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When Will Hip-Hop Have Its #MeToo Reckoning?

Kelis performs in Paris, 2014. (David Wolff-Patrick/Redferns via Getty Images)

In a recent interview with the celebrity news site Hollywood Unlocked, singer Kelis discussed her seven-year relationship with ex-husband, Nas, the legendary Queens rapper, with a level of detail she never had publicly. She described a mix of “intense highs and really intense lows,” including bruises from physical fights, alcoholic binges, cheating, and emotional abuse. Kelis also made claims that, since the divorce in 2010, Nas had been a difficult and unreliable co-parent to their 8-year-old son. At more than an hour long, the interview is a marvel of a testimony and rings with emotional honesty. Kelis seemed weary of keeping quiet about her past, saying she simply woke up and thought “not today.” Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Two: By a Thread

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Part 2 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

It’s mid-November, the end of the first week of the trial in Las Vegas. I’ve found that my favorite time of day here is early morning, when the only people to talk to are those calling “good morning!” from the doorways and brick plazas where they’ve slept. It’s when Fremont Street is free of tourists and populated only by guys with hoses whose jobs are to wash away the things that seem always to fill this city street: spilled margaritas and cheap beer and puke.

I’m staying in a cheap casino on Fremont Street in a room that’s not expensive enough to have a coffee maker, which means I have to eject myself into the world without any caffeine, a thing I would never do at home but here I’ve come to look forward to. It’s the only time it’s quiet enough to think, to not lose yourself in the things Vegas asks you to become.

At night on Fremont, blocks from the federal courthouse, you will be offered whatever you need. Booze, drugs, money, beautiful women, beautiful men. Your fortune, told to you in cards. Your name etched on a bottle opener, a license plate, a flashing keychain, a pair of dice. Get drunk. Get high. Get wild. It’s Vegas, baby — a line people repeat here like a mantra in packed elevators, in coffee shops, in the security line of the “fed castle” where Bundy’s followers empty their pockets of change and pocket-size Constitutions before going through the metal detector. When Judge Gloria Navarro strolls to the bench each morning — always late, always carrying an iced coffee — people explain it with a shrug: “Vegas, baby.”

I’ve avoided the Vegas life this week, but on my last night — a Thursday — I stop into a bar on Fremont Street and take the only seat left at the bar, next to a Mr. T impersonator. There’s no court tomorrow, so I’m OK with staying out a little late and seeing what’s so appealing about this city. Vegas at night, despite my resistance to it, is fun — and I’ve had enough to drink with Mr. T that I strike up a conversation with a couple of guys who’ve traveled here from the East Coast to sample the legal marijuana. I ask them if they’ve heard of Cliven Bundy, and one responds immediately, “He’s that cowboy the government is trying to steal land from, right?”

This must be what poker face feels like.

The next morning, I’m a little hungover and way out in the suburbs of the city. I’m sitting in this bright-white, fluorescent-lit office, guzzling complimentary bottles of water. I’m in the office of an ex-Bundy follower who used to be close with the family, Melissa Laughter. She went to Bundy Ranch in 2014 and to Malheur in 2016. She has spent holidays with the Bundys.

She’s since become a vocal detractor of the Bundys and the wider Patriot movement that supports them. She says the Bundys demand loyalty, allegiance. She has come to think of them as cult leaders.

“A cult is is a blind following of some enigmatic leader,” she says. “They don’t question. They don’t act independently. They act as one.”

Laughter is a devout member of the Mormon church, and the granddaughter of a Utah dairy farmer. She explained what initially attracted her to the Bundys. “I’m like, OK, we have something in common. I’m interested in talking to them and hearing what they have to say,” she says. “So like many people, I was sympathetic to them to begin with.”

Laughter is a staunch conservative — a woman who has run for public office in Nevada as a Republican. She has bright white teeth and wears big cowboy boots with dresses. She’s pro-gun, vehemently anti-marijuana.

She grew up in the church and felt like something was off about how the Bundys talked about the Gospel to friends and family. “We would often have these philosophical religious debates where they would talk about LDS doctrine,” she says. According to Laughter, her differing perspective on church teachings wasn’t well received around the ranch. “They constantly take offense if you say anything against what they’re saying.”

But the Bundys were seeing things in the Gospel she couldn’t understand.

“I’m going to show you something else no one else has but the federal government,” she says. She reaches to grab something from the floor, then plunks a big black binder onto her desk.

“Have you heard about The Nay Book?”

Yeah, I’d heard murmurs of it. I just didn’t think it was real. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter One: A War in the Desert

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 27 minutes (6,900 words)

Part 1 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The place where all the chaos began is a few minutes off Interstate 15 North, where a row of American flags line a curve of rural road and the only sound is the desert wind in their fabric. Two tall flagpoles reach out from a patch of gravel topped with gilded cursive letters spelling out the opening to the U.S. Constitution: We The People.

On them hang several flags, including the American flag, the Nevada state flag, and a blue banner bearing a sharp white V stacked atop a round O — the cattle brand of the last rancher from around these parts, Cliven Bundy. He’s not the only cattleman represented on these poles; a flag bearing the mark of a rancher shot and killed by police flies here, too.

Nearby, just over the Virgin River, a rough road cuts through the dusty Nevada desert. Sandy rocks darken into a deep red all the way out to the horizon, where a dark strip of mountains jut skyward.

Drive down that road and a patch of bright green pops into view — the color of life shrill in a place where everything else looks dead.

It’s here, in Bunkerville, Nevada — in Clark County, about an hour from Las Vegas — that the 72-year-old Bundy owns 160 acres of land: the place where he raised children, grows melons, and rears cattle. A modest house is barely visible from the gravel road. Hay bales are stacked neatly in piles around the property. There’s farm equipment everywhere — hunks of metal weathered by a sun that seems to never set and winds that never cease.

For the better part of the past two years, Cliven Bundy wasn’t allowed to live here. Instead he was housed in a Nevada detainment center, wearing a red jumpsuit and jail-issue orange clogs every day, sleeping in a bunk bed in a room full of other men awaiting trial.

He had been charged with conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, with assault, extortion, with threatening federal officers.

The trial he faced last fall, in a way, would also decide which of the two distinctly opposite characters Bundy has been portrayed as was real.

There’s Bundy’s version of himself: a rebel cowboy father of 14 and grandfather of 66 who believes the government is determined to either kill him or put him behind bars for life, while also stealing his livelihood.

Then there’s the government’s version of Bundy: a vigilante capable of summoning an army eager and ready to revolt against the federal government.

When it comes to Cliven and the rest of the Bundy Family there are a few points that nearly everyone — no matter how they vote or what side of this case they’re on — can agree:

Number 1: An event of seismic proportions occurred near Cliven Bundy’s ranch in April 2014 when he — believing federal agents were closing in — called people from around the country (many heavily armed) to his aid. Along with them came militiamen: the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, members of western militias. People call this event a lot of things, but the most common name for it is the Bundy Ranch Standoff.

Number 2: At that time, Bundy owed the federal government at least $1 million in grazing fees. For more than 20 years, he allowed his cows to graze on public lands managed by the federal government despite not having a permit to do so. He fought in and out of court about it, and he lost every time. But he didn’t take his cows off the land. They’re still out there.

Number 3: Cliven’s own sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, led their own armed standoff in early 2016 at a federal bird refuge in southeastern Oregon.

And last, but not least, number 4: No matter how hard the federal government seems to try to arrest, imprison, or see the Bundys found guilty of federal crimes, they just can’t get them.

“I do not think there is a jury in this country that will convict us,” Ammon Bundy said to reporters last December outside the Las Vegas federal courthouse. Ammon smiled wide, his arm slung around his mom’s shoulders. “The truth is on our side.”

The truth.

What really is the truth when it comes to the Bundys?

For the past two years, I’ve been reporting on the Bundy Family and people who consider themselves followers. I’ve talked to just as many people who see Cliven and his sons as godly figures — prophets, great historical leaders — as people who see them as terrorists, extremists, and the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America. There seems to be no middle with the Bundy Family: You either are with them, or you’re not. And how you see the family may say just as much about you as it does about them.

This story is one of alternative facts and fake news — two, three years before those terms entered the common lexicon. It is a tale of conspiracy theories, crooked politicians, and two polarized sides who read the same facts and take away completely different messages.

When you look closely at the actions of the Bundy Family, their history, their religion, the words of their followers — you can find a story that reflects so much about America right now. There are deep divides. Unrest. You can’t talk to the Bundys or their followers about cows or land without also talking about patriotism and the flag and the Constitution and the Bible, too. Their definitions of freedom, patriotism, terrorism, and even the law might be exactly the same as yours, or they might be way, way different. To have a conversation with or about the Bundys, you have to accept that they consider themselves to be the ultimate Patriots and that they don’t acknowledge the federal government’s authority. They are here to tell the federal government what to do, and to tell the rest of us how we’ve been bad Americans.

People call their theories fringe. Others call them insane.

The Bundy name in much of the West can make blood boil. And where some have cast the old man as a crackpot, a flash in the pan, the details behind the family’s anti-government actions are complicated, stretching back decades — a century, even.

But when Cliven Bundy strolled out of jail in the first days of 2018 — cowboy hat on his head, his legs free of shackles — and raised a fist in victory, what just occurred seemed simple. For the second time, the Bundys thumbed their noses at the feds and got away with it. Read more…

But What Will Your Parents Think?

