Valeria Luiselli has a roving, curious, collaborative mind. In her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, she merged her protagonist’s consciousness into that of the poet Gilberto Owen. In Story of My Teeth, she collaborated with workers at a Jumex juice factory to create a dizzying, hilarious adventure story. And in Lost Children Archive, her third and most ambitious novel, she invokes a chorus of books, images, recordings, and fragments to tell the story of a family traveling across the American Southwest as the country shatters around them.
The protagonist of Lost Children Archive is an audio journalist starting a sound documentary about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the U.S., fleeing violence in Mexico and the Northern Triangle, a crisis Luiselli last wrote about in her searing essay Tell Me How It Ends. Her husband is beginning a sound project, too: “an ‘inventory of echoes’…about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.” They live in New York with their children, a five-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy, but to make his inventory of echoes, he wants to move permanently to the southwest. The two decide to drive across the country with their children, not making further plans until they arrive in Arizona.
Luiselli writes the road trip in a series of lyrical fragments, creating an archive of the family’s time in transit. She records the landscape, the adults’ fraying marriage, the children’s confusion, the mother’s growing desperation to help the child refugees crossing the border, and the ten-year-old’s determination to help his mother — even if that means running away. Woven through these fragments is another story: seven children on a train north, trying to survive a journey through the desert and into the unknown.
The resulting novel is layered and surprising, able to twist without warning. Luiselli’s archival impulses transform her work into a collage of voices and meanings. Lost Children Archive weaves from mother to son, fiction to meta-fiction, Manhattan apartment to Arizona desert, but it never loses sight of its purpose: to tell the story of a lost family, trying to find hope and certainty however they can. Read more…
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,055 words)
Sonny Rollins was busy in 1957. The tenor saxophonist was present for about sixteen recording sessions, some private, most released, with his own bands as well as with groups led by Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Dorham. His landmark A Night At The Village Vanguard, a live recording of two sets, one in the afternoon and one in the evening performed on November 3rd at New York’s legendary jazz club, became a standard by which other improvisers are judged. In addition, Rollins debuted at Carnegie Hall and headlined the first Monterey Jazz Festival the following year.
“When I look back, people say, ‘Oh, you did a lot of records in 1957…’ Well, I mean, I had to be told about it,” Rollins recently told an interviewer. “So, I guess it was more or less of a norm, you know.”
Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop. They ignored him and continued to lay rods on the floor.
Reynolds, then 57, had seen plenty of Russians come through the shop, which sits on a quiet dam access road in Warsaw, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks. He was tired of them poaching the town’s beloved paddlefish. Sick of their entitled attitude, too.
So when he asked them to leave and they did not comply, there seemed only one option left. He removed a .40-caliber pistol from under the counter, chambered a round, and placed it on the counter.
“I fear for my life,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. He wanted to cover his bases, legally, for whatever came next.
The two men looked up, backed out of the store, and never returned.
It was just another dustup in the long-running war between caviar-mad Russians, local fishermen, and the feds that centers on this unlikely town in the Ozarks and a very curious fish. Read more…
If you look closely you’ll notice
That the pattern on this soft broadcloth shirt
Is made of working man’s blood
And praying folks’ tears.
If you look closer you’ll notice
That this pattern resembles
Tenement row houses, project high rises,
Cell block tiers,
Discontinued stretches of elevated train tracks,
Slave ship gullies, acres of tombstones.
If you look closer, you’ll notice
That this fabric has been carefully blended
With an advanced new age polymer
To make the fabric lightweight
Weatherproof, and durable.
All this to give some sort of posture and dignity
To a broken body that is a host for scars.
— From ‘Soldier’s Dream’ by YASIIN BEY
Lagos
I took a photograph on election day in 2015. It was golden hour. I was new in town. Though I had a writing fellowship that had nothing to do with electoral politics, I was a recovering news journalist. So I registered with the electoral commission and got my press pass and badge and drove around the ghostly streets of Lagos with some local reporters. It was largely an exercise in futility. I felt adrift. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The story I wrote rambles about the stories people tell. My fellowship editor thought it was useless.
