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Finding My Father

Illustration by Homestead

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | July 2019 | 41 minutes (7,527 words)

I’ve admired Natassja Schiel since we met at a writer’s workshop on the Oregon Coast nearly three years ago. Her crisp sentences move with warmth and certainty, and her gentle courage with difficult topics pulls a reader in. 

Schiel’s essay “Finding My Father,” is a layered coming of age story about a woman who turns to sex work and creative writing after a difficult upbringing. Opossum, a small literary journal based in Oregon, originally published the piece in November, 2017. According to Schiel, the editorial process was pleasant enough, until the lead editor, John Blanton Edgar, sent her numerous unwanted emails, texts, and calls outside the bounds of their working relationship. She began to hear similar stories from other women writers who’d interacted with him, so Schiel asked for her piece to be removed from Opossum’s site. Edgar complied, then reversed his decision before sending emails claiming responsibility for her career’s success. When Natassja took her story public in May 2019, she heard a resounding chorus of support. Edgar took down the piece the following month. 

Longreads reached out to Edgar. He told us he believed their interactions post-publication were borne of a growing friendship. “I was under the impression that we were friends and that the publisher/writer relationship was in the past. We exchanged many texts and had a small number of phone conversations during the next year or so.” He also expressed regret that Natassja’s experience had been so challenging. “I am sincerely sorry that Natassja feels this way and that I ever made her or anyone else feel uncomfortable.” According to this statement, Edgar shut down publication of Opossum in June. 

Longreads is thrilled to re-publish “Finding My Father.” It is Schiel’s second piece with us—Danielle A. Jackson

* * *

I’d often lean into an older balding man, when I worked as a stripper, grazing his shoulder before bracing myself on the plush leather chair that he lounged in. I’d stand between his legs, undulating my body, my torso inches away, but never touching him, my right breast lingering over his nose. When he exhaled, the tickle of his breath would stiffen my semi-erect nipple even more. “You’re so sexy,” he’d whisper over the loud music, redirecting his gaze to my face. I’d look him in the eyes and think, You’re old enough to be my father. Are you?

I didn’t know my father. I’d never met him. He could have been anyone.

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Searching for The Sundays

Hayley Madden / AP

David Obuchowski | Longreads | July 2019 | 35 minutes (6,336 words)

 

What makes a band your favorite band? Is it the quality of their songs? Is it their politics? Is it because they pioneered a certain sound? An emotional association? I don’t know. Any of those are valid reasons for crowning a band as your favorite.

For most of my life, starting in high school through my 30s, the Smiths were my favorite band. And to be sure, I still love the Smiths. But a few years ago, I came to a simple and somehow comforting realization: My favorite band is the Sundays.

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Pot Luck

Juan Camilo Bernal / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Livia Gershon | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (1,983 words)

Last month, shareholders of Canopy Growth, the world’s biggest cannabis company, agreed to a proposed merger with Acreage Holdings, the largest weed business in the United States. The deal, worth $3.4 billion, will take effect if and when the drug becomes legal at the federal level in the U.S., creating a massive international player in a rapidly expanding, newly legal industry. Meanwhile, as The Intercept reported, Fate Winslow, a homeless black man who sold $20 of weed in 2008, remains in prison on a life sentence, under Louisiana’s three-strikes law. Winslow is confined to a dorm with more than 80 other prisoners, double-bunked with no air conditioning in the heat of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

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An Ocean Away From the Sanctuary of Manhattan, Signs of Peaceful Coexistence

Photo by Jon Tyson, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Candy Schulman | Longreads | July 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I could practically see Morocco from Frigiliana, where I was feasting on tapas in an Andalusian hill town known as a Pueblo Blanco. I was puzzled by the label on a bottle of La Axarca Malagueña, a locally crafted beer. Aligned in one row was a Jewish star, a Christian cross, and a Muslim crescent.

I asked the owner of this tiny restaurant, an expat from the Netherlands who taught kundalini yoga on a nearby beach, to translate the label’s contents.

“Every August we host the Festival de las Tres Culturas, she explained. “We celebrate the coexistence of all three cultures and traditions.” She boasted that Frigiliana’s population of 3,000 swells to 35,000, with food, music, and dancing.

