Search Results for: atlantic

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters

Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)

 

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

 

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

Read more…

Tom Junod Remembers Fred Rogers: “You Were a Child Once, Too”

Getty Images

At the Atlantic, Tom Junod recalls his friendship with Fred Rogers 16 years after Fred’s death. Junod and Rogers traded 70 emails around the time Junod’s Esquire profile of Rogers, ‘Can You Say…”Hero”?’ was published in 1998. The author considers the movies made about Rogers’ life, as well as how Fred would have responded to today’s routine mass violence and the growing lack of civility in political discourse.

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

Read the story

‘I Was Trapped Forever In This Present Tense’: Carmen Maria Machado on Surviving Abuse

“At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.” Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, color lithograph by Arthur Rackham, 1907. (Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Hope Reese | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,125 words)

“The nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her memoir In the Dream House. “We see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.” In this new book, which draws attention to the rarely-written issue of abuse in queer relationships, she hopes to provide an antidote to the problem.

In her elegant and piercing story, Machado, whose 2017 collection Her Body And Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award, fits fragmented memories together to tell her own story of abuse (chapters appear as vignettes, with titles such as “The Dream House as Utopia,” or “The Dream House as Diagnosis”).

“The Dream House” — although entirely real — is a bit fantastical, and Machado writes in the second person to turn the lens around. Her partner is, simply, “the woman in the dream house.” And Machado’s use of footnotes from the Motif Index of Folk Literature is uniquely striking. Read more…

Whose Boots on the Ground

military boots against the background of small identical tombstones
Illustration by Homestead Studio

Kiley Bense | Longreads | November 2019 | 14 minutes (3,580 words)

 

What I notice are the boots: two pairs in worn black leather, lined up beneath a bookcase, their heels pressed against the turquoise-painted baseboard. They look as if their owner had stowed them there in one careless motion, after yanking them off his feet. The toes of one pair turn slightly into each other, just kissing, and the others face off-kilter toward the corner of the room.

This room is a shrine made by freezing the contents of a life in time. It belonged to a French soldier, Hubert Rochereau, who was killed during World War I at the age of 22. His parents sealed off his bedroom intact, and when they sold the house the deed included a stipulation that the new owners leave the room untouched for 500 years.

The wallpaper in the room is a pale pink-and-white stripe, the bedspread a fading snowflake-patterned lace. The books have cloth covers and paper labels taped over their spines. There are framed photographs on the shelf, and on the desk sit an iron-wrought key and a tarnished pipe. A tattered soldier’s coat hangs beside the desk, all its brass buttons dulled with age, the blue fabric fraying.

I got stuck on those boots and on this room vibrating with the memory of a man gone more than a century, because here was a memorial for a soldier that didn’t erase him as an individual: a young man with a serious gaze and dark hair.

When we remember our war dead, we often do so en masse. We visit fields where rows of white headstones radiate outward in straight lines, touching the horizon. We pin red poppies to our lapels and stick yellow ribbons to our bumpers, hoping to express our collective grief. We hold a minute of silence, or two, marking thousands of vanished souls with an absence of sound. We leave a wreath at the base of a monument inscribed with so many names that it would be impossible to linger on any one of them, let alone understand and feel the pain that each of their deaths meant to those they left behind.

Last month, at a rally in Minnesota, as he talked about his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, Donald Trump invoked the deaths of service members and his own feelings about meeting their families as they waited to greet the coffins of their loved ones at Dover Air Force Base. He called visits there “a very tough experience.” “We meet them, and we talked to them, and their son or daughter is being flown in from some far away place in a coffin, and these things are just impossible. I don’t know how parents can do it, even […] I see parents make sounds, that were just 20 minutes ago absolutely fine, make sounds, scream and cry like you’ve never seen before,” he said. Trump noted how surprised he was by this display of emotion, how he hadn’t expected it because the mourners seemed “okay” before the caskets arrived. He didn’t mention any of the families or soldiers by name.
Read more…