Illustration by Mark Wang

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,609 words)

 

This past February, during the book tour for my essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, one of the recurring questions I received most frequently from readers was about how I pushed past the fear to write about the most intimate aspects of my life? I assumed the crowd expected to hear about some grandiose regimen I followed — half an hour of meditation followed by an hour-long chat with a therapist, combined with some amount of whiskey drinking, or chain-smoking. Nevertheless, I told them the truth: I never did fully push past the fear when I wrote about my internalized anti-blackness, my surgically-modified labia, or my indulgence in pornography. Fear was ever-present as I worked on my book. I found it was best to acknowledge it, but not let its presence stun me into paralysis.

Fear is the little sister my mother never gave birth to. She appears and reappears in the furthest corner of the room in which I write and inches closer and closer as I approach the heart of a confession. I’ve discovered throughout the years that the best approach to meddlesome siblings is to acknowledge that they’re there, because if you don’t, they will wreak havoc and derail whatever it is you set out to do. This essay is the longer answer to that question.

Read more…

Five Early Lessons in Parenting

(RichVintage/Getty)

Steven Church | I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part| May 2018 | 16 minutes (4,362 words)

1. How to Be a Superhero

My son came home one day from his progressive and politically correct Providence, Rhode Island, pre-school and informed me that he was not allowed to talk about superheroes.

“Why not?” I asked, flabbergasted. This couldn’t be true, I thought. There must be some kind of mistake.

“Because, Daddy,” he said patiently, “Superheroes solve their problems by fighting and not with their words.”

“Yeah, but…” I tried to respond but couldn’t. I was stumped, struck dumb and silent.

He was right. But for Chrissakes, they’re superheroes. They’re the fabric of childhood. I could barely imagine my own without superheroes. Their stories helped me believe I might actually survive the nuclear 1980’s. A superhero’s problems were not the kind you could just talk about, like parking tickets, traffic jams, or sub-prime mortgages. A superhero had to deal with evil super-villains, rogue mutants, and extra-terrestrial war-mongerers. A superhero had the kind of problems that you might only be able to solve by fighting.

One of my favorites, the Incredible Hulk, couldn’t even use words. He just grunted, bellowed like an animal, and smashed things. But his anger, his insecurity and pain, was his superpower. His existential angst made him special and allowed him to help others with his unique physical gifts. What better role model for a child of the 80’s?

Still I had to admit that my son (or his teachers) had a point. It was just difficult for me to deal with the idea that he could have a superhero-free childhood or, worse yet, that he would think the model of a superhero was this guy on TV named “Sportacus.”

If you haven’t seen an episode of “LazyTown,” you’re missing one of the most bizarre television experiences. A lot of children’s shows are strange, but this one is a truly odd mixture of public service and entertainment. Sportacus, the star of the show, teams up with a spunky little pink-haired girl named Stephanie and a gang of children wearing rubber puppet suits. An adult male outfitted in a tight blue spandex flight-suit and aviator goggles, Sportacus speaks with a faux-French accent and wears a handlebar mustache waxed to sharp points. He champions lifestyle choices like physical activity and eating fruit. Pretty much any problem in LazyTown can be solved with exercise and an apple.

But what good would Sportacus be in the face of real danger? How would he handle a supervillain like Magneto or Lex Luthor or Doctor Octopus? What dreams of survival would he inspire? His beloved fruit would be poisoned with radiation. Exercise is difficult when you have a second head growing out of your shoulder and sort of pointless if you’ve mutated into a Ninja reptile. LazyTown is yet another reminder that my son lives in a world that is both eerily familiar to and strikingly different from my own childhood reality.

Some days I feel terribly ill-equipped to teach him anything.

After watching the animated film The Incredibles, we had another superhero discussion, about Mr. Incredible’s reasons for lifting train cars like dumbbells.

“Why did he do that, Daddy?”

I told him that Mr. Incredible was working out, getting stronger to fight evil, sort of like when Daddy lifts the dumbbells at home.

Then I asked, “Do you think Daddy could lift a train car?”

“Yeah,” he said, and with no prompting at all from me, “’Cause you’re a superhero.”

I just let that one settle in for a while. I let it linger in the rarified air of our minivan.

Then I repeated the story over and over again, telling friends and even strangers. But the more I told it, the more self-conscious I became, the more aware of my own shortcomings as a potential superhero. I have bad knees and bad ankles. My shoulder is wrecked. I’m lactose intolerant. I’m generally afraid of confrontation, and I trust strangers and freaks way too easily. I have more curiosity than common sense. And I look terrible in tights.

I’m glad I didn’t ruin the moment, but part of me thinks I should have politely informed him that I am no caped crusader. I’m a regular guy who makes bad choices sometimes, and he probably shouldn’t depend on my superpowers to protect him from harm. But then again I figured he’d have the rest of his life to learn this lesson. So I decided to let him believe for a while that I could lift some trains or maybe even—following his example—use my words instead of my fists to save the world and protect my family; because perhaps all children need these sorts of fictions to feel safe.

2. How to Play Dead

When I was 5 or 6, a huge scar creased my face, and I towered over many of the other kids. Not only had I pulled a pocketknife on my best friend and booted a kickball through a school window, but I regularly led a gaggle of boys around the playground in a militaristic march, while chanting, “Crush. Kill. Destroy.”

I had some issues. But I overcame them. Mostly.

So I wasn’t really worried when my son’s preschool teacher pulled me aside one day to tell me that he’d been playing a game with the other kids where they put a baby in the oven.

When she said this she said the last part almost in a whisper, a baby in the oven. She folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer and stretched her lips out thin like a knife. This was the same teacher I had to talk with about my son’s repeated reference to his colon and his drawings of the digestive system. She was one of those preschool teachers who just seemed completely incapable of understanding little boys; but she did get me thinking a bit about where he might have learned such things.

Then I remembered that I’d recently read Hansel and Gretel to him, and let me tell you, that is a seriously dark and twisted story. But I thought about it more and realized there are actually quite a few children’s stories about children being shoved into ovens or cooked in pots or cakes. One of our favorites, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, features a naked boy baked in a cake by portly bakers with Hitler mustaches. And then I thought about a game my son liked to play with his mother. It was called “The Baby Bagoo” game, and it was a regular part of our everyday life in Rhode Island. I figured it was the kind of imagination play that good parents are supposed to do with their precocious children.

This is how it went: My son would climb up on the bed and curl into a fetal position. He’d coo and babble like a baby.

Then my wife would walk into the room and say, “Yes, I’ve come to the orphanage today because I would like to adopt a baby,” and then, “Oh, look at all these babies. I want a little girl baby. Where are the little girl babies?”

My son would cry and babble urgently.

“Oh, look at this cute baby!” my wife would say. “Oh, but he’s a boy baby.”

“Ga. Ga. Ga. Goo. Goo,” my son would say.

“What’s your name, baby?”

“Baaagoooo.”

“Bagoo?”

My son nodded his head.

“Oh, you’re such a sweet baby Bagoo. I want to take you home,” she said as she wrapped him up and carried him to another part of the room or the bed.

“Now, I’m going to leave you here by the river/ocean/lake/bathtub, OK, Baby Bagoo? Don’t go anywhere.”

She’d turn around and Baby Bagoo would promptly roll into the water and go under.

“Oh my god!” she’d yell, “My baby! My baby!” as she pulled him out of the water, limp, eyes closed. “Bagoo? Bagoo? Speak to me. Oh no, my sweet Baby Bagoo is dead.”

On cue, my son’s eyes would flutter and open wide. His arms would begin to flail and he’d rise up, cooing and babbling and saying “Bagoo” over and over again. He would be born again, newly risen, and then we’d go about our normal routines.

Of course, I recognized that my son was working through a lot of fears—layers of fear—with this game. It somehow touched on fear of abandonment, death and water, issues of gender, and the promise of reincarnation. But it was an admittedly strange game, one that other people might not understand. It even freaked me out sometimes.

I never told my son’s teachers about Baby Bagoo. I thought they might worry about us. But what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them—unless of course they were hurt by the un-tethered imaginations of children. Our cultural avoidance of death and our ignorance of its meaning begins at an early age. One of the things that makes little kids so morbid, so creative, and so fun to be around is that they are not afraid of death. Or rather they have not yet been taught to face death through fear rather than through curiosity. For my son, curiosity generates questions—and it is these that I’m constantly encouraging him to pursue. “Never stop asking questions,” I say in my more parental moments. Fear only leads us into the darkness of easy answers, to avoidance and ignorance…and this is usually about the time he stops listening to me.

“Daddy?” my son asked me once at a restaurant.

“Yes?”

“Why do we not like George Bush?”

Silence. The sound of guilty pride. Or the sound of me trying to come up with a reason that would make sense to a 4-year-old, or trying to just pare down the list I keep in my head.

“Is it because he doesn’t share his toys?”

For my son, this was the ultimate knock against one’s character.

“Kind of,” I said.

I was trying to speak his language.

“And because he’s fighting a war in the desert and killing people for oil?’

“Uh huh,” I said.

I swear I didn’t prompt him to say this.

“Daddy?” he said, pausing to blow bubbles in his soda. “Why is he doing that?”

“Good question,” I said.