I wondered if Spanish festivals celebrating peaceful coexistence were rooted in guilt for the past, or hope for the future. As a native New Yorker, I strolled through one of the largest melting pots in the world every time I left my apartment. Three cultures and traditions? That was nothing compared to the range of skin colors and mellifluous languages on just one E train subway car from Manhattan to Queens; one-third of the borough’s residents were born outside of the United States, hailing from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, India, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Italy, and other countries.
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The Wind Sometimes Feels in Error

Sectional view of the Earth, showing central fire and volcanoes, 1665. From Mundus Subterraneous by Athanasius Kircher. (Photo by Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Luke O’Neil | an excerpt from Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dystopia | OR Books | forthcoming | 17 minutes (4,698 words)

 

Just outside the gates of the Hofburg Palace the massive baroque seat of power for the Habsburg kings and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and in the shadow of the 13th century cathedral the Michaelerskirche with its elaborate series of subterranean crypts there’s an open air museum in the center of the popular Michaelerplatz. Amidst the tourist bustle and high-end retail shopping and cafes with blankets strewn over chair backs and the omnipresent wall-mounted cigarette vending machines the excavation looks like a narrow scar carved into the earth that opens a window into Vindobona which is a Roman military outpost that is believed to be where Marcus Aurelius died in the year 180.

Aurelius’s Meditations were something like the first self-help book albeit one that set the course for Christianity and Western civilization. In short it was a set of guidelines for being a good man written by himself to himself. Everything happens for a reason he’d say. “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” Sorry but since I’ve been rewatching True Detective season one it’s almost impossible not to hear shit like that in Matthew McConaughey’s voice. Read more…

The First Book

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2019 | 38 minutes (10,294 words)

For me the low point came two months after publication, at a playground a few blocks from my house. I sobbed on the phone with my sister, eking out incomprehensible sentences about my career this, my life expectations that, writing this, the publishing industry that, until finally my sister said, “Maybe you should look for a different job?” and I realized the jig was up — I was doomed to keep doing this ridiculous and often seemingly pointless thing.

A few weeks before this, I’d received my first letters from readers telling me how much they’d loved and needed the book, and I’d had another sister-to-sister phone call — just as wrought with emotion — in which I raved about all the deeper meaning and purpose of this milestone and how it wasn’t about the sales and the metrics but about what mattered blah blah blah. I ping-ponged like this for awhile, alternately aglow and despondent, hopeful and wretched, until finally I just started writing again and got on with it.

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On Keeping a Notebook: A Reading List

“I can feel my brain changing.” Those were the first words I wrote in what would eventually become a continuous journal spanning thousands of pages and dozens of notebooks.

It was the middle of the night, and after I jotted the thought down, I added, “Is it permanent?”

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck, its echo reverberating in my head. We were living in Atlanta then, and our house had one of those oversized master suites, inherited from the previous owner, so once out of bed, I was standing in a small sitting room that adjoined the bedroom. Next to me, a lamp I’d spirited away from my grandfather’s house cast a small glow, easing the insomnia I was experiencing. I kept repeating a phrase to myself, “The rough places made smooth.” I wasn’t sure if it was a biblical quote, or whether I had combined two different sayings (Atlanta is the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had the vague idea that Dr. King had said something to that effect). I only knew I felt relief at committing some of my inner turmoil to paper.

The next night, awake again at 3 a.m., I wrote about what I called “adventures in mind-expansion.” The journaling struck me as unusual. I was a reporter at an NPR station at the time and had been a news journalist for more than a decade. But this was different — akin to the writing I’d done when I was 9 and my teachers predicted I would be a writer.

I can partly chalk it up to something that happened a week later — my son’s birth. When I went into labor and headed off to the hospital that warm July day, I packed a notebook, a practice I’d abandoned years before when my expat days in Italy had concluded. One of the first photos I have with my newborn shows me writing in the maternity ward while nursing him. From there, a notebook became my constant companion. Some days in early motherhood, I couldn’t stop writing. I’d fill notebook pages at different intervals of the day, like an ongoing Twitter thread.

I was preparing for motherhood to change my life; it was the transformation I’d trained my eyes on entirely. But instead a parallel transformation involving writing also emerged.

Writing anchored me through my first year as a working mom. I’d pull off the road to write on my way home from work, or jot a few lines in the daycare parking lot. I found the twister of passing buildings, pedestrians, music on the radio, and the sounds of my son floating up from the backseat inspired me to experience new joys or simply savor old ones from a new vantage point. Sometimes I would even write while leaning the journal against the steering wheel, my eye moving between the page and the road.

