Search Results for: This Land Press

The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson

A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht, 1938. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Peter Duffy | An excerpt adapted from The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism | PublicAffairs | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,458 words)


Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA!
—Clifford Odets, Waiting For Lefty

Seven million New Yorkers, few of them in possession of the luxury item known as an electric fan, woke up to the best news in three weeks on Friday, July 26, 1935. During the overnight hours, the humidity plunged by 33 points. By sunrise, the temperate air from Canada had completed its work. The heat wave was over.

“Humidity Goes Into Tailspin,” the New York Post exulted. “Rain Ushers in Cool Spell,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle.

The New York Times and Herald Tribune didn’t make much of a fuss that morning over Varian Fry’s revelations about his conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl. “Reich Divided on Way to Treat Jews, Says Fry,” was the cautious headline on page eleven of the Tribune. One faction of the Nazi Party, the paper went on in summary of Hanfstaengl’s comments to Fry, “were the radicals, who wanted to settle the matter by blood.” The other, “the self-styled moderate group,” wanted to “segregate the Jews and settle the question by legal methods.” The Times ran its version on page eight and devoted most of the article to Fry’s retelling of the Berlin Riots. “There were literally hundreds of policemen standing around but I did not see them do anything but protect certain cafés which I was told were owned by Nazis,” Fry was quoted as saying. The paper saved its preview of the Holocaust for the ninth of eleven paragraphs. The nation’s newspaper of record didn’t see the value in highlighting the disclosure that “the radical section” of Hitler’s regime “desired to solve the Jewish question with bloodshed.”

Reached for comment in Berlin, Hanfstaengl called Fry’s account “fictions and lies from start to finish.” Read more…

The American Way

All photos by Alice Driver

Alice Driver | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,502 words)

Dusk is closing in. As we drive along the border in El Paso, Texas, ShiQian, a sound engineer from Beijing, sings, “Where the road is dark and the seed is sowed / Where the gun is cocked and the bullet’s cold,” as he plays his guitar sitting in the back seat of our rented van. Liu Xiaodong, the Chinese painter who has organized this eight-day 1,530-mile border trip in conjunction with Dallas Contemporary museum, sits in the passenger seat, looking out at the border wall and wondering out loud in Chinese, which his assistant for this trip, Marco Betelli, who is from Italy but lives in China, translates into English: “Is this the wall Trump says he is building?” I explain that the 18-foot-high metal fence we are viewing that separates El Paso from Juárez was built in 2008. Yang Bo, a Chinese filmmaker, documents all Xiaodong’s international projects on migration. He sits in the back seat next to ShiQian filming everything as Flavio del Monte, an Italian who serves as Xiaodong’s artist liaison at Massimo De Carlo Gallery, drives. From the back seat, ShiQian’s voice rings out with warmth, “Now I been out in the desert, just doin’ my time / Searchin’ through the dust, lookin’ for a sign / If there’s a light up ahead well brother I don’t know,” as we hug close to the border, to a wall that exists in some places and is absent in others and to the Río Bravo — the “fierce river” — which is little more than a trickle running down a concrete channel.
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Uncertain Ground

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Grace Loh Prasad | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,021 words)

In early October, I noticed my Taiwanese and Chinese American friends posting photos of large family gatherings and moon cakes. Others posted photos of visiting the graves of family members. I felt a wave of panic and guilt. Had I missed Tomb Sweeping Day, when I should have been honoring my deceased parents? On the other hand, I remembered and looked forward to Dia de los Muertos, a holiday I hadn’t grown up with but learned about over more than 20 years of living in California. How could I feel such a strong affinity for a Mexican cultural tradition, while being so ignorant of the holidays observed by the Taiwanese and Chinese diaspora?

A quick Wikipedia search revealed that I had gotten my holidays mixed up. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the full moon at harvest time, with families reuniting for a traditional feast and moon cakes. Tomb Sweeping Day (Qing Ming) is one of several holidays to remember your ancestors, but it’s observed in spring. I could not remember which was which because my family did not really celebrate these holidays. Although I was born in Taiwan, I spent my early childhood in New Jersey, and then from fourth grade through high school graduation, we lived in Hong Kong.

We were a curious cultural hybrid: a family of Taiwanese origin living as American expatriates in a British territory where we resembled the local Chinese population, but did not speak the same language and had little in common with them. I attended an American school full of American and international students. One of the advantages of attending Hong Kong International School was that we got American, British and Chinese holidays off: Thanksgiving, the Queen’s Birthday and Lunar New Year.

