Peter Ackroyd | Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day | Abrams Press | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,408 words)
The story of same-sex love among women was bequeathed another chapter with the rediscovery of the clitoris by anatomists of the mid sixteenth century. It had been known to the Greeks but then disappeared from view. It could not have come as a surprise to women themselves that some organ or other was capable of arousal, but finally it had been named. A medical compendium of 1615, Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, announced that the clitoris “comes of an obscene word signifying contrectation [touching or fingering] but properly it is called the woman’s yard [penis]. It is a small production in the upper, forward . . . and middle fatty part of the share [genitals] in the top greater cleft where the Nymphs [labia] do meet and is answerable to the member of the man.” The member of the man need have nothing to do with it, however, and the reintroduction of the clitoris heralded the rise in public awareness of the tribade, the fricatrix, the rubster. These were the women who knew how to manipulate “the seat of women’s delight” with a hand, a dildo or a massively enlarged clitoris.
Helkiah Crooke himself remarked that “sometimes it grows to such a length that it hangs without the cleft like a man’s member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the clothes, and so struts and grows to a rigidity as does the yard of a man. And this part it is which those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts.” It is sometimes suggested that lesbianism was, before the twentieth century, an unmentioned and invisible act; in fact it has a historical identity arguably as long as that of love between men. Wherever there are bodies, there are lovers. It is found, for example, at the end of the twelfth century, in a vision of Edmund, a monk of Eynsham Abbey. He was taken to purgatory and led to that site where the souls of those guilty of same-sex love were consigned for their own particular suffering. To his astonishment, among them were a great number of women. He was surprised because he had not suspected women to be capable of such a deed. But there they were, suspended in woe and pain. Read more…
Kanye West’s emergence from his self-imposed cocoon of social media silence last week has not been seamless. After proclaiming his support for Donald Trump and the president’s Make America Great Again plank, the musician and fashion designer took to TMZ Live on Tuesday for arguably the most bizarre of what has already been a bizarre fortnight of proclamations:
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.”
Kanye is well aware of the weight his words carry. As someone who has referred to himself as the “most impactful artist of our generation,” Kanye long ago realized that anything he says, no matter how inane and obviously ridiculous, will be incessantly discussed. For Kanye to then make such an ignorant proclamation is willfully disingenuous. And his follow-up tweets (now deleted) didn’t help to clarify his position:
The latter tweet references William Lynch, a purported 18th-century slave owner from the British West Indies who traveled to Virginia in 1712 to teach slave owners how to better control their property. His speech on the banks of the James River was first “discovered” in 1970, and began its life online starting in 1993 when a reference librarian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City uploaded the “Willie Lynch letter,” which detailed how Lynch psychologically and physically tortured slaves. The letter is also patently false.
Willie Lynch never existed, nor did anyone from the British West Indies organize such a summit to advise slave owners in the early 1700s. As the librarian mentions in an email to her superiors, “Prof. [William] Piersen of Fisk contacted us a few months back about its origins and provided me with a critique which points to the narrative being a much-latter-day document…assuming Prof. Pierson’s [sic] critique is on target, I think it likely that it’s a ’60s or ’70s document.”
I accessed this email via the Wayback Machine, which means it has existed to dispel the Lynch rumor for years. Yet the letter continues to be legitimized within the framework of pop culture. Kanye isn’t the only artist to name-drop Lynch: So has Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar, and Nas among others.
And it’s not just rappers dotting bars with reference to Lynch’s “letter,” Denzel Washington quotes the letter at length in the 2007 film The Great Debaters.
The letter, and its supposed relevance explaining not only the slave experience but also the origins of “lynching,” has been disseminated enough times that in 2004 Jelani Cobb wrote an extended answer to the question, “Is Willie Lynch’s letter real?”
There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake…it has been cited by countless college students and a black member of the House of Representatives, along the way becoming the essential verbal footnote in barbershop analysis of what’s wrong with black people.
When Mark Adams of the Baltimore Suncontacted the publisher of the St. Louis Black Pages in1998 — the newspaper that first printed Lynch’s speech in the early 1990s — to inquire about the provenance or authenticity of the letter, Adams was rebuffed. “I’ve never run a piece that got the response this one got. There’s something truly magical about it. Don’t ask me to explain it,” said publisher Howard Denson. “How else can you explain how whites kept control when they were outnumbered five, 10 or 20 to one?” he asked. “Blacks still carry the negative mental legacy of slavery. I think we really need to address the things that hold us back. Blacks spend $400 million annually, but they believe they’re poor and powerless because they’ve been conditioned to think that way.”
