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To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time

Nick Fitzhardinge / Getty

Matthew Salesses | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,630 words)

1.

I have been reading books about time: theoretical physics, evolution, parallel universes. Recently I realized that I was reading them because I wanted one to tell me how to go back in time — to before my wife died of cancer.

In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges our concept of time. Time passes more quickly the closer one is to a gravitational mass (like a planet or a star or a black hole). This fact is popular in science fiction. A space traveler might return to Earth to find that her friends and family have aged more than she has. Even at different altitudes on Earth, time is different. Rovelli writes that if identical twins separate early in life and live one in the mountains and one below sea level, then they will find in old age that the one below sea level has aged more, being closer to the center of the planet.

Time, Rovelli claims, is not linear. It is a gravitational field. If he is right, time is like everything else in the universe and must be made up of extremely tiny particles. There is no past or future; we only experience it this way.

So why, my grief asks, can’t we change times simply by changing our perceptions? Rovelli suggests that our linear experience of time is due to thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the total amount of entropy in the universe can never decrease, only increase. For us, or at least in our section of the universe, time operates in only one direction.

As consolation, Rovelli offers the mind as a time machine — we travel via memory. This is a disappointing compromise. In mourning, memory is only another cause for mourning. It does not change time, only reminds one that time has passed.
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None of the President’s Men

Warner Bros.

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY

SORAYA sits down at her laptop with a cookieor some cake or that weirdly oversize banana bread. As she startsworking on a column like this one, the woman next to her, workingon a spreadsheet, glances at Soraya’s desktop and turns to her.

WOMAN: What do you do?

SORAYA: I’m a columnist.

WOMAN: Holy shit, that’s cool.

I starred in this scene two weeks ago, and again just this past week at a party. The women don’t have to tell me why they think it’s cool, I know why: Carrie Bradshaw. An apartment in New York, a photo on the side of a bus, Louboutins, tutus, and a column at the top of each week. Which is why I qualify it every time: “I don’t make as much as Carrie Bradshaw.” Yes, the job is cool, and it is holy-shit-worthy because so few journalists are able to actually work as journalists. But I’m freelance: I can cover my rent but can’t buy a house, I don’t get benefits, and I might be out of a job next week. Not to mention that I might not be so lucky next time. The women usually turn back to their admin after that — admin looks a lot cooler than journalism these days. But only if you’re not going by Sex and the City or basically every other journalism movie or series that has come after, all of which romanticize an industry which has a knack for playing into that.

“This is the end of an era, everything’s changing,” Gina Rodriguez tells her friends in the trailer for Someone Great, a new Netflix rom-com in which she, a music journalist, gets a job. At a magazine. In San Francisco. This is not a sci-fi movie in which the character has time traveled back to, I don’t know, 1975. It is only one recent example of the obfuscation of what journalism actually means now. There’s also the Hulu series Shrill, which presents itself as if it were current-day but is based on the life of Lindy West, who had a staff job at the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger when you could still have a staff job and make a name for yourself with first-person essays, i.e., 2009. Special (another Netflix show) also harkens back to that time, and though it’s more overt about how exploitative online media can be — the hero is an intern with cerebral palsy who writes about his disability (which he claims is from a car accident) for clicks — the star is still hired straight out of an internship. (What’s an internship?)

Hollywood romanticizes everything, you say? Perhaps, but this is a case where the media itself seems to be actively engaging in a certain kind of deception about how bad its own situation actually is. In February, The Washington Post, which is no doubt still benefiting from the press off the still-gold-standard journalism movie — 1976’s All the President’s Men — ran a Super Bowl ad narrated by Tom Hanks, which applauds late journalists Marie Colvin and Jamal Khashoggi, who, in their words, brought the story, “no matter the cost.” The spot highlighted what we already know, which is that we need journalism to be a functioning democracy and that many journalists risk their lives to guarantee it. What it kept in darkness (ha), however, was that to do their job properly, those journalists need protection and they need resources — provided by their editors and by their publishers. Hanks, of course, starred in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film based on the journalists who reported on the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The ad was using the past to promote the future, rather than dealing with a present, in which more than 2,400 people lost media jobs in the first three months of the year and journalists are trying to unionize en masse. But that’s not particularly telegenic, is it?

* * *

The romanticized idea of the journalist — dogged, trenchcoated — really took off at the movies. In 1928, ex-reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote a play which was adapted into The Front Page, a 1931 screwball that became the journalism movie prototype, with fast dialogue and faster morals. My favorite part is that not only is the star reporter trying to quit the paper (in this economy?), but his editor will do anything — including harboring an accused murderer — to keep him on staff. Matt Ehrlich, coauthor of Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, once told me for Maclean’s that The Front Page came out of the “love-hate relationship” the writers had with the industry even back then. “The reporters are absolute sleazebags, they do horrible things,” he said. “At the same time The Front Page makes journalism seem very exciting, and they do get the big scoop.” Ehrlich also told me that some initially thought All the President’s Men, which eventually became the prototype of the journalism movie, was reminiscent of the earlier era of the genre. In case you are not a journalist and so haven’t seen it, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman starred as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post reporters whose stories on the Watergate burglary and subsequent cover-up helped lead to President Nixon’s resignation. While the film also played fast and loose with the truth, it had a veneer of rumpled repetitious reality — not to mention a strong moral core that made taking down the president with a typewriter seem, if implausible, at least not impossible.

