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The Messy Making of a Nearly Perfect Hip-Hop Album

Al Pereira/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

Twenty-five years after its release, Ol’ Diry Bastard’s solo debut Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version still sounds as fresh as ever. Hip-hop rewrote the musical language and pushed the limits of the English language the way only truly revolutionary art can. Then ODB came along and reinvented hip-hop. For Pitchfork’s weeky Sunday Review, writer Sheldon Pearce revisits Ol Dirty’s musical masterpiece.

As his Wu-Tang band-member Method Man said, “there was no father to ODB’s style: Without musical precedents, he leaned into aberration.” His original style came partly from being an unpredictable personality, and that meant an unpredictable life. “The album took nearly two years to make,” Pearce writes in his review, “because of this fitful approach. ODB was surrounded by a small team doing its damndest to keep him recording, but he could not be collected and he would not be…” Pearce awards ODB’s album a 9.3 on Pitchfork’s 10-point scale. I’d go further and say it’s perfect. I’d also rank Pearce’s review-essay at a perfect 10. This is what the best music writing looks like: incisive, lively, revealing, surprising, words deserving of their subject.

Those methods required several measures to wring an entire album out of Dirty. RZA was the hands-off architect. Buddha Monk was the handler, body man, and engineer, tasked with getting ODB prepped and into the studio, and making sure his vocals sounded right. Mastering engineer Tom Coyne was dubbed “the referee” in the liner notes for breaking up fights. Elektra A&R Dante Ross had the demanding task of shepherding the album to completion amid chaos. “I knew I had to get it to the finish line because there are times in life when you know you only have that moment in time, and you gotta get there,” Ross said of the Dirty Version sessions. “I had to get there, ’cause I strongly suspected that would not happen again.”

ODB’s volatility created only a small window for capturing his output. He was anti-prolific, so inefficient in his recording style that it made The Dirty Version even more of a marvel—not just catching lightning in a bottle but harnessing its electricity to power a generator. It’s impossible to overstate how much his jolting vocals jump out and strike you. On “Don’t U Know,” he lurches along, his singing barely adhering to melody and meter. On “Hippa to da Hoppa,” he punctuates every bar with a grunt, then becomes conversational, then does some straight-up showerhead crooning. Across chest-thumpers like “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Cuttin’ Headz,” he becomes a caricature, a monster of pure id born of New York City’s sordid underbelly.

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The Danger of Desire

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
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The Coastal Shelf

Illustration by Homestead Studio

June Amelia Rose | Longreads | March 2020 | 17 minutes (4,495 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

I was getting ready for a kinky leather social mixer when I slipped my mother’s engagement ring onto my finger for the first time. I pulled on a flowing, gothic dress, then did my makeup, glancing at her most prized possession in the mirror as I penciled in my eyeliner. I don’t remember how, in the tumult after her death, I came into possession of the ring, but apparently I did. 

Out of morbid nostalgia, I decided to wear the ring out in the sticky Brooklyn summer air, to see if anyone noticed. 

I never want to get married. At that moment, I was playing matrimonial drag. 

On the bus, the diamond dug into my rugged pink Kathy Acker paperback. The ring fit loosely, a reminder of how much my mom told me she envied my slender fingers and healthy nails growing up. While seeing a secret gender therapist in high school, he told me that my small hands would help me pass as female, if I ever transitioned.

At the party, no one commented on the ring. My girlfriend didn’t seem to notice, and if she did, she didn’t ask. The dominatrixes were too busy relaxing as I cleaned their boots. Black shoe polish smeared across my long, red nails, eclipsing the shine of the chunky diamond like oil on a coastal shelf.

 

* * *

“When I was a little girl, the only thing I wanted in the entire world was a baby boy to call my own. Your father and I love your sister, but a baby boy was my dream.”

 So began my mother’s self-important recounting of my origin story, a tale she told me repeatedly as a child.

