Search Results for: memory

Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

* * *

Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair)

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe.

75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis.

It took way too much Black death to get here.

I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all.

Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice.

Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all.

The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write.

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

Read more…

“Over a Glass of Wine and a Pint on a Quiet Friday Night”

(Photo by Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

At a campsite in Dutch Limburg, as Eoghan Walsh drinks industrial Dutch Lager and snacks on sour cream and onion Pringles, he remembers his mother, who died of cancer at age 47. In this piece at Good Beer Hunting, he recounts that the “beer-suffused memories provoked by that sensory encounter in the Dutch campsite stand out so starkly because they were rare flickers of joy or irreverence in an otherwise unhappy childhood.”

I remember the gray Friday afternoon, sitting with her in that quiet room when it was done, and me mumbling inane banalities about the important life events she would never see and the ones I was so grateful that she had, her face slack and relaxed and impassive.

That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death.

I miss her. Not every day, but enough to entertain the odd melancholic notion of how her life and mine might have turned out had she survived the intervening decade, and what parenting advice she might be able to impart—were I in a mood to listen—over a glass of wine and a pint on a quiet Friday night.

For one, the beer-suffused memories provoked by that sensory encounter in the Dutch campsite stand out so starkly because they were rare flickers of joy or irreverence in an otherwise unhappy childhood. Whether I have been successful or not in my attempts to break with my past in my six years as a father, I have tried to will into existence an environment for my children that is more carefree, warmer, and more predictable than the one I endured. It is also a childhood in which beer is much more present.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mosi Secret, David Farrier, Ferris Jabr, Blake Butler, and Eoghan Walsh.

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

1. Visible Men: Black Fathers Talk About Losing Sons to Police Brutality

Mosi Secret | GQ | December 10, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,072 words)

“We asked the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake to reflect on the violence that forever altered their families’ lives—and what it means to raise a Black man in America.”

2. Hand in Glove

David Farrier | Orion Magazine | September 10, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,967 words)

“And, formed as they are from durable polymers and loaded with toxic plasticizers and other chemicals, plastic gloves can last for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Yet in discarding them (or any plastic object, come to that), we act as if none of this touches us.”

3. The Social Life of Forests

Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | December 2, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,916 words)

“Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?”

4. Molly

Blake Butler | The Volta | December 1, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,486 words)

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.

5. If Proust Ate Pringles — On Memory, Loss, and the Persistence of Heineken

Eoghan Walsh | Good Beer Hunting | December 8, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

“That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death.”

The Secrets of a Hidden Diary

Courtesy of Christina Lalanne

When writer Christina Lalanne bought an old house in San Francisco, she was sure it had a story to tell. What she didn’t expect was that the story would come to her in actual words. As Lalanne details in “Castles in the Sky,” her story for The Atavist Magazine*, the words were written in a diary and in letters that fell from the ceiling of the house’s basement while she and her husband were renovating it. The documents had been hidden for more than a century, stashed away by the man who built the house in 1910. His name, Hans Jorgen Hansen, was inscribed in the diary, which was mostly composed in Danish, but he wasn’t the only person to write in it. So did a woman named Anna—a fact Lalanne found odd, given that Hans’s wife was named Christine:

What drama or scandal was locked in these pages? Handwriting is a funny thing, not least because few people read it much anymore. Anna’s was neat, polite, and comfortably contained by the page. Hans, whose writing made up 90 percent of our find, had a bolder stroke. His flourishes veered maddeningly into indecipherability. In places, the pressure he exerted on his pen had made the ink pool and the letters bleed.

I sent a few diary passages to various Danish friends of friends, but while the language was theirs, none wanted to spend the time required to decipher such baroque penmanship. Frustrated, I made out the letters as best I could and typed the words they seemed to form into Google Translate. At first what came back was gibberish. But the longer I spent with the words, the more of them I got right, and the more the translator divulged actual language. I was also becoming familiar with Hans’s scrawl. His “D” was the longest, most elegant version of that letter I’d ever seen. It marked the beginning of the diary entry in which he lovingly recalled meeting Anna when they were children.

I eventually typed every word from the diaries and letters—some 20,000 in all—into the translator, and a picture of Hans and Anna’s story began to come into focus. Mat and I also did some genealogical research, amassing supporting facts. I found documentation of Anna and her grandmother’s 1897 passage to New York via Ellis Island. I found the household in St. Joseph, Michigan, where Anna was employed. I found evidence of Hans’s departure from Denmark after his stint in Faaborg—a voyage to Sydney, Australia, and onward to Brisbane—as well as his death certificate and a record of his grave just outside San Francisco, which we visited. We reconstructed Hans’s family tree and found a great-grandson on Facebook. We learned that Hans had three children with the woman named Christine, and that their marriage ended in divorce.