In February, Education Week reported that a survey of 500 high school journalism teachers across 45 states found that, in the past two years, 44 percent of U.S. school teachers saw a rise in journalism enrollment and a 30 percent increase in interest in journalism higher education. “This is this generation’s Watergate,” the executive director of the National Scholastic Press Association said. “With President Trump, everyone is really in tune to the importance of a free press.” Sure. But this isn’t 1976. No doubt there are scores of WoodSteins out there, but not only do a number of journalists no longer have the resources or the time to follow stories of any kind, they rarely have the salaried staff positions to finance them, nor the editors and publishers to support them doing the job they were hired to do. In All the President’s Men, executive editor Ben Bradlee asks WoodStein if they trust their source, before muttering “I can’t do the reporting for my reporters, which means I have to trust them. And I hate trusting anybody.” Then he tells them to “Run that baby.” These days there is little trust in anything beyond the bottom line.

The myth is that All the President’s Men led to a surge of interest in journalism as a career. But in reality it was women, increasingly educated post-liberation, whose interest explained the surge. (My editor is asking: “Is it an accident that shitting on journalism as a worthy profession coincided with women moving into journalism?” My reply is: “I think not.”) Still, women remain underrepresented in the field to this day, a fact reflected by the paucity of movies about the work of female journalists. While there were scores of ’70s and ’80s thrillers built around male reporters with too much hair taking down the man, for the women … there was The China Syndrome, with Jane Fonda as a television reporter named Kimberly covering a nuclear power plant conspiracy. And, um, Absence of Malice? Sally Field is a newspaper reporter who sleeps with her subject (I mean, it is Paul Newman). I guess I could include Broadcast News, which stars Holly Hunter as a neurotic-but-formidable producer and personified the pull between delivering the news and delivering ratings (the analog version of clicks). But Network did that first and more memorably, with its suicidal anchorman lamenting the demise of media that matters. “I’m a human being, GODDAMN IT!!!” he shouts into the void. “My life has value!!!” You don’t hear female journalists saying that on-screen, though you do hear them saying “I do” a whole lot.

The quintessential journalism film and the quintessential rom-com are in fact connected. Nora Ephron, who was briefly married to Carl Bernstein, actually cowrote an early script for All the President’s Men. While it was chucked in favor of William Goldman’s, she went on to write When Harry Met Sally, and I’ll forgive you for not remembering that Sally was a journalist. She probably only mentions it twice because this was 1989, an era in which you decided to be a journalist and then you became one — the end. The movie treats reporting like it’s so stable it’s not even worth mentioning, like being a bureaucrat. Sally could afford a nice apartment, she had plenty of time to hang out with Harry, so what was there to gripe about (Good Girls Revolt would suggest Ephron’s trajectory was less smooth, but that’s another story)? Four years later, in Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan is another journalist in another Ephron movie, equally comfortable, so comfortable in fact that her editor pays her to fly across the country to stalk Tom Hanks. This newspaper editor literally assigns a reporter to take a plane to Seattle from Chicago to “look into” a possible lifestyle story about a single white guy. (Am I doing something wrong?!?!)

Journalism and rom-coms were fused from almost the start, around the ’30s and ’40s. The Front Page went from being a journalism movie to being a rom-com when it turned its hero into a heroine for His Girl Friday. The reporter repartee and the secretive nature of the job appeared to lend themselves well to Hays-era screwballs, though they also indelibly imprinted a lack of seriousness onto their on-screen female journalists. After a brief moment in the 1970s when The Mary Tyler Moore Show embodied the viability of a woman journalist who puts work first, the post-Ephron rom-coms of the 2000s were basically glossy romances in “offices” that were really showrooms for a pink-frosted fantasy girl-reporter gig no doubt thought up by male executives who almost certainly saw All the President’s Men and almost certainly decided a woman couldn’t do that and who cares anyway because the real story is how you’re going to get Matthew McConaughey to pop the question. I can’t with the number of women who recently announced that 13 Going on 30 — the movie in which Jennifer Garner plays a literal child successfully running a fashion magazine — made them want to be journalists. But the real death knell of the aughts journo-rom-com, according to rom-com columnist Caroline Siede, was in 2003 with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003. In that caper, Kate Hudson has a job as a columnist despite thinking it is completely rational to write a piece called “How to Bring Peace to Tajikistan” for her Cosmo-type fashion magazine.

* * *

In 2016, the Oscar for Best Picture went to Spotlight, which follows The Boston Globe’s titular investigative team — three men, one woman — as it uncovers the Catholic Church abuse scandal. The film earned comparisons to All the President’s Men for its focus on journalistic drudgery, but it also illustrated the growing precariousness of the newsroom with the arrival of the web. In one scene, executive editor Marty Baron expresses shock when he is told it takes a couple of months for the team to settle on a story and then a year or more to investigate it. At the same time, Baron and two other editors are heavily involved and supportive of the three reporters, who went on to win the Pulitzer in 2003 and remained on the team for years after. Released only 12 years after the fact, the film suggested that journalists who win Pulitzers have some kind of security, which, you know, makes sense, and is maybe true at The Boston Globe. But two years after Spotlight came out, David Wood, who had won HuffPost its only Pulitzer, was laid off. As one of BuzzFeed’s reporters told The Columbia Journalism Review after BuzzFeed shed 15 percent of its staff, “It’s this sense that your job security isn’t tied to the quality of your work.”

“We have so much to learn from these early media companies and in many ways it feels like we’re at the start of another formative era of media history where iconic companies will emerge and thrive for many decades,” BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti blew hard in a memo in 2014, referring to traditional outfits like Time and The New York Times. But both those publications have unions, which Peretti has been clear he doesn’t think “is right” for his company. “A lot of the best new-economy companies are environments where there’s an alliance between managers and employees,” he said in 2015. “People have shared goals.” In this case the shared goals seem to be that Peretti profits (his company was valued at more than $1 billion in 2016) while his staff is disposable.

