The year is 2017 in Siri Hustvedt’s seventh and most recent novel Memories of the Future, and the premise is seemingly straightforward. The novel opens with its protagonist, S.H., a 61-year-old successful author, thinking back on the year when she moved to New York City over three decades earlier. It begins, like so many other stories and dreams, with the memory of a young woman moving to New York holding fast to the hope that this was the start of her life:
Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination, which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him, to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way.
The beginning, like many beginnings and like life itself, is extraordinarily ordinary. S.H. recounts how, that summer of 1978, she found a small apartment on 109th Street in the Upper West Side. She remembers outfitting her new home with two place settings in the hopes of conjuring a lover. She smoked and drank a lot of coffee at the Hungarian Bakery and tried to be the type of person who interesting things happened to or, at the very least, who got to witness interesting things happening first-hand. She was lonely but didn’t want to leave, and instead was determined to lose herself in the rhythms of the city she had long loved even before ever really knowing it. Read more…
Sectional view of the Earth, showing central fire and volcanoes, 1665. From Mundus Subterraneous by Athanasius Kircher. (Photo by Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Just outside the gates of the Hofburg Palace the massive baroque seat of power for the Habsburg kings and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and in the shadow of the 13th century cathedral the Michaelerskirche with its elaborate series of subterranean crypts there’s an open air museum in the center of the popular Michaelerplatz. Amidst the tourist bustle and high-end retail shopping and cafes with blankets strewn over chair backs and the omnipresent wall-mounted cigarette vending machines the excavation looks like a narrow scar carved into the earth that opens a window into Vindobona which is a Roman military outpost that is believed to be where Marcus Aurelius died in the year 180.
Aurelius’s Meditations were something like the first self-help book albeit one that set the course for Christianity and Western civilization. In short it was a set of guidelines for being a good man written by himself to himself. Everything happens for a reason he’d say. “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” Sorry but since I’ve been rewatching True Detective season one it’s almost impossible not to hear shit like that in Matthew McConaughey’s voice. Read more…
Lisa A. Phillips | Longreads | July 2019 | 13 minutes (3,256 words)
My in-law brushes warm wax on my bikini line. This part is soothing, and mildly erotic. Then rip: a stinging, quick pull, taking a section of my pubic hair along with it. I wince. She smiles kindly. Maybe she likes this part the best. If I were her, I would, some small sadistic part of me perking up with every rip.
An aesthetician who works out of her home, she is not my real in-law. An in-law is what, in my small town, you call the parent of the kid your kid is dating. I find out about this bit of slang when I arrive for my bikini wax. She introduces me to her previous client by saying, “We’re in-laws. Have you heard?”
“I have!” the woman chortles. This nascent relationship is hot news. Both kids are 13 and have lived here all their lives. I’m wary of the gossip. But what I’m more worried about is the fact that the house I’m standing in, where my new in-laws and their son live, is, if you have a really, really good arm, a stone’s throw away from ours. All I had to do to get to my appointment — and all the kids have to do to get to each other — is cross a street and a yard.
Just a stone’s throw away. I say this a lot, to underscore my stress as a working mom whose husband travels frequently. I had only recently gotten comfortable with a few latchkey child afternoons. Now the unsupervised couches and beds concerned me more than how many episodes of “The Office” my daughter binged after school. This was not the kind of situation I imagined when, years before, my husband and I chose to live next to a large neighborhood, in hopes that our only child would make friends nearby.
Our daughter, though, was an only child who enjoyed long bouts of solo imaginary play, and that made her particular about friends. Most of the time, the neighbor children didn’t make the cut: The girl who lived closest to us was too moody, the one on the cul-de-sac was a grade younger and thus unacceptable, and so on. Then there was the boy who would become The Boyfriend. For a long time he was like a mythological creature, because we had never seen him. We knew he existed. We had met his parents. But he went to a private school and he was a boy, and the boy part had made him uninteresting. So we didn’t push for what we once called playdates — talk about foreshadowing! — even though it was weird to think that two kids living a stone’s throw away from each other would not recognize each other on the street. This is life in a small town in the Northeast. I’m from one, and I know how surreal community life can be. Privacy, respect for boundaries and the freedom to carefully curate your social life trump mandatory neighborliness. Read more…
I have forgotten how to read. It isn’t the first time. I have forgotten before and I will forget again. In other words, I am still learning how to read.
