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Regarding the Interpretation of Others

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Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

Communiqué from an Exurban Satellite Clinic of a Cancer Pavilion Named after a Financier

Mannequins modeling a wig and a cooling accessory to be worn under a wig by someone undergoing chemotherapy. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Anne Boyer | an excerpt adapted from The Undying| Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,665 words)

 

Pull your hair out by the handfuls in socially distressing locations: Sephora, family court, Bank of America, in whatever location where you do your paid work, while in conversation with the landlord, at Leavenworth prison, however in the gaze of men. Negotiate for what you need because you will need it now more than ever. If these negotiations fail, yank your hair out of your head in front of who would deny you, leave clumps of your hair in the woods, on the prairies, in QuikTrip parking lots, in front of every bar at which your conventionally feminine appearance earned you and your friends pitchers of domestic beer.

Put your head out the window of the car and let the wind blow the hair off your head. Let your friends harvest locks of your hair to give to other friends to leave in socially distressing locations: to scatter at ports, at national monuments, inside the architecture built to make ordinary people feel small and stupid, to throw against harassers on the streets.

Pull your pubic hair out in clumps from the root and send it in unmarked envelopes to technocrats. Leave your armpit hair at the Superfund site you once lived near, your nose hairs for any human resources officer who denies you leave. Read more…

Tramp Like Us

Photo by Alia Smith, courtesy of the author / Little, Brown and Company

Dan Kois | excerpted from How to Be a Family | Little, Brown and Company | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,373 words)

 

“Is there a way I could chaperone,” I asked my daughter’s teacher, “that doesn’t include snorkeling in freezing-cold water?”

We were in New Zealand to learn how the lives of Kiwi families differed from our own east coast suburban bubble. One way, it turned out, was that my 9-year-old was taking a school field trip to snorkel in the little bay by our house in Wellington. It was an example of EOTC, education outside the classroom, a crucial part of Kiwi schooling, ranging from day trips like this to secondary-school tramps across the Tongoriro Alpine Crossing.

When I’d volunteered to chaperone, I hadn’t known that chaperones were expected to bring their own wet suits in order to get in the water with the kids. Now, I like snorkeling, but the very idea of owning my own wet suit was patently absurd. So that’s why I asked if there was some other way I could help.

“On the snorkeling trip?” she replied dubiously. “Errr . . . we do need a few people to stand at the shore keeping an eye on everyone. Perhaps you could do that?”
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What’s Happening to My Body?

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Devorah Heitner | Longreads | September 2019 | 15 minutes (3,869 words)

My mother always said she had thunder thighs. On one visit home, I found a picture of little Cindy at about age 10, long before she was my mother. In the picture, her thighs, solid like mine, are turned outward, in first position. I studied the picture, noting how the blue costume cast a pallor on her pale skin. Her arms made an oval above her head. Her brown eyes looked big and nervous. She was not smiling. Maybe all the girls took ballet in the ’50s, in Little Neck, Long Island. The picture doesn’t give the impression that she was begging to do this.

The huge breasts that would later try to kill her hadn’t emerged yet. Just a small rise underneath her leotard. Holding the photo made me recall the sensation of my own breasts budding, stretching me from the inside, my nipples constantly sore, and rubbing, and wrong.
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‘To Be Polite By Ignoring the Obvious’: Jess Row on Unpacking Whiteness in Literature

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,662 words)

Despite the recurring cycle of conversations on topics such as the need for fully-funded MFA programs, the financial challenges of sustaining oneself as a writer, and the lack of diversity in all levels of media, the issue of whiteness in publishing — and the privileges that come with being white in publishing — continues to justify our scrutiny. We are aware that white people hold much of the power in the literary world, but how do we assess this fact critically, understanding that whiteness is not just a factor in the economics of writing, but in the writing itself? Novelist Jess Row investigates this question in his latest book, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. In his own words, “American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress.” Read more…

My Love Affair with Chairs

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Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…

Hot for Teacher

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Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)

What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.

More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.

More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.

Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.

Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.

More than anything, she wanted a baby.

More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.

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The Myth of Making It

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  7 minutes (1,849 words)

I think maybe I thought I made it a couple of times. Both of them had to do with jobs. Both were fleeting feelings — very much tied to age and stage of life — and I’ve never felt the same way again. I don’t know what “making it” would even look like now: maybe having enough money to buy a house (see: acquire an “asset”) and not be immediately broke? I’d probably still feel dissatisfied because I didn’t write some book or win some award or, like, live around enough trees. That lack of internal contentment, I think, is the problem. It’s what makes grasping at outside validation so fruitless. An already mythical idea, “making it” becomes ever more elusive when measured externally — by accolades, wealth, any sort of acquisition. It becomes as fungible as those things are, whether according to your own circumstances or to the world’s. You’re either competing with yourself to outdo what you’ve already achieved, or you’re competing with someone else for a bigger share of some pie (and there’s always someone else). Or maybe you aren’t consciously competing with anyone; you just have this kind of profound insecurity that follows you from triumph to triumph, serving only the market you buy into, in order to stave it off, but no one else.

