Search Results for: poetry

We Use Language as a Spade

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In this beautiful personal essay at The Sun Magazine, Christine Marshall considers cats and kittens, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and how writing has helped her to express and process her anger, resentment, and grief after a series of miscarriages.

BISHOP’S POEMS ARE like the sky on a clear night. At first you notice the brightness, stars as thick and close as pores in the face. The stars and moon and planets form patterns and shapes. They remind you how much energy exists in the world. Then you start to notice what’s behind the stars: an eternity of dark.

IN A 1966 letter to her poet friend Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop mentions her cat Tobias, who still flourishes, age fifteen. The 1960s were not a great decade for Bishop, who was embroiled in a painful breakup with the love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop didn’t write about her heartache in her letter to her friend. She stayed light. She chatted about the weather and politics and the neighbors’ children and her cats.

Writing, I decide, is not just a record of our experiences but a reaching beyond what we have known, an opportunity to use empathy and curiosity to broaden our sense of self. There’s a strange assumption in the phrase Write what you know — that we already know ourselves.

We don’t stop at what we know. We don’t use language simply as a mirror. We also use it as a spade.

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The Cat Years

Longreads Pick

Christine Marshall considers cats and kittens, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and how writing has helped her to express and process her anger, resentment, and grief after a series of miscarriages.

Published: Jan 11, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,962 words)

Happily Never After

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (1,978 words)

“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough …” On January 3rd, Ukrainian immigrant Ilya Kaminsky quote-tweeted his poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” after it went viral the day Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was assassinated on the order of President Donald Trump. The poem appeared in his long-awaited 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic, about a town that responds to the killing of a deaf child by itself going deaf, a parable of the present-day United States, a country that responds to its own demise (and the rest of the world’s) by blocking its ears. His tweet went up in the midst of increasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and ahead of the death of more than 50 people in a stampede during Suleimani’s funeral procession. It went up months into bushfires ravaging New South Wales that have destroyed millions of hectares and killed roughly half a billion animals. It went up in the wake of a slew of antisemitic attacks across the country. Last Sunday, while thousands in New York marched in solidarity with the Jewish community, the Hollywood awards season kicked off in Los Angeles with the Golden Globes, and the media started gleefully tweeting about couture as though the destruction of the world had politely paused for the occasion. The timing made me think of a friend who recently asked: What if all the people who went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — tens of millions of Americans — protested instead?

“Now’s NOT the time to live happily,” read Kaminsky’s tweet after he extended his thanks for his poetry’s dissemination. He did not squander the moment the way so many of us often do, advising instead that we “write quality journalism & spicy op-eds & protest poems, get out in the street if you’re able. We won’t live happily during another war.”

But aren’t we already? Read more…

This Month In Books: What Did We Miss?

Jessica Ruscello / Unsplash

Dear Reader,

The end of the year is a time for regrets. What are all the things I didn’t do? What are all the books I didn’t feature?

For the past two years I’ve compiled a gift catalog for our readers in December, to remind you of some of the books we’ve covered this year in time for your holiday shopping; but it always puts me in a strange mood, and I begin to think about the books I couldn’t seem to find a way to tell you all about. These books are like my little ghosts of Christmas past, reminding me that time is short. So let me present them to you now: all the books we didn’t feature in 2019.

This one still haunts me: Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s Sounds Like Titantic. I really should have found a way to spread the word about this book, it’s just so perfectly weird. When I was reading it, I kept closing the book to carefully scrutinize the jacket copy, asking myself: Is this actually a true story? Hindman, an admittedly not very accomplished violinist, was hired during a desperate job hunt to play in a famous schlocky composer’s traveling orchestra (his fans say that his music sounds like, you guessed it, the theme from Titantic) and soon she realizes it’s all… a scam! As in, the orchestra isn’t really playing; the musicians are just miming playing their instruments over a recording. That’s right, Hindman goes on a multi-city tour fake-playing the violin, in a fully fake orchestra! It’s… perfect. And the way Hindman writes about her experience is really striking — a sort of lyrical resignation to being part of it, all of it, this scam, all the scams, the grand American scam.


