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‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’

Graffiti on a wall in South Central Los Angeles, 1992. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

On March 16, 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins went to a local convenience store in South Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. Owner Soon Ja Du accused the teenage girl of shoplifting, an altercation ensued, and in a split-second captured on video, Du shot Harlins in the back of the head. She died with two dollars in her hand. A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but against their recommendation, the judge sentenced the Korean-born woman to a $500 fine, probation, and community service.

Harlins’ murder, which occurred two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers, was a major contributing factor to the city’s 1992 uprising—LA’s deadliest year—which resulted in 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, and more than 800 million in material losses. By the end of the unrest, known as Saigu among Koreans, rioters had looted, set fire, and damaged more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, based on the murder of Harlins, is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of two southern California families forever connected by violence and tragedy. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the novel is centered on Korean American Grace Park, a naïve and dutiful daughter who lives and works in the Valley with her secret-keeping parents, and Shawn Matthews, an African American ex-con whose sister was murdered by a Korean grocery store owner.

A new shocking crime sends the Parks and Matthews on a collision course to face their shared history against the backdrop of an already tense city on the cusp of more racial violence. Taut and razor-sharp, Your House Will Pay masterfully examines themes of racism, revenge, incarceration, grief, shame, injustice, and social movements. Read more…

Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler

Penguin Press

In the fall of 2011, Peter Hessler arrived in Egypt, with his family — twin toddlers, and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang. The two had met in China, where Hessler first landed as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, details his two years teaching English. Two other books, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, followed. After leaving China in 2007, the family settled in southwestern Colorado, where they are now based. A few years later, they decided to wipe the slate clean and move to Egypt. But just as they planning their move, the Egyptian Arab Spring started, sending the country down the chaotic path it has followed until today.

Hessler’s latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, chronicles both the revolution itself, and the lives of the people they met during their five years in Cairo. It’s a deep look at what is, in some ways, the oldest country in the world, and it bears the hallmarks of Hessler’s work: vivid scenes, elegant narrative arcs, and a long lens that examines the links and gaps between Egypt’s troubled present and its ancient past.

Today, Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his 2007 National Geographic story, “Instant Cities,” and in 2006, Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist. In 2011 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving Egypt, his family returned to Colorado again, before decamping this year for another stint in China, where Hessler plans to teach at Sichuan University, 20 years after he first taught at Fuling Teachers College. Frank Bures spoke to him about the value of language, learning from John McPhee, and what your garbage man can teach you.

***

Frank Bures: You built your career writing about China, but how did you start writing in the first place?

Peter Hessler: My first interest was in 10th grade. I had an English teacher in high school who thought that I had some talent at it, and encouraged me. She was the one who made me think seriously about becoming a writer. That was one of the reasons I ended up at Princeton, because they had a good creative writing program. I was encouraged there by Russell Banks, who was my teacher and a thesis advisor, and also John McPhee.

I originally was interested in fiction. I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication. Later, after I took McPhee’s class, I started doing a little freelancing. In grad school overseas I started shifting towards nonfiction, partly because I couldn’t sell short stories. It was hard to publish them, whereas I could publish my travel pieces and essays and get paid for them, and that was encouraging. But I was still unsure when I joined the Peace Corps at age 27. I’d published a lot of travel pieces, but I’d never held a job in journalism, and the kind of stuff I published wasn’t enough for me to support myself.

I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication.

FB: What kind of travel pieces had you done?

PH: The New York Times used to have these essays. The first one I wrote for them was about taking the Trans-Siberian train. Because after I finished grad school at Oxford I traveled for six months, and I consciously researched stories along the way, thinking that when I got home I would write pieces, and possibly write a travel book. I wrote the train essay, and just sent it to a name on the masthead at the Times, and by some miracle they read it and published it. After that I started doing some stuff for them as a freelancer.

FB: When did you start thinking about books?

PH: When I joined the Peace Corps, I wanted to learn Chinese and become a better writer. But I didn’t think I was going to write a book about that experience. I felt I was too young, and I really was. I didn’t have the maturity to write a book, nor did I really have the material at that point. But I did take a lot of notes. It was my way of processing what was going on. I would write about experiences I had, or encounters with people, things on campus, but just in a diary format. And I tracked a lot of my students’ writing because they were such beautiful writers, and I thought they were fascinating people.

Then with six months to go, we got Internet for the first time, and I got back in touch with people. If it had been any earlier, it probably would’ve been a distraction, but at that point it was good to start thinking about the future.

He said, ‘It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.’

I had written to John McPhee throughout my time there, and he had written back often. But now we were on email, and I remember writing to him because I was thinking about applying for journalism jobs, and applying for an internship at Newsweek in Beijing. John wrote me a long letter, telling me: “You should write a book about Fuling.” Because he’d read these letters. He said, “It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.”

That was a powerful moment, because I hadn’t thought about it. Once I got that email and started thinking, it immediately made sense. When I went back through all my notes in my diaries, I realized, “I’ve really got a lot of stuff here.” But I could also see what I needed: more detailed descriptions of the landscape, and some deeper observation of the community and of the city.

FB: Did you write the book then?

PH: No, I didn’t write the book until I left. I went back to my parents’ home in Missouri, and I decided I would take about half a year. I was 29 years old and I had never held a job. I had college debt, so I felt a lot of pressure. I was applying for journalism jobs at the same time, sending out resumes to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, pretty much anybody who had a China bureau, and I got form rejections across the board.

