Search Results for: language

The Life-Changing Magic of Getting In Line at 5AM

Photo by Yoshikazu Takada via Flickr (CC -BY-2.0)

Helen Rosner traveled to Tokyo on short notice and with no dinner reservations — and that means the best food requires waiting in lines. A lot of lines. Long ones. In an essay for AFAR, the die-hard line-avoider describes her gradual acclimatization to a country whose language includes the phrase gyouretsu no dekiru mise: “restaurants that have very long lines.” In the end, she found herself calmly waiting for more than a great bowl of ramen.

I was in Tokyo for the very end of actual sakura season, when the city’s abundant cherry trees bedeck the streets with a riot of pink. In anticipation, I’d packed a Canon A-1, a petite brick of a camera from the late ’70s that shoots 35mm film and runs about 50 bucks at a used camera store. I hadn’t photographed that way in years, and as I committed myself ever more deeply to my new practice of patience, shooting on film became a pleasing part of it. A 40-year-old camera has no LCD screen with instant preview—I couldn’t know which vignettes of Tokyo I was successfully capturing, and which would be preserved only in memory. Unlike enjoying the seemingly infinite capacity of a DSLR with a 128-gigabyte memory card, when you shoot film, you can only shoot so much. Each frame is precious, which means you need to make it worth it. You need to wait for the shot.

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Sh*t or Get Off the Composter

A small wooden shed sits in the middle of a grassy field. A sign over the door says "outhouse."
Everything old is new again! (Photo by Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0.)

We all poop, every day (hopefully!). That’s a lot of poop to deal with, and more and more people are asking whether there’s something useful we can do with it, or, at the very least, if we can dispose of it in a more sensible way. At Wired UK, Phoebe Braithwaite talks with some of the folks trying to figure out how to teach the world saner ways to deal with poop — or as they’d prefer to call it, shit.

“Defecating in drinking water is a kind of insane thing that the Romans taught us,” Klehm says. George agrees: “I don’t think that the fundamental principle of mixing shit with drinking water and then paying a lot of money and using a lot of energy to remove the shit from drinking water is necessarily the best idea,” says George. “But it’s too late, it’s not going to be retrofitted.”

The UK is, George says, a faecalphobic culture: we don’t like talking or thinking about faeces and the flaws in our sewage system go broadly unacknowledged. “We have an aversion to coming into close contact with faeces, we want it to be flushed away and we want it to not smell and we want to not think about it,” she says. One of the measures of our failure to get to grips with it is in the language we use. None of our tools, she says, quite work: poop and poo are pretty childish; faeces and excrement are too medical; waste is wrong. The only appropriately direct term, thinks Rose George, is shit.

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This Month In Books: ‘Name the Very Specific Situation Around You’

Photo: Bruno Guerreiro / Getty Images

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about truth and lies, fact and fiction.

In his new book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt tells us Shakespeare was constantly asking himself the question, “Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to?” — plus a whole host of follow-up questions:

Why would anyone… be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

In Shakespeare’s view, Greenblatt goes on to say, the answer is pretty basic: because when tyranny is ascendant, everyone, from the counselors to the mob, is complicit, a complicity brought on by maliciousness, fear, or a total failure to come to terms with what is happening — and maybe even a bit of enjoyment of the spectacle.  

In her new book The Death of Truth (reviewed by Bridey Heing), Michiko Kakutani says the answer is perhaps more postmodern, citing this moment as emblematic of our times:

“When called out for claiming FBI statistics were only “theoretically true,” Newt Gingrich responded, “What I said was equally true. People feel it.”

The truth is what we feeland, conversely, anyone who describes how we feel seems to be telling the truth. In her critical takedown of Jordan Peterson’s work, Laurie Penny writes:

In times of angst and confusion, anyone who accurately describes how you feel will briefly seem like God’s own prophet. This, as any half-decent writer can tell you, is a talent that is extremely easy to abuse.


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Storytelling looks, suddenly, dangerousa way of creating truth through feeling rather than fact. In an interview with Hope Reese, Alice Bolin addresses this not as a practice of a single demagogue or huckster, but a whole society:

I think we need to take into consideration what stories have been told before, what stories have been told to death, and the kinds of messages that we’re sending by reusing these same tropes over and over.

In the detective stories we all love, in which a Dead Girl is discovered and her death is mysteriously unexplained, the tropes take on the status of myths, and the myths obfuscate two important truths about Dead Girlsthat normally their deaths are totally explainable, even predictable:

When we frame these murder stories as mysteries, we have to excise that part of the story that makes who did it obvious. If you watch Dateline or whatever, they say, “Oh, we always have to eliminate the people closest to the victim.” And they don’t exactly say: men are always murdering their wives.

