Search Results for: Washington Post

Eating to America

Naz Riahi | Longreads | November 2018 | 20 minutes (5,095 words)

The last meal I ate in Iran was a stew of cow tongue on white rice, its grains elongated by steam and enclosed in a perfect crispy tadig (crust), stained golden with saffron.

“What are you cooking?” I asked Shee Shee, my mom.

“Beef stew,” she lied, knowing I hated tongue.

It was May 19, 1990. The Iran-Iraq War had ended less than two years before, but the remnants of war — lack of provisions, jarred nerves from years of bombings — remained. Khomeini had died less than a year before. We’d thought his death would usher in a freer era, but not much had changed. I was 9 years old and we were at my aunt’s two-bedroom apartment in Tehran. My maternal grandparents were there, as well as my uncle, his wife and my four younger cousins. They’d all come for one last meal together, to say goodbye and to see me and Shee Shee off to our new life.

A few days before, we’d left my childhood home in Karaj (a suburb of Tehran) for the last time. I’d packed a couple of my favorite toys — a Barbie, a Cabbage Patch Kid — but had to leave most everything else behind — Mini Mouse, books, a dollhouse, my beloved Disney cartoons. Most of my toys and clothes, along with Shee Shee’s things, had been sold to friends and neighbors. What was left, my aunt promised to safeguard for me. Shee Shee had packed her favorite hair rollers — which 30 years later she still travels with — all of our photos, and Baba’s uniform, two pairs of his pajamas, his dog tag, his wings and his papers.

That afternoon, as our car pulled away from the only home I’d ever known, I turned around and waved goodbye. Pushing the lump of tears back down my throat, I made a silent promise to the house that I would come back as soon as I could and live there again.

Six months earlier, Baba, an esteemed navy captain and for nine months a political prisoner, had been executed. Shee Shee would later say we moved to America because she didn’t want me to grow up in the shadow of that tragedy, of my father’s death. But at the moment it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like if we didn’t leave, we wouldn’t survive. She picked the U.S. because we already had family here and she picked May 19 for our departure, because it’s my older brother, Shabab’s birthday (he, too, was living in the States).

On that last night, at my aunt’s house, the mood was somber. Our escape was not the beginning of an adventure, but an abandoning of everything known, everyone loved. When the stew was nearly done, its aroma moved from the kitchen through the living room and into the master bedroom, where I was lying on the bed, listening to a Googoosh tape. Cow tongue smells like rot when it’s cooked. I’d been duped.

“Dinner’s ready,” Shee Shee called. I walked out of the room to join everyone I’d been avoiding for fear that I would cry in front of them, or worse, that they would cry in front of me.

Shee Shee carried the rice, already flipped over on the platter, out to meet the stew on the dining room table. Cooking the perfect Iranian rice takes practice, but making the perfect tadig is a combination of luck and instincts — one never knows if the crust will hold, if it will be thick and crispy or if it will burn or fall apart.

After dinner my uncle drove us to the airport. Our suitcases smelled of pistachios, salted and soaked in lime juice, and saffron — the best saffron in the world is Iranian — which we’d taken as gifts and to stock our new kitchen. As the airplane took off, I looked down at the lights of Tehran, wondering if my house was somewhere down below looking up at the sky for us.

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This Month in Books: ‘When Will I Be a Winner?’ or, ‘Mr. President, I Have a Headache’

A bunch of men. Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

“We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You’re gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’”

—Donald Trump


“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

—George Eliot


Dear Reader,

In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story “The Hospital Where,” the narrator, when he is young and living in poverty, sells his soul to the Twelve-tongued God in exchange for literary achievement. But years later, he still doesn’t know what winning feels like, and wonders when it will happen to him:

I wanted to ask, When will I be a winner? And though the thought never reached my throat, the Twelve-tongued God turned to me just before disappearing through the double doors, and said, “When you win something.”