Motherhood had reunited me with writing, which once again became my confidant, my forever friend. Another event could have been the trigger — a death, a divorce, a relocation. But either way, the pivotal instrument was a notebook — not a computer, not a tablet, not a phone.

Once I began writing again in earnest, I created computer files to record my ideas at greater length. But I wanted to be writing all the time, and one cannot write on a laptop all the time with a baby. A notebook is the solution. You can always write in a notebook — on a plane, in the car, even while out on a lake in a canoe. It’s almost never a breach of etiquette to pull out a notebook. I now teach, and I’ll often write in my notebook if I’ve arrived early for class. A notebook also never loses power and never has a glitch.

I keep lots of notebooks, but perhaps the most important is the small one I stash in my purse. It’s a baby notebook used for appointments and reminders that doubles as a “bits journal,” to steal a phrase from poet David Kirby, since I use it to record any image, phrase, or event that strikes my fancy and could contribute to a piece of writing later. I look at it obsessively throughout the day, re-reading my to-do list or jotting down ideas for stories, articles, poems, or gifts for my son. A typical day reads something like this:

Follow up on sleep pitch.
1 p.m. haircut.
Add “intimacy junkie” to the Di Lascia translation pitch cover letter.
Pick up birthday cake.
Finish book review for the Kenyon Review.
What about a piece called something like, “In Defense of Sleeplessness?”

On my way out of the house, I instinctively grab this daily notebook since I never know when I will think of lines I want to add to a piece in progress.

What’s more, it has given me a constant vocation that doesn’t allow much time for obsessing about other concerns. I’ll get a new phone if I lose the one I have but if my daily notebook goes missing? I’d lose my mind. In fact, it has such power — and provides such security — that I fear (somewhat ridiculously) for its safety.

I now take a notebook with me on every trip, which is fortuitous because I began writing the piece you’re reading while vacationing on a small, remote island in Vermont. The following longreads explore the joys of keeping a notebook and the art of writing longhand.

1. Are We Different Writers When We Move From Longhand to a Screen? (James Draney, August 2017, Literary Hub)

Like an intellectual historian, James Draney brings us a survey of how different authors and thinkers viewed developments in writing — specifically the instruments we use to write instead of writing longhand. He laments that “alas, the page that once contained the essence of the human voice has given way to a simulation of itself on the digital screen.” A simulation. Oh, that’s good. I feel as though I should call the fire brigade or yell, “Stop the presses!”

Draney cites a wide list of authors, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who viewed the typewriter as something “charged with an unthinkable crime.” Draney writes:

For him, this writing machine was no benign piece of secretarial equipment: it was actually destroying the very essence of the human, click by mechanical click.

Draney weighs the impact of “tapping out a word, perhaps backspacing, deleting, highlighting, copying and pasting,” asking, “how do these mechanical ways of writing change the way we think?”

It’s interesting to note that unlike the other authors or subjects of the links here, Draney is not necessarily pro-longhand. That’s because writing in longhand isn’t a skill he acquired long before learning to type on a computer.

It’s odd to think that writers born today will not have any paper in their archives. It’s even funnier to think that these future writers may never actually learn to write. This was what it was like for me, born in 1990. I learned to write by hand at the very same time I learned to type. But rather than focus on my penmanship, I learned to process words on a machine for which writing, typing and processing were one and the same functions. Before the swirl of the pen, there was the plastic click of the keyboard. Not one continuous movement but thousands of discrete ones: arachnid fingers on a plastic pad.

2. Woke Up This Morning (Louis Menard, December 2007, The New Yorker)

There are many ways to use a notebook: anything from journaling, brainstorming, note-taking, and writing in one’s diary. Louis Menand focuses on that last substratum of notebook use, probably the most common form until recently. He is appropriately skeptical about the average person’s ability to remain faithful to a diary, largely because it requires that one input all thoughts, not just the pretty ones or the ones that sound good. “Most people don’t confess; they repress,” he writes.

“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business.

