Search Results for: village voice

A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…

Ellen Willis on Community and Long-Distance Bus Travel

The legendary Ellen Willis (first-ever pop critic for The New Yorker, feminist role model extraordinaire, etc.) passed away in 2006, but her work is enjoying a second renaissance thanks to The Essential Ellen Willis, a 2014 collection edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz. Earlier this month the National Book Critics Circle posthumously awarded Willis their top prize in criticism for the anthology. In honor of the honor, The Village Voice has reprinted “Escape from New York,” a fantastic Willis essay about loneliness, human connection, aging radicals and criss-crossing the country on a Greyhound bus. The essay first appeared as the Voice’s July 29, 1981 cover story, and has since been reprinted in The Essential Ellen Willis. 

For Americans, long-distances buses are the transportation of last resort. As most people see it, buses combine the comfort of a crowded jail cell with the glamour of a liverwurst sandwich. Though I can’t really refute that assessment, I don’t really share it, either. As a student with lots of time, little money, and no driver’s license, I often traveled by bus. Un-American as it may be, I feel nostalgic about those trips, even about their discomforts. In my no doubt idealized memory, discomfort was the cement that bound together an instant community of outsiders, people who for reasons of age, race, class, occupation (student, soldier), handicap, or bohemian poverty were marginal — at least for the time being — to a car-oriented culture.

It is this idea of community that moves me now. Lately I’ve been feeling isolated, spending too much time hiding out in my apartment, wrestling with abstract ideas. What better remedy than to take a bus trip, join the transportation-of-last-resort community, come back and write about what I’ve learned.

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Escape From New York

Longreads Pick

The late Ellen Willis—a legendary feminist and cultural critic—writes about loneliness, human connection and aging radicals in the context of a solo cross-country Greyhound bus trip. The essay originally appeared as a 1981 cover story in the Village Voice, and was later reprinted in The Essential Ellen Willis.

Source: Village Voice
Published: Jul 29, 1981
Length: 41 minutes (10,420 words)

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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How a Legendary Rock Critic Found a Home in the Comments Section of an MSN Blog

As for the awe he inspires himself, Christgau’s devotees are smaller in number these days than in his Voice years, but they’re still extraordinarily dedicated, particularly among a small community who came together in the comments section of Expert Witness, the MSN blog he started after leaving the Voice. (He’s since moved on to the Medium site Cuepoint.) “The Witnesses are the greatest experience of my professional life,” Christgau says. “Most of them are very married kind of guys, but I’m so very married that it makes sense.”

He credits the Witnesses with helping him to stay current. Nick Farruggia, at 25 years old, is one of the youngest members of the group; he first heard of Christgau when he was 15 and trying to branch out musically. During the hours and hours he spent researching music on the internet, he began to notice that the same critic’s name kept appearing in nearly every Wikipedia entry. (At first, “I thought he was really pompous and pretentious,” he admits now.)

Eventually though, Christgau became a kind of reference book for all the things Farruggia was curious about in music. He found the Expert Witness blog, and quickly mixed in with its surprisingly robust comment community: The Witnesses meet up in person occasionally, usually at shows by Wussy, an Ohio indie-rock band that has been Christgau’s favorite for the last few years.

“It sounds so weird, to be honest,” Farruggia says. “We have a hard time explaining it to our spouses that there is this group of people who all have respect for this one older guy, and who collectively constitute this amazing group of friends.”

If Expert Witness is essential to the Christgau diehards, it’s an even more necessary outlet for the author himself. “There’s the sense that there is just not enough time for him to get everything out that he needs to get out,” Farruggia says.

—Leah Carroll, profiling rock critic Robert Christgau in Deadspin. Christgau spent three decades reviewing music for the Village Voice.

