Search Results for: Italy

The Fish That Gave Too Much

Longreads Pick

The history of colatura — a fermented anchovy-based sauce produced in Italy — goes back millennia. Now, overfishing and rapidly warming waters threaten its future.

Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Jul 24, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,094 words)

Smooth Spaces, Fuzzy Lives

Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Rachel Andrews | Brick | Summer 2018 | 18 minutes (4,831 words)

A photograph in an Irish newspaper depicts a member of the Garda Síochána shaking hands with his counterpart from the Police Service of Northern Ireland at one of the points where the territory of the Republic turns into that of Northern Ireland. The photograph, published in November 2015, seven months before Britain voted to exit the European Union, accompanies an article on plans for a “border corridor,” whereby police on both sides of the border can pursue fleeing criminals into each other’s region.

There’s a kind of joviality to the photograph: firm clasping of hands, big smiles. Behind the two men is the Irish landscape, rolling, misted, a river cutting through fields of green. The officers wear different uniforms, but the only obvious territorial demarcation, the only hint that they inhabit different countries, with different laws, health systems, and currencies, is a sharp change in road color, from black to sudden grey.

I remember this non-distinctiveness, the dawning awareness that I had crossed a boundary, from the many trips I took to Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2010, when I worked on an essay that documented the systematic demolition of the Maze prison, a story that presented itself symbolically and — as it turned out — all too simplistically as one of a settling of the past and a coming together for the future.

I never went North as a child. I remember a drawing in a newspaper depicting a map of Ireland. In the sliver of space that is Northern Ireland, the cartoonist had penned: “there be dragons.” In truth, it was worse than that. Ask me as a 6-year-old, a 12-year-old, about Northern Ireland and I would have responded: bombs and blood. Ask my young daughter today and she might look at you blankly. It means nothing to her, and that is a good thing.

There were ways it meant nothing to us too. I grew up in Cork, in the very south of Ireland, and that meant growing up a world away from bombs and blood. As children in the 1970s and 1980s, we were safe from soldiers in the back gardens, from streets we couldn’t walk down. But things filtered into our child worlds. From television: the dark loom of the watchtower, the helicopters, the aerial prison shots following the 1983 Maze escape; Gordon Wilson, who lost his 20-year-old daughter in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing: “I shall pray for those people tonight and every night.” Of the few discussions in school, I remember one: the classmate who had relatives in Belfast, and her upset, her anger, at our fear, our distancing and distaste.

As I got older and traveled in Europe, the easy comfort of that distancing — you and I are not alike — was undercut. “So where did you hide the bomb?” a French colleague joked when I worked for a summer at a hotel in Munich. “Until I met you, I thought all Irish people were savages,” a German girl told me during my Erasmus year in France. This was the early to mid-90s and everywhere I went, there it was. “We in Australia just can’t understand it,” said the visitor to my apartment in London. I still remember the insult of his bemusement and sincerity, as well as my own avoidance. As far as everyone on the outside was concerned, I was them and they were me. I knew better — I mean, was it not obvious?

The first time I went North was in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement, after the Omagh bombing and the howl of anguish that went with it, after it became imaginable, almost normal, for me to drive in my tiny Southern-registered Fiat from Dublin to Belfast and back again as I researched a writing project on women working in politics in Northern Ireland. I was in my late 20s by then, and I wasn’t afraid in Belfast’s city center, which had the same familiar department store names as any British or Irish main street; nor on the Falls Road, which wrapped me in a warm blanket of tri-colors and Celtic symbols; but I felt heavy and intimidated as I made my way up the red, white, and blue pavements on Shankill Road to the offices of the Progressive Unionist Party, hesitant to speak in the corner store lest I betray myself through the soft spill of my Southern tones. But then this dissolved too, and seven years later, when I spent time interviewing former prison officers at the Maze, as well as the residents who had grown up beside the prison, all from a Unionist background, the sing of my Cork accent felt more like a benign curiosity than anything traitorous or threatening.

“Merging is dangerous,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “at least to the boundaries and definition of the self.” Is that why we wrestle against it so? The border with Northern Ireland, once a site of blocked roads and lookout towers, has evaporated, at least on the surface of things, but it remains a place of struggle, of contest, a tussle between those who wish to take it one way and those who would move in another direction, either within the boundaries of a unified Ireland or into the space of clarity that tells us where we end and they begin. The amorphous situation that has existed along the border for nearly twenty years, a fudge that has resisted discrete categorizations and that we seemed to have found a way to live with, or live within, is under pressure in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the clamor to once again define what we are and what we are not, begins to accelerate. We look for the solace of certainty, of knowing if we are one thing or the other, rather than allow ourselves to remain within the complicated, messy space of the both/and, a state made possible by the exhaustion left after thirty years of violence.

Hannah Arendt had a particular view of merging. As she searched out a meaningful concept of a Jew’s place in the world following the sundering caused by the Second World War, she ultimately rejected a form of Zionism that connected citizenship to ethnicity and tethered both to the boundaries of the nation-state. On the other hand, she wrote scathingly of those European Jews who would assimilate, who would ape the Gentiles in an effort to find their way into the ranks of the human, who would, she wrote in disgust, become “good Frenchmen in France,” “good Germans in Germany.” Arendt, you could say, had been one such good German. As a child she did not know that she or her family were Jewish; she learned of her ethnicity only through the anti-Semitic taunts of children on the street. But it was the shocking stripping of her German citizenship as an adult in the 1930s that ultimately woke her to the helpless vulnerability of the assimilated Jew and formed her conviction that Jews must stand defiantly aloof from the boundaries of nationality, turning instead toward the belonging of the citizen; the belonging that attaches to full and complete membership of a political community; the belonging that confers the right to meaningfully speak, act, and be heard in such a community; the belonging that means inhabiting a territory without subscribing to an overarching identity narrative. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples — if they keep their identity,” she wrote. Today her sentiments do not appear so different from those of Dina Nayeri, an Iranian refugee who received U.S. citizenship at 15 and became a French national at 30, and who wrote in the Guardian that she had lost interest in the need to rub out her face as tribute for these benefactions. “As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here,” she said, although a third culture appears to be the choice made by Arendt’s beloved Heinrich Heine, at least as she described it, which was to live as both a German and a Jew rather than deny his Jewishness as the price of belonging. “He simply ignored the condition which had characterized emancipation everywhere in Europe — namely, that the Jew might only become a man when he ceased to be a Jew,” she wrote.

Arendt came out of a Europe that had, she witnessed, conclusively intertwined national rights with human rights, which left her as mistrustful of a national, bordered identity as she was of the “abstraction” of any solemn notions of the inalienable rights of man. Heine, the Prussian-born poet and literary critic, came of age in the early nineteenth century, an era of political instability and contentiousness in his homeland; his conversion to Lutheranism was reluctant, regretted, and carried out only as the price of “admission into European culture.” In the early years of the twenty-first century, there was a feeling —I had the feeling — that Europe, at least on some parts of its continent, had found its way beyond these aspects of its shattering history and was on the turn toward the global and the flexible. In 2002, when I lived for a time in Paris, I could board a plane in France and emerge in Italy, where I could retrieve my bags and leave the airport without showing any identification, without queues or questions. This identity-less travel, the result of the then seven-year-old Schengen Agreement and so opposite to my conditioned, normalized experience of waiting in dutiful lines, gave me the very real sense of being a human in the world. The continent of Europe — the part of it that now had a common currency and permeable frontiers, and even onwards toward the rapidly opening East — felt magical, enlightened even, as if we were all in this together. The distinctions between us, forged through cultural, religious, and geographic experience, appeared shapeless now. I could be both Irish and European; I felt that I could, as Arendt wrote, “speak the language of a free man and sing the songs of a natural one.”