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Here’s another one I regret not featuring: Lucasta Miller’s L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron.The key word here is scandal— and plenty of it! This poetess’s life had some serious twists in it. I could not put this one down. I’ll be honest, I cheated: I started skipping ahead to figure out what was going on with L.E.L. A lot was going on with L.E.L.! I won’t spoil it but suffice to say, poetry is involved.

And how about this one: Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn’s Dance of the Dung Beetles: Their Role in Our Changing World. I actually can’t believe I didn’t feature that one on Longreads. I just sounds like something I would try to make everyone read. Did you know dung beetles navigate using the stars? I bet you did not know that.

Though I talked about it a bit with Ibram X. Kendi in an a episode of our What Are You Reading? podcast earlier this year, I feel this book deserves another mention: Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow is a riveting novel — on its surface a dystopian nightmare of the future of racism in America, Ruffin’s debut functions as a kind of ghastly dissection of race in America today that lays bare too many of the bleeding raw parts. It’s difficult to look away from this book.

And of course there are many more! There are always so many books that we haven’t read. Good luck trying to keep up in 2020!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Longreads Best of 2019: Essays

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

Jennifer Baker

Publishing professional, contributing editor to Electric Literature, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology.

Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill (Jasminne Mendez, Queen Mob’s Tea House)

On Facebook author Jasminne Mendez said “Lesson Plan” came out of “an attempt at capturing what I’ve felt and what I can only imagine feeling.” Art at its best, at its height, at its most vivid brings us into an experience so deeply one cannot help but feel the effects of the work in our marrow. “Lesson Plan” captures something unique and raw through structure, precision, poetics, and accuracy of what an initially conventional turned unconventional school day looks like when it comes to a new “normal”: active shooters/drills. How can we keep kids safe? Is that even possible anymore? What pressures are educators under? What and who gets lost when these events occur? When will this kind of terror end? The refrain of “this is not a drill” pulsates throughout. Remember… remember… remember. The bare honesty of “Lesson Plan” exemplifies the kind of writing that inspires you to experiment with how to encapsulate and explore our reality, as distressing as it may be.

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Running Dysmorphic

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

Devin Kelly | Longreads | December, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,955 words)

I’ll begin this essay the way I introduce myself to a fellow runner when meeting them for the first time: By telling you that I’ve run two 4:48 miles back-to-back. That I’ve run five miles in 26 minutes, 10 miles in 55. That I’ve qualified for the Boston Marathon five times and ran my fastest marathon — 2:41 — into a headwind there in 2015. I’ll begin the essay this way because I don’t love myself, because when I see another runner seeing me I assume they see me the way I see me: all baby fat and bone stock.

I won’t introduce myself by telling you that, on days I don’t run, I have to do 200 sit-ups right before dinner if I want to allow myself to eat. That, in the times I’ve had company over or have eaten at someone’s house, I’ve done those sit-ups in other people’s bathrooms. Or that I’ve been known by roommates to, minutes before dinner, rush out the door and run for 15 minutes if I haven’t run at all that day. Or that in college, I bought a scale and a journal and weighed myself three times a day, documenting my weight to the decimal point each time. For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

I come from a family of runners. My uncle ran a four-minute mile relay split at the University of Missouri. My father ran three miles in 15 minutes as an AAU trackster in Western New York. My brother runs for a track club in Washington, D.C., and has plans to break 70 minutes for a half marathon. He will. Growing up, I ate the same things as my brother but never grew the extra inches. In fourth grade, my nickname was “Marshmallow,” my body Irish white and puffy at the edges. In fifth grade, that same body, some choice lost teeth, and an unfortunate haircut made my nickname “Gopher.” The next year, my brother ran the unofficial middle school record in the gym mile. I smiled through the nicknames and picked up running because I wanted to be like him.

