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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week October 5, 2012 Sign up for a Longreads Membership and we'll send you our latest exclusive, "The Nature of Social Evil," from Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker's book Escape from Evil. Join now for $3 per month or $30 per year.
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1. The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador Karen Russell | GQ | October 3, 2012 | 29 minutes (7,418 words) [Not single-page] Less than a year after losing half his face to a bull, the victim of one of Spain's worst matador gorings returns to the ring:
"There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They're telling him he might never again wear his 'suit of lights.' Never stand before another bull. If he can't return to a plaza, he'll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.
In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.
"'I have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession,' he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: 'I will return to dress as a torero.'"
More GQ: "'The Best TV Show That's Ever Been'" (Brian Raftery, Sept. 2012)
Books by Karen Russell on Amazon
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2. The F Word Jennifer Weiner | Allure | October 3, 2012 | 8 minutes (2,240 words) A writer confronts her daughter after she calls another girl "fat":
"'Excuse me,' I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm's ZIP code. 'What did you just say?'
"From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she'd done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. 'She is fat,' Lucy mumbled into her bowl.
"'We are going upstairs,' I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. 'We are going to discuss this.' And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom."
Books by Weiner on Amazon
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3. I Don't See You Tim N. Taylor | The Rumpus | September 26, 2012 | 12 minutes (3,032 words) A writer on the racism he witnessed while growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, and running a grocery store with his father:
"When I went back for an event for my college fraternity, I introduced myself to one of the new guys, my brother who is the first 'black guy' in my fraternity. When I asked him where he was from, he said, 'From South America originally.' I laughed and said, 'No, I meant where from in the US—St. Louis, Kansas City?' The suburban kid from St. Louis didn’t want to be considered 'African American.' For him, being South American was a safer play in a predominately white fraternity.
"I’ve wondered whether an African American would have gotten a small business loan like my father did.
"In 1989 when the movie came out, a reporter asked Spike Lee a question about what viewers 'should learn' from Do The Right Thing. Lee smiled and quipped that maybe black folks should be able to get financing to run their own pizzerias."
More Rumpus: "An Epilogue to the Unread" (Chad Simpson, Aug. 2012)
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4. Chasing a Ghost Robert Sanchez | 5280 Magazine | September 28, 2012 | 23 minutes (5,753 words) Two cold case investigators uncover a serial killer's trail in Colorado:
"Yearling turned to his computer and pulled up a map. The site where Ramey’s body was dumped—an area southeast of East 56th Avenue and Havana Street—was now a jumble of loading docks, and strips of asphalt and concrete. The detective typed Ramey’s name into a Google search. After a few minutes clicking through different websites, Yearling stumbled upon a message board devoted to cold case investigations. In one comment thread dedicated to unsolved Colorado homicides, he found a simple who-what-when on a young woman who disappeared in August 1979. Her name was Norma Jean Halford. Yearling scrolled down the page and found a copied and pasted, 21-year-old newspaper story that included Ramey’s name on a list of women who were murdered or disappeared across the Denver metro area from 1979 to 1988. According to police at the time, the story said, one man might have been responsible: a man named Vincent Groves."
More Sanchez: "The Education of Ms. Barsallo" (2010)
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5. Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012? Nitsuh Abebe | New York magazine | October 1, 2012 | 23 minutes (5,854 words) Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:
"For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. 'People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,' says Droste. 'Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.' Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with 'a nice little "Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months." ' They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act ('Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage'), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. 'I just think it’s inappropriate,' says Droste. 'Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'"
More Abebe: "We Must Be Superstars" (July 2011)
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Fiction Pick: Fischer vs. Spassky Lara Vapnyar | The New Yorker | October 1, 2012 | 15 minutes (3,741 words) A chess match determines a family's fate:
"For a long time after her husband died, Marina used to scream. She’d feel the scream rushing up from her stomach, choking her from the inside, and she’d run out of the room, stumbling over her kids’ toys, and hide in the hallway, in the narrow space between the coatrack and the mirror stand, biting down on her right forearm to muffle the sound. After the scream had passed, and she unclenched her teeth, there would be little circular marks on her arm that looked like irregular postage stamps. Those scars remained long after Marina had stopped screaming, long after she had ceased grieving for her husband altogether.
"Even now, thirty years later, she could feel them tingle at random moments. She felt it when she heard Bobby Fischer’s name on the radio. She was driving down a snowbound Brooklyn street on the way to see a client. The radio was on low, but she thought she heard the announcer repeating that name. She turned up the volume and there it was: Bobby Fischer. Bobby Fischer had died. Bobby Fischer had died in Reykjavík, Iceland."
Books by Vapnyar on Amazon
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Scott Young @scottalyoung Scott is the social media editor for the Canadian International Council. |
"My favorite longread of the week is Michael Idov's piece in The New Republic, exquisitely titled 'Georgia's Next Leader May Be a Billionaire Zookeeper with Albino Rapper Children.' If that alone doesn't compel you to click, you're duller than Stephen Harper's hair. Idov plunges into the bizarro world of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the eccentric billionaire angling to become Georgia's next president. If he didn't exist in real life, Ivanishvili would have been invented: a private art collection (reportedly including Picasso's Dora Maar au Chat), albino rapper kids, and multiple 'Bond villain lair' compounds. But, it was only after concluding last year that President Saakashvili had purged any genuine political opposition from parliament that Ivanishvili deigned to step into politics. While he readily admits he doesn't 'plan on staying in politics too long,' after his political coalition's victory in Monday parliamentary election, Ivanishvili is slated to become Georgia's next president next year." Georgia's Next Leader May Be A Billionaire Zookeeper with Albino Rapper Children Michael Idov | The New Republic | September 28, 2012 | 18 minutes (4,476 words) |
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