The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Elissa Strauss | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (4,006 words)
I first noticed “mama” while pregnant with my son in 2012. I was browsing on the internet—familiarizing myself the different types of mothers out there, trying to figure out what kind of mother I might become—when I noticed a number of alternative moms who referred to themselves as “mama.” This was the radical homemaking, attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding bunch, and “mama” was right at home with their folksy, back-to-the-earth approach to motherhood.
This use of mama can be traced back to women like Ariel Gore, who began publishing her alternative parenting magazine “Hip Mama” in 1993. Inspired by her experience as an urban single mom, the magazine became the source of parenting advice for riot grrrl types, tattooed and pierced women who wanted to find a way to embrace parenthood while simultaneously rejecting much of the bourgeois accouterment that comes along with it.
This fringe quality of “mama” stuck, leading to websites like the “Wellness Mama,” the home of a popular alternative lifestyle guru named Katie who is into stuff like, “cloth diapering, natural birthing, GAPS dieting, homeschooling, not eating grains, making my own toothpaste, drinking the fat and more.” For her, being a mama isn’t just about parenting one’s kids, but seeing parenting as a medium through which one can change the world.
“Here’s the thing, I can’t change the health of the world alone, but I’m absolutely convinced that as a group, women and moms can. … Not only are we raising the next generation, feeding them, teaching them, etc but we control the majority of food dollars spent around the world.”
She continues by explaining that being a “Wellness Mama” is a way for women to counter any criticism they might receive for being a stay-at-home mom. “I hope to make being #justamom just a little easier for you.” Mama isn’t just a pet name, it’s a manifesto. Read more…

I didn’t pay attention to font until I worked for my college newspaper. After months of poring over proofs in InDesign, I realized I was learning the differences between fonts, their specific names, where they fit best. I’m no typographer—I don’t have the patience—but I’m fascinated by the subtle ways type entrances us and the absolutely grueling work that goes into its design and placement. Now, not only do I know the difference between type design and typography, but I try to make an effort to appreciate the work that goes in to the books I love, the gig posters for my favorite bands, the fonts on my blog.
Colophon: a statement at the end of a book, typically with a printer’s emblem, giving information about its authorship and printing. You know: the details about the typeface, the typographer, the publisher, the who, what and where of the book’s creation. Nick Ripatrazone researches the colophon’s history and its artistic purpose. He concludes, “I call for the return of colophons. The battle of the book is not to be won or lost in preferences of print or digital. The page will always remain. Letters will always remain.” Read more…

With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available.
Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. He was a “swamprat Rimbaud,” “one of the great voices of death,” and “sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern.” He shot himself in 1978, just shy of his 30th birthday. Reviewing the new collection for the New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote about the enigmatic nature of Stanford himself, as well as why his work has been so difficult to find:
Even before his death, Mr. Stanford was an emerging cult figure among Southern writers, the kind of man whose life is difficult to untangle from his work. He was charismatic — “as beautiful as the sun,” in the words of the Arkansas poet Carolyn (C. D.) Wright, who was also among his lovers. He was prolific, writing 11 books before his death, one of them a 450-page narrative poem, and leaving behind a steep pile of unpublished work.
He was enigmatic in a hundred ways. He didn’t do readings. He didn’t teach. He didn’t like big cities. As a baby, he’d been abandoned at the Emery Home for Unwed Mothers near Hattiesburg, Miss. His well-to-do adoptive father built levees along the Mississippi River’s tributaries. When [Lucinda] Williams met Mr. Stanford, he was working as a land surveyor.
Since Mr. Stanford’s death, his cult has grown, but it’s never come close to metastasizing. In large part, that’s because his work has been hard to find, issued by tiny presses and often out of print. The long-awaited publication this month of “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” gives us a chance to see him whole.
Several years ago, Ben Ehrenreich wrote about Stanford for Poetry Magazine. His searching and searing 6,000-word piece is both a profile of Stanford and the story of Ehrenreich’s own quest to unravel the man behind the myth. Not only is it a beautiful read but it also offers the most comprehensive portrait of Stanford’s life available online. Below is a short excerpt:
Some lives are too easy to read backward. Frank Stanford’s is one of those: the last page is now read as the first page—sometimes as the only page—and the first becomes illegible without the last. You may already know how Stanford’s story ends; I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t. Let it suffice to say that a literary reputation once glittering with promise has faded into a myth that grew larger than the man himself—the hard-living, fast-loving Ozark sage, spawn of Lao-Tzu and Whitman by way of Vallejo and Breton.
What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford—edited by Michael Wiegers and with an introduction from former Texas Poet Laureate Dean Young—was published by Copper Canyon Press on April 14. NPR described the release as “the big event in poetry for 2015.”

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:
Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”—Elissa Schappell, 2013
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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)
Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.
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I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…
—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”
The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.
—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)
They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs. Read more…

You’re organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive. Who’s coming?
First I call Shakespeare. “Who else is coming?” Shakespeare asks. “Tolstoy,” I answer. “I’m busy that night,” Shakespeare says. Next I call Kafka, who agrees to come. “As long as you don’t invite Tolstoy.” “I already invited Tolstoy,” I tell him. “But Kundera’s coming. You like Milan. And you guys can speak Czech.” “I speak German,” Kafka corrects me.
When Tolstoy hears that Kundera’s coming, he drops out. (Something about an old book review.) So finally I call Joyce, who’s always available. When we get to the restaurant, Kafka wants a table in back. He’s afraid of being recognized. Joyce, who’s already plastered, says, “If anyone’s going to be recognized, it’s me.” Kundera leans over and whispers in my ear, “People might recognize us too if we went around with a cane.”
The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, from an interview in the New York Times Book Review, October 4, 2012.

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2015
It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, was first published. And not just because the passage of time, in hindsight, is always kind of baffling, but because I have thought about that book so regularly it seems my brain only just first absorbed it. Read more…

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2015 | 16 minutes (4,113 words)
Mary Pilon spent several years reporting on finance for the Wall Street Journal, and several more reporting on sports for The New York Times. In her first book, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, Pilon debunks the myth—long perpetuated by Parker Brothers—that Monopoly was invented by a man named Charles Darrow during the Great Depression. Really, three decades prior, a woman named Lizzie Magie had created The Landlord’s Game, an obvious ancestor. A surprising twist: Lizzie’s game included a set of rules that was anti-monopoly, in which the object was to spread wealth around. In the 1970s, a professor named Ralph Anspach unknowingly carried Magie’s torch by creating a game called Anti-Monopoly, which rewarded players for trust-busting. It was via a very long lawsuit with Parker Brothers that Anspach unearthed the game’s buried history—and through reporting on a wholly unrelated article that Pilon became aware of it. I spoke with Pilon by phone about this complex, multi-layered story, her reporting and writing process, and the surprising Monopoly tricks she discovered. Read more…

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)
Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party. She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002). She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.
Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…
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