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The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

Relearning How to Talk in the Age of Smartphone Addiction

Photo: Peter Urban

Jessica Gross | Longreads | October 2015 | 17 minutes (4,263 words)

 

Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, has studied our relationship with technology for decades. While some of her earlier works highlighted the ways in which technology could help us construct self-identities, her more recent writing warns that we are overinvesting in our devices and underinvesting in ourselves and each other.

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published in 2011, Turkle explored the implications of replacing real intimacy with digital connection. Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, continues that thread. Turkle uses Thoreau’s three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—as a framework, describing how our devices disrupt conversation and healthy development at every stage. When we turn to our phones constantly, we deny ourselves the capacity for solitude and identity development. This, in turn, blunts our ability to form healthy relationships. And vice versa: when we text instead of talk, or look at our devices instead of each other, we diminish our abilities to relate to other people as well as ourselves. Turkle ends the book with a discussion of what it means that we have begun to relate to machines as sentient beings when, in fact, they have no feelings, no experiences, no empathy, no idea what it means to be human.

Turkle—a psychoanalytically trained psychologist who founded and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self—is no Luddite. But she argues for moderation, and for a deep look at how over-invested we’ve become in new technology. She is also optimistic that we are at just the right moment for this rceexamination, and for a return to conversation, reflection, and real intimacy. Turkle and I began our phone conversation by hailing that old thing, the landline.

Hi, this is Jessica Gross, calling from Longreads. Is this Sherry Turkle?

Yes, it is. I’ve been looking forward to hearing from you. But let me have you call back on a landline. I think the fidelity would be better and it’d just be easier. [Ring, ring.] Here I am. I love this old technology. I’m at a seaside cabin with this 1950 phone that works perfectly. [Laughter]

I got my own landline recently and it’s been really delightful.

I mean, there’s this thing where calls never get dropped, where you can hear in perfect fidelity! [Laughter] And it goes on even if the Wi-Fi is down! Read more…

On ‘Remaining in the Shadows’: Elena Ferrante on Anonymity and Writing

After so many years, are you still sure about your decision to remain in the shadows?

“Remain in the shadows” is not an expression I like. It savors of plots, assassins. Let’s say that, fifteen years ago, I chose to publish books without having to feel obliged to make a career of being a writer. So far, I haven’t been sorry about it. I write and I publish only when the text seems of some value to me and to my publishers. Then the book makes its way, and I go on to occupy myself with something else. That’s it, and I don’t see why I should change my behavior.

How do you feel about the questions that are raised about your identity—are you amused, irritated, or something else?

They are legitimate, but reductive. For those who love reading, the author is purely a name. We know nothing about Shakespeare. We continue to love the Homeric poems even though we know nothing about Homer. And Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Joyce matter only if a talented person changes them into the subject of an opera, a biography, a brilliant essay, a film, a musical. Otherwise they are names, that is to say labels. Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer’s or Shakespeare’s? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.

At Guernica, an early excerpt from Fragments: On Writing, Reading, and Absence, a collection of Elena Ferrante’s letters, and interviews with her, due out in January.

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When Corporate Beer Hits Seattle

In Seattle Met, Allecia Vermillion writes about how three friends grew their craft brewery into a Seattle icon, recognized internationally for the quality of its brews, and what happened when the Elysian Brewing Company was acquired by Anheuser-Busch after two decades of proud independence. The reaction in their home city was not kind:

While Elysian’s staff processed the news, word of the deal spread outside the brewery’s walls. The drinking public would spend the coming weeks going through its own range of emotions. Some Seattle bars immediately removed Elysian tap handles. Things got especially rough at the company’s original Capitol Hill brewpub. People called just to yell at the bartender. A server approached a couple to take their order only to have one of them respond, “Why would I want to drink here?” There’s also the story of the guy who purchased a beer from the bar for the sole purpose of pouring it on the floor, leaving a trail behind him as he walked out the front door. Everyone loved pointing out the newfound irony in Elysian’s Loser Pale Ale, conceived as a tribute to Sub Pop Records on its 20th anniversary in 2011; labels bore the tagline “Corporate Beer Still Sucks.”

In Seattle, after all, beer is personal. People who drive Toyotas, text on iPhones, buy Diet Coke at Fred Meyer, and draw paychecks from Amazon swore off Elysian as soon as they heard the news, unable to stomach an IPA now associated with a multinational corporation.

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The Genius of Marie Kondo and the Evolution of Decluttering

Marie Kondo

In 1881, Eunice White Bullard published All Around the House, Or, How to Make Homes Happy, a 468-page manual on everything a head of household needed to know to keep things in order. Bullard, the wife of Henry Ward Beecher, dedicated chapters to everything from managing laundry to pickling, washing flannel, and cooking a goose. Read more…

Second Chances After Fifty: Jeanette Winterson, in ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’

Photo by Chris Boland

Today (October 2, 2015) I turn fifty. This is officially the first age that has freaked me out. Fifty? How can I be fifty? Fifty is how old grandparents are, or how old my grandparents were when I was born, anyway. And I haven’t even been a parent. Fifty is how old Maggie Estep was when she died, tragically, suddenly. I haven’t yet done enough with my life, haven’t done enough of the writing and publishing and other things I’ve meant to do.

