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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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After Three Children, Reclaiming My Body and My Mind

Illustration by Tiffany Baker

Ukamaka Olisakwe | Longreads | September 2019 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

Nurse Ruth’s face was set in tense lines of seriousness as she probed my cervix with a metal instrument. I knew this procedure by heart, having been through it five times in the past 17 years: dilate the cervix, measure the uterine cavity, insert the intrauterine device.

But Ruth was frowning. The last time, another nurse said the depth of my uterine cavity was too short. Twelve years ago, after the birth of my third child, I learned that my retroverted uterus had yet to properly settle itself nicely inside my pelvis and that my cervix had partially descended into my vagina.

Now as Ruth brought out the instrument and gazed at the blood smear on the tip, I trained my eyes on the crumple of her brow and tried to decipher what she wasn’t saying. In another life, I would not set my foot within a 10-mile radius of this place. But here I was, 36 and frightened, and I willing her to say something positive; I willed her to say that childbirth hadn’t ruined me that much.

But she didn’t say those words. Instead, she worked until I could no longer endure the discomfort of metal scraping against the soft of my womb. Because my cavity was still so short, Ruth suggested an alternative contraceptive — a progestin implant. She feared my uterus would expel an IUD if she went ahead and inserted it.

True, the last IUD had snapped and poked at my insides all night until the following morning when I found a doctor, who pried open my cervix and got it out. The one before that, my body began to act strangely and I experienced unexplainable vaginal bleeding whenever sex was vigorous.

“I have heard terrible things about the implant,” I told Ruth. “I hear it can reduce me to the biblical woman with the issue of bleeding who was healed by Jesus.” She laughed, despite the seriousness of the moment, but then she had positive and convincing things to say. She invited me to the clinic’s family planning seminar scheduled for that week. She gave me an emergency oral contraceptive for the time being, and we agreed to have the contraceptive inserted into my arm at my next visit.

I smiled and thanked her. Then I cried all the way home, ignoring the curious looks of concerned passersby, some of whom paused, as Nigerians are wont to do, to ask what made me cry.
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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. 

* * *

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.

* * *

“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.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘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…

Paul Clarke Wants to Live

Photos courtesy of the Clarke family

Rebecca Tan | LongreadsAugust 2019 | 13 minutes (3,006 words)

I. “A death sentence”

On May 16, 2016, scores of adoring parents gathered at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, beaming as 2,225 undergraduates threw their mortarboards into the air, colorful graduation cords swinging from their necks. Paul Clarke, a 22-year-old with brown hair and pale skin, was meant to be on that field. He was meant to have his name emblazoned in black under the list of economics majors, his portrait sitting snugly in the yearbook among the rest of the class of 2016. Instead, the young man was seven miles away, alone, in a dimly lit house littered with half-burned joints, beer cans, and hidden bags of opioids.

In the months following that bright Monday, as Clarke’s classmates settled into high-paying jobs in New York City and San Francisco, he overdosed on heroin three times.

When he was admitted to Penn in 2012, Clarke was a precocious, first-generation, low-income 18-year-old plucked from Kensington, Philadelphia — a neighborhood where heroin is sold often and openly in public — and ushered into the ivy-cloaked buildings of a storied campus. Despite a history of drug use in high school, Clarke stumbled along for his first three years there. He slipped into intense bouts of drug use during his summer breaks, but would always return to school in August, earning a near-perfect GPA. Between joining a fraternity and picking up a binge-drinking habit, he managed to make the dean’s list twice. Then, over the course of Clarke’s senior year, undiagnosed mental health problems sent him spiraling into addiction. As the summer turned into fall of that year, he switched his beers out for painkillers, stopped attending classes, and started crying himself to sleep.

Soon, Clarke was placed on academic probation, kicked out of his fraternity house, and forced to move back home to Kensington — a decision Penn officials said was based entirely on his poor academic performance that semester. He had failed two of his courses and had either failed or taken an incomplete in another, which according to university policy, meant he had to be “dropped from the rolls” and required to take time away from school. As he struggled to keep his spot at Penn, he found little in the way of support.