I didn’t have an answer either. I also didn’t have an answer for why people want to bomb trains or planes or malls or sporting events, or why so many stories are about the loss of innocence. I just knew that we had to keep telling them. And I worried sometimes that fear would rise up and fill the void of answers, that he would stop saving babies from ovens and rivers because someone told him he’d got the story wrong.

3. How to Get Rich

In 2006, shortly after we moved to Fresno, California, I bought my son a frog-shaped sandbox and two hundred pounds of sand from Home Depot. As we were driving home with it in the back, he asked me if I thought a robber would come and steal his sandbox.

I laughed. “I don’t think a robber would be interested your sandbox.”

“Why not?” he asked.

This made me stop and think. I didn’t want to admit that his sandbox wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t sell it for crack, crank,  or a bottle; that it wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t hock a sandbox or recycle it for cash. Lately, the robbers in Fresno had been targeting street-lights in the nice neighborhoods, pilfering yards and yards of copper wire and selling them to recycling plants. More recently there had been a rash of thefts of catalytic converters from cars parked in driveways and public parking lots. Something about the stuff inside that could be sold on the black market.

My son’s sandbox really only had sentimental value. It was not worth money on the black market. It couldn’t be resold or recycled easily. But what if there was a black market that trafficked in sentimental value, an underworld where my grandfather’s typewriter is worth more than my laptop, or where a child’s sandbox is worth more to a meth-head than the copper wiring in the street-lights?

If there were such a market for sentimental value, we’d be rich.

With a few exceptions, most of what we owned was valuable purely for sentimental reasons. We liked our neighborhood, but it was not affluent. There were five vacant, essentially abandoned houses on our block, four of them at our end of the street. Though just one house away from an elementary school, we were also in some gang’s territory. I didn’t know which one. The only real evidence I could see were graffiti tags on our trash cans. Our neighborhood was not high-crime—mainly because there wasn’t much to steal. My son asked us once if we were ever going to be rich, and we gave him our standard line about being teachers and writers and how we were rich in “the things that matter.”

I didn’t want to say his sandbox wasn’t valuable; but I also didn’t want him to be afraid of robbers or bogeymen or the people who picked through our recycling bin, looking for bottles and cans. We’d had a few scares recently.

Once when my son and my wife were out walking the dog, they spotted the black-and-white police helicopter—a ubiquitous presence in our neighborhood at night—hovering just a block away. A voice boomed over the chop, ordering someone to “come out now with your hands up”; they hightailed it home.

Another morning, during our regular walk down to the bakery, my son and I passed a corner roped off with police tape. We found out later that a man had fired shots at a police officer, led the police on a high-speed chase into someone’s yard, crashed his car, and was shot more than 80 times by pursuing officers. I wanted to alleviate my son’s fears about a robber stealing his sandbox, but I couldn’t pretend that crime wasn’t real, and I didn’t want to tell him his new toy was worthless.

Instead, I told him this: “You know what? Your sandbox would probably just be too heavy for robbers to lift. There’s two hundred pounds of sand in there,” I said. “That weighs almost as much as Daddy.”

This was mostly true. I weigh quite a bit more than his sandbox. But it seemed to help. He sat there for a while, perhaps imagining the robbers trying to lift his frog full of sand or his Dad. I often tried to deflect and distract with humor, and I hoped he was imagining me curled up in the frog.

Then he said, “Daddy, I think robbers are golden.”

“Golden?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think robbers are golden and have three golden horns.”

“Golden horns, huh?”

“And they’re made of metal,” he said finally.

I imagined tri-tipped monsters of golden metal clanking and clunking through the side gate—a team of them, four or more with shovels, emptying his frog-shaped sandbox into five-gallon buckets they would trade for cash at the asphalt plant; one of them hefting the plastic frog onto his shoulder and dragging the lid across the concrete. I rose from slumber to the sounds of scraping metal and labored breathing. I dialed the police and watched the golden robbers squeeze into a blue van, ducking so their three horns didn’t hit the door frame. If I wanted to, I could see them circling the neighborhood, pilfering tricycles, soccer balls, and boxes of sidewalk chalk for their weekly haul to the other black market, the warehouse full of battered toys, worn-out t-shirts, and sagging recliners; shelves piled high with emotional attachments, a warehouse full of the most obscurely valuable things you could imagine. I hoped that if I tried hard enough, I could pretend that all robbers were golden sentimentalists, burdened by their metal skin and their guilt over stealing a child’s sandbox; but I knew that if they were, we’d be the target.

4. How to Be a Hummingbird

Providence, Rhode Island, 2005. The rain had been coming down in sheets for nine days straight, seeping through the walls in our basement, leaving puddles beneath the oil tank. We needed to get out of the house, and we drove fast, just barely tethered to the asphalt, headed for a movie in Massachusetts, a movie about a giant Were-Rabbit ravaging the village gardens. The red and green and yellow lights flowered in the moist fog. They twinkled and blinked intermittently with green. It was too much sometimes, too heavy. This place. This moment in time. The white noise of water-spray competed with the radio voices. My son blithely chattered away in his car-seat, conversing with his invisible friend, Tum-Tum the elephant.

Meanwhile, my wife and I talked openly about recent bomb threats to subways in New York City. We said whatever we wanted—things like, “bound to happen,” and “nothing we can do,” or “just gets worse and worse.” We admitted that this was our reality now. But a claymation movie about a giant Were-Rabbit awaited us, and we were happy about this. We were out of the house and not thinking, just driving and living. We were good Americans. It was early October 2005, and we’d already decided not to go to New York before the bomb threats were issued—mainly because we couldn’t afford the trip. But when we’d heard the reports of threats to subways and public transit, we were both honestly relieved to be anywhere but the city.

“Can you imagine that?” my wife asked, responding to another NPR update on the car radio.

“Getting bombed?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Or living with that threat every day like they do in so many other places.”

“No, no I can’t imagine.”

I suddenly realized that our son had gone silent; and the moment began to stretch and expand, distended with silence. He was listening to everything we’d said. He was paying attention to all the words and possibilities, looking for the suggestion of violence or fear or conflict because he had Doppler radar for such drama.

“Who’s getting bombed, Daddy?” he asked.

“Nobody, honey,” my wife said, “Daddy and Mommy were just talking . . .”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I chimed in, but I was kidding myself.

He understood. He listened to NPR every morning and heard me ranting at the voices. I didn’t want him to be afraid of war and bombs. I didn’t want him to feel targeted. I wanted him to stay young and innocent and fearless as long as possible. But I also didn’t want to shelter him from the truth or from real danger. I had to prepare him to live in a world where people bombed trains or sporting events or buildings. But how was I supposed to do this? I was in the midst of a full-on parental pause, a seizure of language, and I didn’t know what to say.

Then my wife swooped in with this diversion: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

He paused for a moment, letting the possibilities balloon.

“Hmmmm, “ he said, “Maybe a hummingbird.”

***

April 15, 2013, Fresno, California: My son the hummingbird, born almost nine months after 9/11, will soon turn eleven. He’s just a few years older than Martin Richard, the youngest victim of the Boston Marathon bombing. My son is a bright boy who takes painting lessons, plays the trombone, and dreams of being a filmmaker. He still likes birds but he doesn’t want to be one when he grows up. His mother now has a house a few blocks away from me. My son and his sister live with me half-time, splitting the weeks. Things have changed a lot in eight years. But my son tells me that he still likes listening to NPR in the car because he learns cool things. These days he’s been listening to the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent manhunt with what appears to be a kind of careful detachment, a calculated pre-adolescent disinterest. But he knows all the details, knows the bombs were packed in pressure cookers, knows they blew apart peoples’ legs, and he knows the bombs killed a young boy.

My 5-year-old daughter seems mostly oblivious to the news; she makes up songs in the back seat as we drive from school to home and listen to the radio reports. She doesn’t ask the same questions that my son asked years before, but I know from experience that she’s listening. I know she’s absorbing it all. And I suppose that’s what I’m reminded of every time something like this happens. Such things—these bombings, this terror—have the capacity to shrink your reality down to what really matters, making the world seem tiny and impenetrable, while simultaneously expanding things exponentially until your world seems immense and fragile and impossible to maintain.

I was still a new parent when my son first became aware of bombs, when he first started to ask “why” questions about war and violence. I can’t say that I know a lot more now than I did then. But perhaps he knew something then that we can all try to remember.

He may have been small, but he thought big and wild and in ways I aspired to match, ways that I still hope to preserve in my daughter and myself. If I could, I’d take them both out in the yard the next time a bomb or some other violence tears through the fabric of our days. Just the three of us, our faces pressed up close to the flowers, and I’d tell them to remember the nectar, remember their wings, their imaginations, and the way they can beat against the pull of violence. It’s a simple matter of defying gravity. I want to free them and protect them with this one fact: a hummingbird can beat its wings seventy times in one second. A simple blur of breath and flesh, and they could be gone.

5. After School Lessons

The other father schooled me during first-grade pick-up time.

“Saw some local fauna in the backyard,” he said and kind of rolled up on the balls of his feet.  He had the tanned muscled calves of a postal worker or a soldier, someone who’d walked a lot of ground.

“An opossum,” he said, nodding his head. “The wife wanted me to kill it, but I said, ‘No, let it be.’”