And that when many Dead Girls turn up in one place, it’s not because one person is killing them, but because everyone is:

I feel like, often, the truth — like in the stories of the Juarez murders or the Highway of Tears in Canada — is that those are a lot of different murderers. The truth is that… the murderer is almost a collective of violent misogynists.  

Bolin is discussing the misrepresentation of truth in fiction — in an interview with Naomi Elias, Ingrid Rojas Contreras talks about the disintegration of truth in reality:

Your biggest worry when you’re living in a violent country is that you are not fast enough or smart enough to detangle what’s going on around you. You feel at all times like “maybe this is a dangerous situation, but I don’t have the power to know.”

She’s talking about the situation in Colombia during her childhood, under the thumb of Pablo Escobar. Stephen Greenblatt, speaking of Richard III, says the confusion cultivated by a dictator, the inability to know what is happening, causes many people living under tyranny to be unable to process facts or contemplate the obvious, even if their lives are in danger:

Then there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.

The tyrant, the liar who spreads confusion in order to prop up his own position, can, of course, exist on a much smaller scale. In fact, the tyrant can often be found in the home. Rafia Zakaria enumerates Hemingway’s emotional abuses of his wives and mistresses. He wrote the novel Across the River and Into the Sea while married to Mary Welsh Hemingway and conducting an affair with the much younger Adriana Ivancich. The book is dedicated to Mary, but is clearly a chronicle of his relationship with Adriana. His deceit snakes into the book and worms out as a revisionist history, fiction becoming a means to assuage a guilty conscience, to perpetuate and simultaneously reveal a lie, to gaslight some women:

When memorable moments with Adriana were not enough material, he borrowed them from moments that belonged to Mary, “an absolutely perfect present” selected and purchased for the latter becoming in the book an offering to the former.

Rojas Contreras addresses the dictator or strongman’s ability not just to use language for spreading confusion — such as, say, writing a novel in which he steals his wife’s memories and gives them to his mistress — but to warp the language of others around himself:

In the novel I call him the “King Midas of words,” and that’s true. If he had a lawyer in the news, they would call that lawyer a ‘narco-lawyer,’ and if he had an estate or farm they would call that the ‘narco-estate’ and they wouldn’t even reference Pablo Escobar, but it was understood by all the people watching the news that he had a hand in it somehow.

But Rojas Contreras also says that language will change to protect its users, to help them navigate a treacherous world:

As a writer I pay very close attention to words… There’s a way in which a very specific atmosphere of tension will give rise to new language in order to be more exact about where you are safe and where you are unsafe, in order to name the very specific situation around you.

 

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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How Women Survive the World: An Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,372 words)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drug lord Pablo Escobar ruled over all of Colombia as if it were his kingdom. Escobar’s lethal combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allowed him to evade capture for years. A real-life boogeyman, his presence altered the atmosphere, layering everyday Colombian life with toxic tension: an opposition leader looking to curb the expansion of Escobar’s drug empire was assassinated, communities were terrorized by car bombings, and paramilitary recruiters transformed young boys into cold-blooded soldiers. Fear and uncertainty were normal states of mind for people who grew up in this era, people like Colombian-born writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who channeled her memories of this formative chapter of her life into a captivating debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, we are introduced to the Santiago family; Chula, age 7, her sister Cassandra, age 9, and their parents, who all live together in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia. The Santiago family’s moderate wealth generally insulates them from contact with the criminal elements terrorizing the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, but this all changes when the family hires Petrona, a teenager from a poor guerilla-occupied slum, as their new maid.

At only thirteen Petrona is her family’s primary breadwinner, a burden that weighs heavily on her. Chula, enamored with the new occupant of her home, finds herself attempting to unravel the mystery that is Petrona, a girl of few words and many secrets. This curiosity eventually lands Chula in trouble — Petrona’s desperate attempts to juggle her duty to her family and her pursuit of the milestones of youth, like first love with a young guerrilla soldier, push her to engage in riskier and riskier behavior, and Chula’s deepening involvement entangles her in a violent conspiracy. Read more…

Weird in the Daylight

Photo by Todd Gunsher

Corbie Hill | No Depression | Spring 2018 | 20 minutes (4,135 words)

The apocalypse came early to Maiden Lane.

The houses on this short dead-end road stand empty and condemned, their doors yawning open and letting in the weather. Just a few hundred yards away, traffic buzzes on Hillsborough Street, a main thoroughfare in Raleigh, North Carolina, that borders N.C. State University. Here, though, everything is uninhabited and decaying. Someone has spray painted “fuck frats” in bold red across the face of the first house on the left, a little single-story blue place in the shadow of a spotless new building. Skillet Gilmore walks into the dilapidated structure without hesitation.

“Karl [Agell] from Corrosion [of Conformity] lived here,” he says. Then he goes room by room, naming other friends who lived in them in the 1990s.

