Search Results for: marriage

Fruitland

Photo by David Black, via Light in the Attic Records

Steven KurutzTrue Story | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words)

 

Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.

This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.

Read more…

Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, 1930. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,079 words)

There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes comic strip where Calvin says, “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed… Verbing weirds language.” With Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s sixth book and first novel in nine years, he has once again weirded language into an inimitable comic brio, capturing the roiling mess of late-capitalist/early-apocalypse America, and making us laugh while he pulls it off.

Here’s Lipsyte on Dieter Delgado, a titan of industry with a deep misreading of Naomi Klein: “Dieter hails from the throw-it-all-at-the-wall school. One war, one earthquake, one tsunami, one pandemic, one dating app and, assuming you are well positioned, you can cover your losses and get mega-rich all over again, ad mega-infinitum. Deets read a book about this that inspired him to seek out more catastrophe. The next hemoclysm may make him the world’s first trillionaire.” Read more…

‘She changed my heart. And that changed my mind.’

Photo by Barry King/WireImage

At 33, Tabitha Blankenbiller believed she didn’t want any children, until — unexpectedly — she became pregnant. In this essay at Salon, Blankenbiller considers how the simple existence of her unborn child changed her perspective on motherhood and life, causing her to reconsider choices and beliefs, only to discover that just when she’d decided that this particular lemon would make great lemonade, sometimes life decides for you.

Think of how many passages you breach in a day. The driver’s door to your car. The turnstile of your favorite park. The impatient elevators of your building. The generous slide of the grocery store’s glass. Out of the bedroom, into the living room. One side of the tunnel, out the other. Hundreds of transitions switching backdrops, edging us forward in the routine, the occasional fresh adventure.

One in ten thousand will bookend us. We will pass through as one thing and emerge another. It will mark our Before and After. That day at work, I entered the single stall private bathroom as a drama queen clutching her pearls over a period missing for a scant blip of a week to take a test she’d managed to skip for an entire adult lifetime of Match.com horror stories and marriage and college, and then grad school bad jobs and dream vacations, first essay published and first book released, canning and handwriting and Thai cooking lessons, 40 pounds up and down five times over.

I peed on the stick, then set it on the counter while I played a game of Disney Emoji Blitz on my phone. The timer cut in for my three minutes, and I tilted the test toward me to discover the faintest line severing the woman I knew into another.

This was impossible. I took a picture in a haze and sent it to my best friend Charlotte, a parent of two.

Holy shit yeah, that is pregnant, she confirmed.

We weave hypotheticals of our lives, speaking over one another to announce what we’d do if it were us. We make lists, connections, promises. For 33 years I ran the simulation in my head of that improbable second line, and decided each time, without fail, that I did not want a child. I believed they were too expensive. I believed my life was already fulfilling and content. I believed that not all women should be mothers. I believed that the capacity and consumption of our species is unsustainable on this planet, and that some flavor of doom is inevitable. I believed that abortion is healthcare, a procedure that does not require an explanation to receive. I believed that a zygote is not a person, and a four-week-old clump of cells is a precursor to human life.

All of these convictions are still accurate. I stand by each one.

But there is the question, what would you do, and there is what happens when a sudden, impending new reality forks your life in two. Our hearts are a vast trove of too many secret reactions and desires to discover in a lifetime. And what I realized about myself is this: that I cannot name a time I have been happier than standing in our backyard gripping the back of the patio chair, demanding that Matt needed to listen to me.

“We have to keep it. I love her already.”

Read the story

The Silence of Women

A scold's bridle. From The Strand Magazine:, July to December, 1894. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Jane Brox| an excerpt adapted from Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Januray 2019 | 15 minutes (4,034 words)



What becometh a woman best, and first of all? Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie I would still crie silence, silence.

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560


For women, silence within the world of judicial punishment has its own complex history. It’s less recorded than that of men, and fragmented. Details must be teased out of obscurity and can be distorted by what is absent. Often, there are more questions than answers for punishment that amounts to silencing on top of silence, since women have long been expected to govern their tongue.

In colonial America this presumption of silence was reinforced by women’s subordinate place in society, and bolstered by centuries of English common law. No woman had the right to vote and once she married — in an age when most women married — she became subject to the law of coverture, which meant that she not only became dependent on her husband but, as William Blackstone in his eighteenth-century work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, explains: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing, and is therefore called in our law — French, a femme covert… under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” Read more…

Foreign Bodies

Longreads Pick

Immigration law isn’t keeping up with reproductive technology — it’s hamstringing the citizenship rights of children not born to married, fertile, heterosexual parents, and showing us that marriage equality in the U.S. isn’t equal in all ways.

Author: Raj Telhan
Source: VQR
Published: Dec 13, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,739 words)

The 25 Most Popular Longreads Exclusives of 2018

Our most popular exclusive stories of 2018. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

1. Who Does She Think She Is?

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

The internet does not hate women. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity.

