I thought that it was a good couple of weeks for alt weeklies as I surveyed recent stories published in alternative papers around the United States for the second installment in this regular reading list.
In Portland, the Willamette Week covered the city’s embattled mayor, Ted Wheeler. Maya Smith, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, filed a charming profile of a blind pharmacist named Charles A. Champion. Christina Sturdivant Sani looked at the underrepresentation of black journalists in D.C. for the Washington City Paper. In Phoenix, a New Times reporter zeroed in on the questionable practices of Arizona’s former parks director.
Back East, DigBoston took aim at Massachusetts’ state gun purchasing agreements. All About Beer, the country’s oldest beer mag, was eulogized in Durham’s Indy Week. Anthony Mariani, the editor of Fort Worth Weekly, wrote an intense personal essay on his brother’s suicide. And the Chico News & Review published an amusing and informative dispatch on the Jefferson separatist movement in Northern California.
It goes without saying that I came across more good writing than I could include in this modest list. But I hope this mix of profiles, investigations, and personal musings will keep you busy until next time.
The Willamette Week, Portland’s best alternative newspaper, gives readers a long, detailed status report on the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, whose term began at the beginning of last year. Reporter Rachel Monahan portrays an ineffectual leader who is losing the faith of his allies after failing to deliver on a number of campaign promises, such as providing a shelter bed for every homeless Portlander.
No man is an island, but Ted Wheeler looks marooned. Next month will mark his second anniversary in one of the highest-profile jobs in Oregon politics—and Wheeler is struggling in a remarkably public manner.
No one doubts his intelligence or his integrity. But nearly all of the two dozen people WW spoke to about Wheeler say those qualities are not enough. They describe a mayor unable to move the city forward on challenges large and small. He’s disappointed the left and the right, while frustrating the institutional players who want to see Portland’s achievements measure up to its potential.
Charles A. Champion is the blind proprietor of Champion’s Pharmacy and Herb Store on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, TN. Maya Smith, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, has written a lovely profile of this 88-year-old pharmacist, who now spends most of his time greeting customers at the front of the store.
Opaque lenses hide eyes that, for the last four years, have been able to make out only faint light. The man in the glasses, wearing a white coat embroidered with “Dr. Charles A. Champion,” sits in a green chair in Champion’s Pharmacy and Herb Store on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Champion is 88 years old, but still has his wits about him and shows up to work every day.
His wife of 60 years, Carolyn Champion, is sitting to his right. His cane, a stack of newspapers, and a plastic bucket of peppermints are on his left. Trusting his ears and gentle nudges from his wife, he gives one of each to everyone who walks by. Champion is the owner of the South Memphis pharmacy and has been there every day (Tuesday through Saturday) since 1991.
There are many fine details in this piece. But I liked this one in particular, a saucy quote from Champion, who has several strong opinions on medicine: “I turn down more people than I serve,” he says. “Just because you want a certain drug, it doesn’t mean you need it. I have to be the one to look out for people. I won’t give someone medicine just so they can continue living unhealthy.”
California’s Jefferson separatist movement has always served journalists well. In 1942, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle named Stanton Delaplane won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the “gun-toting citizens” who wanted to secede from the Golden State. In the Chico News & Review, Stephen Magagnini takes stock of the movement as it exists today in Northern California, which he describes as an “unlikely assortment of survivalists and hippies, pot growers and hardline cops, real estate appraisers and loggers, fencing instructors and gun lovers, Latinos and anti-immigrants.” Jefferson’s leader is Mark Baird, a rugged Trump supporter and something of a libertarian cowboy.
The movement has long been popular with a segment of rural far-Northern California, but Baird, 65, a strapping reincarnation of John Wayne, started breathing new life into Jefferson five years ago. The 6-foot-4-inch fire tanker pilot, rancher and Siskiyou County reserve deputy sheriff cuts an impressive figure. He sports a black belt holster, but instead of a sidearm, packs his weapon of choice, a copy of the Constitution.
Though it seems unlikely that the Jeffersonians will get their way, it would be foolish to dismiss the movement outright, given that Trump’s victory was a surprise to such a large swath of the American population.
Christina Sturdivant Sani, the Washington correspondent for The Commercial Observer and an urban journalism fellow at Greater Greater Washington, takes a look at the underrepresentation of black journalists in D.C.’s media scene.
As a black journalist and native Washingtonian, I am equally proud to report local news and frustrated by my industry.
Beyond local black media, such as the Washington Afro American and the Washington Informer, there’s an underrepresentation of black journalists at print and digital outlets that cover D.C news.
In a city comprised of 47 percent black residents—the largest racial demographic in the city—it pains me that “mainstream” publications are majority white, most of them by a significant margin. It’s also telling that after writing for a dozen local news outlets, I’ve only had black editors at the Afro.
To its credit, City Paper gives Sturdivant Sani the space to take a look at its own track record with diversity. “Many editorial staffs around town, including Washington City Paper,” Sturdivant Sani writes, “could use a heavy dose of melanin — to document D.C.’s historically black culture and preserve the wellness of its black journalists.”
Steven Hsieh, a staff writer for Phoenix New Times, digs deep into an Arizonan archeological scandal. The protagonist of his story is Will Russell, who, while serving as a compliance officer for Arizona State Parks, blew the whistle on Sue Black, the department’s director who, with her deputy director, James Keegan, approached development “with more regard for awards and political ambition than archaeological sites,” Hsieh writes.
During Russell’s year and a half at Parks, he grew angry over practices he viewed as flagrant violations of state law.
Not long after he was hired, it became clear to him that Black and her allies, especially Keegan, did not value his role as a compliance officer. Parks leaders pressured Russell to treat antiquities sites not as cultural resources in need of protection, but as obstacles to development.
Records obtained by Phoenix New Times show Arizona Parks built gardens, trails, campgrounds, picnic areas, and cabins on several archaeological sites without following procedures intended to protect Arizona’s cultural resources.
6. “Fire Sale” (Chris Faraone and Curtis Waltman, September 27, DigBoston)
DigBoston, the cleverly named alt weekly, is currently knee-deep in an investigation into Massachusetts’ opaque state gun purchasing agreements, in collaboration with the Emerson College Engagement Lab and Muckrock, the non-profit news site.
Since the beginning of this year, our team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has examined hundreds of state purchasing agreements, for everything from heavy crime-fighting equipment to consumables for laser printers. Of the many contracts that caught our attention, the firepower free-for-all unpacked herein (SP16-AMMO-X85, abbreviated as AMMO in following references) stands out as especially dubious, with entities on all sides operating in an unchecked fashion despite being on the radar of state prosecutors. Nearly three years into the AMMO arrangement, a malleable open call that allows for multiple contracts to be approved under it, vendors have leveraged the opportunity to make millions of dollars off the state. For most of those procurements, there was no competitive bidding. And the process is far from transparent.
The second installment in the series was published in late November, and the next part, on tasers, will come out in January, according to Chris Faraone, who co-wrote the story and serves as DigBoston’s news and features editor.
7. “Saying Goodbye” (Anthony Mariani, November 15, Fort Worth Weekly)
A recent cover story for Fort Worth’s alternative newspaper — which, every week, publishes breaking news and cultural criticism along with a longform piece that usually tops out around 5,000 words — gets quite personal. Anthony Mariani, the editor of Fort Worth Weekly, writes about his brother Adam’s suicide, and the essay is sad, manic, and occasionally uplifting.