His friends and family spent months protesting his suspension, arguing that sending the 23-year-old back to Kensington was not only going to worsen his addiction, but could very likely kill him. In one of multiple emails sent to five of the university’s top administrators, Clarke’s half brother John Foley wrote, “I’m not convinced Paul will survive this time away.” In another, he stated plainly: “For Paul, a year away is a death sentence.” Aside from some contact with administrators focused on student wellness, who claimed to have no control over the situation, Foley’s emails went almost entirely unanswered.

The story of how an Ivy League student goes from the dean’s list to overdosing half a dozen times before his 25th birthday exposes a question at the heart of how universities respond when students face addiction: Allow them to stay on campus or send them away? Clarke’s efforts to claw his way back into school, to graduate, and just to survive, are a stark reminder of the stakes for students like him.

***

From the day he arrived at Penn, Clarke stood out from his peers. (Disclaimer: I went to Penn as well, and was enrolled at the same time as Clarke, although we never crossed paths socially or academically.) A 2017 study by the Equality of Opportunity Project found that 71 percent of Penn students come from the top 20 percent of the income scale, the second highest figure in the Ivy League. Outside the confines of what students call the “Penn bubble,” 26 percent of Philadelphia residents, including Clarke’s family, live below the poverty line.

But Kensington, the neighborhood where Clarke grew up, isn’t just poor. In October 2018, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the area by Jennifer Percy, dubbing it the “Walmart of heroin.” Alongside a photograph of drug users shooting up underneath the Kensington Avenue underpass, the magazine describes the area as “the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast.”

In his admissions essay to Penn, Clarke wrote about the moment he learned that his home was different: “I found my mom’s coke straw after a tip from a friend who was asked to buy her a 20-bag,” he wrote. “I found out how my dad really died. I found out my house was always cockroach-filled and disgusting. I found out none of the things going on in my house were normal.”

When he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2012, Clarke lacked some of the skills his classmates took for granted. He didn’t know he could email professors if he had problems, for example, and he found it hard to maintain eye contact with anyone, said a former girlfriend of his, Lody Friedman. In addition, Friedman said, Clarke’s “post-traumatic stress was very, bleedingly obvious.”

“And I’m not surprised,” she continued. “He experienced acute trauma his entire life.”

Clarke was 14 when he first took drugs. It was the summer; he stole a bag of marijuana from his stepfather and smoked it in his bedroom. Later that year, he asked one of his stepfather’s buddies for cocaine, but mistakenly got a bag of heroin. By the time he was in high school, Clarke was sampling from an extensive menu of substances. When he turned 15, he started taking Xanax, and at 16, picked up Klonopin. His preferred cocktail was a combination of cocaine and benzodiazepines.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back.”

The summer after his freshman year of college, Clarke overdosed at his grandmother’s house in Port Richmond, a neighborhood bordering Kensington. When Foley, who lives in Washington, D.C., contacted Penn about the incident, Student Intervention Services, the department in charge of crisis situations, assured him that there would be a dedicated administrator monitoring Clarke in the coming semesters. This worked for a couple of months, until Clarke stopped responding to administrators and they stopped reaching out.

Two years later, Clarke found himself battling a major depressive episode more or less alone. Foley, who watched from afar, believes this was when the university failed his younger brother.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back,” he said.

Friedman, who is now a teacher in Boston, feels similarly: “Students are expected to advocate for themselves, which is fine for those coming from affluent families, but it’s not fine for someone who has raised himself. If you knew Paul and understood his background, it’s pretty fucking obvious why he wouldn’t respond.”

 

II. To Reset or Derail?

It’s common practice at colleges and universities to encourage students struggling with severe addiction to take time off from their studies. At first blush, this policy seems reasonable: College campuses, rife with substance-fueled social events, can often be hostile to recovery. But this policy rests on some assumptions that, with students like Clarke, don’t apply.

At Penn, administrators are eager to emphasize that students struggling with their academics or health are urged to take a leave of absence in order to “reset.”