“Before you, we had three miscarriages. I was worried you wouldn’t survive too, but one night I dreamed an angel came down and touched my belly. That was when I knew you were going to be a perfectly healthy baby boy, a gift from God himself.”

These words swirled in my head, haunting me with guilt, as my hand trembled writing the letter. I was 15 years old. The year was 2007, the year I finally accepted that everything felt wrong, and that I needed to speak the new truth I’d found. I started with my girlfriend and therapist, then moved on to my family.

“Mom, Dad. I’m a girl. I feel like a girl. I’ve always been like a girl. I’m a transsexual. I think you know what they are, but please google it. It’s a thing. This is who I am. This is who I will always be.”


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I stressed over the note for days, composing it in a fit of nervousness, trashing multiple copies. I was too young then to appreciate the humor of the situation, before the bitter salt had soaked into my pores. My mother was the woman who invented an immaculate conception story to give her life meaning, and in so doing, she implanted a mystical origin story in me that I never consented to, and that caused me so much harm.

* * *

Near the first anniversary of her death, I got her name tattooed on my back. I harbored so much resentment, but it felt right. Grief makes us do the strangest things. We had a troubled relationship, but her loss deeply affected my worldview and sense of self. 

I always wonder what my lovers think about it. 

Many years and hundreds of dollars later, I got my last name legally changed. A vivisection of the family. Still, her name on my back is a haunting of who I’ve been. The memory seeps into my veins like bitter tar, the same tar she smoked until the cancer took root in her lungs — dark, blooming petals underground. 

* * *

So much of my childhood is fantastical that the line between truth and fiction has become meaningless. Which are the myths and which are the repressed memories? Is it even possible to get an objective answer at this point? Though one of my parents is still living, I cannot trust his version of events. He was barely present, either an oblivious  fly on the wall or overflowing with a tense, fearful rage that shamed my emotions and needs. Because of this, I must doubt my memories while simultaneously going through the motions of acting out their consequences.

‘Mom, Dad. I’m a girl. I feel like a girl. I’ve always been like a girl. I’m a transsexual. I think you know what they are, but please google it. It’s a thing. This is who I am. This is who I will always be.’

My father worked nights, so I rarely saw him as a kid. Most of my parental time was spent with my mother. Since my parents were working-class, they worked two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet and keep a roof over our heads as property taxes in our town continued to inflate. This meant that most of my time growing up was spent alone. My hyperactivity was so pronounced, my parents couldn’t keep a babysitter for more than a few weeks at a time. They all quit, driving my parents nuts. As time passes, I’m inclined to believe my acting out was compounded by a clear case of not enough attention, of a need not being met. I didn’t have the framework to articulate these early storms, until I found out years later that my disconnect was a symptom of my coercively gendered body. 

Recently, I read that this kind of behavior is a premonition of the bipolar disorder I would later be diagnosed with. I wonder what my life would’ve looked like if my family had taken this behavior seriously and not just as a permanent character flaw. Would I have been treated? Would specialists have noticed? Who would I be today?

My family has never asked how to love me. Later in life, the first time a friend asked, “What can I do for you right now?” when I was in emotional distress, it iced me to the core. I didn’t know how to ask for, give, or receive love. I was at a loss. How does this happen to a person? Where does this come from?

Shame and trauma, that’s where. I was pushed to fulfill the role of a person I never wanted to be, then shunned when I voiced my own path. Many years later, when the dust had settled and I had merged with my new womanly body and self, the damage had already been done. Nobody wanted to admit the wounds were inflicted in the first place. 

* * *

Looking at the symphony of jagged scars on my forearm in the present day, my therapist says, “You are acting out the pain that was inflicted on you in the past. It’s all you know, it’s what makes you feel comfortable. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You and your body are worthy of love.” 

Many years later, when the dust had settled and I had merged with my new womanly body and self, the damage had already been done.

I cry, rocking myself back and forth, wringing my palms on my thighs, because she’s right. 

