise I haven’t done, will it finally catch up with me? What did all those survivors and all those asymptomatic people do? Did they get eight hours of sleep every night? Did they stress less (you know stress immunosuppresses, right)? What choices did they make that their bodies chose life?

“Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety,” writes Michelle Allison in The Atlantic. “If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging — in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.” What she is really talking about is all that bread, all those greens, all that running we never did before. She is talking about tricking God.

I don’t believe in God but that doesn’t mean I’ve escaped Christian morality; it’s baked into our bread (sorry, I’ll stop talking about bread — you first, though). And root vegetables. And hundred-mile Peloton rides. Ever heard of “moral treatment”? It’s the treatment of the mentally ill by manual labor, sanity “through self-discipline.” It reminds me of the people who suddenly start going to church when something bad happens, like they can hedge their bets by  paying their dues before Jesus gets wise. Or addicts who think they can wipe themselves clean — of all those cigarettes, all that alcohol, all that sex — by loudly getting healthy. All those people on social media sharing their kale-stuffed recipes as though the virus will give them a pass for good behavior. As Allison wrote, “clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret.” (Comfort eating, on the other hand, exclusively does.)  That’s why the scariest Covid-19 stories are the ones about the healthy kids who died anyway, the adults with “no underlying conditions” who were swept away. And still there’s an explanation: They were just unlucky edge cases. There was something about their bodies the family didn’t share. Some reason. Something knowable.

What we do know is devastating enough. Which is that even if we do everything right, we are still at the mercy of an unpredictable virus and a healthcare system that is as capricious. Bureaucracy is a body too, one which, it has become increasingly obvious, is itself disintegrating. Without it to support us, we attempt to keep ourselves in order, in hand, in control. It is a task on a larger scale, perhaps, but one that is not so different from trying to command the recalcitrant yeast in our kitchens. Maybe that’s why I gravitated toward Eliza Hittman’s new indie, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which navigates the labyrinthine bureaucracy around abortion in America and serendipitously got a wider release because of the pandemic. The film follows a 17-year-old girl on an odyssey from Pennsylvania to New York in the hopes of terminating her pregnancy. When Autumn’s hometown clinic initially confirms she is pregnant, she is told she is 10 weeks along — two-and-a-half months in, plenty of time to abort. Preternaturally resigned, Autumn doesn’t react much beyond a brief wince when the doctor introduces, “the most magical sound you will ever hear,” before the “wow wow wow” sound of the unwanted fetus pulses out of the machine beside her. But she can handle it  — “I’m fine, just tired,” she says days later. This is in New York at her Planned Parenthood appointment, right before she is told she is 18 weeks pregnant, not 10. She’s not fine then. 

I read April’s response to hearing she is in her second trimester as betrayal, by both the health institution and by her own body. The system she can’t trust is all around her, but also within her; the first deception was by her own body, falling pregnant without her consent. Her devastation is born of the realization that not only can no one else in her life be trusted, she can’t even trust herself.

* * *

“If we cannot escape death,” writes Allison, “maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.” But that’s hard to do when the only thing you can really do is nothing. When you can’t manifest the one thing you want in the place that invented manifest destiny. When the entire plan is based on the lie that our bodies are not destabilized by forces as unpredictable as the system in which we find ourselves. Which is the reason we all feel so defeated despite all the vitamins and the pilates and the hand washing. To expect yourself to be responsible for your body, in all its uncertainty, is to underwrite an existence which is at odds with itself. Mortality has no more morality than a virus. Both are unreliable. Both are indifferent. Both affect us as they wish no matter our desires. 

Convention dictates that I end this on a hopeful note, but our culture pits hope and death against one another — and death is always the eventuality. Of course, definitely, wash your hands, social distance, of course, of course, but don’t expect a guarantee. And don’t expect that that uncertainty must be tragic. That our bodies can’t ultimately be controlled means that we are fundamentally free from trying. So sure, make bread if it helps you feel better. Or don’t. Just know it’s all the same in the end, and the end is baked into the beginning.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Little League, Revisited

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Little League World Series / Photo illustration by Longreads

Adam Kuhlmann | Longreads | April 2020 | 17 minutes (4,265 words)

It’s a cold, gray morning in late December, the week that sags like bunting hung between Christmas and New Year’s. I pull my mother’s Subaru alongside a large cinder block building identified only by a street address peeling from a rust-pocked and dented steel door. I see no functional windows, just a few square cavities that have been boarded up from the inside.