“Read,” like “love” or “think,” has a thousand meanings pressed into one deceptively elementary verb. We use it in a way that tends towards simplicity. It is the connection of sounds and concepts to standardized squiggles, to trails of ink on squares of paper, scratches carved into sticks, glowing lines of curved neon, careful stitches poked through a tight canvas. It can seem a basic skill, at least to those who have left the learning of letters behind.
Watching my son learn it now, I begin to understand how daunting a task it is, even given a phonetic language with a small alphabet, even with all the plasticity of a child’s brain at his disposal. Learning to read is a years-long series of internalizing rules and their many exceptions, of tiny modulations and adjustments. At first I thought it would be a matter of recognizing 26 letters. Then I saw that he must navigate upper and lower cases, print and cursive, different typefaces and hands, the sounds rendered by certain combinations of letters, umlauts and double S’s, unmarked short and long vowels, and the vagaries of foreign words and their unpredictable pronunciations.
So much work requires attention. My son approaches the challenge of decoding the world with intense concentration, straining to squeeze out meaning from each word and image. He is spellbound by anything legible, whether a phrase in bold, clear type or a comic strip that communicates just enough plot to fascinate, and will stare at it for what feels like ages. He is laboring hard, I know, but I still envy his power of absorption. Sometimes it feels like my practice as a reader has made me faster, but not consistently better. When I think of my own journey of learning to read, I am in fact thinking of a long process of learning and forgetting how to be with texts slowly, intimately, deeply.
Although there are plenty of irrational aspects to life in modern America, few rival the odd fixation on lawns. Fertilizing, mowing, watering — these are all-American activities that, on their face, seem reasonable enough. But to spend hundreds of hours mowing your way to a designer lawn is to flirt, most would agree, with a bizarre form of fanaticism. Likewise, planting a species of grass that will make your property look like a putting green seems a bit excessive — yet not nearly as self-indulgent as the Hamptons resident who put in a nine-hole course with three lakes, despite being a member of an exclusive golf club located across the street. And what should we make of the Houston furniture salesman who, upon learning that the city was planning to ban morning mowing — to fight a smog problem comparable to Los Angeles’s — vowed to show up, bright and early, armed and ready to cut.“I’ll pack a sidearm,” he said. “What are they going to do, have the lawn police come and arrest me?”
Surprisingly, the lawn is one of America’s leading “crops,” amounting to at least twice the acreage planted in cotton. In 2007, it was estimated that there were roughly twenty-five to forty million acres of turf in the United States. Put all that grass together in your mind and you have an area, at a minimum, about the size of the state of Kentucky, though perhaps as large as Florida. Included in this total were fifty-eight million home lawns plus over sixteen thousand golf-course facilities (with one or more courses each) and roughly seven hundred thousand athletic fields. Numbers like these add up to a major cultural preoccupation.