* * *

School was a blessing and a curse. I wasn’t liked and didn’t fit in. Every movement and word came out with sandpaper sounds, scratching kids away from me. In my formative years my parents pushed me into sports I hated, where I was targeted and beaten by cruel children. So many hands harming my body, telling me it wasn’t mine. Poring over these memories with my therapist, I’ve found this is where my deeply ingrained self-hatred stems from. I left every time crying. My parents didn’t listen, they said it was simply what boys went through and that I’d have to toughen up. 

I loved learning but to do it I had to be tortured daily. I put up with the rejection and isolation because somehow I knew the things I was obsessively learning would be my exit from my labyrinth of a home life. Incredibly, that drive was how I began to develop the literary skills I’d utilize later in life. 

I taught myself to read when I got frustrated that I was being instructed too slow. I picked up books and video games on my own and glued myself to them, silently withdrawing from the rest of the world. I was ravenous, I had to know anything and everything. I would tape random facts around my desk at school so I could memorize them in my spare time. It was a lonely life, but it taught me everything I know today. I have spent the better part of my life alone, retreating away from personhood like an invisible mantra.

I developed suicidal tendencies at age 8. I would come home from school and tell my mother how much I wanted to die. One time, I tried to stop breathing, frustrated that my body wouldn’t allow it. Another time, I jumped off the highest thing I could find, a towering wooden deck in our backyard. Thankfully, I didn’t break any bones.

I have a firm, but probably fake memory of buzzing and electricity in a “dentist’s” office as a kid, screaming and leaving in tears. The story I’ve succumbed to is that my parents, to deal with my own onset of overdramatic paranoid delusions and exhausting hyperactivity, had me attend shock therapy to calm me down. It worked, pulverizing my memory and sapping me of dopamine for decades, implanting depression in me like a Faustian virus. But this may be fiction, like everything else. 

* * *

I am seated at an after-school program that babysits me until my mom gets off of work; a place where fun is outlawed, ruled over by a lady whose resting voice is a low, menacing yell of disapproval. One wrong move, one stray word, and she will punish you, taking away everything for the entire day, making you sit there and stare at the clock.

I am doing just that, sitting on a bench in the corner when my mother arrives. She sees that I am sitting with my legs crossed, slaps my leg, and leans in. “Don’t ever sit like that. That’s not what boys do.”

It was almost a decade before I sat cross-legged again.

* * *

My mother had an addiction to shopping at the mall. I have to admit, despite a disgust toward the monolithic, leeching nature of the capitalist edifice, going to the mall gives me strange feelings of home to this very day.

After a fast food dinner — we ate a lot of fast food in those days — we would head to the Bay Shore Mall, a colossal parking lot field wedged between highways. Her favorite store was Express. She would sit me down on a waiting bench in one of the stores and spend hours trying on different outfits. Shoes, pants, tops, skirts, anything she could get her hands on. She would come out of the dressing room and model it, ask for my opinion, shrug at herself in the mirror, then go and try on the next thing, then double back to the first one. Rinse and repeat. My poor mother swiped her credit card endlessly, and I could see her eyes glisten with regret as we headed home. Sometimes, she left me in the car and went back to return what she’d just bought, a walk of shame as she cried her way through the parking lot. Every month, the credit card bills piled up and the crying at the kitchen table got worse. These personal fashion shows are an obscured image in my mind, but they gave me hours of looking at women’s clothes. I would sometimes wander away and try on hats and bracelets, knowing that what I was doing was a forbidden act. Curiosity had piqued my interest.

I still fondly look back on these seeds of womanhood sewn in me. During the long hours when my parents weren’t home, I began to dig through her walk-in closet and try on those same clothes that had ruined her credit score. Each dress, each pair of high heels, each pair of her skinny jeans only further proved to me this thing I was starting to realize about myself, that I was a woman too. 

* * *

I was born with a dark brown birthmark on my left cheek, approximately the size of a United States quarter. Perhaps I am embellishing its size, but its impact was a mountain in the scars of traumatic memory. At school, children told me I should kill myself because I was so ugly and that the world would be better off without me.