Which brings us back to the Globe in 2019. That is to say the real one, not the romanticized one. This version of the Globe hires a Gonzo-esque leftist political writer named Luke O’Neil as a freelancer and publishes his “controversial” op-ed about the Secretary of Homeland Security’s resignation titled “Keep Kirstjen Nielsen unemployed and eating Grubhub over her kitchen sink.” “One of the biggest regrets of my life is not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon,” it opened, and it concluded with, “As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.” The article was gone by Friday, pulled upon the request of the paper’s owners (O’Neil sent me the original). According to WGBH, a now-deleted note on the opinion page stated that the article “did not receive sufficient editorial oversight and did not meet Globe standards. The Globe regrets its lack of vigilance on the matter. O’Neil is not on staff.” And, oh, man, that last line. It says everything there is to say about modern journalism that is unspoken not only on-screen but by the culture at large and the media in it. It says you serve us but we provide no security, no benefits, no loyalty. It says, unlike Spotlight or All the President’s Men or even The Front Page, we do not have your back. Because if they did, you better believe it would have a good chance of ending up on-screen.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Rewriting A Symphony In Stone

Engraving of the cathedral of Notre Dame circa 1850 by Deroy. Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Summer Brennan | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,685 words)

 

As flames erupted from the roof of Notre Dame cathedral, snapping their bright orange tongues against the blue of a darkening springtime sky, people the world over felt the scorch of its destruction lick the walls of our internal picture galleries. We patted down our memories, as one does when fearing the loss of a wallet, making sure they were still there: the year we lived on the Left Bank, the semester abroad, the summer vacation or backpacking trip when, after what felt like an eternity standing in line, we climbed up to the bell towers for a view of Paris among the gargoyles. Jutting stone of an ancient river island, lapped by eight centuries of the city’s shifting tides of politics and light.

If we had never set foot in Notre Dame, or even in France, our vault of association was no less full. Novels, paintings, photographs, postcards, and films both old and new rushed in to provide romantic context: Audrey Hepburn spilling ice cream on Cary Grant on the quai opposite the famous cathedral in Charade; Jesse telling Celine in Linklater’s Before Sunset about the Nazi who defied orders by refusing to blow it up; Quasimodo swinging down on a rope to save Esmeralda from the mob, and shouting from the symbolic protection of the church his stirring claim of “Sanctuary!” If we do not have our own Paris to recall, there is the fabled city of Victor Hugo, Colette, Ernest Hemingway, and James Baldwin. As Notre Dame burned and we found ourselves, despite our representations and our memories, still pickpocketed by loss, I was reminded of the ways in which Paris has been repeatedly damaged, demolished, rebuilt and reimagined.

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The Revolution…Without Prince

Illustration by David Wilson

Kevin Sampsell| Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,777of words)

Prince’s “Erotic City” was one of the most played songs at dance clubs in the mid-`80s. If I were with my friend, Angie, and the DJ played this infamously dirty B-side, we’d be on the floor immediately after that first sexy note — a lone string plucked and whammied, dreamlike. Prince was the bond in our friendship, one that started when we were horny teenagers and has lasted in some small way or another throughout the years. Even though we live in the same state, we don’t see each other much. I guess you’d say we’re more like Internet friends these days. We chat about parenting, old friends, or jobs. But back in the day it was pretty hot and heavy, and it seemed like the good chemistry between us was heavily influenced by our love for the one and only Prince Rogers Nelson. Which is why it felt oddly appropriate when Angie messaged me on Instagram last year to see if I wanted to go see Prince’s most popular backing band, The Revolution, at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. “It would be a cool flashback if you wanted to go,” she wrote.

***

I have to admit, I stopped paying attention to Prince around the time he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (in 1993), but Angie had stayed a superfan. She interacts with people on Prince message boards, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and newsletters. She has a wardrobe of Prince t-shirts, tank tops, leggings, necklaces, and earrings. She saw him in concert eight times, most recently in Oakland in 2016 on his Piano and a Microphone tour, and before that, in Portland in 2013, when his backing band was the all-female group, 3rdeyegirl. He died less than two months after the Oakland show. Mournfully, she flew to Minneapolis shortly after his death to see The Revolution reunite and perform his songs at the legendary First Avenue nightclub, where scenes from “Purple Rain” take place.

I saw Prince perform only once, at (in my opinion) his creative peak, in 1988 on the Lovesexy tour. Just a year after Sign O’ The Times received rave reviews but before his oddball choice to record a whole album for a Michael Keaton Batman movie. The concert I saw was an elaborate stage show in Seattle, with a horn section, Sheila E. on drums, a seductive dancer named Cat I was obsessed with, and gratuitous stage props like a basketball hoop, a bed, a fountain, and a Ford Thunderbird. Even though The Revolution was not his band at the time, they were his band on his two best studio creations (Around the World In a Day and Parade). I guess I should say “arguably his two best” because when it comes to Prince, every other detail, achievement, and rumor concerning him and his work is argued about.

It took me just a few seconds to reply to Angie and tell her I wanted to go. I didn’t know exactly who would be singing the songs, but just the idea of seeing Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Brown Mark (Mark Brown), Matt “Doctor” Fink, and Bobby Z. (Robert B. Rivkin) on stage together, locking into one funky groove after another — circa 1979-86 — seemed amazing enough.
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MFA vs. NYC: A Reading List

42nd Street with Chrysler Bulding during Manhattanhenge in 2018, captured in Manhattan, NYC. (Getty Images)

Near the end of my MFA, someone asked what my plans were after graduation. Before allowing me to answer, he said, somewhat wistfully, that he thought I should move to New York City and “live a little” before writing anything else. In the moment, I probably nodded politely and smiled, as I’m prone to doing, but his suggestion frustrated me. How, after living for two years on a barely-sufficient stipend, did he expect that I’d be able — or want — to fling myself across the country to a city with exorbitant rent prices where I had no job, no insurance, and no community? And what did he mean by living? Had I not been living during the two years of my MFA, during which I moved to an unfamiliar-to-me city, taught classes at the university for the first time, learned to edit a journal, found my way into a community of writers, and struggled in draft after draft to improve my own prose?

