Search Results for: Outside

Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Stefano Mazzola / Awakening / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new. Read more…

“The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,706 words)

We’re delighted to bring you a brief excerpt from “Chatterbox” — chapter 2 of Rachel Vorona Cote’s excellent book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today.

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We’ve been fortunate to publish Rachel Vorona Cote in the past. Check out The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music.

The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).
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This Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation

Aaron Foster / Getty

Dear Reader,

A thing about me is that I’ve been depressed for awhile. Staying inside a lot. And now, Melancholia-like, real life has begun to mirror my mental state: my outer and inner worlds are on a collision course, and it’s not as clear as I’d like it to be which is drawing in the other.

Last week I told my boyfriend I sometimes have this vertiginous feeling that I caused the pandemic by becoming too socially isolated. I was joking, but not really joking. Yesterday when we were looking out the window at the absolutely nobody going by, I said, “What if we imagined this? What if there is no pandemic, and we’ve just convinced ourselves we have to stay inside?” He responded that he does sometimes worry that we are in a Take Shelter situation. That I, like Michael Shannon in the 2011 thriller directed by Jeff Nichols, convinced myself a storm was coming and prepped our shelter for no reason (I was worrying about corona weeks ahead of the curve), but because I turned out to be right (a total fluke), I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

Honestly, reader, it’s not out of the question. I told him so, and he said that’s fair because it really does seem like a bad idea to go outside, like, ever again. I hear that brave people are out there doing things like gathering PPE donations for frontline healthcare workers or taking groceries to the isolated elderly or just working their regular jobs at the grocery store, which it turns out are wildly dangerous. I keep trying to psych myself up to do something useful like that, but then another formless day peels off its skin, and I find I have achieved nothing. The best I can say for myself is that I am not one of those people at the park making things worse.

Most of this week’s book roundup is about the virus. The whole world is about the virus. I am so sorry.

1. “America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe” by J. Hoberman, The Paris Review

Film critic J. Hoberman points to political differences between Camus’ The Plague and Elia Kazan’s unacknowledged film adaptation Panic in the Streets as a demonstration of how pandemic response can inspire solidarity or descend into authoritarianism.

2. “‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’: A Story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic” by Katherine Anne Porter, The New York Review of Books

NYRB has printed an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a short novel (originally published in 1939) set during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and based on Porter’s own experience with the disease. It is an unsettling read for anyone contemplating dying in the Javits Center next month.

3. “The Anger of the Sick” by Davey Davis, The New Inquiry

Davey Davis reviews Blackfishing the IUD, a weaponized memoir which its author Caren Beilin hopes will destroy the IUD the way the documentary Blackfish destroyed Sea World; Beilin seeks vengeance against the IUD because her use of the device left her with an autoimmune disorder. Davis writes that what separates Beilin’s memoir from others in the ‘sick woman’ genre is her explicit call to action; to defeat the IUD, we must first overturn a medical system that doubts women’s pain. This review was published last month, but it seems prescient now, written at the cusp of the moment before the political anger of the unwell becomes everyone’s anger.

4. “What China’s Literary Community is Reading During the Coronavirus Pandemic” by Na Zhong, Lit Hub

One of the strangest consequences of the pandemic is that at any given time, you can have the uncanny realization that you know exactly what most of the people you know (and billions of others you don’t) are doing right now: sitting around at home, trying to figure out how to think about (or not think about) the coronavirus. Na Zhong has put together a list of books that a few members of China’s literary community are anxiety-reading right now. It’s weird to think that their motivations to anxiety-read about a) other plagues or b) World War II dovetail so perfectly with my household’s anxiety-reading compulsions this past week; I’ve been covering the plague angle while my boyfriend has World War II cornered for now.


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5. “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era” by Joshua Keating, Slate

Joshua Keating writes that Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is the book that’s been on his mind these days, because so far his experience of the pandemic has not been sickness but rather (reminiscent of Ogawa’s surreal novel) the erasure of items from everyday life. “The losses start small and insignificant. At the local coffee shop, the first thing that disappeared was the table holding the lids and the self-serve milk. Then half the tables vanished. Then all the tables. Then the whole shop closed. Then you hear that the employees were laid off … Perhaps you, like me, thought last Saturday that it would be OK to have a couple of friends over to the house as long as you were reasonably cautious … By Sunday, that was off limits. Today, the idea is unthinkable.”