Everyone keeps telling me not to blame myself, that there was nothing I could have said or done to have changed a thing. But why? Why can’t I blame myself if that’s going to make me a better person, a better son to my mother and a better brother to my sister and other brother? And, perhaps most importantly of all, a better husband to my wife and father to my son? I was a lazy brother to Adam. There is no doubt about that. That is a fact. I could have called him more often. I texted him a bunch but rarely ever called. And I knew. I knew he was not doing well. Our mom exploded a couple of years ago when I chose to spend my vacation with my friends instead of with Adam. What’s the big deal? I whined. I even solicited Adam’s blessing while I was living it up with my buds. Ever humble and ever supportive of his little bro, he wrote off Mummy’s angst toward my vacation as her simply being her usual neurotic self. At least that’s what he told me. He was a good brother that way.
America’s oldest beer magazine, the Durham-based All About Beer, founded in 1979, appears to have ceased publication in mid-October. The magazine, whose website now sits abandoned on the web like so much digital flotsam, played a large part in elevating the country’s burgeoning craft beer movement, as Michael Venutolo-Mantovani makes clear in his detailed postmortem for Indy Week, the alt weekly serving North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
At the magazine’s founding, there were fewer than one hundred breweries across America, nearly all of which were mass producers such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors. But even then, AAB quietly heralded the ultra-nouveau movement of craft and small-batch brewing. Its fourth issue had a brief mention of newcomer Sierra Nevada—today the seventh-largest brewer in the U.S., with production facilities in Asheville. In the decades that followed, AAB found itself on the leading edge of an exploding scene.
It’s a sad moment when a publication goes under. Let’s pour one out for All About Beer.
***
Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.
His arms are covered with the sticky gunk left after bandages come off. There is a blue bruise on the inside of his right forearm. A long plastic tube enters a hole near his belly button. When it’s not in use, James “Bo” Calvert tucks the tube that he uses for dialysis into a spandex “bra” that circles his chest.
Calvert has stage 4 kidney disease, which means his kidney function is only 15 to 30 percent. There are six stages of chronic kidney disease — stage 4 is the last stage before end-stage renal disease (ESRD), when the kidneys cannot filter waste and excess fluid from the blood. At this point, you need a transplant or dialysis to stay alive.
There have been a lot of eulogies for the alt-weekly lately, and understandably so. Over the past few years, we’ve lost a lot of them: the Village Voice, the Philadelphia City Paper, the Baltimore City Paper, Knoxville’s Metro Pulse, the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Missoula Independent. The list goes on.
But the story of alt-weeklies isn’t all about attrition. It’s also about resilience in the face of local media contraction. Around the country, alt-weeklies continue to publish deep investigations, irreverent features, and weird columns that you just don’t find in other publications, often by promising young writers who are discovering their voices. The work usually goes unnoticed because alt-weeklies have always operated under the radar. But in this regular reading list, I hope to rectify that.
Whenever I travel to a new town, the first thing I look for is its free alt-weekly, which can most often be found stacked inside a street corner box. Alt-weeklies help me get a read on my new locale, and at their best, they offer a kind of X-ray — social, cultural, political — on a city that you might not find in the daily paper.
Here are some stories which, I think, do just that — and more.
Since mid-September, the fiction writer Samuel Ligon has been serializing a novel in Spokane’s Inlander, one of the country’s more robust, and adventurous, alt-weeklies. It’s a hard-boiled work with terse dialogue and staccato sentences. It tells the story of a guy named Miller Cane, who “has been making his living conning and comforting the survivors of mass shootings,” as an expository summary at the top of one part explains it. The installments, which are also broadcast on Spokane Public Radio, will debut every week for the next year or so. The first part jumps right into the action.
Miller Cane was six days into the Rosedale massacre when Heffner slid into the Legion Hall during an afternoon animal session. Miller didn’t recognize him at first, was focused on calming a howling beagle he’d just settled into a survivor’s lap. But the rage vibe was unmistakable, a disruption in the air over all the animal distraction, even as Heffner slouched and slunk and tried to keep himself small as he looked for a seat, finally taking a broken office chair by the coffee urns in back. It never would have occurred to Miller that a survivor from Cumberland would show up in Texas — a thousand miles away — at a completely different massacre. Maybe the man was just disturbed. Weren’t they all? Maybe his hurt came off as hatred. Miller had seen that before. But he couldn’t help wondering, just for a second, if the man might be another shooter, fresh on the scene to finish them all. He didn’t want to think that. Connie Lopez seemed to know something was off with the dude too, keeping an eye on him from her table in the center of the barroom as she chopped cilantro for chili.
The fourth part of the second chapter is the most recent installment to have been published. This is the sort of thing newspapers don’t really do anymore, and it’s a thrill to watch Ligon perform the high-wire act of writing a novel in public.
Bureaucracy, like inertia, is a difficult subject to make compelling. But the rule doesn’t apply when it comes to the bureaucratic nightmare that is the story of Syed Irbaz Shah, a Pakistani national who was deported from the United States earlier this year but remains locked up in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado because, to simplify a complex situation, he can’t get his passport.
The tension at the core of this tale is so ridiculous — and the chain of events that led to Shah’s imprisonment so serpentine — that you can’t help but continue reading to find out how and why Shah got into this predicament. Chris Walker, a staff writer for Denver’s Westword who covers local news and music, does a good job ironing out all the wrinkles in a story that amounts to a kind of low-key procedural thriller.
Today the Pakistani national remains in the Aurora immigrant detention center where he’s been held since February. While the circumstances surrounding Shah’s case are unusually complicated and technical, he, his family members and multiple lawyers believed that they could overcome any hurdles to get him out of the United States. Instead, they’ve become bit players in a Kafkaesque tale for our time, in which someone who desperately wants to be deported during the most deportation-loving U.S. administration in recent memory can’t seem to get himself booted across the border.
In this deeply reported, 7,000-word investigation for Detroit’s Metro Times, Violet Ikonomova looked into the state of Detroit’s vacant houses and found that many more of them were blighted — and, therefore, abandoned — than the city’s Land Bank Authority had accounted for.
The apparently inaccurate blight calculation raises questions about the reliability of the data being used to guide the day-to-day demolition operations of the city and Land Bank.
In Detroit’s Grandale neighborhood, near West Chicago and Greenfield, Luther Johnson has been monitoring changes in the landscape for 50 years. From the well-manicured yard of the red brick Tudor where he grew up, Johnson looks directly onto a vacant lot where the city recently wrapped up a demolition. On one side stands a vacant house whose door appears to at one point have been pried open. On the other stands a worse-off vacant house, its backside crumbling and wooden bones exposed.
“They should have torn it down,” Johnson said of the ramshackle house. “And I don’t know why they didn’t — they tore this one next to it down. They should have torn that one down before they tore this one down because this one was looking better.”
The Metro Times, it’s worth pointing out, has been doing yeoman’s work of late. The paper recently broke the story on Marc Peeples, a 32-year-old man who was repeatedly harassed by three white women for the unseemly act of building a community garden on a vacant playground in a Detroit neighborhood — or, to put it another way, “gardening while black.”
Callie Brownson, the offensive quality control coach for Dartmouth College’s football team, is also “something else,” Dan Bolles writes in his cover story for Seven Days: “the first full-time female coach in the history of NCAA Division 1 football.” Bolles, an assistant arts editor and features writer for Seven Days, Burlington’s alt-weekly and one of the best newspapers in Vermont, spent some time with Brownson on the field, and he came back with some memorable scenes, as his lede demonstrates.