When I told my mother I wanted to get the birthmark removed, she said, “The scar will be ugly, it will be too noticeable. God made you just the way you are, perfect in every way.”

“You don’t want to alter your body like that forever.”

“The removal will hurt a lot.”

“It’s a decision you can’t go back on.”

I can’t help but laugh as I recall these words, spoken to me out of love, but stifling me, padlocking my pain.

Each dress, each pair of high heels, each pair of her skinny jeans only further proved to me this thing I was starting to realize about myself, that I was a woman too.

I have been taking estrogen for more than three years now, three heavenly years. It is a chemical my body does not regularly produce in large quantities. First it was four blue pills a day, then it was a needle stuck into my leg every two weeks. Spironolactone, my testosterone blocker, makes my head foggy, gives me aches and pains, induces a constant state of dehydration, and causes me to constantly piss, not to mention poses the very real threat of hyperkalemia and osteoporosis. By agreeing to these bodily processes I have made myself infertile, negating any chance of conceiving a child from my genetics, as if I had ever wanted one. I have grown tits that will not go away if I stop medicating. They would have to be surgically removed.

I did this all on my own. I stomached my fear and rolled the dice on a decision I had been told would be social as well as personal suicide. I survived the alteration of my body with glamorous resilience. 

After my mother died, I finally had the birthmark removed my senior year of high school. The procedure was less than an hour of prodding on the numb skin of my face. For two days I walked around with black stitches going down the side of my face, drawing a line from my eyes to my mouth. I looked like a horror movie heroine, sewed up after a chance battle with death. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over the fresh scar tissue on my face, vainly gazing in the mirror.

* * *

I can handle anything, I have cut slabs of flesh off of my body to feel whole. BDSM has become the framework where I have learned to love my body, to connect with the bodies of others. I have engaged in the pleasure of sadomasochism with my lovers. I’ve been kicked, stepped on, slapped, whipped, and caned, all with a beautiful love. 

Has my mother seen how much pain I have gone on to choose and how much I love myself for it? Does she know the sense of finality her early death brought? She did not believe I could handle the pain or permanence of an altered body. At the end, she knew very little about me, and that is where the true, unintended pain creeps in.

* * *

Fifteen again, post-letter. I am the tranny freak of the family, frequently courting silence and darting whispers. I am the shameful family secret, though some of our relatives know. None of them steps in, none of them does anything to help.

My mother asks me into her room and locks the door, a simmering rage on her tongue.

“You’ve been drinking! You and your friends have fake IDs and that’s what you’re doing all the time, aren’t you?” My mother was accusing her straight-edge child of drinking. “Admit it!”

“No, I didn’t do that! I don’t drink!”

“LIAR! How dare you lie to me,” she screamed.

“You’re being fucking crazy.”

My ears rang from the slap, my eyes watered then grew heavy.

I couldn’t tell if my mother actually believed the bullshit she was saying, if the cancer had really burrowed that far into her brain, or if this was some manipulative abuse tactic to keep me under her control. I was a good kid. I wanted freedom but I behaved, I got good grades, I just wanted to live my life and not be interrogated for it.

I am the shameful family secret, though some of our relatives know.

Besides the point, is drinking a beer in your teens the worst thing a child can possibly do? Is that worse than slapping your child in the face in an accusatory outburst as you refuse to listen? Alcoholism is undoubtedly a stain on my legacy spreading out across my family through multiple generations and rotting the extended branches of my family tree. It nearly ruined my life much later, when I was drinking to cope with my mental illness and my failed repressed gender, but it didn’t then. I didn’t know what alcohol tasted like. A slap in the face for something I didn’t do certainly didn’t scare me out of it. In fact, it made me want it more. If I was going to be hated when not drinking, I might as well do it. And a few months after my mother’s death, I sure as hell started drinking, beginning a bender that didn’t stop for almost a decade, nearly killing me several times.

