Search Results for: essay

You Can’t Escape Everything in the Ivory Tower

Photo by J.B. Hill via Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)

At Tin House, Jaclyn Gilbert explores the emotional legacy her father heaped on her, and how she coped as so many of us do: by turning the pain inward, and writing it on her own body. For her father, Jaclyn is an extension of his failed marriage and a debt to be managed rather than a daughter to be loved — something which she long understood instinctively, and her father found ways to drive home explicitly.

An hour later, when I opened the attachment, I found a copy of my parents’ original divorce agreement from the nineties.  I was eighteen by then, of legal age to change the terms my mother had negotiated when I was six.  If I signed, he would no longer have to contribute toward my or my sister’s college tuitions.

The pain and shock I felt in that moment is still hard to explain.  It wasn’t as simple as the question of money, of refinancing my education.  If it were, I would have signed in a heartbeat.

It was the fact of what I represented to him.  Debt, the object of a war he’d lost to my mother and was still searching to recover through me, his eldest daughter.  It was his plotting over the years—as if every time he’d asked me to ignore his absences during visits, his neglect when he wasted afternoons calling his bookies, his insults—he’d been preparing me for this larger acquiescence.  And yet to voice my anger would be to become my mother incarnate, a barrier to his complete financial freedom.  Signing this document not only meant choosing his story over my mother’s, but it meant doing so at my own expense, denying my autonomy.  The conditionality of his love blurred the document on my computer screen. My body seemed to be spinning into tiny pieces, no longer centered, no longer believing in myself as someone individual, separate, or whole.

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The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Longreads Pick

In this critical essay, Lacy Warner examines the downward turn of actress Dominique Swain’s career, and how the trouble began the moment she grew up.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 16, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,431 words)

James Baldwin and the Lost Giovanni’s Room Screenplay

(Photo by Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

Michael Raeburn was in his early 30s when he first met James Baldwin in 1974, a chance encounter at the London book launch for If Beale Street Could Talk. Raeburn was an aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter, with just one short film on his resume, while Baldwin was a literary giant, an essayist, and a civil rights activist. The connection between the two was instantaneous. “He was an extremely influential figure in my life,” Raeburn says. “We were very strangely connected in an almost psychic way. I knew when he would arrive somewhere—he’d travel to New York City, and I would be aware of when he’d arrive at his house.” Read more…

The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

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Positivity Is Relative, Depending on Which Side of the Fighting You’re On

U.S. Army soldiers from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division in the Amariyah neighborhood of west Baghdad, 2007. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the author of Redeployment, which won the National Book Award in 2014; in Iraq, he was a media officer, reporting on major news stories but also responsive for finding the “Positive News Story of the Day” — something he and the Iraqis saw very differently. In an essay in America, The Jesuit Review, he traces his understanding of America’s and his role in the war through the lens of his waxing and waning (but ultimately waxing) faith.

My understanding not simply of the war but of myself shifted. I was not a fallen creature in a broken world reliant on grace, but a Marine in a successful army that had all the answers. I was justified not by a cross, but by an interpretation of public policy, not by the cruel and barbaric torture and murder of an innocent man, but by politics. If the surge had saved lives, turning a monthly death toll of 1,802 to 554, then the month of January did not just make me right and the antiwar folks who had opposed the policy wrong, it made me morally better than them by exactly 1,248 dead Iraqis.

It did not occur to me that I could be right about public policy and still be a sinner, or wrong about public policy and still be redeemed. And so I set aside the moments of doubt. I set aside the experiences that gave me pause. Like, for example, that moment I stood in that small Iraqi town, the town I thought I knew everything about, stared down a street and heard a voice, my voice, saying: I do not know where I am, or what I am doing or what we are doing, and none of the Marines around me do either.

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The House on Mayo Road

Dougal Waters / Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Dur e Aziz Amna | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,986 words)

The spring I turned 12, I moved to an all-girls school, and my family moved from a tiny two-bedroom in the outskirts of Pindi to a huge house in the heart of the city, 30 minutes from Pakistan’s capital. I remember walking into the vast emptiness of the new house, my shoes leaving imprints on the dusty floor. It was a January afternoon in 2004, and the sun came in through windows we would later find to be full of cracks. The garden sprouted weeds. My two brothers and I ran upstairs, knowing our parents would take the downstairs bedroom by the front door. There were two rooms on the second floor, both with their own bathroom. I told my mother, “Ammi, I’m the eldest, I want the bigger one.” She glared at me and said, “We’ll see.”