Take Tyshawn Jones, who’s only 20 and has already been named Skater of the Year by Thrasher magazine, but who can’t stop talking about what he doesn’t have. Or actress Kirsten Dunst, who’s been nominated for award after award, but still feels uncelebrated. Or Bill Hader, whom The New York Times Magazine recently confronted about his show’s success. (It received 17 — 17! — Emmys nods.) The Barry creator conceded the win, but also acknowledged the difference between external praise and the way he berates himself internally. “It never ends,” he explained. “That’s the thing.” That’s the thing with making it, it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Because implicit in the promise that you’ll succeed is the assurance that you never will. 

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If the god in On Becoming a God in Central Florida is ambition, then the devil is an alligator. In the first episode of the Showtime series, which takes place in a 1992 that looks like 1982, a sweaty, mulleted version of Alexander Skarsgård named Travis Stubbs gets pulled into a pyramid scheme that obsesses him to such a degree that he can’t sleep. Starved of rest, he hallucinates a glowing white moose in the middle of the road (idk) and crashes into a swamp, where he is promptly consumed by a gator. Before his soul is claimed, his wife, Krystal (a big-haired, heavily lacquered Kirsten Dunst), balks at the millionaire idols he flashes in front of her face, accusing him of buying into a fantasy. In their wood-paneled bungalow, their newborn asleep, Krystal motions to their surroundings and says, “I know this is inconceivable to you, but this is more than I ever expected.” As irony would have it, the show arrived around the same time as an interview in which Dunst expressed dissatisfaction with a career that her character would likely be barely able to conceive of. In the viral clip taken from her appearance on SiriusXM’s In Depth with Larry Flick, Dunst confessed she had never felt empowered in her three decades of acting. “I’ve never been recognized in my industry. I’ve never been nominated for anything,” she said, adding, “I just feel like, ‘What did I do?’” As if to prove her point, Reuters tweeted and then deleted a post about her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, describing her as “best known for her role as Spiderman’s girlfriend.”

The truth is that Dunst has been recognized. She’s been nominated for multiple Golden Globes (the first at age 11!), for Cannes Best Actress, for an Emmy. She just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for god’s sake. “I know that all you have is your work at the end of the day and that’s all people really are about,” Dunst told Flick. “I’m, you know, intelligent enough to know that and have perspective.” But she’s worked for three decades and what does she have to show for it — $25 million and a few award nods? Equivalent actress — this isn’t a science, but bear with me — Anne Hathaway is seven months younger, has worked 10 years fewer and has an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy. Oh, and apparently she’s worth $35 million. As Dunst said, “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Mmm. It’d be nice to be recognized by your peers.’ You know what I mean?”

Yes, I fucking do know what you mean. Because I am you, but much much poorer and much much less famous. In her SiriusXM interview, Dunst wondered whether she played the game enough, but then admitted she always does what she’s supposed to. “It’s not like I’m rude or, like, not doing publicity or anything,” she said. Her frank bewilderment was achingly familiar. I have had the same conversations over and over and over again. I do good work, I show up, I promote. But I never get awards. When a stranger says they know my writing, I am genuinely shocked. From where I’m sitting, Dunst has made it. But then: Hathaway. In North America, wherever you’re sitting, you’re always aware that someone else is doing better. 

The cliché is that money can’t buy you happiness, but it’s increasingly obvious that what can help make you happy is not knowing how much more everyone else has and not storing your value in your savings account. This year’s World Happiness Report named Finland the most contented country on the planet despite it trailing both Canada and the U.S. in gross domestic product. The highest-ranking countries had not only healthy incomes but also robust social support systems, freedom, and generosity, none of which have much to do with making you feel accomplished but are rather about making you feel as worthy as everyone else. In Scientific American, Finnish well-being expert Frank Martela explained Finland’s position in the context of human beings’ impulse to compare. “If everybody else is doing better than you, it is hard to be satisfied with your life conditions, no matter how good they objectively are,” he wrote. “By not displaying, let alone exaggerating, their own happiness, Finns might help each other to make more realistic comparisons, which benefits everybody’s happiness.” 

The American Dream, that anyone can work hard and ultimately come out on top, is like an anti-happiness plan: A good life is not measured by social support or freedom or empathy, but by material gain. Showing off your wealth shows off your success, which shows off your value as a human being. This goes double for artists, whose livelihoods are that much harder to secure. Triple for marginalized communities, who have to work that much harder than everyone else. While all of this striving is a boon for capitalism, it’s a disaster for the people living under it.