But, driving home, I shot this photograph. In it, a teenager is crossing the road. We are in the neighbourhood of Ebute Metta, and he is wearing the most beautiful hoodie, covered in a twirling, swirling motif. He stares at me through glinting shades. Between the patterned sweatshirt and his shorts — also printed black and white but in a different design — he has layered a striped shirt. He stands in front of the Wasimi Community Mosque, a burnt-red building in the 1970s tropical modernist concrete that blankets much of mainland Lagos. Round concrete circles are embedded like a screen for privacy and ventilation at the top corner of the building. The pattern looks classically Lagosian now, but an architect once told me those cutout blocks were imported from Israel.
Photographs flatten reality. They squash three dimensions into two, and turn bodies and buildings into patterns and shapes. They still the world; they solidify a moment. You can breathe with a photograph, though the instant captured was briefer than your exhale. I was driving when I shot this, and my subject was walking; its stillness is stolen. And yet this split second is layered with everything inside the photograph and also everything ephemeral emanating from the image: emotion, history, foreshadowing. The photograph illustrates an obsession I had not yet noted; a string to a web I had yet to pull and untangle.
I liked it when I shot it. I thought: this looks like Lagos. (And I find Lagos beautiful.)
I later became transfixed by both this swirling pattern and by the thought, “This looks like Lagos.”
I saw the pattern everywhere. I took buses around town, little orbs bouncing through the city filled with uncountable lives, personalities, roles, all squished hip to hip on wooden benches. The clothes people wear express just a fragment of their personas. Sometimes it’s obligatory — white garments for Aladura churchgoers, pleated burgundy skirts for school — and sometimes it’s more loosely prescribed: suits and heels for office workers, individual designs in matching aso-ebi for weddings. But there is also a wide range of freedom both within and beyond this criteria, and cosmopolitan Lagosians are unrelentingly expressive and well-dressed. The sweatshirt in the photograph is of a style worn mostly by the young, fly dreamers of Lagos’ lower social strata — street hawkers, bus conductors, entrepreneurs with many hyphens: real estate agent-used car salesman-blogger of a fictional Yoruba playboy in Dubai. I came to call this style, and the concepts it encompasses, “Versage”. Read more…
Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”
“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.
A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in. Read more…
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)
“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.” Read more…
One of them I think of as a malevolent flower growing in my head, unfurling petal by petal, causing great distress. Another variety is an ink spill in the skull, maybe if the ink were scalding hot, starting at one precise point and then spreading heavily into every cavity. The most common is the plain old nail underneath the eyebrow, always on only one side of the face, hammered upward and lodged there for hours or possibly days, depending on whether I got the timing right with the medication. For me that’s the Wal-mart of migraines, super basic, but it’s still a fascinating one. The pain seems to be contained in one area but is so intense and pulsating you could swear it’s everywhere. So I play games with it. I try to feel with my mind — which is funny, because it’s in my mind — where the exact line of the pain stops and starts.
I may as well do something with these long expanses of time when there’s really nothing to do but feel what’s happening up there. So I try to give myself over to it. Feel the contours of the sensation. It has a shape and a texture. It spreads and moves. It’s like a country suddenly forms and establishes a government up there. Each migraine episode, if you really pay attention to it, has a personality. Oh, this one really wants to take me down. On another day it might be more passive-aggressive. This one is the toxic narcissist, gaslighting me. Sometimes when I’m not sure how bad it’s going to be I like to say I’m flirting with a migraine, but it’s really the migraine that’s flirting with me, and then I finally cave and let it have its way. Read more…
Daniel Fuchs| The Golden West| Black Sparrow Books | May 2005 | 42 minutes (8,396 words)
Dear Editors:
Thank you for your kind letter and compliments. Yes, your hunch was right, I would like very much to tell about the problems and values I’ve encountered, writing for the movies all these years. I’m so slow in replying to you because I thought it would be a pleasant gesture—in return for your warm letter—to send you the completed essay. But it’s taken me longer than I thought it would. I’ve always been impressed by the sure, brimming conviction of people who attack Hollywood, and this even though they may never have been inside the business and so haven’t had the chance of knowing how really onerous and exacerbating the conditions are. But for me the subject is more disturbing, or else it is that I like to let my mind wander and that I start from a different bias, or maybe I’ve just been here too long.