When I finished the book, I sent a resume to Amazon, because they had sent me a recruiting thing when I was in Fuling. I had no idea what it was. I guess my life could’ve been pretty different. I sent them a resume, but they never wrote back.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else. After a couple weeks of this sort of thinking, I finally sent the book out to agents, and a couple of agents were interested. I went to New York and met with them, and I ended up signing with a young agent named William Clark. He sold the book to HarperCollins, and it happened very quickly. It wouldn’t be considered a big advance, but it was enough to pay off all my college loans, and suddenly I realized, “I can just go back to China on my own. I don’t need a job. I’ll just go and figure it out.” And that’s where Oracle Bones starts, in that I was just showing up, and I had a part-time assistant position at The Wall Street Journal, for $500 a month, and that gave me a base.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else.

It took a while for River Town to come out, because I took a long time editing it. But there was a lot of stuff going on that year and people were starting to get interested in China. So I very quickly had a lot of work. After about a year I got a break with National Geographic and The New Yorker. I was on the ground there for just a little more than a year when I sold my first story to The New Yorker in 2000. Then a week later I sold my second story to them, and we were pretty much off and running.

FB: It was a great time to be writing about China.

PH: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was at the right place in the right time. But it did take some faith, because it was very discouraging earlier, when I was rejected for those jobs and living at my parents’ house. I didn’t grow up with any money, so I couldn’t rely on anything else. And the college debt weighed on me.

FB: Was there anything you learned from John McPhee that influenced the way you write, or think about writing?

PH: There were huge numbers of things that I learned from him. There’s technical stuff. Probably one of the best examples is a “set piece.” He’d teach us that in his course, and show us an example from his writing. It’s something, actually, that a lot of journalists don’t learn, because you only do it in long-form writing, but it makes you think differently about the structure and organization, and that was a really useful lesson to have as a young writer. The example he gave came from his Alaska book, where he’s on his trip through the Alaska back country, and they see a bear. The thing shifts to maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words about bears, and it’s no longer in his experience. It talks about the nature of bears, things they do, and their size. There’s all this, of course beautifully written, but it’s a way of getting background information in an interesting way. It also allows you to step away so the voice doesn’t get stale.

McPhee had a lot of technical lessons, but I think the most important thing was the deeper ways of thinking about writing. One of them, for me, was that you can do fascinating creative writing as a nonfiction writer. I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing. My parents didn’t get The New Yorker, so I didn’t realize there were these other ways of writing nonfiction, and that it could be just as dynamic and fascinating as fiction, and just as artistic.

FB: How did you and Leslie choose Egypt?

PH: There are a couple things. We wanted something different from China. We wanted a different kind of challenge, and something that would give us a new perspective. We wanted to study a language that would be fascinating and rich. I like the idea of a place with a long history, and especially with ancient history because I like archeology. But we also needed it to be a place that would interest The New Yorker. I couldn’t go to Portugal, right? I mean, how many stories about Portugal are you going to write for The New Yorker? I had to be able to support my family.

We thought about India, but I didn’t like the way that there wasn’t one language that unified it, and it seemed like maybe it was too close to China in some sense. So we eventually settled on the Middle East. It was going to be Damascus or Cairo, because those are good places to study Arabic. We were leaning toward Damascus for a while, but once the Arab Spring started it was clear that Cairo was the place. But we’d never been there. We showed up in Cairo with these kids, and neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.


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FB: Having kids myself, I can’t imagine a move like that.

PH: When I look back, it’s totally crazy. Leslie and I, maybe we’re delusional or something, but we’re also pretty calm people. It helps, too, if you’re doing this with somebody else who’s totally on board. It was definitely a hard first year. I mean, I think the whole thing was hard, because it’s hard with little kids to do something like that, and it’s hard to be in the midst of this chaotic political period. It was very intense. But it’s an engaging place. The people are likable, even though Egypt has problems on a level that we had not experienced in China. There’s serious dysfunction in many aspects of Egyptian society. But it was a phenomenal experience, and I was also fortunate in that I did get to know individuals who brought some light to what was going on, and not just in the sense of understanding. They were engaging, positive people that I liked to spend time with. Sayyid, and Manu and Rifaat, our teacher. We loved it.

FB: What’s your feeling about the importance of learning the language of a place where you’re writing about or living?

PH: To me, it was fundamental. I’m not interested in writing in-depth about a place where I’m not at least doing my best to learn the language. In Egypt I didn’t become fluent like I was in Chinese, but I was very conversant, comfortable with somebody like Sayyid. I could spend a lot of time with him and his family and understand what’s going on, and that was really important to me.

FB: With Egyptian Arabic, what did you learn about Egypt that you wouldn’t have learned without that?

PH: There’s the deep religious nature of the language, and the impact of religion on the language itself. It’s fundamental to that language. I think that that’s pretty rare in the world. There aren’t that many cultures where you have the religion so deeply embedded in the language. It’s a huge part of what you’re saying when you’re using these terms all the time.

I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing.