But there was a “them.” From my window in Stalingrad, the quartier in the north of Paris where I lived from September to Christmas, I watched men in jeans and jackets congregate outside in the early darkness of the winter evenings, lining up in huddled rows on a Friday for weekly prayers. I looked on, curious — what are they doing? — before I understood. This was one year before the Iraq War, which fractured the Arab world, but already and for long years it was not easy to be Muslim in France, even if you were the French-born descendant of those who had come in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the first wave of migrant workers from northern Africa who stayed in search of a better life; even if you identified as both Muslim and French, as really all, or at least so many, of such descendants do, and as French civic society, with its emphasis on the primacy of the citoyen, encourages — in theory anyway. The exclus, they used to call them. The excluded. If I lived in Stalingrad today, the men across the street would no longer be there; in 2011, politicians banned the saying of street prayers in Paris following far-right protests about creeping Islamization. Instead, near the street I lived on, under the bridge where the metro station lay, there would almost certainly be tents and other makeshift shelters constructed by refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, part of a new and different wave of migration that, along with the 2008 economic crisis, has upended all of Europe. In 2002, I also went to Greece on a reporting assignment. There was no graffiti then comparing Angela Merkel to Hitler; today many in the desperately-indebted country view the dominance of German capital as the source of their woes. In Italy, France, Germany, a radicalized electorate now supports nationalist parties, looks at the European Union with deep suspicion. We were never all in this together.

For the moment, I can travel from Ireland to Britain without a passport. For the moment, I can drive from Dublin to Belfast without stopping, as the road melts from the N1 to the A1 and the white and black sign informs me that speed limits are now being monitored in miles rather than kilometers. (How different to John McGahern’s experience in the early 1990s, recounted in the essay “County Leitrim: The Sky Above Us”: “There are ramps and screens and barriers and a tall camouflaged lookout tower,” he said of the border crossing at Swanlinbar in County Cavan. “A line of cars waits behind a red light. A quick change to green signals each single car forward. In the middle of this maze armed soldiers call out the motor vehicle number and driver’s identification to a hidden computer. Only when they are cleared will the cars be waved through. Suspect vehicles are searched. The soldiers are young and courteous and look very professional.”) By the time I will have finished writing this article, British Prime Minister Theresa May will have triggered Article 50, and the movements I have become used to taking between cities and countries will have been thrown into confusion. Since the terrorist attacks of November 2015, France has been in a state of emergency that includes a firm policing of its borders. For more than a year and a half, commuters travelling from Malmö in Sweden to Copenhagen in Denmark had to present their IDs. Temporary border controls have also been introduced by Germany, Austria, and Norway. Merging is dangerous. Those hoping for a united Ireland — and I am surely one — forget this. On his blog, the journalist and Northern analyst Andy Pollak notes that Andrew Crawford, the former special adviser to current Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster, used to go through reports from one North-South body removing the phrase “all-Ireland.” Perhaps the action of deletion helped Crawford forge certainty, was part of an attempt to make sense of how he existed in time and space. Forging certainty helps us all as we construct both story and identity in order to figure out how to live, but certainty, or at least a fixed destination, gets us into trouble too: we blind ourselves to possibilities, to the creative potential that lies outside of the either/or, to what can happen when we follow Arendt, say, or Deleuze, that great demolisher of dualisms, into the space of the non-being, the uncertain, the becoming.

In her photographic series Kinderwunsch, Ana Casas Broda depicts her body in thrall to those of her children, an artist willing to lose herself in conversation with flux, with change, with overwhelm. The photos are intimate and direct. Casas Broda often stares unsmilingly at the camera: a candid, life-worn Olympia, her pregnant body naked and big, uncomfortable-looking with her second child, or scarred and slack following fertility treatment and birth. In one of the images, her children have marked her face and torso with crayon; she both encouraged this and passively accepted the results. “I am their canvas: they play with me and change me,” she said in an interview. Kinderwunsch means “desire to have children,” and Casas Broda submits, it appears to me, to the terror and the unknown of that primal desire. She tumbles downwards, inwards. In the photographs, her children clothe her in tissue paper, they cover her in Play-Doh. “I see their scribbles on my body as a symbol of how motherhood has changed me,” she said. What she is really depicting is dissolution (of a former self), symbiosis — and something else. In some of the images, she and her children appear as one, interwoven, but there are others where she is alone, or they are indifferent to her: a son plays a video game as she lies naked on a couch, in between mother and person, neither here nor there, her body nonetheless relaxed, strangely at ease in the moment.

Around the time I began my Maze project, I was experiencing the greatest disintegration of self I had ever felt. Crossing the border from North to South represented moments of enormous exhilaration and giddy freedom: dazed as I was, when I lay in a border hotel without the baby, who had just turned seven months, I thought that I could see a way back to myself, that the place where I ended and the child began, would somehow become obvious again, clearly defined. I was wrong about that: there was no going backward. There was no going forward either, at least not in the way I wanted or imagined. Since the birth of my daughter, I remain in limbo land, the borders of a self so carefully constructed over nearly four decades now shifting. She arrived and I disappeared, something like that anyway. The categories I had thought surrounded me have dissipated into confusion and nothingness, and that, if I think about it too much, can be terrifying. Did I turn into you, I used to ask her when she was a baby, or have you become me?

When Colm Tóibín walked the border between North and South in 1987, he bumped into questioning British soldiers; a blown-up bridge on a road that once led from Dublin to Enniskillen; and, in Derry, a march led by former DUP leader Peter Robinson, then in the ascendant. Tóibín feared opening his mouth during the march, lest the crowd (young men in the main, some drunk) spot him as a Southerner. Despite the disappearance of the island’s physical frontier, the hangover from these tensions remains. My friend, a middle-class Northerner from a Catholic background who has lived in Dublin for nearly twenty years, at times employs turns of phrase that leave me reaching for a Cockney rhyming slang dictionary. Yet she and I both use colloquialisms a person born in England will never have heard. Nonetheless, for a long time my friend was lost and lonely in Dublin, reluctant to move back to a society still undercut by a deep lack of trust but without solid ground in the cultural space of the South; she felt different. “I was different,” she told me, as I tried to grasp her feelings of statelessness. It’s not as if we are from different countries, I told myself, not really anyway. But the thing is, we are, both literally and metaphorically. The border has dissolved, but trauma, so deep, so wounding, cuts us off from one another, makes strangers of us in the same land, pulls me one way, pushes her another; trauma turns a society inward, and it has turned Northern Ireland, in the words of retired Oxford professor of Irish history Roy Foster, into more of its own little place than ever. What we have in common is this (and this is easy to write and hard to live): we are more the same than we are different.