6. “An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma” by Patricia Hampl, The Paris Review

Patricia Hampl writes that a book she loved 25 years ago, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue about expatriate life in Italy, has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. “I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks.”

7. “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, The Point

Helena de Bres writes about the books that she turned to for comfort during a period of personal isolation she faced as a child, and how books (generally pessimistic, sad) aren’t really comforting her at all during this period of universal isolation. Instead it’s the unbridled optimism of those crazy people who keep going outside that she’s been motivated by, because she realizes how precious those ridiculous optimists are. We must preserve them.

8. “English PEN Calls for Release of Ahdaf Soueif After Coronavirus Protest Arrest” by Mark Chandler, The Bookseller

A brief note and harbinger: “English PEN has called for the release of Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, who was arrested during a protest about the treatment of prisoners during the coronavirus outbreak.”

9. “Capitalism’s Favorite Drug” by Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

This one is about coffee — the illustrious Michael Pollan reviewing Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland — and honestly it isn’t supposed to be about coronavirus at all, but I read this line and I can’t stop thinking about the rich people who would rather send us back out to die than pay our bills for a little while: “The essential question facing any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has always and ever been ‘What makes people work?’” On Salvadoran coffee plantations, the answer to that question was: a hunger crisis engineered by the upper class.

10. “Anna Kavan and the Rise of Autospec” by Gregory Ariail, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This one isn’t about corona either. It’s Gregory Ariail’s review of the Anna Kavan short story collection published by NYRB this month, and how Kavan’s style (she lived in the first half of the twentieth century) defined a genre Ariail calls “auto speculative fiction” (as opposed to “autofiction”), which he describes as “a truly combustive marriage of opposites: the searing confessions of the inner life on the one hand, and speculative narratives that systematically violate natural laws and reject normative discourses on the other.” I won’t tell you which lines of this review remind me of corona; you can pick those out for yourself.

Take care of yourself,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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What Does a Post-Apocalyptic Gated Community Look Like?

bunkers south dakota
Chris Huber / Rapid City Journal via AP

In trying times, many of us gravitate to escapist cultural consumption — think Seth Rogen watching Cats for the first time while very, very high. You’d assume that a story about mid-market post-apocalyptic bunkers in South Dakota would be the last thing to fit that bill, yet I somehow found Mark O’Connell’s excerpt on that very topic, in The Guardian, oddly soothing.

The piece takes great pleasure in describing the obvious folly of the enterprise — how could it not? (I kept wondering: all these communities would depend on contracted armed forces for protection, but what would stop these mercenaries from killing their wealthy overlords and taking over all the fancy dry foods in their underground pantries?) But it also shows how this absurd concept is, in fact, a very natural next step for a society that largely refuses to act as one.

The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America”, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres and 100 miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from three miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but, to be fair, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished, any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.

Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers and turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders — the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared — and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bare rightwing essentials: a militarised security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.

End-time real estate was an increasingly competitive racket. On the website of one major purveyor of luxury apocalypse solutions, Trident Lakes, I read that in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological emergency, the properties would be sealed by automatic airlocks and blast doors, and that each would be connected via a network of tunnels to an underground community centre featuring dry food storage, DNA vaults, fully equipped exercise rooms and meeting areas. The promotional blurb also promised such features as a retail district, an equestrian centre and polo field, an 18-hole golf course and a driving range.

This was a new entry into the canon of apocalyptic scenarios: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilisation as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeter in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.

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All that Was Innocent and Violent: Girlhood in Post-Revolution Iran

Photo courtesy of the author, Mel Yates / Getty, iStock / Getty Images Plus, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Naz Riahi | Longreads | March 2020 | 29 minutes (7,251 words)

A few months after I was born, just a year after The Islamic Revolution, Shee Shee and Baba bought a house and moved, with my 12-year-old brother and me, to Karaj, a suburb of Tehran.