Carrying Histories of Protest

Joe Raedle / Getty, Algonquin Books

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | excerpt from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir | October 2019 | 11 minutes (3,065 words)

 

Puerto Rico, 1985

Papi and I waited in the town square of Ciales, across from Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the Catholic church. He was quiet, stern-faced, his picked-out Afro shining in the sun, his white polo shirt drenched in sweat. Papi was tall and lean-muscled, with a broad back. He’d grown up boxing and playing basketball, had a thick mustache he groomed every morning in front of the bathroom mirror. Squinting in the sun, one hand tightened around his ring finger, I pulled off Papi’s ring, slipped it onto my thumb. I was six years old and restless: I’d never seen a dead body.

My father’s hero, Puerto Rican poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer, had just died. People had come from all over the island and gathered outside the parish to hear his poetry while his remains were transported from San Juan. Mami and Anthony, my older brother, were lost somewhere in the crowd.

During the drive from Humacao to Ciales, I’d listened from the backseat while Papi told the story: how Corretjer had been raised in a family of independentistas, how he’d spent his entire life fighting for el pueblo, for the working class, for Puerto Rico’s freedom. How he’d been a friend of Pedro Albizu Campos, “El Maestro,” who my father adored, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader who’d spent more than twenty-six years in prison for attempting to overthrow the US government. How he had spent a year in “La Princesa,” the prison where Albizu Campos was tortured with radiation. After his release, Corretjer became one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent activist writers.
Read more…

The Link Between Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Till, Racism, and Climate Change

This is a photo taken of one of the many homes damaged by hurricane Katrina in the lower 9th ward. (Getty Images)

As Mary Heglar remembers the chaos, human suffering, and racist radio coverage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism, discrimination, and climate change are inextricably linked. Read her beautiful essay at Guernica.

The other thing often forgotten, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name “Emmett Till” brought immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sank to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that weighed down his barely pubescent body to make it surrender to the Tallahatchie River.

I remembered the meteorologists explaining how hurricanes start off the coast of Africa and gather strength as they cross the Atlantic, following almost exactly the route of slave ships.

I wondered if Katrina was really a 14-year old boy named Emmett.

I never thought that I’d see the Mississippi my grandfather had known when he was my age, or even the one my mother saw. The Mississippi that brutally murdered a 14-year old boy for a wolf whistle that we now know never happened. But Katrina revealed things that I could never unsee.

I didn’t know it then, but that vision formed the lens I would bring to the climate movement a decade or so later. I can’t help but see the layers of injustice that led to our current situation. The climate crisis is covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically “left out,” but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers. I can’t help but see how those same layers complicate and exacerbate the crisis. Who is saved and who is abandoned. Whose bodies litter the road to the “greater good.”

Like my grandfather, New Orleans became more fragile, more tenuous. I saw the things that made them both—the pressure that made the pearl—in a way that I never had before. They became more beautiful, more precious. And I couldn’t unsee it.

Read the story

I’m 72. So What?

Illustration by Emily Press

Catherine Texier | Longreads | October 2019 | 22 minutes (5,425 words)

“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” — Virginia Woolf

One day, around 20 years ago, towards the end of my marriage, we were walking through Central Park and sat for a moment on a knoll overlooking the lake. I don’t know what we had been talking about but I clearly remember saying: “I don’t see myself growing old in the States.” I was in my late 40s at the time. Perhaps the approach of 50 felt like a milestone, the beginning of “old.” Or perhaps what I meant was that I didn’t see myself growing old with him — which turned out to be the case, since we broke up not long after that.

Perhaps, after almost 20 years in the US, I still saw myself as just passing by — forever a green card holder, resident alien, with one foot on each continent, never really settling down, ready to flee back to France, like these expats from the old European empires who retire home after they’ve put in their time in the colonies.I only had a vague notion of what I meant by “old,” and when I would want to pack up. I figured life would send me signals when the time came.