I don’t want to add patriarchy to this whole thing, but why not. It’s the part that genders success so that Dunst complains about recognition, while men complain about money. It makes sense if you think about what guys are traditionally supposed to be: powerful breadwinners. This is where Tyshawn Jones lives. In a sprawling profile this weekend, The New York Times Magazine called him New York’s first skateboarding superstar. But even though this kid barely out of his teens has claimed the highest honor in his field — Thrasher’s cover and Skater of the Year Award — won a sponsorship deal with Supreme, cofounded a hardware and apparel company, opened a restaurant, and even designed his own shoe, none of it is enough. He doesn’t have a Vogue cover, for one thing. That’s power. And he doesn’t have Nyjah Huston money. “Everybody don’t like him, but I respect him,” Jones said. “He one of the only niggas who really got rich off skating, like really rich, like $2 million crib, like Lamborghini — I think that’s tight. There’s skaters who can’t even get by with $500 a month.” There’s a big gap between $6 million (Huston’s reported net worth) and $6,000, but Jones isn’t comparing down, he’s comparing up. That’s what successful people do. 

So it’s either about recognition or it’s about money, money or recognition. But both come second to the end goal of making it, the Platonic ideal of the Valuable Citizen. Self-actualization, community, autonomy … those things are nice, but they aren’t particularly profitable for a capitalist society. Material is. And measuring success materially keeps success perennially elusive because the standard of comparison is always shifting under your feet. This insecurity keeps the gears of patriarchal capitalism turning as we stumble over one another to feed them and ourselves. The market exploits and perpetuates the constant feeling that we’re not good enough, or, in Jones’s case, not secure enough, by convincing us it has the answer. Every payday or product whispers to us that we’re that much closer to making it — whatever it is — without ever actually allowing us to get there.

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“Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face / My feelings can’t describe it / Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face / And I just cannot hide it.” The 1992 CeCe Peniston song “Finally” is about love, but in On Finding God it’s about making it. The dance hit blasts right after Krystal decides to take over her husband’s dream, the one that turned him into gator food. The animal now lies skinned in her garage, but what might have acted as an exorcism has instead resulted in transference. If the alligator was the devil claiming Krystal’s husband’s acquisitive soul, Krystal now appears to have inherited it. But this time around she’s not the one being sacrificed; she’s all in on the scheme, and everyone around her serves as the oblation. 

This is success in America now, where the closer we get to whatever its manifestation is — whether it’s wealth or acknowledgment or something else — the further we get from our humanity. The only way to get out of it is to fundamentally understand that making it is a myth. Rather than making a pact with the devil, which is to say, buying into validation we know will never be enough, we have to reject the premise of the pact. Bill Hader, as insecure as any of us, chooses to coexist with his self doubt. While this may be disappointingly human to some, his is not a fantasy life based on comparison — it’s him at his most honest. As renowned dancer Martha Graham famously observed, it is here that an artist’s magic resides: “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Migrant in the Mirror

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 8 minutes (1,940 words)

In Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator, called Little Dog, describes the moment that he comes out to his mother. It is a gray Sunday morning inside of a Dunkin’ Donuts; he is 17 years old and in love with a boy named Trevor. After relaying some of the conversation exchanged between him and his mother, Little Dog’s narrative moves backward and forward in time, presenting the history of his queer sexuality. There was a little boy in the sixth grade named Gramoz; he and his family were immigrants just like Little Dog’s family. Little Dog followed Gramoz around, wanting to become his shadow. Years later, a college professor will use Othello to argue that gay men are narcissistic, and Little Dog will think back to his love for Gramoz:

“Could it be…I followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself?…Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty…but to make sure…we are still here. That the hunted boy we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.”

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‘I’m Incredulous That People Do This Repeatedly. The Second Book Thing Is So Real.’

Panic Attack / iStock / Getty, and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Zan Romanoff  | Longreads | September 2019 | 15 minutes (4,099 words)

 

Mary H.K. Choi has been writing on the internet basically forever, covering everything from music to fashion to the best in snacks for publications like The New York Times, Vice and GQ. So it should be no surprise that her writing about the internet is so good: thoughtful and funny, antic and empathetic, and deeply and consistently searching.

Her debut novel, 2018’s Emergency Contact, traces a relationship that develops over text message between a hipster coffee shop barista, Sam, and hyper-anxious college freshman named Penny; it’s a refreshingly chilled out look at the way the digital can actually help create intimacy, instead of just impeding it.

Choi’s follow up, Permanent Record, is oriented in the opposite direction: it looks out at the selves social media allow us to project into the world. When pop star Leanna Smart stumbles into the bodega where college dropout Pablo Neruda Rind works, they hit it off instantly. Leanna — or Lee, as Pablo calls her — makes Pab’s life exciting, but hanging out with her also allows him to avoid the very unglamorous problems — debt, stasis, and uncertainty — that will be familiar to anyone who’s lived through their twenties in the twenty-first century. Read more…