Search Results for: Guernica

A Prescription for Forgetting

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Diane Mehta | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,706 words)

“You’re dead,” said the meditation guide. “You’ve been dead a long time.” I start crying. “What do you see?” she asked. I whimpered, “My dad somewhere, cremated, maybe a river, gone for decades. My son is older. He has a family. He thinks of me sometimes. I can’t stand it.”

“They’ve been gone a long time. You’re fine. Part of the universe. The beginning of what you were meant to be. Does that beanbag chair in the house that you don’t like matter? What about your job and the argument you had with your boyfriend, that burger you had for dinner? Your dresses, your shoes, your jewelry, your house, your keys. Throw your keys away. Throw them into the magnetic sun. Whoosh. Do it again. Whoosh. How do you feel?”

I wiped my tears and scanned my imagination. Exploding galaxies to explore, strange dimensions, star clusters, sunbursts, Earthrise over our moon, star-forming nebula, cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang. What does a black hole feel like when you’re disembodied and inside of it? My mind was clear. A cool mist like summer rain while scuba diving underwater but without equipment. She continued to encourage me to throw things away. “It gets easier. Throw it away. Nothing matters. Whoosh.” I winced, then felt relieved, then felt horrible and finally caved and decided to be dead, dead, dead. As shock left me, I imagined looking around at my new home out in space: stars blinked on and off like fireflies, nearby yet distant, planets with inconceivable colors of lilac-brown and red-rust that hadn’t been refracted through an atmosphere and the curve of the turning Earth.

Everything gets easier according to everyone who believes that life is a positive cult. This guide said she used to have an argument with the world. She was angry at all corners of her soul. “I’m happier,” she said calmly. “You have a very open mind. You’ll do well here.” I panicked and came back to Earth. My feet reappeared, and my hands, which I’d watched burn away, per her instructions, grew back like a starfish regenerating its limbs. Whole again. Beanbag chair and teenager and dog and boyfriend, jobs and writing to do and the whole shebang of worries. I forced a breath out. She was wrong about me.
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Working Through the Apocalypse: An Interview with Ling Ma

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Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,139 words)

The end of the world in Ling Ma’s novel Severance comes not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but a stream of misinformation, social media hysteria, and plenty of willful denial. If this sounds familiar, it’s far from dreary. Ma injects comic levity into a world ravaged by “Shen Fever,” whose victims perform habitual tasks in a mute, somnambulant state until they waste away. Candace Chen, a New York-based, Chinese-American millennial, is immune to the disease, and joins a small group of survivors led by a former I.T. specialist.

Although this post-apocalyptic remnant waves a typical number of red flags — micro-authoritarianism, liberal use of euthanasia — Candace makes do as they scavenge for food and mercy kill the “fevered.” Ma depicts the end times with alternating chapters on Candace’s pre-apocalyptic life: dating in Brooklyn, navigating adulthood, and working at a book production company. She specializes in Bibles and takes occasional business trips to printing facilities in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Ma has fun with the end of the world: Severance reads like The Walking Dead infected with the anarchic spirit of Office Space. Candace’s coworkers sport designer flu masks, idly wonder about the colleague who didn’t return on Monday, and debate whether to take the spot bonus for staying on when everyone else has the good sense to get the hell out of NYC.

Candace doesn’t have good sense. She maintains her routines and eventually moves into her office. She updates a photo blog called NY Ghost with images of the empty city. And we learn Candace is guarding a secret which may imperil her chances with her newfound “friends.” Read more…

At Home on Carmine Street

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Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | August 2018| 14 minutes (3,400 words)

 

When the two stragglers let the door clatter shut behind them, I turn the lights in the restaurant’s dining room all the way up and zip over to the stereo. For the past few months, we’ve been blasting the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” while closing. We all sing You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done? while manning brooms and mops and rags, none of us aware that we are singing of our own lives. At the chorus, we give in, drop what we’re doing and dance: Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

I stack the chairs and tables as I’ve been taught, sweep crusts of bread and remnants of lettuce off the tiled floor, grab the register drawer with the remaining cash — 200, 300 bucks tops, since I’ve been emptying it steadily all night — while, behind the counter, Emily cleans the cappuccino machine and stashes the whipped cream, milk, and pie in the fridge. Tom drags the mop over the floor I just swept, the bucket for dunking sitting at the lip of the kitchen.