2. No, I Will Not Debate You

Laurie Penny | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,795 words)

Civility will never defeat fascism, no matter what The Economist thinks. Read more…

A Woman’s Work: The Outside Story

All artwork by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | January 2019 | 23 minutes (5,775 words)

When I freelanced as a “fit model” in the early aughts (the unglamorous kind of modeling that helps patternmakers adjust their patterns to fit humans correctly) I signed a contract with my agency that legally bound me to “maintain” my “appearance” while they represented me. My skin, all my visible hair (on my head, my eyebrows, my legs, armpits, and face), as well as my weight and several key body measurements all fell under this rubric.

There is nothing unreasonable about this: the main part of the job, besides the obvious — trying clothing on for patternmakers to see if there’s anything in an item that needs correcting, to avoid producing thousands of flawed garments — is to make sure your body is always the same so that a designer can produce clothing that is a consistent fit. The unspoken truth is that even though it’s technically only about measurements, it wouldn’t do to show up without a minimum of good hair and makeup, looking as attractive as you possibly can with whatever looks you pulled in the Lotto of good looks. This goes for all size categories, from junior to plus size.

Accordingly, my accountant and I came up with a deductible category we called “maintenance” — well, I came up with it and she translated it into the IRS-accepted language — and under this category I placed gym membership expenses, haircuts (and eventual hair color as I aged, because my gray hairs upset some designers even if their clothes still fit me perfectly), mani-pedis, and occasional waxing for lingerie and swimwear jobs. I might even have been able to get Botox deducted if I’d kept doing the job long enough. I left it to my accountant to decide what I could legally include.

For context, just because most people are curious about the job description, the ideal fit model has a body that isn’t extraordinary in any way. I was a size 6/junior medium, a size for which there’s a relatively small market, so I didn’t work 9 to 5 like a size 10 or a size 18W would have. This was what made the job perfect for a cartoonist/writer like me.

It was extremely enjoyable to be able to deduct these expenses for that relatively brief period of my life as a woman. It never escaped my ironic notice that with few exceptions, most women feel contractually bound to maintain their appearance in all the same ways I had to as a pro, while paying for it all on a sliding scale from “religiously” to “happily” to “begrudgingly,” usually depending on the amount of social and financial power they are born into or acquire through hard work or marriage.


Read more…

A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Girl

Image courtesy Marlene Adelstein / Portrait by Aaron Kurzen

Marlene Adelstein | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,190 words)

When Mom sees me, a big smile lights up her face, her blue eyes shine bright, and I give her a hug and kiss. “Hi, Connie,” I say. Although she doesn’t know me any more as her daughter, she seems to recognize my face. I’ve flown down to Florida to visit her in the assisted living facility where, until last year, she lived with my dad. When he suddenly got an infection and needed to be hospitalized, Mom, who has late-stage Alzheimer’s, couldn’t be left alone. It was clear what needed to happen. We moved her one floor down to the locked memory care unit, a necessity that was long overdue. My dad had been her caregiver since her diagnosis but the last couple of years she’d simply become too much for him. He recovered from the infection and moved back to the facility but into a smaller apartment, a one bedroom, where he lived alone for about five months until he had a sudden, dramatic decline in his health and, at 89, died.

Once she moved to memory care, Mom would often ask for my dad by his name, Bernard. He was the last person she remembered. But lately she has asked for Bernard less frequently and now when she sees me she says, “Have you seen the other guy?”

“No,” I say cheerfully. “I came to see you! Want to go out to lunch?” Redirecting is the name of the game to avoid the extremely unpleasant outbursts which my mom is known for. A few times a week she sets off the alarm by opening the door to the stairwell while trying to leave the floor, yelling and flailing as the staff restrains her. Exit seeking, the staff calls it. Connie wants to see her mother, who she claims lives across the street. She shoves caregivers away or pounds on the window overlooking the rehab wing my dad was in for many weeks, where she often visited him. Mother, I’m guessing, represents her husband, her children…home.

Back in her studio apartment after lunch, I give her a book called “Bear Hugs,” a small board book meant for very young children. It contains drawings of animals and the various cute nicknames their loved ones call them. I read it aloud with exaggerated expressions, acting it out. “You’re super cute and cuddly, as sweet as pumpkin pie.” When I get to the end where a mama bear grabs her baby in a bear hug, I demonstrate on her, which makes Mom giggle and smile. She loves that part. “That is so sweet,” she says and she flips through the book. She quickly forgets that we just read it so I go to the beginning and read it to her again. She loves being held and I have to admit, I like it too. I was never particularly close to her but in recent years that’s changed as our roles have reversed and I’ve had to care for this mom-child.

