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Alternative Reality: ‘Howard Buffett’s Border War’

Howard Buffett, laughs at his swearing-in ceremony as Macon County Sheriff, Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 at the Scovill Golf Course Banquet Facility in Decatur, Ill. Buffett will fill out the remaining term of retiring Sheriff Thomas Schneider, who confirmed earlier Friday he would step down. (Clay Jackson/Herald & Review via AP)

It’s been a rough month or so for news publications around the country, with recent layoffs at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett, along with impending cuts at Vice and McClatchy. In mid-January, too, almost the entire editorial staff of The East Bay Express, Oakland’s alt-weekly, was laid off.

Despite the carnage, though, alternative weeklies continue to publish ambitious, informative work, performing a vital service at a moment when local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Phoenix New Times, for instance, published an aggressively reported two-part series on Warren Buffett’s son, Howard, who has earned a reputation as something of a border cowboy.

Seven Days, Burlington’s alt-weekly, profiled Charlie Morrow, the innovative musician and composer who is pioneering a new kind of immersive sound technology. Spokane’s Inlander published an in-depth story about grizzly bears, always an intriguing topic. Alex Woodward, in the New Orleans Gambit, documented the history of redlining in the Crescent City.

In Madison’s Isthmus, Howard Hardee took a look at a new effort to house the city’s homeless population. Nicholas Dolan wrote about the abolitionist John Brown for Iowa City’s Little Village. And Gabrielle Gopinath, in Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal, wrote an engaging piece on a recently restored church mural that had been hidden from view for a century.

1. “Howard Buffett’s Border War: A Billionaire’s Son Is Spending Millions in Cochise County” (Beau Hodai, January 13, 2019, Phoenix New Times)

Warren Buffett’s sexagenarian son, Howard, is cast in the first part of this jarring exposé as an aspiring border warrior who has purchased influence along the Mexico-Arizona dividing line, where he owns land, in order to act out what seems to be a dangerous, puerile fantasy as a desert vigilante.

Buffett describes his activities on the border using the language of humanitarianism and concern for the “rule of law.” But closer inspection shows he is using the same dog-eared playbook, and walking in the same well-worn circles, as infamous border warriors and vigilantes who have preceded him along southeastern Arizona’s border with Mexico. Setting Buffett aside from some of his more notorious predecessors is his extreme wealth, and not much more.

Read the second part here.

2. “Charlie Morrow Creates Soundscapes That Mimic How We Hear” (Dan Bolles, January 23, 2019, Seven Days)

Charlie Morrow, the musician, composer, and sound artist, has always straddled the mainstream and the avant-garde. In college, he played trumpet alongside the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and later worked in the advertising industry, perhaps most famously penning the jingle for Hefty trash bags.

Now, Morrow is knee-deep in developing his own 3D sound design technology through MorrowSound, the company he founded, creating immersive sound installations in seemingly random places such as the Kaiser Permanante health hub in Santa Monica, California. Dan Bolles, of Burlington’s Seven Days, paints a vivid portrait of this amusingly eccentric polymath.

When wearing the signature black bowler hat that often tops his round face, Morrow almost looks like a René Magritte painting come to life. And there’s a certain surrealism to what he does. Where the Belgian painter famously juxtaposed ordinary objects with extraordinary settings, Morrow uses ordinary sounds to create extraordinary environments—often, as in the case of the Santa Monica waiting room, in places where you’d least expect them.

3. “A WSU researcher lived with grizzly bears in Alaska. She came away convinced humans and grizzlies can coexist” (Wilson Criscione, January 17, 2019, Inlander)

If you know how Werner Herzog’s grim documentary Grizzly Man ends, then you might furrow your brow at this story about Joy Erlenbach, a bear biologist at Washington State University who has spent 300 days over the past four years living with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilderness. She believes that, in the right environment, humans can live peacefully alongside grizzlies.

Erlenbach says she knows how to read bears’ body language. They are not much different than dogs in the way they express discomfort. She remembers once walking on a path through tall grass when she surprised a mama bear, whom Erlenbach called “Nina,” and two large cubs. Nina was almost within arm’s reach. Erlenbach took a step back, but that upset Nina. So instead, Erlenbach froze, and Nina decided to simply walk past Erlenbach.

