Search Results for: writing

Fruitland

Photo by David Black, via Light in the Attic Records

Steven KurutzTrue Story | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words)

 

Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.

This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.

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Musicians Come Clean on How They Live, Create, and Thrive While Sober

Steven Tyler of Aerosmith on Aug. 15, 2018, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

For GQ, Chris Heath interviews nine musicians about their journeys to sobriety, and how they create today without alcohol or drugs. “Some delight in a dark humor about their earlier excesses,” writes Heath. “Others talk in a way that suggests that to dwell on these too much, to give such memories too much oxygen, would be to take too lightly something they simply can’t risk taking lightly.”

The roundtable of musicians includes Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, Phish’s lead vocalist Trey Anastasio, and other singer-songwriters like Ben Harper and Jason Isbell — plus an additional perspective from rapper Vince Staples, who has never had a drop of alcohol or taken any drugs in his life.

What were your drugs of choice?

Baker: I don’t want to be defined by the sort of drugs that I used to do, and I also don’t want to roll out a litany of my past, like, escapades. More than the specific drugs, what is more significant for me to identify is that I never liked things that were stimulating. When I sought substances, I sought things that would put a blanket over my feelings. Numb them down, turn it all off. Things that would bring me down and things that would make me feel less.

What scared you most about getting sober?

Anastasio: When I first got sober, they had me do all this writing. You have to start journaling like crazy. I was asked to sit down and write this list of everything that I lost to drugs and alcohol. And I remember with shock the first thing that came out of my pen, I wrote “sense of humor.” And it made me so sad. It’s making me sad right now, like I’m gonna cry. Because I laughed with the three guys from Phish from the day we met. Our chemistry together was so funny and so edgy, and they’re such smart guys, and the humor was like seven layers deep. And as soon as those drugs came into it, that was what went away.

Do you worry about remaining sober?

Isbell: No—I worry about a lot of shit, but I don’t worry about staying sober. What used to be a craving for alcohol is now more of a romanticized memory. I let the tape play out, watch the movie until the end and see what it would really do and what would really happen, rather than just remember the buzz.

How has being sober affected what you can and can’t create?

Walsh: I tried for maybe two years to sit down and write a song—I had never written sober. And this little voice in my head would say, “Well, you know what works…just get a little buzz.” That was always my justification: Could Hendrix have played like that if he wasn’t in outer space? I don’t think he could have. Could Hemingway have written those amazing stories if he wasn’t an alcoholic? And that was not an option, so I would have to put down the guitar and walk away. If I never wrote anything again, that was going to have to be okay. Once I decided that, I had this big sigh of relief. And about four months later, I wrote a song.

What do you think would have happened if you’d carried on as you were?

Tyler: Well, I’d be dead by now.

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This Month In Books: ‘How Thick Was the Cane?’ and Other Questions About Things

Photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

“The Senate committee asked as many questions about the cane as they did about Brooks,” Jason Phillips writes regarding the aftermath of the famous incident in which Congressman Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. Questions such as,

“‘Do you know anything of the relative specific gravity of a gutta percha cane or of a hickory cane?’ ‘How thick was the cane used by Mr. Brooks?’ Witnesses who owned pieces of the cane brought them to the Senate investigation in their pockets. They asked the doctor who attended to Sumner if repeated blows to the head with a stick ‘from one half to five-eights of an inch in diameter’ could kill a man. ‘It would depend upon the character of the stick’ the doctor replied.”

This fixation on the character of the stick, on the parameters of what is possible with the stick, becomes a cipher for Phillips’ entire project in The Looming Civil War, which is to understand how people thought about the Civil War before it happened — as it turns out, their thoughts are often most legible through how they regarded material things.

In a review of Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, an autobiographical novel of Geissler’s time spent working at an Amazon warehouse, Rebecca McCarthy asks her own set of questions about things: “Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face? Who needs these pre-distressed Iron Maiden hats, already rags at point of purchase?” The answer, of course, is “Amazon customers, which is to say, all of us.” Or, as Geissler puts it, “It’s because of all the things that are here, which someone or another wants to buy, that you’re here in the first place.” Stare long into the shopping cart, and the shopping cart stares back into thee.

It bears remembering that Amazon started as a way to sell a lot of, and undercut the market for, books. “Everything exists, in case you were going to ask. Absolutely everything exists, and people can buy it all,” Geissler writes. But the ‘everything store’ started as a bookstore, and ‘everything exists’ sounds like something people would used to say about the limitless realities open to us when we read books, rather than about a bunch of actual stuff. It’s as though Amazon is the Borgesian library run amuck. Somehow, on his way to amassing an infinite collection of books in which everything possible is written — ultimately making it all unreadable and useless — Bezos ended up with an an infinite collection of junk in which every possible desire is rendered pathetically visible, making it all… well, I don’t know. Is a George Clooney mug useful? Can that desire ever be usefully satisfied? This, regrettably, seems to be the defining question of our time.