As we moved in over the next few months, I understood why Ammi had been in a foul mood. For me and my brothers, the house meant lots of space. It sat a stone’s throw away from GT Road, the historic highway that once ran from Kabul to Chittagong. It had a garden in the front and a yard in the back, large enough for us to set up a badminton net. For Ammi, the move brought months of scrubbing, washing, organizing. “Don’t think they ever cleaned this place, the old bastards,” she said under her breath as she threw a pail of water onto the grimy marble floor, the air alive with the smell of wet dust.

Built in the 1960s and given to senior employees in Pakistan’s civil service, the house was meant for officers who would hire an entourage of help to sweep the cavernous rooms, take cobwebs off the high ceilings, clean the furry grit that collected on the fans, and water the wild jasmine that bloomed every March, turning the living room fragrant. The lady of the house, the begum, often stayed at home to supervise and entertain. My mother had gotten her first teaching job months after I was born, charming the nearby school principal by telling him that Anna Karenina was her favorite book. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” she told me years later. “I never finished the book, but that was its first line.” I turned the sentence over in my head, a bit miffed by Tolstoy. I felt like we were happy in our own way.

In the years to come, Ammi continued teaching English at a school nearby. She would come home later than us most days, then take a nap during which we tiptoed around the house, knowing that even the slightest sound might disturb her. Once, when we went to wake her up, she made us lie down next to her and asked, “Do you wish you had one of those mothers who stayed at home all day and took care of you?” We gave emphatic nos, because we thought Ammi was quite all right.

Soon after we’d moved in, the house splintered into two worlds. There was the world downstairs: that of morning parathas, Quran lessons, and structured TV hours (one hour a day, from 8 to 9 p.m.). Here, we came dressed in our ironed school uniforms: a maroon tunic for me, white shirts and maroon ties for my brothers. Here, we acted like the good kids our parents knew us to be. After guests left from dinner parties, my parents sometimes said, “Did you see their kids? So ill-mannered.” We, on the other hand, sat in a tight three-headed row in the drawing room, speaking when spoken to, taking no more than two kebabs even when offered.

At 9, we were sent to bed, the staircase a portal to the other world. Despite my initial desire to bag rooms, we had all taken to sleeping in the bedroom my brothers shared, its walls a freshly painted blue. My room was sea green, my favorite color, but we were conscientious kids, and my parents said it was wasteful to keep two fans going. For several hours each night, we sprawled around on the bed, sometimes talking but often not. The room always had dozens of library books lying around. In a childhood shaped by discipline, books were one thing we were allowed to be obsessive and unruly about. The librarian at my mother’s school always let us check out 50 books at a time. “Jamila’s kids, such readers,” she’d marvel to her colleagues.
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We Could Fell a Redwood Forest With This Anger

Photo by Richard Sunderland via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

As increasing numbers of Americans walk around brimming with rage, increasing number of Americans need an outlet so the anger doesn’t turn inward. Organizing and activism is productive and takes the edge off, but sometimes, the boiling cauldron of wrath overflows. Megan Stielstra found an unexpected but in retrospect eminently understandable outlet: axe-throwing. She writes about it with great eloquence and clarity for The Believer.

Competitive axe-throwing goes back to lumberjacks in the late 1800s, but its contemporary indoor equivalent was started by a guy in a Viking metal band. He threw parties in his backyard in Toronto with axes and booze, and people showed up via word of mouth until they had an informal league. Scoring was added—each ring around the bullseye holds a different points value—and in 2011 they moved into their first warehouse. Now there are dozens of axe-throwing centers in Canada and across the United States.

