Search Results for: Telegraph

Did the Modern Novel Kill Charles Bovary?

Imagno / Getty, Heritage / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,602 words)

 

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There were three of them involved in the Bovary marriage to begin with: Charles Bovary, a mediocre doctor and husband, used to being woken up in the middle of the night to set a plaster or secure a tooth in the French countryside; Emma Bovary, reader of great novels and writer of promissory notes, who sneaked away to sleep with other men as soon as her husband left for work; and Gustave Flaubert, the thirty-five-year-old writer of Madame Bovary, morally repugnant, syphilis-infected bourgeois who hated the bourgeoisie for their stupidity. As in all marriages destined for failure, there were sides to be taken. With Madame Bovary began the modern novel; on her side was the virtue of being a pioneer, of being the first in a hundred-and-sixty-year-old model, the precursor to many great novels written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stories of her adultery became sensational and her resistance to the boredom of living aspirational. For Emma could do no wrong. Great, immortal, hero — for her have been used words that are most likely to be used for men in real life. “What a woman!” how often have we thought like Rodolphe, one of her lovers, and watched her go. Read more…

The Queer Generation Gap

Express Syndication / Invision / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.

This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”

***

This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”

The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.

Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.

As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”

The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”

***

When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.

“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”

Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”

Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.

In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.

“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

Read more…

The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

Read more…

The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”

A sinkhole opened up in Philadelphia on Monday, January 9, 2017. Matt Rourke / AP

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,988 words)

There is a certain genre of viral news story that we recycle every so often: odd activity on the earth’s seemingly stable surface that, while probably having a reasonable explanation, is reported on with breathless excitement when its cause is still unknown. “Mysterious Crack Appears In Mexico,” one headline shouts. “Mysterious crack appears in Wyoming landscape”; “A giant crack in Kenya opens up, but what’s causing it?”; “Splitsville: 2-Mile-Long Crack Opens in Arizona Desert”; “The White House lawn has developed a mysterious sinkhole that’s ‘growing larger by the day.’”

The follow-up stories (“Giant Wyoming Crack Explained”; “Let it sink in: The White House sinkhole is no more”) rarely gain the same traction. The mystery offers a chance to surrender control, an increasingly tantalizing option in a world algorithmically engineered to offer us the appearance of optimized choice. We choose, momentarily, to believe in something bottomless and chaotic. Read more…

‘I’ve Always Been Either Praised or Accused of Ambition’: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver

Getty Images / HarperCollins Publishers

 

Sarah Boon | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,686 words)

 

Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988, on the same day that her first daughter was born. Since then, Kingsolver has published eight more novels, two books of essays, a book of poetry, and three nonfiction books — including the popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about growing all of her family’s food on their farm. Her eighth and latest novel, Unsheltered, follows the parallel lives of characters in both 2016 and 1871 as they live and love in the same house at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey.

Kingsolver has received numerous writing awards, including the James Beard Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Kingsolver has also established The Bellwether Prize for Fiction, an award to support writers who cover topics around social change.

I spoke with Kingsolver three days after Hurricane Florence made landfall on the east coast of the US, and the same day Florence was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, though it continued to bombard the region with strong winds and heavy rain. Kingsolver noted that she lives in the mountainous region of Virginia, farther from the storm. She wasn’t too worried about the rain, but was concerned about her downstream neighbors who were likely to be inundated. It was a perfect play on the title of Unsheltered. Read more…

To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story

Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)

 

The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.

I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.

Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.

I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.

When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option. Bile, feces, vomit, and animal oils sound as though they would smell repulsive. The words conjure up scent memories of that time your dog released his anal glands on the duvet, or that summer you worked by the wharf and the August air was thick with the miasma of oily herring heads. Jasmine, on the other hand, sounds like a love song, a Disneyfied dream. Try, right now, to imagine the smell of blooming jasmine. Your memory, ill-equipped to locate scents in its baroque filing system, might pull up something syrupy sweet or softly floral. Is that how you want your body to smell?

