Search Results for: Spin

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

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This Is How You Lose Your Mind

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dani Fleischer | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,731 words)

There’s no single answer to the question of why I lose my mind at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. There are just things that happen over the years, and those things accumulate over time, and those accumulations finally break me. Like the crack of a whip, it’s loud and startling, and it feels like it comes out of nowhere.

It doesn’t.

***

I spend my whole life aiming for academic perfection, starting when I am 10 — the year my father tanks another job and my parents move me and my older sisters down to New Jersey from upstate New York. It’s the second time in a decade they’ve made that particular move, under eerily similar conditions: a lost job, a desperate reach, an uprooted family.

But there’s another condition too — a preexisting one that comes before anything else I can remember: this strange suspicion I have that I am somehow deficient. Being the new kid in 5th grade only exacerbates this vague and amorphous feeling of not-enoughness. It makes me painfully quiet at school and slow to make friends.

Each morning, during journal-writing time, I ask for the blue laminated bathroom pass and go to the bathroom, to the last stall on the right, and I cry. I’m not even sure why I’m crying but I know it has something to do with the sadness that’s bundled up inside me. Nobody ever told me it would be this lonely, I keep thinking. Then, after a few minutes, I pick the blue index card off the dirty tile floor, splash some water on my face, and return to class. It’s a secret ritual that goes on for months.

Then this happens: I become the first 5th grader who can properly fill out a map of all 50 states, and something temporarily replaces that not-enoughness. I don’t even know what it is exactly, but the urge to steal away to a bathroom subsides for the week, and I spend the rest of the year chasing that feeling. State capitals, vocabulary words like doldrums and oxymoron, letters to Elie Wiesel: there’s so much to try to be the best at, and that pursuit carries me straight into summer. It turns out to be a good year for me. I adapt. I make friends, get straight A’s, and begin to feel comfortable in Jersey.

A few days before 6th grade starts, I find out that we’re moving back upstate again. The reasoning my parents give is muddled: the house upstate never sold, and Mom doesn’t like living so close to her mother. I begin to wonder about how the decisions shaping my life are being made.

I return upstate and bring with me the comfort of academic perfection. School becomes the perfect closed system, a way to quantify my worth, and for a long time that system serves me well. I’m good at it and it seems as good as anything else by which to define myself; it’s rigid and unforgiving, and it doesn’t account for my own humanity. The perfect vehicle for self-destruction: something that feels like control, but isn’t. A car speeding down an icy highway late at night.

I spend high school grinding away at perfection and show myself no mercy when I graduate second in my class. I still get to make a speech at graduation, which is nice. I quote Rilke and people congratulate me and I feel smart, even as I continue to eviscerate myself for not being first.

I get into a good college.
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Borrowed Babies

Archival photographs courtesy of the New York State College of Home Economics records, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Jill Christman | Iron Horse Literary Review | Spring 2013 | 41 minutes (8,219 words)

 

Cooking, the science of foods, budget-making, house beautifying, dressmaking and a knowledge of textiles, all of these subjects have been considered essential to the teaching of home economics but the art of babies has until this late date been left to theory, and Providence. Now, however, schools of home economics are adding a new branch of study to their curriculum—practical mothercraft. —“Apprenticing for Motherhood,” Today’s Housewife (July 1924)

 

Just weeks after the level-two ultrasound, almost five months pregnant, I booked a ticket to Syracuse, New York, where I was to pick up a rental at the airport and drive up to Ithaca. I had a grant to do research in the human ecology archives of the Cornell library, and I was scheduled to be there for three weeks. Alone. Ithaca is lovely in the summer, I told myself, and archives are like treasure hunts for nerdy people.

I should have been giddy with anticipation, but I was not. I was miserable and terrified and lonely. I didn’t want to go. Now, I recognize this as one of the most unstable times of my life, hormonally speaking, and with all of the chemical changes happening inside my body, I couldn’t cope with change on the outside. I wanted to hunker down. I wanted a box of Wheat Thins, some lemonade with fizzy water, my couch, my dogs, my husband Mark, and another episode of The Baby Story. 