The artist Rita Duffy grew up Catholic in a largely Protestant area of Belfast; she is the progeny of a Southern mother and a father whose own father, a Catholic from the Falls Road, died at the Somme. Her two great-uncles on her mother’s side supported and may have been actively involved in the 1916 rebellion, which ultimately led to Irish independence, a civil war, and the fracturing of the island of Ireland. “I was continually fluctuating between nationalities, between identities, curious to know could I somehow land up in the middle somewhere that satisfied me today,” she told a symposium I attended in 2016. In recent years, Duffy has established herself within the space of the liminal: “I crept out to the edges of Ulster and we bought a little piece of the border. We built a house and I now have a studio just a mile and a half on the Southern side, and I live a mile and a half on the Northern side, so I kind of live in neither-here-nor-there land, which is a really interesting place to be as an artist. It’s very confusing and out of that springs the best imaginative possibilities for me.” Out of those imaginative possibilities have arrived big, bold ideas. The Titanic passenger liner was built in Belfast; the tragedy of its unfulfilled promise can be viewed as a metaphor for the long years the North lost to violence. In 2005, Duffy founded Thaw, a company set up to fund the towing of an iceberg from the Arctic to Belfast, where it would be moored outside the city and allowed to melt, in the process encouraging the shrinking of the deep, frozen divisions that still exist within Northern Irish society. Duffy has not yet found the means to drag her iceberg to Belfast, but since 2003 her paintings have been replete with the mythology of those hulking, frozen structures. She has created figurative images that appear trapped, encased in ice: Father Edward Daly, crouching, waving his handkerchief; a close-up of an arm, gesturing, holding a white handkerchief that may itself be an iceberg in miniature; in another painting, there is a Pieta, a mother holding a dying son, both emerging out of the bulk of an ice structure.

Duffy paints these images in greys and yellows, sometimes browns or greens, always muted. But in the middle, or in the distance, there is something, a speck of brightness, a blob, the white-grey of Father Daly’s handkerchief-iceberg, the light that draws your eye and that looks and feels like a breath of gulping air. If you thaw the frozenness, if you let it melt into the Irish Sea, then a space can open up, the iceberg no longer blocks your view and holds you in its frozen time. Behind you lies the city, with its plurality of people, before you the sky and the vastness of the ocean, deep and bold and cerulean blue. Duffy’s iceberg queen, a mammoth, back-turned Victoria, ascends into that blue, the blue of space, the blue of a possibility that allowed for an impossible friendship during the short time that former IRA member Martin McGuinness and the once-trenchant defender of Unionism, Reverend Ian Paisley, worked together in government in Northern Ireland. If you thaw the frozenness, a space opens up, and into that space walked Ian Paisley Jr., son of the good preacher, on various radio stations in January 2017, offering “humble and honest thanks” to Martin McGuinness on the occasion of the latter’s retirement.

In the North Atlantic, the largest iceberg on record was measured at 550 feet above sea level, the same height as a 55-story building; less tremendous ice structures can still reach more than 200 feet high. The Titanic, travelling at top speed on a calm night, crashed into an iceberg that was more than a mile long and 100 feet high and had been growing into its dense mass of packed ice since the time of Tutankhamun, although once such an iceberg drifts from the Arctic to the warmer waters of the North Atlantic, which this one had, it will normally melt in two or three years. To an impatient human eye, this melting will be imperceptible until it is close to completion. My daughter likes to play with ice cubes; she takes them from her glass of water and lays them on the table, where she can contemplate their light, their translucence. When she first started this game, I watched benignly; these days I place a tissue or napkin on the table to soak up the water that spreads out so suddenly as the cube, whole only a moment before, turns liquid before our eyes.

In Bosnia, where I’ve been doing research, the iceberg is still solid, a mountainous whole that blocks ethnicities from seeing across to each other. The Bosnian peace deal of 1995 somehow managed to avoid the formation of literal borders; instead, the populace has retreated into different enclaves across the country, Muslims stick with Muslims, Serbs with Serbs, and so forth. The saddest example of this is Sarajevo, which now sits within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of two political entities that compose Bosnia. Sarajevo’s population is now almost 90 percent Muslim, many of them newcomers since the ending of the war; former residents, most of whom will never go back, mourn the city that was once multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan. Everything has changed, they will tell you, shaking their heads; the city is totally different. There is still separatist agitation, particularly in the Republika Srpska, the political entity that sits closest to Serbia proper, whose nationalist leaders threaten to form their own tiny state, but the frozen iceberg contains more than that: it holds the pain of deceit, of mistrust, of horrors, of loss, of history and geography, of denial and defense. Most of my time in Bosnia was spent in the Republika Srpska, in the east of the country, where I found myself crossing and recrossing the border with Serbia. At each crossing, I encountered the checkpoints: the wait, the documents handed over, the computer clearance, the questions on occasion, the stamps. My husband, a photographer, made the crossing alone once and was held for two hours while guards went through his equipment, his backpack, his wallet. The determined absorption of different religions and cultures into the shape of a single Yugoslavia after the First and Second World Wars had its problems too, but those Bosnians old enough to remember the time when the many amalgamated into the one speak of it wistfully, softly, as if it were a fairy tale they used to tell themselves as children. Their iceberg was waiting, biding its time out at sea, before it floated inland to lodge itself forcibly among them. The disappearance of the border between North and South Ireland has not sunk our icebergs. But over the past sixteen years, until the schism that was June 23, 2016, we had found ways to float one with the other, moored and not, comfortable and not, settled and not.

Is it possible to hold two contrary ideas at the same time: that sense that merging is both terrifying and monumental, the knowledge that we are all different, but that we live within a common world, that we can choose to be something and not? Although Alice Notley wrote that the birth of her child had left her “undone” — “feel as if I will / never be, was never born” — she could still see the other side: “Of two poems one sentimental and one not / I choose both / of his birth and my painful unbirth I choose both.” She hung in the balance, remained midway, gave herself over to not settling in. The child that was a baby when I began my Maze project recently turned ten and is in process, in transition. She is a self that I am not, although that self, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is only “a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.” Her identity is no more fixed than mine is, than mine ever was, for all that I have scrambled to chase it. “What is real,” write the philosophers, “is the becoming itself. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.” There is confusion, and much relief, in such malleable thinking.

I was wrong, of course, in the assumptions I made about the Maze story. After the initial openness that followed the prison’s closure in 2000, when the paramilitary prisoners were let out and the public allowed in, political wrangling slowly strangled the goodwill until the great gates swung shut again; they have stayed shut, more or less, ever since. When I talked to people in and around the prison about politics and the peace, they felt bitter and hurt and sad, and that was not easy to hear. But any hard edges of fear and certainty seemed also to have blurred into a resignation that meant we could at least stand outside of compartmentalizations and inside the fuzzy space that doubt tends to uncover.