“You’re good,” she says to me after the third time through the book. “Well, thank you,” I say. “So are you,” and again, I get that brilliant smile out of her.

Later when I am getting ready to leave the facility, always a dicey situation, I tell her I have to say goodbye. Sadness descends over her like a curtain and I think she’s going to cry. I give her an effusive bear hug, holding my mother the way I would have held the child I never had. When she asks for her mother and “what’s his name,” I rock her back and forth as if playing a game until I am able to cajole that smile again. “I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise,” I say.

The elevator is taking forever to come so I punch in the code to disarm the alarm and duck into the stairwell to hide my tears, the door clicking shut behind me. I hear Mom screaming “Let me go, I want to go home!” and when the alarm goes off I realize she’s tried to follow me out the door.
Read more…

They Wanted Her Body

A family member shows pictures of slain fashion model Qandeel Baloch, July 22, 2016. Associated Press.

Rafia Zakaria | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,450 words)

It happened in July, amid the sweltering summer heat of the plains of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. It was one of those days when sweat flows in streams, the beads of depleted moisture dripping down backs and armpits and foreheads as people walk and talk and complain about the heat as if it were a newcomer among them.

The murdered woman was Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani YouTube sensation, whose risqué videos, laden with erotic subtext, had so angered her brother that he strangled her to death. The deed was done late on the night of July 15th. It was late in the morning of the 16th when the first reporter from Pakistan’s rapacious 24-hour news media arrived in the neighborhood.

That journalist was Arif Nizami. After receiving an anonymous tip, he raced to the area and demanded of passersby that he be taken to the “Karachi Hotel.” “This is Karachi-Hotel,” some sympathetic soul finally told him, “the whole neighborhood is Karachi-Hotel.” The comic absurdity of this moment, while an apt metaphor for a country bewildered by looking at itself — especially in the new ways made possible by the internet, ways at which Qandeel Baloch excelled — is a contrast to the tragic scenes that were to follow, all painstakingly recreated in Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher’s book The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch. The book tells an extraordinary story: Qandeel Baloch’s internet fame was built almost entirely from suggestive innuendo-laden videos, shot and shared late at night when millions of Pakistani men go online in search of sexual satisfaction. Qandeel knew that this audience was out there, and in speaking directly to them she captured their erotic imagination.

Tragically for Qandeel Baloch, what Pakistani men love to love in private, they love to excoriate in public. Sexual fantasies, or the women who are part of them, must be shamed with the same ferocity with which their bodies are lusted after. It was this truth which led to Qandeel’s death that summer day, a grisly mix of rage and misogyny ending with her brother’s hands around her neck. In the hours after Arif Nizami arrived at the scene, a sweaty mob of media men crowded before the door of the house where Qandeel lay dead, her body already swollen from heat and decay as the temperature rose. The male gaze, lust-laden in life, had turned voyeuristic in death, the journalists, most of them men, clamoring and pushing and shoving to get a shot of her corpse. Read more…

Losing the Plot

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Sari Botton | Longreads | December 2018 | 23 minutes (5,667 words)

When I graduate from college in May of 1987, I receive a call from the Sephardic Brotherhood, an organization of which my father is a lifelong member. After congratulating me on this milestone, the man on the phone suggests I begin planning for another bigger one down the road: Would I like to be buried in their section of a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey? If I sign up now, I can lock into their special rate of just $90 per year.

I’m only 22 at the time, but I’ve just put myself through four years of college by working and scrimping and saving and worrying, and damn if I don’t recognize a bargain when I hear it — not to mention an opportunity to gain a sense of control over something. I mail off a check and then go about the business of hunting for my first real job in journalism; beginning my adult life while responsibly covering my bases for the end of it.

~

Two years later I marry for the first time, and the Sephardic Brotherhood calls again. Would I like to have my husband — he’s 25 — buried beside me?

“Hang on,” I say to the man on the other end. “Honey?? Do you want to be buried with me in the Sephardic part of a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey? It’s $90 a year.”

“I don’t know,” my husband shouts from another room in our small apartment. “Can we think about it?”

“I’ll get back to you,” I tell the man.

That weekend, at dinner with my in-laws, we inform them of the wonderful opportunity before us. “What?!” my mother-in-law shrieks. “But we’re already paying for plots for you — and your children — with the Shpitzernitzer* Society!”

(*In America from the late 19th to the early 20th Century, European Jewish immigrants formed hundreds of groups like the Shpitzernitzer Society and the Sephardic Brotherhood. Originally these societies served multiple purposes — helping members find jobs, learn English, and navigate immigration issues and assorted other legal matters. Many also became discount burial plot brokers.)

It’s news to us that our corpses and those of our theoretical future children are already spoken for, but we aren’t about to argue over it. On Monday I call the Brotherhood and cancel my burial plan. They issue a full refund.

~

Read more…