Search Results for: Love

Turning Love and Grief into Outsider Art

Photo by Chris Bethell

After one artist’s partner and parents died, he transformed his small London house into his greatest work of art, room by room, covering and filling the space with collage, sculpture, painting, and writing. At Vice, Joe Zadeh takes readers through Stephen Wright’s House of Dreams, where he lives, takes his morning tea, and receives visitors who feel compelled to share their own stories. Wright never intended for his house to become a public shrine, but he’s pleased it did. As he tells Zadeh, “It’s about being human. We are all here to support each other in some way. So it’s not a problem. My heart is big enough to do that.” All in all, this is a love story.

The purely decorative aspect of the House of Dreams fell away and powerful subtexts flooded in. Objects were still chosen for their colours, but also for the memory or symbolism attached to them. Stephen wanted things that were chipped or smelled or sticky or stained. He wanted things that were unwashed. A trace of DNA was important to him. He wanted jackets with mess spilled down them, shoes with a stench, combs with hair in – materials that had life in them. These objects quickly began to fill the walls throughout the house. When he walked from room to room, he could sometimes smell a complete stranger. He liked that.

He cried as he created, but the physical grind of the work itself became a source of solace: the birthing of a sculpture, the mixing of cement, the tedium of mosaicing, the endless sorting of objects. He fed off it. Working with his hands felt like a connection to his parents. He wanted to feel exhausted at the end of each day, he wanted to be hardly able to get into bed.

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But a Novel Will Never Love You Like Your Children Do

(Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Writing for GQ, four-time father Michael Chabon reconciles ignoring the advice of a great, un-named Southern writer who told him that having children would diminish his writerly productivity.

And those four “lost” novels predicted by the great man’s theory all those years ago? If I had followed the great man’s advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the long run the result would have been the same as the result will be for me here, having made the choice I made: I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indifference of space, and it will take only 100 of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust, and consign to oblivion all but a scant few of the thousands upon thousands of novels and short stories written and published during our lifetimes. If none of my books turns out to be among that bright remnant because I allowed my children to steal my time, narrow my compass, and curtail my freedom, I’m all right with that. Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.

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Poe, A Love Story

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex, an African Gray Parrot (Anacleto Rapping/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Accompanied by intimate portraits of birds and their owners by photographer Miisha Nash, for Topic, bird enthusiast Karen Abbott recalls her beloved, quirky, slightly devious African gray parrot, Poe, who passed away of heart failure at the very young parrot age of 18.

I have never wanted children, but I’ve always wanted birds—a realization that dawned in December 1997 in the unlikeliest of places: Las Vegas’s MGM Grand casino, where my husband and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary. One afternoon, in between rounds of $5 blackjack, I wandered to a lobby and discovered a long perch supporting a dozen parrots—scarlet and hyacinth macaws, eclectuses and lilac-crowned Amazons among them—riotous bursts of red and blue and yellow and green, a preening, chirping string of jewels. I’d owned birds since childhood, a succession of mild, low-maintenance parakeets, beginning with a pastel beauty named Jake who rested on the wire rim of my 1980s orthodontic headgear. But parrots were different beasts, exotic and unpredictable. And some breeds have a life span of 60 to 80 years. A parrot, I thought, could outlive us both.

I had promised my husband I would look but not buy. We were 24 years old, had just bought our first house, and owed a combined $100,000 in student loans. The bird cost $1,500, not counting cage, formula, and toys, and required a nonrefundable $500 deposit. I lifted her close to my face. Struggling, she managed to pry one obsidian eye fully open and met my gaze. I named her Poe, after the writer.

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Syria, A Love Story

Longreads Pick

How a bid for freedom from government oppression in Syria ended in torture — both physical torture, and for one young mother, the anguish of not knowing whether her husband is dead or alive.

Source: Washington Post
Published: May 1, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,414 words)

We Love Moms, as Long as They Have Good Insurance

Image by Fred Jala via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

The U.S. is the most expensive country in the world in which to give birth and a country that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for an insured pregnant woman to secure medical insurance. Molly Osberg, writing for Splinter, picks apart the catch-22s, loopholes, and flat-out denials that plunge pregnant women into debt — and somehow get them to blame themselves for not being more fiscally-minded during active labor.

When I started speaking to women about their uninsured pregnancies, I was surprised at how many placed the blame for their bills on themselves. If only, she had been a “better consumer,” one told me, more attuned to a cost-benefit analysis between Medicaid and the private marketplace, more comfortable crunching potential numbers and filling out forms. Another said she wished she’d had the presence of mind, in the middle of a difficult and painful labor that lasted more than 24 hours, to refuse the help doctors were offering.