Wilson Criscione’s profile for the Spokane Inlander doubles as an expansive look at the ways in which people are interacting with grizzlies in the lower 48 states — often violently.

4. “How ‘redlining’ shaped New Orleans neighborhoods — is it too late to be fixed?” (Alex Woodward, January 21, 2019, The Gambit)

Alex Woodward investigates the racist legacy of redlining in this vital piece, examining how the widespread practice of denying credit to African-Americans still shapes today’s housing market in New Orleans.

A 2016 report from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that people of color still are denied mortgages at higher rates than white homebuyers in 61 U.S. metro areas. And a 2018 report from National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that nearly 75 percent of redlined neighborhoods in the U.S. remain low- to moderate-income areas, and people of color live in nearly 64 percent of those neighborhoods.

Though redlining was eliminated with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, its damage was never undone.

5. “Housing Madison’s homeless” (Howard Hardee, January 10, 2019, Isthmus)

In Madison, Wisconsin’s alt-weekly, Isthmus, Howard Hardee writes about a couple of new supportive housing facilities, built to help the city’s homeless, that have been managed — somewhat shakily, it seems — by a Chicago-based company named Heartland Housing. There’s a lot riding on how well Heartland does its job, as the facilities are the first two projects in a larger plan, known as Housing First, to address homelessness in Madison.

The failure of Housing First in Madison would be, first and foremost, a tragedy for people living on the razor’s edge of poverty. It’s hard to overstate how much it means for formerly homeless people such as Melisa, 52, to have a roof and four walls after spending countless nights under bridges, on riverbanks and in the woods.

Melisa grew up on Jenifer Street, played soccer for East High School, and studied graphic design in college. Either she doesn’t understand how she became homeless or doesn’t want to talk about it. “I went through some situations,” she says vaguely. But she knows the streets were harsh. She made and lost friends. Some died. And she was highly vulnerable herself: One night, she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. “We just survived,” she says.

6. “‘Bright Radical Star’: When John Brown came to Iowa” (Nicholas Dolan, January 15, 2019, Little Village)

Before his failed raid on Harpers Ferry, the rugged revolutionary John Brown passed through Iowa, which Nicholas Dolan describes as a “bastion of the abolitionist movement” in his informative historical essay for Little Village, the publication serving Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Leading up to 1859 and that ill-fated scheme, Brown and his fellow insurgents spent several months preparing in a modest Iowa community, even recruiting some soldiers from its ranks. It’s a story that speaks to America’s complicated relationship with religion and violence, and Iowa’s unsung radical history.

7. “The Hidden Palace” (Gabrielle Gopinath, January 31, 2019, North Coast Journal)

Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal published this fascinating article about a recently restored mural in Ferndale’s Church of the Assumption, painted in 1896 by the little-known artist Franz Bernau. The mural had been hidden from sight under whitewash for about a century, but now churchgoers are treated to a vibrant display that, in Gabrielle Gopinath’s telling, recalls a painting by M.C. Escher.

When you enter the Church of the Assumption today, the effect is dazzling. It can be hard to tell where architecture ends and painting begins. This impression intensifies as you approach the rear of the church, where floor-to-ceiling murals frame the altar, reaching some 50 feet above the ground. Below the chancel window, the mural depicts a sanctuary curtain hanging along four bays separated by painted columns and topped by fan ornaments, all rendered in starchy trompe l’oeil.

Gopinath’s vivid descriptions leave you with a strong desire to see the mural in person.

8. “Ilhan Omar’s improbable journey from refugee camp to Minnesota Legislature” (Cory Zurowski, November 7, 2016, City Pages)

Ilhan Omar, the newly elected Minnesota congresswoman — and, along with Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, one of the first Muslim women in the House of Representatives — has been the subject of a lot of intense scrutiny since she took office at the beginning of the year.

But that’s nothing new for the 37-year-old Somali-American, who got her start in politics in 2016, when she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. That same year, the writer Cory Zurowski documented Omar’s somewhat tumultuous entry into politics, along with her circuitous route from Mogadishu to a refugee camp in Kenya to Arlington, Virginia, where her family first moved when they got to the United States — and where a young Omar struggled to fit in.