I’m sure we learned about Mid-Autumn Festival and Qing Ming, but they weren’t as memorable as Lunar New Year, the biggest holiday of the year when everyone got a week off from school or work. Children and younger relatives received lai see (hong bao), red envelopes filled with spending money, and employees received their annual bonuses. I remember going with my parents to join the enormous crowds down in Causeway Bay, pushing for a spot close to the harbor to get the best view of the spectacular fireworks. Stores and restaurants tried to outdo each other with elaborate “Kung Hei Fat Choy” decorations and special menus and promotions. Everywhere you went, people were in a festive good mood.

Since we did not have any relatives in Hong Kong, there were no family obligations during Lunar New Year. It was only the four of us — my mom, dad, brother Ted and me — so at most we would go out for a fancy restaurant meal. We did not go from house to house with bottles of Johnny Walker or baskets of tangerines. We did not make hundreds of homemade dumplings or go to the bank to request a wad of crisp new bills to stuff into red envelopes for my younger cousins, nieces and nephews. My parents might have hung up modest decorations outside our apartment door, but I think it was just for show, so we would not appear strange to our neighbors.

Once I asked my parents why we didn’t do more to celebrate the Taiwanese and Chinese holidays. “Well,” my dad said, “it’s because we are Christian. From when we were little, we only celebrated Christmas and Easter. Your grandpa was very strict. We were forbidden from observing any of the non-Christian, Taiwanese traditions because that was considered superstitious.”

I was relieved that my ignorance was not my fault. But I still felt a void.
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Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel

Workers on an assembly line inside the Ford Motor Company factory at Highland Park, Michigan, constructing steering systems, circa 1913. (Hulton Archive/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,284 words)

 

For many American readers, knowledge of Irvine Welsh came via his 1993 novel Trainspotting. The novel established Welsh as a daring prose stylist with a flair for the transgressive, while the subsequent film adaptation supercharged the careers of many involved, including director Danny Boyle and lead Ewan McGregor. Over the years, Welsh has revisited this world in several other works, including the novels Porno, Skagboys, and The Blade Artist. In each, he’s surveyed how time has changed his characters — and gradually expanded the scope of these books from Edinburgh to something more international.

In his latest novel Dead Men’s Trousers, Welsh has brought this fictional universe to its conclusion. Several of his long-running characters have become fathers of grown children; one of them will not survive to the end of the book. But that’s not the only bittersweet element to be found here: Welsh has set the novel on the eve of the Brexit vote, creating a growing sense of tension in the background even as his characters — including sociopath-turned-artist Frank Begbie and expatriate DJ manager Mark Renton — become embroiled in a cycle of old grievances. At stake is an interwoven pair of questions: to what extent can people change, and to what extent are people willing to allow others to change?

The temporal setting of the novel also allows for some other memorable setpieces, including a number of scenes set around Welsh’s beloved Hibernian F.C. winning the Scottish Cup in 2016. And Welsh, ever the stylist, has also come up with a resonant way of conveying several characters’ experience with the psychedelic DMT: prose pauses and suddenly, the mode shifts into a graphic novel for part of a page. While Welsh has revisited his characters repeatedly over time, each of these books has a distinct feel to it; this one is no exception. Read more…

Coming Home, One Word at a Time

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Sharanya Deepak | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,366 words)

“Big bird, red eyes …” my teacher said, hinting me toward the new word I was learning. “Big, big bird … think about Central Delhi …” he added, excited for me to untangle his clues, for this big bird to fly into my brain. I was in my third Urdu class, ripening my vocabulary in a language I had always known but never formally studied.

Gidh!” I finally screamed, the Urdu word for vulture, leaning onto my notebook. I thought about the times I would lay under trees in central Delhi and watch the birds perch on branches. Gidh, a vulture my friends and I once fed jam sandwiches, determined to get close. Gidh, the bird I once saw feed on an elderly man’s remains in Old Delhi. The simple word for a bird so ubiquitous in folklore, flushed in memories of warm Delhi winters, of stories told to me as a child, of faces of friends I had long forgotten, of the bird both revered and condemned in the city that raised me. But like the Urdu word for it, the vulture was long since gone from my life.