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My Brown Dad Voted for Trump

Illustration by Carson McNamara

Anjoli Roy | Longreads | November 2019 | 28 minutes (6,945 words)

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to make sense of my Southern-drawling, Tar Heels–loving, fiscally conservative, immigrant from India, gyno, deeply loving dad of three daughters. There have been some strange contradictions. When my sisters and I were little and our parents were still together, he and our mom would drop us off at Sunday school at a nondenominational Christian church in our hometown of Pasadena, CA, while they skipped service and went who knows where, enjoying the free babysitting. When I was 14 and he found out my friends were having sex, he gave me birth control pills to “help with my acne.” He answered my friends’ and my questions about bodily pathologies oftentimes connected to sex without judgment and always with a professionalism that told me I could count on him. But, for most of our childhoods, he was traveling on the lecture circuit. It wasn’t until I was an adult that he became more than the scruffy cheek kissing us goodbye in our sleep, or the dry-cleaned suits encased in soft plastic sleeves hanging on an empty door frame, not to be disturbed. Until then, he was the grumpy, tired person I mostly avoided on the rare occasions he was home. He was the distant guy my middle sister Maya and I drew countless pictures for, of shoes with a plus sign and then a bee — a visual representation of how to pronounce his name, Subi — which he’d hang dutifully in his office at county hospital.

Today, my dad, the source of our brownness, is a marker of how I understand myself. I grew up the lightest of my dad’s three girls — the one who looked least like him. Maybe that’s why I reach for him so much: I don’t want to get swallowed up with Mom’s side of the family, locked in with the white folks. I have learned to subject him to the same critiques I aim at my own body. In some ways, his story is my story. Sometimes, it feels like we’re both half-told, bleeding onto blank pages.

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The Speaking Length

Illustration by Fabio Consoli

Josh Roiland | Longreads | November, 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I once lived in Delaware for two days. I had moved there under the pretext of graduate school, but soon fled back to Minnesota amidst the clanging static of a panic attack.

The morning of the move my car had a flat. Once the tire was patched, I headed east with an atlas and not much of a plan. After 15 hours, I stopped in a Walmart parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, and tried to sleep in my overstuffed car. At dawn, I pushed through the Ohio River Valley and emerged in Newark, Delaware, seven hours later.

It was my first time outside the Midwest.

I had booked my apartment online, and when I arrived, I saw that it sat next to a fire station. Inside, there was a woman painting my walls and singing songs from The Wizard of Oz. I unloaded my car as she packed up and left. My only furniture was an air mattress with a hand pump whose nozzle was too small for its opening.

Once my car was empty, and my apartment slightly less so, I stood surrounded by wet paint and cried. I scared myself by the force of everything pouring from me. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

I tried to stay busy, distract myself from everything that was to come — whatever that may be. I went to Kmart. Because I was traveling, I thought I needed traveler’s checks. I paid for my home supplies with 15 10-dollar notes. The cashier had to call an 800-number to verify each one. The line grew while his patience shrank. My chest tightened. I fled back to my apartment where I plugged a random coaxial cable into my 13” television. I watched the Food Network until I passed out. In the morning, I awoke on the floor with the air mattress folded up around me.

***

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the “speaking length.” Preconscious, my feet knock together like boxers’ gloves. I lay there shimmering as pulses push me up off the bed, where I hover and tremble. Stretched tight across the bridge, I glint and wink like a snap of sunlight.

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the ‘speaking length.’

Or at least that’s what it feels like to wake up in the thrall of anxiety. I crackle and can’t communicate what’s going on, where these vibrations are coming from.

***

Day two in Delaware began with the rounded whine of fire trucks. I showered behind my new vinyl shower curtain then left for the grocery store where the briny stench of fresh seafood shocked my Midwestern sensitivity. I found a bank and set up an account. I went to the post office and bought stamps.

But the truth is that I was already plotting my escape.

That afternoon I went to campus and stood in front of my English department mailbox. Having seen what I would leave, I left. I went back to my apartment, which had transmogrified from alien to comforting. Everything was shape-shifting.


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The evening stretched and sprinted. I circled through my apartment, too afraid to leave but desperate not to stay. With everything unfamiliar and nothing certain, I didn’t know what to do. What were my options? Once again, I stood with my arms wrapped around myself, digging my fingernails into my triceps.

I called my dad. My sobs scared him, and he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Well,” he finally said. “You can always come home.”

My car was packed before I hung up the phone.

Then, just before I left Delaware forever, my phone rang. A returning grad student called to welcome me and invite me out for a beer. I stood there in my again-empty living room, holding the phone, not knowing what to say.