Classmates stuck gum to her headscarf when they weren’t trying to yank it off. None of her peers bothered to communicate, even to say hi. They stared instead. The new kid sat solo at lunch, a loner during recess as well. Omar’s English improved.

Then came her classmates’ questions: Does it feel good to wear shoes for the first time? Do you really have hair? Do you have a pet monkey? “I’d say the kids were curiously brutal,” says Omar, “but the lunch ladies were kind to me.”

Soon after her arrival in Virginia, Omar moved with to Minneapolis, and so marked the beginning of her rapid political ascent.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.

Magen David and Me

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Marya Zilberberg | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

​I don’t think my father ever took off his Star of David necklace from the day he put it on in the infancy of the Carter administration. It was always there, resting in a copse of chest hair, a silver target in the V of his open shirt collar. I never asked, when he was alive, what it meant to him, but I imagined he had started to wear it simply because he could, having just escaped more than four decades of oppression in the U.S.S.R., where he couldn’t. Or, perhaps, wouldn’t. ​

The necklace had first belonged to me; my parents bought it for me when I was 14, when we were in Rome awaiting our entry visas to the United States. I had only recently learned of such a thing and its significance when my mother’s cousin Zhenya came to visit us in Odessa from Moscow just before we emigrated in August 1976. I had never before met this cousin, and when I first saw her what jumped out at me was her weird hair, a brown helmet of large immobile waves with a dullness I’d associated with dolls. Thankfully I had by then acquired some tact and didn’t blurt out my first impression. Zhenya wore a necklace, a darkly patinated metal circle, smaller and thinner than a penny, about the size of the old Soviet kopek. Into it was etched a shiny six-pointed star. When I asked my dad what it was, he said, “A Magen David,” the shield of King David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Although his matter-of-factness surprised me, I didn’t press him, thinking I must be missing something.

By the time we were readying to leave, I had spent almost half my lifetime with the awareness of being a Jew, though with no clue as to its larger meaning. At 7, I took a ballroom dance class at the Palace of the Pioneers because my mother thought it might instill some grace into my otherwise clumsy build. At the end of the first lesson, our teacher lined us up against a bleached wall, boys in white shirts and brown pants sagging from their scrawny frames like laundry on a line, girls with pigtails tied in exuberant white bows the size of parachutes, all performing a silent ritual of respectful attention. She instructed us to bring to the next class information about our nationalities. When I asked my parents about it that evening over dinner, my dad, staring into his bowl of soup, said, “We are Jews.”
Read more…

Teen Girls Finally Get to Touch Themselves

Netflix / Netflix / Hulu

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,569 words)

There was a time when people believed masturbating would leave them blind, hairy-palmed, and STD-riddled (okay, the last one was me — I was a kid in the nineties). The ancient Sumerians were down with it — for both men and women — but two centuries of moralists ruined masturbation for everyone. Even now, the act isn’t especially celebrated, particularly if you’re a girl. It’s hard not to think of boys specifically when studies show that kids learn to jerk off from their friends and the media, rather than from their parents or schools. And while I can’t think of one teen movie where a boy isn’t caught with their hands full (of semen), I can barely think of one where a girl is. I read Deenie like everyone else — apparently Judy Blume’s balls-out approach to female masturbation is still rare in YA 46 years later — but there was a dearth of girls getting themselves off in pop culture and, perhaps accordingly, a dearth of girls talking about it in my actual life. This made me feel all those things that have since become stereotypical themes when it comes to women and masturbation: shame, guilt, like there was something wrong with me.

Read more…

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Here’s a List of Longreads about Love for You

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Valentine’s Day always brings me back to the halls of my high school, which, on February 14th each year, teemed with roses by the dozen, glittery cards taped to lockers, oversized teddy bears, and prolonged goodbyes between couples before every class. As a shy high school student, I was more interested in the characters in the novels I read than pursuing my peers, but the holiday always brought an intense anxiety. Even when I told myself I didn’t want a cache of hot pink roses from the Kroger down the street, and even when I convinced myself that the holiday was a celebration of consumerism, I still felt like I was missing out in some way.

When I look back, I’m able to realize that my sense of loneliness didn’t come from any true sense of isolation, but rather the fact that I only recognized one type of relationship being celebrated, a kind I didn’t fully believe in, romances that relied on public gestures as proof. The essays I curated for this reading list are intended to be inclusive of all kinds of love. These writers explore what the landscape of relationships might look like in the age of robots, how one community of queer and trans women healed after Hurricane Harvey, and what pigeons might teach us about our own capacity for love, just for starters.