Too bad: if you choose door number two, you’ll walk away reeking of sharp vegetal tones tempered by a slightly earthy, foul scent. Jasmine absolute is an oily, semi-viscid, dark amber fluid that is denser and more concentrated than jasmine essential oil. Essential oils come from distilled, boiled, or pressed plant matter, while absolutes are traditionally made through a processed called enfleurage, which involves submerging the delicate blossoms or spices in fat before extracting their fragrance molecules into a tincture of ethyl alcohol. While it’s a common ingredient in a natural perfumer’s tool kit, jasmine absolute smells strange: complicated, beautiful, not entirely pleasurable. It reeks of indole (rhymes with “enroll”), an organic chemical compound also found in coal tar, human feces, and decomposing bodies.

If you choose door number one, you’ll be blessed with the kiss of ambergris, a highly desirable natural substance that smells sweet yet rather marine, like vanilla and unrefined sugar mixed with seawater. The scent reminds me a little of the smell of my dog’s paws — pink and light and animal. It smells like cashmere feels. Smelling ambergris is an innate pleasure, one that even an infant would recognize as enjoyable, like the first sip of sweet milk.

For more than a thousand years, humans have been adorning our bodies with animal products like ambergris and putrid-smelling plant derivatives like jasmine absolute. We apply off-putting materials to our bodies to enhance and mask our natural scents. Like dogs that roll in deer carcasses, humans seek to change our olfactory emissions by borrowing from other creatures. It’s not always about simply smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

According to natural perfumer Charna Ethier, ambergris can smell like “golden light” or a “flannel shirt that has been dried on a clothes line on a warm summer day.” Although there are several types of ambergris (including gray, gold, and white), Ethier is referring to her own personal sample, which she characterizes as “soft, fresh, and ozonic.” Ethier is the owner of Providence Perfume Company in Rhode Island, and inside her well-stocked cabinet of olfactory curiosities, she keeps a single bottle of the precious stuff. Next to her 100-year-old cade oil (a foul-smelling liquid made from juniper trees, purchased at an estate sale) and below her collection of floral absolutes and herbal essences, she has stashed a bit of ambergris tincture. The clear glass vial contains a mixture of ambergris and alcohol that includes just 5 percent whale matter. In its pure form, this substance is a waxy gray ball of animal secretion, a floating fat-berg that is “more expensive than gold.” Unlike jasmine absolute, which plays a role in many of her perfumes, real ambergris is simply too expensive to use in a commercial product. “It’s considered the miracle ingredient for perfumes,” she says. “It makes everything better.”

It’s not always simply about smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

Ethier doesn’t use any synthetics in her perfume, nor does she use animal products, though animal scents are a traditional ingredient in perfumery. Not only are these compounds expensive, but true mammalian products like musk, civet, and ambergris often come at a cruel cost. Whales have been murdered for their oily blubber and concealed stomach bile, civets are caged and prodded for their fear-induced anal gland secretions, and musk is harvested from the glands of slaughtered deer. Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly  beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.

There’s a reason perfumers use these notes. They enhance the floral scents, undercutting lightness with a reminder of darkness. Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama — even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them. That’s how siren songs work, and ambergris sings the loudest. Once, Ethier made a perfume using her most prized ingredients. She mixed 100-year-old sandalwood essence with ambergris tincture and frangipane and boronia absolutes, two flowers native to Central America and Tasmania, respectively. It was the first time she’d used ambergris, and this one-off perfume was so lovely that “it was like gold-washing something.” She remembers wistfully, “It was so beautiful.”

* * *

Smell is the most underrated and mysterious sense. In her 1908 autobiography, The World I Live In, Helen Keller called scent the “fallen angel.” “For some inexplicable reason, smell does not hold the high position it deserves amongst its sisters,” she wrote. Keller mapped her world by smell — she could smell a coming storm hours before it arrived and knew when lumber had been harvested from her favorite copse of trees by the sharp scent of pine. In contrast to touch, which she called “permanent and definite,” Keller experienced odors as “fugitive” sensations. Touch guided her; scent fed her. Without smell, Keller imagined her world would be lacking “light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered.”

We don’t often think in terms of color and light when it comes to smell, perhaps because we have so few words for scent that we borrow from the lexicons of our other senses. Despite the fact that smell is our most ancient sense — our so-called “lizard brain” is also sometimes termed the rhinencephalon, literally the “nose brain” — it is also one that seems to elude language. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasures and exaltation.” We’ve had eons to come up with words for the precise smell of fresh-turned earth or the exact scent of a blazing beach fire, and still the best we can do is earthy and smoky.