I grew up in a flurry of languages: in the beautiful, unfurling Tamil of my mother’s rage, in the curt English of my grandfather’s routine, in the effervescent Hindi of my father’s quickly changing moods. The concept of one native tongue had no meaning. Languages switched quickly in our house: New ones entered with meals presented by neighbors, unknown nurturing words appeared in the homes of friends. Our everyday lives were a wonderful linguistic mess, but Urdu — the language that floated in the backdrop of everything in Delhi, in songs, in corners of the old city, in anecdotes told by poetic uncles, in the history of the city’s kings — was the one that got away.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 100: A Reading List

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Monday, Jan. 15, 1988, in front of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco (AP Photo)

March 24, 2019, is American poet, activist, and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday. This week’s release of Little Boy, his new autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel, is also a reason for Ferlinghetti fans to celebrate. In San Francisco, where his bookstore and literary landmark, City Lights, still stands strong, the city prepares for “Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 100” events around town.

To mark this milestone, here’s a reading list of interviews and features from the past several years about Ferlinghetti’s poetry and painting; his relationships with Allen Ginsberg and others of the Beat Generation (a label, writes Barry Miles at Poetry Foundation, that Ferlinghetti rejected); his observations on a dramatically changing San Francisco; and a bonus piece — a meditation on poetry, which Ferlinghetti delivered upon receiving the Frost Medal in 2003.

1. “What Is Poetry?: A Non-Lecture,” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2003, Poetry Society of America)

As the 2003 Frost Medalist, Ferlinghetti delivered an ars poetica, a draft of which is published at Poetry Society of America.

Poems are emails from the unknown, beyond cyberspace.

Poetry as a first language preceded writing and still sounds in us, a mute music, an inchoate music.

Poems like moths press against the window trying to reach the light.

Poetry is white writing on black, black writing on white.

It is a Madeleine dipped in Proust’s tea.

It is a player-piano in an abandoned seaside casino, still playing.

All the world is one poem, all poetry one world, give or take a bomb or two.

Poetry is what we would cry out upon coming to ourselves in a dark wood in the middle of the journey of our life.

2. “Driving the Beat Road,” (Jeff Weiss, June 2017, The Washington Post)

Weiss drove up the California coast in search of surviving members of the Beat Generation and caught up with Ferlinghetti, along with poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, and novelist Herbert Gold, in this 12,000-word, multi-profile odyssey.

“It’s all going to be underwater in 100 years or maybe even 50,” he says when asked what he sees for San Francisco, the beloved adopted city that partially betrayed him. “The Embarcadero is one of the greatest esplanades in the world. On the weekends, thousands of people strut up and down like it’s the Ramblas in Barcelona. But it’ll all be underwater.”

That repetition of “underwater” lingers for a second, as though it’s an anchor that he can’t stop from sinking. At that moment, it’s not hard to imagine this cafe as an Atlantean ruin, filled with drowned corpses tethered to their laptops and iPhones until the soggy finish. He half-smiles again and shrugs, unapologetic for what he sees, as though to say one last time, don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

In another read at Poetry Foundation from March 2013, David Meltzer chats with the poet on his book Time of Useful Consciousness.

3. “The Beat Goes On,” (Barry Miles, March 2019, Poetry Foundation)

Miles, a Beat scholar and friend of Ferlinghetti, pays tribute to the centenarian, exploring his important work as a poet and publisher and his close connections with the other Beats, especially Allen Ginsberg.

The night we arrived, both Ferlinghetti and Shig slept outside on the terrace. It was idyllic. Before we returned to the city we visited the Esalen Institute. At the gates from the highway, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti debated which of them was a member. In the end, they decided they were both honorary members, and it’s true, they were welcomed as honored guests. We were fed, given wine, and invited to take part in the naked group photograph, although we had to leave before that occurred. It was interesting to see the reaction to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti there. Both were respected as part of the California alternative body politic as expressed by Shelley’s line “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

4. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the old San Francisco, his new novel, and his first 100 years,” (Ira Silverberg, December 2018, Document Journal)

Ferlinghetti talks with Ira Silverberg, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, on visionary poets, Little Boy, and the unattractive transformation of San Francisco.

I think the San Francisco that we’ve known all these years is disappearing very fast. In another 20 years, we won’t even recognize this city. In the time of James Joyce—say, in 1902—Dublin was of such a size that you could walk down the main street, like Sackville Street, and meet everybody important in the literary world. I’m sure Dublin isn’t like that anymore, either, and in San Francisco in 1902, probably you could meet everybody important in the literary world. That’s all gone now.