Dartmouth College quarterback Derek Kyler drops back in the pocket and surveys the chaos unfolding before him. The receivers to his right are locked down in coverage. Ditto the tight end crossing the middle of the field. But to the sophomore QB’s left, Drew Hunnicutt has shaken free of his defender and is streaking toward the end zone. In a flash, Kyler winds up and throws, hitting his wide receiver in stride. The pass is perfect, but it didn’t have to be. Hunnicutt didn’t have a defender within six yards of him.
“Hooooooly shit!” a woman’s voice erupts after the touchdown. “He was wide open! Wide open!”
Callie Brownson springs from her position under the goalposts, waving a laminated playsheet as she strides toward a group of defensive backs. “How do you let him get that wide open?” she asks in disbelief, practically teasing the dejected DBs, who mill around the field, heads hung low and hands on their hips.
Brownson, 29, has been written about by a number of outlets, but Bolles’s profile is an intimate, in-depth portrait, one that readers have come to expect from Seven Days.
In Louisville’s charmingly named Eccentric Observer — otherwise known as LEO Weekly — the author and historian Lisa Pisterman took a look at the mysterious case of Patricia Wilson, who, in July of 1936, fell to her death down an elevator shaft at the Seelbach Hotel in downtown Louisville and is now believed to haunt the building. She is known as the “lady in blue.”
She didn’t receive word that said estranged husband died in a car accident on the way to meet her.
She didn’t throw herself down the elevator shaft in response.
She wasn’t found half-naked in a negligee and stockings.
No one heard her fall, and no one ran out in the hallway to catch Lt. Gov. Henry Denhardt stealing away.
She did fall at least six stories, and she died instantly, not hours later at the hospital. She was not penniless. She had a nice funeral, and she was buried in a quiet plot of her own. She was described as beautiful, sweet and well-liked. She was grieved by those who knew her.
She was a real person, and her name was Patricia Wilson.
Using a number of primary sources, such as city directories and coroner’s inquest records, Pisterman give us as detailed a look as possible at Wilson’s life, putting to rest many of the myths and rumors that have accumulated through the years.
For City Pages, the alt-weekly serving Minneapolis and St. Paul, Susan Du reports that a construction boom in the Twin Cities has helped created a kind of underground economy of labor trafficking. Du hinges her story on a Honduran immigrant named Yimer Iriarte, who came to the United States and found work in the construction industry after much hardship.
Eventually he found himself building a house in Apple Valley, where his luck changed.
One day Ricardo Batres, a pint-sized, sweet-talking El Salvadoran man, walked onto the site and introduced himself as owner of American Contractors and Associates. He dazzled Iriarte with offers of a lucrative partnership, a room in a house free of charge, and—to celebrate the completion of their first project—a pleasure cruise down the Mississippi River.
They were treasures Iriarte, now 21, will never forget.
Yet time would quell his hopes. The house Batres rented for 10 workers came without heat and hot water, nor were they allowed to use the stove. The landlord eventually threatened eviction, claiming Batres hadn’t paid the rent.
Marty Wolfson doesn’t exactly fit the profile of a “Florida Man,” but his story is perhaps one that could only have come from the Sunshine State. In this sympathetic New Times profile, Mike Clary gives readers a textured look at Wolfson, the son of America’s first corporate raider who went on to become one of the most successful horse trainers in South Florida, only to lose it all when his lucky streak petered out. Clary sums up Wolfson’s weird life story in a tidy paragraph.
Ironies abound in the story of Wolfson’s fall from grace. He was a rich kid who ended up broke. He was a painfully shy young man who later posed nude for a national magazine. And for years he succeeded as a horse trainer before finding himself at a rural recovery farm where he was paired with a thoroughbred that raced but rarely won. In the end, the 11-year-old gelding would save Wolfson’s life by demanding nothing at all from him.
In this disturbing piece, Daniel Villarreal investigates a death in Seattle’s gay kink community, in which a young man, Jack Chapman — otherwise known as “Pup Tank”– died after having liquid silicone injected into his genitals. Chapman was romantically connected with a man named Dylan Ray Hafertepen, “a well-known member of the Dom/sub pup play communities in San Francisco and, later, Seattle,” Villarreal writes. “To his pups, including Pup Tank and Pup Alpha, he’s called Master Dylan, but on Instagram and Tumblr, he’s widely known as Noodles and Beef.”
It may sound weird, but such injections are a fetishized form of erotic body modification. Some men fetishize enlarged scrotums as a sign of potency, much like the bronzed huevos dangling from the Wall Street bull. Some guys like to nuzzle gigantic silicone-enhanced ball sacks while giving head, or they enjoy feeling them slap pendulously against their asses while bottoming.
Since World War II, cosmetic surgeons and back-alley “pumpers” have offered liquid silicone injections as a quick and dirty form of plastic surgery. When injected, the body surrounds liquid silicone with collagen, permanently providing a rounder and fuller appearance, smoothing wrinkles and reshaping sagging butts and breasts.
Was Hafertepen responsible for Chapman’s death? Villarreal story digs into that question.
***
Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.
On the day New York State legalized same-sex marriage, I proposed to my girlfriend in the New York Times Modern Love column. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The column’s editor, Daniel Jones, had emailed me to request an essay he’d previously rejected for being too political. He explained the paper was dedicating part of every section in the Sunday edition to Marriage Equality. “If it’s not already committed elsewhere, there isn’t much time.”
I accepted his retraction and, being a personal-is-political kind of lesbian, sent back a few additions to his notes and ended the revision with a marriage proposal.
“Are you sure?” Jones called. “This will be the column’s first.”
“I’m ready, if you are, Dan.”
He recommended I find a way share the piece with her before Thursday, when the digital edition went live. “You want her to be the first to know.” Read more…
“I was born a fifth-generation Kansas farmer,” writes Sarah Smarsh, “roots so deep in the country where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons.”
In her memoir Heartland, Smarsh tells the story of four generations of that Kansas family. The book reaches back to a great-grandmother working multiple jobs and beaten by her husband, but is addressed to a future generation that will never be: Smarsh’s unborn daughter August.
Smarsh, the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother, “was on a mission toward a life unlike the one I was handed.” August is a theoretical child born during Smarsh’s teenage years, whose very existence would have continued the line of teenage motherhood and derailed Smarsh’s mission. August is at once a guiding principle (“what would I tell my daughter to do?”) and a symbol of the poverty Smarsh worked to escape.
Heartland is the story of a family and the story of a class in America, an explanation to August of all she would have inherited and lost. I spoke to Smarsh by phone between New York and Kansas, where she lives. We discussed the invisibility of class, how “the country” has become a clichéd set of imagery, and how politicians on the left can reach alienated voters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
* * *
Huw Williams is not a hermit. Not exactly. For one thing, he answers a telephone while I’m visiting him. The phone connects to a jack somewhere, although I don’t understand how it can function properly; it seems impossible that a cabin so rudimentary and run-down could support something as technologically advanced as a telephone.
The floors are covered with broken power tools, a machete, unmarked VHS tapes, decades-old newspapers and knocked-over litter boxes once filled by the three cats prowling around. Stenches of urine and filth are masked only by the rot on the stove, where the remains of long-ago meals are eating through the pans they were prepared in. And the cabin is so cold that when anyone speaks, breath becomes vapor.
Dried-out orange peels hang from the ceiling. “It’s a way of breaking up the straight lines,” the 76-year-old Williams tells me cryptically. “I’m averse to being inside a box, with all straight lines.” A radio plays environmental talk radio here in Edwall, a tiny community about 35 miles by car from Spokane, Washington. The radio is part of an ’80s-style dual cassette player, but the trays where the cassettes should go are broken off.