His triumph, it turns out — over life, death, other writers in a short story contest, whatever — is tautological. That is, it is not assured until his has written it down. Writing become a fantastical act, reflecting back on real life, healing wounds, curing the sick and floating the… well, also floating the sick. (Honestly, you just have to read it….)

History, the saying goes, is written by the victors. Or, more to the point, writing a battle is an easy way to win it. Howard Hughes, the playboy, director and billionaire, paid gossip columnists to spin or kill stories about him, as billionaire playboys are wont to do. Karina Longworth, author of a new book on the women of Hollywood’s Golden Age, tells Rae Nudson that women had to watch powerlessly as even their attempts to tell the truth were used against them:

If you don’t have a lot of power, then you probably don’t have access to getting the gossip columnists to spin things the way you want them to. And so your version of the story doesn’t get told, or the story that you don’t want told gets told… And I mean you see Faith Domergue is an example — where you see her picking up the phone and calling these gossip columnists and being like, “That thing you’ve heard about Howard being involved with Lana Turner is not correct.” And the gossip columnists who were being paid off by Howard Hughes will report this, but in this completely mocking way where it’s like, “poor little Faith.”

Longworth scoured Hollywood’s archives for the truth behind the “history,” discovering what seems almost like a demon at work in the history books:

There’s one man who’s pulling a lot of these strings, and he starts pulling strings in 1925, and then he just pulls more and more and more strings over time.

Which is not to say I’m promoting some sort of a “great man” theory of messing with the truth — for instance, sometimes it can be a bunch of men! As historian Colin G. Calloway writes in The Indian World of George Washington,

Historians of the early Republic… often treat Indian affairs as tangential or even irrelevant. In fact, federal officials devoted much time, attention, and ink to conducting diplomatic relations with Indian politicians…

Probably more books have been written about Washington than about any other American, but few of them pay much attention to Indians, let alone consider the role they played in his life. Certainly none of Washington’s biographers have shown any particular interest or expertise in Indian history…

Washington’s life, like the lives of so many of his contemporaries, was inextricably linked to Native America, a reality we have forgotten as our historical hindsight has separated Indians and early Americans so sharply, and prematurely, into winners and losers.

Or, as Karina Longworth put it: “I think that certainly these are tools that the powerful can use against the powerless.”


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Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All is a book about people who hold just such a power, though they seem almost oblivious to it. Reviewer Will Meyer tells us the book’s origin story: in the heart of the Disneyfied world of Ted Talks, “thought leaders” and philanthropy as self-help for rich people — that is, at the Aspen Institute “ideas conference” — Giridiharadas stood in front of all those “philanthropists” and gave a talk that “took aim at what he dubbed the ‘Aspen Consensus,’ an ideological paradigm in which elites ‘talk a lot about giving more’ and not ‘about taking less.’” Through storytelling and live-action philanthropist-role-playing, the wealthy elite have built “a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites…. try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing.” And yet, even as they pat each other on the back for ‘doing good,’ “there is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history… But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history.” In his review, Meyer points out that if the rich really want to ‘do good,’ they should become class traitors FDR, and raise their own taxes, a history which Giridharadas’ subjects seem completely unaware of and which even Giridharadas himself seems shy of bringing to their attention — he clearly thinks it will not convince them, even though, truthfully, it is the only thing for them to do.

Class problems need to be written before they can be solved, is sort of the idea. When it comes to bookstores unionizing for better pay and working conditions, you’d think booksellers, at the very least, wouldn’t have trouble getting their side of the story written down — and their battles won — given their extreme adjacence to the literary world. But not so, Rebecca McCarthy discovers during her investigation of bookstore unionizations, because “embarrassingly absent from conversations surrounding bookstore labor have been the voices of authors” and publishers. Telling the history of a flurry of bookstore unionizations in the ‘90s and early 2000s, she writes:

“Despite a huge community of poets and writers in the Twin Cities, the struggle of booksellers and bookstore workers at one of the largest bookstores in town seemed to be off the radar of 99% of the local writers,” Mark Nowak wrote for the Poetry Foundation, years later. “I was even the chair of the Political Issues Committee of the National Writers Union local at the time and the most I could muster from them was a resolution of support (which I had to write myself) — not a single NWU member would show up at the Borders pickets, either.”….