The language also makes you think a lot about the Pharaonic world, and the ways in which it lasted or didn’t last. There are remarkably few Pharaonic words in Egyptian Arabic. It’s quite striking. There are probably more Turkic words than there are Pharaonic words. But it’s also striking that a lot of those Pharaonic words are very foundational, like the vocabulary for agriculture has a lot of Pharaonic stuff in it, and the word for women, the word for water, the word for land, the Nile, the river. These are things that have deep roots, and those survived the adoption of Arabic.

FB: I love how in both The Buried and Oracle Bones, you’re writing about the distant past and the present, and finding connections and divergences. Do you think that was one of the reasons that you were attracted to Egypt?

PH: I definitely liked the idea of this place with an incredibly rich ancient history. I think there are always some people who say, “Well, that’s not really relevant to what’s going on today.” But I don’t believe it disappears. There are too many echoes that you can see. Also, it’s not just whether things stay the same. I’m not saying that everything is static, but more what I’m saying is that the ancient Egyptians were brilliant politicians, and a lot of what they did politically we see echoes of. For example, their use of nostalgia. Even 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they were already writing nostalgically about the past, and the perfect political world of the past. That’s an effective political strategy. It’s what Trump does now. People do this all over the world.

FB: What’s your sense of the difference between how people in China and Egypt relate to that distant past?

PH: It was a huge difference. The Chinese are much more comfortable with it, and there are a couple reasons for this. The main one, of course, is they see their history as an unbroken line. It’s a very powerful thing to have that link. Egypt does not have that. The other huge difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself Pharaoh was somewhere in the second century BC, and from that point until 1952. there was not a single Egyptian leader.

FB: What was the biggest challenge as a writer in Egypt?

PH: It was getting enough language, and being able to do that while the revolution was going on and while I had small children. I couldn’t study all the time the way I had in Fuling. In Egypt I was having to go report on stuff, and I had kids to take care of.

FB: In Oracle Bones you say that in writing narrative nonfiction stories, you’re collecting fragments and organizing them into stories. Some of your stories have arcs that span years. How do you know when a fragment, or something that you’ve collected, is part of that story?

PH: It’s an instinct you develop over time. It took me a while to get there, but by the time I left China I had a pretty good sense of this. When I was in Colorado, for example, and I was reporting on the uranium industry in my corner of the state, and I ran into a town where everybody was telling me to talk to the pharmacist, because he knew everything. That confused me, because why would a pharmacist be somebody who knows a lot? Then I talked to him and realized, well, there’s no medic, there’s no hospital anywhere near here, so he’s basically like a doctor.

I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start.

He also mentioned the story of some loner in town who died and left him half a million dollars, and at that point my instinct kicked in and I thought, “There’s something going on here.” So I left him out of the uranium story, with the idea that I was going to pursue this. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I thought there was something there. You get those instincts over years of writing stories and books. The same thing in Egypt when the garbageman, Sayyid, kept bringing me stuff from the neighborhood and he knww so much about people.

FB: Do you typically start with an idea?

PH: It’s usually either a person or a place. It’s almost never an idea. I don’t start with themes or issues. Partly that’s my instinct, but partly it’s also deliberate because I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start. Maybe you’re fitting them into a larger narrative or idea that isn’t appropriate. So I tend to start either with a place or a person, and then the issues and the themes are secondary. They come in as I get to know the person or the place.

So I get to know Sayyid. Then I start to learn about him. Then that leads me into the informality of Cairo and the self-organization of those communities. Then it also leads me into gender relations, because I start to get to see how him and his wife interact. It leads me to issues of education, because I realize that this incredibly intelligent person is illiterate, and I get to know what his children are doing in school, and educate me in new perspectives. But it all starts with him.

FB: And now you guys are going back to China. Where are you going to be?

PH: We’re going to Chengdu. I’m going to teach for a year at Sichuan University. It’s been 20 years since I taught in Fuling.

FB: Is Chengdu near Fuling?

PH: It’s close. I wanted to teach in Fuling, but I wasn’t allowed for political reasons. I could do it in Chengdu. I’ll also be tracking down my former students and seeing what they’re up to, and revisiting Fuling.

FB: Are you going to write a sequel to River Town?

PH: I suspect some kind of follow-up book. But, I don’t know. I always wait until I’m into it before I really know what form it’s going to take. I do want to build on that experience, and I want to try to write something about how this place has changed and what it feels like on the ground, both for the people involved and for me as an observer. I’m also interested in my former students, who were a remarkable generation, because they were born around the time that Mao died, and they grew up with the changes. I’m curious to know more about their perspective on what they’ve seen and what they’ve lived through, because they’re middle-aged now.

FB: Is your plan to be there for a year?

PH: Right now, I think we’ll be there for five years. I’ll do one year of teaching, and then transition to writing full-time and reporting. Leslie is finishing her Egypt book, and then she’ll transition to writing. We also want our children to learn Chinese.

FB: How did you guys meet?

PH: I was working at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant, and she was a journalist, or a correspondent for them in China. I was the lowest guy on The Journal totem pole, and she had a real job, back in ’99. But we didn’t date then. We were in the same circle of friends, and then in 2003 we started dating.

FB: Can you say what Leslie’s Egypt book is about?

PH: It’s about women factory workers in Egypt. She reported on the factory in Alexandria. She has really good stuff, and she’s partway through it now.

FB: That will sit nicely on the shelf next to Factory Girls.

I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it.

