Search Results for: Tin House

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

California raisins. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jonah Engel Bromwich, Ryan Goldberg, Meghan Daum, Alison Osius, and Joel Mowdy.

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Lengua Tacos

Getty, photo collage by Homestead

Feliz Moreno | Longreads | May 2019 | 24 minutes (6,008 words)

I am 26 and I haven’t been back to México to visit my dad’s extended family since I was 5 years old, and this isn’t because of financial or legal obstacles. When my youngest sister, Belén, finishes her undergraduate studies and announces that, in celebration, she wants to take a family trip to Michoacán, México, I am not enthusiastic about the idea. When plans for the trip solidify and I request time off from work, my boss asks me if I speak Spanish. “I understand more than I speak,” I tell her, as I fill out the time off request form.

I don’t remember much about the trip we made when I was 5, but I know that my language habits were already solidified at that point, that my understanding of the world had already been shaped by the hard ‘j’ consonant sound found in words like ‘juice’ and ‘jump rope.’ And it is tough for a 5-year-old to rationalize the inability to communicate with other children in a Spanish-speaking country. “Nobody here speaks English,” my 5-year-old self complained to my Dad. This, along with the fact that I got extremely sick from being exposed to México’s tap water, didn’t leave me with any desire to ever return.

The upcoming trip will be 10 days, with time split between the Jacona-Zamora region of Michoacán, where the majority of my dad’s family is based, and la Ciudad de México, México City. My two younger sisters, who took the time to study abroad in Central American countries during their undergraduate careers, are excited about the approaching trip. My dad calls me a few times in the weeks leading up to it to inform me that Michoacán has the highest murder rate in the country right now, and that we need to be vigilant and smart when we travel. I add this to the long list of anxieties I have about the trip, the primary one being my Spanish deficiency.

What is it Edward James Olmos — cast as Selena’s father — says to a young Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 film about the young singers’ life? “You speak it a little funny.” “It” being Spanish. The Quintanillas are in the car discussing the possibility of touring in México when Olmos launches into a frustrated rant.

“Being Mexican-American is tough. Anglos jump all over you if you don’t speak English perfectly, Mexicans jump all over you if don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We gotta be twice as perfect as anybody else…our family has been here for centuries, and yet they treat us as if we just swam across the Rio Grande. Anglo food is too bland, and yet when we go to México we get the runs. Now that to me is embarrassing… we gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans — it’s exhausting!”

In the scene, the Tejano singer laughs and brushes off her father’s frustration with humor. She reassures him that she’s been singing in Spanish for ten years. But the reality Olmos’ character identifies is real, and as we sit in the airport preparing to board the plane to Guadalajara, my anxiety is palpable.

In the states, when Spanish speakers ask me if I speak the language my response varies. I will say “más o menos,” when I am feeling more practiced in my ability to communicate. “Entiendo más que yo hablo” I will say, stumbling over the words, hoping to diffuse any expectations of my responding in Spanish. “Cuando era niña, hablo más Español,” which translates (roughly) to, “When I was a little girl, I spoke more Spanish.” My mother tells me that some of my first words as a baby were “agua” and “leche,” but even so, I’ve always felt apprehensive about my Spanish.

Derek Owusu, a writer and podcaster from Tottenham, London, speaks of the cultural limitations of not speaking Twi after his mother emigrated from Ghana to the United Kingdom. In his article “Mother Tongue: The Lost Inheritance of Diaspora” he writes:

“For as long as I can remember, whenever I’ve been asked…whether I can speak Twi or not, my response has always been ‘I can understand it, but I can’t speak it.’ In that moment it’s hard not to feel only half Ghanaian…”

I can relate to this sentiment. In the U.S., I have made myself relatively comfortable with the fact that people see me as an outsider among the middle-class white communities I often find myself in. The discomfort that comes with being an ethnic minority in the U.S. is familiar to me now, even if it remains traumatic. At least I have some language — cold, academic words like “microagression” and “oppression,” — in which to communicate the trauma; I have a wealth of resources I can access that validate my experience in this country. In México, being an outsider hurts more for some reason. Being called a “pocha” by the people that are supposed to be your raza hurts more, or maybe it just hurts in a different way than I am used to.
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The Growing Power of Prosecutors

Rex Wholster / Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,345 words)

In our current criminal justice system, there is one person who has the power to determine someone’s fate: the American prosecutor. While other players are important — police officers, judges, jury — the most essential link in the system is the prosecutor, who is critical in determining charges, setting bail, and negotiating plea bargains. And whose influence often falls under the radar.