Perfumers have their own language, but their words have only recently begun to trickle down into popular culture through beauty magazines and blogs. Not only do perfumers and their superfans speak of absolutes, oils, and tinctures, but they can also rattle off compounds like coumarin and eugenol. A trained master perfumer (or “nose”) can pick out precise scents within a layered perfume. They don’t just call something foul — they can pick out the pungency of musk or the reek of tobacco, ingredients that are delicious in small doses but overwhelming when used out of balance.

In my quest to understand the appeal of seemingly repugnant ingredients, I spoke with doctors who study the nose, perfumers who feed the organ, and even a zookeeper who spends her days breathing in the pure, undiluted scent of civet discharge. While they had various theories as to why darkness seems to be an essential element of beauty, they all agreed on one thing: It’s all about context. In the right context, even the smell of death can be appealing. In the right context, vomit can be more desirable than gold. In the right context, with the right music playing in the background, you begin to root for the glamorous hit woman or the sardonic drug dealer.

They also agreed that sex is part of this equation, and it’s the easiest explanation to trot out. But perfumery is also about more than just smelling nice and attracting a mate. It’s about aesthetics, taste, and desire in a more general sense. We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable. If that were the case, Thomas Kinkade’s light-dappled cottages would be considered the height of fine art, and we would all walk around misted lightly with synthetic jasmine and fake orange blossom. Instead, we adore the luscious gore of Caravaggio’s canvases and dab our pulse points with concoctions containing the miasma of swamp rot, the cloying smell of feces, and the pungent, tonsil-kicking fetor of death. Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost. Just as desire and repulsion walk through the same corridors of our minds, so too do beauty and destruction move hand in hand. Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.

* * *

One of the first known perfumers in history was a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim. According to clay cuneiform tablets dating back to 1200 BCE, Tapputi lived in ancient Babylon and likely worked for a king. The second part of her name, “Belatekallim,” indicates that she was head of her own household, in addition to holding a valued position at court. Thousands of years before the advent of the “SheEO,” Tapputi was leaning in and bossing around underlings. She was a master of her craft, and recognized as such by her peers. Much of what we know about her comes from secondary sources, but the process of distilling and refining ingredients to produce a fragrant balm — oil, flowers, water, and calamus, a reed-like plant similar to lemongrass — is described on surviving clay tablets. It’s miraculous how modern her scents seem — or rather, it’s surprising how little has changed. Tapputi used scent-extracting techniques like distillation, cold enfleurage, and tincture that natural perfumers still use today. She also mixed grain alcohol with her scents, creating perfumes that were brighter, lighter, and had more staying power than anything else available at the time. These scents may have played a religious role in ancient culture, but they may have simply been another way to prettify the body and please the senses.

Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.

Unfortunately, Tapputi’s story is a fragmented one — she’s possibly the first female chemist, and yet she’s been lost to history. There is much more evidence available about the perfumes of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Rome. In 2003, archeologists unearthed the world’s oldest known perfume factory in Cyprus. Archaeologists theorize that this mud-brick building and the perfumes it produced caused Greek worshippers to begin associating the island with Aphrodite, the goddess of sex and love. (Born from the magical remnants of the sky god’s testicles, which had been separated from his body and cast into the sea by Cronos, the Titan god of harvest, Aphrodite supposedly walked from the foaming waters of the sea and onto the beach at Paphos, an ancient settlement located on the southern coast of the island.) Analysis of the material found on-site revealed that these ancient perfumers were using plant-based ingredients like pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley, among others.

These perfumes all sound rather pleasant, don’t they? I can imagine dabbing almond oil mixed with a bit of bergamot on my wrists, catching a botanical draft of scent here and there as I move. It seems terribly obvious that people may want to smell like plants. Some of the earliest pieces of art represent flowers, leaves, and trees. Studies have shown that we crave symmetry on an unconscious level, and we’re drawn to color, so it makes perfect sense that flowers would hold our attention with their Fibonacci spirals and vivid hues. I can even understand why curiosity might compel someone walking along a beach to pick up a chunk of marine fat and sniff it. It’s a bit harder to understand the moment when medieval perfumers made the conceptual leap from smelling the glandular sacs of dead musk deer to dabbing it on their pulse points. Yet at some point, this must have happened, for starting after the Crusades, Europeans became obsessed with musk.