“The relationship of the literary community and the working class is a pretty problematic one in general I think,” Nowak told me over the phone. “So it really wasn’t surprising, but it was disheartening…. we had pictured forming some kind of umbrella organization for bookstore workers who were trying to organize and we wanted to produce a book that was a history of those organizing drives, but unfortunately we never found a publisher for it.”

Film critic W. Scott Poole, in his book about World War I and the origins of the horror genre, also has something to say about writers and reality and winning — although there weren’t really any winners in World War I, just a generation preoccupied with the lifeless, unmourned bodies of their friends. He describes at length the post-WWI movie Waxworks, which is about a carnival, “a nightmare dimension in which a young poet in this age of disillusioned poets takes a job from a showman.” Poole explains that this writer, too, is able to write things to life, but instead of a misguided effort to cure the sick, he just falls right in to one of capitalism’s most workaday pointless activities: spending too much time and energy on enacting his boss’s fantasies:

The poet will work in service of the dark carnival, writing narratives for each of the empty-eyed figures in the showman’s wax museum. In the cavernous tent the waxworks begin to move and act out the dreamlike tales of horror the poet imagines. These dark imaginings revolve around tyrants inflicting torture…

Which reminds me of what Sarah Perry said during a discussion with Bridey Heing about her new novel Melmoth:

So many of the great atrocities in the world are carried out by perfectly ordinary people who think of themselves as being good people, but who sign the paperwork or don’t speak up when they should speak up.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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RomCon: Our Failure to See Black Romantic Comedies

Tyler Perry Studios‎, Homegrown Pictures Screen Gems, New Line Cinema, Sneak Preview Entertainment, FoxSearchlight, Universal Pictures

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,438 words)

When I think romcom, I think white — Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers — white women, white houses, white stories. But I was weaned on white culture. More striking is that Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins, who had a “low-whiteness diet” growing up, thinks the same thing. So does The Undefeated culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, who attended a predominantly black high school and remembers kids “losing their minds” over Love & Basketball. Yet the first thing that enters her mind when she thinks of romcoms is her favorite, Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s funny because even in my head the movies are segregated,” McDonald says. “I can list off a whole bunch of movies with majority black casts that of course are romcoms, I just didn’t necessarily think of them that way.”

Earlier this week Rebel Wilson, star of next year’s Isn’t it Romantic, was shamed into apologizing for claiming to be “the first ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy” and then blocking the black women on Twitter who reintroduced her to Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique. “To be part of a problem I was hoping I was helping makes it that much more embarrassing & hard to acknowledge,” she tweeted. No kidding. While both my boyfriend (white) and I (half-white) have seen a number of black romcoms, including Queen Latifah’s, we were ashamed to realize that we were as complicit in their erasure as Wilson — we likely would have forgotten them too. For this, Collins has understanding, if not sympathy. While he sides with Rebecca Theodore-Vachon — one of the first to call out Wilson — he also recognizes that the critic is occupying a space of lucidity independent of the white-washed culture that formed Wilson (and me and my whiter boyfriend): “It is true that it would take a mental adjustment for her to think of some of those movies as romcoms because no one advertised them as those things.” Read more…

Partners in Crime: The Life, Loves & Nuyorican Noir of Jerry Rodriguez

Photo courtesy the author / Kensington Publishing / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,320 words)

It was the third week in August 2004 when my best friend of 23 years, the screenwriter, playwright, and noir author Jerry Rodriguez, called me to blow off steam. Although he never told me the reasons, he and his girlfriend were breaking up. She was an attractive light-skinned woman from the West Coast, a respected editor, music critic, and novelist with hair that belonged in a shampoo commercial and a Colgate smile. A moody Cancerian who proudly represented “The Bay,” she’d known Tupac personally and could recite the lyrics to Too Short songs. Jerry was sick with cancer off and on throughout their three-year relationship and was still ill when his girlfriend decided it was over.