A woman reads a book on the Manchester-London train, c. 1983. (Martin O'Neill/Redferns/Getty)
Dear Reader,
This month’s books newsletter has a lot of conversations in it. It’s really pretty chatty for a topic that’s supposedly the pastime of introverts! I don’t just mean our normal author Q&As, or even the inaugural episode of the new conversation series I’ll be hosting on the Longreads podcast. (It’s called What Are You Reading?, and in it I’ll be asking authors to tell me about — you guessed it — what they’re reading. This month I spoke to Elizabeth Rush.) I’m referring to conversations like the surreal one Amos Barshad had with so-called “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin, which Barshad recounts in his recent book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World. Barshad’s interest in speaking to Dugin is part of his broader fascination with how Rasputin-esque figures exert influence on powerful people, and his account of the conversation reflects his sensitivity to all the pressure points a con man or a close-up magician would try to hit:
Dugin’s hands move constantly. Not just one or two swipes; it’s a wild, unceasing symphony of gestures. He swings an open palm, slams fingertips straight down on the tabletop, points an index finger in the air and his other hand’s middle finger straight down. The fingers and palms move in synchronicity and also alone, every single one on a mission. He interlocks and breaks apart and throws out his hands and brings them back together. Some of the moves he repeats. Some come just once. I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.
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Barshad is not listening to what Dugin says as much as studying how Dugin says it. Ayşegül Savaş takes a similar approach in her essay “The Cost of Reading” — though she doesn’t apply her powers of observation to a far-right demagogue and tyrant’s advisor, but rather to a male writer, a colleague, who keeps recommending that she read his own work while telling her pointblank he will not make time to read hers — so, the same kind of guy, really. There’s a lot to admire about Savaş’s essay, but I like the way conversations reverberate through the piece. At the beginning she quotes a scene from writer Deborah Levy’s essayistic autobiography, The Cost of Living.
… [T]he narrator overhears a conversation at a restaurant. A middle-aged man, “Big Silver,” is talking to a young woman he’s invited to his table. After a while, the young woman interrupts to tell him a strange story of her own, about a scuba diving trip, which is also a story of being hurt by someone in her life.
“You talk a lot don’t you?” Big Silver responds.
“It was not easy to convey to him,” Levy writes, “a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too … It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.”
That conversation echoes through the rest of Savaş essay and bolsters its argument, which is that by simply reading Levy’s book thoroughly — by giving it her time — she has completed a necessary literary labor that her male colleague has failed to do; he is slated to be in conversation with Levy about her work during a symposium, but at the event talks so much himself instead that he compels Levy to interrupt him and correct his misunderstanding of her work, which she attributes to his failure to read it all the way through. The male colleague is shown, in brief but hyper-observant conversations that appear throughout the rest of Savaş’s essay, to speak regularly about how he prefers not to read whole books, or even whole stories; meanwhile, he himself gives the same talks over and over again. Savaş meditates on what men are willing to spend time on, and how little of what they spend time on seems to be taking women’s intellectual contributions — and women’s time — seriously.
Lisa Taddeo’s new book Three Women is nothing but conversation. Taddeo became the close confidante to — you guessed it — three women (straight, white, and cis) who spoke to her about an intense romance that they were currently in the midst of or emerging from; the women told Taddeo in wrenching detail about the extremes of their euphoria and despair in a way usually reserved for only a woman’s closest friends, not her biographer. In Francesca Giacco’s review, she points out that what feels striking is the women’s isolation in their passion and desire; it’s not something they can tell their beloved men about. Only other women can serve as witness to the true intensity of their feeling. The book is a dizzying spiral into those kinds of long, obsessive conversations that I’m sure many women besides me are familiar with; the kind during which it starts to feel like one’s real life is not passing the Bechdel test. I know from firsthand experience that, at the time, these obsessive talks about beloved men feel necessary, as necessary as the love itself. But in the calculating distance afforded me as I read Giacco’s review, I had (not for the first time, of course) the discomforting thought that perhaps we women don’t take our time seriously either; we let ourselves be directed so much by men.
Music is contradictory. Highly personal expressions can become hugely popular. Tradition can be reinvented as something completely new. Understatement can often get a point across the most forcefully. Few musicians embody these contradictions more than composer, singer, and guitarist João Gilberto, who died on July 6, at age 88.
Gilberto almost single-handedly invented bossa nova — which translates from Portuguese as “new wave” — in the mid-1950s. He did so while isolated, during an ebb in his developing career. His intimate way of singing and playing would inspire every composer in the bossa nova genre, leading to incredible commercial success and the brief, if dazzling, resuscitation of jazz as a popular art form in America.