***

The stories we tell are never wholly our own. Words, and the stories they create, have their own history, and we all work within their limits. Writers and speakers, all of us, constantly reorder and encode new meaning in what has already been said. Our words, as the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin put it, are always “half someone else’s.” This phenomenon came to be known as “metadiscourse.”

One reason we tell stories is so others can understand what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling. But often we misunderstand a basic premise, believing that the communicative norm is transparency when, in fact, it’s opacity. What is meant never fully transmits into what is understood. Linguists call this false belief the myth of perfect understanding.

The stories we tell are never wholly our own.

As much as we may desire to control both the narrative and its reception, meaning is always contingent and never inherent. There is no such thing, Bahktin says, as “neutral and impersonal language.” We merely offer, in the words of Bahktin scholars, “endless redescriptions of the world.”

***

I first saw a therapist early in my second bout with a Ph.D. There’d been break-ups, and I once again felt dislodged from everything I thought I knew. But the counselor and I had a great rapport to the point where he questioned why I was even there. He thought my hyperventilating about certain regrets and uncertainties was overmuch. Though I shared and shared, I could not get him to understand exactly what was going on inside of me.

Nearly every session, in an effort to make me feel better, he’d joke: “So what’s wrong with you again?”

Nonetheless, I went on to see a psychiatrist, and then another, in an effort to better explain myself. Or have myself explained to me. OCD? Bipolar? Plain old depression? Who could tell? Regardless, medications were prescribed and ingested. Klonopin for acute anxiety. Zoloft for depression. Then Effexor when the Zoloft didn’t work.

There was little oversight with these scripts, and I experienced all the ignominious side effects without much psychic relief. When I told the doctor that the Klonopin didn’t seem to quell any sudden panic, she said it was because of my high metabolism and urged me to up the dosage until I felt OK.

Then one night, I was carried out of a bar.

***

A few years ago, I gave a public talk about my mental health. Its title, “Almost Aloud,” was a line clipped from the short story “Good Old Neon,” by David Foster Wallace. For years I had researched and written about the history of Wallace’s nonfiction, and the talk’s nominal hook was describing what it was like to work in his archive.

My first-ever publication argued that Wallace’s journalism lacked what Nietzsche called “oblivion” — the psychic ability to filter good self-consciousness from bad. The piece somehow ended up wedged between some famous authors in an anthology. Essentially, though, I just mapped my own experience onto Wallace’s work, and it happened they overlapped.

And so it was that six months into a tenure-track job, I nervously told an audience of colleagues, neighbors, and friends how working on Wallace activated my own anxiety. Or was it that my already-activated anxiety was an a priori factor in my interest in Wallace’s work? How to tell?

I began the talk:

For me the sound of anxiety is silence. It’s an empty room where I sit, alone, and all I can hear are my thoughts, which quietly insist themselves upon me, both unbidden and unwanted. And after a time, a time when I get up and walk through other empty rooms, only to return, and get up and return, those thoughts begin to take the same shape as that recursive path through my apartment. Looping endlessly, relentlessly.

For six minutes I guided the audience through these seemingly overlapping maps. When I mentioned Wallace’s suicide — an act he himself described in Infinite Jest as “eliminating your map” — there was an audible gasp, then dead silence for several minutes.

I ended the talk darkly. I wanted to convey a desperation, even a resignation at the whole intellectual endeavor. At the absurdity of speaking and writing and teaching. Where did all that thinking, all those words get you anyhow? I closed with the last sentence from “Good Old Neon” — the only way, it seemed to me, to control a feral mind: “Not another word.”

Looking back, I misread that story completely.

***

I haven’t slept through the night in decades. Melatonin, meditation, booze, Benadryl — they’ve all pulled me under, but invariably my mind burns through the restraints and I surface. When I’m marooned in the middle of the night, legs scissoring and feet belting back and forth, I turn to all manner of sleep apps and ambient music. The song I come back to over and over again is “DLP 3,” by the avant-garde musician William Basinski. It is one of nine songs on his five-hour, four-record album The Disintegration Loops.

Writing in Pitchfork, Mark Richardson tells the album’s origin story:

In the 1980s, [Basinski] constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle.

The Disintegration Loops are literally disintegrating loops. They erode as you listen to them. The change from one revolution to the next is imperceptible, but the tape is falling apart. Each pass, a redescription of the past.