When I came upon Williams’ cabin on a wet afternoon last September, I assumed it was empty. My GPS couldn’t locate it, and neighbors were unsure if it was inhabited. Rusted-out trucks and cars surround the house, which is up on a slight hill atop a dirt road that bisects another dirt road that runs off a few other dirt roads.
But for all his isolation, Williams is not hiding. He grew up on this land, which his parents ran as a cattle and wheat farm. He moved back here in the 1970s after his first wife ran off with their friend and took the kids. He also lived here with his second wife, until she too left him for another man. Anybody could find him, if anybody cared to. Maybe that’s the hardest part.
Williams has prostate cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, melanomas, multiple sclerosis, and he thinks he might be bipolar. He speaks slowly and softly, as if he might run out of breath at any second. He looks the Unabomber part, with his long beard and ragged clothing. But then, he was idiosyncratic even when he used to get out more. He hitchhiked across the country to protest nuclear war, got arrested a time or two, and, after going through a brief celibate period, was a swinger who had sex with his wife’s boyfriend’s mother. Most spectacularly, in 1963 he founded a 240-acre farm nearby that is among the longest-lasting remnants of the ‘60s communes that Charles Manson gave a bad name to. And it was based on the teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Read more…
Matthew Kassel | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)
Jazz has changed a lot over the past 100 years or so of its existence, but it has never been as stylistically varied — or more packed with practitioners — as it is at the present moment. That’s a good thing for listeners, who now have many points of entry if they are new to the music and don’t necessarily want to start with a record that was cut 50 years ago. Mary Halvorson’s slashing guitar, for example, may appeal to more punk-minded listeners. The pianist Robert Glasper’s Dilla-esque grooves are a good gateway for hip-hop fans. And the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s sweeping, spiritual-minded albums are a potential attraction for jam band aficionados. There’s a lot going on.
And yet, at the same time, there are probably fewer people writing about modern developments in jazz than ever. While niche magazines like JazzTimes and DownBeat are still going strong, there is scant jazz coverage in mainstream music publications (which tend to treat jazz like a novelty item), and the New York Times no longer runs weekly live jazz reviews (a recent development). Nate Chinen was, in fact, the last person to review jazz shows on a regular basis there, a position he left in 2017 after a dozen years contributing to the paper. He is now the director of editorial content at WBGO, the Newark public radio station.
In his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, Chinen draws on his experiences as a former newspaper critic, attempting to make sense of what’s been going on in jazz over the past few decades. It isn’t an easy task, and he does a good job collating a whole lot of material, pulling on interesting threads and adding context for readers who may not be all that familiar with the reasons why Wynton Marsalis was — and still is, to an extent — a polarizing figure. Mostly, Chinen approaches jazz on its own terms. He describes what the music sounds like now and conveys to readers where modern jazz artists are coming from. In doing so he’s created a book that is truly of its time. Read more…
My parents met as library students at the University of Kentucky in 1979. From my intimate point of view, library school is a bit of an academic catchall, sometimes a plan B, appealing to weirdos of many backgrounds. People assume that librarians love books, but that isn’t even it. University librarians like my parents love flying below the radar, omniscient about university curriculum but not bound by classroom teaching, grading, or even regular students. When she went to library school, my mom was a 25-year-old polyglot, very pretty and shy, who until then had been taking graduate German courses and hanging around Lincoln, Nebraska, listening to the Who. My dad was 32, starting a new career after years of working for the army as an Arabic translator. He is very loud and friendly, bubbly even. Contrary to the stereotype, he is a librarian who is constantly being shushed.
On their first date, he raced up the stairs to her apartment too enthusiastically and fell and broke his arm. He tried to deny that he had injured himself, and they went to a showing of Casablanca. He cradled his arm like a baby in the dark of the movie theater until the pain became too great, and my mom took him to the emergency room. The next day was Labor Day, and no pharmacies were open within walking distance of my dad’s house. He didn’t have a car, so he sheepishly called my mom to ask if she would drive him to get his prescription. She took him back to her house and made him grilled cheese and tomato soup.
The patently adorable and weird quality of their first date seems to have set the tone for their entire relationship. Early on, my dad gave my mom a copy of one of his favorite books: Roseanna, the first in a series of ten mystery novels by Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that follow the detective Martin Beck. “You’ll find it ironic,” he told her coyly, and she did: the title character, whose murdered corpse washes up on the shores of a Swedish lake, is a librarian in her 20s from Lincoln, Nebraska. My mom was not put off by the implications of this macabre coincidence, and she and my dad are still together now, many decades later. Improbably, my parents’ marriage echoes the Dead Girl story, but with a happy ending.
***
Uncovering the origins of my dad’s Martin Beck obsession has been more of a project than I first anticipated. When I asked how he discovered the books, he first told me that he read about them in a footnote in Robin Winks’s 1969 essay collection The Historian as Detective, a study in the methods and pitfalls of the academic historian, imagining historians as sleuths solving thorny cases. Throughout the book, there are references to actual detective fiction, which my dad used as a syllabus. He talked to me at length about The Historian as Detective, but later was fuzzy on whether Winks had mentioned Sjöwall and Wahlöö at all. He was only certain that it was where he had heard about Robert Hans van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, historical mysteries about Tang Dynasty China. (The last Judge Dee mystery is called Poets and Murder, a possible alternative title for this book.)
When that lead dried up, he launched into a story from when he was in the army, working a desk job in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, as he told me, “having a lot of fun.” Unexpectedly in 1973, he was called back from vacation and ordered to report to Fort Bragg. The Russians were in danger of joining the Arab-Israeli War, which might require reciprocal action from the United States. Nixon had put all of the 82nd Airborne, of which my dad was nominally a member, on alert. His superiors on the base refused to issue him a uniform because they didn’t know how long he would be staying there. Instead of having him run information in street clothes, they sent him to the library and told him to read whatever he wanted. “I asked them whether they could teach me to jump out of an airplane if we had to go to the Middle East,” he said of his time at Fort Bragg. “They told me, ‘Eh, no problem.’” He read several of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books there, but he was already very familiar with the series, so in the end, they were not very important to that story.
A few days later, he called to tell me he actually first read the Martin Beck books when he was a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He had known he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam, so he joined the army and became an Arabic translator, an ironic way to avoid combat, considering our current geopolitical situation. In Monterey, he said, he had studied stupidly hard and had no fun, but he found a Martin Beck book on a rare trip into town. Later, he emailed me another confounding update: he visited a relative, a man named Jim who he claimed was his father’s “cousin/nephew,” the night Nixon had fired his attorney general. Jim had worked briefly in the Nixon White House, he told me. His stories unfold this way, full of the small, intriguing details that in a novel might work as foreshadowing. “I typically spent the first hour of the workday looking through The Washington Post to see what the latest Nixon news was,” he went on to say before circling back. “I think I was at Jim’s when I got a call instructing me to go to Fort Bragg.”
I have found his stories often share an eccentric focus on what he was reading during his somewhat Forrest Gumpy journey through the 20th century. Once he regaled me with memories of his time as a firefighter in Idaho in the late 1960s, when he lived with an agriculture student who was later a prisoner in the Iran hostage crisis. (Rory Cochrane, the guy who played Lucas in Empire Records, portrayed Dad’s roommate in the movie Argo.) Dad hitchhiked down to Jackson Hole during a day off and got The Twenty-Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace’s biography of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s wife, and Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon from the library. He took issue with my saying in an early version of this essay that he checked out books about the Mormon Trail. “I was more interested in biography than the settler experience,” he wrote me. “I have since read books like Angle of Repose, and taken an interest in TV shows like Deadwood and Hell on Wheels.”