1. The Love Story That Upended the Texas Prison System (Ethan Watters, October 11, 2018, Texas Monthly)

Fred Cruz, imprisoned for 15 years for a robbery in Texas in the 1960s, was known for his calm manner, his study of law, and his practice of Buddhism. When Frances Jalet, a lawyer who moved to Texas because she was told it was a place where she could best fight for civil rights, met Cruz, the two hit it off. Jalet and Cruz, through years visitation and discussions of law in their letters to one another, fought for prisoners’ rights in Texas.

‘I know how deeply you love your son,’ Jalet wrote to Cruz’s mother that spring. ‘I have grown to love him also.’ Just what kind of love she was professing was unclear, perhaps even to her.

2. Love in the Time of Robots (Alex Mar, October 17, 2017, Wired)

What are the differences between humans and androids, and can the differences be “solved” through research? Can a relationship with an android stave off loneliness? What are the ethical considerations of trying to create an android so close to a human that the differences are difficult to perceive?

Alex Mar, in this riveting piece, addresses these questions, and also writes about the motives of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a man in Japan who regularly produces androids.

3. They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, October 21, 2015, Medium)

‘Gender identity typically develops between the ages of two and four, and sexuality emerges between ages eight and 10. ‘But if you’re not allowed to explore gender and sexuality and yours happens to be different than what’s culturally expected,’ Dr. Colt Keo-Meier, a trans man clinical psychologist practicing in Houston told me, ‘yours will be delayed, which is why you see people transitioning at 30, at 55.’ In Texas, he said, this is particularly true, thanks to the state’s stifling religious, cultural, and conservative forces.”

Settled into married life with her husband, with two children between them, Jeannot Jonte realized over time that she needed more. She asked her husband to open their marriage, and subsequently met Ashley Boucher at Sue Ellen’s, a famous lesbian bar in Dallas. The two connected. Their romance led to Jeannot divorcing her husband and allowed space for Jeannot — now Johnny — to explore gender identity in a safe space for the first time in their life.

4. After Divorce and Postpartum Depression, Work (and Bees) Brought Me Back to Life (Christine H. Lee, January 8, 2019, Catapult)

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s husband was allergic to bees but, after he left, Lee ordered her own nucleus and began tending to them. In this poignant essay — one that’s part of a series called Backyard Politics — Lee uses bees as a metaphor for the ways in which she learned to build the kind of life she wanted after postpartum depression and the dissolution of her marriage.

“It is no wonder that I am so in love with my bees. They live by structure and routine, but they are also resilient. They fight for their lives.”

5. India’s Golden Chance (Meera Subramanian, January 6, 2014, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Meera Subramanian visits Bihar, India to “find out what it means to be a girl turning into a woman in today’s India.” She is met with startling statistics.

“For every 100,000 mothers who give birth, 261 die—​more than ten times the US figure. Though it is an illegal act, nearly 70 percent of Bihari girls are married before their eighteenth birthday, and well over half of newlyweds have their first child by nineteen. The average woman in Bihar bears 3.7 children over the course of her lifetime. Of those, nearly 5 percent die within the first year.”

Subramanian writes about the efforts of a woman named Pinki Kumari, who’s involved with a program called Pathfinder International, which seeks to educate people about reproductive health. The training also seeks to empower women to make choices that might lead to a brighter future, such as resisting arranged marriage, birth control options, achieving economic stability on their own, continuing education, and speaking out against pervasive issues such as sexual violence.

6. How Queer and Trans Women Are Healing Each Other After Hurricane Harvey (Yvonne S. Marquez, October 25, 2017, Autostraddle)

After Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, many LGBT and undocumented Houstonians struggled to heal, and were left without access to resources to do so. In this longform piece, one that is a testament to the power of love that exists within community, Yvonne S. Marquez shares the efforts of people like poet Tiffany Scales, who is part of the T.R.U.T.H. Project, a project that organizes uplifting and educational performance art events for LGBTQ communities and their allies; Ana Andrea Molina, founder of Organización Latina de Trans en Texas (OLTT), who used her resources and connections to open a nonprofit where undocumented queer and trans people receive support; and Jessica Alvarenga, a queer Salvadoran photographer who hopes to “capture a truer narrative of her community to counter anti-immigrant narratives spewed by conservative politicians who depict all Central American immigrants as members of the dangerous MS-13 gang.”

7. Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak (Minda Honey, February 2018, Longreads)

A decade away from her last long-term relationship, Minda Honey arrives to a party celebrating her 33rd birthday without a date. After a friend gives her a tarot reading and suggests Honey will find a man, Honey reflects on the way she has evolved throughout various encounters with men, and discusses the way she now uses “politics as a barometer for the caliber of person” she dates.

“But I wish there were space in our culture for single women who are unhappy with their status to say so without being pitied, and without the pressure to break out into the Independent Woman song and dance. I can have a happy, fulfilling life and still long for romantic love. Two things can simultaneously be true.” 

8. What Pigeons Teach Us About Love (Brandon Keim, February 11, 2016, Nautilus)

After observing a pair of pigeons for a spring — birds he names Harold and Maude — Brandon Keim ruminates on what we know about how animals conceive of love, and how their interactions as couples reflect on how we as humans engage in relationships.

“Part of the reluctance to talk of bird love, I suspect, is rooted in our misgivings about our own love’s biological underpinnings: Is it just chemicals? A set of hormonal and cognitive patterns shaped by evolution to reward behaviors that result in optimal mating strategies? Perhaps love is not what defines us as human but is something we happen to share with other species, including the humble pigeon.”

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

You’re Just Too Good to Be True

Hulton Archive / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kavita Das | Longreads | February 2019 | 27 minutes (6688 words)

New York City, 1980

Mommy and I had a deal. On our twice-a-week, 45-minute drive to speech therapy, I practiced singing South Indian Carnatic songs, the ones she grew up playing on the violin, and on the way back I was allowed to listen to anything I wanted. So, as soon as we hit the road from our house, she prompted me to begin with sa-pa-sa. Sa is the equivalent of do, the starting note in Western classical solfege, and pa the equivalent of sol, the fifth note above do. Singing these fifth intervals helped ground me in my pitch before I began any song.

Once that was done, Mommy picked from songs she had already taught me during previous car trips, or began a new one. She quizzed me on which raga, or key, it was in, and then we sang the scale of that raga together. Unlike Western keys, ragas might have different ascending and descending scales, which struck me as hazardous. Even if I knew my way up the mountain, taking the same path down might send me careening into a ravine of shame. Then, she began tapping out the talam, or the time signature, on the steering wheel of her deep blue Chevy Horizon hatchback, while navigating through traffic, and I followed along, tapping it out on my thigh or on the vinyl seat next to me. I began to sing. When I forgot a lyric or the melody, she piped up and sang alongside me, and then chided, “Start again and this time concentrate, and sing it correctly.”

We went from one song to the next as we made our way from our home in Bayside, Queens to Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, driving over highways, crossing bridges, stopping at lights, paying tolls. Sometimes we arrived at speech therapy mid-song, and then afterwards, when we got back in the car, instead of switching to my choice, per our deal, Mommy made me finish the song first, which meant I only got to my music when we were halfway home. So, I learned to gauge how close we were to the medical center and speed up my singing so that the end of the Carnatic song coincided with our arrival. This way, the whole car ride back was just for my music.

As soon as we were back in the car, our seat belts fastened, I popped in my favorite tape. It was “The Ultimate Engelbert Humperdinck,” one of the only non-Indian music albums my parents owned, by the first Western musician I was allowed to listen to. I loved everything about him and his music. He spoke to me, an almost-5-year-old who felt she already knew a thing or two about the world — having visited India, Japan, Hawaii, and New Jersey; not to mention endured the pain of multiple surgeries and the monotony of speech therapy for a cleft palate, and the loneliness of being an only child, who was not so much misunderstood as not understood, receiving quizzical looks whenever I spoke. He knew me and cared deeply for me — it was all there in the beautiful lyrics of his songs, and in the way he crooned them just to me. His voice oozed with feeling. It was as smooth and sweet as the caramel squares my grandfather loved so much that he asked me to climb a chair and sneak up to the candy box and fetch him some more.