* * *

It was a year after I had confessed to my family that I was a woman. My grandfather’s funeral was the next day, yet nobody could understand why I dissociated the whole time as they forced me to be fitted for a suit. I refused to say I liked any of them, my silent protest drove my mother and father absolutely mad.

“Is this because you want to wear a dress?” my mother accused. “You know we can’t let you do that. Why do you always have to be so difficult?”

I cried in the backseat of the car, a box containing a suit sitting on my lap, as I listened to my mother tell me how the life I wanted wasn’t possible.

* * *

On Halloween that year, I dressed up as a girl. I looked so comfortable and natural in my role that I even convinced a few partygoers that I was a completely different person. My friends were talking about it and my mother overheard. After they left, she came up to me.

“Can I see the pictures? Please, can I see?”

“No,” I said, closed-off.

“Why? Why do you want to become this person I can’t even see? Why can’t you show me?”

The unspoken answer: Because I know you will not like what you see, and it very well may break your heart, and I can’t handle one more rejection from you.

* * *

Will I ever hear the words “My beautiful daughter?” At the point they do come, if ever, will I still care for the person who speaks them?

* * *

I remember taking the train into Manhattan with my mother, happy because I got to skip school for the day to gawk at the skyscrapers. For obscene pleasure, I was reading The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s novel where her hero, Howard Roark, designs buildings for a living, apart from being a crypto-fascist ubermensch in his spare time as he gushes emotionlessly about capitalism. As if capital has ever been the sole arbiter of good art and not a physical limitation of the medium.

I thought these excursions were nice. I got to listen to my iPod the whole time, staring out the train windows, riding in taxis for the first time in my life. I felt so special.

What I didn’t realize was that we were using taxis not because my working-class parents had suddenly become rich, but because my mother was beginning to lose mobility — she didn’t have the strength to stand up straight on the subway, to be on her feet all day, or to walk and still have breath to spare.

My mom didn’t take me along on these trips because she thought it would be fun to let me skip school. At this point, we were barely on speaking terms, and most conversations ended in screamed accusations and thrown dishes. The woman was dying. She pushed me away with anger and paranoia. As an introverted secretive teen, I was more than happy to push myself away. 

I still feel guilt for blaming her for these things, even though I know in my heart of hearts that it’s never an excuse. I’m the one who had to live with these mistakes after she was gone. She made sure she’d never be forgotten.

My mother took me along because she knew she was terminally ill, past the point of no return, and after these doctors gave her terrible news, she wanted to spend the day with her kid, perhaps knowing these were the last few chances she’d have an extended time to do so. She wanted to come out of each tragic death sentence meeting to her child in the waiting room, the baby boy she’d longed for all those years.

I couldn’t be that for her, and in front of her eyes, as my hair grew down to my waist and my outfits grew more feminine, I was living proof of the death of her greatest dream.

* * *

The NYU hospital overlooked the Manhattan skyline and the glistening water of the East River.

It was the middle of January. Even though it was the dead of winter, that day was particularly warm and sunny. The windows of the buildings reflected the light down into my overstimulated eyes, incubating me.

I held my mother’s hand and looked out the window as she took her last breaths. In all those years of sickness, it was the first time I actually realized she was dying, and I cried with embarrassment. 

In the room was her brother, the one I’d barely heard of until I came out. He too was a shameful secret. He was gay, and he knew my story, but we never got to talk about that. In a few years, he’d be dead too, cancer all the same. A decade later, I’d find out he created his own faction of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970. An erased legacy, kept obscured by my family’s shame.

When I think about death, I am usually thinking about the ocean. A body of water is like living proof of eternal return, the slick spinning of an ouroboros signifying truth.