During the day, the place is bustling with people — upstairs, downstairs, out front, gates open all summer long. But now it’s 12 a.m. at The Grey Dog on Carmine Street in the West Village, and everyone else has gone home.

I leave Emily and Tom singing in the dining room, and carry the money from the register, platter-like in one hand, through the swinging doors of the upstairs kitchen, down the narrow, slippery staircase, past the dishwashing station and the baker’s area, where the croissants and scones are warmed at 5:30 a.m., past the catering department, where two Irishmen make platters of Caesar salad and triangular-cut sandwiches all morning to the sounds of NY1, and get to the restaurant’s windowless, corner office. I unhook the mass of keys from the loop of my jeans and let myself in. Sammy, the resident cat, slips past my ankles. The office reeks of cigarettes and pot.

Up on the desk, I count the cash, separating crisp bills from soft ones, count it again, and add it to the change drawer under the desk, which is always stacked with rows of 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and a couple of 50s — $1,000 or $2,000 total. Much of that night’s profits — but not all — have already been rolled up, wrapped in elastic bands, and dropped into a heavy metal drop box in the corner of the room.

When I’m done, I switch off the lights and lock the door behind me, making sure that Sammy is inside. If I forget — as I have before — the cat wandering the restaurant will set off the alarm at 3 a.m. and my boss will get a call from the police: There’s been a break-in.

Just as I turn around to walk through the unlit basement and bound back up the stairs, I see Emily in the semi-darkness. There is a gun by her right ear, its barrel pointing at me. Her body is bigger than usual these days — she’s 27 and six months pregnant with her second child, a mistake courtesy of a quick fuck in the restaurant’s downstairs bathroom with one of the cooks. They broke the sink off the wall, and now here she is, shuffling along the slick floor, belly first, with a man at her back, pushing her slowly into me, toward the office door at my back. I can barely see his face; it is nuzzled behind Emily’s hair and concealed by the panic on her own face.

Emily and I stand frozen in the underground quiet, looking at each other.

Then it hits me: The door.

I didn’t lock the front door.

Emily whispers, “Open the office.”
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The Killer Who Spared My Mother

Nicodemos / Getty, Associated Press, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Diana Whitney | Longreads | August 2018 | 13 minutes (3,338 words)

 
My mother never warned me about anything before I left home. She never came into my room, sat down on my bed, ventured a comment about condoms or consent. No little talks about protection of the body or the soul, the ways a woman might use her voice. Was it her responsibility to start that conversation? Did I dismiss her attempts? I was naive and covetous and hungry to be desired. She couldn’t have changed my nature.

I was 29 before I learned she’d nearly been murdered in college. She didn’t tell me. My father did, over a pot of earl grey in my Vermont farmhouse kitchen. They’d driven up north for a visit before I moved out west with my new rower boyfriend. Tim sat beside me, tall and glorious in his sweats post-workout, while my mom chatted on about the cool weather, the sudden frost.

Dad a-hemmed professorially. “We’re flying down to Philadelphia next month. Your mother’s been asked to be a witness in a murder trial.”

“What?” I didn’t understand.

Mom looked down into her lap, her red hair loose, cheeks flushed. In her late 50s she was still a statuesque beauty, a half-Irish mix of Julianne Moore and Janis Joplin, radiant except when worry furrowed her face.

“Someone your mother dated at Penn is on trial for murdering a woman back in 1977,” Dad continued in his formal baritone. “The prosecuting attorney wants her to testify.”

“Who is this guy?” I asked.

“Ira Einhorn,” Mom said, softly. “He was crazy.”

“Ira was a kind of cult figure on campus,” Dad explained. “A charismatic Sixties radical. Your mother went out with him and he… well, he hit her over the head and left her unconscious.”

“I thought he was going to kill me,” Mom corrected.

I glanced from one parent to the other in the sunlit kitchen. A log shifted in the wood stove. The neighbor’s milking herd lumbered into the back pasture.

My quiet boyfriend, Tim, summoned the courage to speak when I couldn’t. “What happened?”

Dad sketched out the story for us then, Mom nodding in assent, adding a detail here and there. Stunned, I could barely follow their voices, unable to grasp the existence of this man, his connection to my mother, and the trial she was about to attend. I don’t remember wishing her luck or hugging them goodbye, though I hope I did both. I don’t remember following up on the conversation. Like smoke I let the name Ira Einhorn dissolve and recede from my consciousness.
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Purple Pain

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Matthew Miles Goodrich | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,837 words)

 

I came to inside a CAT scan machine. Not a revelation  — I didn’t spring up and bang my bruised face against the cool metal of the medical marvel  —  but a recognition, a lugubrious return to my cognizance. I surmised I was in a hospital and, broken bones considered, that was a good place to be.

