In the introduction to Birthday Stories, a 2004 anthology edited by Haruki Murakami, Murakami writes about the particular weirdness of having his birthday become a public event. January 12 has come around again, so in honor of Murakami’s 67th birthday it seemed apt to revisit the introduction, which also ran as an essay in The Guardian:
Early one birthday morning I was listening to the radio in the kitchen of my Tokyo apartment. I usually get up early to work. I wake between four and five in the morning, make myself some coffee (my wife is still sleeping), eat a slice of toast and go to my study to begin writing. While I prepare my breakfast, I usually listen to the radio news – not by choice (there’s not a lot worth hearing), but because there’s not much else to do at such an early hour. That morning, as I waited for my water to boil, the newsreader was announcing a list of public events planned for the day, with details of when and where they were happening. For example, the emperor was going to plant a ceremonial tree, or a large British passenger ship was due to dock in Yokohama, or events would be taking place throughout the country in honour of this being official chewing-gum day (I know it sounds ludicrous but I am not making it up: there really is such a day).
The last item on this list of public events was an announcement of the names of famous people whose birthday fell on January 12. And there among them was my own! “Novelist Haruki Murakami today celebrates his **th birthday,” the announcer said. I was only half listening, but, even so, at the sound of my own name I almost knocked over the hot kettle. “Whoa!” I cried aloud and looked around the room in disbelief. “So,” it occurred to me a few minutes later with a pang, “my birthday is not just for me any more. Now they list it as a public event.”
A public event?
Oh well, public event or not, at least at that moment some of the people throughout Japan – it was a nationwide broadcast – standing (or sitting) by their radios may have had at least some fleeting thought of me. “So, today is Haruki Murakami’s birthday, eh?” Or, “Oh, wow, Haruki Murakami’s ** years old, now too!” Or, “Hey, whaddya know, even guys like Haruki Murakami have birthdays!” In reality, though, how many people in Japan could have been up at this ridiculous pre-dawn hour listening to the radio news? Twenty or thirty thousand? And how many of those would know my name? Two or three thousand? I had absolutely no idea.
Now that LeBron James has his first championship ring, his narrative is complete. A brief history:
Finally, after several drama-clogged months, LeBron James announced his intentions. He called a public meeting in the Roman Forum, at the very spot from which Marc Antony had addressed his countrymen after the death of Julius Caesar. (Some found this choice of venue distasteful.) ‘I have decided,’ James declared, ‘to take my tridents to Sicily.’
“This came as a surprise to many: the gladiatorial scene in Sicily was rather provincial, its arena small and poorly attended. There were, however, other dominant fighters in Sicily with whom James was eager to team — a lion named Jade and a dancing bear named Squash. From then on, they fought exclusively as a trio, doing well sometimes and not so well at other times. Spectators around the empire found this all to be rather anticlimactic. Interest in gladiator fighting dwindled, and many scholars believe it is no coincidence that the sport was officially banned, without public outcry, just a few decades later.
1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, what’s great is the willingness of both subject and writer to play, and the dynamic between them—these pieces exploit the “profile as date” subtext really well. It’s fun to think about them as a sort of inverse to Jennifer Egan’s brilliant satire of the profile biz in A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the Vick piece, what I like is the way that Leitch uses the PR apparatus around the process of profiling Michael Vick to reveal what’s at stake for him. He didn’t get much time with Vick, just a photo shoot and a phone call, but he used it to both explain and complicate the Michael Vick Story that the quarterback’s handlers want to tell.
2. There are a bunch of New Yorker stories I could pick—Ryan Lizza’s “leading from behind” piece on Obama’s foreign policy was so influential; Jane Mayer on Thomas Drake and state secrets was fascinating and moving; Kelefah Sanneh not only wrote a great analysis of Odd Future, he tracked down their missing member; David Grann is David Grann—but my favorite was Jeffrey Toobin’s take on Clarence Thomas. There are so many things going on here: It’s a revisionist view that frames Thomas as very smart and canny; it shows how one justice can move the entire Supreme Court over decades through the way opinions are written; it sets the stage for next year’s healthcare ruling as a culmination of Thomas’s entire mission; and it makes clear once again just what a strange, extremist man he is.