Diagnosed on Good Friday 2001, a few weeks after noticing a swelling on the top of his right foot, the disease steadily progressed. “She said I have to be gone by Labor Day,” Jerry sighed. “I’ve already started packing.” I sucked my teeth. “Well, that still gives you a few weeks to figure it out,” I answered, trying to sound reassuring. “It’ll be cool, man, don’t worry about it. I’ll come by and help you tomorrow.”

“Thanks, man.” Jerry’s voice was deep and serious. A lover of Sinatra, he sometimes carried himself in that stoic Frankie way. He’d watched a lot of tough guy movies with Bogart, Cagney, Lancaster, Widmark, and Mitchum as a kid. In the living room sitting next to his dad, he became a lover of film dialogue that he could recite verbatim.

That phone call came a week after Jerry turned 42. Born under the sign of Leo, he was a natural leader who usually had a big roar, but not that evening. I came over the next day while his now ex-girlfriend was at the gym. There were white moving boxes scattered throughout the beautifully decorated apartment. Outside, it was Hades hot, but the space was comfortably chilled by an air conditioner. Theirs was a dwelling I knew well, having been over for dinner parties, Sunday nights watching The Sopranos, Monday evenings viewing 24, and dog-sitting when they were out of town. Next to the front door was a long, wide cage containing Jerry’s furry white ferret Bandit. I could smell the Café Bustelo brewing.

Brooklyn Hospital was across the street, and the sounds of sirens were constant. Jerry would usually be talking about some new project or telling me about the folks from his day job at a Bronx drug clinic, but that day he was church-mouse quiet. Glancing at him, I sipped the strong coffee and placed familiar books in a box. I knew exactly what was coming next. After a few false starts, he blurted, “Look, if I can’t find a place right away, can I come stay with you for a little while?” I looked at him and smiled, knowing that in New York City, apartment-hunting-time “a little while” could mean anything from six months to six years.

For the previous few years, since my girlfriend Lesley passed away suddenly, I’d lived alone in Crown Heights. The last thing I wanted to do was share space with anyone. Still, how could I say no? He’d always been there for me, especially after Lesley’s brain aneurysm. The afternoon of her funeral, after everyone was gone, Jerry and I stood together in the empty New Jersey graveyard as my mind tried to process my plight. I was afraid to go home and face the empty Chelsea apartment Lesley and I shared, and Jerry understood my dilemma. “Let’s go to the movies and see The Iron Giant,” he said casually after we’d slipped into the limo back to Manhattan. I smiled for the first time since claiming her body at St. Vincent’s Hospital. For the next two weeks, he visited me every day after work.

All of that came back to me as I contemplated his question about moving in. “Of course, you can stay with me,” I answered, “but is the ferret coming too?” Then it was Jerry’s turn to smile.
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West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…

Living with Dolly Parton

Mark Humphrey / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilkerson | Longreads | October 2018 | 43 minutes (7,851 words)

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.

I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”

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The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Kathryn Smith | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,450 words)

 
I spent New Year’s in a hot pink temple shaped like a lotus flower, surrounded by 100 other people with their eyes closed and their legs crossed like pretzels. I had taken a vow of silence and not spoken to another human in three days. It was so quiet that I could hear the twinkly lights on the ceiling humming.

I’m a mid-30s white woman with a cat, a small apartment, and a mid-level office job. I don’t meditate, really. I vociferously hate chanting. I don’t know what I think about swamis in long orange robes who believe energy runs through everything and rocks have feelings — I have a 401K and a thoroughly sensible life.