When I die, I know my ashes will be scattered, as per my explicit requests, along Riis Beach, so I can be among every gay person we’ve lost. I will be scattered across the length of the sands I grew up on, bringing fertilizer to the beachgrass, little atoms of me carried across the planet to places unknown — every country I never had the time to visit. I’ll be trading a biological family that never understood me for the people who understood me more than anyone else: the drag queens, the black trans girls murdered before their time, the powerful femme dykes, the gay leatherdaddies who succumbed to AIDS before we even had a good grasp at what it was. We all will be together, forever.

* * *

Aside from at the funeral, I have never been to my mother’s grave.

Perhaps the final eternal hurt is that, because of my mother’s death, none of this can be resolved. I am condemned to overanalyze the past, as she rests in our family plot in a cemetery on Long Island. This lack of closure leaves me unsure, nursing the wounds of a bitter love that spoiled. My family life has eroded my trust, causing turmoil in my interpersonal relationships with friends and lovers. To this day, I’m not sure I understand what affection means, how much is too much and how little is too little. It seems like a distant language to me. I work on these things in therapy every week. I read books about transformative healing, about boundaries and resilience, about trauma and self-love and community. 

I will be scattered across the length of the sands I grew up on, bringing fertilizer to the beachgrass, little atoms of me carried across the planet to places unknown — every country I never had the time to visit.

I have to catch myself. I pull away from people, hard. I take too much power from the falsehood of self-reliance. The irony in my self-reliance is that I have become my own best friend, and yet we have both hated each other for so long, a hatred made worse by the abandonment I felt as a teen. I have lived the majority of my life in an abusive relationship with myself. 

In baring my truest self to my family, I was rejected. What that experience showed me was that I could never be honest about my emotions or desires, and that doing so would bring me and others around me pain. I lost any semblance of trust for anyone. I have carried these feelings into my relationships, and have spent the second half of my life unlearning what I was taught. It is only in the past few years that I have begun to feel any sort of progress, but the water runs deep. 

* * *

Philip Larkin has a famous poem, titled “This Be the Verse,” so beautiful I want it tattooed on my body.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

It is a tongue-in-cheek poetical dig at the way all parents fuck their children up by the sheer proliferation of legacy. I come back to it often, a reminder of the absurdity of family. Larkin doesn’t want us to get out of life as early as we can by killing ourselves, but instead to do everything we can to unlearn the crashing waves of the harm committed against us. As a trans woman, a femme lesbian, a leatherdyke, I know that my own legacy is whatever I choose it to be. 

My legacy is my body, my writing, my chosen family, the energy I put out into the world. My legacy will end with my transsexual body, a woman’s body with a Venus symbol tattooed onto her left arm, burned and scattered across Riis Beach, the gay coastal shelf where I will finally be free from pain, at home with my gay and trans siblings. My chosen family will honor and remember my writing, and in that way, lapping at the coastal shelf of my mother wound, I will live forever.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto

* * *

June Amelia Rose is an anarchist leatherdyke fiction writer and proud transsexual living in Brooklyn. Her short story, “My Sweet Femme Nightmare,” was recently published in Best Lesbian Erotica Volume 4. She has a short novel awaiting publication, and is currently at work on another one.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Amanda Hess, Robert Draper, Emily Gogolak, Mark O’Connell, and Gabrielle Bellot.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Wing Is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There.

Amanda Hess | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2020 | 20 minutes (5,140 words)

Surprise: women’s empowerment harnessed to American-style capitalism delivers more inequality, and an Instagram wall can’t fix it.

2. The School Shooting That Austin Forgot

Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | March 19, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,305 words)

“The anguish that has plagued the Murchison students presages the kind of long-tail trauma that many of today’s witnesses to shootings will be burdened with for the rest of their lives.”

3. An Intersection at the End of America

Emily Gogolak | Oxford American | March 17, 2020 | 45 minutes (11,400 words)

“A portrait of Dilley, Texas, home of the largest immigration detention center in the United States.”

4. Real Estate for the Apocalypse: My Journey into a Survival Bunker

Mark O’Connell | The Guardian | March 17, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,844 words)

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, entrepreneurs are translating fears of societal collapse into post-apocalyptic gated communities.