PH: I think the two books will be interesting. My book and her book also will be interesting because we’re looking at Egypt from slightly different angles. There are some cross-themes, and it was fun to have these projects being researched at the same time. It helps, I think, both of us to have all these conversations while we’re doing research.

FB: Do you guys read each other’s work, like Joan Didion and John Dunne?

PH: Pretty late in the game. We don’t do it as we’re working. I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it. Actually, for this last book, she didn’t read it until pretty late in the process because I think she was feeling a lot of pressure for her book and trying to get it going, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to throw it on to her. She needed to focus on her thing, but I think that was a little bit of an unusual time, just part of the whole challenge of doing these projects with young children. We’re both very supportive, and it helps a lot in terms of the reporting, because each of us is learning things that help the other person.

FB: With two writers in the family, how do you balance your life and work?

PH: I guess that develops kind of naturally. It’s all we ever knew together, because both of us were writing from the time we met. The hardest thing about having two writers is probably financial, and lack of stability. Neither of us have a steady paycheck, but we had kids so late, and then both of us had the good fortune to start in China, which was a good place to get established. Though we would never write together. We have no interest in that. We are not a team of writers. It’s an individual sport, like running.

***

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology. He writes about travel, culture, language, science, outdoors, narrative, and belief for publications such as Harper’sAeonLapham’s QuarterlyThe Washington Post MagazineOutside, and the Best American Travel Writing

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

The Great Fiber-Optic Fraudster of Alaska

Getty Images

Why secure actual signatures from partners on multi-million dollar contracts to install fiber-optic cable at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean when you can just forge them? At Bloomberg Businessweek, Austin Carr reports on scam-artist extraordinaire Elizabeth Pierce, the former CEO of Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC. Pierce created fictitious contracts to fund an Anchorage telecom startup, fleecing investors for a billion dollars before getting caught.

Arctic fiber has been an entrepreneurial fantasy for decades. Soaring demand for broadband helped drive companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon.com, to spend tons on high-speed underwater cables that keep customers watching Netflix and YouTube with minimal delay. But many of those lines run in parallel in the Atlantic and Pacific along well-established ocean routes, leaving the world’s internet vulnerable to earthquakes, sabotage, and other disasters both natural and human-made. A trans-Arctic route would help protect against that while offering a more direct path, potentially making internet speeds much faster.

Pierce scribbled her first forged signatures on contracts with the Matanuska Telephone Association, which services south-central Alaskan towns such as Wasilla, in May and June 2015. Although Matanuska CEO Greg Berberich had been reluctant to strike a deal, Pierce assured her investors in New York in an email that Berberich was “nervous but very committed.” The next day she uploaded a contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with what looked like Berberich’s signature to a personal Google Drive account she shared with Murphy, the CIP managing director. Pierce also said she was close to locking in another gigantic sale with the nonprofit Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, whose customers include residents of remote Inupiat communities and the city of Utqiagvik. Soon she sent Murphy a contract with a phony version of the Arctic Slope CEO’s signature, too.

Pierce executed similar deceptions at least eight times, and the fraudulent contracts totaled more than $1 billion, according to court filings. Sometimes she completely fabricated deals; other times she negotiated real contracts, then changed key pages with more favorable terms.

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Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage

creative commons / Pegasus Books

Andrea J. Buchanan | excerpted from The Beginning of Everything: The Year I Lost My Mind and Found Myself | Pegasus Books | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

This is what I do when I am startled, or confronted by an argument: I freeze. If I can become very still and wait it out, become invisible, then it will stop, and I will be safe.

This is not a great strategy for dealing with confrontation. And yet it is a powerful reflex, one against which I have to actively work to fight in a moment when I find myself in a combative conversation or stressful dynamic. This is why I end up staying longer than I intend to, or agreeing to things I don’t necessarily want to do, or losing an argument I should win. This is not a pattern that works in my favor in the long run.

My marriage has been a long argument, and I am perpetually freezing. It’s true that over the years I have gotten better at responding, at not holding myself so still that I can barely breathe.

And it’s true that when the argument is about something that’s not me, when it’s about the kids and what’s right for them, for instance, I am able to resist the urge to hide and instead fight on their behalf, or for what I know is the right thing. But my first instinct is always to not break, to not allow myself to shatter. And so often, against my better judgment, I agree, I soothe, I capitulate. I freeze.
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Same Sh*itty Media Men, Different Day

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 24: Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer attend Cocktail party to celebrate ASP - The World Surf League at Jimmy at the James Hotel on July 24, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

The more things don’t change, the more they remain the same. At The Cut, Rebecca Traister reads Ronan Farrow’s damning new book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (out today!), and realizes that those executives at NBC who colluded to obstruct Farrow’s ground-breaking reporting on Harvey Weinstein — and who protected Matt Lauer from sexual misconduct accusations — remain in charge today.

The reveal in Catch and Kill is not that there are corrupt people; it’s that corrupt people are in control of our media, politics, and entertainment and that, in fact, many of them remain in control — two years after the mass eruption of stories of harassment and assault that Farrow played a big part in precipitating. In his detailed laying out of systemic dread, Farrow does much to vividly describe the kind of horror story we still live in, when it comes to harassment and assault and, more broadly, to power imbalances and abuses.