My wife, Mysha, eyes the grim façade from the passenger seat. “Is it strange,” she asks, “that Chase takes lessons inside a commercial slaughterhouse?”

Chase is my nephew, an 11-year-old with the eyelashes of a Hollywood starlet and a penchant for neon athletic wear. During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, he had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

“It gives him a leg up,” my sister had told me the previous night after Chase went to bed. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, she explained the nature of today’s competitive child-rearing: how all of a kid’s activities — from his first birthday party to his college admissions — must be coordinated and enhanced, for a fee, by biologically unrelated adults.

At 39, with no plans to father a child myself, I am free to pass judgment on all manner of parental behavior without worrying that, one day, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. So, I reminded my sister about the 1990s, when the most we’d hoped for was piano lessons. As for getting into college, I told her about the Friday night before I took the SAT. I’d stayed up late, crowding around Betsy Newman’s backyard fire pit. I’d joined a boozy, a cappella rendition of Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” My test prep had consisted of just saying no to the nozzle of a can of Cool Whip, a triumph of restraint I’d managed without a glance of adult supervision.

My sister patiently absorbed my nostalgia. Then she added: “Chase wants this too. He loves baseball.”

I couldn’t argue with Chase’s results. Last summer he’d been selected for the all-star team of his neighborhood little league. My sister sent us photos of the boys celebrating at a local Mexican restaurant. In one close-up, Chase’s arm is draped over the shoulder of a boy with the same tousled hair spilling from the same star-spangled hat. With the other hand, he is slugging a yellow concoction from a goblet the size of a table lamp.

During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, my nephew, Chase, had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

Looking down at her phone, Mysha confirms the address, so we slip into a small parking lot in the back of the building. Though it’s no more welcoming than the front, at least we find no sign of doomed Angus cattle.

Inside, the facility’s décor hews to jock brutalism. Forty feet above us, fluorescent lights hang from metal beams, filling the cavernous room with a stadium’s ice-blue brightness. The atmosphere is warmed only by the sound of classic rock rattling from speakers bolted to the walls. Black netting curtains off a pair of batting cages, where a few stocky teens hack at soft tosses. The floor is covered in green artificial turf studded with five-gallon buckets, around which cluster litters of scuffed baseballs.

I spot my brother-in-law, Clay, seated with two other men whose buzz cuts and taut expressions would fit in on the bridge of a naval destroyer. They lean forward from metal folding chairs, studying the ritualized movements of their boys. Nearby is a makeshift pitching mound, where I spot Chase moving into his windup: a fluid and compact gathering of 100 pounds of muscle and bone. His pitch sails high, pulling out of his catcher’s crouch a college-aged man in gray sweats. His bottom lip is swollen with tobacco, and he pauses to discharge a brown stream into a soda bottle before offering my nephew a blunt appraisal: “You’re overthrowing again. What happened to your release point?”

Chase cocks his head thoughtfully. “I forgot to reach out with it.”

“Right,” the coach says, demonstrating with his own right hand before returning a dart to Chase’s glove side. “Fix it.”

In his plush suburban home, Chase is a merry prankster. When he was 4, he stood on the carpeted mezzanine, reached his hand between two wooden balusters, and dropped an untidy sock onto the face of my sister, napping on the sofa below. Here, in this Spartan box, Chase’s aim is nearly as true — but he is all business.

We slide in, and the fathers stand to make room for us in the self-consciously gallant way of Southern men. And suddenly I recognize that I am easily the smallest person in the seating area. This includes my wife, who at 6-foot-1 dwarfs me in a way that attracts stares in public.

Out of the corner of my eye, I track a wide throw that tips off Chase’s glove and bounces once on its way toward our congregated shins. I bend and manage to spear it with my right hand.

One father draws out a whistle through his teeth.

“Once a second baseman, always a second baseman,” Clay says.

I toss the ball back to Chase, who registers the deed — and our presence — with a stoic little nod.

“College ball?” asks the other father.

Before I can laugh, say “no,” and explain that this catch had been the most graceful maneuver I’d accomplished in 20 years — indeed, I’d just tweaked my back and would require, this evening, a liberal application of Tiger Balm — Clay jumps in.

“This guy played in the Little League World Series!”

I wince.

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