It was almost always cold at the Maze; even during summer, the fog hung heavy over its vast flatness. When I was in need of warming, I would retreat to the small security hut at the entrance to the site, where a handful of guards took phone calls and processed visitors. What I recollect about these visits are the moments of recognition. One of the men, a gentle soul, English-accented, who had lost his wife too early and now lived a simple life of work and extended family, was the chatty type. I still remember how he once articulated my fear. “You dip your finger in a pool of water, swirl it about for a while, and when you take it out, the water will return to the way it was. Then it will be as if you never were.”

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This essay first appeared in Brick, the biannual print journal of nonfiction based in Canada and read throughout the world. Our thanks to Rachel Andrews and the staff at Brick for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

The Country Where Fútbol Comes First

Candace Rose Rardon | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,824 words)

They call it the Maracanazo — the final match of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, held in Rio de Janeiro. Host team Brazil was the obvious favorite, set to take on their much-smaller neighbor to the south, Uruguay. Victory was nothing short of inevitable.

The match took place on July 16, in the newly opened Estádio do Maracanã. The official paid attendance was 173,850 — of whom approximately 100 were Uruguayans — but because the stadium’s grandstands had no seats, the actual number might be closer to 210,000. It’s still one of the most-attended sports events of all time.

On the morning of the match, in true Brazilian style, an impromptu carnival began at dawn, with the crowds chanting “Brazil must win!” A samba, “Brazil The Victors,” had been composed, and the mayor of Rio addressed the Brazilian team with a rousing speech: “You, players, who in less than a few hours will be hailed as champions by millions of compatriots! You, who have no rivals in the entire hemisphere! You, who will overcome any other competitor! You, who I already salute as victors!”

That day’s morning edition of O Mundo ran a photo of the Brazilian team on its front page, beneath which a caption read five fateful words:

There was only one problem — they hadn’t played the game yet, and Brazil’s small but mighty opponents weren’t ready to go down without a fight.

Read more…

Queens of Infamy: Joanna of Naples

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | July 2018 | 23 minutes (5,932 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Are you the sort of person who loves a high court drama with plenty of devious intriguing? Is learning about grisly murders one of your guilty pleasures? Do you get a voyeuristic thrill out of tracking the rise and fall of royal romances? What about plagues? Do you like plagues? If you are currently clutching your chest and muttering “yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” then: a) sick, and b) keep reading. We’re about to take a deep dive into the life of Joanna I of Naples, and shit’s about to get really, really real.

Joanna — or Giovanna, as she was and still is known in her mother tongue — was born in 1326 to Charles, Duke of Calabria and heir to the Kingdom of Naples, and Marie of Valois. Although she was Charles and Marie’s fourth child, Joanna was predeceased by her three older siblings and became second in line to the throne at birth. A member of the Angevin dynasty, Joanna was the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like Eleanor, she would prove to have a knack for ruling. Also like Eleanor, her ambition and capability would threaten the powerful men around her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both queens found themselves having to run for their lives. Joanna’s flight — which involved escaping her besieged castle under the cover of night and then undertaking a dangerous journey across plague-ridden seas (all while pregnant, mind you) — might be less famous than that of her predecessor, but it’s arguably an even more incredible story.

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The Road to Asylum

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,300 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I want to finish elementary school.” — Karla Avelar, 40, founder of the Comcavis Trans Association, which advocates for LGBTI rights in El Salvador

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“Women, don’t be deceived,” boomed the weary, yellow-eyed preacher, his sombrero tipped forward with a drama fitting for his bus-ride sermon, one that would last all the way from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to Guatemala City. As he made his way down the aisle of the bus, he stopped to touch women and girls on the head or the arm. “Don’t let men trick you,” he shouted, holding his bible up so high its well-worn pages brushed the roof of the bus. He didn’t touch Marfil Estrella Pérez Méndoza, 26, whose chosen name translates to Ivory Star. As she rested her round, hopeful face on the bus window, dark eyes peering out into the rainy grayness of early morning, the preacher passed by without laying a hand. “How do you say asylum in English?” she whispered.

Marfil Estrella was born in Cuscatlán, El Salvador, in a body that never felt like her own. She was assigned male at birth, and at 15, she came out as gay to her family. Their response was to disown her. “They told me that I brought shame on the family, that I should forget about them, and that I needed to leave,” explained Marfil Estrella. Like many members of the LGBTI community in El Salvador, her family forced her onto the street, and her schooling ended abruptly at ninth grade because she had no money to continue. She fled to San Salvador and slept in a park where she met other gay boys. “I saw a transsexual, and I said, ‘I want to be like her! I want to be like her!’” she recalled. She lived on the street, grew out her hair, and began to dress in women’s clothes, but she had no way to earn a living and consequently became very thin. Eventually she started to do sex work, one of the only options available to trans women in El Salvador to earn money. Read more…

Your Best Work Comes from Scaring Yourself

Photo by Ryan Lowry

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,419 words)

Several of the sentences in Chelsea Hodson’s debut Tonight I’m Someone Else radiate with the epigrammatic wisdom of Kelly Link or Maggie Nelson. There’s just something about her lines — “How lovely to be young enough not to know any better” or “I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own” (both from “Simple Woman”) — that demands furious underlining and exclamation points in the margins.

These essays span the writer’s life in Tuscon, Los Angeles, and New York as she investigates what it means to have a body, to be an object, to run away, to look for answers in strangers, and to chase danger. As in, let’s tie a butcher knife to the ceiling fan and sit beneath it until someone gets hurt (“Near Miss”).

With praise from Miranda July and Amy Hempel, Tonight I’m Someone Else is a book that delights and disturbs and — in its deep dive into the performance of female identity — feels very now. Hodson is an essayist with one foot out the door, and she’s holding the keys to someone else’s car, asking if we want to drive into the ocean. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: Anne Boleyn

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,949 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

* * *

Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Some people believe that the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is the ultimate way to classify personality types. Others think that the Enneagram is the way to go. Even more people set their stock in astrology, hoping that the fixed position of the stars at the time of a person’s birth will explain everything about them. I, however, think that you can tell everything you need to know about someone based on which wife of Henry VIII’s is their favorite. Do you prefer Catherine (or Catherine, or Catherine)? Do either of the Annes do it for you? Or, god forbid, are you a fan of the insufferable Jane Fucking Seymour?

Personally, I’m Team Anne Boleyn. My reasons for this are multifold. As an Anne, I am naturally sympathetic to others of my name. I also can’t help rooting for an underdog, and if being beheaded because your crusty husband wants to marry Jane Fucking Seymour doesn’t make you an underdog, I don’t know what does. Finally, I respect a good hustle, and Anne’s hustle was iconic — my god, how she hustled! Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.

But who was Anne Boleyn, exactly? The mythology surrounding her improbable rise and sensational fall is pretty well-known, yet most of the information we have access to was either written by haters or produced decades after her death (or both). It’s hard to know much about Anne as a person (as opposed to Anne, Destroyer of Marriages and Churches). We’re not even sure what year she was born — 1501 and 1507 are the two most likely candidates, with arguments hinging on a letter Anne wrote to her father in 1514. Historians have endlessly debated what age Anne was when she composed that neat, measured handwriting (in her second language, no less), and while I am absolutely not an expert, I will say that as the mother of a 7-year-old, I feel 97.5% sure that a child of that age did not write that letter. Then again, maybe my low penmanship expectations are the product of my plebeian public-school education.