***
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a pair of Swedish journalists, a married couple who wrote the Martin Beck novels over long nights after their kids were asleep, working on alternate chapters. Their ten novels, released between 1965 and 1975, were an unexpected sensation, popular worldwide and the subjects of dozens of film and TV adaptations. The books are violent, sexually frank, and political, updating the hard-boiled American noir for the liberal Scandinavian 60s. Nearly everyone acknowledges Sjöwall and Wahlöö as the origin point for Nordic noir, a regional genre that has produced international stars like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Jo Nesbø. But Sjöwall and Wahlöö didn’t just inspire other Scandinavian writers to embrace the murder mystery: they shaped the genre so completely that all of their descendants bear their eccentricities. The Martin Beck series is bizarre, a fitting starting point for what has become a multimillion-dollar industry selling other bizarre, exasperating books.
The novels follow the melancholy detective Beck and his cohort in the Swedish National Police’s Homicide Division as they solve cases including a serial sex murderer preying on children, a mass shooting on a bus, a “locked room” mystery involving a corpse decayed beyond recognition, and the assassination of the Swedish prime minister. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books hold very little allegiance to the typical noir that is sparsely written and pessimistic, showing one man against the world. Beck is the putative hero, but in practice, the books are ensemble dramas, shading often into ensemble comedies. His colleagues are annoying misfits, described by their quirks, like the fastidious Fredrik Melander, who has a photographic memory, passionately loves his ugly wife, and spends too much time on the toilet. The series abounds with pairs of hapless bozos whose comedic value is underlined by their alliterative names. Bumbling beat cops named Kristiansson and Kvant wreak havoc at several crime scenes until Kristiansson is tragically killed. After that, Kvant gets a new partner named Kvastmo.
Sjöwall has said she and Wahlöö were influenced by “progressive” crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon, but they took this progressive imperative rather further. Believing that “people read more mysteries than they do political pamphlets,” they set out to write a Marxist indictment of the failures of the Swedish welfare state disguised as a series of mystery novels. They titled their series “The Story of a Crime”—that is, the crime of a cruel and unequal society. They described their political agenda as “the project,” as if it were a covert mission of infiltration, when it could not have been more obvious. In book after book, the authors include pages-long polemics about the nationalization of the police system, Stockholm’s overdevelopment and the miseries of urban life, and the many demographics that had fallen through society’s cracks. Their political tirades are written in a strident, journalistic tone, fissures where narrative conceit drops out completely. A visit to Beck’s elderly mother becomes an occasion to bemoan (at length) the state of Swedish retirement homes:
Nowadays they were called “pensioners’ homes,” or even “pensioners’ hotels,” to gloss over the fact that in practice most people weren’t there voluntarily, but had quite simply been condemned to it by a so-called Welfare State that no longer wished to know about them. It was a cruel sentence, and the crime was being too old. As a worn-out cog in the social machine, one was dumped on the garbage heap.
My notes from the books are filled with comments like “so didactic” and, more to the point, “why didn’t somebody cut this?”
Critics revisiting Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books now are fawning, using that canonizing method of inverting their weaknesses instead of acknowledging them. A write-up in The Wall Street Journal from 2009 hilariously calls the Martin Beck books “anything but polemical.” Louise France writes in The Guardian that while the action in the books is “often slow,” they are addictive: “You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints.” I admit that I don’t recognize the impulse to stay in bed for a week binging on mints, so maybe that’s why I found the experience of reading these slow books a bit slower than France. The sometimes-tedious lack of action in the books is often pointed to as a strength. In his introduction to Roseanna, Henning Mankell writes that “it’s probably one of the first crime novels in which time clearly plays a major role.” Sjöwall echoed this idea recently, saying that “slowness, and the tension that waiting, distance, and irritating gaps in communication create, became an aspect of the books’ realism.” This argument smacks of imitative fallacy to me, but the wonky pacing of the series does point to its redeeming strength: the utter wonkiness and unconventionality of their entire approach.
Roseanna is more wrapped up in Dead Girl genre tropes than the rest of the books. At first, the series seems less a treatise against corrosive changes in Swedish society than a darkly funny and melancholy meditation on the absurdity of Swedish bureaucracy. The novel opens by describing the administrative procedure for dredging the lake that eventually reveals Roseanna’s body: it is unclear who can okay plans for dredging, and papers for it move among agencies, “passed from one perplexed civil servant to another,” a process that takes months. This critique is more existential than political, a mirror for the frustration Martin Beck experiences in his marriage and his career. As a good Dead Girl should, Roseanna haunts and excites Beck, who for a time is unable to identify her. The case consumes him, so that “when he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.” Once he identifies Roseanna, though, his image of her is inevitably complicated.
In conversations with her roommate and her boyfriend, back in Nebraska, Beck learns that she was promiscuous and odd, that she looked messy and slept with her friend’s boyfriends. Where Beck thought he had found a Dead Girl, he had, in fact, found an ordinary dead woman.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books at first seem to follow the Dead Girl genre’s usual depiction of female sexuality as sinister and crazy. Women are constantly described as “nymphomaniacs,” including Roseanna and other female victims, seemingly indicating that they have been punished for their insatiability. There are the requisite femmes fatales, many of whom make attempts to seduce Martin Beck, who distractedly rebuffs them—like many noir detectives, Beck is at first little more than a neutered intellect. But especially as the series wears on, we see that many of the regular characters have adventurous and unconventional sex lives, like Beck’s detective friend who lives with his wife only on the weekends and has a girlfriend in Copenhagen. Beck releases himself from his unsatisfying marriage and finds new love with a magnetic and iconoclastic leftist. Unlike most detective series, which rely on the bleakness of their protagonists’ lives, Sjöwall and Wahlöö allowed their detective a journey of enlightenment and redemptive love.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö did not have a conventional relationship either: Wahlöö was married when they met, and Sjöwall was twice divorced. They lived together for 13 years but never legally married. Sjöwall has said that after Wahlöö died, shortly after the publication of the last Martin Beck novel, she was “kind of wild for a while. With guys, with pubs.” She has had relationships since then but maintained her independence. “I know many guys,” she said. “Some of them I have been together with for a while, some are just good friends. That is enough for me.” Considering the authors’ lifestyles, the books read as less judgmental of their promiscuous female characters. Despite my skepticism, I’ve come to believe Sjöwall and Wahlöö did what they set out to do: write a series of novels that are truly progressive, or, at least, that have fewer hang-ups.
***
My dad told me he had read the entire Martin Beck series “five or ten times.” “Why?” I asked him. “Because I love them,” he replied. I don’t know why it’s so frustrating that my dad refuses to say or even think about why he likes the things he does, when his preoccupations run so deep and are so consistent. When I ask him why he likes something, it’s a perverse exercise less to gain new insight than to trick him into admitting to his personality. It’s obvious to me why he likes the Martin Beck books. They are exactly the kind of thing he likes!
When I was a kid, the Martin Beck books were everywhere in my house, old duplicate copies my dad bought at garage sales and used-book stores, leering out at me with their incendiary titles: Cop Killer. The Terrorists. I had never read them until I began working on this book, when I read all of them over the course of several trying months, capping off that experience by reading another Swedish mystery series, the only one that has managed to supplant the Martin Beck books in my dad’s heart: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I thought I was reading them in a quest to understand him better, but I’m not so sure that’s true now. At worst, this essay seems like a Freudian patricidal project to ignore, then obsessively read, then talk shit in print about my dad’s favorite books.