It’s odd to have one of your coping mechanisms become the thing you abuse to seek approval. What I mean by coping mechanism is that I began running because I wanted to, and I kept running because it saved my life. In fifth grade my mother — an alcoholic, a bulimic, an addict, the most beautiful person I know — left my father and my brother and me. Those years, I ran often with a Walkman cradled in my palm so it wouldn’t skip on my downstep, listening to CDs I burned with odd, jangling, melancholic playlists ranging from Jack’s Mannequin to Joni Mitchell. I kept running because it felt good to run away from home and then come back on my own, with no one chasing me, all of it up to my own two feet, my own volition. I kept running, too, because I got less chubby and started to get fast. I kept running through middle school and high school because even after therapy sessions and basement meetings with children of alcoholics, the only time I felt in control of my own body and mind was out on the road, where there was no one to tell me to speed up or slow down other than myself.


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What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers. In a 100-meter dash, a difference of .1 seconds between two sprinters might as well be a mile. Watch any final kick of a mile race, and you’ll often see five or six runners separated by half a second at the finish line, spread all over the track. And consider how being one single second slower than someone else on each lap of a 5K track race means that you’ll be close to a hundred meters behind them at the finish, which might be the difference between being a professional runner and a nobody for the rest of your life. No matter how good you are compared to everyone else you’re racing, when you’re a competitive runner, you have no choice but to measure yourself by seconds ticking away on a stopwatch.

By the time I left high school, I was a decent enough runner to walk on to the track and cross country teams at Fordham University, where I reveled in comparative mediocrity for four years, never making much of a dent in the outcome of any race or meet. But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks. I wanted to be as good as I could possibly be, to reach my fullest potential. I did not want to be an embarrassment. But I began to feel like one. It started with pictures, when I saw the way my thighs loomed larger than the bare essential thighs of other racers. Why weren’t veins cascading down my legs like a map of rivers? I started to be afraid to take my shirt off on long runs when everyone else did. I began wrapping the towel further up on my torso, so no one would see the un-flatness of my lower belly.

For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

Years before, in high school, my coach had told me I could stand to lose a few pounds. Then, in college, one of my teammates said, “You’re not fat, you’re just …” before trailing off. I began to understand a few things. I looked in the mirror and saw someone society might’ve deemed as lean or athletic, but someone who was too big, too thick around the bones to be taken seriously as a competitive college runner. I understood, too, that this was an issue the women on my team, and women all around the county, faced daily. I knew female runners who were anorexic, bulimic, the subject of harassment from runners and coaches. I understood all this but also didn’t know what to do with it. I was never satisfied in a terrible way. Nights of impromptu diets, nights of less food, nights spent running secret miles around the block. Nights like this, willed against my body, willed for my body, until I looked in the mirror and saw six hard lumps protruding out of my abdomen, then immediately wished that they were more pronounced, that a creek bed ran between them. I bought a scale and began to measure myself daily, but even then I did not know what to do with this information, with all these numbers. Where was the lowest point I could reach? What was ideal? When would it stop? I didn’t know where to put it. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn’t. I still really can’t.

Those years, I learned to introduce myself among runners before anyone else did, so that they would not have to make any sort of judgement audible. “I’m the fat one,” I’d say. Or I’d grab a fist of lower belly and say, “I gotta lose this! I know it!” I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable with the unsaid. I wanted them all to know that I knew whatever I assumed they were thinking. I wanted everyone comfortable with my knowledge of my inadequacy. And that’s not to say that my teammates were even remotely mean to me. Some of them are still my best friends. I love so many of them dearly. But at a high enough level, even if you’re not very good, you learn to unthink your love for yourself. It’s the bane of being a human. If you’re smart enough to observe the world around you, to overhear one stranger’s snide comment to another, to see the person on the train deleting photos of themself from their phone, you can make the mistake of assuming another person’s judgment even if it’s not really there. The world is cruel that way. It doesn’t promise anything but delivers everything instead.

The idea of believing in your own negative self-image as a route to self-betterment is fundamental to the American experience. I think of faith and the way the church and the state have never really been truly separate in this country. Humble yourself before the Lord, the scripture says. Without you, I am nothing, I once prayed. In America, that you can take many forms. Wealth, power, style, a new body. It is part of some collective understanding here that there is always something more to be other than ourselves. It is told and untold. It eats away at the image in the mirror. I look so hard some days to see someone other than me. Because I want to. Because I need to.