5. The Curious Language of Grief

Gabrielle Bellot | Catapult | March 11, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,495 words)

“I wonder why I wonder, and then I remember why: I am still mourning him, in part because I am mourning all the relationships I never got to have with the people who never knew me as a woman.”

Teaching Writing and Breaking Rules

AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

“As much as we might admire what is fresh and innovative, we all learn by imitating patterns,” writes Irina Dumitrescu in The Times Literary Supplement. “To be called ‘formulaic’ is no compliment, but whenever people express themselves or take action in the world, they rely on familiar formulas.” It’s true. For her review-essay, Dumitrescu reads five books about writing and explores how writing advice is caught in a paradox: to get people to communicate clearly, logically, and find their own voices, instruction must first teach them rules and provide enough room to learn by copying. This is why most of us writers begin by imitating established writers. We find someone whose style or subject reflects our own – someone in whom we hear our ideal selves, someone who sounds like we want to sound one day – and we mimic them. This could start with a parent, move to a cool friend, then end with a famous novelist or memoirst, before we emerge from the pupae of literary infancy. In other words, to facilitate originality, we must teach formula, encourage imitation, and push for eventual independence. She explores the value of craft, structure, exploration, and formula, and the way sticking to rules erodes a writer’s style, their character, even the essence of the art. She contrasts John Warner’s book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities with the book Writing to Persuade, by The New York Times‘ previous op-ed editor, Trish Hall.

It is easy for a lover of good writing to share Warner’s anger at the shallow and mechanistic culture of public education in the United States, easy to smile knowingly when he notes that standardized tests prize students’ ability to produce “pseudo-academic BS,” meaningless convoluted sentences cobbled together out of sophisticated-sounding words. Warner’s argument against teaching grammar is harder to swallow. Seeing in grammar yet another case of rules and correctness being put ahead of thoughtful engagement, Warner claims, “the sentence is not the basic skill or fundamental unit of writing. The idea is.” Instead of assignments, he gives his students “writing experiences,” interlocked prompts designed to hone their ability to observe, analyse and communicate. His position on grammatical teaching is a step too far: it can be a tool as much as a shackle. Still, writers may recognize the truth of Warner’s reflection that “what looks like a problem with basic sentence construction may instead be a struggle to find an idea for the page.”

Then she looks at a book like Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, which provides further contrasts and insight:

Shapes appear in Alison’s mind as clusters of images, so what begins as literary analysis condenses into a small poem. For “meander,” Alison asks us to “picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat”. She speaks of the use of colour in narrative “as a unifying wash, a secret code, or a stealthy constellation.” The point is not ornamentation, though Alison can write a sentence lush enough to drown in, but tempting fiction writers to render life more closely. Against the grand tragedy of the narrative arc, she proposes small undulations: “Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave.” These are the shifting moods of a single day, the temporary loss of the house keys, the sky a sunnier hue than expected.

The Roman educator Quintilian once insisted that an orator must be a good man. It was a commonplace of his time. The rigorous study of eloquence, he thought, required a mind undistracted by vice. The books discussed here inherit this ancient conviction that the attempt to write well is a bettering one. Composing a crisp sentence demands attention to fine detail and a craftsmanlike dedication to perfection. Deciding what to set to paper requires the ability to imagine where a reader might struggle or yawn. In a world tormented by spectres too reckless to name, care and empathy are welcome strangers.

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On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

How to Write Well

Longreads Pick

Rules and rigidity are anathema to writing style and the kind of exciting, surprising language that make literature so rewarding. But writing rules also allow for clear communication and logical arguments. So where is the middle ground?