Instead of moving to New York City, I did what might be considered the opposite; I started a PhD in creative writing in the middle of Oklahoma, which I’m finishing up now. During my years here, I’ve certainly grown as a writer and a teacher, and had the opportunity to build lasting relationships with people who have supported me in innumerable ways. But I also have remained aware of the problems within academia: there is a food pantry for graduate students in the room across from my office, for example, a lack of diversity within my program and many others, and a job market that dwindles every year. Sometimes I think back to that person telling me to move to NYC, and I wonder who I might be now — as a writer, as a person, as a professional — had I “lived life” rather than pursuing another degree. I’ve probably thought about his offhand comment more than I should, but it also seems to encapsulate some of the larger conversations about the function of MFA and PhD creative writing programs and the various pros and cons of making a life as a writer within or outside of academia.

More interesting to me than prescribing one way of life over another, however, is to examine the challenges and sources of nourishment in each, and to wonder about the possibilities that exist beyond a reductive dichotomy. The essays curated in this reading list illuminate problems that exist within MFA and PhD creative writing programs, explore the idea of mentorship both within and outside of the academy, and offer insight on how to live a fruitful writing life without the support and constraints of a formal program.

1. MFA vs. NYC (Chad Harbach, November 26, 2010, Slate)

Chad Harbach theorizes about how MFA programs are influencing both the craft and professional development of fiction writers, as well as impacting the landscape of publishing, in this viral essay.

It’s time to do away with this distinction between the MFAs and the non-MFAs, the unfree and the free, the caged and the wild. Once we do, perhaps we can venture a new, less normative distinction, based not on the writer’s educational background but on the system within which she earns (or aspires to earn) her living: MFA or NYC.

Related read: Which Creates Better Writers: An MFA Program or New York City? (Leslie Jamison, February 27, 2014, The New Republic) and “MFA vs NYC”: Both, Probably (Andrew Martin, March 28, 2014, The New Yorker)

2. Going Hungry at The Most Prestigious MFA in America (Katie Prout, Lit Hub)

The idea of writers living without substantial income is one that’s sometimes romanticized, as Katie Prout notes while listening to an audiobook of A Moveable Feast, in which Hemingway says that “he and Pound agreed that the best way to be a writer is to live poorly.” One month away from turning 30, Prout writes about the realities — which include food banks and multiple jobs — of living with very little money while pursuing her MFA at Iowa.

I’m an instructor at the university where I attend the best nonfiction writing program in the country, and I make approximately $18,000 a year before taxes. When I was denied a second teaching assistantship at the university this summer for the upcoming school year even though I already had signed a contract with the offering department, my director explained that it was in the school’s best interests to look after my best interests, and my best interest was to make sure that I had time [to] write my thesis.

3. Every Day is a Writing Day, With or Without an MFA (Emily O’Neill, November 27, 2018, Catapult)

The requirement to relocate and the insufficiency of fully-funded spots are just two of many reasons why MFA degrees are not possible for many people, as Emily O’Neill explains in this essay about how she nurtures a writing life outside of the academy.

I don’t have an MFA. It often makes me feel like the man on that mortifying date to admit this to writers I don’t know well. So many people who write are academics or at least aspiring to an MFA or PhD, and mentioning I don’t feel specifically drawn to the demands of graduate school is often seen as a sin against literature.

4. Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces (Minda Honey, March 2017, Longreads)

After two years, Minda Honey longs to escape from the whiteness of her MFA program, and plans a trip to four national parks, not realizing that “80% of National Parks visitors and employees are white.” Weaving together moments from her travels and memories from her writing program, Honey lays bare the lack of diversity in both spaces.

When I’d first started my MFA program, I thought it would be an escape from the oppressive whiteness of Corporate America. I thought without suits to button my body into, I would be free to exist. But Academia proved to be just as oppressive.

5. How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color (Deena ElGenaidi, April 17, 2018, Electric Lit)

When consulting with people about how to apply to PhD programs, Deena ElGenaidi’s advisor tells her to play up her minority status in her personal statement. ElGenaidi explores the problematic and pervasive nature of this advice, while also discussing what it means that minority students and people of color are encouraged to use their trauma in order to be admitted into academic programs.

The experience taught me that society, white America specifically, regularly asks minorities and people of color to tokenize and exploit themselves, talking about their cultural backgrounds in a marketable way in order to gain acceptance into programs and institutions we are otherwise barred from.

6. The Mentor Series: Allie Rowbottom and Maggie Nelson (Allie Rowbottom, ed. Monet Patrice Thomas, March 25, 2019, The Rumpus)

How do writers balance the challenge of seeking publication in a difficult fast-paced market while nurturing their craft? And what role do mentors play in a writer’s development? In the inaugural installment of “The Mentor Series,” a series of interviews between mentors and students curated by Monet Patrice Thomas, Allie Rowbottom and Maggie Nelson ruminate on these questions and more.

Allie Rowbottom: I remember once, after I finished my MFA thesis, you advised I take my time and sit on the project. You said something about not publishing too young, or rushing out of the gate, and I’ve thought about that a lot now that I have published—one of my biggest challenges (or strengths?) as a writer is that I push myself. Now that my first book is out in the world, I feel an urgency to produce more, at the same time I worry that rushing never makes for solid work.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Lock Your Doors?

