Search Results for: memoir

The Kidnapping Case: Seizure and Recovery

Solomon [Northup], the subject of the following narrative, is a free colored citizen of the United States; was born in Essex County, New York, about the year 1808; became early a resident of Washington County, and married there in 1829. His father and mother resided in the county of Washington about fifty years, till their decease, and were both free. With his wife and children he resided at Saratoga Springs in the Winter of 1841, and while there was employed by two gentlemen to drive a team South, at the rate of a dollar a day. In fulfilment of his employment he preceded to New York, and having taken out free papers, to show that he was a citizen, he went on to Washington City, where he arrived the second day of April, the same year, and put up at Gadsby’s hotel. Soon after he arrived, he felt unwell and went to bed.

While suffering with severe pain some persons came in, and, seeing the condition he was in, proposed to give him some medicine and did so. That is the last thing of which he had any recollection until he found himself chained to the floor of Williams’ slave pen in this City, and hand-cuffed. In the course of a few hours, James H. Burch, a slave-dealer, came in, and the colored man asked him to take the irons off from him, and wanted to know why they were put on. Burch told him it was none of his business. The colored man said he as free and told where he was born. Burch called in a man by the name of Ebenezer Rodbury, and they two stripped the man and laid him across a bench, Rodbury holding him down by his writs. Burch whipped him with a paddle until he broke that, and then with a cat-o’-nine tails, giving him a hundred lashes, and he swore he would kill him if he ever stated to any one that he was a free man.

– From the New York Times’ 1853 coverage of the Solomon Northup case. That same year, Northup published a best-selling memoir of his kidnapping into slavery, and remarkable escape. 161 years later, the film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave won Best Picture at the Oscars.

Image: British Library, Flickr

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‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’

Longreads Pick

Cartoonist Roz Chast’s illustrated memoir on the final years of her parents’ lives.

It’s no accident that most consumer ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. For one thing, they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents’ stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at YOUR stuff in the same way.

Author: Roz Chast
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 7, 2014

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The Feel Of Nothing: A Life In America’s Batting Cages

Steve Salerno Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words)

Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and media at Lehigh University. This essay first appeared in the Missouri Review (subscribe here!). Thanks to Salerno for allowing us to reprint it here.

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Observed on video at half-speed, through the metal lattice-work of the batting cage, it is a perfectly choreographed pas de deux of man and machine. While the machine readies the pitch, the man executes the idiosyncratic but vital preparatory movements of torso and hand that jump-start his batting rhythm; he leans forward, then rocks his weight back, the bat wavering in a narrow arc above his head much as the young palms visible in the background yield to the soft ocean breezes—slightly forward of true vertical, slightly aft, slightly forward again. As the dimpled yellow ball shuffles down that last segment of the feeder sleeve toward the pair of spinning wheels that will propel it homeward, the batter’s hands twist around the axis of the lower wrist in a subtle cocking mechanism; when the ball drops between the wheels and disappears for an instant, the batter’s front foot lifts, then returns to earth perhaps six inches beyond its initial resting place; the bat itself remains well back, high over the rear shoulder, in obeisance to an ancient admonition—“hips before hands.”

Even in slo-mo, the swiftness of the ball’s flight to the plate startles. At first it seems that there’s no way the man can snap the bat down and around his body fast enough to intercept the sphere (which actually, now, more resembles a yellow antiaircraft tracer) before it blurs by him…. But no, he starts his swing, his lower body leading the way, pivoting sharply on the front foot—now—and in fact, somehow manages to confront the pitch out
 ahead of the ersatz plate. If you pause the video at this precise point—that millisecond before impact—you marvel at the fact that, slicing through the strike zone, the bat, despite being molded from a single sheet of metal, is no longer a straight, rigid line. Rather, the bat- head clearly lags behind the handle in its travel to the ball, a vivid manifestation of the explosive torque all good hitters rely on for generating power. An instant later, post-contact, the ball too is misshapen, flattened on the impact side, shooting off the bat in a shallow upward arc with such velocity that it appears to leave a comet-like contrail in its wake.