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The weight of the meaning of the things around us, of our material environment, becomes disturbingly apparent when reading Dorothy Butler’s Gilliam’s memoir Trailblazer. Butler Gilliam was hired as the first black woman journalist at The Washington Post, at a time when the city was inherently segregated; so racism manifested itself most obviously as the denial of access to things. Each deprivation would magnify the one that came before it, transforming everyday assignments into uncertain quests:

“My editors would assign me a story for the next day’s edition, and, like other reporters, I had only a few hours to get the story, return, and write it before deadline…. I would wave frantically for a taxicab, mostly driven by white men, but all would whiz past me…. When I eventually got to my assignment, I did my reporting, and I would again try to flag a cab to get back to the paper to type my story. As time passed, deadlines neared and no taxi stopped, I would start writing my stories out in my reporter’s notebook….”

And that was just the taxis! Many of the lunch places, the coworkers, and the subjects of her stories were racist, too. What a hellish job. “Many years later,” Butler Gilliam writes, “I discovered I had turned a lot of my anger inward in what became depression, and someone close to me at that time later told me, ‘you didn’t know how much bondage you were in at The Washington Post.’”

The ramifications of another type of material segregation are apparent in Rafia Zakaria’s review of The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch, Sanam Maher’s biography of the slain Pakistani YouTube star. “Qandeel was not my daughter but she was my son. She provided us financial and emotional support,” her father lamented after her death. He accused her brothers of killing her for her money, or perhaps more accurately over the money, which it was unusual and unseemly for a woman to have so much of — especially so much of it that she was the child supporting her parents. One of the brothers confessed to killing her for ‘honor,’ blaming, among other things, some sexy selfies she took with a cleric. But Zakaria knows the score: “A woman’s economic empowerment can be anything from an existential threat to an inconvenience, but in any case, men believe they are entitled to stop it by stopping her life.” What’s lost in the telling of the story of Qandeel Baloch, Zakaria is saying, is that she was killed for doing her job.

Overall, it’s obviously the bigots who are the problem, but there’s something about the jobs, too, that stinks: “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.”

So this month, I offer you a blessing that is only a blessing until it actually happens, like for the furloughed federal workers, in which case it becomes curse: as Geissler puts in, “May every day be a day when shifts are terminated, ideally right after they begin.”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, 1930. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,079 words)

There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes comic strip where Calvin says, “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed… Verbing weirds language.” With Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s sixth book and first novel in nine years, he has once again weirded language into an inimitable comic brio, capturing the roiling mess of late-capitalist/early-apocalypse America, and making us laugh while he pulls it off.

Here’s Lipsyte on Dieter Delgado, a titan of industry with a deep misreading of Naomi Klein: “Dieter hails from the throw-it-all-at-the-wall school. One war, one earthquake, one tsunami, one pandemic, one dating app and, assuming you are well positioned, you can cover your losses and get mega-rich all over again, ad mega-infinitum. Deets read a book about this that inspired him to seek out more catastrophe. The next hemoclysm may make him the world’s first trillionaire.” Read more…

‘She changed my heart. And that changed my mind.’

Photo by Barry King/WireImage

At 33, Tabitha Blankenbiller believed she didn’t want any children, until — unexpectedly — she became pregnant. In this essay at Salon, Blankenbiller considers how the simple existence of her unborn child changed her perspective on motherhood and life, causing her to reconsider choices and beliefs, only to discover that just when she’d decided that this particular lemon would make great lemonade, sometimes life decides for you.

Think of how many passages you breach in a day. The driver’s door to your car. The turnstile of your favorite park. The impatient elevators of your building. The generous slide of the grocery store’s glass. Out of the bedroom, into the living room. One side of the tunnel, out the other. Hundreds of transitions switching backdrops, edging us forward in the routine, the occasional fresh adventure.

One in ten thousand will bookend us. We will pass through as one thing and emerge another. It will mark our Before and After. That day at work, I entered the single stall private bathroom as a drama queen clutching her pearls over a period missing for a scant blip of a week to take a test she’d managed to skip for an entire adult lifetime of Match.com horror stories and marriage and college, and then grad school bad jobs and dream vacations, first essay published and first book released, canning and handwriting and Thai cooking lessons, 40 pounds up and down five times over.

I peed on the stick, then set it on the counter while I played a game of Disney Emoji Blitz on my phone. The timer cut in for my three minutes, and I tilted the test toward me to discover the faintest line severing the woman I knew into another.

This was impossible. I took a picture in a haze and sent it to my best friend Charlotte, a parent of two.

Holy shit yeah, that is pregnant, she confirmed.

We weave hypotheticals of our lives, speaking over one another to announce what we’d do if it were us. We make lists, connections, promises. For 33 years I ran the simulation in my head of that improbable second line, and decided each time, without fail, that I did not want a child. I believed they were too expensive. I believed my life was already fulfilling and content. I believed that not all women should be mothers. I believed that the capacity and consumption of our species is unsustainable on this planet, and that some flavor of doom is inevitable. I believed that abortion is healthcare, a procedure that does not require an explanation to receive. I believed that a zygote is not a person, and a four-week-old clump of cells is a precursor to human life.