3. Overall, my favorite thing in the new New York Times Magazine is probably the Riffs section—it identified a gap in the preview-and-review saturated culture journalism market, which is (relatively) long form argument/idea-driven pieces. To pick a few highlights: Dan Kois’s piece on avant-garde movies kicked off a fierce, endless, at times kind of ridiculous debate that just about every movie critic had to weigh in on; Adam Sternbergh’s piece on jokeless comedies defined an era; Sam Anderson on Derek Jeter both mocked empty sports hagiography and read like a hilarious version of Donald Barthelme. Alternate winner in this category is the New York Review of Books, which published some of the best cultural essays this year—Daniel Mendelsohn on Mad Men and Spiderman, Lorrie Moore on Friday Night Lights, and Dan Chiasson on Keith Richards were all delightful and provocative.
4. I just loved Paul Ford’s “The Web is a Customer Service Medium.” It’s the kind of piece that would be hard to get into a print magazine for various reasons, but it resonated instantly online. It’s a pretty abstract argument about a subject that’s not exactly under-analyzed—what is web content about, and how is it different from other forms of content?—but it opens by coining a phrase which instantly makes sense to anyone who works on the web: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” And then it goes on to make a very detailed, specific, convincing, and non-buzzword-filled argument that isn’t formulated expressly to piss off anyone who works in “old media,” which is refreshing.
5. Finally, some favorites in the emerging multimedia genre of longform tweeting. I probably read more words on Twitter than anywhere else this year, and I am grateful for the stamina of those who somehow manage to tweet and retweet extended thoughts all day, every day on specific themes. I learned as much about the Arab Spring by dipping into @acarvin’s feed as from any essays about it. @daveweigel is constantly insightful, and one of the few people capable of being funny about politics. Following @questlove’s stream is like listening to the world’s kindest, most passionate music geek.
Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.)
The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in the U.S. that are translated into English. But even that number is inflated, as it includes technical material — manuals, guides, instructions — and new editions of canonized authors like Leo Tolstoy and Plato. American readers interested in the full-throated energy of contemporary world literature, of global book culture beyond their particular location and language, have limited options. Publishers suggest that literature in translation doesn’t sell — excepting a certain Swedish novelist called Stieg, of course — but my thinking is that readers like good things to read, wherever they come from. Readers are a curious sort.
I am ignited by literature of the world. I am fascinated by the stories and styles that come from different places. My Top 5 Longreads shouldn’t be considered a *best* list; rather, a cultivated selection of the year’s most interesting reading on international literature, translation, and storytelling. But this conversation isn’t finished; there is more to be said.
I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea.
An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv.
Today, the 60-plus year conflict between Israel and Arab countries has impacted heavily on translations between the two Semitic languages, which are now viewed by many with mutual suspicion and distrust.
Crispin interviews Dubravka Ugresic about her new essay collection, Karaoke Culture. Discussed: the author’s relationship to pop culture and how a Hemingway lookalike contest fits into the same essay as the war criminal Radovan Karadžic.
Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.
With a bit more time on my hands commuting a few stops on the subway, I need some reading material to Instapaper to my iPad. Longreads has been invaluable in providing me with a great selection of really interesting articles. Along the way, there were five particular stories this year that really caught my attention. Without further ado, here are my five favorite longreads of 2010:
I’m generally uninterested in celebrity culture but this was a really fun, creative article that is a sort of modern day “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” The author has some interactions with Franco but for the most part Sam Anderson creates a mythology around the actor and his career schizophrenia.
Amongst all the anti-terror hysteria of 2010 was this story of Dr. Steven Hatfill who was wrongfully accused of being responsible for a series of anthrax attacks in 2001. David Freed recounts in a breezy but detailed story of the entire ordeal.
There have been so many articles written about Gawker and so few tell us anything we haven’t already read before. Felix puts together perhaps the most comprehensive piece on where Gawker’s been and where it appears to be headed, revealing some odd financial handling using offshore accounts.
Tumblr may be better known as a micro-blogging platform but there’s plenty of longform content being produced and Matt Langer provides some of the best. In this piece Langer discusses race, the Shirley Sherrod affair, Andrew Breitbart, and how we are still very far from living in a post-racial America.
Michael Azerrad | The New Yorker| September 22, 2021| (7,102 words)
Music journalist Michael Azerrad’s piece about his friendship with Kurt Cobain is honest and lucid. Azerrad recounts a number of moments with the late Nirvana singer, starting with the first time they met in 1992, when he visits the small Los Angeles apartment Cobain shared with Courtney Love to interview him for Rolling Stone. As a journalist, Azerrad gains Cobain’s trust, and eventually goes on to write a book about the band, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which was published in September 1993, the same month their third and final album, In Utero, was released. Azerrad remembers encounters over the next few years — an epic show at the Reading Festival, a business dinner with executives (“the grownups,” as Cobain referred to them), tense moments between band members while on tour, flashes of Cobain’s heroin addiction. My favorite bits, though, are Azerrad’s quiet, beautiful descriptions of Cobain away from the spotlight: the intimate hours the two spent in a Seattle hotel room as Cobain read Azerrad’s manuscript, and the time they wandered around an eerily empty downtown Dallas with daughter Frances, who was just 15 months old at the time. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Matthew Shen Goodman | n+1| September 18, 2021 | (4,386 words)
Look, just because I had zero interest in watching a card of fights between retired ex-champions on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 while Donald Trump and his namesake son commentated doesn’t mean I have zero interest in reading a gimlet-eyed, absolutely bonkers polemic about it. And that’s exactly what Matthew Shen Goodman delivers in his slightly drunken, extremely lurid critical essay, which also marks his first inclusion as a Longreads Pick. The horrors on display are many, whether Snoop Dogg “performing” with the late Marvin Gaye (the essay’s headline details Snoop’s literal answer to Marvin’s titular question during a rendition of “What’s Goin’ On”) or onetime mixed martial-arts great Tito Ortiz’s plodding defeat to other onetime MMA great Anderson Silva (“veterans of one sport playing at another, their takedowns and elbows and kicks and joint breaks pared down to only punches, four-ounce semi-articulated gloves replaced with the bulbous curve of twelve-ounce boxing mitts”). The piece is half exhausted sigh, half feverish deconstruction, and entirely memorable. Punching down may be easier than the alternative, but sometimes it’s just what you need. —Peter Rubin
Lisa Wells | Harper’s Magazine | September 20, 2021 | (6,064 words)
This is a story about a company that is pioneering natural organic reduction (NOR), or the composting of dead bodies. Readers get all the dirt—sorry, sorry—on the science and business behind the venture, but writer Lisa Wells offers so much more than that. Her piece is a meditation on intention and guilt; grief and fear; life and loss. Perhaps above all, it is about our species’ fraught relationship with the natural world. I will be thinking about it for a long time. —Seyward Darby
Daniel Riley| GQ | September 21, 2021 | (7,369 words)
Daniel Riley clearly relished reporting on the freediving competition Vertical Blue — a chance to be around 42 divers who feel they are doing something “sublime.” This event at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas is a mecca for all serious divers, but Riley focuses on Alexey Molchanov, who, as the world’s best freediver, is tremendously skilled at staying present in a dive, with nothing “beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter,” until he reaches a depth where there is no light, no sound, just sensory oblivion. Riley pulls you into the water with Molchanov, to such a degree that I went from feeling the serenity of the stillness to intense claustrophobia, as we go down and down — a rather impressive gamut of emotions to feel while in fact sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea. Riley’s respect for Molchanov is evident throughout the piece — he is, after all, a man who has dedicated his life to a sport that killed his mother, and has the potential to kill him too. —Carolyn Wells
Mary Kay McBrayer | Oxford American | August 31, 2021 | (4,784 words)
Come for an introduction to the uncanny work of miniature construction and collecting, stay for a rumination about what it means to cope with chaos and cruelty. “I cannot control any of the horrors that happen at me,” Mary Kay McBrayer writes. “But in my dollhouse, I own everything. I make the horrors happen. I am the one.” This is a piece for fans of Hereditary and Shirley Jackson, and for anyone struggling to make sense of our world gone mad. —SD
We rarely think of it this way, but the leaders of organizations are designers too. Organizational designers. By choosing the strategy, the budget, the culture and who they hire, they have more impact on whether good work is possible than anyone. CEO Alfred Sloan, who made good design central to his strategy for cars at General Motors in the 1930s, would never have called himself a designer. But his choices redefined how we think of a good car, as well as what the words design and designer mean for the world. We’re often told it’s people with great ideas or passion that make good work happen, but there’s a hidden and formidable truth. What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power.
An organization could hire Maya Lin, Zaha Hadid or Bjarke Ingels, three legendary architects, but if their client ignored all of their suggestions, their skills would be rendered useless. When we see great works we often give the most acclaim to the designer, but as Michael Wilford wrote, “Behind every distinctive building is an equally distinctive client.” Designers and architects are often the center of attention when a work is finished, but along the way the client has the power to reject their ideas. Sometimes designers are hired as design theater, so the powerful can say “we have talented designers,” using their fame and reputation to help sell the project, even if that designer is mostly ignored.
Often there’s more than one person in power, and it’s their capacity to collaborate that defines what’s possible. Take, for example, the town of Missoula, Montana. It’s a small city with one very unusual characteristic: it has a city grid plan, but the central grid is oriented 45 degrees from the rest of the town. This makes it much easier to get lost, defeating a primary advantage of grids. What was the urban planner thinking? The answer is that there wasn’t just one plan, there were two, each led by factions that couldn’t agree.
Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.
In the 1880s, two landowners, W.M. Bickford and W.J. Stephens, owned property near an old wagon road that ran diagonally through the area. They formulated their own plan to align with it, with all streets running in a grid parallel to the wagon road (which still exists today, shown with the dashed line below). They imagined an entire town called South Missoula, with this as the core.
Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.
The problem was that another landowner, Judge Knowles, owned land to the north. He didn’t like the plan that Bickford and Stephens proposed. He thought the angled roads were a mistake, since they ignored the original master section plan that much of the surrounding area was using. But he also didn’t like the idea of there being a new town called South Missoula. He was able to get the Missoula government to agree to annex his property, and installed a true rectilinear grid plan.
Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.
At the time most of the area was undeveloped, so the official plan didn’t mean that much until more roads were built and more people settled the area. There was still a chance for Bickford and Stephens to have their design become the dominant one. The pivotal factor was that an old bridge on the Clark Fork River, the Higgins Bridge, needed to be replaced. Depending on how it was positioned, it would support one grid plan over the other. Whichever road the bridge fed out to would become the primary thoroughfare.
The Higgins Bridge was named after one of Missoula’s founders, C.P. Higgins, who just happened to be friends with Judge Knowles. They agreed to back the north-south alignment that Knowles had planned for, and worked together to influence citizens to take their side. Combined, they had far more influence than Bickford and Stephens, and when it came to a vote, the north-south alignment that Knowles wanted won. The citizens of Missoula would forever pay the price.
Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.
At each intersection where the two grids meet, the single street from the north-south grid has to divide into two streets, with different names. These five-legged junctions at odd angles make it unnecessarily complicated and dangerous to find your way. The worst intersection, nicknamed Malfunction Junction, had six legs, and until its recent redesign (which took eleven years to complete) it was one of the most dangerous and frustrating intersections in America.
This kind of design-by-politics is common, in cities, nations and sometimes even in products themselves. People in power often prioritize their own interests, which means good design to them is that which helps them protect their power. The concerns of the people who will deal with the consequences, perhaps citizens, are secondary at best.
Hand-drawn map of Malfunction Junction in Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.
Melvin Conway, a computer programmer, expresses this idea in a law that is named after him: “Organizations . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”¹ In other words, the limitations of an organization’s politics are expressed in the design of the things they produce. When one landowner, or executive, doesn’t get along with another, the battle lines between them show up in the product itself, to the detriment of everyone.
This often surfaces in websites for large organizations, like government agencies or universities. Websites should focus on the most frequent things that people who visit need to do. Yet, leaders often assume that the view inside an organization is the best one to share with the world. But that’s like forcing someone who wants to watch a movie to think mostly about how it was made, the movie sets, the cameras, the lights and the producers, instead of experiencing the movie itself. Good movies work because of suspension of disbelief: they are crafted to make you forget about what went on behind the scenes, or that there were scenes, or sets, or lights, at all. Unlike the trap in chapter four, where the Segway project started with the technology first, this is a case of starting with the organization’s politics first. In both cases, it’s the people for whom, in theory, all of the work is being done who lose.
Public Domain.
On a global scale, there are similar stories. At the end of World War I, the Allies worked together to decide what to do with the remains of the Ottoman Empire, which covered much of what we call the Middle East today.
The British and the French worked out a secret plan, called the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which divided up Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into areas run by the British or French government. There were three problems. First, François Georges-Picot and Mark Sykes were two mid-level diplomats acting on behalf of their European nations, who had their own agendas for the best use of these lands. Second, neither had a great a great understanding of the history of the people who lived on the lands they were redesigning. Third, the Arabs had been promised independence in return for their cooperation during the war and this pact broke that promise.
Nevertheless, they invented new nations and borders on top of hundreds of years of history and expected their new map, or nation design, to work.² Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, explains:
If you look at the Middle East today, there’s essentially five artificial nations that were created by Sykes–Picot, the most prominent ones being Iraq and Syria—and Jordan being another one. But anyone looking at Iraq and Syria today sees that the artificial borders that were created have now completely disintegrated . . . The lines crossed tribal lines. They divided up clans and sub-clans.³
After the act was ratified, riots and civil wars began. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it set in motion the Middle East we know today. In response to the unrest they had created, the British and French worked to take away the power that existing groups had. They gave it instead to weak leaders they could manipulate and who posed little threat of revolting. Britain and France did nothing to help soothe the ethnic, religious or linguistic divides they had intensified.
After World War II, the US and the Soviet Union inherited the responsibility from the British and French, maintaining many of the same nation borders using many of the same methods. And according to Anderson, it wasn’t until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Arab Spring, that the lid on the mess that Sykes–Picot had created by design finally came off.
Many wonder why the Middle East seems to always be in trouble. Or the borders between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, or Nigeria and Cameroon. While there are many factors, one compelling lens is that people in power, often foreigners, chose the borders to be where they are. And powerful nations exert their influence on other countries for their own reasons, without understanding the history of why those efforts often fail.4
Americans don’t have to travel far to see the power of mapmakers. Gerrymandering, where politicians in office change voting district maps to keep themselves in power, is common practice. More disturbing is the way the US government, after WWII, chose home ownership as the way to rebuild the economy and shore up the middle class for the sixteen million Americans returning from the war (including one million African Americans).5,6 The Federal Housing Administration defined who could get loans, and their manual stated that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”7 They made maps of which neighborhoods could get loans: green for yes, and red for no (thus the term redlining).
Through these policies, poor and black neighborhoods were denied loans, as well as the right to move to neighborhoods where loans would be made available. Most Americans assume the free market decides the fate of neighborhoods, and is why some struggle and others thrive, but that’s often not true. Rey Ramsey, former chair of Habitat for Humanity, explains that despite the history, “people are lulled to sleep thinking that certain things happened by default, rather than by design.”8
A broader discussion of Conway’s Law can be found on Wikipedia.
The Sykes–Picot map and a discussion of the agreement can be found on Wikipedia.
Yxta Maya Murray | Longreads | August 2020 | 4,990 words (20 minutes)
— with thanks to Dr. Alex Pivovaroff
1.
Chaparral spreads its hard, green shine over the hills and valleys of Southern California. This tough-leafed shrub community established itself as part of the local plant landscape millions of years ago. It flourishes during the area’s rainy springs, and survives droughts by plunging its sturdy roots deep into granite bedrock, which can hold a surprising amount of water.
Chaparral also bears a reputation for fire. These plants have adapted to the types of blazes Southern California’s semi-arid landscape has historically endured, and some varieties of chaparral evolved a literally incendiary mode of survival: their seeds need to burn in order to sprout. After wildfires scorch the land, the chaparral bursts into a glossy biome, hosting fire-follower poppy blossoms that fan out over the blackened hills.
2.
Los Angeles has always lacked an adequate supply of indigenous water.
This problem brings out the worst in its settlers, who adapt to the landscape with as much scorched-earth ingenuity as does the chaparral. Read more…
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)
Even the way I first listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters was oppositional. It wasn’t intentional. I knew I needed about an hour to listen to it all the way through. I knew I couldn’t really do anything else in order to give it my attention. So I took Fiona Apple’s inside record outside. At four in the afternoon in Toronto, the sun was piercing and it was open-coat weather, a strange way to listen to Apple’s nicotine voice and bedroom lyrics. Walking in the middle of a day so bright I needed to squint even through sunglasses, “Fetch the bolt cutters/I’ve been in here too long,” bounced out of my headphones, a jazzy paradox. As everyone knows by now, the album was made by a shut-in, a “messianic figurehead,” according to the New Yorker, who hadn’t produced an album in eight years. A backstory all the better for conjuring the image of a mythical genius at work on an inevitable masterpiece.
I didn’t get it.
Claustrophobia is the overarching theme, even if it isn’t, of the album that came out of Apple’s exile. And during a crisis in which we all feel that same thing, it was inevitable that the concept would eclipse the music itself. It’s also understandable that not answering Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ call would feel particularly alienating — Slate music critic and Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste author Carl Wilson, who I contacted for this column in befuddlement, said that even he was surprised by how much attention Apple’s fifth album was getting. But in the present atmosphere, with physical connection forbidden, every other kind of connection becomes that much stronger. A man singing on his balcony in Rome unites a building, and a woman pounding on a piano in her home in Venice Beach unites the rest of us. Most of us. In normal times, having the dissenting opinion is a point of pride. In pandemic times, where all you want is to not be alone, it’s a cause for concern. Which is why it felt so important to figure out why I didn’t much like Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
* * *
Technically I started listening to Apple’s album before that walk. Motivatedby theunanimouspraise, I went to YouTube and played the first track, “I Want You to Love Me.” But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit. Later, in a more studious frame of mind, I persisted. And after about 20 seconds, that sound liquefied into a cascade of piano trills which would be familiar to any ‘90s Apple-ite. At the risk of sounding reductive, this is kind of how Fetch the Bolt Cutters goes if you aren’t feeling it; verses of relief surrounded by weird shit that plays like the opposite of an actual melody. In between hangs the kind of Apple-isms that have always clanged in my ear — mouthfuls of the kind of poetry that was once limited to high school but now stalks us all on Instagram — not to mention the insufferable repetition of words and phrases and the obnoxious holding of never-ending notes like “youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” At the end of “I Want You to Love Me,” Apple discharges a lengthy, high-pitched throat warble that reminds me of Andie MacDowell’s dolphin-like vocalization in the 1991 Bruce Willis flop Hudson Hawk, a squall that causes Sandra Bernhard to sneer listlessly, “Just shoot her.”
