Search Results for: language

Prayers to Lucia

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Heather Quinn| Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,102 words)

 

Obtain for me, by your intercession with God, perfect vision for my bodily eyes, and the grace to use them for God’s greater honor and glory and the salvation of souls.
— Prayer to Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia holds her left arm outstretched, a silver platter balanced on the palm of her hand. On the platter rests a disembodied pair of eyes. They are looking, lidded, expressive. What they seem to express, in their straight-ahead gaze, is serenity and knowing, a kind of Mona Lisa without a face. In some images Santa Lucia holds the eyes in her hand directly, without a platter to rest on, with a sort of branch that connects them both like fruit on a tiny tree. I think of optic nerves connected directly — without the brain as intermediary — to the spinal cord. Sight talking to body, vision sent from nerves straight to muscle, a physical and tangible thing.

These are Lucia’s own eyes, though she gazes out from the picture with an identical pair of her own, safe in their sockets. They were gouged out while she was alive, then restored to her after her death.

Lucia is the patron saint of eye diseases, blindness, writers, stained glass makers, the poor, and sore throats. Her name means light and her feast day is attended by young girls in red-and-white gowns with crowns of candles upon their heads.
Read more…

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.
Read more…

Hot for Teacher

Getty / McSweeney's Publishing

Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)

What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.

More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.

More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.

Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.

Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.

More than anything, she wanted a baby.

More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.

Read more…

‘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…

Anaphylaxis of the Mind

Azurhino / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Alyson Pomerantz | Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,316 words)

About 12 years ago, at my law firm’s holiday lunch, something strange happened when I took a bite of the crab appetizer. There was a tickling sensation in my throat. I say tickle, which makes it sound playful, but it was uncomfortable. I tried to clear it with a sip of wine, but the tickle stayed put. I went to the bathroom because the privacy of a small toilet seemed a better place for me to investigate what was wrong, despite the fact that it was poorly lit and I couldn’t open the door without it hitting the sink.

Of course, I could divine nothing in the tiny bathroom about what was causing the tickle deep in my throat. I sat on the toilet and tried to breathe, but my breathing only grew more labored.

I decided to call my doctor, who also happens to be my father. Though he worries about his children, he has that doctor way of being calm and cool in an emergency. Reciting some figures about anaphylaxis, he told me I should get to a hospital right away.

One of my co-workers helped me find a cab. The driver reminded me that he was not an ambulance, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with emergencies, and so I pleaded with him to take me to the hospital. At New York Presbyterian I stumbled toward the front desk, gesturing at my throat. I could barely whisper my name when the attendant asked.

They ushered me to a curtained-off space where I was given a huge dose of Benadryl. I was examined, but the doctor saw and felt nothing, which she said didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. She implored me to breathe and told me she would be back to check on me. This was in 2007, before smartphones could entertain us, and so I eavesdropped. The curtains were thin, and apparently everyone else there knew enough not to come to the emergency room by themselves. A woman on the other side of the curtain pleaded with the person she was with to stop touching “it.”

Eventually the doctor told me I was stable and could leave. My orders were to get an allergy test as soon as possible to sort out what had happened. I didn’t yet know that the allergy test was going to raise more questions than it would answer.

After the doctor left, I weighed whether I should splurge on another cab. The thought of riding the subway seemed daunting after what I had just been through, but I was fine, wasn’t I? The woman next to me urge her loved one to stop doing whatever he was doing again. The attentive badgering made me suddenly desperate for my own mother, who had been gone six years at that point. My mother was the one who always told my sister and me to treat ourselves after we’d been through something hard, but my father’s voice, the practical one, also loomed large in my head. I was 30 years old, wishing my mother were alive to give me permission to take a cab.

At that moment, nothing seemed sadder to me than sitting in that hospital, alone, convinced that but for a dose of Benadryl, I would be dead.

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…

‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”

Members of the US Camel Corps in the southwestern desert, 1857. (MPI/Getty Images & Random House)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words)

Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. We’d even forgive a sophomore slump. Fortunately for us, her novel Inland bears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor.

While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Camel Corps. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)

As you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water; her two grown sons soon follow. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps — led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali — and bonds with his trusty camel Burke.

Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has “reinvented” a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility — possibly the oldest American tradition. I asked Obreht about her novel over caffeinated cocktails in Manhattan. Read more…

When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

Read more…

The Reluctant Propagandist

Illustration by Saman Sarheng

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4149 words)

 

It’s 7 a.m. in Kabul. As usual, hundreds of thousands of cars are stuck in traffic jams around the city, where police checkpoints, Humvees, and blast walls congest the perilous streets. Taxi drivers in faded yellow Corollas roll up their windows and try to shoo off street children blowing heady incense — meant to ward off evil spirits — inside their cars. Policemen yell “boro, boro” (move) through the loudspeakers of their dark-green pickups. Fruit sellers calmly navigate the madness, pushing heavy carts laden with dark-red pomegranates, juicy grapes, and Pakistani mangoes while dust lingers in the air behind them.

Here, nothing is ever certain: Any minute, a bomb could go off, destroying families, livelihoods, and hopes.

Read more…

‘Victims Become This Object of Fascination… This Silent Symbol.’

Dessert, c 1923, by Frederick G Tutton. (The Royal Photographic Society Collection/Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Getty Images)

Jonny Auping | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,848 words)

 

While reading Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites, there will probably be a point when you’ll think to yourself, “This person is obsessed.” You might be referring to any one of the book’s real life characters who took their obsession with violence to its most illogical extreme. You might actually be referring to Monroe herself, who doesn’t shy away from the notion that she might still have been digging deeply into these stories of bloodshed even if there were never a book to tell them through. Or, you might realize that you planned to sit down and read for only 20 minutes, but it’s been over an hour and you can’t tear yourself away.

Questions about the nature of obsession permeate Savage Appetites, which tells the stories of four women whose connections to violent crimes — either as investigator, killer, defender, or victim — became the obsessive center of their universes. Monroe, whose stories have been featured at places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly, also weaves in personal experiences and historical context in order to take a macro-view of the true crime genre. What are the causes of our obsession with violent crime and, perhaps more importantly, what are the political and sociological consequences of it? Read more…