All of these convictions are still accurate. I stand by each one.

But there is the question, what would you do, and there is what happens when a sudden, impending new reality forks your life in two. Our hearts are a vast trove of too many secret reactions and desires to discover in a lifetime. And what I realized about myself is this: that I cannot name a time I have been happier than standing in our backyard gripping the back of the patio chair, demanding that Matt needed to listen to me.

“We have to keep it. I love her already.”

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The Silence of Women

A scold's bridle. From The Strand Magazine:, July to December, 1894. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Jane Brox| an excerpt adapted from Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Januray 2019 | 15 minutes (4,034 words)



What becometh a woman best, and first of all? Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie I would still crie silence, silence.

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560


For women, silence within the world of judicial punishment has its own complex history. It’s less recorded than that of men, and fragmented. Details must be teased out of obscurity and can be distorted by what is absent. Often, there are more questions than answers for punishment that amounts to silencing on top of silence, since women have long been expected to govern their tongue.

In colonial America this presumption of silence was reinforced by women’s subordinate place in society, and bolstered by centuries of English common law. No woman had the right to vote and once she married — in an age when most women married — she became subject to the law of coverture, which meant that she not only became dependent on her husband but, as William Blackstone in his eighteenth-century work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, explains: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing, and is therefore called in our law — French, a femme covert… under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” Read more…

Astrology Year Zero

Longreads Pick

“For the hardcore enthusiast, with the software and the charts, astrology seemed at most an intricate hobby, convertible to modest profit at only the highest level, like translating Scandinavian languages or freelance writing.”

Source: The Baffler
Published: Jan 14, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,922 words)

‘In a Marriage, You Grow Around Each Other’: An Interview with Tessa Hadley

Corbis Historical, HarperCollins

Sarah Boon | Longreads | January 2019 | 16 minutes (4,272 words)

 

Tessa Hadley is a late-bloomer in UK fiction, despite having wanted to be a writer since she was a child. “It chose me rather than me choosing it,” she says about writing. Hadley published her first novel at the age of 46. Since then, she’s been an unstoppable force, publishing five additional novels, two short story collections, and contributing regularly to The New Yorker. Her new novel, Late in the Day, delves into the institution of marriage, particularly long marriages. She explores how couples grow around each other, like trees, and how the sudden death of a partner can send life into a tailspin. Read more…

At Risk, at Home and Abroad

Illustration by Lily Padula

Joy Notoma | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (3,079 words)

 

Akosua* was in my care when she was assaulted. A man entered the bedroom where she was sleeping and tried to undress her.

She called out, waking us around 3 a.m. Moments later, she appeared in our bedroom doorway hugging herself, a distraught expression on her 15-year-old face. Akosua was sleeping in the bedroom next to where my husband and I slept, in the house we were renting in Benin, a small country on the southern coast of West Africa.

“There was a man!” she stuttered through tears. “He came into my room. He tried to undress me,” she said.

I wanted it be a nightmare, but Akosua was an unlikely person to confuse reality so dramatically, and we would have taken her word for it anyway. She was the type of teenager who contemplated big issues about the world, who could hold her own in conversations about race and politics, who expressed emotions easily while still managing to be grounded. She was selfless in the way American parents sometimes wish their own kids were.

There was an exit door in the bedroom where she slept that I had carelessly neglected to lock, which made me culpable. I was overwhelmed by guilt.

The man who did it was the groundskeeper for the house we were renting, hired by the owner. People called him the security guard, but I never could. It made me feel like the house was a prison. What could he have actually protected us from anyway? His only valuable task which I could discern was yard work, so I called him the groundskeeper. And then it was he — the supposed security guard — who assaulted Akosua.

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“Welcome to the House of Horrors”: When IP Address Mapping Goes Wrong

For years, strangers showed up at John and his mother Ann’s home in Pretoria, South Africa, accusing them of crimes. These mysterious visitors were certain that their house was a location for criminal activity, and pulled up maps on their smartphones to prove it. But John was a lawyer; his mother was a nurse. They weren’t criminals, but rather victims of very bad IP address mapping — and it turns out, the U.S. government played a big role in the mess.

For Gizmodo, Special Projects Desk deputy editor Kashmir Hill — who reported on a similar story about a farm in Kansasinvestigates why John and Ann’s backyard had over a million IP addresses mapped to it, and how a U.S. intelligence agency’s poor decision led to a series of mistakes reflected in databases used by IP mapping sites, companies, and people all over the world.

“My mother blamed me initially,” said John. “She said I brought the internet into the house.”

The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads.

“It’s almost with religious zeal that these people come, thinking their goodies are in my yard,” John told me. “The Apple customers seem to be the worst.”

They wondered if it would be worse if they weren’t white South Africans. And indeed, when the police showed up looking for a stolen laptop at the home of their neighbor, a pastor named Horace, who is black, the police wound up seizing a laptop at the home and taking Horace’s tenant to the station for questioning. It was a dead end, as usual.

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