Edward Hopper, October on Cape Cod, 1946, oil on canvas. VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty.

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | April 2019 | 8 minutes (2,082 words)

 

I recently bought a century-old Victorian house in the Hudson Valley after a decade in Brooklyn. There are mountain views and streets lined with mature trees; it’s about as bucolic as you’d imagine. I’m now adept at lowercase ‘fixer-upper projects’ like stripping 1970s wallpaper, staining a deck, and cursing the previous owners for installing 1970s wallpaper. The cursing feels productive, and the house, a marker of adulthood.

One unexpected development: movies and books about home invasion deliver a gut-punch like never before. I’m no longer the rent-stabilized New Yorker tittering at the onscreen rubes killed one by one in their cabin in the woods — now I’m the rube. Specifically the nerd rube: I die second to last.

This isn’t limited to horror films. Even watching art-house fare like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, I cringed less at the grand guignol filicide than at the houseguests’ breaking of that gorgeous double-basin sink. (You animals!) This new sensitivity is reassuring. I worried about becoming complacent as I entered the propertied class, in addition to the usual worries of growing cynical with age. The sensitivity is a naked flank for art to locate and slowly pierce. In the case of two books published in the past year, the piercing came with a memorable twist of the knife. Read more…

United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan

Mike Rosiana / Getty

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,461 words)

 

On March 13, 2019, a twenty-four year old construction worker named Anthony Comello drove to Staten Island and backed his pickup into a Cadillac owned by the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali. When Cali came to the door, Comello shot him. Comello was arrested a few days later in Brick, New Jersey, and upon his appearance in court, it became clear that he was a believer in the confusing and ever-shifting conspiracy theory, QAnon — whose adherents believe President Trump is locked in a mortal battle with a “deep state,” which they contend is running child sex trafficking rings (among other things). A photo from the arraignment shows that Comello had written the letter “Q” on his hand, along with “MAGA FOREVER” and “United We Stand.”

A mob boss, a cadillac, a murder, a town called Brick, New Jersey — all of those things make sense when itemized and grouped together. In 2019 it’s not even that surprising that a member of QAnon was involved. But, barring new information, what is surprising is the simplicity of the actual motive — Comello wanted to date Cali’s niece and Cali disapproved.

“Life is so much more random than we would like it to be,” Anna Merlan told me over the phone, when we were talking about Cali’s murder. “Everything is so much weirder and less meaningful than we would like it to be and I constantly see people that I talk to grappling with that idea — that maybe there isn’t a grand narrative under the surface animating everything.” Read more…

Notes on Citizenship

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Nina Li Coomes | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,609 words)

A month after Donald Trump is inaugurated president, my mother visits me in Boston. I have lived in the city for only a month, and my apartment is furnished, but barely. During the day, while I sit in a windowless office, my mother drags a suitcase down snowy Commonwealth Avenue to TJ Maxx, where she fills the rolling bag with comforting objects: a teal ceramic pitcher; a wire kitchen cart; a swirling, blue-and-white rug. She makes at least three trips down the hill to the store and back again.

When she is not buying knickknacks, she scrubs my buckling apartment floors. She wrings a rag in warm water, palms it over the wood, her posture and form impeccable as usual. Though I’d beg her not to do this, her actions make sense. For the 20 years we have lived in the United States, my mother has made a ritual of scrubbing the floors of all of our homes. In our first American house, in the unwelcoming cornfields of Illinois, I would know that all was well if I came through the front door to see the warm gleam of freshly scrubbed wood. In my parents’ house in Chicago, if I ever walked across the kitchen in my shoes by accident or, more likely, in a careless hurry, guilt would course down my back, the memory of her hunched by the radiator busily scrubbing flooding my mind. After college, when I lived in New York, she visited me there and insisted on getting down on her hands and knees again, though my roommate had a dog who shed constant, ungrateful clouds of black fur, making a clean floor impossible. In each place we have lived, no matter where we are, my mother has labored over the floor to make it home.

* * *

I was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father. After my birth, my parents sent an application the U.S. consulate for my American citizenship. The application included my Japanese birth certificate and an accompanying English translation, proof of their marriage in both languages, as well as proof of my father’s U.S. citizenship. My mother’s status as an ethnically Japanese national qualified me for Japanese citizenship upon birth. I have always been a dual citizen of both the United States and Japan.

As a child, I bragged about this status to my peers. I had two countries I could claim as my own, I would crow, two places to call home. My parents often chided me for this bragging, but my willful girl-self ignored them. Though my status as mixed race was most often confusing and other times painful, this was one place I found pride, a jolt of pleasure pulsing through my hands as I touched the spines of one blue and one red passport, both with my name emblazoned on the inside. At the customs kiosk in airports, I liked the momentary juggle my parents did, swapping out our U.S. passports for Japanese ones in Tokyo, and back again in Chicago. All of the coming and going resulted in my American passport looking like an absurdist travel log, appearing as if I left the country and came back a month later without ever entering another country. Though I was only ever just shuttling between the same two nations to visit one set of grandparents or another, childishly I imagined my dual citizenship as a secret mission, a doorway into which I could walk and disappear, existing in secret for a short while. Other times, my passports felt like a double-headed key, easing the pain of leaving one home with the improbable solution of arriving at a different one. My passports — their primary-colored bindings, their grainy texture and heavy pages, these were magical tokens of my childish belief in my double-belonging.

This was one place I found pride, a jolt of pleasure pulsing through my hands as I touched the spines of one blue and one red passport, both with my name emblazoned on the inside.