Published: Mar 6, 2020
Length: 11 minutes (2,793 words)

“The Anger of Women is an Earth-shattering Thing”: Lidia Yuknavitch on Resisting the Hero Narrative and the Body as a Generator of Stories.

https://lidiayuknavitch.net//Riverhead Books

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | March 2020 | 15 minutes (3,519 words)

Lidia Yuknavitch’s disquieting new collection of short stories, Verge, is often bleak, yet also exquisitely hopeful. Her characters, largely women, are on the edge of death, humiliation, relocation, mercy, self-harm — as well as a new kinship with themselves.

In “The Pull,” two sisters flee their war-torn country. When their raft falters far from a safe shore, the sisters know their strong swimmer bodies are the only way to save both themselves and the “family of strangers” onboard with them. The young girl in “The Organ Runner” is transporting black-market human organs when she’s confronted with saving the life of a “donor,” who is a former bully. The woman in search of “the most perfect wound” in “A Woman Signifying” carefully, gloriously, burns her face on the radiator. These stories are taut and precise; at times like fairy tales in their measured yet majestic scope. They are hard punches and sweetheart hugs, somehow as one.

Yuknavitch often wiggles into those dark spaces so many of us prefer to avoid. Take her memoir The Chronology of Water, which opens with the stillbirth of her daughter and carries us, with unflinching intimacy, through physical and sexual abuse as well as drug and alcohol addiction. The Small Backs of Children delves into the brutal aftermath of war. And The Book of Joan depicts a decimated Earth with a pod of now-sexless humans living in a hodgepodge space station and carving stories into their own skin.

And yet there is beauty. Dazzling beauty. This Yuknavitch never lets us forget.

Her self-generated motto is “make art in the face of fuck” — meaning the harder the world becomes, the more we need to create art of any sort. And the upside of a lot of fuck these days is that we’re graced with more of Yuknavitch’s.

We spoke over Skype about different ways of communicating, the end of the hero, and how women can harness their anger. Read more…

A Crying Public Shame

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.” 

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘n—a say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted? 

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions. 

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”


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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once. 

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Behind One of the Sketchiest Men, a Sketchy Woman

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 24: Adam Neumann and Rebekah Neumann attend the 2018 Time 100 Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

For Bustle, Moe Tkacik takes a close look at the ways in which wealthy, new-agey Rebekah Paltrow Neumann — Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, Adam Neumann’s wife — helped fuel WeWork’s rise and spectacular fall.

Not surprisingly in late-stage capitalism, many WeWork-adjacent faux-virtuous institutions came tumbling down right around the same time the co-working behemoth failed.

The Kabbalah Centre preaches that you can get what you want by willing or “manifesting” it to be. According to the former WeWork staffer, Adam believed that by the time the music stopped, so much important real estate would be annexed by WeWork that they’d be Too Big to Fail. Lofty marketing and lush amenities nearly got them there. “You can use the language of spirituality to revive a discredited idea,” [Rebekah’s yoga instructor and Uma Thurman’s brother Dechen] Thurman says. “And so, the yoga business is old-fashioned labor exploitation, and maybe WeWork was a Ponzi scheme.”

By the middle of the decade, Rebekah’s spiritual stomping grounds had come under fire for taking advantage of congregants. The Jivamukti yoga studio was sued for sexual harassment in 2016 and later settled; it closed its doors in New York City in December 2019. The Kabbalah Centre has faced multiple lawsuits from former members over misappropriated donations and sexual assault, and is currently being sued by seven former staffers who accuse the group of forcing them to sign “vows of poverty” and work essentially for free.

The junk mail company that had bankrolled Rebekah’s lavish childhood began to collapse, too, a few months before WeWork’s botched IPO. In March 2019, roughly 700 employees of a company factory in Ciudad Juárez were told to take a three-day weekend, only to return to an empty warehouse; in interviews, employees said the machinery had been driven back across the border. No one bothered leaving their last paychecks, so employees resorted to hanging “Wanted” posters outside the plant with photos of Rebekah’s brother-in-law, Nick Robinson, who had been running the company during Bob Paltrow’s tax evasion case and is accused in one lawsuit of looting its coffers.

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