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Gary Shteyngart on the Highest Form of Tragedy

The funnier you are, the more I think there’s a tragic undercurrent. … I think humor is one of the highest forms of tragedy there is. People talk about the serious novel and these sort of hallowed tones and how important it is, but I think a lot of humorous stuff — books by writers like Sam Lipsyte and even writers like Mordecai Richler in Canada, who is no longer with us — these are some of the most funny and tragic books I know because humor doesn’t work unless you’re making fun of something that keeps paper cutting you throughout your life, something that keeps hurting and hurting you; and that’s why parents, and relationships, and the political system are all such delicious targets.

—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure, on the To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast, talking about humor as tragedy. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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What High Schoolers Should Be Reading

“Just maybe the novel is not the best device for transmitting ideas, grand themes, to hormonal, boisterous, easily distracted, immature teenagers. Maybe there is a better format and genre to spark a love of reading, engage a young mind, and maybe even teach them how to write in a coherent manner. Thankfully this genre exists: It’s called non-fiction.

“Journalism, essay, memoir, creative nonfiction: These are only things I started reading as an adult because of how little I enjoyed reading novels in high school. Surely, the un-made-up stuff would be more of a bore, I thought. Yet when I finally read In Cold BloodInto Thin Air, the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, I continually pleaded aloud to my friends in their twenties, ‘Why didn’t anyone make me read this in high school?!'”

Natasha Vargas-Cooper eviscerates the high school reading list on Bookforum‘s blog.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Study of Hidden Animals

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I spent this morning exploring The Museum of Unnatural History in Washington D.C. Fueled by the likes of Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and Paul Simon, the museum is the storefront for 826DC, which holds workshops and tutors local kids in creative writing and reading. A venue combining my fascination with cryptozoology, contemporary literature, and teaching kids to write? Sounds positively mythical.

But I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, since middle school; I devoured Paul Zindel’s Loch and Reef of Death. In college, I read that essayist and poet Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary, said, “I hope there is an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen.  And I hope nobody ever sees it.” A week ago, Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” proposed to his fiancé at Loch Ness. And today I admired stencils of chupacabras and jars of unicorn burps. Cryptozoology reveals all the best and worst parts of human nature, and it makes for great storytelling.

1. “The Private Lives of the Cryptozoologists.” (Martin Connelly, The Morning News, March 2013)

Step into the cabinet of curiosities: The International Cryptozoology Museum is in Portland, Maine. It’s stuffed with artifacts ranging from a taxidermy Bigfoot to children’s drawings to blurry photos. It’s staffed by sweater vest-clad Loren Coleman, a foremost authority on cryptozoology and a wonderful tour guide.

2. “Bigfoot.” (Robert Sullivan, Open Spaces Magazine, 2012)

Sullivan interviews several of the men most invested in finding Sasquatch; these profiles read like entries from a delightful almanac. Though their methods range from field work to anthropological study, these men share a rivalry with each other and anger toward the scientific community’s contempt for them.

3. “Dr. Orbell’s Unlikely Quest.” (Eric Karlan, All About Birds, Winter 2004)

Cryptozoology isn’t only Bigfoot and Nessie. These scientists are also interested in animals thought to be extinct. Here, Eric Karlan delves into Dr. Geoffrey Orbell’s triumphant search for the Takahe—a bright, flightless, stocky bird native to New Zealand, supposedly gone forever–which took over 40 years of scrupulous research in the face of naysayers.

4. “Loch Ness Memoir.” (Tom Bissell, Virginia Quarterly Review, August 2006)

With weird, wonderful humor, skeptic Tom Bissell explores Loch Ness with two writer friends and his childhood love of Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

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Photo: JD Hancock

How to Forgive Yourself

“I’ve never forgiven myself. I think eventually you realize that it’s just another form of self-indulgence to keep beating the shit out of yourself so you sort of try not to. If you fuel all of that guilt you’re going to be the guy who walks into a room who radiates self-loathing, which God knows I’ve been for years before I realized people were passing out whenever I walked into a room. I think you do it as much for other people because it just becomes a fucking bore to carry that cross around.”

-Author Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight, Happy Mutant Baby Pills) on The Nerdist podcast. Read more on forgiveness.

(h/t contexual_life)

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013: 22 Outstanding Book Chapters We Featured This Year

This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…