Farrow, like his New York Times peers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in their recent book She Said, has chosen to frame his narrative around his own journalistic project — how he came to publish the blockbuster story of movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual predation. But unlike Kantor and Twohey’s triumphal tale of working within a supportive news organization, much of Farrow’s story is about working against the news network, NBC, where he was employed as an on-air investigative journalist and where he did much of his reporting on Weinstein, though that reporting would never air. (He eventually published in The New Yorker).

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Old Dudes On Skateboards

Photos courtesy of the author

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | October 2019 | 36 minutes (8,980 words)

 

“It’s a very fine line between presenting yourself as a true skater and hardcore and being destructive.” ─ Lance Mountain

JR, one of my oldest, dearest friends, died in December. He was 43. We grew up skating together, during that golden age when Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, and Steve Caballero rode for Powell Peralta’s famed Bones Brigade skate team. Back in the mid-1980s, the Bones Brigade were not only discovering what these wheeled slabs of wood could do, they were releasing weird movies on VHS like The Search for Animal Chin and Future Primitive, where they skated ramps, pools, and steep roads, and clowned around. For kids like me, who didn’t relate to baseball or basketball, those movies taught us how to dress, taught us how to talk, taught us the many tricks we could do if we were willing to constantly injure ourselves practicing. My friends and I wanted to be the Bones Brigade, but most of us turned out differently.

Even though one old-school motto was “skate and destroy,” the Bones Brigade seemed kinder and gentler than most. They didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. Other pros did. Duane Peters, Christian Hosoi, and Jeff Grosso got lost partying. But no drug could give Lance Mountain and Tony Hawk what skating could. Vegan Mike Vallely put an elephant on his board to remind people of animals’ suffering. Rodney Mullen, essentially the inventor of street skating, spent lots of time reading in the library. Constructive rather than destructive was their identity and their art form. In hindsight, I wish we’d followed their lead sooner.

My middle-aged friends and I decided to honor our shared origins by sprinkling some of JR’s ashes at the Wedge, our old Phoenix skate spot, at the end of this summer. All my life, summer has been my favorite season. I’ve never wanted summers to end, especially this one, this way.
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‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy

A young woman and her boyfriend speak to her mother over the Berlin wall, 1962. (Bettmann/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,536 words)

 

What makes history resonate into the present, and how does memory change that? Deborah Levy’s new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything — long-listed for the Booker Prize this year — follows a British historian named Saul Adler as he prepares for, and then embarks upon, a trip to East Germany in 1988. Whether or not his visit will be a politically compromised one is a question that Saul grapples with as he makes his way into a politically repressive — and repressed — nation. Saul also finds his own desires leading him to unexpected places, from his feelings for his estranged girlfriend in London to his growing attraction to the man he’s working with in Germany.

If this was the sum total of Levy’s novel, it would be enough for a thoughtful, challenging exploration of the personal and political — but Levy has larger goals in mind. Throughout Saul’s travels in the first half of the novel, he experiences strangely dissonant moments, places where the narrative ventures into unexpected places and suggests another dimension to the story Levy is telling. In the second half of the novel, those narrative threads pay off dramatically, creating a powerful sense of memory, history, desire, and ideology all converging on a singular point. The Man Who Saw Everything comes at a time when Levy’s work has earned an abundance of acclaim: her last two novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her collection Black Vodka was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Longtime readers of Levy’s work will know that she’s just as capable of voyaging into the surreal and uncanny as she is documenting the social and psychological mores of her characters. Jeff VanderMeer has hailed her early novel Beautiful Mutants for its exploration of the weird, and her memoirs Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living each take significant narrative and structural risks that one doesn’t normally see in nonfiction. Add in her forays into the mythic and the archetypal, as in the verse work An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and you have a sense of a writer who’s capable of nearly anything. Read more…

Happiness is Fleeting

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell / Penguin Random House

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell | excerpt from The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life | Penguin Random House | October 2019 | 12 minutes (3,277 words)

 

There are so many topics and themes and recurring jokes in the wonderful world of Peanuts; if it were allowed I would just sit here and write a list of all my favorite cartoons.

But since I don’t have a podcast called My Favorite Peanuts (yet), and since we all have short attention spans, I’m going to write about my two favorite topics, which I believe are intrinsically connected: disappointment and dancing.

Amongst the thousands of life lessons found throughout Peanuts, I believe there is one that stands out amongst the rest: At the end of the day, you can either be disappointed, or you can be dancing, but you cannot be disappointed while you’re dancing. So take your pick.

To begin to explain this, I have to go back and start at the beginning of me and Peanuts. The beginning is often a good place to start.

I was born into a family that was already very into Schulz. I’m sure there are many of these types of families. You’re probably from one, or maybe you will start one, or maybe you wish you were from one. In which case, feel free to join mine! Each of my parents is one of seven children, I am the youngest of four. There are so many cousins, we wouldn’t notice or question your presence at the family reunion.

My maternal grandfather, Dr. Daniel Vaughan, was golfing buddies with Charles Schulz, Sparky to his friends. In 1964 Grandpa Dan co-founded a pro-am charity tournament in San Jose and Sparky did custom drawings for it for the following twenty or so years. I grew up inside a home filled with Schulz sketches addressed to my mother and original cartoons that referenced an ophthalmologist in San Jose, that of course being my grandfather. I already, and quite literally, had someone to look up to.

But that someone, at first, was not Sparky. It was Snoopy. Here we have not only an adorable cartoon dog, but one that dances. I loved dogs and dancing, so, I believe that is what they call “kismet.”