Dual citizenship is technically only legal in Japan until the age of 22, at which point an individual is required to make “declaration of citizenship,” effectively asking dual citizens to give up their claim on at least one of their countries of origin. There are, of course, ways around this. There are an estimated 700,000 dual citizens past the age of 22 living in Japan, though this number is probably skewed by the willingness of illegal dual citizens to come forward regarding their legal status. Some dual citizens choose never to declare, trusting in the inefficiencies of a labyrinthine bureaucracy to forget about legal technicalities. Others make their declaration in remote locations far from metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka with the hopes that less-urban officials will not take the time to ask for a renunciation of non-Japanese passports. Some, like me, renewed their passport on the eve of their 22nd birthday, effectively buying another four years to weigh the choice, hoping that laws might shift to allow for legally sustained dual citizenship.

* * *

In Japan, a person obtains citizenship not by birthplace but by blood: This is called jus sanguinis citizenship, or citizenship as defined by the “right of blood.” It does not matter if you are born in the country or out of it. You are only a citizen if you have at least one parent whose blood can be classified as Japanese. (There are some exceptions based on naturalization and statelessness.) Requiring Japanese blood as a tenet of citizenship implies that there is such a thing; that Japaneseness can be traced back to one, biologically determined race. In 2008, conservative lawmakers proposed that DNA testing become part of the process necessary to determine Japanese citizenship, suggesting that biological markers could identify Japanese blood over foreign blood. Though the proposal was ultimately thrown out on grounds of logistical and financial impossibility, it lays bare the use of Japanese citizenship to promote a Japanese ethnostate. Simply put, to Japan, an ideal citizen is someone who is 100 percent racially Japanese.

In the United States, people become citizens through a combination of jus sanguinis, “right of blood,” and jus soli, “right of soil.” If you are born within the boundaries of the United States of America, or born to a parent who is a U.S. citizen, you are granted U.S. citizenship. This idea is introduced in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It is tempting to say that the U.S. is egalitarian, that it is not founded on ethnocentrism, but the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was written only as a result of the Civil War. It granted citizenship to Black Americans nearly a century after the nation’s founding and in many ways did so in name only.


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Though Asian Americans were granted citizenship in 1898, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 insured that immigrant laborers were not given easily accessible avenues to permanent citizenship. By the same token, Supreme Court cases in the 1920s (Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind) established a further precedent barring Asians from naturalizing as citizens on account of their not being “free white persons.” The “free white persons” clause of naturalization in U.S. law was dissolved in 1952, but strict immigration quotas continued to be official policy until 1965. Before 1924, Native Americans were only considered citizens if they could be taxed, if they served in a war, married a white person, or disavowed their tribal allegiance. By the time the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 passed, most had already followed these alternate paths to citizenship, and even then, states with large Native American populations refused to grant citizenship to their population for fear of the Native American vote. It took almost 25 years for the Indian Citizenship Act to be adopted by all 50 of the United States of America.

No matter the intention of our Founding Fathers or the text of the 14th Amendment, citizenship in the United States is complicated, fraught; at once given and taken away, fickle and traitorous, seemingly color-blind and yet in service to a majority of “free white persons.”

My passports — their primary-colored bindings, their grainy texture and heavy pages, these were magical tokens of my childish belief in my double-belonging.

This duplicity isn’t unique to the United States or Japan. It is the nature of citizenship to uphold humanity while simultaneously denying it. For the Roman philosopher Cicero, one of the first to consider the idea of the citizen, this duality was best explained as a trade-off between citizen and state. In return for completing certain civic responsibilities (say, paying your taxes and following road signs), citizens are offered rights: protection from the state, the ability to claim nationality, and the like. More than a thousand years later, German-born American philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt echoed this same sentiment by famously calling citizenship “the right to have rights.” In her view, citizenship was a necessary vehicle to deliver human rights. Simply being human didn’t give you access to things like life and liberty. One needs a state to fulfill them. Taken backwards, this implies that without a government’s acknowledgement of citizenship, a person can be stripped of the rights inherent to their existence. In other words, if you’re not a citizen, you’re not fully a person.

* * *

At the end of my mother’s Boston visit, her busy homemaking and floor-scrubbing now at an end, I take her to a donut shop for breakfast. Inside, a Cambodian family slips rings of hot fried dough glazed in honey into paper envelopes, handing them to construction workers, police officers, and university students. Behind the counter, on the other side of the kitchen door, no English exists. Instead, Cambodian wafts, punctured by laughter and sighs, tossed by the woman pouring coffee with her hand balled at her hip, the smiling man behind the counter, the surly teenager bussing half-finished plates of buttery scrambled eggs. Above the cash register proud signs hang declaring the store a “Boston Favorite,” a “Chosen Community Partner,” and the recipient of numerous other local awards.

At our sticky table, I find myself unexpectedly moved. Passing by the donut shop on my daily commute, I assumed that the curly pink neon signage, a relic from the ’50s preserved on a triangular storefront, was surely the property of a white family. Instead what I found was a family of South Asian immigrants, making a classic American food and serving it in their own fashion with aplomb. The donut shop seemed unconcerned with assimilation. Months later, I’d take my sister to the same donut shop and she’d say that she was confused. The decor inside made her feel like she should be eating some sort of noodles but instead she was eating a chocolate glazed cake donut.

As a rule, I am skeptical of the American Dream. I’m suspicious of what it sells and at what cost. What does it mean to believe in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” when the state reserves the right to take it away at a moment’s notice, to inter you and your family for looking like the enemy? What is freedom if it is a specific, circumscribed kind of freedom? A labored freedom? An unfair freedom? A tilted, volatile, violent freedom?

