I had the most restful few days imaginable, as our submissions address had not ported over from the old host yet, and Tech Goth Maria, at my urging, agreed not to fix it until after the Glorious Fourth. The silence! The glorious silence. It came to an end yesterday morning, but I will never forget the serenity of this weekend. It is truly a brief absence that makes the heart grow fonder. I am rejuvenated and excited to read your work once more.
Robert Shelton looks back on working at the Domino Sugar refinery:
The sugar that was once stored here came in by barge on the East River. It started out brown; it took a mixture of animal bone charcoal and chemicals to bleach it white. In the char house near the sugar house, Mr. Shelton’s kilns heated the bone char for reuse. The smell, he said, made him sick to his stomach. Against the heat, he wore long johns and special insulation, layers that did nothing for the sweat that clung to his hair and squished in his socks.
That heat: night shifts, day shifts, weekend shifts, holiday shifts, 60 or 70 hours a week for 20 years, all feeling like 2,000 degrees. It made even the most veteran kiln workers woozy. It still imprints his body. Accustomed to furnacelike temperatures, Mr. Shelton said he wore wool socks in his sneakers even when he played handball in the summer. For him, each winter is torture.
That garbage Anthony Cumia idiot got canned, bless the universe. dur dur free speech something. We needed a victory after last week, even if this is small potatoes.
Jesus, Guernica has been having some great stuff recently:
When our donors met the actual people they were helping they often didn’t like them. During our Secret Santa drive, volunteers sometimes refused to drop gifts at houses with TVs inside. They got angry when clients had cell phones or in some other way didn’t match their expectations. Other times, the donations we got were too disgusting to pass along—soup cans that bulged with botulism and diapers so dry rotted they crumbled in our hands. One Thanksgiving, a board member called from the parking lot, requesting help carrying a frozen turkey from her trunk to our office. “Can you find a deserving family?” she asked. I lugged the bird up three flights of stairs. Somewhere near the top, I noticed the expiration date. It was seventeen years old.
Great, difficult-to-read profile of Roxane Gay from NPR.
I ask Gay if recovery is only a fiction. “No, I don’t think it’s a fiction, but I think we have a fictionalized understanding of what recovery means,” she says. “Especially for Miri, in the novel, recovery is just getting to a place where she wants to be alive, and feels alive, and can be present in her life. But I think we like to believe that recovery means we can get over everything and that we can forgive those who have trespassed against us. And I just refuse to do that. And I believe in forgiveness but find it very difficult to offer up forgiveness and I don’t particularly feel like forgiveness frees you from your burden of trauma [she says this last phrase with contempt]. I think we just tell ourselves these palliative things to just become more comfortable. And to believe we can overcome anything.”
Bakeries you should visit before you die. OR AFTER, AS A POLTERGEIST.
On the earliest English-language translation of the Quran:
In November 1733 the first translation of the Quran from Arabic into English — a copy of which Jefferson would eventually purchase — appeared in London. Its author, Sale, had learned Arabic in his spare time and had never visited a Muslim country. He once wrote, “I am but too sensible of the Disadvantages, one who is neither a Native, nor ever was in the Country must lie under, in playing the Critic in so difficult a Language as the Arabick.” To translate the holy book, Sale mainly used volumes in his own library, including a recent Latin translation that had been published in Counterreformation Rome. This Latin Quran, designed for the use of Catholic missionaries, contained a wealth of previously untranslated information.
On quitting Facebook:
Here’s what shakes me the most now: Facebook’s privacy changes laid the foundation for this breach of my personal privacy, and its doublespeak facilitated it. So how was Facebook’s complicity so invisible to me that I didn’t assign it any blame? That is, why did I accuse my family member of negligence, instead of accusing Facebook of negligence?
The only thing better than Richard Dreyfuss’s kids talking about JAWS is the olds in the comments assuming this must be the END of Mother Jones.
I had never, ever seen “Gap Yah,” and then Mallory sent it to me, and now I care for nothing else:
