Search Results for: Slate

When It Comes to the Climate Crisis, Don’t Forget the Power of the States

Photo by Juniper Photon, Icons by Greer Mosher

Livia Gershon | Longreads | November 2019 | 7 minutes (1,863 words)

My family’s natural gas-fired furnace is 23 years old. That’s aged; the average lifespan of a system like ours is 15 to 20 years. I live in New Hampshire, which gets awfully cold in the winter and, every October, I wonder whether we’ll make it to March. If the furnace fails this year and we replace it with another one like it, we’re committing to burning fossil fuels until about 2042. If my household switches to electricity, which is better for the environment than what we’ve got, our gas bills will nearly double, to around $2,800 every year. Recently, I called Bill Wenzel, who owns a geothermal heating business the next town over from me.

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Why Lhasa de Sela Matters

Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)

 

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

 

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

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Influence: Who Gains It and Who Wields It and Who Abuses It

View from above young couple with smart phones photographing food in cafe
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On our November 8, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-Checking Matt Giles, Books Editor Dana Snitzky, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and working on.

This week, the editors discuss the fate of Deadspin, the uncanny canon of Wakefield Press, and recent stories on Airbnb and influencers.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:30 What Happened to Deadspin, According to the People Who Were There (Stefan Fatsis and Josh Levin, November 5, 2019, Slate)

10:40 I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb (Allie Conti, October 31, 2019, Vice)

19:35 Whitney Houston’s Longtime Confidante Breaks Her Silence (Jon Caramanica, November 7, 2019, The New York Times)

23:14 Under the Influence: White Lies (Soraya Roberts, October 2019, Longreads)

29:51 Dana’s Book Corner: Wakefield Press

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), oil on canvas, Henri Rousseau, 1891. (Imagno/Getty Images)

Adam Morgan | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,861 words)

 

The deceptively slim Reinhardt’s Garden, Mark Haber’s astonishing novella, is composed of a single paragraph, one that meanders across 150 pages and several hemispheres, from the ramparts of an oddly constructed German castle (it’s full of fake walls and trap doors) to a fictional jungle in Uruguay (Uruguay is, in actuality, a country of rolling hills called the Pampas). At the center of this web of fun-house geographies and architectures, lost in that fictional jungle in the year 1907, Croatian scholar and megalomaniac Jacov Reinhardt is searching for his lifelong obsession — not a city of gold or a fountain of youth, like in the doomed adventurers of Aguirre, the Wrath of God or The Lost City of Z, but a man: Emiliano Gomez Carasquilla, “a lost philosopher of melancholy” last seen somewhere in Colombia or Brazil. Melancholy, as Jacov’s long-suffering servant (and the book’s narrator) explains, is “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either,” an elusive emotion Jacov has pursued to the ends of the earth. Read more…

As Impossible and Imperfect as Translation

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In this beautiful and poignant essay at Guernica, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Last month, my mother recited Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to me on the phone. I stopped in the middle of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn as she stumbled over the word prairie. I imagined her tongue working to shape those foreign sounds. My mother immigrated to the United States more than thirty years ago, but she has always felt self-conscious about her second language, with its hard r’s and supple l’s. “My friend suggested reading poetry in English to improve my vocabulary, since I write poetry too,” she explained in Korean.

She asked me how to pronounce words she didn’t know—despair, prairie, unrelenting. I repeated them after her, slow and then fast, with definitions and without. We talked about rhythm, image, the deceptive simplicity of Mary Oliver’s lines.

I wanted to weep. My mother and I primarily communicate in Korean, and we rarely talk about literature. We have a complicated relationship, but in that moment, I felt a new closeness—rooted not in the inextricable tie of family, but in choice. I have an immediate affinity for others who have committed to the impossible act of writing.

The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency. I worried. Should I adhere to the words or the rhythms, to the sound or the meaning? Should the poem feel smooth in the translated language, or retain some of the syntactical markers of its original?

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Can We Ever Make It Suntory Time Again?

Keith Bishop / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,939 words)

Bic Camera looked like many of the other loud, brightly colored electronics stores I’d seen in Japan, just bigger. Mostly, it was a respite from the cold. The appliances and electronics that jammed its interior gave no indication of its dizzyingly good liquor selection, nor did the many inexpensive aged Japanese whiskies hint that affordable bottles were about to become a thing of the past, or that I’d nurture a profound remorse once they did. When I found Bic Camera’s wholly unexpected liquor department, I lifted two bottles of high-end Japanese whisky from the shelf, wandered the aisles studying the labels, had a baffling interaction with a clerk, and put the bottles back on the shelf. All I had to do was pay for them. I didn’t.

Commercial Japanese whisky has been around since at least 1929, so during my first trip to Japan (and at home in the U.S.), there was no reason to think that all the aged Japanese whiskies that were readily available in the early 2000s would soon achieve holy grail status. In 2007, there were $100 bottles of Yamazaki 18-year sitting forlornly on a shelf at my local BevMo. One bottle now sells for more than $400 at online auctions; some online stores sell them for $700.

Yoichi 10, Yoichi 12, Hibiki 17 and 21, Taketsuru 12 and 17 — in 2014, rare and discontinued bottles lined store shelves, reasonably priced compared to their current $300 to $600 price tags. Those were great years. I call them BTB — before the boom. Before the boom, a bottle of Yamazaki 12 cost $60. After the boom, a Seattle liquor store priced their last bottle of Yamazaki 12 at $225. Before the boom, Taketsuru 12 cost $20 in Japan and $70 in the States. After the boom, online auctions sell bottles for more than $220.

Before the boom, Karuizawa casks sat, dusty and abandoned, in shuttered distilleries. After the boom, a bottle of Karuizawa 1964 sold for $118,420, the most expensive Japanese whisky ever sold at auction, until a Yamazaki 50 sold for $129,186 the following year, then another went for $343,000 15 months later.

Before the boom, whisky tasted of rich red fruits and cereal grains. After the boom, it tasted of regret.

I’ve spent the past five years wishing I could do things over. I remember my trips to Japan fondly — the new friends, the food and record stores, the Kyoto temples and solitary hikes — except for the whisky, whose absence coats my mouth with the proverbial bitter taste. I replay the time I walked into a grocery store in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood and found a shelf lined with Taketsuru 12, four bottles wide and four deep, at $20 apiece; it starts at $170 now. I look at the photos I took of Hibiki 12 for $34, Yoichi 12 for $69, Taketsuru 21 for $89. I tell friends how I’d visited the Isetan Department Store’s liquor department in Shinjuku, where they had a 12-year-old sherried Karuizawa bottled exclusively for Isetan for barely more than $100, alongside a blend of Hanyu and Kawaski grain whisky that famed distiller Ichiro Akuto did exclusively for the store. Staff wouldn’t let me photograph or touch anything, but I could have afforded both bottles. They now sell for $1,140 and $1,290, respectively. I torture myself by revisiting my unfortunate logic, how I squandered my limited funds: buying inexpensive bottles to drink during the trip, instead of a few big-ticket purchases to take home.

Aaron, I’ve thought more times that I could count, you are such a fucking idiot.

To time travel, I look at photos of old Japanese whisky bottles in Facebook groups, like they are some sort of beverage porn, and wonder: Who am I? What have I become? There’s enough incredible scotch available here at home. Why do I — and the others whose interest spiked prices and made the bottles we loved inaccessible — care so much about Japanese whisky? Read more…

The Corpse Rider

Yūrei from Bakemono Zukushi (Monster Scroll), artist unknown, c. 1700. Wikimedia Commons.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,729 words)

“The daimyō’s wife was dying, and knew that she was dying.” So begins Lafcadio Hearn’s uneasy and unsettling ghost story, “Ingwa-Banashi,” gathered first in his 1899 collection, In Ghostly Japan, and republished this year in a new Penguin Classics anthology edited by Paul Murray. As the daimyō explains to his wife that she is dying and preparing to leave “this burning-house of the world,” he offers her any final rites she may request. She asks him to summon one of his concubines, the nineteen year-old Yukiko, whom, she reminds him, she loves like a sister.

Yukiko arrives, and the dying woman tells her that one day she will rise in rank and be made the honored wife of the daimyō, a fortune that the low-born Yukiko cannot believe. As her last request, the daimyō’s wife asks Yukiko to carry her out to the courtyard to see a cherry tree in bloom — obligingly, Yukiko lowers her back and allows the old woman to wrap her arms around her, to carry her. Once she has grasped hold of Yukiko, though, the old woman laughs, clutches tight, and, with her dying breath tells Yukiko: “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom — but not the cherry-bloom of the garden! … I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it! — oh, what a delight!” Read more…

Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith

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Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (5,214 words)

 

I first became aware of Cameron Dezen Hammon during a group reading at Powell’s when she filled in for Alexander Chee at the last moment. Lithe and ridiculously hip, her voice as smooth as glass, as soon as she started speaking, I was mesmerized. Cameron read from the first chapter of her book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession in which, as worship leader for an evangelical megachurch, she’s guiding the congregation through the flashy funeral of a young girl. Increasingly conflicted about her role as a woman within the church Cameron writes, “We’re both objects in this space, the eighteen-year-old girl and me, two different kinds of painted dolls. We are lit and arranged and positioned to scaffold the belief that women are to be seen in specific, prescribed ways.”

When I finally got my hands on the galleys several months later, I remained enthralled. Cameron’s prose is lean, whittled, spectacularly exact. Yet her world is achingly alive. At twenty-six, a half-Jewish New Yorker, Cameron is baptized into a charismatic evangelicalism in the frigid waters of Coney Island’s Atlantic Ocean during a lightning storm. Soon she’s speaking in tongues and giving testimony and feeling as if she’s, at last, found family. A gifted and ambitious singer, she falls in love with a fellow musician, Matt, and they settle in Texas where they have a child; together they become more and more immersed in various evangelical churches — even serving as missionaries for several months in Budapest — until Cameron and her magnificent voice move up the ranks to worship pastor. Read more…

The Final Five Percent

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Tim Requarth| Longreads | October 2019 | 27 minutes (6,723 words)

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

When the motorcycle accident dealt my brother’s brain an irreversible blow, he and his wife were living in their newly purchased farmhouse on the fringes of suburban Chicago. Conway* had been waiting to move out of the city’s inner-ring suburbs for years, and each morning on the forested property he woke up exuberant. Shortly after moving in, he built an extraordinary tree house some 60 feet in the air, spanning two trees, with sliding joists under the floor to accommodate sway and a hammock to lie in during sunsets. He loved riding his motorcycle, and before work he’d sometimes take his bike out for a spin on the open roads just a few miles away. His wife, Caroline, loved antiques, and the area was full of shops. They were in their 50s and living in a house they planned to grow old in together. Then, after dinner on a fall day in 2007, Conway hopped on his Harley Softail Classic to go buy ice cream and cigarettes. A drunk driver barreled into him. Conway’s left femur snapped and his skull struck the traffic-warmed asphalt, splattering blood all the way to the road’s shoulder. 

Conway’s body was battered, but the real threat, the injury warranting a helicopter ride to the closest hospital with a neurosurgeon on call, was a hemorrhage beneath the subarachnoid membrane, a thin sheath of triple-helixed collagen fibers intertwined with blood vessels that protects the brain’s private chemical harbor of cerebrospinal fluid from the open waters of the body’s blood. The sons of a doctor ourselves, my brother and I had heard stories about neurosurgeons called in at midnight, and those stories didn’t have happy endings.

In the weeks after the accident, I watched Conway wake, recognize familiar faces, and begin to walk. Some signs of progress were cause for celebration; other developments were more worrisome. He’d rarely ever raised his voice at Caroline, but now he called her a “worthless cunt” and a “bitch.” He was lewd to the nurses, exposing himself and laughing. When a speech therapist gently reminded him that she would return for another session later that afternoon, Conway retorted, “No you won’t, because I’ll be fucking you in my van outside!”

At first, the doctors assured us that this inappropriate behavior was a passing recovery phase of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The lewd remarks eventually subsided, but his behavior took another ominous turn. “He always had a wild streak,” Caroline told me. It’s true that before the accident, Conway had loved flouting the rules. He’d cut across an empty park on his motorcycle to avoid traffic, or build a towering bonfire in his backyard for kicks. “But there was no violence,” she said. After the accident, Conway flew into rages so vicious the hospital staff put a cage over his bed to contain him. When he finally left the hospital, Conway attempted to return to his former life, but he struggled to run his business and pay the bills. He and Caroline’s marriage began to fray. Hopes for a full recovery waned, and eventually Conway’s neuropsychologist confirmed our fears that the personality change might be permanent. “He’s recovered 95 percent brain function,” she said, “But the final 5 percent, it might never return.” Read more…