But at the donut shop, picking apart a vanilla-and-chocolate twist, I see a glimpse of what this country might offer: a promise of evolution, integrity, and acceptance. Perhaps this is what belonging in this country might mean, at its best: that something as classically American as a 1950s corner donut store could be taken over by a family of refugees from South Asia without pomp or angst. That the store and the family that run it can exist without concerning themselves with assimilating to a white American standard, but instead remain rooted in their own traditions and languages. Sitting in the corner table with my mother, I feel as if happiness, freedom, equality, these are hard to come by and elusive. But change, the potential for newness and its embrace, these might yet flourish. These prospects feel solid, somehow, steady and unconditional, vivacious in comparison to the pale two-faced promise of a passport. A hint that perhaps making a home for oneself actually has nothing to do with the cold detachment of a customs official, and more to do with the warmth of feeding your kin on a cold morning.

* * *

Here is how I once passed through customs in Tokyo:

After 14 hours of sitting in an economy class seat, the overhead bin bumping precariously along to turbulence, sleep evasive and slippery, I am greasy and dry-eyed. Everything feels dreamlike. Time moves in stilted seconds, late afternoon sunlight pouring in through pristine panels of glass when my mind is clamoring that it ought to be night. Passengers are herded like badly behaved cattle along moving walkways, the robotic woman’s voice telling us to please watch our step. The path curves, and soon the windows are replaced by gray walls and fluorescent lights. I continue to trudge forward, dragging my stubbornly lagging suitcase. On the walls are signs advertising caution about various strains of influenza.

Sitting in the corner table with my mother, I feel as if happiness, freedom, equality, these are hard to come by and elusive. But change, the potential for newness and its embrace, these might yet flourish.

At customs, placards hang from the ceiling, directing the flight crew to the right, followed by foreigners and tourists, with Japanese nationals and permanent residents filing to the far left. I take my place in the line to the left, feeling at once indignant and like an imposter. An anxious, scrambling feeling chases its tail under my collarbone. As I approach the sunken booth, I try to sound as local as it can get, hoping that the country bumpkin slur of my words will score me a point in the invisible tally of Japaneseness I imagine each customs official keeping. I answer questions about where I am staying, why I am here. Images of the kerosene stove in my grandmother’s front room, my grandfather’s furled fists, their unruly garden — these blossom in my mind, a talisman of home to hold tightly under my breath. Believe me, I pray, believe that I belong here. Inside my backpack, I can feel my other passport, my other citizenship, pulsating like a treacherous living thing.

* * *

It is not lost on me that the language of citizenship traffics in metaphors of life and death, but delivers on promise and rumors. We are given weighty, destiny-scaled ultimatums, discussions of blood and soil evoking images of birth and death, sustenance and longevity. Identification implies belonging, our membership to a country playing on notions of larger, state-bound families. The nation is our mother. The nation is our father. In giving us the gift of citizenship, it has labored to give us life and will lay us weeping in the ground.

But in delivery, citizenship becomes elusive and hard to pin down. It is promised to us with outstretched arms, then snatched away with ease. We are assured home and kinship; we arrive to find an empty house. We are drawn to the visage of a guardian — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — but we are greeted by a ghost.

* * *

 

After finishing our breakfast at the donut shop, my mother and I take a cab to Logan Airport so she can catch her flight home to Chicago. When we arrive, I help her check in and walk her to the TSA cordoned security area. She waves me away at the mouth of the line, the oblong maze of tangled tape empty at this apparently unpopular time to fly. “Go,” she says. I shake my head, watching her hoist her navy canvas bag over one shoulder, taking mincing steps through the open line in front of her. This shooing-and-staying, like the floor-washing, is another one of our family’s traditions. Whenever one of us leaves their home, whether it is in Japan or the U.S., whomever they are leaving staunchly refuses to leave the side of the security line until they can no longer see them. This staying put is an act of loyalty, of love, of claiming each other as our own. We are stating that no border crossing, no officialdom, no distance or space can slice its way through our bonds.

That day I watch my mother’s small body turn even smaller in the distance, and I feel a familiar animal anxiety dig its claws into my chest. Earlier that week, crowds of people poured into U.S. airports, protesting Donald Trump’s travel ban. Scenes of lobbies filled with protesters flooded televisions, mouths moving in angry unison on muted screens. Reports of families separated at customs, of loved ones canceling plans to visit their relatives in the U.S., patients unable to access American hospitals — these are the stories that dominated the news cycle.

Suddenly, as if someone had passed a transparency over my eyes, I see the TSA agent taking a closer look at my mother’s green card. I imagine his voice, meaty and rough when raised. I imagine my mother’s English, flattening as frustration crept into her voice. I imagine what I might do if someone emerged from the wings of the security booth to grab her by the arm, roughly escorting her to a private room. I imagine if I would shout, run, or stay rooted to the spot. At least she would be OK in Japan, a small voice, at once guilty and relieved, says inside me.

My mother passes through the security checkpoint without incident. She waves from behind the metal detector, her hand cleaving a wide, swinging arc in the air. 

* * *

Citizenship comes into sharp relief at the most important junctures of life. Two years after my mother’s visit to Boston, my now-husband and I go to the Cook County Clerk’s office, in Chicago, to obtain our marriage license. We are presented with a list of appropriate documents to prove our citizenship — driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates. Above us, a looming sign proclaims: COOK COUNTY CLERK | BIRTH MARRIAGE DEATH. Birth, marriage, death: To be acknowledged, all these require proof of belonging to a nation. Plunking down my own driver’s license, I wonder what one does without the proper identification. A man ahead of us in line is turned away for not having the correct paperwork to claim his infant daughter’s birth certificate. Without the necessary government-issued credentials, no matter how strange it seemed, he could not receive proof that his daughter now existed outside the womb. Without citizenship, could you be born? Without it, could you die?