They moved to the suburb, in part, for the same reasons many young couples with children everywhere in the world, do — for space and a quiet place to raise their family. They moved also to get away from the chaos of Tehran, a city that was changing rapidly, seemingly overnight, after The Revolution — becoming overbearing with rules, regulations and unexpected dangers.

They found refuge in a private development called Dehkadeh. Built a few years before our move, in the mid ‘70s, Dehkadeh had a guarded entrance and a town square. Its streets, named after flowers, were lined with white birch — regal, gentle. Over the years, the birch grew tall, bending towards each other, creating a canopy. In the hot summers, they shaded us, letting just enough light stream through their leaves. In autumn those same leaves changed color and fell to the ground, turning our streets into rivers of reds and yellows. In the winters, their bare branches were covered in snow and icicles.

The town square had a sandwich shop, a grocery store and bakery. There was a fountain in the middle and a sit-down restaurant — which, shortly after we moved, was taken over by the government and turned into a mosque. All of the businesses, including the local bus line, were owned by people who lived in the community, comprising 700 or so houses. My pediatrician was a family friend who lived a few doors down from us, the elementary school I would eventually attend was at the end of our cul-de-sac and all of the teachers lived in Dehkadeh.

That was home. An hour’s drive to the city, but a different world, less hectic, safer (for a time) like a secret that protected us from all the bad, scary things happening in Iran — the war with Iraq, the new government that brutally enforced theocracy, the people whose allegiances weren’t known and who therefore couldn’t be trusted.

We lived on Niloufar Gharby (Water Lily West). Our tiny, single-story ranch-style house had a white metal gate that creaked open and shut and was surrounded by hedges thick with honeysuckle whose fragrance and nectar I’d lose myself in, daydreaming about all the happy lives I’d live someday. I’d become a writer like my grandfather, Baba Moeini, revered as he was. I’d travel the world like Shee Shee and Baba had done before The Revolution, before I was born. I’d be the hero of a real life story like my favorite superheroes, the ones I’d learned about on bootleg videos procured by my aunt’s husband on the post-Revoution black market, where everything from Corn Flakes to Michael Jackson tapes could still be found.

Our backyard was large and filled with fruit trees — peaches, nectarines, sour cherries, apples, and plums. A trellis ran down the middle, covered in grape leaves, and a white swing sat under an enormous weeping willow. There were rows and rows of strawberries in the field, and rose bushes beneath the windows.

Between the time I was a toddler and a child, my parents tore apart the back of our house to expand the living room and give me my own bedroom adjacent to theirs. I remember the excitement of getting a room of my own, but when construction ended and a big-girl bed arrived, I was horribly afraid to be alone at night. Though my parents’ room was just on the other side of my door, I felt abandoned. I remember Baba putting me to bed, tucking me in, and telling me to be brave.

For Baba, a helicopter pilot and soldier who was often away fighting in an actual war, bravery was a person’s greatest asset. His bedtime stories were rich with heroes fighting dangerous forces. I tried hard to be brave for him, but fell asleep each night a coward, hiding beneath my comforter from the night and its invisible dangers.

I took my first steps in the hallway in front of my older brother’s room. Shee Shee insists there is no way I could remember. But I do. I remember falling into an uncle’s arms. After that, the memories rush in.
Read more…

This Week in Books: This Moment Doesn’t Remind Me of Anything

Film kiss with protective mask to prevent infection during a flu epidemic in Hollywood, 1937. (Photo by Imagno / Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I’ve been trying to think of what books this corona moment reminds me of. I don’t know why — uh, I guess I instinctively try to relate most things that happen in my real life to my reading life? What’s unsettling though is that — and this is something I’ve seen others saying already — this moment doesn’t really remind me of anything I’ve ever read. I started reading David K. Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate — a book about how a bubonic plague epidemic threatened to sweep through America in 1900 — a few months ago, but I didn’t get very far into it, and then I put my copy in a holiday gift box for my mom in Ohio. She read it last week while she was sick in bed with pneumonia. I don’t know what kind of pneumonia. (She didn’t get tested for flu; too expensive.) I don’t know if it was corona. I don’t even know how to know. There are, as you have heard, no tests.