I told him and another mom about the raccoon I’d seen crossing busy VanNess Avenue and the Coopers hawk that took down a grackle on our street corner.

I’d called my kids to the window. “Hurry,” I said, “check this out,” and we watched the hawk stomp on the smaller bird, plunging its talons into the heart, puncturing the tiny chambers until the grackle bled out and stopped shuddering and flapping. It took a long time for that little bird to die. And then we watched the hawk carry it away.

When I finished my story, the mom gasped, “Oh, dear. I don’t know . . . ,” She put her hand up to her throat, covering the scar where she’d had her thyroid removed. “I can’t even . . .”

“It’s not violent,” I said. “It’s natural. The order of things.”

***

In one hand, the other father clutched a snack baggie stuffed with fruit. Strawberries and grapes, maybe a raspberry or two. A gift for his daughter. A treat for the walk home. He brought her something special every day.

“I freaked my sister out,” he said, gesturing toward me with the fruit baggie.

The children had already begun streaming out the doors, single-file, gravitating toward parents or guardians, gathering on the grass to wait.

“I poured salt on a block of dry ice,” he said over the chaotic noise of children.

“Watch,” he’d said to his sister. “Wait for it.”

And the deer did come. Two of them. Put their tongues to the salt. Stuck there, they pulled against the dry ice. Anchored to the lick, they strained to break free. And I wanted to tell him to stop.

“And my sister was like, ‘What are you going to do to them?”

I could see the deer pulling on their tongues, practically yanking them from their skulls. Panicked, they must have strained against their own anchor.

The other father handed his daughter the fruit baggie, “Here you go, honey,” he said and then he finished his lesson:

“And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing nothing,’ and that’s when I slit their throats.”

He smiled, nodding his head again. There was a breeze that day. Unusual for Fresno. But it could not carry his words away. They dropped into the space between us.

The children flocked to their parents, gathering around us like metal fragments to a magnet. Drawn to our shelter. And I wanted to hold them all, to drag them all away from the image of the deer pulling against their tongues, their throats spilling blood.

The other father’s daughter looked up at him, his words hanging there, waiting to attach and take root. My own daughter, oblivious to the gore, grabbed my hand and begged, “Can I?” pointing at the playground; so I let her go, watching her legs kick up, bouncing toward the cedar chips.

His daughter watched, too, staring at the other girls at play. She wrapped her arms tight around the baggie and squeezed until it burst. Pop! Like a shot. And the fruit spilled down around her feet. Grapes rolled like they were trying to escape. The strawberries just sat there, wet and seedy on their flat-cut sides. And the girl looked up at him.

“Why did you squeeze it?” the other father asked, squatting to the concrete, sitting back on the heels of his Army boots.

“I don’t know,” the girl said, talking into her chest and twisting her toe on the ground.

“Consequences, baby,” he said. “Consequences,” as he picked up the fruit, and tossed it into the grass for the squirrels.

* * *

From I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear and Fatherhood by Steven Church. © 2018 by Steven Church. Reprinted with permission of Outpost19.

Forgetting the Madeleine

Frances Leech

Frances Leech | Longreads | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,315 words)

 

I have friends in Paris who are now 4 and 6 years old. When I ring the doorbell at their apartment, I hear a clamor of footsteps and shouts of “Frances” and “Frances-madeleine” as they fight to open the latch, just within reach of small arms.

“What did you bring?” asks the boy, searching me for a telltale tin or box.

Tu es une PATISSERIE,” says the girl: you’re a bakery, or a baked good. I do not correct her.

Then they remember: “bonjour,” “bonsoir,” a kiss on the cheek. They pull me away like tugboats to see their room. At one birthday party they kidnapped me so fast that the adults did not find me for half an hour. I was busy being dive-bombed by toddlers and pretending to be the wolf.

They are curious about many things: trains, love, my cat whom they have not yet met, all of the cooking that happens in their narrow kitchen. They know if they ask “what is it?” they will receive un petit bout: a morsel of chocolate or a scrap of herbed fat, something to test for themselves. Or someone tall will hoist the child up to watch bubbling sugar turn to caramel — from a safe distance — before chasing them out. “Go play with your kitchen!” They have a wide selection of plastic fruit, vegetables, pizza, cakes.

“What did you bring?”

This particular afternoon I only brought a pan. I showed it to them.

“Can you guess what we are making today? It begins with an M…”

“MACARONS!” The boy loves them, for their melting sweetness and array of colors. Whenever I make a butterfly or flower in pastel colors, I save one for him.

“No, it begins with an M and it’s also in my name.”

“MARIE!”

“No, that is maman. It looks like a shell but you can eat it.”

I find madeleines are often bland rather than exceptional, whether it’s the spongy ones in supermarket packets or the pâtisserie ones that are prettier than they taste. I’d rather dip a boring digestive biscuit in my tea and know what I am getting. I’d rather be named after an éclair. But I will make madeleines for these two French children. I can’t resist their big eyes and round cheeks, and neither can their local baker’s wife: she always slips them a chouquette or a little cake when their parents pop in to buy bread.

Read more…

Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…

Captive Audience

Lucas Mann | Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV | Vintage | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,553 words)

Hi (: I am ______, I am a 17 year old with a story.

I want to quit feeling like I am not important. I want to be somebody in my life, I do not want to be remembered as some face in the yearbook, I want to be heard. Currently, I make youtube videos, and I have 317 subscribers. I know it is not a big number, but I am finally being heard by some people and I love it. I just want to make people happy, in any shape or form. Putting a smile on people’s faces is my dream! If I could be casted on this show, my life would be complete. I just want people to know me more than just some girl who likes makeup. I want people to know who I am. My family is not against this, but they do think I should focus on school, which I agree with but this is my dream.

Height: 5 feet 5 inches
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Dream: This.

Please help me reach for the stars, this is my dream and if it comes true, I can’t even imagine my life. Help me out (: Help me be heard.

— from the Casting Call Hub website http://www.castingcallhub.com

I have, for a long time, suggested that we get rid of cable. I have even suggested that we throw out our TV altogether so that we may eat at our actual kitchen table and play more Scrabble. I’d say these suggestions come biannually, on average — they used to be more frequent, then ebbed, and are now increasing again. They have been going on for the better part of a decade. They arise, as most of my impulses toward change do, out of feelings of shame. They arise when we open up our home and visitors see the way we live — by which I mean what we watch and the frequency with which we watch it — and make remarks that I take to be scornful:

I cannot believe you guys have all the channels.

Or: How can someone retain so much information about Bravo?

Or: How do you do it? If I had cable, I think I would forget how to live. It’s just too easy to let your mind get lost in the slush and forget to look up.

It seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored.

The relationship between television and life is loaded. The relationship between television and love is, perhaps, even more so. Life, the way I think the term is most commonly used, is about action. Go out and live is the kind of thing that people say to those they deem flawed — ride something, climb something. Engage. Or it can be used as an insult to those who have nothing valuable to offer: get a life.

Love, the way I think the term is most commonly used, necessitates the same action. Loving passively is as shameful as living that way. When we love fully, we are doing something to make that love valid; it’s a conscious process, it’s active. Two people see each other in a way that elevates the act of sight to a challenge that must be confronted. Two people refuse to take their eyes off one another; that’s the idea. When we love fully, we are meant to engage.

*

For a long time, when you would refuse to give up television, I would pretend to be grudgingly acquiescent, as opposed to relieved. You would placate me and say that our watching was your fault, that I was merely implicated by association, the same way it is when I buy ice cream and offer you some — those aren’t your calories if you didn’t seek them out. We would, as a way to avoid any long-term legislation, briefly turn off the TV and spend the following hours in a sort of mutual meditation, leaning over the table at dinner, sometimes by candlelight, taking in the contours of the face in front of us, as though it had changed from the previous day, and the one before that, and the countless expanse of days that stretched out behind us (nearly every day of our adult lives), making us forget what it felt like to not know that face.

The literature of love, both the bad kind and the good, hinges on this type of sustained gaze. And, though the word boredom rarely comes up, it seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored. I’m thinking of Keats here, in one of those gorgeous poems to Fanny that I once read aloud to you in college, the last time neither of us owned a TV. I read to you of Keats wishing only to be:

. . . gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast. . . .

People used to live at such a slow, sensual pace. This is the kind of thing I still say on the nights when the TV is off. Nostalgia is all wrapped up in slowness. How long we used to linger. The capacity we used to have for sustained care, sustained concentration, sustained quiet.

My favorite book about love is John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Berger wrote it in 1984 — an early–MTV era book — but he wrote with a slowness that implies timelessness, that makes a piece of writing feel resonant, or maybe the word is authentic. He was an aging icon in the French Alps then, describing the way his life had moved, the way he’d seen the world change, but at its core the book is a missive to his lover.

He writes of when he is without her, thinking of her, how she shifts in his imagination:

In the country which is you, I know your gestures, the intonations of your voice, the shape of every part of your body. You are not physically less real there, but you are less free.