My dad’s fixation on the Dragon Tattoo books began so quickly and has held for so long it is stunning. He listened to the audiobooks on his iPod over and over again, until he reached the point where he would listen to their chapters on shuffle. I am admittedly inclined to be frustrated with Stieg Larsson’s project, especially because after Larsson’s idols Sjöwall and Wahlöö so cleverly subverted Dead Girl tropes, he embraced them. His books have the Dead Girl story’s typical investigator with a good-guy complex, the crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, whose career is dedicated to revealing fraud and corruption in the financial industry. In the first book, he is drawn into solving the 30-year-old disappearance of a wealthy industrialist’s niece, Harriet Vanger. The second and third have him trying to get to the bottom of an ever deeper conspiracy that begins with the smuggling of prostitutes from the Baltics and ends with a secret and all-powerful cabal in Sweden’s security police. Since Dead Girl stories are so psychologically fraught, harried by every demon Freud ever thought up, they often have the torturously complex plots of nightmares. The serial killer plot in the first book particularly has that frenzied kitchen-sink feel: there is not one but two killers, targeting scores of victims over many decades. Some of the murders are humiliating and bizarre, inspired by verses in Leviticus, and on top of this, the killers have ties to nascent Swedish Nazi organizations.
The key element of any Dead Girl story is the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession with the Dead Girl, or rather, the absence that she has left. Larsson plays with this overtly, as Blomkvist investigates Harriet Vanger’s case and he finds himself “hopelessly fascinated with the enigma of the dead girl’s disappearance.” A police officer he talks to also admits that he is still captivated by the Harriet Vanger “puzzle.” The implication of this choice of vocabulary, if I am being uncharitable, could not be more clear: that women are problems to be solved, and the problem of absence, a disappearance or a murder, is generally easier to deal with than the problem of a woman’s presence. True, Blomkvist (spoiler alert) eventually finds Harriet alive and has an affair with her, as he does with most of the women he comes into contact with in these novels, lending this Dead Girl story a stupefying and ambiguous denouement.
After Larsson’s death, one of his hangers-on, the Swedish journalist Kurdo Baksi, wrote a strange hagiography of him for the Daily Mail, in which he discusses Larsson’s passionate opposition to violence against women. When they discussed this violence, Baksi writes, “Stieg’s eyes would fill with tears. He could not accept someone could be denied their freedom simply because of their gender.” Larsson’s disgust at what he saw as a ubiquitous misogyny was supposedly the impetus for the Dragon Tattoo books, with the original Swedish version of the first novel being titled Men Who Hate Women. But forgive me if I find the Dragon Tattoo books to be something less than the feminist treatises they claim to be. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his characteristically rude piece on Larsson, their “moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels, because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval.”
More troubling to me than the books’ violence is a flaw at the core of Larsson’s anti-misogynist mission. Throughout the novels, characters insist that “men who hate women” are not monsters: they are everyday people. Blomkvist’s fellow investigator, Lisbeth Salander, says in the first book that their villain is “not some insane serial killer … he’s just a garden variety bastard who hates women.” But Larsson’s villains are as monstrous as he can make them, even though they may hide in plain sight. They are cruel, insatiable, and meticulous, with strange and deviant sexual appetites. The first book is obsessed with sexual sadism, ending with a flourish in a serial killer’s tricked-out torture chamber. This depiction sidesteps the complicated truth of sexual desire and fantasy, which is that in certain circumstances, a person can be turned on by the idea of violence that they would never commit or condone. In the same way, the books sidestep the true face of misogyny: if men who hate women are normal and common, then misogynist violence does not have to be so diabolical. Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, has said that Larsson was inspired by comic books, and he obviously could not resist the temptation of the archvillain, a worthy foe for his hero. Where Sjöwall and Wahlöö succeeded in deromanticizing crime and criminals, in his mission to condemn violence against women, Larsson has ended up lionizing its perpetrators by exaggerating the same old prudish tropes.
The first Dragon Tattoo novel features what is in my eyes a maddeningly long final act, where Blomkvist, having solved the mystery of Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, seeks revenge on a corrupt Swedish billionaire who has sidelined his career. Later I came to see that this fight against corruption was exactly the point of Larsson’s books, with misogyny functioning more as an occasional thematic hobbyhorse. Larsson was a lauded investigative journalist, having founded the anti-fascist Expo magazine, and his plots about corruption among CEOs and government agents gave him the opportunity to write random op-eds a la Sjöwall and Wahlöö on subjects including the injustice of the stock exchange, the Swedish police force’s use of hollow-point bullets, and inconsistencies in enforcing prostitution laws.
In fact, twisted misogyny often acts as a metaphor for other kinds of personal corruption, with fascism, authoritarian overreach, and greed manifesting as sexual malignancy. The political intrigue Blomkvist is investigating in the second and third books turns out to be a conspiracy of perverts, as a sadistic rapist lawyer, a security agent who consorts with prostitutes, and a pedophile psychiatrist conspire to get Salander institutionalized. Blomkvist and Salander hack the hard drive of the psychiatrist, Peter Teleborian, and discover masses of child pornography. This evidence is sprung upon him during his testimony against Salander in the third book, and he is led in handcuffs from the courtroom. After that, as if caught off guard by the implausibility of the book he has found himself in, the judge remarks, “I have never even heard of a case in which the prosecutor’s chief witness is arrested during a court in session.” My dad told me that the downfall of Peter Teleborian is “one of the great moments in literature.”
***
If I sound completely fed up with Larsson’s books, it’s because I have barely talked about Salander, the girl of the books’ titles, who is undeniably their soul and their selling point. When Blomkvist first meets her, she is working as a private investigator at a firm called Milton Security, a role she dispatches so brilliantly, we later learn, because she is one of the most skilled hackers in Sweden, as well as a polymath with a photographic memory. The books are as preoccupied with her unusual appearance as with her unusual talents: she is very small and looks very young, with tattoos, piercings, and a personal style that could be approximated as motorcycle Goth.
Larsson is seemingly in love with the trick of having his heroine judged as a child, a criminal, a deviant, only to have her prove everyone wrong with her unbelievable intellect. The longest arc of the novels is correcting the injustice she suffered from Sweden’s guardianship system. She was put in a mental hospital as a child, and when she was released was assigned a guardian within the government who had control of her legally and financially. An incorrect psychological assessment from when she was a teenager had the government believing she was mentally ill, with criminal tendencies and very low intelligence. Her edgy appearance did nothing to persuade the guardianship agency of her competency.
But despite the Dragon Tattoo books’ focus on Salander’s journey to seize self-determination, she is often constrained by the narrative’s own gaze, even when it is mediated through characters who will end up in the wrong. Descriptions of her are icky either in their prurience or disgust, with a creepy focus on her body. In the first book, I count six times where she is described as looking anorexic (she is not anorexic). Before we have gotten to know her at all, several pages are devoted to her boss’s coming to terms with his sexual attraction to her, a plot element that goes exactly nowhere. She later jumps into bed with Blomkvist, as she is (conveniently) into older men. Salander is, in many ways, a male fantasy of a rebel girl: she is bisexual, rides a motorcycle, works out at a boxing gym, and eats only junk food. Considering that she is only one of Blomkvist’s many paramours, her characterization works especially to distinguish her from his other girlfriends. As with so many detective series, the Dragon Tattoo books seem to be a study in every kind of woman the detective, as proxy for the writer, could possibly be attracted to.