Grandpa Dan gave me my first Snoopy doll when I was probably about six or seven. It was one of those authentic Snoopys. Not those plush things you see at every drugstore across the world these days. This Snoopy was made in San Francisco in 1968 (now that I think about it, it’s incredibly impressive Grandpa Dan hung on to this thing until 1997). I have slept with it in my arms nearly every night since. As a twenty-seven-year-old, I’ve even boarded planes clutching it. It elicits a certain concerned look from the flight attendants and, like Charlie Brown, I’m almost always looking for sympathy.

Snoopy was essentially a god. His style, his moves. I wanted to dance just like him. His hands in the air, his feet, everywhere! He always embraced the music, and usually alone. Who needs a partner when you’ve got two feet? Between Snoopy and my mother, I had two dancing role models to set me up for complete success, at least on the dance floor.

Second to dancing, the thing I loved the most was drawing. When I began to draw, I was extremely concerned with my ability to draw Snoopy and Charlie Brown just like Schulz did. No tracing! I needed to be able to do it myself. Get all the strokes and shapes just right. Schulz, without knowing it, taught me how to draw. I think a lot of his expressions (and well, his whole outlook on life) still exist in my work today.

In an effort to keep me entertained, my parents bought me many Peanuts books for me to copy. The more I copied, the more I read, and the more I read, the more my connection grew. This was more than cool drawings of a beagle around our home. I still loved the dancing bits, but this stuff was hitting little my little soul. Hard.

By age 10, I was in the height of my “copying Snoopy” phase. I believed myself to be a young artist. Fully equipped with self confidence and self doubt, with contradicting thoughts like, I’m incredibly unique and important,” and “No one really wants me here, maybe I should go home and watch a movie instead?” And then, one day in the 4th grade, something happened. Sammy Wallace told me that I was, in fact, not a real artist because I was copying someone else’s work. Plus, I used an eraser. His sister Carly did not use an eraser, and she was definitely a real artist. I was horrified. I was embarrassed. I was Charlie Brown.

All my fears were confirmed. Clearly, everyone at school thought I was a joke, the laughingstock of all the other 4th grade artists. No one liked me, in fact, everyone hated me.

That was the moment Peanuts started to change for me. I like to think all Peanuts readers have some sort of pivotal memory in their life when the cartoon took on new relevance. Almost too much relevance. I wanted so badly to be liked by everyone, just like Charlie Brown, and somehow nothing was working out for either of us. It seemed it never would. And yet… there was still this hope inside of me, that maybe things would change? Maybe one day, I’d be as cool as my big brother, maybe I’d be the best dancer at the party, or even know how to tell a good joke without messing up the punchline! That push and pull of hope and despair, expectation and disappointment, in a nutshell, is life. And life is a Peanuts cartoon.

This revelation wasn’t exactly funny to me at first, but I did feel very understood by the gang. What started off as an innocent love affair with a group of kids and their beagle, soon became a heavy-duty, serious relationship that would shape my understanding of myself and the world around me. These weren’t jokes, but tales of love, loss and the human condition! Peanuts taught me that despite the little engine of hope inside you convincing you otherwise, you know timing will always be a little off with you and the Little Red-haired girl, Christmas will never be quite as amazing as you expected, and you’ll never be satisfied with what’s in your bowl. So you better take what you can get because, happiness is… fleeting.

Or as Linus would put it, “Good things last eight seconds. Bad things last three weeks.”

There are so many ways you can be disappointed in a Peanuts cartoon. You can be disappointed at home, in love, at school, on vacation, over holiday, during baseball, golf, or any sport under and out of the sun. You can be disappointed in a kate, a book, a play, your classmates, your parents, your friends, and even your dog.

Most importantly, for each of these lil’ folks, if all else fails you can always be disappointed in yourself. Who else is there to blame, Charlie Brown, when you’re the one setting the expectations so high?

Every day they have a list of great expectations of how their day will go, and by age five they are already learning that life is mostly not going to go as planned. Lucy will “probably never get married” and as much as Peppermint Patty studies she will somehow always know less than before. I think Schulz could have written a great self help book titled, “How To Be Disappointed.” In fact if he were coming up today, literary agents would probably be forcing him to do so.

Let’s examine some of my favorite examples of disappointment in Peanuts

Charlie Brown is the king of disappointment. He’s been disappointed in everything and everyone. His dog has forgotten his name, his kite can’t keep away from the trees, and no matter how much they practice, his baseball team will never win a game.

If the world is not disappointing Charlie Brown, he’s disappointing them. Why can’t he just take his therapist’s advice and “snap out of it” already?

More than anything, Charlie brown is disappointed in love. Will he ever be loved by the Little Red-Haired Girl or will he have to settle for a peanut butter sandwich? Luckily, Charlie has an amazing ability to turn the disappointment in his relationship (or lack thereof) into a complete dissatisfaction with himself. One of the best examples of this being when Charlie is so mad at himself for not talking to the Little Red-Haired Girl, telling himself as he walks away “I hate myself for not having enough nerve to talk to her!” and then after a moment, “Well, that isn’t exactly true… I hate myself for a lot of other reasons too…”

That’s what I love about Peanuts. The disappointment is the joke. When you learn that, you learn to laugh at yourself and that is so important for survival.