“DLP 3” is 42 minutes long. The loop, a three-note horn fugue that pushes forward over a ghost march before sucking back in on itself, is only eight seconds long. It repeats 310 times. My fibrillating mind trains on its respiratory rhythm.

Turning and turning, the song softly transforms from hypnotic to unsettling. The gradations are subtle, but the crackles widen and a buzzy silence fills the perforations. If I don’t fall asleep during its first half, I’m worse off than when I laid down. My mind catches on the crepitates and recollects all that I tried to cast off, like a needle dredging dust with each revolution of a record.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

***

A decade after my first foray into therapy, I tried it again. Academia had drawn me back to the East Coast and all of its familiar dislocations. Soon, a much more substantial break-up left me unmoored. My therapist gave me language to understand these upheavals, but when those words miscarried, she suggested medication.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

I met with a psych nurse and explained how meds hadn’t worked for me in the past. She suggested a genetic test. While I awaited the results of my cheek swabs, I started Lexapro. It did nothing. Six weeks later my GeneSight results came in. It sorted drugs into three categories: 1. Use As Directed; 2. Moderate Gene-Drug Interaction; and 3. Significant Gene-Drug Interaction. Many of my previously prescribed psychotropic medications were listed under the third category — meaning they were essentially incompatible. Below the drug columns were numbered notes headlined, “Clinical Considerations.” One referenced a high metabolic rate; another read: “Serum level may be too low, higher doses may be required.”

I was encouraged by these explanations.

My university health insurance, however, wouldn’t cover the test. The American Psychiatric Association says the science behind using biomarkers as a diagnostic tool is inconclusive. GeneSight’s website itself acknowledges these interpretive limits: “Psychiatric pharmacogenomics does not have an individual genetic marker or causative gene like is often typical in molecular diagnostic testing. … Instead of diagnosing the bimodal presence or absence of a disease state, the GeneSight test predicts patient response to medication.”

A year after starting Cymbalta, I finally felt I had a floor when I fell. But it did not eliminate the worry and doubt. I tried explaining to a friend the difference between my outward appearance and inward feeling; the incongruity between medication and the persistence of depressive symptoms.

“I guess that’s what makes it difficult to understand,” she said. “Because you have so many relationships and people to lean on and care about, and who care for you. But it’s so deeply seeded inside of you. I’m very sad about that, Josh.”

***

My life has nearly doubled since Delaware. The tenure track job’s gone. As are those colleagues and friends. Health insurance, medication, my retirement—none of it’s left. All stories too difficult to tell, yet harder still not to explain.

I now live in a camper, parked in the same driveway I departed two decades ago. The future feels weightier today than then, carrying everything that once was and the understanding of what can never again be. The strings still vibrate, louder sometimes than others, but I’ve learned, if not wholly accepted, that this is life. Or my life anyway.

A few weeks after I came home again, my dad nearly died in front of me. He’d recently been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and one day after lunch I followed him as he walked to his bedroom to take a nap. Climbing into bed he looked at me and said, “Here it comes.” His heart slowed to a near-stop, and he began gasping for breath.

Since then, my dad, sister, and I have spent countless hours in hospital rooms genuflecting to doctors as they dispense diagnoses, which stirs complicated feelings for an unemployed Ph.D. whose own work never resonated with his father.

I’ve filled my reporter’s notebook with words I never thought I’d know: Ejection fraction. Asystole. Metoprolol. Amiodarone. Cardioversion. As I sit there asking questions and taking notes — grasping for agency — I worry that someone is going to ask me what I do for a living.

No one, of course, does, preferring instead to lightly fill in the blanks themselves. During our third visit to the heart clinic, a two-hour drive away, my dad’s cardiologist again observed my constant scribbling and said, “Josh is writing a novel over here with all his notes.” Everyone laughed. Then he doubled down: “Josh is like a historian!”

As misbegotten as faith ever is, hospitals can engender hope with their clear-eyed promise of science to diagnose, explain, and treat. They can offer a map. In my dad’s case, recovery has meant a CRT-D implant, a suite of medication, and cardiac rehabilitation.

Three days a week I drive him, in his pickup, to a rehab clinic where he pedals on an elliptical bike for 40 minutes, while I sit in the back of the room and record his weight and blood pressures. The nurses and other patients regard me benignly. They think I’m a college student, home for the summer.