Anne was writing to her father because her educational circumstances were about to change drastically. Initially, Thomas Boleyn had managed to secure a spot for his young daughter in the Burgundian court in the Netherlands. There, she was educated alongside several royal children, including Charles of Castile, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It’s unknown how Thomas, a diplomat whose closest personal tie to royalty was his wife, a descendant of Edward I, managed to winkle this incredible opportunity for his daughter; some historians speculate that it may have had to do with a gambling debt owed to him by Margaret of Austria, regent of the court where Anne was staying. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the gift for aggressive upward social mobility was strong in the Boleyn blood.

Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.

Just a year after Anne’s arrival in the Netherlands, shifting international alliances caused her abrupt departure. Henry VIII’s 18-year-old sister, Mary, had initially been promised to Charles of Castile, forging strong ties between the Holy Roman Empire and the Tudors. Then, in August of 1514, Mary wed the aging French king, Louis XII, by proxy. This sudden and stunning rejection of the teenaged Charles in favor of the visibly infirm, 52-year-old Louis likely made Anne’s position in the Burgundian court very uncomfortable. Luckily, Thomas Boleyn was able to place his daughter as a maid of honor in Mary’s household (my god, how these Boleyns hustled).

The Burgundians certainly weren’t the only ones who were upset about Mary’s wedding. Mary herself was less than enthused about the whole situation — understandably so, since she was a) three and a half decades younger than her new husband and b) deeply in love with her brother’s BFF, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Apparently she only agreed to marry Louis on the condition that after he died she would be allowed to marry whomever she wanted; the stars seem to have aligned in Mary’s favor, because Louis dropped dead just three months after they married. Henry sent Charles Brandon to France to collect his widowed sister, but with strict instructions:

HENRY VIII: Bro, whatever you do, DON’T propose to Mary when you get to France

Charles Brandon: LOL bro, I won’t!!

HENRY VIII: I’m serious, bro. Louis just died, like, five minutes ago

HENRY VIII: so be chill, ok?

Charles Brandon: Bro!! I promise I’ll be chill!!!

FIVE MINUTES LATER

Mary: We should secretly get married while we’re still in France

Charles Brandon: YOLO

To say that Henry was pissed would be an understatement. Not only had Charles Brandon directly disobeyed him, it’s also unlikely that Henry had ever intended to let his friend marry his sister. After all, the only value royal sisters and daughters had was to cement alliances through marriage; it’s unlikely Henry would have wasted the opportunity to marry his sister off to a foreign power (again) just because she was in love with a trifling Duke. Henry’s privy council wanted to imprison and/or execute Charles Brandon for treason, but in the end the king realized that would probably make family reunions super awkward, so Brandon just had to pay a stiff fine.

What was Anne Boleyn up to while this whole Charles Brandon foofaraw was happening in England? Still in France, she was now a maid of honor in the service of the new queen, Claude. At the French court, Anne learned all the skills necessary for being a good courtier — including (allegedly) the art of the blow job which was (again, allegedly) unknown in England at the time. While this last part is entirely apocryphal, it is my favorite rumor about Anne Boleyn. I have so many questions! What did it feel like to introduce la beej to an entire nation? Do you think she later demonstrated it to her own ladies-in-waiting so that they, too, could spread the gospel of buccal onanism? What were they even doing in England before Anne taught them the joys of fellatio? The mind boggles.

In 1521, Anne’s father recalled her from France with the hope that she would marry her Irish cousin James Butler and resolve a dispute over the Earldom of Ormond. It was one of those very boring succession situations that were always popping up among the gentry: Anne’s grandmother Margaret Boleyn was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Ormond and had been co-heiress to his estates, but now James, who was a descendant of the 3rd Earl of Ormond, was claiming the title for himself. Several of the parties invested in the outcome of this situation — including Henry VIII himself — thought that a union between Anne and James would settle the Ormond question. This probably wasn’t the marriage Anne was hoping for; at the very least, she would have known that she could do better than a discount wanna-be earl.

As you’ve no doubt already sussed out, the marriage between Anne and James never happened, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

* * *

At this point it behooves me to mention Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn; she figures importantly in this story not only as Anne’s sibling, but also as one of Anne’s predecessors in Henry’s bed. As with Anne, Mary’s birthdate is unknown — actually, it’s not even clear which sister was born first. On the one hand, the fact that Thomas Boleyn chose Anne to be the daughter brought up in the Burgundian court indicates that she was older (it would have been extremely strange to pass over an eldest daughter in favor of a younger one when offered such an opportunity). On the other hand, Mary was wed before Anne, and it would also have been uncommon for a younger sister to be married first. There’s also some boring stuff about which of their descendants inherited which titles under which circumstances, but there’s evidence to support both birth orders, so basically: who even knows at this point?

Like Anne, Mary Boleyn accompanied Henry VIII’s sister Mary to France for her wedding. (As a side note: if you’re starting to think there are too many Marys and Catherines and Annes in this story, you’re right — Tudor England was desperately uncreative when it came to names.) Like Anne, Mary Boleyn also stayed in France after the widowed Queen Mary returned to England for some Hot Charles Brandon Action. Unlike Anne, Mary Boleyn allegedly had an affair with the new King of France, Francis, who apparently referred to her as “my English mare” and “a very great whore, the most infamous of all.” I’m sure he totally meant these things as compliments!

Mary Boleyn returned to England in 1519 to become one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, at which point she almost definitely started sleeping with the English king. We know this because later, when he was trying to get with Anne, Henry requested a special dispensation that allowed him to marry the sister of his former mistress. During the period when she and Henry were Doing It, Mary Boleyn got married to a courtier named William Carey. Mary and William had two children together, but it’s speculated that Henry fathered one or even both of them. On the one hand: maybe not. On the other hand: just look at Mary’s granddaughter Lettice Knollys and tell me she doesn’t have Tudor blood. Lettice Knollys would later go on to wed noted Tudor fuckboy Robert Dudley, a favorite of Elizabeth I’s, and their marriage would earn them a banishment from court thanks to Elizabeth’s jealousy (of Lettice) and intolerance (of fuckboys).

Some people might regard Mary Boleyn as a classic example of “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — after all, if she’d played her cards right, she could, in theory, have wound up as the king’s wife instead of his mistress. On the one hand, it’s likely that Anne viewed Mary as something of a cautionary tale, and that’s partly why she was so intent on keeping the king at arm’s length (literally, with hand jobs) until he finally put a ring on it. On the other hand, Mary was the only Boleyn sibling to come out of that whole situation with her head still attached to her body. It’s possible that Mary survived through sheer luck, but it’s also possible that she understood more keenly than Anne just how fickle the king was and how harshly this world punishes clever, ambitious women.

If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up.

While Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII were making googly eyes (and other googly body parts) at each other, Anne had her own blossoming court romance. She and Lord Henry Percy, who belonged to one of the richest and noblest families in England, fell in love and became secretly engaged. Actually, they went even further than just an engagement — they were alleged to have entered into a “pre-contract,” which involved saying wedding vows in front of a witness. This distinction is important, because the church considered these de futuro vows to be binding if they were followed by sexual consummation of the union. Percy was a page in the service Henry VIII’s favorite cardinal, Thomas Wolsey, and when Wolsey found out about the betrothal, he was absolutely furious. It wasn’t so much that Anne wasn’t wealthy or titled enough for the Percys (although she wasn’t), or that Percy was already engaged to someone else (although he sort of was), or that Henry VIII was wildly jealous (Anne wasn’t even on his radar yet); the main problem was that Percy and Anne had taken something that was supposed to be a public business contract between two families and turned it into a private love-fest. Percy and Anne brought shame on their families by violating one of the most deep-seated rules in their culture: marriage between nobles wasn’t supposed to be based on love, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen in secret. They had to be punished.

Percy was immediately and unhappily married off to Lady Mary Talbot, the woman to whom he had been betrothed when he was a teenager. Anne was “rusticated,” which meant that she was removed from court and sent to live in her family’s country estate. The experience must have been not just heartbreaking, but also humiliating for both of them — in trying to behave like adults, they’d ended up being treated like naughty children. At any rate, Percy seems to have loved Anne for the rest of his life; several years later, when Thomas Cromwell wanted to use the pre-contract as a way to annul Anne’s marriage to the king, Percy repeatedly denied its existence. It’s possible that Percy did this because he was (rightfully) afraid that admitting to having a past sexual relationship with Anne would get him into hot water with the king, but it’s also likely that he was doing his best to save Anne’s life.

A few years after Anne was dishonorably discharged from the court, she was given the chance to return and join her sister as one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up. This time, she would aim high — real high. And, for a while, it would seem as if she’d succeeded in her ambitions.

* * *

By the time Henry VIII began to pursue Anne Boleyn in 1526, he’d been married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two decades. In that time, they’d only managed to produce one living heir, Mary Tudor, the future Mary I of England. By the late 1520s, the subject of succession caused Henry a great deal of anxiety. As his father’s only surviving son, the burden of continuing the Tudor line was riding entirely on the king. A series of English civil wars, now commonly known as the Wars of the Roses, had ended only with the marriage of Henry’s parents; he knew that a succession crisis could plunge the country back into conflict. On top of all that, England had historically bucked under women’s rule, so even if Mary — by all accounts a sickly child — survived to adulthood, that was no guarantee of peace.

The big question is, of course, whether Anne was the cause or a symptom of Henry’s decision to dump Catherine. Was she a wily enchantress, luring the King away from his beloved Queen by casting dark spells on his dick? Or did she arrive back at court and catch Henry’s attention after he’d already started looking for a new wife? Catherine’s sympathizers preferred the dick-spells theory, with Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sanders writing half a century after Anne’s death that she had six fingers on one hand and a cyst under her chin, both of which were thought to be the markings of a witch. I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France? That being said, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Henry’s realization that Catherine would probably never bear him a son happened at roughly the same time as his burgeoning obsession with Anne. While it might be tempting to analyze their eventual marriage as the result of six years of cock-blocking, Henry was probably already looking for a new wife when his eye happened to wander in Anne’s direction. The fact that Henry began asking the Pope about annulling his first marriage less than a year after Anne’s return to court is evidence of this.

I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France?

That’s not to say that Anne never encouraged Henry’s pursuit of her. Did she flirt with him? Sure! Did she tell him she wanted to marry him? Totally! Did she promise him a billion legitimate sons once he finally ditched his pious snooze of a wife? Almost definitely! But there are two things we have to keep in mind when considering Anne’s role in the annulment of Henry and Catherine’s marriage. The first thing is that it’s very, very dangerous to refuse to give a king what he wants, especially if that king is a man who is only too happy to snuff out the lives of those who have disappointed him. The second thing to remember is that Anne literally had one job in life: to marry a rich, powerful man. This job was the only end-game of all her fancy education, all the years spent learning multiple languages, studying religious texts, and perfecting her dancing skills. Every opportunity Thomas Boleyn had secured for her was to serve the goal of her marrying well; to marry beneath her station or not marry at all would mean that Anne had failed to make good on her family’s extensive investment in her.

Some of you might be wondering: why Anne? Why, out of all the women available to him, did Henry fixate on her? Was she incredibly beautiful? No, not exactly; even the most flattering contemporary accounts describe her as being just average in the looks department (though the king did refer to her breasts as “pritty duckys,” thus confirming my suspicion that he was a boob man). But she was charming, witty, and apparently a lot of fun to be around. And she was patient. Boy, was she patient. Having watched her sister Mary be picked up and then later discarded by the king, Anne knew that sleeping with Henry during their long courtship would only undermine her chances of marrying him, so she dug in and played the long game — one that involved keeping her chastity technically intact while at the same time maintaining his sexual interest (which probably involved a lot of what is euphemistically referred to as “heavy petting”). It was a fine line, but one she managed to walk for six years as Henry tried to negotiate his annulment with Pope Clement VII.

HENRY VIII: Heyyyyyy bro

CLEMENT VII: Oh. Hey. It’s you again.

HENRY VIII: Remember how I’m the best Catholic?

CLEMENT VII: Not really

HENRY VIII: Sure you do! I wrote that book? About the sacraments?

CLEMENT VII: Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry

HENRY VIII: I’m officially a Defender Of The Faith!!

CLEMENT VII: I’ll take your word for it

HENRY VIII: Anyway. Since I’m really amazing at figuring out this God shit now, I’ve been thinking about my life

CLEMENT VII: Oh good

HENRY VIII: I’ve decided that I don’t have any surviving sons because I’m a horrible sinner

CLEMENT VII: So you’re going to stop having affairs? Give up drinking? Quit gambling?

HENRY VIII: Lol no, I’m going to leave my wife for a much younger woman

CLEMENT VII: …

HENRY VIII: Yeah, because in Leviticus? It says that if you marry your brother’s wife? You’ll be childless? And Catherine was totally my brother Arthur’s wife first

CLEMENT VII: That’s … ok, you’re completely misinterpreting that law

CLEMENT VII: And anyway, you were granted a papal dispensation to marry your brother’s wife

CLEMENT VII: This is a problem that has literally already been solved

HENRY VIII: Ok well I’m going to need you to cancel that dispensation lol

HENRY VIII: And also annul my marriage

HENRY VIII: Thanks in advance!!!

The Pope was not, in fact, interested in annulling Henry and Catherine’s marriage. This was at least in part because Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, had just sacked Rome in 1527 and was basically holding Clement VII hostage. Henry, never one to be deterred easily, followed up his request for an annulment with an inquiry into getting a papal dispensation for bigamy which, unsurprisingly, the Pope was not super enthused about either. There was a trial, and a lot of it involved some cold-case sleuthing over whether Arthur and Catherine had consummated their brief marriage. Catherine swore up and down that they hadn’t, but some of Arthur’s pals from back in the day said he’d emerged from his bedroom the morning after his wedding declaring that he’d “been to Spain” (because Catherine’s vagina was apparently a Spanish territory). Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate who was overseeing the trial and Henry was not granted his annulment.