What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers.

But what is the end goal of self-improvement? My answer now is different than it ever was. Years ago, I would have rattled off a series of numbers. Finishing times. I would have told you dreams and ideas. Jobs. Now, my answer varies. Some days, it’s simply I don’t know. Some days, the hardest thing to do is to forgive myself for being myself. America makes this hard. America, where you manifest destiny. America, where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. America, where you suck it up. This America of no pain, no gain. This America of contradiction, this America of dissonance. This America where our mythological origin story begins with work ethic and ends with a shame we lodge deep inside our collective heart and never acknowledge.

After college, I went to graduate school to become a poet and fiction writer, which was not something I explored a lot in college, where I never took a single creative writing class. I leaned into the idea of this new identity pretty hard, while still holding onto my identity as a serious runner. What that looked like was objectively weird. I took up smoking and drank pretty heavily. I stayed up late with my friends after class and sat in backyards and ripped through packs of cigarettes and six packs of beer and stumbled to the last train back to the city in those first hours of morning. Then I’d wake up, make coffee, and run. I was training for my first marathon and putting in 70, 80 miles a week of running. I’d do workouts on the treadmill between classes, then light up a cigarette the moment I left the gym. I wanted to be both reckless and fit. I wanted to say fuck you to a world that said I had to change things about my body and myself in order to be better. I did not want to fit into a prescribed mold. I relished when people would ask the question you smoke … and run?

This stroked an ego that had never been stroked before. In college, even running at a highly competitive level, my mediocrity was front and center. I would line up to race a 5K on the track knowing that I would not win. And then I’d finish in the middle or the back, walk off the track, and notice all the things that were different about the winners than me. They were always taller, skinnier. They walked lightly along the surface of the earth like angels. And I’d pinch my own thighs, find the fat in me, and want to slice it off with a knife.

But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks.

But with this new identity, I could be a hard-living, hard-running rebel. I could deny my past and honor it too. If I didn’t look like a runner, I could look like a writer. In fiction workshops, I learned that the reader delights when the distance between the expected outcome of a story and the actual outcome of the story is the greatest, or when the distance between the expected tone of the content of the story and the actual tone of the content of the story is at its highest. Think of Barthelme’s “The School,” that wacky story of hyperbolic events spinning out of control told in the flattest tone possible. As a person, I wanted to inhabit that distance of expectation versus reality. I wanted to be a walking fucking delight.

The world often asks too much of us, and then we ruin ourselves to be approved by the world. And I think the most sinister aspect of this is that the world’s asking doesn’t often look like asking. In college and after, nearly every time I heard a voice inside my head telling me to lose weight, I couldn’t actually find the voice, or the mouth it came from. The source of that voice was removed, like an elaborate form of money laundering. The voice was there in the way people fawned over the veins bulging out of a distance runner’s calves. It was there when I overheard another runner say, “Damn, man, you look fit” to someone whose ribs were rippling out of his skin. It was there in comment sections and internet forums, as people picked apart even the bodies of professional runners.

And the same could be said about my new identity as a writer. No one ever told me I needed to smoke, to drink myself toward a twilit stumble every other weeknight. But it was there in the packaging, wasn’t it? It was there when I fell in love with my favorite poet, Larry Levis, his eyes catching mine from the book’s back page through a haze of black-and-white smoke. Or watching an interview with Baldwin, seeing him deliver something searing before pausing to smoke, knowing he had the audience. Or the great stories of the great drunks, or the great stories we thought we told while greatly drunk.

It’s about identity, isn’t it? All of it. It’s about the fact that this life is not comfortable if you’re aware of your own your-ownness. It’s about the comfort of ritual, and sometimes the comfort of demands, about what it feels like to see someone else’s structure then to mold yourself to fit into it. It’s about not wanting to be judged. I wanted to set myself apart but also be a part. I wanted to say I’m one of you to as many people as I could because I was scared of being myself.