The place is completely wrecked. The floors complain underfoot as if they could give way, and there are gaping holes where the heater vents used to be. The fireplaces have been disassembled with sledgehammers.

“Honestly, it doesn’t look that much worse than it did,” Gilmore offers.

He would know. The house Gilmore lived in at one point in the ‘90s is farther down Maiden Lane on the right. So he and Caitlin Cary, who both played in storied Raleigh alt-country band Whiskeytown and who now are married, lead me into that one, too, again going room by room and naming the previous occupants. A construction truck idles outside and across the street, but nobody comes out to tell us to leave. Nobody bothers us at all. Read more…

The Slow Regard of a Difficult Past

In this harrowing and brave essay at LitHub, Brandon Taylor examines his relationship with his his abusive mother, a woman who suffered her own trauma and begat that trauma within her family. He considers the fiction in the space between truth, memoir, and reality, and how when love turns to fear, emotional and physical violence is often the result.

What is love if you get it secondhand? Is it a fact or merely a detail?

I am more comfortable in fiction than in nonfiction. In fiction, you get to decide what is real and not real, what is true and not true, which details are facts and which are mere detail. In fiction, I am the discerning eye, the single source of truth. But when I tried to write about my mother, all my stories were flat. I couldn’t move her into fictional language, it seemed. Indeed, my journals about the days she died are full of details about the weather and the feeling that a chasm had opened up in me. I was trying in those early days to pin something down, to assemble a body of details that might give me some hint or clue of how to go on. I also felt that I had no right to feel that way, so sad about her, after all the hateful things I’d thought about her or been subjected to by her hands.

The thing that kept me from writing about her, about grief, in fiction was that I lacked genuine, human feeling for my mother. Or, no, that’s not true exactly. What I lacked was empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life. I couldn’t leave a space for her to be a person. I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone. That’s when the imagination begins to work, trying to sort things out, trying to get them right, to understand them. I couldn’t write fiction because I hadn’t yet mastered my own feelings. I couldn’t write fiction because I had not yet come to understand her or what her life had meant to her. I was solipsistic and righteous in my anger, my fear, my sadness. I missed all of the eerie symmetries between us—her trauma, my trauma, her rape, my rape, her anger, my anger. It’s not that I came to love her really. But I did learn to extend to her the same grace that my friends extended to me. That’s one of the beautiful things about writing, the way we learn about others and what that tells us about ourselves.

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A Woman’s Work: The Art of the Day Job

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | August 2018 | 19 minutes (4,656 words)

At first I was worried about saying my first day job was as a model in Paris, because I don’t want to infuriate people out there who have certain very hard-to-shake preconceptions (involving envy and scorn, simultaneously) about models and modeling. But you know what? Screw it. My first day job was as a model in Paris.

This is how it happened.

I was a fashion design student at Parson’s School of Design back in 1984. A reluctant one. I had wanted to go to SUNY Stonybrook to be an English Major, another thing that infuriates certain demographics, particularly the one my parents belong to: firmly middle class, non-college-educated first-generation Americans. They, with visions gleaned from TV sitcoms and 1950s movies of “mad men of advertising” in their heads, decided they’d rather see themselves dead — “over my dead body” said my father, only the second time in his life, the first being when I asked for bagpipe lessons — and made me go to art school instead. Who ever heard of that? But yes:

Dad: "I'm not paying to turn you into some kind of pathetic... English Major. Me, thinking: "There's got to be a way to judo-flip this crap to my advantage." Mom: You have talent! Why hide it under a bush?" Me: "So, I can draw. So what! And it's a bushel. Also way to abuse bible verses in the name of capitalism!"

I fought them to at least let me go to Parson’s, because of the BFA in Liberal Studies that was attached to the art degree on offer, unlike F.I.T. at the time, which only offered certificates but was cheaper and therefore more attractive to my dad. I posited that neither of my brothers wanted to attend college, and it wasn’t like I was asking to go to medical school, so they were getting off easy. Also, after raiding my dad’s dresser and finding his bank book, which explained why I’d been turned down for every kind of financial aid I’d applied for, I shamelessly blackmailed him with the terrifying specter of my mother’s rage if she were to find out he was limiting my access to a better, more high class diploma, which he could perfectly afford. Education was everything in our house, right up there next to financial security and a constant sense of unspecified shame.
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On the Origins of the Word ハーフ, or Hafu (Half): Belonging and Not Belonging at Once

Miss Japan Ariana Miyamoto at the Miss Universe pageant Sunday, Dec. 20, 2015, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

In the final installment of her Catapult column, “Mistranslate,” author Nina Coomes writes about the word, ハーフ, or hafu,“the Japanized pronunciation of the English word half. It is used primarily to describe biracial people who have one parent of European descent. While unraveling the word’s origins, Coomes thinks through evolving ideas of citizenship and beauty in Japan, and brings us along her journey to understand what it means to come from more than one place.