And that’s what makes this coronavirus moment different from the little bit of Black Death at the Golden Gate that I read, and from the portions my mom described over the phone while she coughed and coughed and coughed. In that book, some American government officials and scientists heroically stop the plague from spreading. Which means the story being told in that book is more like the one in Singapore or South Korea today: the triumph of science.

So what’s the story here? What does the failure of science feel like? I listened to the latest TrueAnon podcast while I made dinner last night, and, as I recall, Liz Franczak described a sort of sensation she’s been having (out there in San Francisco) that there are visible particles of fear floating in the air. My boyfriend has reported something similar every time he’s come home from work for the past three days, after his 45 minute trek across Brooklyn — there’s something wrong out there, it looks weird. There’s something wrong with the air. (He works retail. There has been something wrong with his air.)

I have not been outside in over a week. I don’t know what it is he’s describing. (But whatever it is, there is a very good chance he has brought it in here with him. In his air.)

I thought of and dismissed a few other books that this moment might be like. For awhile — a few days ago? — coronavirus was a looming, impending crisis that I knew would lead to ruin and death, but which many people around me seemed oblivious to. That brought to mind books written in Germany in the 1930s, like Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin — books in which many people seem oblivious of society’s imminent doom, even the authors themselves, no matter how canny they try to be. I also thought of Anna Kavan’s Ice — a book I’d previously associated with climate change — in which a natural or perhaps supernatural force, a malignant and almost sentient ice, is engulfing the world, and no one is able to stop it.

But the thing is, someone could have stopped coronavirus. A lot of someones, up and down the various chains of command and control. They just … didn’t. And no one is oblivious to it anymore. We all know about it now. We’re all just sitting around, waiting to find out if we have it.

Honestly, the book I’ve been dwelling on the most these days is Mario Bellatin’s The Beauty Salon. It is a book about AIDS. It is a slight and brutal novella about a beauty salon in which gay men are dying of AIDS because hospitals will not take them in. It is a very grim book. I think it comes to mind so much mostly because I am cowardly, and I fear the overcrowded sick room: I fear being one among many stranded in beds lining hospital hallways or neglected in quickly converted conference halls or gymnasiums. I am childishly afraid of dying in the Javits Center.

But perhaps there is also a thread of connection here beyond my overwhelming cowardice. Covid-19 could very well be one of the few emergent diseases of the 20th or 21st centuries to become endemic, like HIV. People in cities across the country are sheltering in place, waiting to see if they are infected, because our country, unique among countries, does not have the tests to ease our minds. Failures of science like this are more frightening than just the diseases they fail to cure. Like with the malicious mishandling of the HIV epidemic, we know it is people, not gods, who have caused this thing. We look out our windows and we can see there’s something wrong in the air, something wrong in the world, besides the virus. 

 

1. “Lawrence Wright’s New Pandemic Novel Wasn’t Supposed To Be Prophetic” by Lawrence Wright, The New York Times

This is the second time Lawrence Wright has done this.

2. “I’m Not Feeling Good at All” by Jess Bergman, The Baffler

Jess Bergman notices an emergent new genre and criticizes its implications. “With this literature of relentless detachment, we seem to have arrived at the inverse of what James Wood famously called ‘hysterical realism’ … Rather than an excess of intimacy, there is a lack; rather than overly ornamental character sketches, there are half-finished ones. Personality languishes, and desire has been almost completely erased…”

3. “Escaping Blackness” by Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books

In a review of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ latest memoir, Darryl Pinckney surveys the history and literature of resisting and ‘transcending’ race. “Even when you’re done with being black and blackness, it seems that you cannot cease explaining why.”

4. “I called out American Dirt’s racism. I won’t be silenced.” by Myriam Gurba, Vox

Less than a month after Myriam Gurba wrote the essay that triggered a wave of well-deserved backlash against American Dirt, she was put on administrative leave at the high school where she teaches.

5. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” by Mary South, The White Review

Mary South’s short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten published this past week. One story from the collection, excerpted in The White Review earlier this year, is told in the style of a brain surgeon’s FAQ for patients.


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6. “Heroic Work in a Very Important Field” by David Gelber, The Literary Review

A book review of a book about book reviews. “Uncertain why you are reading this? Good, because I’m not any more certain why I’m writing it.”

7. “How Shakespeare Shaped America’s Culture Wars” Sarah Churchwell, The New Statesman

A review of Shakespeare in a Divided America, James Shapiro’s account of the uses and abuses of Shakespeare in American political history.

8. “‘Minor Feelings’ and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity” by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino on Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. “Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for.”

9. “What Happened to Jordan Peterson?” by Lindsay Beyerstein, The New Republic

The self-important self-help guru seems to have suffered a severe health episode and his daughter has made some very peculiar statements about what happened.

10. “Pigs in Shit” by Hunter Braithwaite, Guernica

Hunter Braithwaite reviews Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, a disturbing multi-generational pig-farming novel. Animalia will come as no surprise. It does not speculate. It doesn’t offer warnings. Which is fine, because if climate change has taught us anything, it’s that warning signs don’t mean shit.”

11. “Woody Allen’s Book Could Signal a New Era in the Publishing Industry” by Maris Kreizman, The Outline

Hachette employees staged a walk-out to protest the house publishing Woody Allen’s memoir. Surprisingly, it worked.

12. “What’s So Funny About the End of the World?” by Rumaan Alam, The New Republic

Rumaan Alam writes about Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, another recent novel that revels in its disgust for industrial farming (this time chickens, not pigs) and views its violent practitioners as a doomed species. As Alam notes, “We might be sad about the end of humanity, but the chickens are probably relieved.”

 

Happy reading! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Moving Literary Life Off the Page

Craig Barritt/Getty Images for New York Magazine

Before John Freeman became a respected editor of magazines such as Freeman’s and Granta, and edited multiple anthologies, he was an aspiring poet. Like many of us young writers, he couldn’t figure out how to get his writing life started, so he went into New York book publishing, thinking that might be the career route for him. For Poets & Writers magazine, Freeman writes a welcome personal narrative about how literary events were actually what provided the guidance and models he needed at that early stage of his career. He’d spent so much time in classrooms that he didn’t understand how writers conducted their professional and artistic lives. Interacting with authors offered the same kind of humanity that reading books did, except author events also inspired, educated, illuminated, humbled, and oriented him as a writer, giving him the directions he needed at that stage in his life. Candid, unscripted moments, pointed questions, casual off-the-cuff comments by everyone from Susan Sontag to David Foster Wallace – even the way they conducted themselves in front of the audience – it all left its mark on Freeman.

To this day, even after attending hundreds of readings, and giving hundreds more of my own, I find it hard to be cynical about gigs, readings, tours, and the like: Every single event holds the possibility that someone will leave changed—even the writer. The best writers on the road or onstage know that giving a reading or participating in an event isn’t simply a chance to say what they know. A good public event is more of a dialogue than that. An oral version of what writers do on the page, a reading has no predetermined outcome. In the sacred space of the public event, writers can try things out: a new idea, a way of seeing around what’s in front of us.

Having grown up in the heyday of post-structural criticism, which touted the idea of the abstract author, I was relieved when I started going to readings to see the forms I loved re-embodied, to see that the novel was made by a human hand, a heart, a mind. The more writers I saw onstage, the more physical the art form seemed to be, the more conceptual theory felt beside the point. John Ashbery seemed flattered by all the work done to figure out what his poems were about, but he also appeared, at good readings, just glad to be there. By the time I saw him read, much too late, he seemed to know his time was brief.

It’s funny reading this essay, because for me, it completes a circle. Freeman did the same for me at one AWP panel, where he and others spoke about how they think about editing, and how they came to it. I listened and filled pages of my tiny notebook with their ideas and anecdotes, and in turn, that simple panel shaped me. Such as: “If you’re not reading submissions that represent what America looks like, then you’re not presenting an accurate portrait of a time and place.”

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On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.

“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”

I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…

“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

Read more…