It’s not just Charlie who has been let down, time and time again. Lucy is also frequently disappointed. If it isn’t with one of her patients, it’s always with her brother. She cannot get him to ditch that blanket. If only she could’ve had a better brother, one with more personality. In one strip, Linus confronts Lucy, asking, “Why should you care if I have any opinions or personality or character?” Lucy responds, “Because if you don’t have any character, it’s a reflection on me!”

Like Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl, Lucy’s love life with Schroeder continues to fall short. Try as she might, she may never convince him to pay more attention to her than to the piano.

Sally, though innocent, is no stranger to disappointment. Her latest field trip was nothing to write home about, literally, and “What’s so much fun about a balloon” anyway? According to Sally, nothing. What a let down.

Along with her brother and Lucy and pretty much the whole cast, love is a disappointment for Sally. Linus, her sweet babboo, still hasn’t asked her out yet. Even when she’s dropped so many hints! And who can forget when she practiced all week for her role in the Christmas play, only to get on stage and recite “HOCKEY STICK!” instead of “hark!”

Sally is not the only one to be let down by the buildup of the holiday. Lucy waits for what seems like forever for Christmas to arrive, counting down the months, the days, the hours, the minutes… only to leave her completely unsatisfied…sigh. Will we ever be happy?

Linus has great resilience for his disappointment in The Great Pumpkin. My favorite example: He starts off writing a letter to express just how disappointed he is that the Great Pumpkin did not show up yet again, noting “If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.” But before he can finish the letter and save some dignity, hope finds its way back in. After writing the Great Pumpkin off for good, Linus adds, “P.S. See you next year.”

That is the thing about disappointment; it cannot exist without expectation. Try as they might, these kids are never going to get rid of expectation. One day, while sitting at the brick wall, Linus shares his worries about his worries, lamenting “I guess it’s wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. / Maybe we should only think about today.” Charlie responds, “No, that’s giving up…/ I’m still hoping that yesterday will get better.”

Hope lives on… and so must disappointment.

Schroeder’s friends will never understand Beethoven. No one will want to listen to Woodstock’s long winded stories. Peppermint Patty will never be appreciated as the great caddy she knows she is and her gal Friday, Marcie, will probably never stop being disappointed in, well, Peppermint Pattie. “Always an embarrassment, sir.”

So it would appear that, according to Schulz, just about anything can and will let you down.

As dark as all of this was for a pre-teen to come to terms with, there was one thing that stood out in the comic, one sigh of relief from the existential crises of childhood and beyond. While everyone’s life was going horribly downhill (Sally signed up for conversational French, not controversial French like she thought), there is this dog. And there was a lot of frustration with this dog because he is too happy and always dancing.

Lucy, honestly, can’t stand it. On more than one occasion she’s yelled at a dancing Snoopy, “With all the trouble in this world, you have no right to be so happy!” It drives Charlie nuts as well. “What makes you think you’re happy?”

By default, dancing then becomes one of the only pure moments of bliss: The rare time when you cannot worry or take yourself too seriously, you simply cannot be upset! Lucy could shout, “Floods, fire and famine! / Doom, defeat and despair!” but dancing saves you from all life’s downers. “Nothing seems to disturb him!”

Dancing can never be a disappointment. It is the savior of sadness.

It is no surprise that the one who dances the most is a dog. As Lucy says, “It’s easy for him to be so happy… he doesn’t have any worries!” The deep irony is the idea that Snoopy is a ball of pure happiness, unaffected by consciousness. That is wildly untrue. Snoopy has so many disappointments of his own. He wishes he were anything but a dog. Why couldn’t he be an alligator or a snake! Or better yet, a World War I fighter pilot?

I particularly love the contrast between Snoopy’s hopes and dreams, which are way out of the realm of possibility, and someone like Lucy, who wants to be a psychiatrist. She could very well become one but Snoopy will always be a dog.

“Yesterday I was a dog… today I’m a dog… / tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog…/ *sigh* / there’s so little hope for advancement!”

Even though his aspirations may be futile, they embody the crises of consciousness we all know too well. There is no satisfaction? Even when Snoopy does try to live out his fantasies, he usually comes to the conclusion that he isn’t suited for the role. Can’t be a hunter because of his “weed-claustrophobia.” Can’t be a giraffe because it’s “too hard on the neck.”

As much as he loves to golf and get some quality time in on the typewriter, all these activities often leave him a little discouraged. He may never be satisfied with life or food — “Needs salt!”– but dancing is one guarantee of a good time. With dancing, Snoopy can be himself! He can let it all go! Sure, he still hasn’t gotten his invite to play in the Masters, but it must be in the mail. Anyway, none of this worldly stuff matters while you’re doing the Charleston!

Though the whole gang likes to act as if they are very annoyed by all of Snoopy’s dancing, the fact of the matter is they are quite jealous. They wish they didn’t have to worry about being alive. Or do they?

One day as Snoopy dances around, Charlie comments, “I sure wish I could be that happy all the time.” Lucy replies, “Not me… / it’s too hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re happy.”

Lucy’s response here might be the most definitive cartoon in defense of my argument. Sure, they could be happy, but they are choosing not to, because it’s much more entertaining to live the emotional rollercoaster of hope and despair. But you do always have the option to dance.

