Search Results for: The Stranger

It’s in the Stars: A Reading List About Astrology

In 2015, I started to copy my weekly horoscopes into my journal. I didn’t do it every week, but I did it often enough that it became something like a practice. I subscribed to several astrological-themed TinyLetters, which led to three hours researching tarot, which led to…well, you get the idea. 2015 was rough, and it feels right to start off 2016 on an optimistic, mystical note.

1. “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” (The Editors, n+1, Winter 2016)

“As skeptics have long argued, part of what makes astrology appealing (and so easily proven “true”) is that each sign of the zodiac has a cluster of traits assigned to it that may be found in nearly any person. Astrology could thus be seen as a humanizing corrective to other, worse stereotypes. To consider that the shy person is sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice something rather like empathy.”

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American Gun Culture Is Literally Killing Us: A Reading List

“You look like you’re saving the world. Are you saving the world?”

I looked up from my notebook into the face of a tipsy, friendly woman, glammed up for her night out. We were in the narrow aisle of our local pizza joint. She’d shared a quick snack with her friend, and my sandwich and soda were half-finished. Writing here has become a Friday night tradition: When I wrap up my shift at the bookstore, I head here to eat, read and sketch out last-minute ideas for my reading lists.

If she knew what I was reading, she wouldn’t ask me that. “No!” I laughed. “I wish.”

“Well, good luck with it, whatever you’re doing,” she said. I thanked her. She left with her friend.

I was reading—am reading—about guns. About their magnetism, their effect, their handlers. About the people caught in the literal crossfire, the innocent and the marginalized. Read more…

How Sarah Schweitzer Discovered the Story About a Boy Rescued from Near-Fatal Abuse

There are stories that creep up and remind us that there is no substitute in journalism for simply spending time with a subject. It’s a luxury many reporters don’t get, but what these stories reveal about the depth of humanity—the best and worst sides of it—make them so worth it.

The Boston Globe’s Sarah Schweitzer was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for last year’s “Chasing Bayla,” and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see her nominated again for “The Life and Times of Strider Wolf,” in which she and photographer Jessica Rinaldi documented the difficult life of a young boy and his brother, rescued from near-fatal abuse, and sent to live with their grandparents, who face their own troubles. I sent her a few follow-up questions via email: Read more…

An Ode to du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca,’ by Rachel Pastan

A screenshot from Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 adaptation of Rebecca.

Rachel Pastan | Riverhead Books |  2014 |  15 minutes (3,709 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is the second chapter from the novel Alena by Rachel Pastan, as chosen by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers, who writes:

“Sometimes a book that is wonderful and well-told and riveting is overlooked. I believe this is the case with Rachel Pastan’s Alena. This novel, about the art world and its ghosts, came out quietly to great reviews last year, was called “a brilliant takedown of the self-serious art world” by Alex Kuczynski in the Times Book Review, and was published in paperback earlier this year. Inspired by the ghost-filled mega-bestseller of its day, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Pastan’s ode tells the story of a young art curator who takes a position at a small Cape Cod art museum that is left mysteriously vacant by her predecessor, a woman named Alena who has vanished under mysterious circumstances. Pastan trades the aristocracy of manor house for the aristocracy of the art world, but keeps all the hauntednesss one expects to find oozing from a haunted house’s drafts and flues. In this chapter, we meet our narrator, as she works to make art her life, and we see a glimpse of the fraught future she has in store.”

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By the Reflection of What Is

Plate 2. Unknown photographer, July–August 1843.

John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd | Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American| Liveright | Nov. 2015 | 22 minutes (5,654 words)

The following excerpt appears courtesy of Liveright Publishing.

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Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of civil war, he wrote more extensively on photography than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were “riveted” to the war and wanted a speech only on “this mighty struggle.” He frequented photographers’ studios and sat for his portrait whenever he could. As a result of this passion, he also became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.

It may seem strange, if not implausible, to assert that a black man and former slave wrote more extensively on photography, and sat for his portrait more frequently, than any of his American peers. But he did. We know this because Douglass penned four separate talks on photography (“Lecture on Pictures,” “Life Pictures,” “Age of Pictures,” and “Pictures and Progress”), whereas Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician and writer who is generally considered the most prolific Civil-War era photo critic, penned only three. We have also identified, after years of research, 160 separate photographs of Douglass, as defined by distinct poses rather than multiple copies of the same negative. By contrast, scholars have identified 155 separate photographs of George Custer, 128 of Red Cloud, 127 of Walt Whitman, and 126 of Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses S. Grant is a contender, but no one has published the corpus of Grant photographs; one eminent scholar (Harold Holzer) has estimated 150 separate photographs of Grant. Although there are some 850 total portraits of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show, and 650 of Mark Twain, no one has analyzed how many of these are distinct poses, or photographs as opposed to engravings, lithographs, and other non-photographic media. Moreover, Cody and Twain were a generation younger, and many if not most of their portraits were taken after 1900, when the Eastman Kodak snapshot had transformed the medium, bringing photography “within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees,” as Kodak declared. In the world, the only contemporaries who surpass Douglass are the British Royal Family: there are 676 separate photographs of Princess Alexandra, 655 of the Prince of Wales, 593 of Ellen Terry, 428 of Queen Victoria, and 366 of William Gladstone.