My absolute favorite song off the tape was Killing Me Softly. Listening to it, I felt as if I was all grown up, sitting in the audience at a small café. I was the person he sang about, who comes undone by the lovelorn songs of a soulful troubadour. I sang out with abandon, the windows down, drowning out city noises. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly. My mother continued to drive as I sang my little girl heart out all the way back to Queens.

I had named my dearest possession after him — my nubby pale blue woven blankie, which stayed steadfastly at my side as I played, before I carried it to bed each night, and which in turn carried me to my dreams. And when my 5th birthday rolled around, and preparations were being made for my party, I instructed my mother to invite Engelbert Humperdinck. My mother assured me that an invitation had been sent to him in England, where he lived and where my parents used to live before they migrated to the U.S. I was so excited, I ran around our basement swinging from the foundation poles, which usually served as the villains I lassoed as Wonder Woman. I could barely believe that in just a few days, Engelbert Humperdinck — I always called him by his full name — would be here in our basement. I wondered what to wear. None of my Indian stuff. Perhaps my powder blue shift and jacket, trimmed with white faux fur. It made me look like a lady, just like the long silk gowns my mother had gotten stitched for me in India. My powder blue number was a hit when I wore it in Japan — while we were snapping photos of the sights and surroundings, Japanese young women were asking my parents if they could snap photos of me in the photo-finish outfits Mommy bought, hand-stitched, or had tailored for me.

I decide that when he arrived, I would give him the frosted flowers from atop my Carvel ice cream cake, a token of my selfless love and admiration. I hoped he would sing Close to You — my second most favorite song, with perfect lyrics for celebrating me as the birthday girl. On the day that you were born the angels got together, And decided to create a dream come true, So they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue. Well, hair of black and eyes of brown, but I still believed he meant me since Engelbert Humperdinck himself was no blonde-haired blue-eyed being.

I had taken out the album liner notes from the plastic cassette case so often to stare at the two jacket photos of him that the case had broken. He had a head of shiny blue-black hair that cascaded in waves over his smiling face, culminating in two sturdy pillars of sideburns. It reminded me of Daddy’s hair. Unlike Daddy, though, he didn’t have a mustache, which meant he wouldn’t scratch me when he kissed me on the cheek. His nose was pointy, but not too pointy, and his honey brown eyes seemed to twinkle at me like stars from the nursery rhymes I’d learned seemingly so long ago. Now that I was a 5-year-old, I had graduated from nursery school to kindergarten, from nursery rhymes to love ballads, and from imaginary play friends to real-life music idols. I imagined us holding hands, going to the park, and, of course, singing duets together. And sheepishly I wondered if maybe, when I grew up, we could get married. When Mommy and Daddy weren’t around, I pressed my lips against his in the jacket photo, the way I had seen grownups do in TV shows. I never saw any of the Indian uncles and aunties do it, but I knew it was something other grownups — white and Black — did when they loved someone. When I closed my eyes to make a wish, I sometimes focused on a Barbie doll, but other times I hoped for the chance to kiss Engelbert Humperdinck for real.
Read more…

Mothers of the Future

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Thea Prieto | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,399 words)


“I got annihilated as a natural, as the real deal, as her truest, most important poem, her Lie Box. But she stuffed some torn-up papyrus in a crocodile; she taught me how to look for shards of a vase with a few words on it and piece together a story.”

—Sophia Shalmiyev, Mother Winter


When Anne Carson translated every tantalizingly incomplete snippet of Sappho’s poetry in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, she was continuing a centuries-long project: the excavation of our poetic fossils. In Carson’s translation, Sappo’s fragments are littered with empty brackets, which box off the blank spaces where words used to be, giving a reader the translator’s experience of “the free space of imaginal adventure… the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes.” These ancient relics of love and longing contain voids that can nowadays only be filled in, painstakingly, by imaginative poets and scholars; or by archaeologists lucky enough to exhume new slivers of Sappho’s poetry from antique garbage: cartonnage in mummy cases, packing for vases, or stuffing in mummified crocodile carcasses. “There can be no periods at the end of Sappho’s translations,” writes Sophia Shalmiyev in her debut memoir Mother Winter, “because she is forever unfinished business to us.”