Every once in awhile, they give in to Snoopy’s ways and when they do, they love it. In one strip Schroeder presses a frustrated Lucy, “What in the world do you have to worry about?” Lucy thinks a moment, realizes the answer (nothing), then joins Snoopy dancing with huge smile on her face. And why wouldn’t she love it? Dancing is great! If only they’d let themselves do it more often…

“To dance is to live! / For me, dancing is an emotional outlet… / I feel sorry for people who can’t dance… / If you can’t dance you should at least be able to do a happy hop!”

Snoopy’s words, not mine.

Lucy is usually the one who succumbs to Snoopy’s carefree calypso, “if you can’t lick em, join em!” Though she tries very hard to resist most of the time. One of my favorite dancing cartoons that has really stuck with me has Lucy screaming at Snoopy, “Just because you’re happy today, doesn’t mean you’ll be happy tomorrow!”

Isn’t that the whole reason Snoopy chooses to dance? Who knows what small disaster is on the horizon. Your novel could be rejected, someone might call you “fuzzy face,” or even worse, you could find out there’s a new “No Dogs Allowed” sign at the beach.

What is life but a series of small disasters with a little dancing in between!

They say don’t sweat the small stuff. But for the Peanuts gang, small stuff is all they’ve got and they are sweating. When each day is another question of whether to be disappointed or to dance, the answer is simply which kind of sweat you’re looking for.

Of course there has to be a balance. As much as we’d like to, we can’t always be dancing. And I never meant to suggest there is any problem with being disappointed. It’s good for you. I don’t know who I’d be if I wasn’t always just a little let down. I would probably be a very boring person. Peanuts would be a very boring cartoon. They say comedy is tragedy, plus time. The great comedy (and tragedy) in Peanuts is that every day there is newfound hope, as Linus puts it, they will grow up to be “outrageously happy!” despite all the evidence that points to the contrary. As if total satisfaction were something to be desired. If we were all outrageously happy, I have no idea what we’d talk about. And yet, the idea of happiness… sure sounds nice.

Maybe it’s because I read so much Peanuts as a kid or maybe it’s just who I am, but I find the balancing act between the fountain of hope and the forecast of disappointment to be the essence of life. It seems I wake up every morning cheerfully wondering…

Big or small, I know something will. Charlie knows something will. Linus knows something will. We all know something will. But it’s fun to believe otherwise. It’s fun to believe Lucy won’t pull the football out from under you, even when you know better.

As an adult my hero has shifted from Snoopy to the creator of Snoopy. Through his work, Schulz taught me that in the middle of the mess of day-to-day life, the one thing I (and the Peanuts gang) can rely on for a truly good time, is to dance. Like Lucy, it’s just a matter of whether or not I want to be pulled out of my pity party.

We’ve all got a little Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and ultimately Schulz in us. Sometimes our similarities scare me. When I saw the new Peanuts movie a couple years back, I recognized myself so much in Charlie Brown that I came home in tears. My mother had to put her 25 year old daughter to bed, crying…

 

And… that very well may be true, but, the next day, we had a glass of wine and ended up dancing all night to The Beach Boys and that was great, so I think that’s what Snoopy would call “par for the course.”

* * *

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is a cartoonist, writer and comedian living in Brooklyn. Her cartoons have been in The New Yorker, The New York Times and more. She is currently working on her first graphic memoir, Murder Book. Follow her on Instagram @cartoonsbyhilary.

Excerpted from The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life, available from Library of America on October 22, 2019.

Longreads Editors: Sari Botton and Katie Kosma

Ronan Farrow Depicts a Chilling Cover-up at NBC

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Rebecca Traister reads Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, and realizes that those at NBC who colluded to obstruct Farrow’s ground-breaking reporting on Harvey Weinstein remain in charge.

Source: The Cut
Published: Oct 11, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,670 words)

We All Die In the End, But Our Skin Looks Great: A Reading List

Image by Ben Rose (CC-BY-2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories

I am as superficial and vain as anyone who wants to look hot, fun, and flirty 900% of the time (and who achieves it maybe 20% of the time). But for 35 years of my life, my vanity was missing a piece. Then, sometime in 2016, the internet let me know that I needed to pay more attention to the largest organ in my body. Obsessive attention, in fact. I found it impossible to care that much about my skin, but my vanity did permit a certain amount of heightened interest in my birthday suit. So while I have not yet gone for diamond microdermabrasion, a fruit acid facial, a full-body salt scrub and seaweed wrap, gua sha, cupping, or a ritual beating with branches by a woman of Eastern European extraction, I have considered all of these! But why?

The answer, of course, is so that someone will love me. No one told me, specifically, that I must engage in one or all of these things or else risk a lifetime of loneliness, but the message that skin-care marketing sends is: Do this, or wither in isolation. It is demonstrably true that one can live happily and healthily with wrinkles, blemishes, dry skin, dark spots, light spots, inflammation, and visible pores on one’s epidermis. But digital marketing, that most seductive form of storytelling, got married to social media and found even more insidious ways to invade our brains. Look at enough of those headlines, subject lines, Instagram ads, sponsored tweets, and carefully crafted hashtags and calls to action and you, too, will fall into the abyss.

I had a great deal of fun researching the topic and I made it out without buying any goop from Goop, a website primarily known for selling pussy eggs to white women, which is surely some kind of tiny victory. So enjoy this array of skin-care research, stunt reportage, and opining from around the web.

Read more…