Even though the letter is fake and Willie Lynch is a conjuring from the civil right era, that is not to say the character doesn’t have power. As Lupe Fiasco noted via Twitter:
It’s shouldn’t be suggested that because it lacks a verifiable provenance or even that if it is a work of modern literary fiction that it’s source material & subject matter should be downplayed. It has a power & is actually rather tame compared 2 REAL historical facts @Longreads
Lynch’s letter shouldn’t be downplayed, but it also shouldn’t be given the sort of weight that a work of historical significance carries, and perhaps a search down a Willie Lynch rabbit hole with lead to other examples that provide a far greater historical context, whether that be Solomon Northup, When I Was A Slave, or Cudjo Lewis.
Willie Lynch is an urban myth, and while the internet is full of stories that we know to be false, we’ve known for more than two decades that there was no Willie Lynch, so why keep spreading the lie to only fit a convenient narrative? For Kanye to willfully ignore what has been proven untrue is perhaps more dangerous than his support of MAGA and his “brother,” Donald Trump.
George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. That’s one of those conflated facts taught in grade school, much like everyone still believing the earth was flat in the 15th century when Columbus discovered America. Actual first honors go to a Canadian, Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who was issued U.S. Patent No. 306727 for his “flavoring paste” to be used in the manufacture of “peanut-candy” on October 21, 1894. (Pre-Columbian Aztecs also pounded peanuts into a paste, so nothing is really new in the New World.) But Carver’s botanical research at the Tuskegee Institute contributed greatly to peanut butter’s rise in popularity. In 1916, he published a bulletin titled “How to Grow the Peanut & 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption,” which included his recipes for soup, cookies, fudge, and mock chicken. He also recommended peanuts for shampoo, mayonnaise, paint, massage oil, and flour. The Carvoline cosmetics company of Birmingham manufactured peanut hair pomade with his endorsement.
But wait! The humble peanut is even more multi-functional than that.
It is unlikely Carver would have imagined the use devised more recently by 12 inmates at Walker County Jail in Jasper, Alabama, on a Sunday evening last July. They saved peanut butter from their sandwiches and molded it like clay to alter a number above a door leading outside, then tricked a rookie guard into opening it. (The employee thought he was letting them back into the cells.) The prisoners ditched their orange jumpsuits, flung blankets over the razor wire fence, and busted out. Most didn’t get far—two were captured at the Flying J truck stop in town. At a news conference the next day, county Sheriff James E. Underwood said:
“Changing some numbers on the door with peanut butter — that may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox.”
When I reached Jasper Mayor Paul Liollio for comment, he wrote back: “This wasn’t Jasper’s finest hour.”
Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
— India.Arie, “I Am Not My Hair”
1.
I had never even met John P., but there I was, on a bus in East Knoxville, riding to meet him where he lived in a troubled public housing complex called Lonsdale.
I should have been at school, sitting in homeroom with the rest of the freshmen. But instead, at 13, I had decided to cut class and take a journey across a town I wasn’t even vaguely familiar with, to meet a man I didn’t know.
John P. was my classmate Kayla’s uncle, and in the neighborhood and at our school, he was known to have “gifted hands.”
He didn’t have the proper credentials to work in a professional salon, so instead he would accept women into his ground level apartment. It was there that he would slather their scalps with white creams that smelled like drain cleaner and lye, then cut and curl their hair for about a third of the price at a real beauty parlor.
My family had only been living in this small southern town for a few months, but in that short time I had come to vividly understand that the way I wore my hair was not only “not cool”; for many, it was unacceptable.
And so, even though I wasn’t the rebellious type of teen who would normally skip school, I broke the rules for the very first time so that I could go get my hair done.
Without permission — in fact, in direct defiance of my family’s wishes — I headed to see John P. I was determined to get a Jheri curl — a slimy hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson and Prince. Read more…
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Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…
Peanuts are essential to baseball games school lunches, state fairs, and even prison commissaries: the fascinating, sometimes ugly, history of the world’s favorite ground nut.