I was sure I knew why: Hans and Anna could only love each other. What then had kept them apart?

“Castles in the Sky” is a love story intertwined with Lalanne’s meditation on her relationship with the past, including the loss of her parents when she was still in grammar school. Through dogged sleuthing and poignant reflection, she seeks to unravel the mystery of what happened to Hans and Anna:

I have a vivid memory, early one morning when my father was in the hospital, of my uncle making his way up the carpeted stairs to the bedrooms where my siblings and I slept. I was nine years old. I knew my uncle was bringing bad news. How is that possible, to just know? Maybe his steps were slower or heavier than normal. Or maybe you can feel someone you love slipping away from this world.

Every few years I have a different experience of knowing. I’ll be in a crowd or walking down the street, and I’ll catch a glimpse of my mother or father. Something about the way they move or hold themselves or brush their hair from their face makes me certain. I’m wrong, of course, but the joy is true. If only for a moment, something I want seems real.

A similar thing happened when I finally found Anna. My trip to Denmark had furnished me with the facts that follow a person during their life, no matter where they end up. I knew Anna’s date of birth and the village where she was born and her date of entry into the United States. I knew that her father was Danish, her mother Swedish. I found her application for a passport. I looked at her picture, her dark hair and mournful eyes. She signed her name in the same meticulous way she had in Hans’s diary.

These facts are what made me sure that the Anna I came across on Ancestry.com was unmistakably, irrefutably her. My heart leaped in my chest. Then it fell, because of where I found her and what it might mean.

Read the story

*The author of this post is the editor in chief of The Atavist, which is Longreads’ sister publication.

Longreads Best of 2020: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

‘Transforming Craft Into An Act of Protest’: Embroidery In Response to Femicide in Mexico

Photo by Eva Elijas

In “Memory Weavers,” a piece in Hazlitt on the femicide crisis in Mexico, Amandas Ong writes about Bordamos Feminicidios, an embroidery collective that sews the stories of murdered women and, through their handmade creations, raises awareness of female-targeted violence.

There are only three basic requirements to be part of Bordamos Feminicidios, and for Minerva to assign you a story to embroider. First, the embroiderer must tell the narrative in first person. “I want them,” she says, “to really try and imagine the life of this woman, who we only know in her last moments.” To honor her is to build a profound empathy with the fantasy of a life fuller and more complex than a broken body. Second, the embroidery should be done on a pañuelo, a standard white handkerchief, though Minerva has begun allowing deviations to this rule, because she finds it endearing when the embroiderers add personal touches to their work. “I have received tablecloths or fabric of all shapes and sizes, stained with coffee and wine, with little cats and flowers sewn into the bottom,” she says. “I love it. It means that these women are working on the embroidery everywhere and whenever they can, and the decorative details are like little kisses to the deceased.” The third rule, she says, is that the words must be in purple.

Transforming craft into an act of protest against indifference, against the lack of willpower to reverse or address a societal ill, is something that Mexican women, and women around the world, are familiar with. For centuries both in reality and the literary imagination, women have been the faithful scribes of tales revealing personal and social resistance to injustice or oppression. They did not do this with pens, or quills, or rigid implements that were good for scratching script onto stone—all of these were traditionally believed to be instruments that wielded real power in the realm of the public, where only men’s words counted. Instead women spoke through the objects they had created with their hands, some of which would never cross the threshold of the home.

Read the story

‘My Tongue Swallowing the Taste of Home Soil’: On Filipino Food, Family, and Identity

WASHINGTON DC - September 5TH: Sisig from Purple Patch shot on September 5th, 2017 in Washington DC. (Photo by Goran Kosanovic for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

At The Margins — the online magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) — writer, filmmaker, and photographer Jill Damatac explores identity, colonalism, and memory through the lens of family and Filipino food. In “Dirty Kitchen,” Damatac shares two recipes — tinola, a ginger chicken soup; and sisig, a diced-up pork dish seasoned with calamansi juice, onions, and chili peppers — and weaves cooking instructions throughout sharp, sensory prose.