“Emotionally,” she told me with sober hindsight, the lack of control “really affected my capacity to manage the moment.”

Of course, even when you think you’re insured, or that Medicaid will cover things, communications breakdowns or processing issues might thwart you:

A full year and three months after she gave birth, Rief received an invoice for $8,996 for her delivery. When she called Blue Cross Blue Shield, they told her she’d been denied for the low-income program, and too much time had passed for her to appeal. She still doesn’t understand what happened, even after spending months on the phone. She called the hospital so often she says they started to recognize her. A few months later, they stopped working with her and sent her debt to collections. Rief is still paying off the bill.

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Inside the Black Market Hummingbird Love Charm Trade

Longreads Pick

“Catch a hummingbird. Kill it. Wrap it in underwear, cover it with honey—and sell it to arouse passion in a lover.” On the booming black market for dead hummingbirds to be made into Latin love charms called chuparosas.

Published: Apr 18, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,154 words)

Reality TV, Why Do We Love You So?

Andrew/Sputnik via AP

Why does reality TV work so well? According to some TV producers, it’s because people don’t want to think, they want to turn off their minds and feel superior to people, and because artificially heightened emotion is a potent drug. To investigate this enduring genre, and examine his own role in the so-called train wreck of stars’ lives, Lucas Mann wrote a whole book about he and his wife’s shared love of reality TV, called Captive Audience. The Paris Review ran a portion of it. Just try to take your eyes off the screen.

The way these producers framed it, intellect and emotion were rendered entirely divergent—intellect was what a person should aspire to; emotion was the thing that the lazy settle for to avoid thinking. Every one of these emotion purveyors said they wished for a world that was better than the shit they professionally put into it, but you know what, the world is the fucking world. They discussed their own projects, the lives they wanted to commodify, with a strange mixture of pride, exhaustion, and scorn.

Cool guy, heartless guy told me I should write a book about reality stars of yore, the ones who knew nothing and were discarded by culture, husks of what they had once presented themselves to be. It would be grotesque, but it would be captivating; he would’ve pitched it as a show if licensing wouldn’t have been such a hassle. We imagined these discarded stars as a group: just as willing as ever, maybe more so. People don’t think about the damage; they just want to hear the shouts and see the squirming—everyone agreed upon that.

There was an undercurrent to the conversation, of course, that was about complicity, particularly as reminder clips ran across the screen, little teaser morsels of everything Trump said or tweeted, whom he had mocked, how he had lied. It all looked familiar—a closed-circuit loop of mania. As we watched, there were whistles and sharp inhalations. There were rueful headshakes, the mixing timbres of semiforced laughter. What a shit show, it was marveled. What a pageant. What a sham. What a spectacle.

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“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh

Jonny Auping | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (4,156 words)

 

In her recently published book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, Elizabeth Flock aims to tell authentic stories of love in the city of Mumbai. But in a place where the notion of flashy Bollywood romance is ubiquitous, Flock went about her mission as a diligent reporter, spending close to a decade observing the daily lives of married couples in the eighth largest city in the world — interviewing them, living with them — even sleeping on their bedroom floors.

Flock, who spent two years in Mumbai in her early twenties, returned in 2014 to embed with her book’s subjects — three couples she had previously met. “I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers,” Flock writes. “They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention.”

The deeply reported chronicles of these middle-class Mumbai couples depict the sometimes painful push and pull between love, breaking convention, and the ingrained duty to generations of tradition.

True to the diversity of the city, the book follows three couples from different religious and cultural backgrounds: Maya and Veer are Marwari Hindus, Shahzad and Sabeena are Sunni Muslims, and Ashok and Parvati are Tamil Brahmin Hindus.

But as Flock’s writing illustrates, these backgrounds were contextual and monumentally significant to their circumstances, but not even close to wholly representative of their identities.

Although Flock removes herself from these narratives, the stories feel complete and candid in a way that seems remarkable considering they are told by an outsider. The years worth of trust she built with her subjects — at times even babysitting their children — led to revealed secrets and emotions that take the accounts from ordinary to captivating.

Some of the obstacles these six people face — religious restrictions, gender expectations, antiquated laws and practices — are unique to their cultural environment. But what all of them are after — a successful marriage — is universally relatable.

Flock took the time to speak with Longreads about her reporting process, the state of marriage in India, and how love does or does not transcend culture and region.

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“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

Longreads Pick

An interview with Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, on the years she spent studying other people’s marriages in Mumbai.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 8, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,156 words)