Search Results for: essay

A Woman’s Work: Home Economics* (*I Took Woodworking Instead)

Longreads Pick

An illustrated personal essay in which New Yorker cartoonist Carolita Johnson tallies the costs and benefits of love and cohabitation as a woman artist living in a patriarchy.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 20, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,600 words)

The Dangerous Beauty of Russian

A Russian stamp from 1992 showing children's book character Cipollino, a little onion who fights the unjust treatment of the his vegetable friends and neighbors at the hands of the upper-class -- Prince Lemon and Lord Tomato.

Keith Gessen‘s parents left the Soviet Union when he was six, young enough that he speaks unaccented English but old enough that he still knows Russian — which he’s now teaching his son Raffi. In a lovely essay in The New Yorker, he reflects on bilingualism, child development, and why he’s teaching Raffi the language of a country he won’t even take him to visit.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them. One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad, in 1941, for expressing “seditious” sentiments and died, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital the following year; the great Soviet bard Alexander Galich would eventually call the song about the man in the forest “prophetic” and write his own song, embedding the forest lyrics into a story of the Gulag. Raffi really liked the Kharms song; when he got a little older, he would request it and then dance.

It’s difficult to encourage bilingualism when life is lived overwhelmingly in English, but eventually, the songs and stories and conversations begin to pay off — but to what end?

Raffi hummed the Nautilus Pompilus song on the way home. A few days later I heard him singing it to himself as he played with some Legos.

Ya hochu byt’ s toboy
Ya hochu byt’ s toboy
Ya hochu byt’ s toboy

And a few days after that, he said his first Russian sentence. “Ya gippopotam,” he said. I am a hippopotamus.

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. What had I done? How could I not have done it? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that eventually he will.

Read the essay

Trying to Kill the Want

Philip Toscano/PA Wire

Kristi Coulter | Nothing Good Can Come From This | MCD x FSG | August 2018 | 15 minutes (3,080 words)

I had just left Babeland and was heading to my car when I spotted the otter I thought might get me sober. He was in the window of the craft shop next door, waiting to be felted into being and then hung on a Christmas tree or something. I didn’t know what felting was, or even that it could be a verb. I assumed that felt, like most things, sprang from Zeus’s forehead in precut rectangles, ready to rock. Apparently not. I stood on the sidewalk, looking at the otter and contemplating all the things I could learn if I got my head right, before going inside.

I had a hopeful, sheepish relationship to crafting stores. I saw them as temples to utility and skill and the concept of having an interest in something besides drinking and worrying about drinking. Twice a year I would drop mounds of cash on yarn for scarves I imagined donating to homeless shelters, or embroidery thread for tooth fairy pillowcases I would donate to children’s hospitals. My crafting plans were always large-scale and philanthropic, partly to compensate the world for the wake caused by my existence but also because I needed a project. Some neophyte knitters might think that one scarf is a project. But then their goal is probably to make a scarf. My goal was to no longer want to drink a bottle of wine every night, and that would take more yarn. So I would set myself up with the needles and the patterns and the diagrams and spend about twenty minutes in earnest learning mode before realizing it wasn’t working. I was in fact not absorbed in my craft, and my nerves were not calmed the way other knitters claimed theirs were, and I still wanted to have that glass of Viognier that would become four. And all my new supplies would go into the linen closet among the sheets and beach towels, to the shelf reserved for optimistic variations of myself that rarely surfaced. Read more…

The Cold War and its Fallout

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 15, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,418 words)

The Cold War and its Fallout

Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Vincent Czyz | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,418 words)

 

I was born into Cold War America, 1963: Brezhnev, the Kremlin, the KGB, ICBMs, the Warsaw Pact. My father was a hard-line Republican, a Rough Rider looking for his Roosevelt. Reentry vehicles, NATO, first-strike capability, limited strike, and hardened silos were all part of my vocabulary by the time I was 12. He dismissed with contempt liberals who wanted to cut the defense budget and showed me bar graphs comparing U.S. and Soviet military hardware. The red bars representing Soviet numbers always towered alarmingly over the blue ones, except when it came to helicopters; the United States had a lot of those.

The stalemate between the superpowers has been over for a long time, but every now and then I still catch some of the fallout. While making a furniture run, for example, with a friend — Danny had mothballed a bedroom set at his mother’s house and needed a hand getting it into his truck. We went to the front porch in jeans, construction boots, jackets. It was a chilly March afternoon. He rang the bell.

Danny’s mother, a small Korean woman, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me, then covered her mouth. I almost stepped back, wondering what I’d done wrong.

Mrs. Lo Cascio lowered her hands. “You look just like your father!”