* * *

In late 1532, three very exciting things happened. Anne accompanied Henry to France, a move that legitimized her position as his partner. Then, when bad weather forced them to dawdle in Calais for two weeks while their Channel crossing was delayed, Anne and Henry took a Fornication Vacation and finally consummated their love. It was also around this time that Thomas Cromwell drafted the Act of Appeals, which, when passed in 1533, would make Henry the final legal authority on all English matters, meaning that he could finally get his annulment over and done with and also take his first official step away from the authority of Rome.

Henry and Anne (who was almost certainly already pregnant) were secretly married on January 25, 1533. On May 23rd, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine to be invalid (which meant that he’d technically been bigamous for four months, but since he was calling all the shots now that didn’t really matter); on May 28, the Archbishop declared Anne’s marriage to Henry to be good and valid. On June 1, Anne was crowned queen in an elaborate ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Six years of various jobs (hand, blow, and otherwise) had finally paid off!

Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy.

The three months that followed would later be seen as the apex of Anne’s upward trajectory. She chose “The Most Happy” as her royal motto, and certainly it must have been a very happy time for her: not only had she finally hustled her way into the highest office an English woman could occupy, but she was also pregnant with the king’s child, whose birth would hopefully secure Anne’s future. That is, if the child was a boy, of course — and everyone, including Henry, assumed that this would be the case. After all, now that he was no longer breaking Levitican law, surely God would see fit to shower him with all the sons he wanted?

On September 7, 1533, Anne gave birth to a healthy baby girl, whom she and Henry named Elizabeth. They had been so sure the child was going to be a boy that they had already commissioned letters announcing the birth of a prince; these had to be hastily corrected before being sent out. Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy. Still, it must have given both Anne and Henry some comfort that both mother and baby were healthy. The fact that Anne had survived giving birth was proof that God favored her, and although she wasn’t a boy, Elizabeth was still an heir — something Henry very much needed, since he was about to declare his daughter Mary illegitimate.

There’s a myth that the king’s interest in Anne began waning almost immediately after Elizabeth’s birth. Even today, Anne is often represented in popular media as a shrewish schemer who made Henry’s life miserable from the moment he put a crown on her head. Certainly she had her own ideas about how things should be done, and occasionally she and Henry were seen arguing over the course of their marriage. But her inability to produce a male heir notwithstanding, the two and a half years following Elizabeth’s birth were generally happy ones for Anne. She was finally able to put her fancy education to use and was instrumental in helping Henry reform the church in England, advocating for the availability of religious texts in vernacular instead of Latin. When her downfall came, it was swift, unexpected, and hinged on a series of life-changing events that occurred in January 1536.

In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in.

Anne became pregnant at least twice more after Elizabeth was born, but none of these pregnancies made it to term. She suffered from either a miscarriage or a stillbirth in late 1534 or early 1535; by late 1535 she was definitely pregnant again. This, along with the death of Catherine of Aragon on January 7, 1536, gave Anne and the king a good deal to celebrate, since now the persistent question of whether Henry was still legally married to Catherine was finally resolved. The day after her death, Henry and Anne dressed in yellow silk — a color of mourning in Catherine’s native Spain, but widely regarded as a symbol of joy and vitality in England. Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole.

Shortly after Catherine’s demise, on January 24, 1536, Henry fell from his horse. This accident caused the leg wound that would plague him for the rest of his life; he also suffered a head injury so severe that he spent two hours in a coma. Less than a week later — perhaps as a result of the stress from Henry’s near-death experience — Anne miscarried what appeared to be a male fetus. Around the same time, Henry began courting Jane Fucking Seymour, who was one of Anne’s maids of honor and also happened to be her second cousin. If romancing your wife’s employee-relative while she is either pregnant or has just suffered a miscarriage isn’t the definition of Tacky Asshole, I don’t know what is.

The fallout of this rapid succession of events was complex. According to some accounts, Henry was increasingly paranoid, moody, and volatile after his fall; coupled with the fact that he was unconscious for so long, these symptoms could point to a possible traumatic brain injury, which might explain the heightened violence and unpredictability he displayed for the rest of his life. The fact that Anne had miscarried his longed-for son only made things worse. As someone who believed that God rewarded the righteous, he would have seen this event as proof that he was still not in God’s favor (and that it was almost certainly Anne’s fault). In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in. It must have seemed to Henry that the only way forward was to marry someone new; into that void stepped Jane Fucking Seymour.

Here’s the thing about Jane Fucking Seymour: I actually have a grudging admiration for her. In many ways, she played the game just as skillfully as Anne. The things that had initially drawn Henry to Anne — her lively wit, her intelligence, her strong-willed nature — were the same things that made him tire of her. The fact that she tried to blame her miscarriage on Henry’s fall (as well as possibly implicating his nascent romance with Jane) only added to his fury towards Anne; everyone knew that reproductive issues were the woman’s fault, and were almost certainly a punishment from God. How dare she say that Henry was to blame instead of repenting whatever sin of hers had led to this? While Henry was trying to grapple with the idea of having lost a potential male heir, Jane cleverly presented herself as the anti-Anne: quiet, pious, and submissive to the king’s every whim. Although it’s tempting to view Jane as a bland, milk-fed virgin who just happened to trip and fall into Henry’s lap, the truth is that she had a few power moves up her (huge) sleeves.

* * *

Not long after Anne’s miscarriage, the king began to say that he had been tricked into marrying Anne by her use of “sortilege,” a French word for sorcery. It’s possible that he honestly believed this, or else his desire for Jane Fucking Seymour (and a male heir) meant he was beginning to build a false case against Anne. Whatever the truth is, Thomas Cromwell — who had earlier been a sometime-ally of Anne’s — now fully turned against the queen. At least part of this about-face can be traced to their disagreement over the redistribution of the church’s wealth; Anne wanted the money to go to charitable causes, and Cromwell preferred to use the money to line the royal coffers (while taking a cut for himself, naturally). Cromwell did not relish the idea of having someone undermining his authority in the king’s presence, especially if that someone was a combative and opinionated woman. It’s completely within the realm of possibility that he was the one who orchestrated Anne’s downfall, then helped pull the strings to get meek old Jane set up in her place.

HENRY VIII: Do you ever feel like Anne is, um …

CROMWELL: A total slut who’s sleeping with her own brother?

HENRY VIII: I was going to say “sometimes kind of a bitch,” but now that you mention it, yeah

CROMWELL: You should kill her

HENRY VIII: Isn’t that kind of drastic?

CROMWELL: Nah, you’re the king, you can kill whoever you want.