I’m not going to make you suffer through much more of my non-critical thinking around music, but there’s definitely a sensation with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, if you listen to it from start to finish, of a knot being untied, of the songs relaxing into something more digestible as you pass the halfway mark (Editor’s note: “Are the songs relaxing into something more digestible, or are you relaxing into the songs?” Author’s note: It’s not me, it’s her). What doesn’t morph is the subject matter, which, restricted as it seems to Apple’s interpersonal grievances, seems all too confined for a project that was already confined in its production. The whole thing just struck me as too insular for how sweepingly it was being lauded. And despite the claims at raw unprocessed sound, those dog barks onthe title song are so strategically placed I was more tickled by the actual dogs barking behind the fence I passed while listening to it. But then you can’t deny the added texture Apple’s voice has acquired with age and her own liberation from her old song strictures. The song I momentarily hated the most on the album, for the opening repetition of its title (“Ladies,” sixteen times!), is also the one I liked the most. Despite the clunky lyrics — “ruminations on the looming effect and the parallax view” — some subterranean motor seems to power this track through the history of music, from folk to rap to whatever, sailing between genres like there’s nothing to it. When people talk of genius, when Pitchfork gives the album 10 stars, I hear a glimpse of that here.
That’s the tension. If I just thought everyone had bad taste, or was dumb, I wouldn’t be tortured by disliking Fetch the Bolt Cutters. My lack of connection to it suggested I was missing some substantial sliver of intellect, which is something I can’t abide as someone who never really feels smart enough. So I groped for a music critic to explain it to me. But if I felt alienated from this particular cultural event, critics didn’t seem too concerned about inviting me in. “She sings, scats, lightly raps — and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination,” Jenn Pelly wrote at Pitchfork. Wait, what? That isn’t critical analysis, it’s critical flexing. AtThe New Yorker, Carrie Battan’s use of the term “feral authenticity” to describe Apple’s oeuvre — based on her penchant for avoiding the public — recalled my mother’s duo-syllabic reaction to Apple (“hippie”) but not much else. So, I emailed Carl Wilson. Then I called Wilson; that’s how desperate I was for Wilson to explain what was wrong with me. “I feel a little stymied by your question,” he rightfully responded, “how can I tell you how to like something you already know you don’t like?”
But then he proceeded to write the kind of email that should have been an article, the kind of explanation that’s the reason Wilson is my favorite music critic. That space between the music and the person listening to it? He writes the bridge. Wilson explained that the reaction to Fetch the Bolt Cutters felt “disproportionate” because of Apple’s absence for so long and because it is “of the moment in its theme and feel.” That includes its lyrics on the sort of gender issues we are currently confronting — not to mention Apple’s transcendence of musical boundaries, mixing disparate genres from cabaret to hip-hop — and that raw home-recorded style that opposes today’s ubiquitous hyper-produced singles. Wilson also noted the self-selection of music critics. And that most of the reviews I read on Apple’s album were by white women, on a beat that has famously had a dearth of female voices as a whole, does imply her music still hasn’t shaken that decades-old Lilith Fair connection.
“Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan back when — like you, I kind of felt that she was good but not great, maybe a little too self-conscious and strained to be great,” Wilson explained. But then he heard Apple’s fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, in 2012. That’s when he thought she had finally self-actualized (upon his suggestion, I listened to that album too and, indeed, the last track, “Hot Knife,” would not sound out of place on her new record). On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Wilson noticed the piano that Apple forefronted in the past melded into layers of rhythm and percussion and vocals, her monotonous deep bluesy voice fracturing into a wider range of pitches. “To my ears that’s really opened up the space in her style, which I used to find too suffocating,” he wrote. “It has an immediacy that I find really rare in music right now, allowing by turns for both vulnerability and rapture.”
After all of that, Wilson’s final words could have very well been all he had written: “[M]aybe you just find Fiona Apple a bit much.” The irony is that the same thing I critique her for — for being too solipsistic, for making it all too self-centered — is the same reason I can’t hear her straight. My reactions to art are as impulsive as my consumption is lonely. It’s why, ultimately, I can’t trust critics’ taste though I can trust their analysis, and why I can’t trust the artists themselves, only their art and my own experience of it. If you think about it, it’s a little crazy to believe in your gut when your gut is at least in part influenced by exposure: “acquired taste” is a thing for a reason. And yet I always seem hellbent on independently deciding on the quality of everything. If nothing else, I am entirely secure in my judgment, because, the thinking goes, I may not know much about anything else, but I know myself perfectly.