Luckily, Salander is a more compelling, surprising, and complex character than Blomkvist, in his possessive and protective desire, can see. Salander, a classic avenging angel, has her own notion of justice, but it is hard to rationalize her actions, as Blomkvist repeatedly does, as stemming from some deep morality. She uses her computer skills to steal millions from the corrupt industrialist at the end of the first book because he is a bad guy, but also because the opportunity presents itself. When she was 12 years old, she attempted to kill her abusive deadbeat father by throwing a burning bottle of gasoline into his car. This violence is constantly justified by Blomkvist and others, who say that she was only trying to protect her mother, but I do wonder if she could have protected her in a way that did not involve a firebomb.
Larsson created a character so interesting that she wriggled from the grasp of his narrative, letting ambiguity and chaos into a world he set up as black and white, good guys versus bad. Larsson’s widow, Eva Gabrielsson, often speaks about the books like sacred tracts, seeing them as being didactic first, entertaining second. I would tend to agree. But with Salander, who is impulsive, intransigent, and sad, very often unable to be there for the people she cares about most, it is difficult to say what lesson is to be learned—fortunately for the reader. Without her, we would have only Blomkvist, a character as intolerably, triumphantly decent as Perry Mason. (Mason, the hero of Erle Stanley Gardner’s legendary detective series, is the smuggest, most well-adjusted milquetoast in the history of mysteries. In the early nineties, my dad recorded every episode of the Perry Mason TV series onto VHS tapes and cataloged them on our old DOS-prompt computer.)
***
Salander injects into Larsson’s matrix of morals some of the anarchy of children’s literature, and that was by design. Gabrielsson explains how Salander was inspired by Pippi Longstocking:
this delightful and formidable little girl has been a champion of equality between the sexes: she doesn’t depend on anyone, can use a revolver, has sailed the seven seas … But the main thing about Pippi is that she has her own ideas about right and wrong—and she lives by them, no matter what the law or adults say.
But Salander lends some of the melancholy of children’s literature, too. Pippi’s story, after all, is not only about how she brings excitement to a staid Swedish village but the problem of her loneliness, as she seeks friendship and understanding in a world that wasn’t made for her.
I am charmed by Gabrielsson’s description of Pippi Long- stocking, not only because it describes the near-superhero Salander so well, but because in spirit (though in not many practical details), it describes my dad, too. I always think of him as an impish mischief-maker, something of a manic pixie dream dad, whistling in public, sobbing at stories on NPR, flirting with babies, buying candy and stuffed animals, and generally pissing off uptight assholes. Once when he was walking with my brother, they saw a car with a “Who is John Galt?” bumper sticker, a reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He stuck a notecard on the windshield that said you are an idiot.
As I think about my dad and Pippi, it illuminates another common feature of the films, books, and TV that he likes: girls who kick butt. He was an early fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though he believes it took a downturn after she graduated from high school) and is even more ardently committed to the cult teen detective show Veronica Mars, whose plucky heroine wields a Taser almost as well as Salander does. I first told him to watch Veronica Mars, and later, after he had breathlessly emailed me about Veronica and Logan and Dick Casablancas enough times, I regretted ever watching it. I used to think that he only had some embarrassing pervy attraction to girls who kick butt, and, I mean, he definitely does. But after he told me through tears that “he only wants Veronica to be happy,” I should have gotten the picture that he sees himself in them, too. I guess it is no surprise that he identifies with teenage girls, when there is an illustrious tradition of grown men expertly crafting young women’s entertainment, from boy bands of all eras to Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, to Buffy and Veronica Mars.
“I definitely think he relates to those girls,” my mom told me. She reminded me of a scene at the end of the first Dragon Tattoo book, when Salander realizes she has fallen in love with Blomkvist and resolves to confess her feelings to him. When she finds him, he is on a date with another woman, and Salander is crushed. This is the most affecting part of the books for my dad, my mom told me. “He’ll just cry and cry about that part,” she said. All along I thought he saw himself as the valiant everyman Blomkvist, who comes to the aid of the sexy girl who kicks butt. I was wrong about that, and I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I have figured him out again. I told him that I thought he identified more with Blomkvist, but then it occurred to me that he maybe identified with Salander. “I don’t think I’m like any of them,” he told me stubbornly. “I just think the books have the ring of realism,” a description that in my opinion could not be more incorrect.
***
When I complained to my mom about my dad describing books that strain plausibility in every way as having “the ring of realism,” she explained to me how this is one of the phrases he uses indiscriminately to describe works that grab his imagination (the other is “the spark of greatness”) in the manner of, for instance, the cop show Hill Street Blues. This shorthand praise is another way for him to avoid analyzing his own whims. It’s also, maybe, a defensive posture to keep us from analyzing him.
This could be why I have delayed addressing what was supposed to be one of the points of this essay: whether my dad has autism and if it matters. The therapist he works with has suggested that he has Asperger’s syndrome, based on his difficulty reading conversational cues and other people’s moods; his short temper; his many intense enthusiasms; and his almost complete lack of social inhibition, which often leads to totally inappropriate behavior. When I asked him about it for this essay, it was the first time we had ever spoken about it. “Why are you asking me about that?” he said incredulously, and I explained that it made me think of him when Blomkvist privately guesses that Salander has Asperger’s because of her savant-like skills and social awkwardness. “Yes, that is one possible diagnosis,” he said about Salander. Of his own diagnosis, he would only say, oddly, that he didn’t remember it, comparing it to the apparent amnesia he developed in the 1990s when he had bursitis of the elbow. I pressed him, but he stood by his “no comment.” “I have zero memory of anyone ever saying I have Asperger’s,” he said. “I’d completely forgotten that and I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t have any thoughts or any opinions.”
I really don’t blame him for having no thoughts or opinions. No one even raised the possibility that he was on the autism spectrum until he was 68, and charging someone that age with a condition we often associate with childhood is complicated by a lifetime of ambiguities and examples to the contrary. As he approached his eighth decade, the methods he had learned to navigate the world were just his personality, as they are, I assume, for everyone. He was also unwittingly encountering a fateful tendency in my family to monumentalize the eccentricities of its members, to talk and laugh about them among ourselves and with strangers—write about them, even—until the picture shifts into focus, and those eccentricities reveal themselves as dysfunction.
And no matter his age, I’ve come to see autism spectrum diagnosis as an alienating thicket, where there is no textbook case. At his therapist’s suggestion, he read David Finch’s memoir The Journal of Best Practices, the story of Finch being diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult and using this new self-knowledge to become a better husband. Despite what would seem to be obvious commonalities between Finch and my dad, he found no applicable lessons in his story, and he thought the book made Finch look, frankly, like a jerk. Finch and his wife, Kristen, were on an episode of This American Life in 2012, where Kristen, a speech therapist who worked with disabled kids, says that she and her coworkers would always joke that their husbands were autistic. The stereotypes in that joke are uncomfortable for me in both directions. Joking about men’s emotional stuntedness seems at best inaccurate, at worst self-reinforcing, and joking about autistic people as socially retarded and robotic almost certainly increases their ostracization. But it also collapses the almost endless variation among people with autism spectrum disorders: my dad didn’t recognize Finch’s compulsions, which isn’t to say he has none of his own.
I found myself combing through websites about the autism spectrum, many of which are compiled by civilians who have the disorder themselves, who I think are also trying to come to terms with the many ways one can have autism. One particular website called Inside Perspectives of Asperger Syndrome and the Neurodiversity Spectrum describes possible autism spectrum symptoms across an exhaustive list of categories, including work, sex, eating, sleep, phone problems, “spacing out,” and even allergies and drug sensitivities. The primary sources on every page are testimonials from web users who identify as having autism and related conditions, like Asperger’s and ADHD, describing their own experiences. Many of these don’t describe my dad at all, while others do with eerie accuracy. During the conversation we had about his possibly being autistic, this description was dinging in my head: “Some have problems with reciprocity & timing and either talk on and on without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, constantly interrupt others without realising that it’s disrespectful to do so, or say nothing at all unless asked a direct question.” There is of course also the claim that many with autism “are able to hyper-focus intently on the same thing for hours, days, sometimes weeks on end, and keep up a special interest for years”—see Sjöwall, Wahlöö, Larsson, et al.
