Search Results for: Marijuana

A Single Dad Takes a Fatherhood Development Class

The last student to arrive for fatherhood class was the only one holding a baby, and a dozen men looked up from their desks to stare. Paul Gayle, 19, had a pink diaper bag hanging off a shoulder decorated with tattoos of marijuana leaves, and a crying 7-month-old in his arms. “Come on, girl, chill out,” Paul said, carrying the baby to a seat in the corner. He offered her a rattle, and she swatted it away. He gave her a bottle, and she only cried louder. Finally, he reached into the diaper bag and took out a pacifier for her and a shot of Goody’s Headache Relief for himself.

“Sorry for the noise, y’all,” he said. “We’re both a little mad at the world today.”

“No problem,” the teacher said. “I’m up here talking about being a dad, and you’re doing it.”

“I’m trying,” Paul said. “But damn.”

— Paul wants his baby girl to have the world, and he’s participating in the President’s 16-part fatherhood course to get there. But his girlfriend won’t return his calls, he can’t hold down a job and he lives in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Eli Saslow has the story at the Washington Post.

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The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

 ***

The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

Buried Alive in a Grain Silo

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Erika Hayasaki | December 2014 | 2,554 words (10 minutes)

 

Four years ago, Erika Hayasaki learned about the death of two young men in a corn grain bin accident in the Midwest. Over the next two years, while pregnant and later with her then-six-month-year-old daughter and husband in tow, she left her life in Los Angeles to visit Mount Carroll, Illinois, population 1,700, to capture the story. Her interest, however, wasn’t so much in rehashing the deaths of the two young men, but in telling the story of the survivor, Will Piper, who nearly died trying to save his friends from the deadly pull of the grain bin, and whose life took a surprising turn after the accident. The following is an excerpt from Hayasaki’s story, Drowned By Corn, which describes the lives of the young workers before the accident. Read more…

Fact-Checking ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’

[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his fair share of LSD, and seen lives destroyed by heroin. What he didn’t know he borrowed from underground publications like the Berkeley Barb, passing on tips that hadn’t been fact-checked. As it turns out, one cannot get high by eating banana peels that have been boiled and baked, or smoking crushed peanut shells. (Powell was right, however, about nutmeg’s hallucinogenic potential.) Nor had the city’s sewer system been taken over by “New York white,” the giant marijuana plants said to be the result of people flushing seeds to avoid arrest. “The sewer plants usually reach a height of between 12 and 15 feet and are bleached white because of the lack of sunlight,” Powell wrote, in the authoritative voice that permeates the book.

He researched the other sections at the main branch of the New York Public Library, flipping through the card catalogue and returning with books such as the U.S. Army Field Manual for Physical Safety and Homemade Bombs and Explosives. He holed up in the building for months, reading about wristlocks and tear gas and nitroglycerine. Most of the book is a cut-and-paste creation; when Powell’s voice does emerge beneath the technical-manual speak, it’s usually in the form of a cocky young man trying to sound streetwise beyond his years. About explosives, he wrote: “This chapter is going to kill and maim more people than all the rest put together, because people just refuse to take things seriously.”

Gabriel Thompson, writing in Harper’s about The Anarchist Cookbook and it’s author, William Powell. The book was published in 1971 when Powell was an angry and disaffected nineteen-year-old; today, he is a sixty-five-year-old grandfather. Powell has spent much of the last four decades fighting to take the book out of print. For further reading, check out Powell’s 2013 op-ed on the topic, which ran in The Guardian.

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For the Love of “Rent”

I had never seen anything like it. Its music was gorgeous, its spectacle captivating. But then there was the scandal of it to my 12-year-old self. I’d never heard something as horrifying as having your ex-girlfriend break the news that you both have HIV and slitting her wrists in the bathroom. I’d never heard someone say the words “dildos” or “masturbation” or “marijuana” or “erection” or “faggots lezzies dykes cross-dressers too.” I’d never seen a depiction of a romance between a gay man and a drag queen, let alone one so beautiful it made me weep. Most importantly, it depicted what to me was a fantasy as attractive as any I’d ever seen: that you could be in your twenties, living in New York City, surrounded not by the family you’d left behind but by the ones you’d made. That you could pursue above all else art and love. At its end, I leapt to my feet in applause. After, Dylan and I waited by the stage door and got autographs with every actor we could. In the photographs his mother took we are beaming.

In late middle school and early high school, on weekend mornings, I would sit at my desk in my bedroom, the blinds still drawn, and listen to the soundtrack, which hadn’t come with a lyrics sheet, and listening on my Discman try to write out the words to the songs in my journal, especially those to the epic, two-part, 12-minute number at the play’s center, a sort of manifesto to the lifestyle embodied by the play’s characters, “La Vie Boheme.” I’d have to carefully press the button down to backtrack and listen to the contours of the words I didn’t understand — “Sontag,” “Vaclav Havel,” “Pablo Neruda,” “Antonioni, Bertolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana.” I don’t recall trying to search the internet to see what these things were. They were strange and beautiful symbols of the unknown. For years to come I’d encounter them in museums and textbooks and life and they’d ping that Rent part of my brain.

But I kept my love of Rent quiet, especially as I tried to eschew some of the intense uncoolness that had so defined me. Eighteen — that was the last time I could love Rent without shame, when I was first, finally living thousands of miles away from my family, in Providence, Rhode Island. When I was having my first drunken evenings, my first heartbreaks, my first exposure to intellectual texts and to people who had been raised among art that was much better than Rent. When I was finally beginning a thing called adulthood and would therefore begin to see that, yes, Rent is kind of dumb.

– In this tender, funny and damned relatable essay for BuzzFeed News, Sandra Allen traces the intersections of her love of Rent, an interview with her favorite author and her own romances.

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Cannabis Conundrum

Longreads Pick

Medical marijuana provides relief for epileptic kids. So why does New Jersey make it so hard for young patients to benefit from the state’s pot program?

Published: Oct 16, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,890 words)

Untangling the Knot: My Search for Democracy in the Modern Family

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | October 28, 2014 | 16 minutes (3,966 words)

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Pot Kids

Longreads Pick

Inside the quasi-legal science-free world of medical marijuana for kids.

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Oct 22, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,949 words)

The Rise and Fall of the Biggest Pot Dealer in New York City History

Longreads Pick

It began with a disgruntled ex-girlfriend walking unprompted into a Long Island DEA office. What followed was a seven-year-long investigation that “went beyond the wildest imaginings of the agents assigned to it,” culminating in the arrest of a French-Canadian playboy thought to be the biggest marijuana dealer in New York City history.

Author: ALAN FEUER
Published: Sep 5, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,642 words)

Heart of the Emerald Triangle

Longreads Pick

The illegal farmers of California’s Humboldt County brace themselves for marijuana’s legalized future:

And yet California, long the marijuana movement’s pacesetter, and a haven for high-capacity growers, finds itself in the perhaps-unwelcome position of losing outlaws like Ethan. Should the state follow Colorado’s and Washington’s leads in legalizing recreational use, as is expected, already-fragile economies in the north—specifically in the “Emerald Triangle” of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, home to some quarter of a million people—could be crippled. The “prohibition premium” that keeps marijuana prices, and those economies, aloft would fall, possibly so precipitously that many growers would lose their incentive and (perhaps ironically) leave for more-punitive regions. In recent years, many growers have reportedly left California for places like Wisconsin and North Carolina—markets where a pound of marijuana might fetch double what it does in the Golden State. Legalization helps keep growers out of jail, but regulation slashes their profit margins.

Author: Lee Ellis
Source: The Believer
Published: Jun 5, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,914 words)