In Mother Winter (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Shalmiyev describes many women who are yet unfinished business, most poignantly her own estranged mother. In 1978, in Leningrad — once and now again called Saint Petersburg — Shalmiyev was born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father. Widespread anti-Semitism drove her father to emigrate to America with his daughter, leaving Shalmiyev’s alcoholic mother, Elena, behind. From age eleven onward, Shalmiyev traveled new and unsafe worlds, navigating different cultures and subcultures, searching motherless for words to define her grief. Mother Winter is the result of her searching, a language of loss and longing that depicts in lyrical, fragmented vignettes her painful journeys, examining what it means to fill absences with words, like stuffing a crocodile with fragments of poetry. Read more…

This Month In Books: ‘This Is Really Not What I Want To Be Reading’

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Dear Reader,

I spent a while thinking about what the theme of this month’s books newsletter ought to be. Should it be state censorship, like the kind experienced by both Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, and Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet Nobel Laureate? Or, should it be (apropos of nothing, of course) all the scammers that popped up this month in our books coverage, like … well, also like Diderot (defrauder of priests) and Sholokhov (plagiarist)? (For an account of Diderot’s youthful pastime of scamming priests, I’ll have to refer you to the book itself — sadly, our excerpt doesn’t cover that side of him.) Then I realized the theme couldn’t be more obvious if it was lying face down on my coffee table, propped open like that (and ruining the spine) in order to save my page — books! The books this month are all about books!

For instance, starting with our two bad boys Diderot and Sholokhov: As Andrew Curran tells it in his new biography The Art of Thinking Freely, Diderot, along with his Enlightenment pals, wrote/edited the massive multi-volume Encyclopédie as, basically, a prank on the theocratic regime they lived under; the encyclopedia format, especially the radical potential of — I kid you not — cross-references, allowed the authors to subtlety undermine notions of absolute and divine authority. Meanwhile, as you can read in Brian J. Boeck’s biography Stalin’s Scribe, Sholokhov wrote/plagiarized a massive multi-volume novel, And Quietly Flows the Don — a genuine masterpiece — that he couldn’t finish for years. The main problem, other than a lack of additional material to plagiarize, was that if he had finished the book during the Terror, and all the characters hadn’t convincingly turned into Communists by the end, then Stalin would certainly have killed him. So, better to wait it out.

A little closer to our own time, in a conversation with interviewer Adam Morgan about Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment in his own massive multi-volume endeavor, Marlon James points to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series as a book that “continues to rule his life.” Gormenghast, says James, taught him “how the fantastical grows up,” and paved a path forward for his latest project, a literary fantasy epic based in African mythologies and histories. David Treuer, in the prologue to his new history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, points to a book that “ruled his life” in a very different way: Treuer explains that his own book was conceived of as a “counternarrative” to Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When he read Brown’s book in college, Treuer says he had felt deep “dismay” at the fact that “Brown’s narrative relied on — and revived — the same old sad story of the ‘dead Indian’” (as in, spiritually and culturally dead, as well as having suffered through many massacres and tragedies) and invoked the squalor of the reservations. Treuer felt compelled to present an alternate narrative, “to communicate what it was that [he] loved” about his home and his history, to change what had so alienated him as a young Native reader of Brown’s book.


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On the other hand, when beginning work on her latest novel, Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli tells interviewer Lily Meyer that she didn’t have a book in mind with which hers could be set in conversation, or which had laid a path that hers could follow. So, being a self-described “documenter” — as opposed to a fabulist, who could sit down in a “vacuum” and invent — she needed to hunt for one:

I read tangentially, obliquely, not reading about the child refugee crisis or even the crisis in migration from Syria. I read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade. I read about orphan trains, ships during slavery, lots of historical documents, and just archive, archive, archive. Then I read a book called The Gates of Paradise, written by Jerzy Andrzejewski and translated by Sergio Pitol, and I thought, This is exactly it. This is the way in.

Luiselli describes the ephemeral euphoria of finding The Gates of Paradise, which was a kind of moment every reader knows well, the kind we’re always aching to hit on again — that realization that you’ve finally found the book you want to be reading:

It’s so hard to find a book that you absolutely want to read in that moment. I begin a lot of books and then realize, This is really not what I want to be reading. Not the atmosphere, not the tone, not the voice. I don’t want to be in this world. When you find one that is exactly what you want to be reading, it’s like a miracle of some sort.