CROMWELL: And you need to get her out of the way if you want to shack up with Jane

CROMWELL: You don’t want a repeat of the Catherine situation where she’s still alive and people feel sorry for her

CROMWELL: So let’s just make some shit up and execute her for high treason

CROMWELL: Nice and clean, no loose ends

HENRY VIII: I do hate loose ends. Almost as much as I hate not having sons

The arrests began at the end of April: first Mark Smeaton, a musician in Anne’s employment, then a handful of noblemen and a poet named Sir Thomas Wyatt, and finally her brother George. Each was accused of having a sexual relationship with the queen; each of them denied this accusation, although Smeaton later confessed after being tortured on the rack. On May 2, Anne was arrested and brought to the Tower of London. Her charges were adultery, incest, and high treason. On May 14, the Archbishop of Canterbury — the same man who had annulled Henry’s first marriage and then validated his second one — declared Henry and Anne’s marriage to be null and void. On May 15, Anne was put on trial at the Tower of London. A jury of 27 peers found her unanimously guilty.

Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion.

When the verdict was announced, Henry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed and had to be carried out of the courtroom. He died eight months later, apparently having loved Anne until the end of his life.

Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion. He even brought in a swordsman from France who was skilled enough to kill a person kneeling upright with just one blow (as opposed to the traditional English executioner, a comparatively clumsier axeman — apparently France has a long-standing tradition of killing royalty with style). Historical writer Leanda de Lisle speculates that Henry preferred a sword because it was both more romantic (think King Arthur and Excalibur) and also more phallic; on the one hand, this might be a reach, but on the other hand, “killing my wife with a penis” seems extremely Henry. A true gentleman among princes!

HENRY VIII: Babe

HENRY VIII: I know things aren’t great right now, but I’m really trying

HENRY VIII: I got you the best executioner money can buy

HENRY VIII: Babe, look at me

HENRY VIII: Babe

HENRY VIII: You don’t like it, do you?

HENRY VIII: Just tell me if you don’t like it

HENRY VIII: We’ll get you whatever kind of execution you want

HENRY VIII: Do you want a swordsman from Italy instead? Is that it?

HENRY VIII: Because I can get you an Italian if you want

HENRY VIII: Lol, I mean, you still have to die

HENRY VIII: But you’ll die like a queen!

William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, reported that Anne was facing death in the most Anne-like fashion: with (almost literal) gallows humor. “And then she said, ‘I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,’ and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily,” Kingston wrote. On some level, Anne might have seen death as an escape from the shame and misery of Henry’s wrath. At any rate, she would have known that her execution was inevitable, and, according to Kingston, wished to get it over with as soon as possible. One poem, widely attributed to Anne, begins with the lines:

O death! rock me asleep,
Bring me on quiet rest;
Yet pass my guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast

On May 19, Anne climbed the steps to a scaffold that had been built especially for the occasion and made a short speech to the crowd. In it, she maintained her innocence and described Henry as a gentle and merciful ruler; although she knew that she could not spare her own life, it’s likely that praising Henry was an attempt to make things easier for Elizabeth. She took off her headdress and tucked her hair up, then knelt on the scaffold. After asking the crowd to pray for her, she repeated “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul” over and over until death came. When it did, it happened in a single stroke of the sword, just as she had hoped.

The next day, Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Fucking Seymour, because these two couldn’t even wait until Anne’s half of the bed was cold before making it official. Jane would go on to give Henry the son he wanted, although she would give up her life in the process. The fact that she had died producing Henry’s only surviving male heir gave her a mythic near-martyr status in his eyes, and he would do creepy things like having her appear in a family portrait eight years after her death (and not even as a zombie or vampire, much to my dismay). She was the only one of his wives to be buried next to him.

I know I’ve made lots of jokes about how terrible Jane Seymour was, and while I do think she’s literally the worst, I want to say a brief word in defense of all of Henry VIII’s wives. It can be tempting to think of them as a succession of catty bitches, all intent on tearing down the reigning queen in hopes of taking her place — certainly that’s how they’re often portrayed in pop culture. But really, they were all Henry’s victims, each of them placed on a pedestal by him and then toppled by his violent, capricious will. If they competed with each other, it was because they lived in a culture where women were often forced to turn on other women in order to survive. That’s not to say that any of them were completely blameless in their behavior (other than Catherine of Aragon, of course, whose picture you would probably find in the dictionary if you looked up “blameless”), but they all deserve a certain amount of sympathy. Even Jane Seymour, as much as it pains me to say that.

Anne had the last laugh, of course. Jane’s son Edward was at best a useless boy-king, and at worst a divisive religious extremist who disinherited his sisters. It was Anne’s daughter Elizabeth who would go on to become one of the savviest and most popular rulers England has ever had, leading the country into a social and political golden age. From sparking a radical religious reform to giving birth to one of England’s most beloved monarchs, it’s possible that Anne shaped her country more than any queen before or since.

Long live the fucking queen!


Previously:
Queens of Infamy: Eleanor of Aquitaine

* * *

Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Editor: Ben Huberman

The Whole World is Naples Now

Photo by Mario Mancuso via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

At the Los Angeles Times, Didier Jacob interviews Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the massively popular “Neapolitan novels.” In the four-volume story of friends Lila and Lenù, the city of Naples — sprawling, crumbling, beautiful, violent — is less a setting than a character; in the interview, Ferrante talks about her own experience of the city.

One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

Read the interview

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.

 

The Forever Nomad

Margarita Gokun Silver | Longreads | April 2018 | 18 minutes (4,386 words)

 

On an afternoon in August 2017, I walk out of the library and turn right. At the intersection, the pedestrian light comes on and I cross knowing that once I reach the end of Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, I’d wait less than a minute before I could cross again. I’ve done this walk every day for the past several years, my pace synchronized with the rhythm of traffic lights; my mind concentrated on counting the stairs — 14 of them: seven for my right foot to ascend and seven for my left — and my hand clutching a euro to give to the old man selling tissues on the corner. Everything is the same — skateboards banging against the concrete under the quick feet of their teen devotees, dogs running around the middle of the square let loose by their owners, and, up above, a giant red-and-yellow Spanish flag flying in the wind. Everything but one thing.

I’m on my way to a home that’s no longer there.

A week ago the movers came and methodically went through our three-bedroom apartment. They wrapped our glasses, plates, vases, and the ceramic Don Quixote in bubble wrap. They encased our furniture in cardboard, bending the thick corrugated boxes patiently so that when they were done our couch looked like a mummy-copy of its former self. They sealed our artwork — most of it painted by me — in wooden crates that resembled well-insulated tombs. I wanted to ask if the art could breathe through the layers of paper, plastic, and wood, nailed shut so tightly that not a ray of sunlight could get through. But they were busy, and I didn’t bother them. Instead I went into what used to be our bedroom, lay down on the bed that wasn’t coming with us, and concentrated on my own breathing.

By my count, this was the 18th time I moved homes. Some of those moves were miniscule — just several miles away from where I’d lived, my belongings riding in the back seat of a car in milk crates and an old laundry basket. Others were more substantial — intercontinental relocations that involved wrapped furniture, sea freight, and customs bills. What all of them had in common — and what set them apart from this last one — was that they didn’t evoke grief. Sure, many had been tinged with goodbyes and sadness, but none before had stopped my heart, gelled the blood inside of my veins, and perforated my body with holes that seemed to allow life to seep right out of it.

None of those moves had felt like loss.

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