5. “In Conversation: Lawrence Ferlinghetti with John Held, Jr.,” (John Held, Jr., December 2014, SFAQ)

In this conversation, which took place over four sessions in 2014, Ferlinghetti focuses the discussion on his painting, the reception of his art in Italy, art publishing, and the Bay Area art scene.

Yeah, but let’s stick to the painting subject. In the 1950s, I got Hassel Smith’s painting studio at 9 Mission Street. It’s the Audiffred Building. It’s at the foot of Market Street and the Embarcadero, and there was no electricity over the ground floor. On the ground floor was the Bank of America. On the second floor we shared the floor with the Alcoholics Anonymous club. On the same floor was Frank Lobdell—his studio was there and in the back of the floor was Marty Snipper, who was an art teacher. There was no heat over the first floor and no electricity. I had a small pot bellied stove for heat. So, it was just like a Paris studio. It was really studio size, like in Paris. In North Beach today, there are no studios. People have one room, and they call it a studio.

6. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco,” (Dwight Garner, March 2019, The New York Times)

Garners visits the City by the Bay to write about — and remember — Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco; his itinerary includes North Beach Beat-era hangouts like Caffe Trieste and Vesuvio Cafe, and a tour of bookstores around the city, from City Lights, which Ferlinghetti opened in 1953, to Dog Eared Books and Borderlands Books, both in the Mission.

At 99, Mr. Ferlinghetti is largely blind. He was not, I was told, quite up to receiving visitors. But we had two lively telephone conversations. In advance, I’d told both his publisher and his assistant that I planned to ask about his favorite places in the “cool, grey city of love,” as the poet George Sterling called it.

Yet when I rang, Mr. Ferlinghetti barked at me. “This is just the kind of interview I don’t like to do,” he said. “These sort of questions just leave me blank.” He condemned “travel section stuff.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was writing this article for the Travel section.

‘Women Can Be Required To Wear Something That’s Painful.’

Virginia Gonzalez / Getty

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,283 words)

 

From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world’s most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories in High Heel, part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury. Told in 150 vignettes that alternately entertain and educate, disturb and depress, the book ruminates on the ways in which society fetishizes, celebrates, and demonizes the high heel as well as the people, primarily women, who wear them.

She writes: “We’re still sorting out the relationship between glass ceilings and glass heels. For now, the idea of doing something ‘in high heels’ is a near-universally understood shorthand meaning both that the person doing it is female, and that in doing it, she faces additional, gendered challenges.” Whether you see high heels as empowering or a submission to patriarchal gender roles (or land somewhere in between), you’ll likely never look at a pair the same way again after reading High Heel.

Brennan, an award-winning investigative journalist and author of The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, has written for New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Scientific American, Pacific Standard, Buzzfeed, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. A longtime communications consultant at the United Nations, she’s worked on issues and projects ranging from the environment and nuclear weapons to gender equality and human rights. Read more…

Of Safe Words and the Sacred

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (2,913 words)

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our lives and our will over to the care of God as we understood him.

In the throes of passion, it’s not unusual to cry out for the Heavenly Father. Bodily pleasure, the agonizing ecstasy of orgasm, can feel like prayer — a communication with the divine, a gift from somewhere beyond this realm. Sex is one of the most primally human experiences, but when it’s good, it can feel otherworldly.

In AA’s Big Book, they say that having a spiritual experience in recovery will rocket you into “the fourth dimension of existence.”

I thought I’d already been to that dimension: consensually tied up and flogged in a hotel room, the red splotches spreading across my ass and thighs — precursors to the bruising that would splatter my backside like a Jackson Pollock painting in the days to come. I thought I’d found heaven in the place between the agony of the whip and the ecstacy of His fingers finding my wetness. He called me demeaning names and degraded me in all the right ways; I was happy to do anything He asked.

I did not believe in God, but I believed in surrendering my body and my will to this man. Surely, He would save me.
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Navigation

People take a selfie in the Montrose neighborhood on August 25, 2018, in Houston, Texas. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

Bryan Washington | A short story from the collection Lot | Riverhead Books | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,120 words)

 
1.

It started how you’d think, with this whiteboy throwing up in an alley. I’d pulled a job at a taqueria dumping pig guts out back. The cooks gave me grunt work, the way they do when you’re starting out, like when my father had Javi and me pinching the shells off shrimp back in the restaurant as kids. It didn’t matter that I’d been fixing mole in Ma’s kitchen for years; I was short on money.