It takes us a half hour to get to the clinic, and we don’t really say much on the way there or back. Sometimes, on the way home, we stop for ice cream.

My dad is months removed from the fainting spells and physical restrictions that catalyzed my chauffeuring in the first place. He’s returned to his routine drives by himself every afternoon and evening to look at crops, talk to friends, and go fishing. But every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:50 a.m. we head out to the truck, and he climbs into the passenger seat.

Sometimes I want to ask him why he still has me drive him to these sessions. But then, what really could he say?

* * *

Josh Roiland is a writer living in western Minnesota. He last wrote about Jonathan Richman’s mid-career hiatus to Maine for Popula.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Steven Cohen
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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

View from above young couple with smart phones photographing food in cafe
Getty Images

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…

Whose Boots on the Ground

military boots against the background of small identical tombstones
Illustration by Homestead Studio

Kiley Bense | Longreads | November 2019 | 14 minutes (3,580 words)

 

What I notice are the boots: two pairs in worn black leather, lined up beneath a bookcase, their heels pressed against the turquoise-painted baseboard. They look as if their owner had stowed them there in one careless motion, after yanking them off his feet. The toes of one pair turn slightly into each other, just kissing, and the others face off-kilter toward the corner of the room.

This room is a shrine made by freezing the contents of a life in time. It belonged to a French soldier, Hubert Rochereau, who was killed during World War I at the age of 22. His parents sealed off his bedroom intact, and when they sold the house the deed included a stipulation that the new owners leave the room untouched for 500 years.

The wallpaper in the room is a pale pink-and-white stripe, the bedspread a fading snowflake-patterned lace. The books have cloth covers and paper labels taped over their spines. There are framed photographs on the shelf, and on the desk sit an iron-wrought key and a tarnished pipe. A tattered soldier’s coat hangs beside the desk, all its brass buttons dulled with age, the blue fabric fraying.

I got stuck on those boots and on this room vibrating with the memory of a man gone more than a century, because here was a memorial for a soldier that didn’t erase him as an individual: a young man with a serious gaze and dark hair.

When we remember our war dead, we often do so en masse. We visit fields where rows of white headstones radiate outward in straight lines, touching the horizon. We pin red poppies to our lapels and stick yellow ribbons to our bumpers, hoping to express our collective grief. We hold a minute of silence, or two, marking thousands of vanished souls with an absence of sound. We leave a wreath at the base of a monument inscribed with so many names that it would be impossible to linger on any one of them, let alone understand and feel the pain that each of their deaths meant to those they left behind.

Last month, at a rally in Minnesota, as he talked about his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, Donald Trump invoked the deaths of service members and his own feelings about meeting their families as they waited to greet the coffins of their loved ones at Dover Air Force Base. He called visits there “a very tough experience.” “We meet them, and we talked to them, and their son or daughter is being flown in from some far away place in a coffin, and these things are just impossible. I don’t know how parents can do it, even […] I see parents make sounds, that were just 20 minutes ago absolutely fine, make sounds, scream and cry like you’ve never seen before,” he said. Trump noted how surprised he was by this display of emotion, how he hadn’t expected it because the mourners seemed “okay” before the caskets arrived. He didn’t mention any of the families or soldiers by name.
Read more…

Walking Across California

Image by Kevin Bosc, Counterpoint Publishing

Nick Neely | Alta California | Counterpoint | November 2019 | 49 minutes (9,706 words)

 

Evening approached as I strolled west, back toward the ocean, past San Luis Rey’s trailer parks and down the river levee’s bike path, vaguely looking for a place to camp or simply reassurance that there would be a place to camp if I walked a few more miles. The river channel was a bottomland of scrub, deadwood, and patches of sand, with larger cottonwoods shivering, a revelation of groundwater. Hard to imagine a flood in this dry land that would warrant a levee of this size, but history must justify it. Several figures in a culvert raised my guard as I first approached the levee, but it was only three kids with their pit bull, sharing a joint.

