Search Results for: Tin House

The Power of 'Confessional' Writing

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, a book of essays, writes in the Guardian about the power of confessional writing:

Confession doesn’t just allow – it incites. Someone tweeted about my essays: “After reading this book, I want to write about my hidden pain until my fingers bleed, and then I want to write about my bleeding fingers.” One woman wrote to me to say that as she was writing, her mother was collecting her things from her ex-boyfriend’s house: “I don’t know how to hold this hurt inside,” she said. “But I’m mortified at the thought of talking about it or writing about it or painting it – somehow that seems so much more embarrassing than drunk-dialling him, or falling off a bar stool and breaking my wrist, or whatever ways used to seem like options.”

Another woman wrote to say that one of my essays had made her turn down sex with a guy who didn’t love her. “As low as that sounds,” she said, as if it didn’t matter much. But it mattered to me. It didn’t sound low at all. It sounded like something I might have needed – at several points in my life – to hear. She told me she was writing drunk. She’d needed to get drunk to find the courage to write at all.

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Photo: matryoshka

The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born

Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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Vera Nabokov, Eugen Boissevain, Leonard Woolf: On Spouses Who Supported Their Famous Partner's Writing Careers

At the Atlantic, Koa Beck writes about the spouses of famous writers who supported their partner’s writing careers, often devoting their lives to it. Vera Nabokov epitomized this: She not only performed the duties of cleaning and cooking expected of her as a wife in her era, but also worked as her husband’s “round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary”:

To some writers, Vera Nabokov remains much more than “just a wife,” but rather a template for an enviable asset. It’s undeniably easier to prioritize one’s art with a 24/7 writing coach who also manages “the mini-country that is home,” to quote novelist Allison Pearson.

As Laura Miller recently pointed out in Salon, Virginia Woolf and Edna St. Vincent Millay each benefited greatly from truly anomalous marriages of their time, in which their respective husbands assumed a Vera-esque role. Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, reportedly described himself as a feminist and “married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with the express purpose of providing her with a stable home life and relieving her of domestic tasks so she could write.” By the time Millay died, she had written six plays and more than a dozen books of poetry. While Leonard Woolf cared for Virginia during her bouts of mental illness, he also managed the household, tended to the garden, and co-founded the couple’s literary press. Throughout his dedication to his wife’s craft—and her general well-being—he also managed to have a literary career of his own, producing both novels and stories while maintaining editorships at several journals. Claire Messud wrote in The New York Times that the Woolf partnership was one of “extraordinary productivity.” In her lifetime, Woolf published nine novels, two biographies, and several collections of essays and short stories—among other works.

But not all gifted writers are blessed with Veras (or Leonards or Eugens for that matter). At a promotional reading of Bark at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, [Lorrie] Moore clarified to me—and a room’s worth of fans—that she absolutely does not have a Vera. “I do every little thing myself,” she said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Real House Candidates of Beverly Hills

Longreads Pick

Inside the race to represent California’s absurdly wealthy — and sometimes just absurd — 33rd District:

A few days later, I was sitting in Marianne Williamson’s home in Brentwood, a luxury apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard. It is a warm and vast space, filled with books, art and frantic activity. “Can someone hand me my glasses?” Williamson called out, and an aide quickly fetched them. She was sitting in her living room, Googling around for a quote from Thomas Jefferson that she wanted to share with me. “You know the one,” she said. “It’s on the monument.” She said she would email it to me.

Published: Apr 24, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,175 words)

Why Owning an NBA Team is Like Having a House on the Best Beach in the World

Last year the Milwaukee Bucks were purchased by two hedge-fund billionaires for $550 million. In a piece for Grantland, Bill Simmons tried to nail down what exactly drives the super rich to acquire NBA teams, a purchase that—at least by the numbers—is often a pretty lousy investment.

Simmons concluded that for many owners, exclusivity and prestige outweigh straight number crunching: “You can’t rationally assess the ‘value’ of anything when ego is involved. What’s the value of sitting courtside as everyone watches YOUR team?” Apparently over a half a billion dollars, even for a losing, small-market team. After all, according to Simmons, “plenty of rich people can buy a plane or an island, but only 30 of them can say they own an NBA franchise.” It’s about supply and demand. As long as the supply in question remains incredibly limited, the super rich will remain drawn to what Simmons billed as “the world’s most exclusive club.” Here’s how he broke it down:

If you pretend the NBA is an exclusive beach on Turks and Caicos, it makes more sense. Let’s say it’s the single best beach in the world, and it can only hold 30 houses. Let’s say some of the houses are bigger and prettier than others, only all of them have the same gorgeous ocean view. And let’s say all 30 owners feel strongly that their investments will keep improving, barring a collapsed stock market or an unforeseen weather catastrophe, of course. Does it really matter if you bought one of the ugliest houses on that beach? Don’t you just want to crack the 30? You can always knock the house down and build a better one … right?