This staying put is an act of loyalty, of love, of claiming each other as our own. We are stating that no border crossing, no officialdom, no distance or space can slice its way through our bonds.

My wondering is of course borne of a certain kind of privilege. Undocumented and stateless people know exactly what it is like to live without citizenship. People dear to me have struggled for acknowledgement in the eyes of a mercurial state, granting and revoking rights with the turn of an administration. In many ways I am lucky to be presented with the conundrum of citizenship after 22 years of dual citizenship. I have had not one but two homes.

* * *

On my most recent trip home to Japan, this time to celebrate my new marriage with my family, I exited the plane groggy and barely awake. I followed the familiar corridor, the paneled light flickering, the woman’s voice telling us to mind the gap. Passengers plodded on, all of us filing forward to customs, noting the warnings for newer, more varied strains of flu. This time, I did not take the far left lane. Instead, I entered the country for the first time on a U.S. passport, my lapsed Japanese one tucked in my backpack, safely away from questions of allegiance, loyalty, and citizenship. A small part of me was relieved to filter through the droning line of tourists, no need to prove my worthiness of entry to a stony-faced official. A larger part of me wallowed in a shallow sadness, as if a pale premonition of grief, suspecting that this might be the first step toward exile.

Why do you speak Japanese so well? the man at customs barked, suspicious. Because my mother is Japanese, I answered, the image of her running a rag over my Boston floors, the homes she has created the world over for us, blurring my vision. Is this your only passport? he jabbed a finger at my solitary blue book. Yes, I smiled, three red booklets pulsing against my back.

* * *

Nina Li Coomes is a Japanese and American writer from Nagoya and Chicago. Her work can be found in The Atlantic, EATER, Catapult and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Editors Thinking About Editing at the AWP Conference

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (1,878 words)

 

The 11,000 people who attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual Conference & Bookfair (AWP) come for professional advancement and to build community. They come to attend panels, to stay motivated after graduate school, to promote their magazines, book presses, and graduate programs and to choose magazines to write for, books to read, and graduate programs to attend. For many attendees, AWP is a chance to talk shop deep into the night. I came this year for many of these reasons, and also to improve my editing abilities.

Even though I work as an editor, I have a lot to learn, and the editors on the panel “Editor-Author Relationships: How Should They Be?” offered tons of practical wisdom. Jennifer Acker from The Common magazine moderated a group that included John Freeman of  Grove/Atlantic, Freeman’s, and Granta, One Story editor Patrick Ryan, and Catapult managing editor Matthew Ortile. Freeman is a quote machine; his  mind moved so quickly I could barely write down what he said.   Read more…

Do Not Mess with the Devils Hole Pupfish

File -- In this Saturday, April 30, 2016, file photo, a still image taken from security video released by the National Park Service, shows three men inside the perimeter fence at the edge of Devils Hole, in Death Valley National Park, Nev. The National Park Service says the men climbed a fence guarding Devils Hole, a detached portion of the park located in southwestern Nevada, on April 30. The Park Service says they fired a shotgun at least 10 times and one man swam in Devils Hole, a hot-water pool that is the only natural home of the tiny Devils Hole pupfish. The man left his boxer shorts in the water. (National Park Service via AP, File)

In Death Valley National Park lies Devils Hole: an aquifer-fed pool home to one of the rarest fish species in the world — the Devils Hole pupfish. The pupfish has been the center of controversy between conservationists dedicated to protecting the inch-long species and Nevadans who believe it isn’t worth sacrificing their right to pump water on their land.

As Paige Blankenbuehler reports at High Country News, Trent Sargent learned about how well the pupfish is protected the hard way. After a booze-fueled break-in and skinny-dipping session at Devils Hole in which Sargent killed a pupfish, the law tracked him down and he was sentenced to a year and a day in jail.

SIXTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, a narrow fissure opened up in the Amargosa Valley, releasing water pooled deep in the earth and creating Devils Hole, the opening to an underwater cavern. Scientists disagree over just how it happened — whether by way of underground tunnels, ancient floods or receding waters — but several desert fish were separated from the larger population and trapped in Devils Hole. There, a tiny sub-population — the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) — evolved in extreme isolation for tens of thousands of years, eventually, according to scientific consensus, becoming an entirely new species.

Today, visitors to Devils Hole get a rare window into one of the Mojave Desert’s vast aquifers. Steep limestone walls surround a tiny opening into turquoise water. Divers have descended over 400 feet into the cave without reaching the bottom. The water is so deep that earthquakes on the other side of the world cause it to slosh, shocking the fish into spawning.

The Devils Hole pupfish are truly unique. The males are a bright blue, the females a subdued teal, and they’re only about an inch long. They are more docile and produce fewer offspring than their cousins, which are found in pockets ranging from the Southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Devils Hole pupfish lacks the pelvic fin that enables its kin to be vigorous swimmers. But it is able to thrive in temperatures far warmer than similar species can tolerate. Trapped by geology in a consistent 93-degree womb, Devils Hole pupfish have nowhere to go. In fact, they have the smallest geographic range of any known vertebrate species on earth.

The pupfish were among the first species to be protected under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1967 — along with the American alligator, the California condor and the blunt-nosed leopard lizard — and that protection was carried over to the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At the time, around 220 survived in Devils Hole, but since the 1990s, the species has been in significant decline, sinking to just 35 fish in 2013. Today, there are modest signs that the population is growing; the last population count was 136.

Normally, the nocturnal visitors would have been caught by a motion sensor that triggered a loud alarm. But a barn owl roosting in the area had caused too many false alarms, and rather than spook the bird, officials had disabled the device. So once the men broke in, they felt no real urgency to leave. Little did they know that multiple cameras captured their every move.

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