Photo by Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Charles Bowden | The Red Caddy | University of Texas Press | April 2018 | 19 minutes (5,099 words)
I don’t bring a lot to the table. I knew him, we were friends and we had a lot of good talk. But there were no big moments, dramatic events, or secret missions. There is no cache of letters. I’d pretty much pitch those as they came in. I was trained up as a historian but apparently the training never took. I am by nature a person who takes things as they come and that is how I took him. The only thing special about him to me was our friendship, since I don’t make friends with everyone I meet.
Now I run into people who are struck that I knew him and I always tell them it was not a very hard thing to do. He was reasonably polite, didn’t shit on the floor, and was well read. This last point mattered to me since I devour books, and like most such wretches love to talk about what I have read and even better argue about it. He had a similar pathology. I admired what he wrote and by and large agreed with it — not just philosophically, but viscerally. I suspect I was born already knowing a lot of what is in his books, it seems to come with a certain ornery cracker territory as part of the blood. So, naturally, we never wasted time on such commonplaces but talked about other things. Read more…
The house is squat and tan, near a 24-hour Walmart and a small truck stop along a busy road where diesel pickups groan and belch black exhaust. My new landlord leads me to the sparsely furnished basement, where a room costs $600 a month; the window by the bed is level with the gravel parking lot. About a half-dozen other women are renting rooms in this oasis of one of America’s most patriarchal societies: the North Dakota oilfield.
“It’s not like you’re in prison,” says the landlord, explaining that we are not to have any guests over. “But we don’t let it be the Wild West and let people get crazy.” Somebody’s oil worker boyfriend might trash the place; indeed, the last round of roughnecks already have. Men in other camps and housing developments are also forbidden from having women over, in an effort to keep out prostitutes. Gender segregation is de rigueur in a region where the oil industry is about 80 percent male. There are plenty of women around, but they’ve often followed a boyfriend or husband to the oilfield and taken jobs cashiering, tending bar or working as office administrators.
The landlord owns a cleaning company, and the house was originally purchased to lodge some of the cleaning staff, though it has open rooms for tenants like me. Some clients hire him after other cleaning firms send out women who lean over their mops to reveal undergarments, signaling they are available for extra services. But the landlord assures me that his operation is nothing of the sort. A billboard at the corner features a rotation of advertisements:
West Prairie Estates – new home auction
Holiday season special Golden China super buffet (lunch $6; dinner $8)
Dewatering containers filter sock solutions SPILL-CLEAN-UP
Little Caesars $5 classic TURN LEFT NOW
It’s spring 2015 and I’ve spent the last few years traveling back and forth from Minneapolis to the North Dakota oilfield in order to write a narrative nonfiction book about the largest oil rush in modern U.S. history, and the implosion that follows. Like most people out here, I’ve found myself living in a myriad of makeshift circumstances: crashing in spare rooms and on couches in a farmhouse, a camper, a few apartments and a trailer park called Dakotaland where a roughneck from Tuscaloosa gets stoned every night with our Houston neighbor and educates me about the intricacies of workover rigs. My housemates have been all men — more out of necessity than preference — until I decide to go on Craigslist and sign a proper lease. By the time I show up to the basement room near Walmart, several people have dismissed my inquiries upon learning that I’m a woman.“We don’t want to discriminate, but we can’t put anyone in a compromising situation,” says one landlord. So the basement room by Walmart in Williston, the largest town in the oilfield, is my only choice. It is too expensive to live alone — even as OPEC’s oil price war against the American shale industry makes overleveraged apartment owners desperate for tenants. Read more…
This is the first in a three-part series on gun violence.
In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.
In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.
In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear.
* * *
Write your name here. Address, here. Here — check every box on this long list of disorders and diseases and conditions that are a part of your medical history, your parents’ medical history, your grandparents’ medical history and down the DNA. So much terrifying possibility. So much what if in our blood, our bones.
I checked two. Melanoma and —
“Heart disease?” my new doctor asked. I liked her immediately; her silver hair, her enviable shoes. Is that an appropriate thing to say to your doctor? I know we’re talking about my vagina but those heels are incredible. Later, I’d love her intelligence and, later still, her respect for my intelligence even when — especially when — I acted bonkers. She removed the weird, spotty growths from my arm and told me they weren’t cancer. She diagnosed my thyroid disorder and fought it like a dragon. She helped me understand my own body and demanded that I treat it with kindness, even when — especially when — I was stressed or exhausted or scared. It’s so easy to forget ourselves, to prioritize our own hearts second or tenth or not at all. Do you see yourself in that sentence? Are you, right this very moment, treating yourself less than? Cut that shit out, my doctor would say, except she’d say it in professional, even elegant doctorspeak and to her, I listen. Her, I trust. Every woman should have such an advocate and the fact that our patient/doctor relationship is a privilege as opposed to a right makes me want to set the walls on fire. Look up — see the wall in front of you? Imagine it in flames.