João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born in Juazeiro, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, on June 10, 1931. From an early age he was utterly charming and only concerned with music. Singer Maria Bethânia described him as “simply … music. He plays. He sings. Without stopping. Day and night. He is very, very strange. But he is the most fascinating being, the most fascinating person, that I have encountered on the surface of the earth. João, he is mystery. He hypnotizes.”
After moving to Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto sang with the vocal group Garotos da Lua for a while, but in 1951 he was fired for turning up late for gigs — or sometimes not turning up at all. Never having a place of his own, he was a permanent houseguest for a revolving set of friends. “It was always understood by his hosts that he would never be asked to participate in paying the rent or covering other household expenses,” Daniella Thomposon wrote for Brazil magazine. “Occasionally he would bring home some fruit (tangerines were his favorites), but his most significant contributions were his surpassingly intelligent conversation and the captivating music he played.” Gilberto grew out his hair, wore shabby clothes, continually smoked marijuana, and refused to get a real job.
By 1956, Gilberto began an eight-month stay with his sister and her husband in Diamantina. Seldom changing out of his pajamas, he installed himself in the tiled bathroom, as much for privacy as acoustics, practicing guitar and voice nonstop. It was here at age 25 that he created bossa nova, largely by reducing the older musical form of samba down to its essence.
“I think João Gilberto did it like this,” guitarist Baden Powell once said. “He just took the rhythm of the tamborims [a small tambourine-like drum] of the Samba Schools to the exclusion of the other percussion instruments. That’s the clearest rhythm you hear in it all. He took out all the rest.”
Gilberto also began singing more quietly and without vibrato. He changed his phrasing and used his voice as its own percussion instrument — sometimes as a complement to the guitar, sometimes creating rhythmic tension.
Despite the musical breakthrough he accomplished in his sister’s bathroom, Gilberto’s obsessiveness caused concern. His sister and her husband sent him to live with his parents in Juazeiro.
Afraid of being ridiculed for his new vocal style, Gilberto practiced on the banks of the São Francisco river, where he wrote a song mimicking the sway of the washerwomen as they walked by, carrying baskets of laundry on their heads. He used his new vocal and rhythm techniques to compose “Bim-Bom,” and so it is considered by some to be the first bossa nova song.
Gilberto’s father, unimpressed with his abilities and embarrassed by his son’s lack of respectability, had him committed to an asylum. During one interview, Gilberto stared out the window. “Look at the wind depilating the trees,” he said. When reminded that trees have no hair, he responded, “And there are people who have no poetry.” He was released after one week.
Gilberto returned to Rio and renewed his friendship with musician Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, then a composer and arranger for Odeon Records. Jobim arranged his song “Chega de Saudade” for Gilberto to record, but the artist’s perfectionist streak held up the process: Gilberto chided the musicians for little mistakes, made the unheard-of demand for separate microphones for his voice and guitar, and argued with Jobim about the chord progression. “Chega de Saudade” and “Bim-Bom” were finally cut on July 10, 1958. After a slow start, the single became a regional success.
American guitarist Charlie Byrd heard Gilberto’s music in 1961 while on a Jazz Ambassador tour organized by the State Department. Byrd returned home with some Gilberto/Jobim bossa nova albums, which he played for saxophonist Stan Getz. “I immediately fell in love with it,” Getz remembered. “Charlie Byrd had tried to sell a record of it with I don’t know how many [record] companies, and none of ‘em wanted it. What they needed was the voice — the horn.”
Getz and Byrd released Jazz Samba in April 1962. It entered the Billboard pop album chart in early March and ultimately peaked at No. 40. Getz earned a Grammy for his performance of Jobim’s “Desafinado.” The bossa nova craze had begun, and its definitive statement would come two years later, when Getz collaborated with the genre’s originator.