Douglass’s passion for photography, however, has been largely ignored. He is, perhaps, most popularly remembered as one of the foremost abolitionists, and the preeminent black leader, of the nineteenth century. History books have also celebrated his relationship with President Lincoln, the fact that he met with every subsequent president until his death in 1895, and that he was the first African American to receive a federal appointment requiring Senate approval. His three autobiographies (two of them bestsellers), which helped transform the genre, are still read today. Yet, because his photographic passion has been almost completely forgotten, historians have missed an important question: why would a man who devoted his life to ending slavery and racism and championing civil rights be so in love with photography? Read more…

Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Hollywood, 1923. Photo: Library of Congress

Judith Freeman | Pantheon Books | December 2007 | 38 minutes (9603 words)

Judith Freeman traces Raymond Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and his introduction to Cissy Pascal, the much older, very beautiful woman who would later become his wife.  This chapter is excerpted from Freeman’s 2007 book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which Janet Fitch described as “part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part séance.” Freeman’s next book—a memoir called The Latter Days—will be published by Pantheon in June 2016.

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Cities I’ve Never Lived In: A Story By Sara Majka

Photo credit: Chris Ward

Sara Majka | Longreads |  October 2015 |  23 minutes (5,561 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a previously unpublished short story by Sara Majkaas chosen by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers, who writes: 

“This short story, about a woman who decides to travel to from city to city, working and eating in soup kitchens, is the previously unpublished title story from a collection I have been wishing and longing for for almost a decade. I first met Sara Majka in a fiction workshop at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where we both were enrolled as students. At the time, I was a new assistant editor at A Public Space and I brought Majka’s work to the attention of editor Brigid Hughes. If I recall correctly, her story was the only story I brought from my workshop directly to the magazine for consideration. It was a quiet and considered story with a singular voice. I was struck by how certain and precise the language was—how unusual and full of unspoken yearnings. She was able to convey so much disorientation, doubt, and pain through small observations and deceptively simple memories. Majka’s characters read as if they are feeling their way through a room with their eyes closed even though the lights are on—the reality of what is in front of them is difficult for them to process, the choices they are faced with confusing—despite their sincere attempts to find their way.

The story I showed Hughes ultimately did not end up in the magazine, (I later found it a home at Pen America), but she was more than intrigued, and later published another story and began a working relationship with Majka that led to the forthcoming publication of Cities I’ve Never Lived In, as a part of A Public Space Books, their imprint with Graywolf Press. These stories are a marvel and will break your heart. Majka’s debut is breath-stopping.”

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Meet the Honey Badgers: The Women For Men’s Rights

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, and he’s not wrong. Case in point: the coterie of outspoken women who believe men’s rights are being trampled. They call themselves the Honey Badger Brigade, and they have podcasts, conventions and vlogs. At Marie Claire, Jen Ortiz interviews these rabid defenders of men and subtly refutes their every point in her investigation:

Just over a year ago, some of these women assembled in a hall at the Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, as part of an inaugural international conference on human rights. (They were supposed to meet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Downtown Detroit, but plans changed last-minute because of reported threats by critics.) It was the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues. “It was really fantastic for all of us to be in the same room together,” says Janet Bloomfield, 36, one of the most prominent female faces of the men’s rights movement. “The idea that the movement is comprised of a lot of angry white men who can’t get laid is just simply not true—there were so many women!”

Bloomfield, a former bank productivity analyst, juggles being a stay-at-home mom of three “deep in the woods in Northern Ontario” with her work as a writer and unofficial MRA spokesperson. She grew up on a farm, in a family organized by traditional gender roles, where she “could never buy that this was oppression or bad.” A difficult relationship with her mother showed her that women are human—in other words, a woman has the capability to be just as terrible (or presumably, as not-terrible) as a man. Three years ago, she began her blog as a sort of inside joke with a close friend, but it quickly landed her in the manosphere with her take-no-prisoners style of writing about gender and culture. See: “The moment I knew feminism was a crock of shit.”

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The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

The Hard Life and High Times of Independent Musicians

The band Dead Moon is a rock and roll institution and legend around their native Pacific Northwest. Formed in 1987 by husband and wife team Fred (guitarist) Cole and Toody (bassist) Cole, their do-it-yourself approach to making music and managing their affairs has influenced musicians around the world. This September, Fred collapsed on stage during their set at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival and was taken to the hospital. He’s 67 years old. In February, 2014, Callie Danger spoke with bassist Toody in She Shreds magazine about making music for a living, keeping control of their art, and keeping motivated.

She Shreds: And what are the advantages of running everything independently?

Toody Cole: It’s that you’ve got free range to do what you want with it. That’s always been a big thing. That’s why we got into having our own business. Fred used to have to work for temp labor, putting his hair up in a hat just to get hired. You guys forget how difficult it used to be, just to be weird! You have the freedom as a musician to not have to go, “Gee, would it be okay if I take off next Friday?” Because you’d just get fired. At some point, we said, “We should just create our own thing.” We’re both control freaks, so just to have the control is number one. It’s also a cost-saving thing as well, to have your own label. To just be able to go direct to the source for the mastering and the pressing. To not have to go through somebody else who would charge you for the time and labor to do it for you. We’ve always been hands-on.

She Shreds: How long do you think it took to conjure up the commanding stage presence that you have today?

Toody Cole: There used to be a big thing on the West Coast called Garage Shock that Dave Crider from Estrus Records used to have every year in Bellingham, Washington. People used to come from all over the United States, all over the world. When we went up there, it might have been one of the first times Dead Moon played. There were a bunch of these other bands—naturally, all guy bands—sitting around. We were one of the headliners. And, of course, they hadn’t heard of us. At that point, nobody really had. When I walked by, one of these guys goes, “Oh, we’re so gonna blow these guys. They’ve got a girl in the band!” I don’t get mad that easily, but man, I was so fucking pissed. “Yeah, we’ll see, dudes. We’ll see who blows who off the stage, asshole.” It wound up being one of the best gigs we ever did! [laughs] It’s a great motivator, when people underestimate you.

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