I know, for instance, that I have a particular aversion to hippies, and that during the making of this album, Apple chanted around her house with various other musicians, banging on a box of her dead pet’s bones. I know I am intimidated by the blues and by jazz and reject them because of how stupid they make me feel, a symptom of my more general difficulty with engaging in art I don’t at least marginally understand. I know I have a particular aversion to beautiful women in the arts, because it’s never just about the art. I know this particular beautiful woman has dated powerful men — most notably the director Paul Thomas Anderson, as he got more and more famous — and that never means nothing, good or bad. And I know I resented Apple as a teen for being publicly tortured when she was publicly everything girls like me tortured ourselves for not being — good enough, but, more importantly, the right package to cover up for it (as Apple herself sings: “I resent you for never getting any opposition at all.”) I know all of this, but I feel it more.
Unfortunately, you can’t think yourself out of the way you feel. “A lot of the record is about feeling confined, emotionally and societally,” Wilson explained, “and about thinking of ways to liberate yourself.” But had Fetch the Bolt Cutters not alienated me musically, everything around it would have. I’m skeptical of blanket accolades; that something can appeal so globally suggests a lack of originality. And I can’t escape (liberate myself from?) the fact that being told another artist has achieved perfection is, as they say, triggering. The idea that someone has unlocked everything they are capable of and created something that is so purely them that it transcends time and space, God-like, to become an indisputable piece of perfection — it’s the thing every artist wants, for all their neuroses and all their intellect and all their values to coalesce into this object that by virtue of being so essentially them is essentially the rest of us as well. It’s incredibly rare, but you see it in work like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, for instance, or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, both of which have had the added advantage of being recognized for their greatness. But this rarity makes each new proposed addition to the canon seem less believable than the last.
More than that, though, it plagues every other artist. Every time we hear that someone else has achieved mastery, or at least been recognized for achieving it, we’re reminded that we haven’t and likely never will (let alone be acknowledged for doing so). That’s the deepest feeling of isolation for an artist of all of them, that chasm between them and immortality. That’s the one they fear most that they (I) will never breach.
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I listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters on a Spotify mix, so the album ended and then rolled into “Criminal,” Apple’s Grammy-winning 1997 single and perhaps her best known. Hearing that smooth lyrical piano and that even smoother voice felt like slipping into sweats after a long day in a pencil skirt; I think I may have sighed aloud. (Apple wrote “Criminal” when she was 17 and maybe that says something: that my music appreciation is stuck at that age.) The song, about how bad she felt for getting things so easily by virtue of her sexuality, recently resurfaced in Hustlers, with Jennifer Lopez making her entrance as stripper doyenne to Apple’s adolescent croon, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” That was another piece of popular culture that was unanimously praised that I was only so-so about. The difference is that I felt no tension there. I know films, and I could explain why I didn’t like Hustlers much. Because of that, because I had a reason, I allowed myself to dislike it. And until my editor mentioned it, I didn’t think that had anything to do with my gender. But now I’m starting to think it does — men never seem to require permission to opine, they don’t feel the need to be informed to do so. Which is not to say I shouldn’t — it’s to say they should. Because it means meeting a piece of art halfway, respecting the spirit in which it was made, and respecting the artist who made it.
As much as I continue to feel dissatisfied with my response to Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I’m less troubled after speaking to Wilson and researching Apple herself. ARolling Stone profile from 1998 reminded me that when she was a kid, she carried around this quote by Martha Graham: “No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” It’s the same quote I usedin a column last August. And according to her New Yorker profile from March, Apple continues to display a photograph of Graham on her piano, the one she played on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. So even if I couldn’t connect to that album, I could, in a way, connect to the woman behind it, another isolated artist, unrested, just trying to keep marching.
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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.
Julia Wick 
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