Devi S. Laskar wrote her new novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, in dialogue with yet another type of book — neither one that has been haunting her since young adulthood, nor one recently discovered after a long search, but one that is irrevocably lost. Years ago, her finished novel disappeared when her home was raided by law enforcement and her laptop seized as evidence. Her new novel is born of Laskar’s efforts to come to terms with the grief of that bereavement, and move past it, finding new ways to carry the work forward:

I started writing this story back in 2004, and then I was relying heavily on my previous experiences as a reporter, trying to be factually accurate. By the time I returned to this story about a decade later, I had hard choices to make because of what had happened, how I’d lost most of my work [in the raid]. First I had to come to terms that I’d probably never see my laptop again. Once I got through that… I jettisoned a lot of the facts that I’d previously held dear. I took a lot of similar “beats” or inflection points in the story and I made them composite, basing them on several people’s experiences, not just my own. I am not the narrator.

The loss of the first draft changed the structure and perspective of the final work. It’s as if reality inside the books shifts with all our troubles and griefs here on the outside. It reminds me of Edward Gorey, and his protestations to a long-ago interviewer. As Bridey Heing writes in her review of Mark Dery’s new biography of Gorey, Born To Be Posthumous:

When questioned on whether or not his books are a reflection of reality or fantasy, Gorey responded, “No one ever lets me explain what I mean about the reality of my books! Everyone always thinks, ‘Isn’t that amusing that this is his idea of reality!’”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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‘Archive, Archive, Archive’: Valeria Luiselli on Reading In Order To Write

Getty / Knopf

Lily Meyer | Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,198 words)

 

Valeria Luiselli has a roving, curious, collaborative mind. In her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, she merged her protagonist’s consciousness into that of the poet Gilberto Owen. In Story of My Teeth, she collaborated with workers at a Jumex juice factory to create a dizzying, hilarious adventure story. And in Lost Children Archive, her third and most ambitious novel, she invokes a chorus of books, images, recordings, and fragments to tell the story of a family traveling across the American Southwest as the country shatters around them.

The protagonist of Lost Children Archive is an audio journalist starting a sound documentary about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the U.S., fleeing violence in Mexico and the Northern Triangle, a crisis Luiselli last wrote about in her searing essay Tell Me How It Ends. Her husband is beginning a sound project, too: “an ‘inventory of echoes’…about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.” They live in New York with their children, a five-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy, but to make his inventory of echoes, he wants to move permanently to the southwest. The two decide to drive across the country with their children, not making further plans until they arrive in Arizona.

Luiselli writes the road trip in a series of lyrical fragments, creating an archive of the family’s time in transit. She records the landscape, the adults’ fraying marriage, the children’s confusion, the mother’s growing desperation to help the child refugees crossing the border, and the ten-year-old’s determination to help his mother — even if that means running away. Woven through these fragments is another story: seven children on a train north, trying to survive a journey through the desert and into the unknown.

The resulting novel is layered and surprising, able to twist without warning. Luiselli’s archival impulses transform her work into a collage of voices and meanings. Lost Children Archive weaves from mother to son, fiction to meta-fiction, Manhattan apartment to Arizona desert, but it never loses sight of its purpose: to tell the story of a lost family, trying to find hope and certainty however they can. Read more…

Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in. Read more…

Writing for the Movies: A Letter from Hollywood, 1962

AP Photo

Daniel Fuchs | The Golden West | Black Sparrow Books | May 2005 | 42 minutes (8,396 words)

 

Dear Editors:

Thank you for your kind letter and compliments. Yes, your hunch was right, I would like very much to tell about the problems and values I’ve encountered, writing for the movies all these years. I’m so slow in replying to you because I thought it would be a pleasant gesture—in return for your warm letter—to send you the completed essay. But it’s taken me longer than I thought it would. I’ve always been impressed by the sure, brimming conviction of people who attack Hollywood, and this even though they may never have been inside the business and so haven’t had the chance of knowing how really onerous and exacerbat­ing the conditions are. But for me the subject is more disturbing, or else it is that I like to let my mind wander and that I start from a different bias, or maybe I’ve just been here too long.

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