My managers looked like gauchos. Porno mustaches, bloated frames. They read my name and they saw my face and they pointed to the dishes. One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español, and I wanted to snatch his ears off but then I’d be out of a check.

So I should’ve left the whiteboy outside alone. I had enough on my plate.

But I stayed. Watched him heave. When he finished I came back with a glass of water.

He took me home. Dude had these little hairs climbing his belly. His eyes got wide at how furry my legs are. When we finished he gulped at the air in the room, he asked for my name as we were sliding down the futon, and when he couldn’t pronounce it the whiteboy gave me a new one. Read more…

Barely There

Getty / Collage by Katie Kosma

Jennifer Baker | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,059 words)

 

Before things begin, Eliza and I share the normal pleasantries on the way to her room. She takes her leave soon after we enter, granting me privacy while I undress. The room is equipped with familiar items: cotton balls/swabs, gauze, tongue depressors. Like in a doctor’s office, there’s a cushy table covered with paper for me to lie on. Unlike the office of a medical professional, there’s wax heating that’s azure in color, molasses in texture, along with a paper thong in the middle of the table. There’s also mood music. A kind of subdued instrumental flows in the air.

***

Nair is pungent and medicinal, reminding me of the funk of a relaxer but even more distinct. As hair started to grow on my prepubescent body I asked my mom if I could join in her regimen. Clad in t-shirts and underwear we smeared goo the color of cotton candy on our legs and sat on the edge of the bed making sure none of it got on the furniture. It was cold upon application, then began to tingle. After the designated wait time, we did an imitation of a penguin’s waddle to the bathroom for washcloths to wipe off the gunk. Each swipe removed most of the hair but left patches we attacked with more Nair before resuming the position.

Hair growth and removal seemed the threshold to cross toward adulthood. This wasn’t told to me so much as revealed in the shows I watched, the magazines I peeked at. To this day Nair’s trademark song from the eighties — “We wear short shorts” — echoes as subdued mockery in my head. Spotlight on glistening legs, trimmed bikini lines, armpits with no evidence of my burgeoning curly cues, becoming more noticeable. To see women with hair on their bodies was to see them in the real world, not the universe many of us observed, especially bookish, television indulgent children like myself. Most of my classmates, the women on TV, the girls in books who never mentioned shaving yet always wore skirts and had good (read: unblemished, glossy, smooth) skin. This pointed to my own inadequacy. The traces of my mom’s beauty routine littered around the sink and atop the dressers we shared were no longer meaningless, they morphed into tools.

Hair growth and removal seemed the threshold to cross toward adulthood. This wasn’t told to me so much as revealed in the shows I watched, the magazines I peeked at.

After the first Nair session I took a moment to really see myself. I twisted and posed taking in the sheen of my skin, the lack of stubble. It was the easiest of transitions; I felt more visible, more feminine. It was as if the sense of touch was enhanced so I could better feel fabric on my bare legs, be it cotton covers or faded denim. I strutted around with this newfound appreciation, arching my feet as though I wore heels. Further inspection led me to reckon with my budding breasts, the nipples imprinting my training bra. Evidence of the growth spurt that suddenly created intrigue, not just to me but my classmates who’d mock my chest by sticking pencils down their shirts, creating cone bras reminiscent of Madonna while exclaiming, “Look I’m Jennifer!”

My mom had her arsenal: cosmetics, wax strips and tweezers, manicures/pedicures, new hairstyles. She applied foundation on the hottest of days even though it dripped down the sides of her nose. She often held an already sienna-spotted napkin to wipe away additional perspiration. Sometimes, beyond Nair, I joined her in these efforts of perceived femininity.

Pubescence came fast. At 12 I saw, felt, and smelled the changes. Anxious though determined, I graduated from depilatories to disposable razors. I was cautious before becoming assured as I slid the blade against the grain. I hardened up to the cuts, quickly wiping blood away as I progressed. Yet, within a day stubble appeared. Add up all the time spent in the shower, on the edge of a tub, legs lifted higher than usual, hunched over a sink. Add up the razor pile in your trashcan from one or two (or the ill-advised 10 uses), the price increase every year for a new iteration of the same thing — double blade, then triple, now quadruple. But this was worth it, right? This was the expectation, the norm, the price?

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