Since then, I have stayed put — notwithstanding a few half-hearted attempts to cross the Atlantic, looking for international schools for my daughters in Paris when the divorce was final, or briefly putting my New York apartment on the market while fantasizing about quaint seven-story walk-ups near Bastille, when I had a boyfriend who lived in Europe.

Now, as the years pass, I have less and less desire to leave New York, where my roots have pushed down through the cracks of its broken sidewalks, even though, technically, at past 70, I suppose I am truly getting old. But the idea of going back to France would seem alarming, a tolling of a bell of sorts. Of course, staying in New York, the city I fell in love with at 22, might seem like waving a garlic branch in front of the grim reaper, a kind of vade retro satana, a vain attempt to stay forever young, or at least delay the inevitable.
Read more…

A Green New Jail

Felix Mizioznikov/iStock/Getty

Will Meyer | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,738 words)

 

“Seen clearly, nature and landscapes are palimpsests of history and social violence more than they are respites from these things,” observes legal scholar and environmental writer Jedidiah Purdy in his new book This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle For A New Commonwealth. This is an echo from his 2015 book After Nature, in which Purdy recalled the role of early American landscape paintings in a project of “collective self-creation”; these paintings, pioneered by the influential Hudson River School painters during the 1830s, obscured the settler violence inherent to the United States’ colonial project while presenting scenes from the fledgling countryside: the vistas, railroads, and faraway cities that were central to early imaginations of the nation. Not only were these images important to constructing a civic identity, they “yoked ideas of nature to nationalist and imperial projects and to new aesthetic and spiritual claims,” Purdy wrote — that is to say, seeing meant believing. Fusing together notions of landscape, nature, and narrative was critical to the success of the settler project — and remains so today, Purdy argues in This Land. Indeed, this violent visual history pulses through the slim book, which aims to make a case for a Green New Deal — “a commonwealth of shared dignity and mutual care.” Read more…

‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (5,214 words)

 

I first became aware of Cameron Dezen Hammon during a group reading at Powell’s when she filled in for Alexander Chee at the last moment. Lithe and ridiculously hip, her voice as smooth as glass, as soon as she started speaking, I was mesmerized. Cameron read from the first chapter of her book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession in which, as worship leader for an evangelical megachurch, she’s guiding the congregation through the flashy funeral of a young girl. Increasingly conflicted about her role as a woman within the church Cameron writes, “We’re both objects in this space, the eighteen-year-old girl and me, two different kinds of painted dolls. We are lit and arranged and positioned to scaffold the belief that women are to be seen in specific, prescribed ways.”

When I finally got my hands on the galleys several months later, I remained enthralled. Cameron’s prose is lean, whittled, spectacularly exact. Yet her world is achingly alive. At twenty-six, a half-Jewish New Yorker, Cameron is baptized into a charismatic evangelicalism in the frigid waters of Coney Island’s Atlantic Ocean during a lightning storm. Soon she’s speaking in tongues and giving testimony and feeling as if she’s, at last, found family. A gifted and ambitious singer, she falls in love with a fellow musician, Matt, and they settle in Texas where they have a child; together they become more and more immersed in various evangelical churches — even serving as missionaries for several months in Budapest — until Cameron and her magnificent voice move up the ranks to worship pastor. Read more…

Research and Rescue: Saving Species from Ourselves

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Ashley Braun | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (4,191 words)

 

On a crisp December afternoon, I convince my sister’s family to visit an unusual exhibit in the Cincinnati Zoo. Countless holiday lights glow in the surrounding trees as we walk toward a statue roughly the size of a chicken. The sculpture is of a pigeon, and we stand admiring how it gracefully arcs its smooth, bronze neck toward the sky while bending down its saw-toothed tail.

This memory of a bird recalls Martha, the very last passenger pigeon on earth, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in 1914. Most zoo-goers breeze past the sculpture, as if this pigeon were of no more interest than the kind that pecks through garbage. After we approach, my nieces, ages 5 and 11, flank the statue, downhill from a quiet Japanese-style pagoda, the aviary where Martha had spent her final years.
Read more…