When I began writing these essays months ago, I wanted to write toward ease in an uneasy place. I was trying to reconcile my two tongues by going beyond the limits of dictionary definitions, telling stories of reverence and recognition along the way. I assumed my work would mean tying things together; taking what felt disparate and attempting to make it fit into a larger lexicon.

So I wrote the first essay, and the next, and the one after that, and what I thought was going to be a body of work focused on finding harmonies between two voices instead evolved into cacophony. I found myself scrawling a veritable dictionary of mistranslation in my notebook, the margins darkening as my handwriting turned frantic. It is actually laughable—I wanted to try to make my home in a place of mistranslation, and yet here I am surprised by the home I’ve begun to write.

Similarly, when I began writing about the term hafu, I initially thought I would write about an identity that was more than simply half of something, blending English and Japanese to explain the other. Instead what I’m finding is that I have no easy conclusion in any language. I am just beginning to sink my teeth into all the uncertainties I’m discovering.

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Eight Things You Need to Know About Me and the Beach

Matthew Brodeur / Unsplash

May-lee Chai | Longreads | July 2018 | 15 minutes (4,118 words)

When I was a junior in college, my father, mother, and brother took a trip to Hawaii. I didn’t go because I’d been named editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and needed to be at school before the semester started. I needed to get the first issue out for freshmen orientation. I also needed the money. My parents weren’t paying for my college, and I needed every little bit of cash that I could get.

While she was in Hawaii, my mother called me at my dorm to tell me about the trip. Only recently had my mother overcome her severe fear of flying and she still had a kind of ecstatic quality to her voice that I associated with the extreme highs that followed her moments of panic or fear.

“It’s beautiful! This is my place,” she declared. “The flowers, all the flowers, everywhere!”

She then proceeded to tell me how lovely she found Honolulu — the sunlight, the birds of paradise and jasmine and red ginger and hibiscus and bougainvillea, the white sand, the warm ocean. After seven years in the Midwest, seven years of blizzards and tornadoes followed by more blizzards and more tornadoes, she was sick of weather that rotated from one extreme of discomfort to the other.

“And they like me here! I went out into the water, Papa was on the beach, you know he won’t get wet, and Jeff wasn’t feeling well, he was in the room, so I went by myself into the ocean, and I was just splashing the water over my arms, it felt so good, and a white woman came up to me. She said, ‘Aloha! Welcome!’ Then she leaned in close to me and said, ‘We whites have to stick together against the Asian invasion.’” My mother was ecstatic. “She liked me! They like me here!” Read more…

Bridget Jones’s Staggeringly Outdated Diary

Miramax Films / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,918 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

I spent most of the ‘90s smoking and being a poseur, but in between packs of Gauloises I also read a lot, so long as it wasn’t the books that my teachers and professors assigned. My literature of choice was all about the same thing: cool contemporary adults wigging out about their relationships, a genre that would soon fall under the terms “chick lit” (see: Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996) and its somewhat lesser-known counterpart, “dick lit” (see: Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, 1995).

Bridget Jones was acid-tongued but also prone to disastrous pratfalls, just like me! And High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming was unambitious and antisocial, just like me! I loved these protagonists so much, in fact, that when I stood in front of a chagrined Hornby at a signing in New York and thrust out my dog-eared copy of his book, I proclaimed that it had “helped me through some very difficult times,” and then I smoked a cigarette indoors, and everyone seemed pleased, especially me. In revisiting these tomes of my youth as an aging poseur, I’ve had both a not-insubstantial craving for nicotine and a series of horrifying revelations. Namely, these books — despite their cool Gen-X setting, cool Gen-X props (cigarettes), and cool Gen-X openness about failure — are some inveterate Baby Boomer bullshit.

Reader, if you think I’m aiming to incite a Quarrel of the Ancients and the Even More Ancients, you are correct. These cool Gen-X novels, written by people born in 1958 (Fielding) and 1957 (Hornby), are basically different iterations of a familiar Boomer trope. It’s the same romantic wish fulfillment — the uncomplicated, largely imaginary, white-bourgeois heterosexual sort — you find in the offensive and pre-antiquated self-help bestsellers of the same decade, namely The Rules (Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, 1995) and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (John Gray, 1992).

Whereas the Gen-X motto of whatever encapsulated the extent of our desire to mitigate other people’s love lives and often our own, our elders — unencumbered by slackitude; seemingly aghast at our normalization of casual sex — saw in us a deep and aching need for what the Germans call das Happyend. Romantic fatalists of the ‘90s needn’t worry, you guys! For every (white, bourgeois, heterosexual) romantic problem that appeared in our midst and on our bestseller lists, there was a corresponding solution straight outta Levittown.

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