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Like many prized spices, fabrics, and luxury items, musk came to Europe from the Far East. Derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, “musk” refers to the glandular products of small male Asian deer. These little sacs of animal juice were harvested from the bodies of slain deer and left to dry in the sun. In its raw form, musk smells like urine, pungent and sharp. But after being left to dry, musk develops a softer scent. The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head. It gained a reputation as an aphrodisiac; according to some legends, Cleopatra used musk oils to seduce Mark Anthony into her bed. The size of musk molecules also contribute to its perfume popularity: Larger molecules oxidize slower, so musk’s comparatively large molecules last longer than other odors and allow it to extend the life of other scents. Its fixative property means musk is a base note in many perfumes, even ones that don’t smell overtly musky.

In 1979, musk deer were listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), so it’s no longer legal to use natural musk in commercial perfumes. However, Tibetian musk deer are still killed for their glands, and a brisk trade in poaching has resulted in some illegal musk showing up online. Musk is also used in some traditional Chinese and Korean remedies, which helps the substance remain one of the most valuable animal products on earth. In his book The Fly in the Ointment, Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, points out that musk is “more valuable than gold.”

Civet is a more unknown fragrance, though it also appears frequently in perfumes. Made from the glands of a mammal that shares the name of the scent, civet is similar in structure to musk on a molecular level but smells even more animalistic, according to people who have actually sniffed it. “They have a general odor about them that is very pungent,” says Jacqueline Menish, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Nashville Zoo. Civets are uncommon zoo creatures. They are neither felines nor rodents, though they’re commonly mistaken for both. Although few visit the zoo just to glimpse these odd little nocturnal creatures, the Nashville Zoo has several banded palm civets because the zoo director “just loves them.” (You may have heard of civet coffee, a product made by force-feeding Asian palm civets coffee beans, then harvesting them from their poop. Society, it seems, has come up with several odd ways to make money from civet asses.) When they are startled, frightened, or excited, civets “express” their anal glands, and the greasy liquid “shoots right out.” The scent hangs in the air for days. “I guess I could see if it was diluted it might not smell as offensive,” Menish concedes. “But it can be really bad if it hits you.”

Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.

The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head.

Like musk and civet, ambergris comes from an animal, but making it doesn’t necessarily involve murdering whales. Whales have historically been killed for their bodily products, including their oil, spermaceti, and their stomach contents, but it’s more likely now that ambergris is beach-found since it is only produced by an endangered species, sperm whales. The waxy substance forms in the hindgut of a sperm whale to protect their soft interiors from hard, spiky squid beaks. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, ambergris begins as a mass of claw-shaped horns that irritate the whale’s digestive systems. As the mass gets pushed through the whale’s hindgut, it grows and slowly becomes “a tangled indigestible solid, saturated with feces, which begins to obstruct the rectum.” Once it passes into the ocean, it begins to slowly mellow out. The black, tar-like wad is bleached by the ocean until it becomes smooth, pale, and fragrant. It ranges in color from butter to charcoal. The most valuable ambergris is white, then silver, and finally moon-gray and waxy. It’s believed that only 1 percent of the world’s sperm whale population produces ambergris. It’s very rare, very bizarre, and very valuable.

The human appetite for ambergris dates back to ancient times. The Chinese believed it was dragon spit that had fallen into the ocean and hardened, and the ancient Greeks liked to add powdered ambergris to drinks for an extra kick. King Charles II of England liked to eat ambergris with eggs, which was apparently a fairly common practice among the aristocracy in England and the Netherlands. It shouldn’t be surprising that people engaged in some light coprophagia — smell and taste are so deeply linked, and while I can’t attest to the taste of ambergris, I can say that it smells beguiling. Given the chance, I would sprinkle some silvery whale powder on my eggs, just to see what it was like. (It’s certainly no stranger than eating gold-coated chicken wings — another practice seemingly designed to destroy value by passing the desired object through a series of rectums until it reaches the inevitable white bowl.)