From his early 20s on, my father had had a mustache, and this was the first time Mrs. Lo Cascio had seen me with a beard. Her reaction was a rerun of an incident at my father’s wake in June 1983, a couple of weeks before I turned 20. Uncle Eddy, an adopted member of the family, put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re the ghost of your father when he was 17.” As often happens at funerals, his face performed a high-wire act between smiling and crying.

Read more…

Series Exhumes Out-of-Print Books by Black Authors

A row of vintage worn books

Since last January, author Michael A. Gonzales has been writing a monthly column for Catapult called “The Blacklist,” in which he rescues out-of-print texts by black authors from obscurity. Gonzales so far has uncovered little-known works of satire, crime fiction, and urban realism from the middle to the end of the 20th century. In each installment, he interviews those close to the work — usually editors, friends, or the authors themselves if they’re still living — for insight into the book’s creation.

The second piece in the series was on Henry Dumas, author of several collections of poems and short stories, as well as the posthumously published novel, Jonoah and the Green Stone. Dumas was killed by a police officer in a New York City subway station in 1968 at age 33.  The novel was acquired by Toni Morrison for Random House while she was an editor there. With a detailed, painterly touch, Gonzales brings color and drama to the story he tells about the book and the atmosphere that nurtured it into being:

It was poet and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe who introduced his friend Toni Morrison to both Dumas’ work and Redmond. Having moved to New York City in 1971 to teach, Troupe was already a well-known poet and essayist on the West Coast. “I didn’t know Dumas personally, but I loved his literary voice,” Troupe said from his home in Harlem. “His voice was different from the other young poets; it was elegant, but also as haunting as voodoo. I gave Toni the two books (Poetry for My People and Ark of Bones) published by Southern Illinois University and she freaked out. She loved them and wanted to publish them at Random House.”

In a 1975 review, the New Yorker called the prose in Ark of Bones a “collection of extraordinary short stories,” while also declaring that “Dumas was that rarity—a passionately political man with a poet’s eye and ear and tolerance of ambiguity . . . one of the saddest things about his book is that it leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that there were even better books to come.”

On the night of his murder, Dumas, who in photos was a lean, goateed man, had just left a rehearsal with jazz futurist Sun Ra and his Space Arkestra, and was headed downtown, perhaps to hear more way-out musical sounds at the Vanguard or Slugs. Although he also loved gospel and the blues, it was at Slugs where Dumas and Sun Ra met in 1966. “Everybody should try to be what they are,” Sun Ra told the young scribe, whose tapes of the interview were released posthumously as The Ark and the Ankh in 2001. According to the Redmond-penned liner notes, “The two men were very close and Sun Ra waxed alternatively angry and depressed when he received news of his protégé’s death.”

In the latest installment, Gonzales highlights Rhode Island Reda detective novel written by Charlotte Carter. She was a Chicago-born poet who’d been inspired to write crime fiction, in part, by the work of Chester Himes. While introducing us to Carter’s novels, Gonzales also draws a lineage of black crime fiction.

According to Paula L. Woods’ seminal collection of Black crime fiction Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes, the first published Negro mystery story ever published was “Talma Gordon” by Pauline E. Hopkins in 1900 in Colored American Magazine. Still, it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Black women began contributing to the genre en masse with novels by Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Grace F. Edwards lining the bookstore shelves.

Nevertheless, it was [Charlotte] Carter’s jazz-loving, sexually liberated protagonist that resonated with me from the moment I’d bought the book at the now-closed Shakespeare and Company bookstore on Lower Broadway. “A terrific novel, from those witty, subversive opening sentences, to the edgy, melancholy and very satisfying ending,” read Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson’s blurb on the book. Tracing [protagonist] Nanette’s origins, Carter says, “I was with a man (Frank King) who I subsequently married actually, and he was writing crime fiction. One day we were on 6th Avenue in the 20s, in what used to be known as the Flower District, and we saw a young woman playing saxophone with a hat in front of her to collect tips. When we got home, Frank said, ‘You should do a book about a female saxophonist. It would be kinda funny, but you like mysteries so much, why don’t you do that?’ And, that’s how it started; I never would have done it without him.”

The Blacklist goes a long way towards highlighting the complexity and variety of literary art by people of color. This kind of excavation work often goes unnoticed and unheralded — it is in the vein of Walker’s headstone for Hurston, Nina Collins’ rescue of her mother, Kathleen’s short stories, Brigid Hughes’ recovery of the work of Bette Howland. It’s an exciting series to follow, and I anticipate that some of the work highlighted will make its way back to the marketplace.