Journalist Emily Bazelon’s new book, Charged, The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, brings to light some of the invisible consequences of our current judicial system — one in which in which prosecutors have “breathtaking power” that she argues is out of balance.

In Charged, a deeply-reported work of narrative nonfiction, Bazelon tells the parallel stories of Kevin, charged with possession of a weapon in Brooklyn, New York, and Noura, who was charged with killing her mother in Memphis, Tennessee, to illustrate the immense authority that prosecutors currently hold, how deeply consequential their decisions are for defendants, and how different approaches to prosecution yield different outcomes. Between these stories, she weaves in the recent push for prosecutorial reform, which gained momentum in the 2018 local midterm elections, and the movement away from mass incarceration. Read more…

Liberation: a Love Story (and a Reckoning)

Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Wong | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,187 words)

As a relationship therapist, I know a lot about love, loss, repair, endurance, and growth. Of course, I was trained for this. But the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned came from my grandparents, who taught me nearly everything there is to know about these things.

That is, until one evening three years ago that left me to question everything they taught me.

That night, I’m drawing a bath for my young daughters when my phone dings. As the water runs, I look and see that it’s a forwarded email from my mother, a message from one of my father’s long removed cousins — the daughter of my grandfather’s estranged brother. The email is about my grandfather’s dark side, a part of him I knew nothing about.

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The Age of Forever Crises

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Efrem Lukatsky / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Linda Kinstler | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,527 words)

How does one recognize catastrophe, when it comes? What does it look like, how does it sound and smell? If it is an invisible catastrophe, how can you know when you are near it, and when you are far away? And what if it is an everlasting catastrophe, a disaster with a long half-life, so no matter how much time passes, it never quite goes away, and in some places, it only grows stronger? And when a decision from on high announces that it is time to try to move past it, to lay a wreath and get on with life, how does one mark the anniversary of a disaster still in motion, a crisis without end?

Last week marked yet another anniversary of the explosion of the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station’s Reactor No. 4. Thirty-three years ago, in the early hours of the morning on April 26, 1986, an ill-fated safety test unleashed an explosion equivalent to sixty tons of TNT, obliterating the reactor and sending the contents of its core — uranium fuel, graphite, zirconium, and a noxious mixture of radioactive gases — into the surrounding air, water, and earth. Read more…

Prince of the Midwest

AP Photo/Phil Sandlin

Michael Perry | Under Purple Skies | Belt Publishing | May 2019 | 10 minutes (1,861 words)

 

You’d never dream it looking at me, all doughy, bald, and crumpling in my 50s, but I owe the sublimated bulk of my aesthetic construct to Prince Rogers Nelson, circa Purple Rain. The film and album were released the summer after my fresh-off-the farm freshman year in college. I sat solo through the movie a minimum of four times, wore the hubs off the soundtrack cassette, draped my bedroom with purple scarves, stocked the dresser top with fat candles, and Scotch-taped fishnet to the drywall above the bed. Intended to create seductive shadows of mystery, it wound up a pointless cobweb.

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What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn

Illustration by Homestead

Nancy Jainchill | Longreads | April 2019 | 22 minutes (5,383 words)

 

“Peter, I can’t do this.” I grabbed my boyfriend by the arm.

The crew with whom we were making a porn movie had just arrived, their footsteps like drum beats as they made their way upstairs to our second floor flat. I stared at the doorway. Didn’t they realize they had the wrong house? I must’ve been crazy to say yes. Their footsteps continued. Maneuvering past me, their tripods were like hulking robots, their metal legs clattering along the wooden floor. Peter stood nearby, lit a joint, and turned to me. “Where’s Charley?”