Elisa Albert | Longreads | February 2019 | 17 minutes (4,343 words)
They never empty the dedicated shitcan in the dog park. It’s always full to the brim, overflowing with poop bags, swarming with flies and wasps. Which is odd, because all the other trash cans get emptied on the regular, and the fields are mown like clockwork, every other week. Dilapidated Department of General Services carts are often seen cruising around, taking care of park business. So what’s up with the perpetually overflowing dog park shitcan? It’s the enduring mystery of summer. You can smell it from forty paces in the infernal heat.
I call the DGS every couple days to complain about the overflowing shitcan, and always speak to the same lady. We are buds.
Hey, so the poop-bag thing still hasn’t been dealt with, I say.
Yeah, she says. Okay, gotcha. I’ll let them know.
I imagine writing a short story about our relationship, me and the DGS lady. About how we eventually come to share some singular kinship based on our limited exchanges. About how our different lives are ultimately defined by a common emotional struggles. Very Raymond Carver. Maybe we eventually have a fight, or a misunderstanding. Maybe we carry private knowledge of one another like a sacred oath, far into the future. Maybe we pass on the street and don’t register a thing.
Barely seven minutes into her black-history elective on the morning of April 16th, Juanita Douglas was asking her students a question she’d never asked in a classroom before, not in 24 years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. She’d been preparing to ask the question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students the conversation that followed would be painful. Disorienting. She didn’t like the idea of causing them pain. She didn’t want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost. But she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end the difficulty would be worth the trouble.
It was only second period. Several of Douglas’s students — a mix of juniors and seniors — were visibly tired. A few slumped forward, heads on their desks. I was sitting in the back row, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought one or two might be fully asleep. Some were stealthily texting or scrolling through Snapchat. Others were openly texting or scrolling through Snapchat.
After a few seconds, Douglas repeated the question: “Do you know Jon Burge?”
A ragged chorus of noes and nopes and nahs.
“Tell me again what year you were born in,” said Douglas, who is 54 and likes to playfully remind her students that they don’t know everything about the world.
2000. 2001. 1999.
“Okay,” she said. “Well… Welcome to Chicago.”
Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”
The video cut to Darrell Cannon, one of the Midnight Crew’s victims. He spoke about getting hauled by cops into a basement:
I wasn’t a human being to them. I was just simply another subject of theirs. They had did this to many others. But to them it was fun and games. You know, I was just, quote, a nigger to them, that’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name… They had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected, quote, police officers to do anything that barbaric, you know… You don’t continue to call me “nigger” throughout the day unless you are a racist. And the way that they said it, they said it so downright nasty. So there’s no doubt in my mind that, in my case, racism played a huge role in what happened to me. Because they enjoyed this. This wasn’t something that was sickening to them. None of them had looks on their faces like, ugh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t do this much. Nuh-huh. They enjoyed it, they laughed, they smiled. And that is why my anger has been so high. Because I continuously see how they smile.
Text on the screen explained that Burge was fired in 1993, following a lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to produce a report on his involvement in “systematic torture,” written by its own Office of Professional Standards. After his firing Burge moved to Apollo Beach, Florida, where he ran a fishing business. In 2006 another internally commissioned report concluded that he’d been a torture ringleader, but still no charges were brought; the Illinois five-year statute of limitations for police brutality charges had by then expired. In 2008 FBI agents arrested Burge at his home, and creative federal prosecutors charged him — not with torture, but with perjury. In a 2003 civil case, Burge had submitted a sworn statement in which he denied ever taking part in torture. In 2010 a jury found him guilty. After the trial, jurors pointed out that the name of Burge’s boat — Vigilante — hadn’t helped his case.
As soon as the video ended and Douglas flipped the lights back on, her students — most of whom were, like her, black — started talking. Their confusion ricocheted around the room.
“How long did he get?”
“Four-and-a-half years.”
“He only got four-and-a-half years?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“I really feel some type of way about this.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I’ve got it on my phone.”
“He didn’t torture them alone. Why didn’t anyone else get charged?”
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