One of the most helpful things I read on Inside Perspectives is this eloquent description from one of the site’s users of the problem with seeing autism as a disorder:
If you have one neurodiverse trait you are more likely to have additional neurodiverse traits. I am not sure why this is. The more of these traits you have, the more difficult it is to function . . . If you can’t function in society because you have too many of these traits and/or they are too intense then it becomes a disability. And when it becomes a disability then they have to put a label on it. . . . The ‘clump traits together and give them a name’ strategy is fundementally [sic] flawed . . . Labeling falsely claims you have one thing, not a group of things which may be better treated individually.
But viewing the autism spectrum as a matrix of possible traits evokes all the problems of mental health diagnosis, because, to put it simply, everyone has traits. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does not seek to describe what a healthy person looks like: psychological “normalcy” is judged only by an absence of any of the dysfunctions it addresses. Considering the gargantuan length of the DSM, there are nearly as many ways to be crazy as there are to be alive. But despite the DSM’s attempt at exhaustiveness, it remains very difficult to wrangle a human being’s habits, thoughts, desires, quirks, and pain under the heading of a single diagnosis of mental illness. This is underlined by the manual’s primary use, which is not therapeutic, but clerical: a diagnosis of a disorder with a DSM classification is often the requirement for an insurance company to authorize treatment.
I gained the most insight from the wonderful autistic writer and rhetorician Melanie Yergeau, who discusses the problem of diagnosis on her blog autistext.com. As she writes, “For many, diagnosis is validating and/or leads to self-understanding. Diagnosis can explain a lot.” But a disease model of autism, where there are degrees of severity and some have it “worse” than others, effaces the individual value of autistic people. Yergeau writes powerfully for the model of disability that relies on disabled people’s rights to advocate for their own needs:
Whether your disabled child screams in the grocery checkout line or testifies in front of Congress, he is self-advocating. Whether your disabled child throws peas in your face or writes a snarky blog post or falls asleep during board game nights or says NO in all capital letters, she’s self-advocating. And none of these things is less noble or gutsy than the other.
All people have needs that flow from their humanity, not from a predetermined list of problems that we call disability. Diagnosis and the vocabulary that it trades in should be tools to help people understand themselves and ask for what they need. It follows, then, that if the language of disability doesn’t help someone advocate for himself or herself, he or she should be free to reject it.
For my dad, navigating the “neurodiverse traits” that make functioning more difficult individually—like helping him to remember not to make too much noise around the house, to reflect more on his emotions, not to give in so quickly to frustration—is most helpful, and it doesn’t require him to align all the vagaries of his personality with a diagnostic label. The autism designation isn’t helpful for him. The autism spectrum is one more place I’ve looked for my dad, with only partial success. My mom told me that, library cataloger that she is, one of her greatest interests is in creating typologies, finding categories and seeing where things fit. But she has never been that good at categorizing the people close to her, not suspecting that there was anything in my dad’s weirdness that might be explained by someone else’s weirdness. “I tend to be accepting of the way that people are,” she told me helplessly, which might be another way of saying that love is blind.
***
Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscript for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, never living to see his novels published, much less the worldwide sensation they would become. Per Wahlöö died after he and Sjöwall finished the tenth Martin Beck novel, blessedly missing most of the social degradation he had warned against. These deaths are both eerie in the same way: socially conscious writers not living to know how right they were. Sjöwall cheerily admits now that “the project” was a failure. “Everything we feared happened, faster,” she says. “People think of themselves not as human beings but consumers. The market rules, and it was not that obvious in the 1960s, but you could see it coming.” What would have been harder for them to see coming was the murder of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, 11 years after they wrote about a fictional Swedish prime minister being assassinated in The Terrorists. The most remarkable thing about reading the Dragon Tattoo books now, in the spring of 2017, is their overwhelming, prophetic resonance with the scandals of the 2016 election and the Trump administration, as they involve neofascists, computer hackers, sexual misconduct scandals, Russian spies, government corruption, evil billionaires, and journalistic integrity. It makes me wish Larsson had lived to comment on it, although I assume the current era would immediately make him wish he were dead.
Many people have noted the marketing brilliance of changing the title of Larsson’s Men Who Hate Women for the English translation, shifting the focus from creepy men to always more salable “girls.” Men Who Hate Women could be another alternate title for my book, and I have chosen, maybe hypocritically, to sell it on girls instead. In the end, the careers of Larsson and Sjöwall and Wahlöö turn out to be Dead Man stories, where men leave their wives and collaborators to deal with their absence for decades. This female survival is probably the truer story and, I think Larsson, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö would agree, a better one, but it doesn’t have the same addictive glamour that comes with a Dead Girl. In Roseanna, one of Beck’s colleagues mentions a movie that the suspect they’re trailing goes to see. “It has a wonderful ending,” he says. “Everyone dies except the girl.”
Larsson died at 50, after years of working too much, eating too much junk food, drinking too much coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes. There has been extended drama involving his partner of 30 years, Gabrielsson, who, since they never legally married and Larsson left no will, is not entitled to any of his posthumous millions. His death was ironic and unjust, having happened at altogether the wrong time. I can’t help but think about my dad when I read about Larsson’s heart attack: how Larsson’s colleagues found him in a chair, breathing heavily and in a cold sweat, and even then he did not want to admit he was sick. My dad was probably in congestive heart failure for weeks before my brother and his boyfriend found him hunched over in a parking lot, gasping for air. I burst into terrified tears when I saw him on a gurney in the emergency room, looking so gray and puny. “It makes me cry, too,” he said and sobbed.
Insofar as this is a Dead Girl story with a happy ending, you know that my dad got better. His cardiac emergency became another episode in his life, another story underscored, appropriately, by reading. In the hospital after his angioplasty, he had a paradoxical reaction to a sedative that launched him into an hour-long panic attack. Every 60 seconds, he would jump out of bed and run around his hospital room, endangering his fresh stitches. At one point my mom, her nerves completely shot, picked up The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and began to read from Salander’s trial. This was the only thing that soothed my dad, and she read to him until he fell asleep.
Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
— India.Arie, “I Am Not My Hair”
1.
I had never even met John P., but there I was, on a bus in East Knoxville, riding to meet him where he lived in a troubled public housing complex called Lonsdale.
I should have been at school, sitting in homeroom with the rest of the freshmen. But instead, at 13, I had decided to cut class and take a journey across a town I wasn’t even vaguely familiar with, to meet a man I didn’t know.
John P. was my classmate Kayla’s uncle, and in the neighborhood and at our school, he was known to have “gifted hands.”
He didn’t have the proper credentials to work in a professional salon, so instead he would accept women into his ground level apartment. It was there that he would slather their scalps with white creams that smelled like drain cleaner and lye, then cut and curl their hair for about a third of the price at a real beauty parlor.
My family had only been living in this small southern town for a few months, but in that short time I had come to vividly understand that the way I wore my hair was not only “not cool”; for many, it was unacceptable.
And so, even though I wasn’t the rebellious type of teen who would normally skip school, I broke the rules for the very first time so that I could go get my hair done.
Without permission — in fact, in direct defiance of my family’s wishes — I headed to see John P. I was determined to get a Jheri curl — a slimy hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson and Prince. Read more…
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