How strong a gaze; how long lasting — until his love (who remains unnamed throughout) becomes the image of herself, a creation of his mind and memory as much as the person he knows. There is a bending of reality in this sentiment, and in turn a sort of dehumanizing, but in Berger’s hands it doesn’t feel gross. Instead, it is a way of seeing I aspire to. It’s the elevation of a person to art: to speak to the one I most care for and hopefully witness a grander sentiment (Love! Timeless love!) whisper out from the intimacy of that address. But Berger wrote these words long before anyone ever wrote the word mansplain, and I wonder now if he might ask for a do-over And I wonder, too, if I should try to find a better way to capture and perform my own love. You don’t need me to tell you what’s there, what’s been there, like it’s a show that only I’ve been watching. And yet I do, uncertain, trapped in my own voice, hoping you see at least a sliver of yourself in the portrait, frozen in sustained care.

We went to the Alps once, with your sister and a bunch of other leather-clad Europeans. All that money blown to spend New Year’s partying at high altitudes. Everybody else went skiing, but you knew I couldn’t, so you let me avoid the embarrassment by staying behind in the cabin. I spent a week binge-watching over bad Wi-Fi, and that experience of waiting for the screen to unfreeze while cold rain pecked at the windows of a moldy chalet only ratcheted up the claustrophobia. I watched. Sometimes I walked until I got bored, then returned to the screen again. I waited to hear you come in the door, and we’d put our cheeks together so I could absorb some of the cold from you.

On New Year’s Eve, after a long party, we lay in bed unable to sleep. The shadows of the mountains were maybe visible through our window, framed in moonlight, but we weren’t looking. We watched each other’s faces and waited for the laptop to buffer. Finally, we were able to watch The Real L Word, a show about actual lesbians in LA, developed to capitalize on the success of a show about fictional lesbians in LA that I never had any interest in watching. It’s a program we’ve only ever sought out in transit — in a motel in Pennsylvania, mid-move, U-Haul packed in the parking lot, dog whimpering at the sound of trucks passing outside, or in a semisecluded corner of O’Hare Airport on a night when all connections were grounded for tornadoes.

Sometimes it’s nice to match moods, to decide on that mood matching together. There’s a restlessness to The Real L Word that appeals only in restless moments. There’s a pulsing crassness to the way the most intimately personal is made to feel branded. The women fuck desperately in some scenes, and with the lights on, no pretense that they’re unaware of the cameras. They look up, let us see their faces, and then plunge their heads back between legs. In the nonfucking scenes, every word they say is loaded with as much pressure as sex; anything said about anyone can be taken as a slight. It’s easy to get a sense that they don’t know one another at all, or maybe they really do and this is how shallow knowing someone actually looks when there’s a camera around — another loaded thought.

Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility.

We were on the futon in the dark, in the Alps, listening to the party die down, and there was Whitney on screen, fucking white-dreadlock Whitney, celebrity makeup artist-cum-minor-celebrity, confessing in the confessional room after a pretty graphic tryst with her on-again-off-again.

Lust is easy for me, she said in front of a bright-red curtain, for some reason. Love is hard. Lust is exciting. Love is scary.

We looked at each other, like always. We didn’t say anything, but let Whitney’s cutaway lines hang between us as a question or an invitation. I saw your face, pale, and my face reflected in your dark eyes. It doesn’t take much to approximate profundity. At least not to me.

***

I’ve written about a lot of things, or it seems that way to me, but ultimately they’re all kind of the same thing. I write about loneliness, or dissatisfaction, or incompleteness. I have tried, in different (though not very different) ways, to make sense of the things that hurt. What is harder, and what I have avoided, is trying to honor the truth of everything that doesn’t hurt: that I am not alone; that (although I am reluctant to say the phrase exactly because of Jerry Maguire) I am closer to feeling complete because we are together; that often, in our little house in front of our big TV for hours until my eyes begin to sting, I am satisfied.

This is hard to reread after writing it. It seems an impossibly small statement to make, one meant to be offered only semisincerely, and a bit drunkenly, at special-occasion dinners.

Barthes says that love, as a subject, has been driven to the backwater of the “unreal.” Then, he strives to distinguish between unreal and disreal. The unreal is the fantastical — Tristan and IsoldeIt’s a Wonderful Life, that kind of thing. In its grandness and sincerity and removal, the unreal is easier to explain, always familiar. And so it’s the love story that is easiest to find in any book or movie or TV show, allowing the audience to linger in swelling impossibility.

But the disreal, Barthes argues, is where love belongs. The disreal is lived experience, the flickering, perceived moment, unsayable — if I utter it (if I lunge at it, even with a clumsy or overliterary sentence), I emerge from it.

My problem is that I am immersed in it and because I’m immersed in it, I can’t think of anything else to utter. We are in one place: our home; we see one person: the other. What else is there to say? I want to believe that I’m not interested in fantasy. I am interested in the disreal, not the unreal, both in the art that I seek and the love that I live. But if you look at any life long enough, with enough vested interest, how do you not begin to push toward the fantastical?


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Whenever you catch me looking at you, you say, What are you looking at? Which is a really loaded question. You know what I’m looking at — you, the person in front of me; what else could I be looking at? But what you’re asking for is the difference between image and interpretation — is what I see more interesting than what is really there, or what you think is really there? And all I can ever say is nothing. And then you roll your eyes and we become exactly what the world would expect us to be. And now I’ve gone from Roland Barthes to a sitcom punch line. I turn back to the TV.

***

It’s hard to trace an exact history of the “reality show.” The term is often applied retroactively — roots can be found in The Real World, back in the mid-nineties, or Cops in the late eighties, or in early eighties variety shows like That’s Incredible! or the seminal seventies docudrama An American Family. One thing remains consistent: it’s always been a tortured lineage, a confounding term.

The best parsing of the language I’ve read is this, from a book called Trans-Reality Television: “Reality show” as a phrase is self-confessing.

In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.

I like that the implication isn’t that we who watch so faithfully are being bullshitted, but rather that we are willfully bullshitting ourselves to get what we want. We are promised a dynamic that cannot actually ever exist, and we accept that.

More than accept it. The genre means a lot to us, to me. I’ve never expressed that sentiment with even a gesture toward sincerity because it’s embarrassing. But I think I mean it. Sincerely. At least for now I do.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

Far more than I’ve read Berger (or Barthes or Sontag, or any of the others on the grad-school syllabus that I claim shaped how I see the world), far more than we have walked through museums together (and really, how many times have I had the patience for more than one wing and the café?), far more than we’ve sat and listened and harmonized to the songs that we so seriously call ours, we have watched and internalized and discussed televised showings of spectacular reality. The Real Housewives of Atlanta (and New Jersey and New York and Beverly Hills and, to a lesser degree, Miami and Orange County), Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Real World, Road Rules, The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Love and Hip Hop, Sister Wives, Basketball Wives, Breaking Amish, Storage Wars, My 600-Pound Life, My Big Fat Fabulous Life, Shahs of Sunset, Married to Medicine, Botched, Say Yes to the Dress, Deadliest Catch, Million Dollar Listing, Intervention, The Little Couple, Vanderpump Rules — there are many more that I’m forgetting offhand, and there have been many that came and went and briefly held some importance for us, and there are many more being produced right now that we will soon adopt. These are the narratives that have underpinned our lives. These are the types of stories that we choose to live alongside.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. A part of what — and, more important, how — you remember.

***

We’re on your bed next to the window in your dorm room and we’re nineteen. I’m running my hands along your tattoo, your first one, and you tell me to stop because you don’t like your body, and I tell you that I do. You don’t believe me.

We ask for everything about each other, the kinds of details that other people wouldn’t know, as though that will confirm the importance of our conversations. My first memory was of a red vacuum cleaner on the gray carpet of my mother’s apartment on East Sixth Street. I was scared of the noise it made. It was a cramped basement apartment, and every sound was loud. I was frightened often. This was Alphabet City in the late eighties, and outside our windows I could see and hear the pacing boots of methadone patients waiting for their morning fix.

“Oh, I can picture you,” you say. “Were you blonder? Were you chubby?”

I was, both. And I want you to picture me that way: a cherub in a hard, looming world.

I do remember the vacuum cleaner, and that the carpet was gray. I have heard about the methadone clinic from my mother, mostly cheerful stories about me getting free lollipops. I don’t remember it, but I can picture it now, too.

You are running your fingers through my hair and smiling at what isn’t an outright lie, just an interpretation, the beginning of a character that I would rather you see, another in a quickly building collection — Q: How many partners have you had? A: Plenty. Q: Wait, did you come already? A: {Indecipherable, hopefully erotic grunt}.

You say you remember almost nothing. You didn’t speak as a child, you say, like not ever, because you moved to different countries and had to start learning language all over again. You remember an overall feeling of loneliness, but hardly any images. Oh, here’s one, you say. Coming back from the beach in Italy, drinking peach nectar out of a carton — how sweet and thick and simple it was. Oh, and you had a boy’s haircut. Oh, and you were bullied for your weirdness, and your silence, so you preferred to be alone — most of the memories you have are of that pain. Oh, and one more thing: you were a liar. When you did speak, it was never the truth. And there was one particular lie you told that was too big, too painful, and you’ll never talk about it even still.

This scares me a little but mostly turns me on — a repressed past; an untellable secret; dark, brooding eyes under a strange, little-boy haircut, lonely, sucking nectar out of a carton. It becomes instantly important to know that there is something unknowable about you.

***

I keep thinking of your secrets and the lonely anger, and all those redacted memories for a while, and then I forget about them as other details emerge to pay attention to. But these plot points linger, always, making each new scene a little more enthralling, and then they resurface, brief, overpowering — reminders that we can see so much of each other, know each other as best we can, and yet always, underneath, there is the unknown.