“Megan?” she said, and I pulled myself away from her shoes. “There’s a history of heart disease in your family?”
Over coffee a few weeks ago, our audience development editor Catherine Cusick told me something remarkable: someone, somewhere is always reading “A Sociology of the Smartphone,” an excerpt from Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies (Verso, 2017) which we published in June of last year. This astute social scientific rumination on our new and profound interconnectedness via the “ubiquitous… slabs of polycarbonate” in our pockets is Longreads’ most-read book feature of all time.
Meanwhile, in “The Death Row Book Club,” our recent excerpt from The Sun Does Shine (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Anthony Ray Hinton remembers that “the books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband.” It is the book, sometimes just a single copy — tossed from reader to reader across the prison library with a little prayer that it never land too far out of anyone’s reach, since rising from your seat during death row book club is strictly forbidden — which provides a new and profound interconnectedness for the prisoners.
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In another of our recent book excerpts, from Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), we read that when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded their literary magazine Les Temps modernes in the rubble of Paris in 1945, they had to request an allocation of paper from the government. They had to bring their own rations to the literary parties. Nevertheless, the magazine was an instant, global success — Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s books became bestsellers, rumors spread that women would swoon when they heard Sartre lecture, even the State Department got Existentialist fever, and Richard Wright bought his entire family steamer tickets to France and wrote in his diary that he “felt relief as he saw the Statue of Liberty” drifting away. He came to Paris to advise Les Temps modernes on their upcoming “America” issue — in which they excerpted books like The Black Metropolis, a groundbreaking sociology of redlining and poverty on Chicago’s South Side.
Of course, in this post-Rex world, the State Department surely no longer has the wherewithal to bother reading such a minor cultural artifact as the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter. Indeed, the founding of Les Temps modernes differs from the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter in, ah, a number of ways — probably the most important of which is that I have not written a 1,000-page philosophical novel to co-promote with this newsletter. But I find myself dwelling on it anyway, comparing our efforts to the past and its apparent perfection. (Or near perfection. According to David Remnick, who is certainly an authority on such things, it was the first issue of The New York Review of Books — also founded, incidentally, at a moment of paper shortage, during the 1963 printer’s strike — which was “surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.”) After all, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand on the shaky notion that there is some strong dividing line between “the modern times” and “history.” And difficult to think that we should not be making comparisons.
So in the future (no matter how alarmingly it starts to resemble the past), look to this newsletter to encounter new works that hopefully, as Sartre bragged in his introduction to the first issue of Les Temps modernes, “do not… miss a beat on the times we live in,” that “inten[d] to influence the society we live in,” that “take sides.” You’ll read excerpts from new books like Noliwe Rooks’ groundbreaking study of inequality in public education, Cutting School (The New Press 2017); interviews with authors who’ve written remarkable new books that we’re eager to hear more about, like Elizabeth Flock’s study of love, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea (Harper, 2018); essays and discussions about the writer’s craft; and book reviews. Yes, book reviews. This, despite the fact that, in her interview with Longreads, the cultural critic Michelle Dean notes the hysterics to which Norman Mailer was driven by Mary McCarthy’s The Group when he reviewed it in 1963 (in those same venerable pages of the New York Review of Books, although not in the first issue — I checked — but rather the fourth one). Dean tells us that, reading Mailer’s review and others like it, she “starte[d] to have a sense of humor about the value of a review that comes out when a book is initially released.” She continues:
You start to realize how wildly out of sync [contemporary reviewers tend to be] with whatever later opinion of the book developed after people had the chance to digest it and think about it…. The reception adds an element of absurdity to the whole thing.
So there you have it. The modern times are wildly out of sync (more so than ever?) and absurdly wrong about new books; these days books are as ubiquitous as air and as precious as contraband; and we at Longreads have decided it’s the perfect time to start a books newsletter. Welcome and enjoy!
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