He adds that if the journal in question doesn’t contain a lot of unimportant drivel (“dross”), it’s not a diary. “It’s something else — a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

3. Mostly True (Sarah Manguso, February 2015, T: The New York Times Style Magazine)

One of the more noted diarists of recent years is writer Sarah Manguso who, unlike Anaïs Nin, didn’t publish her diary but rather published a book about it called Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Manguso kept her diary for several decades. In this article from the New York TimesT Magazine, she tells us about the impetus of her diary and its contents, but perhaps one of the most interesting snippets to my mind is that she does not fetishize the actual container of the diary, which is to say the “little black books” she’s used.

In my late teens, overburdened by an excess of life, I built a storage facility for it: a diary. After I wrote things down I could safely forget them. It was the only relief I ever found, and I kept at it. I don’t keep a routine, but the diary gets written daily — usually several times daily, even in transit, in hospitals and at parties. In little black books and, as of this year, on my phone. Since 1992 I’ve created a new text file on my computer every New Year’s Day. Whatever I have written gets transcribed into the file and I throw the draft away. A little black book is a beautiful object, but I don’t care about the objects; I care only about the words in them.

4. 8 Writing Tips from Jeff Vandemeer (Jeff Vandemeer, March 2018, Chicago Review of Books)

The impetus for this article was a single word buried amid some writing tips from blockbuster science fiction author Jeff Vandemeer. Specifically, the word “luddite.” It appears in a tip about recording bits of inspiration whenever they come to you. He writes:

There is an immediacy to writing it on paper that appeals to me, too. This doesn’t strike me as a luddite thing, but a thing about the human brain.

As a journeyman writer, I gained all kinds of useful info on his writing process and the story behind the huge success of his “Annihilation” series of books from the piece, but the killer line for me is the one about being (or not being, as the case may be) a luddite. He seems almost apologetic about suggesting that the offline, old-school technology world might be all right, too. Which is too bad because his ideas are fantastic.

I carry a pen and a small notebook or loose notecards with me at all times. I also keep them on the nightstand next to the bed. I have pieces of paper in the kitchen, too. Over the past twenty years especially, I have not lost or forgotten a single idea or scene fragment or character observation or bit of dialogue because I have always written it down immediately, no matter what situation I’m in (this includes when I had a day job).

Over time, my subconscious has rewarded me more and more for taking It seriously. If your subconscious brain “knows” you are going to write it all down and use what it gives you, a loop is created where, at times, and depending on other factors, the problem isn’t lack of ideas but having too many ideas.

Like Vandemeer, I feel as though similar accusations are coming my way when I think about how a notebook’s “technology” is actually superior to a phone or computer. I open it and voilà, my dear ones, my notebook is ON. Close it, then open it again, and I’ve “rebooted” it. When I want to transcribe a thought, an idea for a project or the next line of this piece, I want to do it instantaneously and a notebook is the only instrument that can meet that demand (excluding, of course, writing on my hand). If I were Vandemeer and had written multiple best-selling novels, I hope I wouldn’t be shy about saying what to me is obvious.

5. Messy Attics of the Mind: What’s Inside a Writer’s Notebook? (Philip Horne, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt, and Amit Chaudhuri; April 2018; The Guardian)

The way the writers featured in this piece describe their notebooks, I know they are besotted with the practice. They are kindred spirits, and they write beautifully about it. This is especially so with Susie Boyt, who calls her notebooks “messy little attics of the mind.” It’s such a lovely, original description that I almost find it aspirational — do my notebooks really look like messy little attics of the mind? If not, I’ll be working on that today. The expression appears in an extended description of her notebook history:

I have always kept notebooks — messy little attics of the mind, an odd assortment of shapes and colours stuffed into drawers next to defunct phones and balls of string. They feel private and tender, a bit like night clothes; or embarrassing, like over-eager little sisters.

I admire writers who operate their notebooks rigorously, with mathematical co-ordinates of character and plot, in the fashion of the Euston Road School painters, but mine are filled with a jumble of poetry, prose and criticism, lists, plans, with occasional personal anecdotes in which I often emerge the slightee.

6. Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction, No. 72 (Robert Phillips, Fall-Winter 1978; The Paris Review)

OK, so many writers and artists keep notebooks — this we know. But some actually compose their first versions of their work in a notebook. In other words, they write longhand. In this wonderful interview from the Paris Review, prolific author Joyce Carol Oates includes a brief mention about writing longhand and how typing on a typewriter is now “an alien thing.” Arguably I could have just written “Joyce Carol Oates” and any argument about the potential virtues of writing longhand would cease. Joyce Carol Oates does it. Need I say more? It’s especially so since she has written about five dozen books. And she isn’t just using a notebook — she is composing entirely in longhand before ever touching a computer file. (I assume the practice began after Them, her 1969 novel, which won the National Book Award and runs 500 pages, but still).