A few years later, at a party in Brooklyn, you’re talking and drinking and laughing, and then suddenly you’re silent and flushed, looking over my shoulder, down a crowded hallway. You’ve seen someone from childhood, from an American camp you were sent to when you knew no English, and your face is the face of a silent girl, alone and enraged. At first you ask me to hide you, but then she comes up and says, “Oh my God, how crazy to see you! Remember camp? Don’t you miss camp?”

I watch you glare at her, silent for a moment, and then you crescendo into emotion. You say that you don’t miss it at all. You tell this girl that she had been so cruel — does she even remember what she did to you? She says, “No, not me,” and you stand closer to her, and say with a new force, “Yes, you.”

There are others around us at the party, turned stiff and awkward, but you don’t see anybody else. The camp girl says she doesn’t remember it the same way, but then she squeaks through an apology. You don’t accept. The crowd watches; I watch, and watch them watch you. I am transfixed — by your tears, by your rage, by this beautiful soap-opera haze that has fallen over the hallway.

On the way home you don’t bring it up. You are silent; you hold your body in what looks to be a performed, anguished seethe, and I keep stealing glances at you as we walk. Years have passed, and I still remember it, a vivid, pleasurable return each time — those mysteries in you, the pain turned to brief power, probably overblown in my mind but always potent.

* * *

Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, out in May from Vintage Books.  He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere.  He teaches creative writing at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and lives in Providence, RI, with his wife.

From Captive Audience by Lucas Mann.© 2018 by Lucas Mann. Reprinted by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

 

Unearthing the History of Lynching, One Story at a Time

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 20: Names and dates of lynching victims are inscribed on corten steel monuments at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice on April 20, 2018 in Montgomery, Al. More than 800 corten steel monuments are on display representing each county in the United States where a lynching took place. More than four thousand victims are honored at the memorial. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On April 26, 2018, the first national memorial to honor victims of lynchings opens in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial’s main feature is an installation of more than 800 suspended columns made of steel, one for each U.S. county where the murders occurred. The names of victims are etched into the markers — in places, the engravings simply read, “unknown.” Bryan Stevenson, whose Montgomery-based Equal Justice Institute,  compiled an official tally of burnings, hangings, shootings, and drownings of black Americans by white mobs from 1877 – 1950 and created the memorial, said he wanted to capture the “scale” of the 20th century’s racial terrorism.

The story of lynchings in the U.S can also be told on a smaller scale. Mob violence against blacks was wrought on communities, families and individual bodies. Throughout the memorial, details of some of the killings are listed along a walkway. But documentation of many of the murders is scarce: newspaper accounts are missing or unreliable, and memories of many witnesses and bystanders has been lost to silence and grief.

For New York Times magazine, journalist Vanessa Gregory unearths one story as she follows the descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, to Oxford, Mississippi, where they learn the details of the events surrounding his 1935 murder by a white mob and visit his possible burial site in an attempt to come to terms with their family history.

Higginbottom was 4 when the mob came for his father. He is now 87, with eyes set in a perpetual glaucoma squint and the strong voice of a younger man. He is the last remaining family member to have seen his father alive, and the thought of returning to Oxford was gnawing at him. The anxiety began when his daughters first proposed the trip, and it intensified that morning when he woke. And now Washington, the youngest of his six children, was peppering him with questions.

“So, who is your daddy’s mama?”

“I don’t know my grandmother on my daddy’s side,” he said.

“When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?”

“I don’t know when my parents got married.”

Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching. They raised E.W., the eldest, and his siblings, Flora and Willie Wade, in Forrest City, Ark., and later in Memphis. Higginbottom’s mother told the children their father had been hanged but didn’t share many details. And she almost never spoke of her dead husband’s character, habits or looks — the stories of his life. Maybe grief kept her quiet. Or fear. Either way, Higginbottom knew better than to mention his daddy. Sometimes he asked his cousins Dorothy and Olivia about him, but they told him to leave it alone. Don’t mess around in that, they said. You might get hurt.

Higginbottom had occasionally returned to Oxford when he was younger, chaperoned by uncles who wanted to visit relatives or take in a service at the family’s former church. But it had been a long time. He stared at the fields consumed by kudzu, the gravel drives, the hardwoods lush with summer growth, and saw only a foreign country. “I was trying to see something I recognized around here, but I don’t,” he said. “It don’t look like I ever lived down here.” As they sped closer to Oxford, he kept gazing out the window, scanning the landscape for even a spark of memory.

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Publishing the Best of the Desert: An Interview With Ken Layne

AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File

Ken Layne is the writer, editor, and publisher of the Desert Oracle, a bright-yellow “field guide to the desert that covers the “strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros” of the Joshua Tree region in California. We spoke with him after the publication of a recent profile in Pacific Standard, in which he explained how he designs and delivers each issue himself to desert outposts with as little as 30 people. 

Aaron Gilbreath: You grew up in the desert. Where exactly did you grow up in Phoenix?

Ken Layne: I was born and mostly raised in New Orleans, far from any desert, but I lived in Phoenix during the formative middle-school years. First on the poor side around Buckeye and Seventh Avenue ─ old Phoenix, a shack behind my uncle’s house. Vacant lots, railroad yards. We had motorcycles and Chihuahuas. My classmates were mostly Latino and Native American. I made one friend, this very poetic character, and he lectured me all the time on Aztlán, the Chicano cause. It was all new to me. He kept the tougher kids off my back, which was nice. My grandpa had been a coal miner, along with his father, and they all moved out to the south side of Phoenix on the Black Lung train. At least that was the story I heard now and then.

The other place was a nice little stucco house with a swimming pool,  a suburban elementary school a few blocks away. Most everybody was a white kid from Illinois or Michigan. My dad and his twin brother started an air-conditioning service business, so eventually, we could afford our own house. There was this big urban cowboy sort of honky-tonk nearby, huge place on a nearby big intersection on the northwest edge of town. My parents used to go there now and then. Just north of Greenway Road was wild desert, dirt roads through foothills, crazy saguaros with owl nests hanging out.

AG: I grew up in Phoenix, too. The city itself felt like any other, but one unique thing was how you could drive in any direction and be in the middle of undeveloped Sonoran Desert in thirty minutes. When did Arizona desert start to work its magic on you as a kid?

KL: I never much saw the natural world before we moved to Arizona. I never saw mountains all around, or mountains at all. But it was purgatory for my dad, something he had to endure again to finally earn enough money to move to San Diego. That’s the usual dream of kids who grew up in Phoenix of the 1940s and ’50s, especially the poor ones: Take the highway out to the beach and never come back. There are three generations of Laynes buried in Phoenix.

I liked it up in the foothills, in that mostly wild desert that began just across Greenway. I got to go to a science camp at this since-submerged place up at Lake Pleasant. We held gopher snakes and tarantulas, walked out under the stars, listening for owls and coyotes. It was fantastic.

AG: After your family moved to California, you started exploring the desert on your own. What did you do on those trips? Why were these experiences formative?

KL: Had a group of friends, oddballs mostly, from different parts of town. Four of us went out to Death Valley one freezing winter, Christmas break from high school. Everybody had part-time jobs so we had this narrow window, maybe 48 hours. We drove up in the middle of the night — after one of the guys finished work at a pizza parlor — in this other guy’s grey-primer VW bug with holes in the floor and springs coming out of the seats. A very cold night. Didn’t do much more than drive around, watch the sun come up over the wild desert, hiked a little, explored old buildings. I took a bunch of black-and-white pictures. Drove back in the middle of the night, listening to weird AM radio stations. It was romantic. Still is. That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California. A weekday night, alone with the radio, a motel and more driving ahead. A vague destination or purpose, with time to take sketchy dirt roads, to walk around outside, stop in used bookshops and little roadside taverns with E Clampus Vitus neon signs.

AG: Those desert drives are deeply romantic. They’re a good place to make a life. It’s interesting because many residents of big desert cities loath the desert. They like the sun, the pools, the mild winters. Are you trying to reach those people with Desert Oracle and convert them to the landscape’s wonders? Or are you trying to reach the converted?

That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California.

KL: The only propaganda angle is desert conservation, encouraging people to love these places for their wildness, for their desolation and spooky beauty. I try to make something that looks good in a desert home, that you’ll leave out when you’ve got people coming over. And maybe you learn about the animals, learn about the plants and the seasons, the folklore and history, both recent and ancient. And maybe you already have a backyard full of native plants and ground squirrels and roadrunners, and you want to encourage more of that, defend the wild desert where that’s still the norm.

People who love a place will fight for it, whether or not they live around there full-time, whether they’re in Palm Desert or Scottsdale, surrounded by strip malls and golf courses. You can still see the mountains! The best of the desert isn’t where most people live, anyway, all crowded together. The best of the desert is walking alone on a sandy trail, or being lost in a wilderness area and figuring out how to get back, or sitting alone in the rocks while creatures go about their business, or driving some mysterious road in the middle of the night, watching for cattle on the road and military drones and UFOs.

AG: The desert West is many things: its poisonous critters, prickly plants, spaciousness and deadly heat. It carries the burden of a distinctive mythology and politically charged climate. But it also evokes a feeling, a kind of mystic awe and reverie. Desert Oracle somehow manages to capture that elusive experience in its pages. Can you talk about trying to bottle that desert feeling?