I ran my fastest marathon during those grad school years, when I was drinking and smoking more than I ever had or would in my life. I don’t know how, or why. I wouldn’t recommend it. I was also losing a bit of myself, every day, to ideas of who I should be and my desire to both inhabit those ideas and deviate from them as much as possible. I was a tourist in my own life.

Today I am six years removed from my last race as a collegiate athlete and probably 20 pounds heavier than I was then. Maybe 30, I don’t know. I don’t let myself buy a scale. I still look at myself in the mirror every time I take a shower. I turn and turn and see my body in the light. I push the belly around, pull it down, try to find the body I used to have. I am trying to learn how to be proud. I don’t really know how. No one ever taught me. This is part of being a man in America. My girlfriend, coming back from a run of her own, will often mention how she passed a man while running who then, upon realizing he had just been passed by a woman, sprinted past her. This happens to her at least once a week. It’s sad to live in a world where vulnerability is still widely seen as weakness, where the things men are taught to be proud of are often the things pushed outward and not turned inward.

The violence of shaming someone is so often a result of distance between what you see in front of you and how you feel inside. I know this because I shamed and still shame myself. I am concerned with the violence of men. I am a victim of my own masculinity, which is as dark and deep as the surface of a lake stretching out in the middle of the night. The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like pull yourself together, or make better choices, or I did it, why can’t you. Shame neglects the work of understanding. Shame is waking up in the morning to see the lake in daylight and saying it looks too far to cross. The potential for understanding is the rowboat moored along the shore. In America, especially, there is a long line of men sitting on the beach, taking photos of the lake they’ve yet to cross. I am with them, too, waking up each morning to get in the rowboat and begin anew the long, relentless journey of learning to love myself. Some days I don’t even try. Now, more than 15 years after my mother left my father and brother and me while struggling with addiction, I want to hold her and say I don’t get it, but I do. How hard it must have been, how hard.

I still turn to running to find solace, because it’s the only place that offers it for me. Frustrated, tired, stressed — the first thing I think to do is lace up my shoes and go for a run. Out there, years of practice have allowed me, no matter how I look, to maintain some semblance of control over my life. I can speed up and slow down. I can have an easy day or a hard day. I can push my own threshold of pain, dial back, and push it again. I imagine this kind of feeling is not limited to running, and certainly not limited to the physical. I think of dancers, those who meditate. That sense of carving a world within the world that you know just a little bit better.

The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like ‘pull yourself together,’ or ‘make better choices,’ or ‘I did it, why can’t you.’ Shame neglects the work of understanding

Two years ago, my friend Matt convinced another friend, Nick, and me to sign up for a 50-mile race. It was uncharted territory for the two of us. We had run marathons together, but 50 miles seemed daunting, too great a task. I’ve written about that day before, how the unimaginable distance leveled expectation. It was the opposite of the Barthelme story. Because it was so outlandish, the only way to approach it was in the most ordinary way possible: step-by-step.

Since that day, I’ve run multiple ultramarathons, as well as two 24-hour races. They are the only places where I feel at home in my body, where judgment feels unnecessary because of the absurdity of the task. There is a sense with ultramarathons that the further out you go, the less you carry with you to be measured by. Yeah, there are people racing these races, but if you go to any ultra-long distance race, you will find that the majority of people don’t care about the veins bulging out of your calves or whatever rippled leanness you present to them, whatever beautiful and rounded edges. Mostly because everyone is banded by a sublime weirdness. If you run long and far enough, you’ll find something good in yourself and see something good in someone else. The thing is, this isn’t even that strange of a concept, because life is like that, too. All these people. All different. All on the start line of today’s morning wearing different things and being different heights and sizes. It’s not really a cliché so much as a fact. It’s difficult enough, life is. Who cares what you look like doing it?

The word endurance means, quite simply, to suffer without breaking, to continue on. It boils down to the Latin word durus, which means hard. To be without pliancy. Which is interesting because of the way so much of endurance, to me, is to bend without breaking. I think of James Wright’s collection of poetry The Branch Will Not Break and how the title is referenced at the end of his poem “Two Hangovers,” as the speaker gazes at a blue jay alighting on a branch:

“I laugh, as I see him abandon himself

To entire delight, for he knows well as I do

That the branch will not break.”