At least my trauma had a sense of humor. I couldn’t remember where I had been before landing inside the CAT scan machine, but I could tell you the song that had been rattling around my concussed head. It was Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

Inside the giant X-ray assessing the damage, I became aware that I was humming along to the song’s rhythmic chug. As the fog of my brain injury lifted, cueing the sharpening of the prickly sensations upon my skull, I eked the lyrics out of my memory: “Never meant to cause you any sorrow / never meant to cause you any pain.”

***

I cried the first time I heard “Purple Rain.” (This puts Prince in a broad category of musicians that runs the gamut from Television to Miles Davis to Taylor Swift.) It’s not only, in my opinion, Prince’s best song — a tough contest, to be sure, considering “Little Red Corvette” — but also one of the best songs ever written. That’s a rare achievement for a ballad, a genre whose slow-burning schmaltz tends to yank at the heartstrings rather than soar for the stars. “Purple Rain” does both, thanks to Prince’s lilting lyrics, addressing a hurt and harmed “you,” and that teasing, probing, undulating guitar solo. Prince carries us with him along every bent note, with the ebb and flow of a prom-night sway. “Purple Rain” is sad, tender, and triumphant, the sound of the most painful part of any relationship: the letting go.

“Purple Rain” is a letting go.

Price died on April 21, 2016, the same day I turned 23. He achieved a rare ubiquity in my adolescence: His iconography was everywhere and his music was nowhere. I knew he was once the “Artist Formerly Known As Prince,” the only satisfying pronunciation of the unpronounceable symbol that he performed under for a spate in the ’90s. His stare on the cover of “Purple Rain” — which has him festooned like some courtier draped around a fanged motorcycle as mist threatens to envelop him — told me everything I needed to know. Just as his career was fraught with disputes with record labels, making for spotty access to his albums in the post-Napster era, Prince’s stare was a diva’s: pouty, churlish, provocative, longing, damaged.

My first exposure to Prince came in high school. It was around the time I started playing guitar. Looking for a hero, I found a 2004 video of him, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and others paying tribute to George Harrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, trading verses of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The version of the video I saw promised “the BEST guitar solo in music history.”

Prince’s histrionics begin after the final verse, his solo coloring the A minor chord with a chromatic descent. He takes a few bars, then a few more, barrelling over Petty’s attempts to steer the group back to the chorus. With his shirt unbuttoned to his midriff, Prince kneads the frets, thrusting the guitar into his groin and wielding its neck like a phallus. With each elongated note and ecstatic contortion of his lips, he scales a new climax, thrusting and weaving and longing. The panache with which he falls onto a cameraman only to rise again, still playing, would have been unworkable from any less of a showman, but Prince sells it with orgasmic euphoria. Harrison’s son beams at Prince from onstage. The band finishes. Prince tosses his instrument. The camera zooms out. The guitar goes up. It doesn’t come down.

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There Are Few Second Chances for Immigrants Who Commit Crimes

Photo by Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

At Guernica, Anjali Enjeti reports on the lives of immigrants who now live in fear of deportation after serving prison sentences for crimes they committed in their early lives. For US residents without legal citizenship, ICE leaves little opportunity for self-improvement. After their prison time, these immigrants have to regularly check in with ICE, who often detain them again, indefinitely, in facilities that resemble prisons, and essentially punish them for the same crime multiple times. This is the opposite of being born white in America, where white men repeated fail upwards.

Many of these residents fled trauma in their native countries only to endure trauma in America from racist taunts and violence, and now, the constant specter of detainment and deportation. This approach discounts everything good that these residents have done in their communities since their early crime. They work legal jobs, pay taxes, take care of their children and elderly family members and often volunteer at organizations that help other immigrants integrate into society. As The New York Times recently reported in “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant,” this link between crime and non-citizen immigrants is a figment of America’s racist imagination, and as the mounting evidence shows, the white men in the current White House commit more crimes than immigrants do.

Since he left prison, he’s been a community organizer for juvenile justice reform and immigration rights, and founded API-ROC, an organization that assists with re-entry and immigration services for formerly incarcerated Asian and Pacific Islanders in Orange County. “Tung is a monumental part of our community,” says Lan Nguyen, a fellow community organizer who has attended activist training sessions with him. “He donates so much of his time and emotional labor into helping others.” He is also the primary earner for his wife and stepson.