KL: I like having minimal information when I’m exploring: rumors, oddly-worded signs, a sense of menace around a truck stop or a rest area, weird motels, out-of-date interpretive displays, Civilian Conservation Corps’ bunkhouses and trail stairways, the cheery and somewhat suspicious oddballs you meet in a campground outside Trona or Tonopah. With the Oracle, I try to keep it sparse. Easy on the eyes. I don’t want to give anybody eye strain. In telling stories of UFOs and Yucca Man and past civilizations and failed real-estate schemes, I want to dryly transcribe the weird stuff. I don’t want to oversell it. Like somebody calling you in the middle of the night and reading the police reports out of the paper in Barstow or Pahrump, like a radio announcer in a long war. I trust that the people who enjoy the Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities. Alive and alert.

Like any old southwestern newspaper or quarterly, Desert Oracle is presented without fanfare. I don’t explain things too much. You can look up the rest if you get obsessed. And you will probably get obsessed with some of this material, and then you’re diving down internet rabbit holes and raiding used bookstores in the High Desert, seeking evidence. I despise those “Explainer” things that are so popular in the online media. “Here’s a complex subject that could provide years of intellectual pleasure should you pursue it, but we’re going to post some glib, error-ridden thing that nobody even bothered to proofread, and then you’ll be all set!”

AG: Preserve the mystery while sharing bits of it. Desert writer Edward Abbey was a big influence on you. How’d you first discover him? What did his writing and life teach you?

KL: After that first Death Valley trip, I was raiding the high-school library for regional books, anything about the wild desert. Desert Solitaire was there, with all the nature books. And like everybody who falls in love with the desert and that book at the same time, the deal was done. Abbey wrote beautifully, of course, but he also had that swaggering thing that appealed to me at that age. The brave poetic writer, etcetera, a lifetime of screw-ups, moments of beauty and transcendence.

You’ll find when you start hiking and learning about the wildflowers and the animals, some scold will often appear and start lecturing you, telling you all the things you’ve got wrong, everything you don’t yet know — the people who suck the joy right out of a place in their constant campaign to be validated as some sort of self-appointed expert. Abbey never did that, and that’s one reason why it’s so easy for people to fall for him. He’d often explain that he wasn’t a naturalist, wasn’t a biologist or geologist. He was a philosopher. In one of his books, Abbey claims his favorite desert birds are the turkey vulture and the “rosy-bottomed skinny dipper.” It’s very welcoming. A good teacher makes it enjoyable, makes it a pleasure to accumulate those little bits of knowledge we have about the desert, about the natural world in general.

AG: Abbey influenced me, too. I spent my undergrad years bushwhacking southern Arizona’s deserts and mountains alone. When I found Abbey’s books, I realized I wasn’t some crazy loner, just an enchanted youth fascinated by this place’s magic, and that I could try to write about it, too. He was my first role model desert rat. Do you identify as a “desert rat”?

KL: I like any dramatic, moody landscape. But I guess I’m most at home in the American desert, and mostly the parts of the Great Basin and Mojave with a minimum of other people. Harry Oliver mastered the “desert rat” thing with his Desert Rat Scrap Book that he self-published for 20 years starting in 1946. (Oliver was a self-taught architect and set designer who worked with director Cecil B. DeMille and built the Tam O’Shanter and Brown Derby in Los Angeles, before retiring to Thousand Palms to become a full-time desert rat.)

That’s a particular thing, that sort of cornball comedy, relocating the ornery hillbilly or farmer to another environment that is baffling to the city people. It’s a very American archetype, and I guess I picked up a little of that for the radio show, for my campfire stories. For myself, I seem to be moving toward something more like the early desert hermits of early Christian Egypt. Probably a one-room stone cabin that’s a daylong walk from the nearest person. I don’t want to farm or collect junker cars or have domestic animals or shipping containers everywhere, and I don’t want to see any human works: no power lines, no satellite dishes, no other houses, no visible homes. Come into the little town every week or three for a dinner out and a martini, check the PO box, then “See you next month.” Boy, that would be nice.

The people who enjoy the Desert Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities.

AG: In his posthumous Abbey biography, The Red Caddy, desert rat Charles Bowden wrote: “Desert worship is a suspicious matter to desert rats. It is as if talking about what is out there will diminish what is out there. Also, as a group, we feel damn foolish admitting what we feel out there.” What do you make of that?

KL: Well I don’t feel foolish about it. And I don’t mind talking about it, now and then. But when you’re visiting with other desert people, you don’t need to convince each other of anything. It’s usually the new convert who needs to wax poetic and all that, and that’s a normal part of infatuation.

It’s a good feeling, building this link to a place, a bioregion, the part of the Earth where you’re going to settle in. People can go overboard at this stage but that is all right. Enthusiasm is necessary and generally in short supply. Most of us who choose to live in low-population desert places are looking for a minimum of human interaction anyway. A little goes a long way.

AG: In the recent Pacific Standard article about Desert Oracle, you describe how a black triangular object hovered beside your car before shooting off through the clouds ─ a UFO. What about that experience influenced your magazine’s vision or aesthetic?

KL: It is entirely possible that my preference for black geometric icons and dingbats influenced how I saw that particular UFO — and by “UFO” I mean an unidentified thing you could loosely describe as “aircraft” but more as “pulsating 100-foot-wide manta ray hovering silently next to your car, before it vanished in a point of light over the distant clouds.” It’s also a very popular UFO shape, seen for hundreds of years: the black arrow or triangle. They are still seen, often on country roads or desert highways. It’s a really particular kind of experience, from the many eyewitness reports I’ve read over the years. Usually goes from a brilliant light on the horizon to this enormous thing hovering nearby to a light streaking away in the opposite direction, at the speed of a shooting star. Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas billionaire who had the Pentagon’s UFO study contract that the New York Times recently revealed, ran a black-triangle study for many years. After my own sighting in late 2001, I contacted them and was interviewed by one of their people. They eventually put out a report that said people see these things fairly often, and whatever they are remains unknown.

Desert Oracle #4, the UFO cover from 2015, has a UFO typographic symbol as the only cover art. It’s an “Adamski disk,” something George Adamski saw (or faked) around Desert Center, near the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park. Just this black symbol on yellow cover stock. I love everything about that. It’s my favorite cover so far, and it’s echoed by the radio show’s art, the podcast logo you see on your phone when you listen to the show. My signs at the office in Joshua Tree look like that, too. It puts you in the right frame of mind.

But it initially felt kind of cheap to make a cover out of what is basically a printer’s dingbat, a wingding. I had been commissioning artists to do illustrations for the covers before that one, and the first couple issues have good covers. But the really stark covers are my favorite.

Since the 1990s, I was designing websites that mimicked tabloid newspapers, black and white with some primary spot color. And whenever a “real designer” came in, everything got crowded, too much of everything. Too much color, too many elements. The ultimate nightmare is the modern Internet page, with fifty different things blinking and yelling at you, a sewage mix of every color, every bad style of graphic, crowded and miserable. So I do it all myself now. I just learn as I go.

I’ve always liked one-color printing. Cheap offset printing, no two pieces exactly alike, blocky type, colored stock. I love that kind of poster art, like Eastern European political posters, or Southern California punk-rock flyers. The desert component was the regional press, these small shops in the Southwest that printed up their own field guides, rockhound books, trail & wildlife guides. You could buy them at gemstone shops in the desert, or gift shops at the state park. They had single-color printing for the usual reason—it’s cheap—but generally with desert-colored cover stock, so you’d have the utilitarian and modern 1950s and ’60s typesetting and graphics in black on a yellow or orange or sand-colored cover. Keep it sparse. All of that goes into the design for Desert Oracle. I used to run the photo-typesetting machine at this little backcountry weekly, at night when the regular typesetter was gone and the editor had his column ready after going through a few coffee mugs full of Bushmill’s, and I loved the limited choices for headlines, captions, and body text. The sans serif choices were News Gothic and maybe the Avenir or Futura families, and you could do so much with variations of shape and font size. Then you had easy-to-read serif fonts for text columns, Times New Roman, Schoolbook and such things. Add a little black-and-white illustration from the “Old West Clip Art” books. That combination is nice to read, just nice to look at.

Anyway, I suspect the really dramatic close-up UFOs are at least partly filled in by the brain of the observer, the witness. There’s a whole episode of my radio show, #25, on this subject. Jacques Vallee and John Keel often wrote about it. And it’s entirely possible that my own convincing UFO encounter on a desert highway triggered the part of the brain that produces or processes spiritual experiences — Saul on the road to Damascus and all that, the children at Fatima, people who “see” a spaceship from Star Trek or elves from a fairy tale — and that our aesthetics and culture fill in the details, the “message” if you get a message in the process. Or maybe not. UFO theories aren’t terribly interesting to me, all these 20th-century science-fiction tropes. In the return of Twin Peaks last year, there’s something like a mass UFO sighting in a small-town New Mexico. A girl and a boy are walking at night and she picks up a Lincoln penny. And then this Abe Lincoln robot-hobo is terrorizing the town, staggering through traffic, etc. That made a lot of sense to me.

AG: “Crowded and miserable” — that describes both the modern Internet pages and certain popular urban desert trails I’ve hiked. Part of each Desert Oracle issue contains reprints of naturalists and explorers writings, alongside original pieces. How do you find older material?