There are a million branches we each stand on over the course of a given day. A lot of us are standing on branches held out by people we will never meet, people with power behind certain doors, people who want us to buy their shit. I think those branches break. I think those branches break often. And I think the same people who make those branches make other branches to catch us when we fall. There are other branches though. The start line of an ultramarathon is a kind of branch. It’s sturdy, too. Not because the people standing on it are light, or especially fit, or anything other than human. It’s because they are human, and they recognize their own absurdity, and they revel in it, and they give themselves permission to find joy.

The Greeks had their own word for endurance, hypomone, which appears frequently in the Bible and is often translated as endurance or steadfastness, but literally means to bear up under. I find this more agreeable. It is the bearing that remains a constant for each of us, but it is also the bearing that takes on different forms. Bearing can look like bending. One who bears a load on their back must stoop to tie their shoe. Bearing assumes a constancy that is not in the rock-hard, unbending quality of the spine, but a constancy, simply, of the bearing itself. We bear and bear and bear.

To recognize each person’s individual capacities for endurance is, I think, one way in which we can create a world that relies more on generosity than judgment. In what ways can we recognize the race we are each running, on our own separate tracks that have no specific shapes, where there is no such thing as time, no such thing as an Olympic record? It is the exactness of time that destroys us. It is the way time has been commodified. It is the how-much-can-you-fit-in. It is the way, when you begin talking about how much you can do or how much you can consume, you begin to think of how to alter yourself so that you can do and consume more.

What I mean to say is: My better is not your better. I want to say it to myself in the mirror, to the face that looks back at me and says you’re not fat … you’re just … I’m working on it. So much of life is about what you give yourself permission to do or don’t do, and how that act of self-permission leads to joy. This requires the discernment to know what joy is, or how it feels, and in what ways it is true. Both of these acts — permission and discernment — take a lifetime to learn. And the choice to learn requires its own lifetime. It goes on, this work. It endures.

***

Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

Read more…

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters

Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)

 

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

 

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

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The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp

George Peters / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Mona Kirschner | Longreads | November 2019 | 20 minutes (5,102 words)

Day One

I look around the pool as I kick my legs backwards. I wonder how I found myself in a swim cap and a full-piece bathing suit doing water aerobics with eight ladies over 60 at a health retreat that turned out to be an upscale fat camp.

Why is it that we never tire of talking about love? Of analyzing all angles of heartbreak?

No Uber driver’s English is bad enough to deter us, no stranger on an airplane too disengaged for it to all come spilling out, the same story, again and again.

Filling the void, my therapist had said. I always hoped that when I inevitably fell apart, at least I’d be original about it.

The previous day I had rushed down to the waiting taxi, stalling outside the high gates of my apartment building in São Paulo.

I was late, throwing clothes onto the bed and settling for stretchy workout pants and an old blue sweater that was too tight on the arms. The flight was smooth, the two hours going by quickly as I stared out the window in dark sunglasses that covered most of my face.

On the other end, I shuffled through the airport with my head down and bought sweet and salty peanuts after I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I walked outside; the muggy heat relentless, but I kept my sweater on, joining a group of elderly women next to a van stamped with a logo I recognized from the website. This should be good, I thought, making eye contact with no one and finding a seat.

A friend had recommended this place, deep in the countryside of southern Brazil, a short flight from my place of birth and my home for the last 10 years, having moved back after falling in love and dropping out of school in Canada, where I had grown up with my immigrant parents and privileged life.

I was always looking for something. For love, for adventure, for a story worth telling. I shifted happily from a good kid with a scholarship to a bartender in shorts and knee-high boots with no plan, chasing the drama.

And then I fell in love with a man in that way you do when you throw yourself into something so hard, you don’t even recognize yourself when you take a step back. Fully, entirely consumed.

He had green eyes and skin that actually glowed. I saw him for the first time from the side, across a cheesy wedding dance floor. I remember feeling short of breath. I hardly saw his face. Yet I recognized him as if I had known he was coming.