You can imagine, then, how comforting it was–and perfectly timed, just before my birthday–to come upon these lines in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson’s excellent 2012 memoir of coming to understand herself after breaking free from her religious fanatic adoptive mother, embracing her sexuality, and meeting her birth mother:

“I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

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My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. Her memoir My Unsentimental Education was published today, and our thanks to the University of Georgia Press for allowing us to reprint the chapter below. Two previous excerpts from the book have been long-listed for The Best American Essays (2011 and 2015), and an early excerpt also appeared on Longreads in 2013.  

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Patti Smith Returns with ‘M Train’

The Guardian has published an excerpt of Patti Smith’s upcoming memoir cum travelogue, M TrainI’ve had the privilege to read the entire book—I enjoyed it so much I promptly bought tickets to see Smith read at George Washington University. M Train is the diary of a genius; it slips from colloquial to brilliant, and back again, within a paragraph:

I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me, like the worn canvas sack of an angst-driven teenage hockey player?

It is intimidating, yet full of small, relatable moments: Smith binge-watches detective shows, drinks endless cups of coffee, and fangirls over her favorite authors:

Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset. They entertain and sustain me. Linden and Holder in The Killing. Law & Order’s Goren and Eames. CSI’s Horatio Caine. I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends, whether in real time or rerun.

As for me, I started to carry my galley wherever I went. It is smudged with pencil and debris from the bottom of my bookbag. I will not lend my copy to anyone, but I encourage everyone to read it.

As if it had followed me from Berlin a heavy mist descended on Monmouth Street. From my small terrace I caught the moment when drapes of cloud dropped upon the ground. I had never seen such a thing and lamented I was without film for my camera. On the other hand I was able to experience the moment completely unburdened. I put on my overcoat and turned and said goodbye to my room. Downstairs I had black coffee, kippers, and brown toast in the breakfast room. My car was waiting. My driver was wearing sunglasses.

The mist grew heavier, a full-blown fog, enveloping all we passed. What if it suddenly lifted and everything was gone? The column of Lord Nelson, the Kensington Gardens, the looming Ferris wheel by the river, and the forest on the heath. All disappearing into the silvered atmosphere of an interminable fairy tale. The journey to the airport seemed endless. The outlines of bare trees faintly visible like an illustration from an English storybook.

M Train is available October 6.

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Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis

Operation Teapot, the Met Shot
Operation Teapot, the Met Shot, a tower burst weapons effects test April 15, 1955 at the Nevada Test Site. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Joni Tevis | The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse  | Milkweed Editions | May 2015 | 28 minutes (7,494 words)

 

Below is Joni Tevis’s essay “Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb,” from her book The World Is On Fire, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. This essay originally appeared in The Diagram. Read more…

‘Stubborn Gladness’: Elizabeth Gilbert on Poet Jack Gilbert and Defending Joy

This past weekend, just a few days before the release of Big Magic: Creativity Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new ode to the creative spirit, I bumped into her in the restroom at Omega Institute, where she was speaking. As I was drying my hands, she caught a glimpse of the Anaïs Nin quote tattooed on my forearm. “Hold still,” she said. “I have to read that.” She then proceeded to show me her tattoos, done in white ink. One says “Courage,” one says “Compassion,” and a third one says “Stubborn Gladness.”

Later, in her talk, Gilbert revealed the source of that last one. It’s inspired by “A Brief for the Defense,” a poem by Gilbert’s “personal poet laureate” Jack Gilbert (no relation), about the imperative of appreciating joy and pleasure in even the harshest of times.

After the sometimes reclusive poet’s death in 2013, Gilbert wrote about him, and about how he inspired her, in The Atlantic.

When it comes to developing a worldview, we tend to face this false division: Either you are a realist who says the world is terrible, or a naïve optimist who says the world is wonderful and turns a blind eye. Gilbert takes this middle way, and I think it’s a far better way: he says the world is terrible and wonderful, and your obligation is to joy. That’s why the poem is called “A Brief for the Defense”—it’s defending joy. A real, mature, sincere joy—not a cheaply earned, ignorant joy. He’s not talking about building a fortress of pleasure against the assault of the world. He’s talking about the miraculousness of moments of wonder and how it seems to be worth it, after all. And one line from this poem is the most important piece of writing I’ve ever read for myself:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

This defines exactly what I want to strive to be–a person who holds onto “stubborn gladness,” even when we dwell in darkness. I want to be able to contain both of them within me at the same time, remain able to cultivate joy and wonder even at life’s bleakest.

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