But I went to an ashram because I thought it might fix something, and I think it kind of did.
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‘As a Grown Woman, I Still Have To Continuously Learn To Say No’

MirageC / Getty Images

Wei Tchou | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,646 words)

We’re certainly living in a time of revolution. I feel a great deal of wonder when I reflect on the fact that we’ve witnessed our society’s cultural norms regarding sexual assault and consent shift in real time, on the most public of stages: Washington, Hollywood. Yet I’m perhaps less attuned to the shifts happening within myself, in light of the national conversation. I know that I conceive of my own consent and agency more intentionally now, from day to day. But where I most often notice this evolution is in the way I think about my past — it’s as if many of my memories have been entirely rewritten.

I was thinking of all of this as I read Tanya Marquardt’s Stray: Memoir of a Runaway. In the book, Marquardt writes about escaping her dysfunctional home at age sixteen and finding community within the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. The book is haunting and spare, and wrestles with the nuances of one’s agency, in the face of cyclical abuse. Marquardt is an award-winning performer and playwright. Her play Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and she has published personal essays in HuffPost UK and Medium.

We became friends, back in 2011, while we we both attending the M.F.A program at Hunter College, and we sat down recently to speak about the art of crafting memory into literature, the ongoing stigma against personal writing, and the ways in which the cultural conversation surrounding consent affected the writing of her book, among other topics. Read more…

Women Are Really, Really Mad Right Now

Simon and Schuster

Hope Reese | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,838 words)

 

“Women’s anger is not taken seriously,” author, journalist, and political commentator Rebecca Traister told me. “It’s not taken seriously as politically valid expression.”

That’s a major oversight, Traister argues in her new book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Women’s anger has the power to spark major social and political movements; it’s an essential ingredient for democracy. In Good and Mad, both a political history and critical reflection, Traister chronicles women’s anger and shows the ways in which it’s been downplayed, stifled, and underestimated — from the anger of suffragettes to the achievements of activists like Florynce Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and Shirley Chisholm, to the groundswell of anger that erupted in 2017 with the #MeToo movement. Traister, a writer-at-large for New York magazine and contributing editor at Elle, has devoted a large part of her career to writing about women in politics, spending years covering Hillary Clinton, authoring All the Single Ladies in 2009 — a deep dive into the sociological significance of the rising number of unmarried women — and most recently covering women’s anger in our current political moment, like the response to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court Justice. Read more…

Ugly, Bitter, and True

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Suzanne Rivecca | Zyzzyva | April 2018 | 84 minutes (16,714 words)

 

The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. –Michel de Montaigne

 

There’s a tiny park on Hyde Street in San Francisco, on the cable car line, and for about a year I half-heartedly planned to kill myself in it. The park is slightly sunken, set off from the street, mostly concrete: one of those wedged-in, rarely utilized “mini-parks” common to this part of the city. There are a few rickety maroon-painted benches, a banner of tattered Mexican party flags, some scattered plants and trees. Sometimes, on warm nights, people sit there and eat ice cream cones from the famous ice cream parlor on the corner. Sometimes people take their dogs there to pee. But most of the time it’s empty.

I zeroed in on it because it’s near my apartment and ill-lit. I’d made only a cursory stab at formulating the logistics. Mostly I fantasized in broad strokes, visualizing the final result rather than the step-by-step labor. I knew this much: I wanted to put my California ID in my pocket, along with a piece of paper with my sister’s contact information, swallow a bunch of Xanax with alcohol, and hang myself from a tree. I didn’t think about what I’d use to hang myself, or what I’d stand on to reach the tree, or what kind of knot I’d tie. I didn’t even know which tree. My reluctance to hammer out these details probably indicated a lack of genuine resolve. Or maybe it was just indicative of the bone-shaking agitation that made it impossible to focus on anything intently enough to make a plan.

I walked by the park almost every day, but found it hard to enter. Sometimes I’d stand on the sidewalk and just stare into it, my heartrate accelerating. I knew this was the place, but I didn’t want to go in and scope out coordinates and vantage points. If it was going to happen, I didn’t want to be methodical about it. I was waiting for some trigger that would make it inevitable: some fresh humiliation, some galling failure. Something that would make it all fall into place, get the ball rolling organically, negate the need for foresight. I may have also been waiting for an irrefutable reason not to do it at all.

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