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Almost Famous

Longreads Pick

A profile of the legendary Robert Christgau, who spent three decades as the Village Voice‘s rock critic.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Feb 23, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,050 words)

Think of This as a Window: Remembering the Life and Work of Maggie Estep

Photo via YouTube

Sari Botton | Longreads | February 2015

 

A year ago this month the world lost an incredible talent. Maggie Estep, a great writer—and before that, slam poet/performance artist—died suddenly, a month shy of 51.

The loss has hit me hard, even though I had been just getting to know Maggie personally. She was someone I’d idolized from the time we were both in our twenties, she a couple of years older than I. I’d see her stomping around the East Village, where I lived, too, in a black dress with fishnets and a combat boots, utterly self-possessed and unconcerned with what you thought of her. Read more…

Our Music, Our Lives: A Reading List

Turn the music up and tune into these five articles.

1. “The Soundtrack to My Late Blooming Sexual Awakening: A Round Table.” (Rachel Vorona Cote, Kirsten Schofield, Sarah Seltzer, and Lindsay King-Miller, The Hairpin, August 2014)

What maelstrom of musicians is this?! These four authors elaborate on everyone from Usher to Fiona Apple as they reminisce about their teenage dreams.

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He Looked Like a Detective in the Movies

The door opened. Two men in suits walked in. The man in front was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, thin-waisted, thick-haired fellow with deep-set, dark eyes and an icy glare. The precinct detective knew this man. He’d seen him around the precinct. It was hard to miss him. He looked, colleagues often said, how a detective in a movie looks. And he played the part well. His suits were tailored. He always seemed to be chomping his trademark cigar, whether at the station, on the streets, or at the bar after hours. He had a booming voice thick with a Brooklyn accent. He had a hearty laugh and a respectable handshake. He loved to buy others drinks and trade stories. He was the friendliest and warmest man many of his peers had ever met, and he was quick to cut himself down with abundant doses of self-deprecation. It was hard not to love Detective Louis Scarcella.

Behind Scarcella stood his partner, Detective Steve Chmil, a stout man with a trim mustache, a brown comb-over, and skeptical, probing eyes. Where Scarcella seemed to seek the spotlight, Chmil was fine working in the shadows. The Robin to Scarcella’s Batman, cops around the borough joked. Scarcella and Chmil had come to assist on the precinct detective’s homicide case. He was expecting the company. Scarcella and Chmil were members of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, a roving, 40-man task force formed to relieve the borough’s murder epidemic. Precinct detectives faced dozens of robberies, burglaries, rapes, assaults, and shootings each month. The heavy caseloads made it tough to stay on top of a murder investigation for more than a few weeks. So homicide-squad detectives worked with the precinct detectives to help investigate murders. And perhaps no detective in New York City was better known for solving murder cases than Louis Scarcella.

Albert Samaha, writing for the Village Voice about the embattled career of Brooklyn detective Louis Scarcella. In recent years, many of Scarcella’s tactics have been questioned, and convictions made with his help have come under scrutiny.

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More stories from The Village Voice

Photo: Flickr, Michael Cory

How Island Records Made Bob Marley Into a Household Name After His Death

In the Village Voice, Chris Kornelis writes about how Bob Marley became a household name posthumously thanks to some careful remarketing:

Robinson had a hunch that suburban record buyers were uneasy with Marley’s image — that of a perpetually stoned, politically driven iconoclast associated with violence. And so he commissioned a London-based researcher named Gary Trueman to conduct focus groups with white suburban record buyers in England. Trueman also met with traditional Marley fans to ensure the label didn’t package the album in a way that would offend his core audience.

Less than a decade before violence and drugs became a selling point for gangsta rap, the suburban groups told Trueman precisely what Robinson suspected: They were put off by the way Marley was portrayed. They weren’t keen on the dope, the religion, the violent undertones, or even reggae as a genre. But they loved Marley’s music.

“There was almost this sense of guilt that they hadn’t got a Bob Marley album,” Trueman says. “They couldn’t really understand why they hadn’t bought one.”

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