Of the two in Chicago, one is twenty minutes west of our apartment. I learned this in September on the day Betsy DeVos rescinded sexual assault protections on college campuses. I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction for twenty years and long ago lost count of the young women and queer and gender nonconforming people who put their hearts on pages and hand those pages to me saying please, please, please don’t tell because they don’t trust the systems that are supposed to protect them. I choke on that word: protection. We shouldn’t need protection. We should be able to walk into the classroom or dorm or boardroom or bar or park or grocery store or anywhere without needing a bodyguard or a wing person or a knife in our goddamn pocket and while the protections under the Department of Education weren’t perfect, they were something, a start, a way of saying we see you and you matter and we’re trying.

My husband found me crying in the bathroom and asked how he could help.

Vote. Donate. Teach our son to dismantle the white cis hetero patriarchy.

“I would like to throw axes,” I said.

We got a babysitter.

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Consider Who Can Afford the Oyster

You may know Ruby Tandoh as the runner-up from season 4 of The Great British Bake Off; you may not know that she’s a thoughtful writer working hard to stretch the boundaries of what “food writing” means. In Vice UK, she uses the life of ur-food writer M.F.K. Fisher — whose Consider the Oyster is about to be republished — as fertile ground for an exploration of the limits and potential of food writing.

The boundaries of food writing are hard to trace, but what is clear is that in spite of the soaring popularity of the food memoir and its ilk, little editorial time and space is being given to topics that sit in more overtly political territories. The Guardian‘s Feast magazine, and many other national food supplements, are rich with imagery, whimsy, and culinary flights of fancy, but largely apolitical. Famine, urban food deserts, food legislation, and the workplace rights of restaurant employees lie outside of the remit of much contemporary food writing, shoved sideways instead into environmental or political journalism and often taken off the plate entirely…

“Pearls,” Fisher explains, “grow slowly, secretly, gleaming ‘worm-coffins’ built in what may be pain around the bodies that have crept inside the shells.” Just as the parasite, the wound and the body converge in the milky stillness of a pearl, food writing must allow itself to crystallise around points of tenderness. Moving away from the assertive “you are what you eat,” we can venture into a more uncertain, questioning space: Why do you eat what you eat? Who has the freedom to eat for pleasure, and who does not? Why does food matter at all? We start, but do not finish, with the Fisher-esque culinary selfie. The gastronomical “me” is no longer a monolith but an anchor point: a place in time, space, family, and culture from which we might turn our lens outwards to explore issues of hunger as well as comfort, suffering as well as joy.

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Falling for my Booty Call

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 12, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,867 words)

Falling for My Booty Call

Illustration by Cat Finnie

Sarah Kasbeer | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,867 words)

 

His brown eyes trailed over my body in an exaggerated way. If it had occurred at work, it could have been considered sexual harassment. But at the bar, and uninhibited, I felt the rush of being seen.

At 22, I was lonely and working in a restaurant. Nic was a server I had a crush on who’d hardly ever spoken to me until we bumped into each other on a random night off. He walked into a Chicago dive bar where I happened to be getting drunk with a friend. I approached him from behind to order myself another round.

“Corona — with a lemon,” I said to the bartender. Somehow I’d gotten the impression that this was the sophisticated European way to drink cheap beer. I left a dollar and change on the bar before forcing my lemon wedge into the bottle, ready to make my move.

“Hi Nic,” I said to the half-moon formed by the adjustable snaps on the back of his hat. The half-moon turned. Nic set his Heineken down before slowly looking me up and down. He seemed to still be processing my identity.

Perhaps it was my off-duty attire that threw him. During shifts behind the restaurant bar, I was forced to wear black button-up shirts and dress pants, my shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. That evening, I had donned a dive-bar appropriate denim and pink tank top combo. My long bangs were swept to one side, my light hair down.

“Sa-rah,” he finally answered, his mouth widening into a smile. The slow, deliberate way he lingered over both syllables of my name made it seem as if he knew something about me that I didn’t, or at least not yet.

Instead of being offended by the once-over, I was awash in a familiar response: pleasure mixed with shame. Sexual objectification can trigger conflicting impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to be treated with respect. On the other hand, I wanted to be wanted. Getting laid was the easiest way to prove my desirability, even if the feeling only lasted a few fleeting hours.

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