KL: Mostly it’s chosen as intentional propaganda. Mary Hunter Austin was really the first Edward Abbey. She wrote The Land of Little Rain, about the California desert, and she was this bohemian character, a socialist, an artist, an important early feminist in the literary and theater scenes. And she wrote beautifully about the desert, in a way that reads very well today. People should read Mary Austin. And it’s public domain, so I can afford it. Same with John Wesley Powell, who most desert people know as this great explorer, the guy who recommended that the United States leave the desert Southwest alone, as it could not support huge populations with its scant water. But he also wrote with style and wit, and you feel like you’re there with him, around the campfire after a day of adventure. I feel a kinship with Powell. His family, like my paternal family, originates in the West Midlands and wound up around the Ohio River, and we both had many early Methodist preachers in our line. His life was a series of adventures, his morals were good and progressive for his time, and he looked at the Southwest with the right eyes. We should’ve listened to him more, but much of the federal desert land we have today is the result of the land-conservation philosophy he helped create, and the recommendations to the U.S. government after his great explorations of the Colorado River and the interior West in general. It was in the last years of his life that the General Land Office ─ what became the Bureau of Land Management in 1949 ─ finally transformed from a land-giveaway agency controlled by the railroad monopolies to a bit more of a conservation mission. He’d be heartbroken to see “Lake Powell,” which is a monument to everything he was against. And of course we’re all still fighting about public lands and water rights, and there are a handful of welfare ranchers and deadbeats like those Bundy people who are paid instigators of an anti-American effort to strip us of everything that’s in the public domain, everything that is part of the Commons. One day we’ll stuff all those nutbags in a rocket and drop ’em on an asteroid somewhere. “It’s all yers, Clive!”

Then there’s Zane Grey, who is always kind of dismissed as this cowboy-book hack. When I finally got around to reading his stuff, I found it interesting and sort of poetic. He was living in a desert cabin and crossing the Southwest on horseback at a time when it was really a commitment to be out on the desert. I like reading something and realizing what I assumed about it was wrong, that there’s real value to the stuff, and then I like to spread it around if I have the opportunity. The old pieces also give you a sense of time as part of the space of the desert. All these times layered over the desert: the U.S. Calvary camels crossing the Mojave, Charles Manson hiding out in the Panamints, Minerva Hoyt sleeping under the stars in a desert canyon, Shoshone and Paiute stories of great ships in the sky, red-eyed monsters in the night.

AG: You must have a large home library.

KL: It’s spread out between home and the Oracle office and a storage unit. I’ve got most of the desert-related books close at hand, but one day soon, I hope, it will all be assembled together, at my secret ranch house that is many happy hours away from busy little Joshua Tree.

AG: What is your ideal Desert Oracle piece? What elements do you gravitate to in material?

KL: It’s not completely clear. It is mood more than subject. I’ll start off with a bunch of ideas for each book and sort of see which ones I still like when it’s time to fill the text columns.

AG: Lots of people who love magazines think it’s nuts to try to start a magazine. Charles Bowden often worked eighty hours a week running his magazine from a cluttered Tucson office. In his words, “The magazine is an obsession and I am at my happiest when I am obsessed.” You’re a one-person operation: You have to fill it, design it, distribute it, sell and promote it. You go store-to-store. How much time does Desert Oracle take? What sacrifices does independent publishing require of you?

KL: It’s one of those times right now when I haven’t had a day off in three months. It’s not always like that. Summer is slower. I can bum around a little more. Each book takes a good 60 days to put together, I’ve slowly figured out — two months full-time. And then I do all these other jobs that are part of Desert Oracle: a weekly radio show that needs to be written and produced and edited, these live performances at museums, hotels and campfires, talking to the reporters, running the goddamned social media accounts, invoicing and delivery, shipping out orders, tax returns, bookkeeping, postal permits. Somewhere in there you try to write and edit and design and proofread this little magazine. It’s every day all the time, and it’s depressing to always be so far behind on everything, but it’s ultimately a satisfying thing to invent and halfway manage to pull off. I had a whole thing in mind: Not just a print book with this certain look, but a radio show, live events and the sparse office with books and maps and yellow file cabinets — this specific desert thing layered over the existing reality, to make the existing reality better, cleaner and more romantic.

But it’s not a sacrifice at all. A sacrifice is working for some media corporation where everybody’s always in fear for their jobs, for their lives. It would be nice to have more money,  to be able to afford to hire a couple of people who see the vision, who would enjoy contributing to the thing. One day. Or not. I’m aware that it’s a singular pursuit and might always be that way.

AG: People either imagine magazines being these lucrative enterprises with fancy editorial parties and celebrity photo shoots, like Vanity Fair, or they imagine them as money pits that devour all your savings before leading to nicotine addiction and divorce. What are the financial aspects of running an independent magazine?

You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you.

KL: Desert Oracle has been barely profitable since the first issue. It doesn’t make much, I rarely pay myself, and I run a tight ship. But I’m deeply against going into debt for things. You have to play whatever angles you’ve got, whatever strengths you’ve got, and see if that works, try something else if one thing falls flat. Stick to the vision but always be ready to go with it, wherever it goes. Having a small-but-loyal readership, a cult following, etcetera, can work out if you run a tight ship. You have to do pretty much everything, and you have to get some satisfaction from it.

There’s this idea that artists — designers and writers and musicians, that whole crowd — are supposed to be dupes when it comes to money, when it comes to contracts. You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you. As a one-person publication, you can rarely afford consultants or “professional services.” I will not skimp on attorneys but I do my own accounting, I do my taxes. I am my own subscriptions-and-circulation consultant, I figure out the postal permits and the databases and the wholesale and retail mix. I design the envelopes and postcards, the invoices and the business cards, my work uniform, all that. I clean the bathroom and change the printer ink, and take packages and issues to the post office, proofread the issues and process the photos. There is always something to do.

You’re going to have do most everything, so you might as well make it the way you want. You have to create the whole world you will operate within, from your physical office to your daily schedule.

AG: Every generation includes ambitious people with literary aspirations who have something to say, and they start magazines and independent presses. Many universities have graduate publishing programs. What insights can you share with these folks about running your own magazine?

KL: If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied. Don’t let people bully you into putting a lot of stuff in the book that doesn’t please you. Don’t feel obligated to run anything. Don’t give out excess free copies if you depend on selling those books. Treat your readers and your retailers well. Answer their emails, at least the nice ones. Listen to them, because your loyal readers can point you to a lot of potential material, and because they’re people with interests very close to your own. You will meet good people and new friends through such work. They will generally forgive your mistakes and tardiness if they believe your work is done in good faith.

If the publication begins to get some attention, and you can make a living from it, then you are part of a proud American tradition of the small-town publisher, the country newspaper, the regional quarterly: Poor Richard’s Almanack, Leaves of Grass, the Territorial Enterprise, the Los Angeles Free Press. It’s a great life, especially if you pick a cheap area to live.

AG: One of Abbey’s problems, particularly with Desert Solitaire, is that his books’ popularity drew more people into his beloved quiet spaces than he was comfortable with? As his friend Charles Bowden put it in The Red Caddy, Abbey “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground and pulverized one of his favorite backwards of the Colorado Plateau.” As a publisher, does that concern you?

KL: Of all the human uses of the desert, people visiting national parks and monuments to sight-see and hike and camp is the best. And you want to convert these people from “Oh this looks great on Instagram” to “I will donate time and money for the rest of my life to non-profits that defend and protect wild desert.” We’re fighting this mafia federal government right now, these Russian mobsters trying to upend our beloved new desert national monuments, trying to upend California’s Desert Renewable Energy Plan, which was put together over a decade of hard negotiation between the Bureau of Land Management, the state government, the environmental groups and the renewable energy companies, years of public meetings and reports and science. These attacks on the environment and our parklands are completely out of step with California, with the modern West, where people place tremendous value on these weird wild landscapes that are near enough to all the big cities for people to escape for a weekend. The California parks and monuments are a steam valve for the densely packed California cities. It’s important.

I’ll complain like any local crank about the tourist traffic and how you can’t eat out most of the time, because we have very few restaurants and they’ve got lines out the doors in tourist season, which is now a solid nine months a year. But these are people here to appreciate the desert landscape, the flora and fauna, the run-down cabins, the wind and the sand. That’s good. We need these people on our side. Too many of these people is a good problem to have.

I’ve spent half my life out here chasing illegal hunters, trash dumpers and off-road motorcyclists tearing up the desert. It’s a lot easier to run off some illegal campers from Oakland or wherever. I always tell them where they can legally camp or point it out on their map.

AG: Endurance and armor are important survival strategies for desert creatures: come out at night, hunker down by day, grow slowly and develop a thick skin. Where do you see the magazine in five years?

KL: Hopefully it’s still here — hopefully we’re all still here! — hopefully publishing on a tighter schedule, maybe with a couple of employees, an editorial person and a production or layout person, maybe another several thousand subscriptions, some income from the radio show, some other things in the works, and mostly I hope I can do more driving around and walking around the desert. I had planned on a “couple days a week” made-up job as publisher and editor of the Oracle and that part of the scheme has not yet worked out. But it’s all right. Better than the usual alternative: Go bust and go back to working for somebody.