The van bumped along. I watched a series on Netflix on the drive out about an artist from Brooklyn and her many affairs. I noticed how all the actors on it were thin. Something I would have never realized a few months before.

We drove onto the property, a long, winding driveway with cornfields on either side. The sky was a rich shade of blue and the sun peeked out from the clouds, hot and unforgiving.

A purple and yellow butterfly flew next to my window as we drove up. I hated butterflies, always thought of them as the mean girls of insects. All colorful, flashy wings on the same old insect body.

We arrived to a welcome drink of green juice, the glass only filled halfway, hinting at the moderation that was to come. I noticed I was the youngest person there by at least 15 years. They showed me to my room and instructed me to turn up for my doctor’s appointment at 3:15. I let my bag drop off of my shoulder.

Everyone was in their provided white robes, the blue logo embroidered on the left side. I put mine on, noticing gratefully that it hid everything that needed hiding. My thighs chafed in the heat.

The nurse was gentle, especially when asking me to step on a large, rectangular scale.

“That’s a good girl.” She said, making a note on her clipboard. The doctor put me on a diet of 850 calories a day, which sounded absurd. “What caused the weight gain?” he asked.

“Heartbreak.” I shrugged. “Wish it was a more original reason.”

What is it about comfort from strangers that is so soothing? That makes us feel as if our uncertain futures are less terrifying if someone promises they won’t be? Someone who couldn’t possibly know? And yet.

“Do you think I’m going to be okay?” I would ask anyone who would listen.

I missed him. I could feel his hands, the callouses on his palms. The softness of the finer hair on the nape of his neck. The smell of his shirts. I could see the wrinkles on the side of his eyes when he laughed. I could hear his voice. My chest on his. Could feel him pinching my side when he thought something was funny. I’d say his name aloud.

They say our brains label pain, give it a face. He had a beautiful face.

How do you determine the difference between love and fear? Should it feel so similar?

The love had been there, at some point. Perhaps it was passion. It faded. The fear was constant. I was afraid of the fights, I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of leaving. I was afraid of being alone, of regretting it, of missing him, of realizing there’d be nothing better.

We introduced ourselves at the welcome address, our names, where we’re from, why we were there. I sat in the back. They assigned each one of us a table that we’d sit at for the week. Mealtimes clearly required military-level control. I looked down at the sad six grapes in front of me and tried to concentrate on chewing whatever absurd amount of times was recommended by one of the many (thin) doctors who gave a painfully slow speech before we could eat. Was it 40 times?

My ex and I used to get kicked out of bars for our screaming matches. He was jealous, I was hysterical. I thought it was romantic. I ended it after almost 10 years. He was my first love, all I knew. It was my decision. Courage and strength showed up suddenly, like unannounced dinner guests to an otherwise lonely affair.

He loved me. But he was terrible to me. We were terrible to each other. I plotted and hoped for my freedom for years. Yet the loss, the gaping hole felt like it was only getting bigger.

Love or fear?

They gave a tour of the grounds, the clinic, the vegetable garden, the main house.

I set my stack of books on the bedside table. I looked at the clean, neatly made single bed and sighed. I listened to Miles Davis.

Dinner was pea soup.
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Kissed a Girl

David Bohrer / Getty, Aunt Lute Books

Vickie Vértiz | Excerpted from Graffiti, the inaugural anthology from POC United | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

Spring break in LA is one long day at Magic Mountain. My friend Moses parks his 1985 Caprice Classic next to our chain-link gate. The engine clicks off and the Led Zeppelin guitar goes quiet. He brought Eva, Rudy, and my boyfriend Beto to pick me up. We’ll be on roller coasters if only we can get out of the alley I live in. From the family bedroom, I hear all four doors close. Rudy jokes with Amá. She’s letting them into our cement yard. Then, no more laughing.

I grab my jacket and go outside as soon as I can, but not fast enough. Amá is standing in her apron facing her wall of pink geraniums. That’s when she thanks them for being my friends, especially after “that thing that happened.”

“What thing?” my boyfriend asks. Beto pushes up his glasses on his nose as if it will help him hear better.
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