Read the series

 

A Woman’s Search for Salvation, Love, and Family

Women reading the Holy Bible., reading a book.,reading

In a vivid personal essay for Kweli Journal, author Jodi M. Savage writes about growing up in New York City with her Pentecostal evangelist grandmother. The church gives their family a community to belong to and allows the narrator’s grandmother to build a life of leadership and influence.  But it could also be stifling and punishing for the women of its congregation. The author figures out how to honor her grandmother’s memory while bearing witness to the church’s limitations.

Granny raised me on mustard greens, hot water cornbread, and a super-sized portion of Jesus. Although I mastered the Rubik’s cube of rules for sanctified living, religion robbed me of my voice and left shame in its place. You could say that it all started with my teenage neighbor Bobby.

When I was a kid, I let Bobby paint my fingernails red. I knew it was a sin by Pentecostal standards, but my nails looked so pretty and shiny in the sunlight. A few days later, our street had our annual block party. Everyone had moved their cars off our Brooklyn street that morning; one end was blocked off with a Cutlass Supreme and the other with a Nissan Maxima. We played in the street all day until late into the night—volleyball, tag, double Dutch, hide-and-seek. Folks played spades and dominoes on the sidewalks; roamed from yard to yard sampling each other’s food; and blasted reggae, reggaeton, old school R&B, and hip hop from speakers all at the same time.

As I played across the street from my house, Bobby barreled into me on his bike. His front wheel and handlebars collided with my groin and stomach, sending me flying several feet away. I limped home to tell Granny what happened. She suddenly noticed my red fingernails for the first time. Again, we were Pentecostal, which meant we weren’t allowed to wear fingernail polish. Anything red was considered to be a special kind of sinful—carnality of the whorish variety. Instead of consoling me, Granny whipped me with an extension cord. That was the day I learned that one’s own pain is secondary to religious dogma. I learned to keep quiet when people hurt me, or else risk punishment for revealing something far worse—something sinful.

Read the story

Wrestling With My Father

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 11, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,488 words)

TPS Reports All Day Long

Simon & Schuster

Existentialists with agita, rejoice. We now have an anthropologist’s confirmation that what we do means nothing. At the New YorkerNathan Heller writes about David Greaber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a book that examines our current work economy and how we attribute meaning to our lives with possibly (probably?) meaningless tasks.

[Bullshit] jobs are endemic even to creative industries. Content curators, creatives—these and other intermediary non-roles crop up in everything from journalism to art. Hollywood is notoriously mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be almost pure bullshit.

In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard Keynes projected that, a century on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be so great, and prosperity so assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy from leisure and boredom. Maybe, Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a day, just to feel useful.

Is it possible that bullshit jobs are useful? In Graeber’s view, they simply reinforce their premises. “We have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—‘a life,’” he writes. 

Read the story

Wrestling With My Father

CSA-Archive/Getty

Brian Gresko | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

 

1.

When I was a child, it seemed my dad only touched to hurt. Hugs were scarce, and cuddles not an option for “big boys.”

My family ate dinner early, and when I was about 8 and my brother 4, we would beg Dad to wrestle after we cleared our plates. Most evenings he said no, choosing instead to do push-ups and sit-ups or, more often than not, watch the news. But occasionally, according to some calendar our childish minds couldn’t fathom, he agreed, and we’d take up position in the living room.

In our corner at the foot of the steps, my brother and I would huddle, ready to rush him. This was our only move. Swarm, then clasp our tiny bodies to his great one, hoping to drag him to the ground with our weight. A kind of violent embrace.

My dad, on his knees in sweats, gigantic mitts at his side, had a variety of assaults, which he would announce with monstrous growls.

The Scissors! Lying on his side with me between his thighs, he squeezed downward, crushing me in the middle. I was sure my insides were going to come out of my mouth or into my pants. My mom, dishes done, passing us on her way up the stairs, would chastise him. “You’re going to give them hernias!”

The Claw! With fingers splayed, he grabbed my chest, digging into the flesh as if he could rip out the heart, still beating. “No, Dad, no!” I screamed while my brother, tenacious as fuck, pummeled him from behind till Dad swatted him onto his ass. Then the claw would rain upon him, and I’d be at Dad’s back, trying futilely to rescue my wailing brother. Later, the bruises formed constellations around our nipples.

The Steamroller! Instead of pinning us, Dad would roll his whole body across ours, back and forth, again and again, the only time I recall touching parts of him like his thighs or his back or his hair. The force of his mass would mash us against the carpet, giving us rug burn, knocking the wind from our lungs.

Forget screaming“uncle”: with us trapped under his knees, Dad commanded we beg our mother for help. As the pressure built, we’d holler at the top of our lungs for her, the game no longer so fun. Sometimes she came to the top of the stairs, crying. “You’re hurting them!”

“Oh, lighten up,” he’d say. “We’re roughhousing.”
Read more…