In the distance, parachutists were swinging in descent. Camp Pendleton marines, I thought at first, but the base was north of the river, beyond a ridge. These were just civilians falling toward the Oceanside Municipal Airport for a thrill and the evening view. On Benet Road I crossed the river, seeing on my phone’s screen another dotted line, a trail, one that might be less traveled. Maybe I could camp there. Past the driveway to Prince of Peace Abbey, past a scrapyard with battered cars piled up, I came to a sign where the road dead-ended: No Trespassing — Area Patrolled. A man was changing the oil of his old vehicle just there. When I asked if anybody went down that way, his mumbles were unintelligible, but my impression was, No, it was a bad idea. A semitruck idled nearby with its driver hidden behind tinted glass. Feeling a little desperate, I turned around. Read more…

B is for Bastard

Illustration by Joe Waldron

Brian Gresko | Longreads | November 2019 | 19 minutes (4,752 words)

1.

In seventh grade Ms. Applegate tells us what the word bastard means. (I have no idea now why this was relevant to the lesson, I only recall the defining of the word itself.) “A child born out of wedlock,” she says with arch authority from behind her desk. “The church doesn’t approve of such things.”

I startle in my seat, in the center row, about halfway back. She lifts a grey eyebrow and meets my gaze. “If you were born a bastard and baptized in the Catholic Church, it’s a sin. A mortal sin. For you and your parents, too. Of course, I’m sure none of you have to worry about that.”

I swear she’s speaking right to me, with a smirk on her lips. I’m sure she knows — that my reaction gave it away, or else she’d heard about it somehow. Maybe she can read minds.

Ms. Applegate is not like other teachers I’ve had at Visitation Elementary School. She cracks jokes, sometimes ones that go over our heads but which cause her to cackle. Throughout the day a small clique of the more lively teachers on the middle school floor lean in our doorway to chat or trade barbs while we silently complete pages in our workbook. When we’re done with our lessons, Ms. Applegate lines us up on opposite sides of the room for competitive spelling bees or trivia quizzes. She tells me I’m the smartest kid in the class but the worst test taker, words I take with me into high school like a prophecy, and she says I’m book smart but lack common sense. My dad says the same thing. And like him, she doesn’t pull any punches. The next year she won’t return — during the summer she’ll elope with her boyfriend, a practice which the nuns who run our Catholic school don’t approve of, and so they fire her. The church only accepts marriages conducted by the clergy.

This word, “bastard,” enthralls me. I’ve heard my dad use it, and read it in a Stephen King novel or two. I thought it referred to a bad person. But no, that’s me, I think on the bus ride home. That’s a word for what I am: a bastard.

After snack and Ducktales I hit my desk for homework. When Mom stops in to check on me I tell her. “Today the teacher told us this word,” I say. “For kids born out of wedlock.”

Like me, I almost say, but the words run the wrong way in my throat.

In a snap her whole face changes, the flesh falling toward the floor, like she’s taken off a mask and revealed her true self. Her cheeks hollow out, and spots of red blossom in their valleys. She perches on the edge of my bed, hands gripping the quilt for stability. She’s gone frail.

“And what word is that?” she says.

I’m curious about her reaction. Not the way a cat might be with a mouse, more like testing the waters, determining if they’re safe to wade into. She must know the word and why it’s significant to me, but I’m not going to say it if she doesn’t say it.

“I can’t remember. The word starts with…. a B, I think?”

Mom appears to be trying to eat the inside of her cheek. “And what did she say about this word?”

“That kids born like that, when their parents aren’t married, shouldn’t be baptized. And if they are, it’s a sin. Like, a mortal sin.”

She’s got that faraway look in her eyes; she’s on my bed in body only, I don’t know where her mind has gone. It’s clear to me now: these waters are not safe ones. They go deep and teem with monsters. Finally she asks, “Do you believe that?”

I shrug. This is well before I tell her I’m not sure I believe any of the shit they tell us at that school. “It’s what they say, I guess.”

She nods. “Well, if you think of the word, let me know.”

This word, ‘bastard,’ enthralls me. I’ve heard my dad use it, and read it in a Stephen King novel or two. I thought it referred to a bad person.

She heads across the hall to her bedroom and closes the door. I hear her murmuring on the phone with someone, as she does a few times a week. Again I shrug, this time to myself. Who she calls or what she talks about behind that closed door is a mystery to me, another secret.

At this point, I think it’s been three, maybe four years since my parents told me that my mom became pregnant with me when she was young and unmarried, and that her current husband, the man I call Dad, is not my biological dad. Aside from revealing this to me one night before bed, this is the closest we’ve ever come to talking about it.

That’s not to say I haven’t thought about it, though, over the years. And had feelings about it too.
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