In perfume, ambergris is often used to boost other scents. It plays a supporting role rather than a starring one, for although the smell is fascinating, it isn’t very strong. It has an unearthly fragrance. It smells like the sea, but also like sweet grasses and fresh rain. It’s amazing that something made in the bowels of the whale could smell so pure. If you found fresh ambergris, midnight black and sticky and stinking, perhaps you wouldn’t want to eat it. But with distance and dilution, ambergris is transformed from animal garbage to human ambrosia.

* * *

Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to these scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.

Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones, which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomenon to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population knows about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scent, may contain pheromone molecules — ones that pigs would find very enticing.

But where science fails to offer a satisfactory explanation, artists can step in, providing an illuminating tool to help understanding our relationship to desire and aesthetics. For perfumer Anne McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions. The indecent element becomes a secret of sorts, a gruesome piece of marginalia scribbled alongside the recipe, visible to only those in the know but appreciated by all. The foulness whispers below the prettiness, and combined, these various elements create a scent that smells paradoxically clean and dirty, light and dark.

“Indole is what makes the scent of jasmine interesting,” she says. “It makes you want to come back and smell it again — it has an addictive quality to it.” Unlike citrus scents, which are one-note and rather simplistic, florals have an element of decay, a whiff of putridity. McClain rightfully points out that this is part of what makes flowers themselves attractive to bees and other pollinators. Corpse flowers famously smell like dead bodies, but so do many other blossoms, just to a lesser extent.

Plus, humans are by nature “just a little bit gross,” McClain says. Like civets, musk deer, and whales, we shit, we secrete, we mate, and sometimes we vomit. But we also give birth and create beauty, and for McClain, it’s this life-giving ability that links blossoms and humans. “I think there is a depth to anything that is made of life and creates life. There’s something inherently sexual in that,” she says. “Even though something like civet will smell gross on its own, it adds an element of reality.” When layered properly with other olfactory delights, this can create an evocative smell, one that you want to return to, to interrogate with your nostrils the same way you might pore over a painting. Through layering pleasure on top of disgust, perfumers can create something that resembles life — exquisite, fleeting, and mysterious.

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Giving Up the Ghost

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Emily Urquhart | Longreads | August 2018 | 19 minutes (4,759 words)

 
After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the entrance to the subway, and he was the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mall.

I couldn’t anticipate these visitations. They happened at random and unexpectedly. The people I’d imprinted with my brother’s image were only shades of him — dark hair, a downward slope to their shoulders, a bushy mustache, thick-rimmed glasses. This was fitting because, even in life, I didn’t know him well. My brother was 11 years old when I was born, and we had different mothers. As a child he’d visited on weekends with my other brother. We’d overlapped in adulthood only briefly, so my memories of him are from childhood. They are fleeting and jumbled. It was only after my brother died that I discovered his first name had been Joseph. A name chosen by his mother, but secreted away after birth in favor of his middle name. I learned this from my father when I was tasked with writing my brother’s obituary. I remember feeling awed and somewhat ashamed that I could have spent 24 years in my brother’s orbit but not know his given name. This was just one of the ways I didn’t understand who he was. This unknowing compounded the loss, which was tragic and grim, and I think this is why I bumped into him so often after he died. When he was alive, I never ran into my brother in the city where we both lived.

I was young then, my footing in the world unsure and sometimes timid. When my brother died, I was a few weeks into my second year of a graduate program in journalism. I believed I would never return to school and that I would never write again. I felt suspended among wilted funeral flowers and well-intentioned casseroles with a grief that would last indefinitely. But after two weeks I left my parents’ country home and returned to the city, resumed my studies, and re-entered my life. My upstairs neighbor serenaded me when I arrived at my apartment, assuming all the cards and flowers that had collected at my front door were birthday greetings. I thanked him, gathered the well-wishes, and stepped back into my old life, which was physically and structurally the same, but emotionally rearranged.

I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years. I didn’t investigate why these sightings happened, or if they happened to anyone else. It would take another 17 years for me to do this. Approaching middle age and now a mother, I’m a more confident version of my earlier self. I’m a journalist rather than a trainee, and I’m a folklore scholar. I interview people about their supernatural experiences, respecting their beliefs, no matter how far they stray into otherworldly terrain. In this way, I am now uniquely positioned to turn my gaze inward and question myself.
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