“We’ve tried to destigmatize the idea that a leave is failure,” said Rob Nelson, the former executive director for education and academic planning at the university. “The actual idea is that something is going wrong and you need to take time off. … Any kind of separation from the university usually has the effect of helping students succeed.”

For Clarke, this wasn’t the case. Sending him back to Kensington, by his own account, exacerbated his problems with addiction not just because his environment offered a steady stream of drugs, but because sending him away robbed him of one of the most important anchors in his life: being a Penn student.

Clarke spent four months at a recovery house in Collingswood, New Jersey, while participating  in a now-defunct recovery program called Life of Purpose in nearby Cherry Hill. There, trained mentors guided residents through recovery with the aim of transitioning them back to school. Similar collegiate recovery programs have existed since the 1970s, though they remained relatively unknown within higher education until about five years ago. According to the Hechinger Report, there were only several dozen collegiate recovery programs in 2013; today, there are around 200.

At Penn, the central resource for students struggling with addiction is the Office of Alcohol and Other Drugs, housed under the office of the vice provost for university life. The office’s director, Noelle Melartin, said in an email that they offer a program called First Step, “a brief intervention for students whose alcohol or substance use is at a lower level of severity.” Students like Clarke, with more severe cases of addiction, are referred to “appropriate outside services,” she wrote.

By the time it became clear to Penn that Clarke was struggling with addiction, he had already overdosed once and secured a steady supply of drugs from Kensington.

At elite universities, collegiate recovery programs can sometimes be seen as bad PR, experts say. James Winnefeld, a cochair of the nonprofit SAFE Project lost his college-age son to fentanyl-laden heroin in 2017. He told the Hechinger Report, “[Universities] don’t want parents walking around campus seeing posters that imply there is any kind of a substance abuse problem on campus.”

And yet, substance use among college-age Americans is clearly an issue. Figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation show that in 2017, more than 4,760 people ages 0 to 24 died from opioid overdose. According to a 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of drug overdose deaths of people ages 18 to 25 increased 411 percent from 1995 to 2015 — the greatest increase of any age group.

Despite this, a 2018 report found that fewer than 5 percent of universities in the United States have in-house recovery programs. Penn, in other words, is not the exception but the rule.

In December 2018, the Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on disability inclusion, released a report that concluded that Ivy League institutions are effectively using leaves of absence to push students off campus in order to avoid legal liability and bad press.  Read more…

Rock Me Gently

Kevin Winter / Getty, Danni Konov / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  9 minutes (2,273 words)

I have no reason not to believe Rolling Stone when it calls cover star Harry Styles a “21st century rock star.” He certainly looks like one: shirtless, tattooed, his hair a tousled mess, and a smile that may not say big dick energy but definitely says he knows what to do with it. He could be 1977 cover star Peter Frampton, when he was named “Rock Star of the Year.” There’s even a tagline to the left of Styles’s nipple promising sex and psychedelics. But then you start reading, and the setup begins to break down. Sure, he has a reputation for fucking a lot, but it all sounds very consensual and age-appropriate. He also seems unfailingly polite, not to mention sunny. I mean, he gets sad — his new album is “all about having sex and feeling sad” — but he’s not broody and doesn’t seem like he’d ever trash a hotel. This is a guy who appears to sort his problems out the way therapists tell us to: friendships, meditation, even work. “I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes,” he tells the magazine. He describes himself as vulnerable and loose (the mushrooms and weed can’t hurt). Rolling Stone describes one moment as “rock-star debauchery” but all he did while tripping was bite off the tip of his own tongue — the only person he bled on was himself. As for everyone else, he just wants them to feel loved. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he says. “I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

The classic ideal of the rock star — the depraved renegade with infinite hotel bills, addictions, and infidelities — is dead. The charismatic young white man (it was usually a young white man, sometimes several) who rebranded selfishness as revolution has been overthrown, taking with him a part of the individualist, white, patriarchal capitalist system he came from. In his place, new rock stars, sometimes white and male, often not, have sprung up to nurture rather than destroy — instead of shutting us out, they let us in. Read more…

In the Age of the Psychonauts

Frank R. Paul, 1924. Forrest J. Ackerman Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Erik Davis | An excerpt adapted from High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies | The MIT Press | 2019 | 35 minutes (9,207 words)

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the future discovers a tightrope walker preparing to perform in front of a crowd. It is here, crucially, that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero of the spirit. Humanity, he says, is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that passes over the abyss.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.” Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a predilection for risky behavior, these radical free thinkers are “curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Nietzsche simply calls them those who attempt. Their truths are their own, rather than general facts, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least as guests.”