On the taste of tinola, and memories of her childhood:

When I was little, before I departed the sunny, Pacific chaos of our world for the chilly, Atlantic silence of the new world, we often had tinola for Sunday lunch at Lolo and Lola’s house, where I would spend weekends. In the early mornings, Lolo and I would stroll the barrio streets to buy fresh pandesal from the local bakery, me skipping along in mumbled song with the roosters, him punching the air with calisthenic fists, just as he had done with the American GIs during the war. In Pennsylvania, where he had followed us a year after we left, he would walk me to and from school, the two of us passing a bag of sticky, sour sampalok between us, spitting out the smooth, shiny seeds into our palms. He always wore his pristinely white Reeboks and sometimes his ten-gallon cowboy hat. I still remember my shame on the days he would arrive in that hat.

It was during those early years in the land of the free and the home of the brave that I first felt shame, which is a hunger for pride, and loneliness, which is a hunger for belonging. Tinola’s plain, clear-brothed, ginger-laced embrace helped to sate these hungers, my tongue swallowing the taste of home soil.

Sauté the garlic, ginger, and onion in oil in a large pot, stirring until soft. 

On sisig, but also colonialism, home, and identity:

“You want to know why my sisig is special?” Tito asked me recently over a sizzling plate. We were sharing a meal next to the volcano, Taal. I had just returned to the islands after twenty-two years of undocumented American exile.

“Because I make it with pork belly. Usually it’s made with the cheap parts of the pig, ha. Why should we eat only cheap parts? And love. I cook it with love.”

Sisig is no longer made with just the discarded cuts, but its poisonous effects remain. The Americans are gone, but their imperious scars linger. No longer trapped by our colonizers, we trap ourselves. We transform to survive, but we still bear the boiled, charred, gristled remnants of our past. I will continue to exist in a hungry space between longing and belonging, for my body, exported from its country of birth, deported from its country of growth, now has only sense and memory to call home.

Serve immediately, using two large spoons to stir in the eggs to cook. Enjoy with garlic fried rice. 

Read the essay

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers, center, speaks during a rally outside the White House in Washington, Sunday, June 25, 2017. Rhodes was one of many speakers at the "Rally Against Political Violence," that was to condemn the attack on Republican congressmen during their June 14 baseball practice in Virginia and the "depictions of gruesome displays of brutality against sitting U.S. national leaders." (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mike Giglio, Omar Mouallem, Katherine Laidlaw, Dave Daley, and Tim Greiving.

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

1. “Civil War Is Here, Right Now”

Mike Giglio | The Atlantic | October 1, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,950 words)

“A Pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans. An Atlantic investigation reveals who they are and what they might do on Election Day.”

2. January 8, 2020

Omar Mouallem | Edify Magazine | September 28, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,835 words)

“The day that PS752 was shot down will forever be frozen in his memory.”

3. Heartbreaker

Katherine Laidlaw | Toronto Life | September 28, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,601 words)

“To women in search of love, Shaun Rootenberg seemed like a catch. What they didn’t know: he’d spent decades stealing from just about anyone who crossed his path. Lonely women on dating sites were only his latest prey.”

4. I Cry for the Mountains: A Legacy Lost

Dave Daley | The Chico Enterprise-Record | September 27, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,500 words)

A rancher’s account of a wildfire’s devastating impact on his family, his cattle, and the forests they have relied on for generations.

5. The Oral History of ‘Best in Show’

Tim Greiving | The Ringer | September 29, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,200 words)

“Looking back at the dog show–centric successor to the mockumentaries ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ and ‘Waiting for Guffman’ on its 20th anniversary.”

January 8, 2020

Longreads Pick
Source: Edify Magazine
Published: Sep 28, 2020
Length: 15 minutes (3,835 words)

Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court

Photo collage: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) / Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | September 2020 | 6,849 words (24 minutes)

 

The Equitable Life Building, at 100 Montgomery Street, sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Named after an insurance company, it was the first skyscraper built in the city after the Depression, a symbol of optimism rising 25 stories high with marble walls that sparkled in the sun. Today, it is home to all sorts of buzzy Bay Area companies, from Spruce Capital Partners (“investors and thought leaders in the Life Sciences industry”) to the OutCast Agency (“strategists and creatives” with “a hyper-growth mindset”). To get away from the hectic pace of investing, strategizing, and creating, tenants can burn off calories inside the building’s private gym or take their lunch break atop a luxurious rooftop deck. 

The Equitable Life Building is also home to the San Francisco Immigration Court, though it’s easy to miss. On my first visit last winter, the only hint that a court lay within was the scores of families in the lobby, clutching summonses and looking confused. The court is above, occupying the fourth, eighth, and ninth floors. Up here, the elevators opened into a slightly off-kilter dimension: A security line snaked into a cramped waiting room, which led to a winding and windowless hallway, from which one entered identical windowless courtrooms. It was deeply disorienting. I often encountered people fumbling around in the hallway, not sure how the hell to get out.    Read more…