“I’m not a sociologist, but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” João’s wife Astrud Gilberto said in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” The eight tracks on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto provided just that. Getz’s lyrical phrasing was a match for Gilberto’s intimate vocal. Jobim’s understated piano proved a perfect complement. Jazz critic Howard Mandel called the album “another tonic for the [Kennedy] assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.”
Jobim cowrote several compositions on the album, most notably its opener “The Girl From Ipanema.” João sang the first verse in Portugese; Astrud the second in an English translation.
Both the single and the album were an astonishing success. Getz/Gilberto spent almost 100 weeks on the charts and won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. “The Girl From Ipanema” is second only to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” as the most recorded song.
Gilberto went on to release albums for five more decades, making solo records as well as collaborating with American jazz greats like Herbie Mann, and a new generation of Brazilian musicians including Gelberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He became a cult figure in Japan.
What might be hard to understand is that the João Gilberto who locked himself away in a bathroom and eschewed a day job is the same man who would go on to change Brazilian — and popular — music. He was fortunate to have been surrounded by people who valued him and trusted his artistic vision.
In the mid-’50s, Gilberto played, or sometimes just held court, at the Clube de Chave in Porto Alegre, appearing at any hour with his guitar. After being asked why he never finished a song, he admitted to not liking his guitar’s steel strings. The patrons, many of whom had changed their sleeping habits to conform to his, chipped in and bought him a nylon-stringed instrument. This one also wasn’t quite to Gilberto’s taste. When it was exchanged for another, he began a months-long residency.
Musicians, like music, can be contradictory. Sometimes their most idiosyncratic expressions are reflections of the universal. “João Gilberto does not underestimate people’s sensitivity,” Jobim wrote in the liner notes to Gilberto’s first album. “He believes that there is always room for something new, different and pure which — although it may not seem so at first sight — may become, as they say in the jargon, highly commercial. Because people understand love, musical notes, simplicity, and sincerity, I believe in João Gilberto, because he is simple, sincere, and extraordinarily musical.”
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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.
Love, in the world of Walt Disney films, has changed. Happy endings are no longer sealed with a kiss and the goal of heterosexual romance has been replaced by a new ideal: family love. Sophus Helle explores this twist in the Disney tale.
I am in kindergarten and I am kneeling on the seat of my desk chair. So are all of my Catholic school classmates. We are 4 and 5 and 6, and we stare at the crucifix hanging on the wall while our knees burn from the pain of prolonged contact and pressure against the blond, lacquered wood. Our teacher, Miss Judy — who, my father says, is a dead ringer for Jane Russell — knots silk scarves at the hollow of her neck and wears Candie’s sandals that thwack against the soles of her feet while she walks. While we kneel, she talks about the drunk driver who killed her sister many years ago, and says we need to pray for her sister’s departed soul. We don’t pray for the driver. I think, My father smells like whisky when he drives. My father has crashed a car. My father is going to Hell.
Most people reasonably expect the story of the evolution of the automobile to begin with the invention of the automobile itself. I’ve disappointed enough people in my life already, so I give you the Jesuit Rat Car of 1672. In that year, missionary Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam wagon to bring the Emperor of China to Jesus, but the car was only big enough to carry a rat.
If you don’t like the Jesuit Rat Car as an automotive first, you might consider Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s cannon hauler of 1769. A product of the French army’s skunk works, it was canceled in beta testing. In 1790, Nathan Read got the first American patent for a steam-powered wagon, a remarkable feat because the US Patent Office itself had yet to be invented. Perhaps that counts. In London, Richard Trevithick set a Georgian coach body atop a steam boiler and eight-foot wheels, creating the first giraffe-less carriage. In 1805, American Oliver Evans drove his harbor dredge, the Orukter Amphibolos, down the streets of Philadelphia in hopes of enticing investors for a car business. Philadelphia cobblestone street paving gave horses purchase but shook the Orukter so violently that the wheels broke. Let’s call his the first amphibious car. Read more…
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