But despite Nguyen’s success assimilating back into society, he’s often worried. Though he continues to live at home with his family, in 2011 an immigration judge issued a final order of removal. “Take my criminal file and compare it to who I am today,” says Nguyen. “I’m asking for mercy.” He doesn’t know when or whether ICE will detain him, and lives in fear that ICE will target him soon. “I’m just so vulnerable right now.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Ben Blum, Reeves Wiedeman, Mizuho Aoki, Amy Wright, and Sarah Scoles.

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Dorothy Allison on how Shame Defines Class

Author Dorothy Allison (AP Photo)

At Guernica, Amy Wright interviews novelist, activist, and feminist Dorothy Allison on class, how poverty can influence a life’s path, the definition of a working-class heroine, and the role of women writers in literature.

A social activist deeply invested in the early feminist movement, Allison met head-on the dangers of free expression. If her courage to keep raising her voice empowers others, she is not so naïve as to imagine our right to speak will ever be equal. Nor, I realize after spending several weeks with her, would she deprive anyone of the fight, her sentences often undercutting someone else’s surety, or her own. Having written genius works of resilience, she recognizes the favor you do a person to unsettle her.

Guernica: How does your conception of class differ from that projected on you?

Dorothy Allison: You know those famous pictures of the South in which dirty-faced kids are standing there with a finger in their mouths? They are not speaking because they aren’t sure what to say or how to behave. You are aware absolutely that you are not as valuable or as human as people who speak easily and who are comfortable.

Learning that is class is actually a huge empowerment. When I read Marxist theory, it was like being handed a shovel. You could do something. You could dig out of the hole. You could defend yourself, because what not being as important as others really means is that you’re always in danger.

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Politics and Prose

Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

Marie Myung-Ok Lee | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,630 words)

 

“Walls are built in the mind.” — Wole Soyinka

“The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.”

— Rachel Coye, “New Year”

As a writer, a books columnist for the literary site The Millions, the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a literary citizen with prolific and brilliant friends whose readings and performances I could probably ink every night on my calendar, let’s say I go to a lot of book signings. Some have food, some have wine. Some have people who wander in and ask irrelevant questions with disarming earnestness.

At one reading where I acted as interlocutor, the novelist I was interviewing took out a package of Swiss chocolate she’d brought with her from Geneva, and instead of putting it on the plate with the wine, handed it to me with a sly smile. I’ve been to several readings where I have been the sole member of the audience. I was asked to do a reading that would involve live exotic animals as accompaniment. I went to one on the Lower East Side, back when it was truly gritty, where the writer was accompanied — overpowered, really — by a person blowing random high notes on a flute. Each reading offers something different, delightful, educational, new.

But I’ve never been to a reading/book signing that had protesters. Especially not for a book the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “Beautiful, eloquent, and timely” memoir authored by a young writer with a new MFA, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Award. In the era of Trump, where there is something new to protest every day (women’s rights, the EPA, the NEA, gun control, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare…), what would cause the lovely indie bookstore, Books Are Magic to send out a warning on Facebook before the event?

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Reporting on Bolivia’s Coca Rebirth: An Interview with Jessica Camille Aguirre

AP Photo/FILE, Dado Galdieri

In her recent Guernica article “Bolivia’s Quest to Spread the Gospel of Coca,” journalist Jessica Camille Aguirre reports on policy changes in South America’s poorest country. New coca legalization goes against everything American policymakers think about cocaine, but as many Bolivians will tell you, coca isn’t cocaine. It’s a leaf, touted in Bolivia as a cure-all, no more dangerous than a cup of coffee, but far more invigorating.

The coca leaf doesn’t get you high, it simply wakes you up. Many Andean people chew or drink it brewed for energy, or to treat altitude sickness or stay sharp. The War on Drugs only led to violence and death in Bolivia, and small farmers suffered. After cooperating for decades with the U.S. on drug issues, Bolivian president Evo Morales decided to expel the DEA and let Bolivia design its own drug policy: It would let farmers grow and sell more coca leaf inside the country and encourage entrepreneurs to use it in new commercial products. Despite the very clear difference between powder cocaine and raw coca leaf, some people describe the diffrence as a matter of degree. I spoke with Aguirre about her reporting on a profound shift in thinking about an unfairly stigmatized plant. Read more…