“Childwold needed to be written in longhand, of course. And now everything finds its initial expression in longhand and the typewriter has become a rather alien thing—a thing of formality and impersonality. My first novels were all written on a typewriter: first draft straight through, then revisions, then final draft. But I can’t do that any longer.

The thought of dictating into a machine doesn’t appeal to me at all. Henry James’s later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it’s transcribed into written prose.

I love the way she says that “now everything finds its initial expression in longhand.” On a par with the way you might have changed your morning routine once you learned about coffee, or the way you might structure your life once you’ve understood the vagaries of unbridled love.

7. Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing By Hand Catalyzes Creativity (Maria Popova, February 2013; Brainpickings)

Mary Gordon, a novelist and memoirist from New York, is a true acolyte of writing longhand. And her essay on the topic, “Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper,” is excerpted generously in this piece from Brainpickings about a book of essays by writers on their writing processes. We learn about Gordon’s writing process, how she reads and listens to music before composing anything herself. We also see her deftly locate the essence of notebook use:

For related reading, here’s a piece from BookRiot on the finer points of writing in pencil.

Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.

8. Why I’m Obsessed With Reading Books About Writing in Notebooks (Josephine Wolff, February 2019; The Washington Post)

There is an adjacent topic to writing in a notebook and that’s the publishing industry sector that’s grown up around the practice (or aspirational practice) of writing in a notebook (this is still America, after all). A delightful look into this phenomenon comes to us here by way of a professor not of writing but of cybersecurity. Here, we find notebook devotees — professional notebookers, you could say — trying to indoctrinate everyone by selling specific types of notebooks.

One reason I’m so transfixed by notebook experts is that their systems bring together free-form, individualized artistic expression and the structured formatting and rigid rules of computer science. This may be key to the appeal of notebooking: In an increasingly algorithmic world, these systems let us crack open the black boxes of our lives, allowing us to develop systems of our own and helping us figure out what matters to us along the way.

Selfishly, I’ll add that for me the best line in the piece is where it becomes clear she is truly as obsessed with notebooks as I am. She writes that at any moment, she keeps “one for daily to-do lists and appointments, one for notes and ideas, [and] one for teaching.” If she added a sleep diary (which I began keeping this year), we’d be about even.

* * *

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator whose work has been published by the New York Times, Catapult, Marketplace, and CNN Travel. She won the 2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for her translation-in-progress of Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in Ombra. She will be a short-term fellow at the New York Public Library in 2020.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Companion Fair?

Getty Images

In 1987, Steven Rothstein bought a pass that allowed him to fly first class on American Airlines for life for $250,000. As his daughter Caroline Rothstein recounts at Narratively, until American unceremoniously cancelled it, the pass not only allowed Steven to see the world, it bought him a place to grieve the death of his only son Josh, protected by the vacant seat he’d buy with his companion fare that provided the space he needed to cry amid the anonymity of the first class cabin.

In September 1987, five months after my brother, Josh, was born, and three months after we moved from downtown Chicago into the north suburbs, Dad bought his unlimited lifetime AAirpass. The cost was $250,000, which the agreement stated was based on his age. My father was 37 years and four days old when he dated the check.

Two years later, which was one year before my younger sister, Natalie, was born, he added a companion feature to his AAirpass, allowing him to bring another person along on any flight. The cost was $150,000, based on his being 39 years old. This changed the game, not only for him, but our entire family.

I understood the weight and privilege as a kid. I understood — we all did — that the AAirpass meant my father could travel and do business in unprecedented ways, and it allowed our entire family to travel in ways few people on earth could. We got the privileges, all of them, all of us.

As I get on the subway, he writes me an email detailing how when he purchased the companion feature “it was 100 percent contemplated that [he] would buy a seat for nobody to keep it empty.” They gave him examples of empty seats for legal documents, an extra carry-on, or even musical instruments.

“The example given to me was that Yo-Yo Ma, with whom I flew more than twice and whom I met in several hotel lobbies, flew with his [cello] in the next seat. Under those terms I bought the extra seat.” He thought it would be Mom, my siblings, me, Uncle Shelly, a business associate, or someone he “met at the airport. Anyone I wanted. Anyone. Documents.”