Sounds to me like Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries to mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics. Read more…

Shelved: Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty Images

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2019 | 12 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Sometime between the massive success of his first single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the extraordinary musical statement of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison walked into a New York studio and recorded thirty-one of his worst songs.

To be fair, he was terrible on purpose. What became known as Morrison’s “revenge” or Contractual Obligation album is perhaps the most distinguished of many record label f-yous. Comprised of over thirty songs supposedly recorded in an afternoon, with titles such as “The Big Royalty Check” and “Blow In Your Nose,” the work was, understandably, shelved. Apparently that was the point: Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with Bang Records and make a new home with Warner Brothers, and the Contractual Obligation songs were supposedly central to that transition. Morrison’s Bang Records contract stipulated quantity, not quality. The truth, about all of it, is a lot more interesting.

Read more…

White Looks

Getty / Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  8 minutes (2,132 words)

 

They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of “sameness,” even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

—bell hooks, Black Looks (1992)

 

I’m experiencing some deep angst about this essay. That anxious feeling where you’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a perfect day — no wind, no sound, no bird of prey — and you’re almost certain you’ll throw yourself off. Every time I email a black critic for this article, it’s even worse because I can’t even tell if I’ve jumped or not. Like I’m dead at the bottom of that cliff, but I have to wait for a reply to be informed. That I’m dead. This is what white people call “white fragility,” right? “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race,” Robin DiAngelo wrote. (As book critic Katy Waldman noted, many people of color could have written White Fragility in their sleep.) I am in fact biracial — my father is white, my mother is Pakistani (she grew up in England) — but I pass. I barely identify with my Pakistani side, except when I see a group of Pakistani people. Then I’m like Hey. I know you. (Even though I don’t.) I don’t think this when I see a group of black people. Although, what’s that line in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist? “To be an antiracist is to realize there is no such thing as Black behavior.” To be an antiracist is to realize there is such a thing as White behavior.
Read more…

‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II

Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2019 | 24 minutes (6,573 words)

 

Bassey Ikpi remembers the Challenger explosion; she can recall the exact moment it happened, in 1984. She can remember, in exquisitely painful detail, how she felt watching that tragic accident unfold on live television, in 1984. Yet Google and the history books tell us it happened in 1986. “What is truth,” Ikpi asks, “if it’s not the place where reality and memory meet?”

The blurry line between emotional truth and fact is stylishly captured in an optical illusion of a book cover (designed by Matthew McNerney) for Ikpi’s new memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying. The Nigerian-American author takes up the project of remembering, with great dexterity and compassion for herself. Ikpi opens up about living with bipolar II; “Imagine you don’t fit anywhere,” Ikpi writes, “not even in your own head.” We experience her life pre- and post-diagnosis; her adolescence in Stillwater, Oklahoma; her early twenties touring as a spoken word artist with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; her sleepless nights; and her hospitalization.The latter proves to be a turning point, one that finally gives her a name for her mental illness and — as the book demonstrates — a framework for understanding the story of her life.

The diagnosis is clarifying; it allows her to see how mental health impacts her relationships to her family and friends, and to herself, often determining what she feels and remembers, and how she remembers it. In this way Ikpi also uses her book to interrogate the nature of memory itself — how fragile it is, how it can be colored and recolored by trauma and guilt and self-preservational drive. “I learned how to take the truth and bend it like light through a prism,” Ikpi explains in the book, “I learned to lie beautifully.” Rather than present readers with a sanitized cluster of biographical data, Ikpi offers a memoir that places the reader inside her mind, conflict and all. Read more…