Of course he was concerned about our dog.

***

My star turn began in a Berkeley flat on a summer morning in 1970. As our kitchen was heating up from the sun, Peter stripped off his flannel shirt, rubbed his hands up and down on his chest, and pointed to a classified ad, “Bus boy wanted. Starts immediately.” He took a sip of coffee.

Okay, he was right. We were short on rent money, and Peter solved problems. Except Peter wasn’t bus boy material. No way that would be happening. His mother had served him dinner in front of the TV every night until he left for college, and he didn’t do dishes. Sitting down next to him, I leaned over to see what he was reading.

Balancing his cigarette on our kitchen table’s edge — one of those fifties-era Formica tables, mottled red and white with a metal rim that couldn’t burn — he flattened the paper out with both hands. “Wow. Nancy, look at this. Become a porn star overnight.” He tapped his pen on the ad, and circled it.

I sputtered on a sip of coffee. “Are you kidding me?”

Peter’s voice quickened as he read. “Listen. ‘Having trouble paying your bills? Enjoy yourself while you earn your way out of debt.’” He shoved the paper at me. “Why not? We’re short on rent money. This looks easy.” He wasn’t joking.

After scanning the ad, which offered cash for taking off my clothes, I got up and walked to the window. While I wanted to make Peter happy, this hadn’t been part of the plan. Not for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I never took off my coat. Summer or winter, my coat stayed on. I had the idea that my body wasn’t good enough, so I kept it hidden.

“C’mon Nance.” He gave my butt a light slap.

He knew I’d give in. When was the last time I’d said “no” to Peter?

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The Enduring Myth of a Lost Live Iggy and the Stooges Album

Iggy and the Stooges performing at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 31, 1973. Photo by Ronnie Hoffman.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 48 minutes (8,041 words)

 

In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. It was a four-band bill. Blue Öyster Cult headlined. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show??? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert.

The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. Iggy taunted listeners. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll.

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We All Work for Facebook

Carol Yepes / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Livia Gershon | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,270 words)

When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’ heads. It was pretty dumb. It was also created by professional writers, actors, and crew, who were decently paid; many of them belonged to unions.

Today, my kids don’t have much interest in that sort of show. For them, TV mostly means YouTube. Their preferred channels collect memes and jokes from various corners of the internet. In a typical show, a host puts on goofy voices to read posts from r/ChoosingBeggars, a Reddit message board devoted to customers who make absurd demands of Etsy vendors. It’s significantly funnier than “You Can’t Do That on Television,” I admit. It also involves no unionized professionals.

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The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls

Gaia Banks / New Directions Publishing

Ruby Brunton | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,674 words)

Rachel Ingalls, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 78, was a writer who did not seek out the spotlight, but found it not at all unpleasant when at last it came. Beyond a small circle of loyal friends and regular visits to Virginia to see her family, Ingalls lived a fairly reclusive existence after her move from the U.S. to the U.K. in 1965. “I’m not exactly a hermit,” she said, “but I’m really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I’d resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. It’s just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.”

A writer of fantastical yet slight works of fiction, with a back catalog numbering 11 titles in total, Ingalls flew more or less under the literary radar until recent years, when the newfound interest that followed the 2017 re-issue of her best-known book, Mrs. Caliban, also finally allowed her readers to learn about her processes and motivations; the attention slowly brought her into the public eye. Reviews across the board revered the oddly taciturn novella, in which mythic elements and extraordinary happenings are introduced into the lives of otherwise normal people by a prose remarkable for its clarity and quickness. “Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.” Wrote Lidija Haas in The New Yorker; in the same piece she described Ingalls as “unjustly neglected.” (Mrs. Caliban was also lightheartedly celebrated as a venerable addition to popular culture’s mysterious year of fish sex stories, a fittingly strange introduction of her work to a broader readership.)  Read more…