He goes on, “After they told me not to buy an empty seat they knew that I was in a huge depression in the actual MEDICAL SENSE. IT WAS A SERIOUS DEPRESSION. I was incoherent, crying several times daily, drinking liquor which I never did before and if I got in a seat I didn’t want to explain why I was crying to anyone.” So he wanted it empty. He wanted to be alone, just as had always been his booking practice on many airlines, even well before the AAirpass days. He liked his space. He liked access to bringing extra carry-on bags. He liked some privacy. The airplane was his home. It’s where he lived. It’s where he got to do work, or catch up on sleep, or regenerate. Then, once Josh died, it’s where he grieved. He was at home.

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Bonding with My ‘In-Law’ Over Bikini Wax

Getty Images, Photo Collage by Homestead

Lisa A. Phillips | Longreads | July 2019 | 13 minutes (3,256 words)

My in-law brushes warm wax on my bikini line. This part is soothing, and mildly erotic. Then rip: a stinging, quick pull, taking a section of my pubic hair along with it. I wince. She smiles kindly. Maybe she likes this part the best. If I were her, I would, some small sadistic part of me perking up with every rip.

An aesthetician who works out of her home, she is not my real in-law. An in-law is what, in my small town, you call the parent of the kid your kid is dating. I find out about this bit of slang when I arrive for my bikini wax. She introduces me to her previous client by saying, “We’re in-laws. Have you heard?”

“I have!” the woman chortles. This nascent relationship is hot news. Both kids are 13 and have lived here all their lives. I’m wary of the gossip. But what I’m more worried about is the fact that the house I’m standing in, where my new in-laws and their son live, is, if you have a really, really good arm, a stone’s throw away from ours. All I had to do to get to my appointment — and all the kids have to do to get to each other — is cross a street and a yard.

Just a stone’s throw away. I say this a lot, to underscore my stress as a working mom whose husband travels frequently. I had only recently gotten comfortable with a few latchkey child afternoons. Now the unsupervised couches and beds concerned me more than how many episodes of “The Office” my daughter binged after school. This was not the kind of situation I imagined when, years before, my husband and I chose to live next to a large neighborhood, in hopes that our only child would make friends nearby.

Our daughter, though, was an only child who enjoyed long bouts of solo imaginary play, and that made her particular about friends. Most of the time, the neighbor children didn’t make the cut: The girl who lived closest to us was too moody, the one on the cul-de-sac was a grade younger and thus unacceptable, and so on. Then there was the boy who would become The Boyfriend. For a long time he was like a mythological creature, because we had never seen him. We knew he existed. We had met his parents. But he went to a private school and he was a boy, and the boy part had made him uninteresting. So we didn’t push for what we once called playdates — talk about foreshadowing! — even though it was weird to think that two kids living a stone’s throw away from each other would not recognize each other on the street. This is life in a small town in the Northeast. I’m from one, and I know how surreal community life can be. Privacy, respect for boundaries and the freedom to carefully curate your social life trump mandatory neighborliness.
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Understanding Craig Stecyk

Photos by Susanne Melanie Berry

Joe Donnelly | L.A. Man | Rare Bird Books | April 2018 | 42 minutes (8,454 words)

 

Decades ago, Craig R. Stecyk III tagged the walls near his seedy surf spot at Pacific Ocean Park, then a crumbling pier of abandoned rides and amusement parlors straddling the Venice and Santa Monica border. Among the graffiti were the terms POP and DOGTOWN running horizontally and vertically in a cross, a rat’s head in the skull’s position over crossbones, with the warning, “death to invaders.” At first, these markings were little more -than youthful insolence, meant to stake territorial claim for his band of surfers and skateboarders, many of whom were recently glorified in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. In the ’70s and ’80s, though, through enterprises like Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Surf Shop, Dogtown Skates and Powell Peralta skateboarding company, these images would become among the first widely disseminated skateboarder graphic art; the first icons of a radical, street-savvy youth culture that reflected the attitudes of Stecyk and his Dogtown peers. Meanwhile, in magazines like Skateboarder and Thrasher, Stecyk’s photos and essays about the scofflaw Z-Boys skateboarding team created and spread the Dogtown myth to eager adolescents across the country.

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