That’s the National Basketball Association in 2014. Who wants to be on the hottest beach? What will you pay? How bad do you want it? Get one of those 30 houses and you can invite your friends down for the weekend, show them around, make them drinks and eventually head out to your deck. And you can look out and watch the sun slowly setting, and you can hear the water splash, and you can hear your friends tell you, “I love the view, it’s spectacular.” Because right now, it is.

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Medellín: Latin America’s New Superstar

Longreads Pick

How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities:

The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the exploits of cocaine cowboys made Miami the murder capital of the world in the early ’80s, an ignominious title Medellín itself stole in 1991, when it topped out at 381 murders per 100,000 residents, 40 times what the United Nations considers “epidemic.” That rate, if translated to New York

Source: Next City
Published: Mar 31, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,363 words)

Dispossessed: Haunted Houses of the Great Recession

In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work:

My wife and I walked, zombie-like, through home after home, throughout that stifling summer, into homes that had been closed against the light but bristled with claustrophobic air. We took to nicknaming these places: the Flea House, after whatever it was that bit our realtor; the Burn House, with its charred patches of wall and blackened carpets; Tony’s House, after the name on the novelty license plate still stuck to a bedroom door, a detail particularly creepy amid the otherwise empty gloom of the house, as though Danny Torrance would big-wheel down the hall at any moment.

For the most part, these homes were on regular streets, among other unexceptional homes. It was strange to find them in Los Angeles; the haunted house is usually built outside of some small town, a nightmare in the wilderness that beckons just beyond some tiny hamlet. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as Eleanor Vance makes her way to Hillsdale, Illinois, she’s told not to ask about Hill House: “I am making these directions so detailed,” Dr. Montague writes to her in a letter, “because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.”

It’s a common trope: the unaware traveler and the wary, even hostile townspeople. Why, in all these stories, do the poor townspeople hate the haunted mansion? Well, because they’re poor. They can’t afford to move away, to uproot their families, even after some rich eccentric has unleashed an unspeakable evil just beyond the town limits. “People leave this town,” a Hillsdale resident tells Eleanor, “they don’t come here.” The archetypal haunted house story is often really about class, about the rich who don’t understand the land or the people or the history and blunder into the landscape, attempting to buy their way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals nearby. The town grows resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly—haunted by forces beyond their own control.

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Photo: US National Archives, Flickr

Supernatural Sightings By Japanese Tsunami Survivors

Haltingly, apologetically, then with increasing fluency, the survivors spoke of the terror of the wave, the pain of bereavement and their fears for the future. They also talked about encounters with the supernatural. They described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbours, and dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices and public places, on the beaches and in the ruined towns. The experiences ranged from eerie dreams and feelings of vague unease to cases, like that of Takeshi Ono, of outright possession.

A young man complained of pressure on his chest at night, as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because the eyes of the dead stared out at him from puddles.

A civil servant in Soma visited a devastated stretch of coast, and saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight. When he looked for her again she had disappeared.

A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway and prayed for the spirits of those who had died – and the ghostly calls ceased.

A cab driver in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, he looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the levelled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.

In the London Review of Books, Richard Lloyd Parry looks at Japan’s cult of ancestors and the phenomena of the appearance of ghosts after the country was devastated by the 2011 tsunami. See more stories about the tsunami.

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Photo: Pieterjan Vandaele

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Can a Company Keep Innovating After the Founder Is Gone?

Marc Andreessen is obsessed with the idea that tech companies need to focus on innovation above all else. He believes that the “output” of technology companies isn’t products — at least not the way the “output” of Ford is cars. The “output” of tech companies, he says, is innovation.

Andreessen’s second theory of innovation is that the people who are the very best at it are the people who create successful technology companies — founders. They are the people who have a proven ability to develop a concept and bring it to fruition.

For this reason, Andreessen believes that tech companies should be run by their founders. The problem for eBay is that its founder, Pierre Omidyar, had no interest in running it. And John Donahoe, a talented manager, had the wisdom to know he was not the kind of visionary who could found an innovative tech company.

So he decided he was going to have to go after the next best thing. He was going to have to build a team of founders, or founder-types, and give them the run of the place. He, meanwhile, would operate as their in-house consultant (and boss).

Nicholas Carlson, in Business Insider, on the origins of a secretive eBay project, led by Jack Abraham, that helped the company reverse its fortunes. Read more from Carlson.

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Photo: nikonfans, Flickr

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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…