a murder of crows

take a spin through Karolina Waclawiak's brain matter

[buzzfeedreader]

Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed

When my friend told me in the ICU that I had overdosed on my pills, I fuzzily asked, “My birth control pills?”

Actually, I’d stood at the water fountain outside my dorm room and swallowed two bottles of antidepressants. I had also been drinking all day, making for a perfectly lethal cocktail.

Make no mistake, this was not a drunken whim.

Just three months earlier, I had been a patient in another medical facility: a mental hospital. My best friend, Denise, had killed herself on Christmas, and days after the funeral I told my mom that I wanted to die too. I couldn’t forgive myself for the role I’d played in Denise’s death: Not only did I fail to save her, but I’m fairly certain I gave her the idea.

Suicide has been part of my identity ever since puberty — probably when I developed major depressive disorder, which wouldn’t be diagnosed and treated for another five years. In retrospect, I can acknowledge that I was a popular, attractive, and bright teenager, but my diary entries are peppered with thoughts of suicide and self-loathing. And when Denise and I both had a pregnancy scare (her first time having sex; my second), my “solution” was to gas ourselves in her red Pinto in her garage while her family wasn’t home. (Our periods were probably late because of our stress about unprotected sex, and synced because we spent so much time together.)

But I was the first to make an actual attempt, swallowing 16 tablets of my brother’s prescription medication, writing a short note soaked in tears and bathos, and calling Denise to tell her what I was doing. Of course, she rushed over and told my mother, who called poison control, and Denise and my brother raced to a drugstore to buy ipecac (a popular emetic at the time) while my mom stayed home watching me.

- My Best Friend Saved Me When I Attempted Suicide, But I Didn’t Save Her

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Such an important essay.

[nasa]

Mercury In the Spotlight

For more than seven hours on Monday, May 9, Mercury will be visible as a tiny black dot crossing the face of the sun. This rare event – which happens only slightly more than once a decade – is called a transit.

Although Mercury whips around the sun every 88 days – over four times faster than Earth – the three bodies rarely align. Because Mercury orbits in a plane 7 degrees tilted from Earth’s orbit, it usually darts above or below our line of sight to the sun. As a result, a Mercury transit happens only about 13 times a century. The last one was in 2006, and the next one isn’t until 2019.

When: On May 9, shortly after 7:00 a.m. EDT, Mercury will appear as a tiny black dot against a blazing backdrop, traversing the sun’s disk over seven and a half hours. Mercury will cross the edge of the sun (ingress) after 7:00 a.m. EDT. The mid-transit point will occur a little after 10:45 a.m. EDT, with egress around 2:30 p.m. EDT.

Where: Skywatchers in Western Europe, South America and eastern North America will be able to see the entirety of the transit. The entire 7.5-hour path across the sun will be visible across the Eastern U.S. – with magnification and proper solar filters – while those in the West can observe the transit in progress at sunrise.

Safety!

Unlike the 2012 Venus transit of the sun, Mercury is too small to be visible without magnification from a telescope or high-powered binoculars. Both must have safe solar filters made of specially-coated glass or Mylar; you can never look directly at the sun. We’re offering several avenues for the public to view the event without specialized and costly equipment, including images on NASA.gov, a one-hour NASA Television special, and social media coverage.

The Science…Why are Planetary Transits Important?

Transits like this allowed scientists in the 17th century to make the first estimates of Earth’s distance from the sun. Transit observations over the past few centuries have also helped scientists study everything from the atmosphere of Venus to the slight shifts in Mercury’s orbit that could only be explained by the theory of general relativity. Because we know Mercury’s size and location precisely, this transit will help scientists calibrate telescopes on solar observatories SDO, SOHO, and Hinode. 

Transits can also teach us more about planets – both in and out of our solar system. The Venus transit in 2012 provided observations of the planet’s atmosphere. Transits are also the main way we find planets outside the solar system, called exoplanets.

The transit method looks for a drop in the brightness of a star when a planet passes in front of it. This method will not find every planet – only those that happen to cross our line of sight from Earth to the star. But with enough sensitivity, the transit method through continuous monitoring is a great way to detect small, Earth-size planets, and has the advantage of giving us both the planet’s size (from the fraction of starlight blocked), as well as its orbit (from the period between transits). Our Kepler/K2 mission uses this method to find exoplanets, as will the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellites, or TESS, following its launch in 2017/2018. 

We will stream a live program on NASA TV and the agency’s Facebook page from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. – an informal roundtable during which experts representing planetary, heliophysics and astrophysics will discuss the science behind the Mercury transit. Viewers can ask questions via Facebook and Twitter using #AskNASA.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

[believermag]

Parties Without Tears

Illustration by Sunra Thompson

With the holidays looming comes the prospect of parties to attend. If that proposition fills you with dread, here are a few handy tips from Michel Houellebecq, a seemingly unlikely purveyor of self-help. Then again, he may know what he’s talking about going by the memorably miserable party scenes in his books, notably the opener of Extension du Domaine de la Lutte in which the protagonist, having downed four vodkas, starts to feel ill, proceeds to collapse onto a pile of cushions behind a sofa where subjected to eavesdropping on a punishingly vapid conversation about the merits of miniskirts in the workplace he eventually drifts off, only to find on resurfacing that he’s vomited all over the carpet. After moving some cushions over to cover up the vomit, he decides it’s time to leave, but it turns out somewhere along the night, he lost his keys.

—Dorna Khazeni

PARTIES

The point of a party is to make us forget we are solitary, wretched and betrothed to death; in other words, to transform us into animals. Which is why savages have a highly developed party sense. Light up a bunch of hallucinogenic buds, shake a couple of tambourines, and presto! it doesn’t take much. At the other end of the spectrum, the average guy in the west acquires insufficient quantities of ecstasy only after endless raves whence he emerges deaf and drugged up. He has no party sense whatsoever. Profoundly self-conscious, radically estranged from others, terrorized by the idea of death, he’s quite incapable of achieving any form of exaltation. And still he persists. The loss of his animal state saddens him and breeds shame and rancor. He would like to be a partier or at least to pass for one. He’s in a tough spot.

What am I doing with these idiots?

“For when two or three gather together in My name, there I am with them.” (Matthew, 18: 20) And therein lies the problem: gathered in the name of what? What could actually justify being gathered?

Gathered for fun

This is the worst hypothetical. In these sorts of circumstances (nightclubs, dances, parties) that are in no way visibly fun, there is but one solution: the pick-up, to hit on someone. At which point you leave party mode to enter a fierce narcissistic contest, with or without penetration as an option (it is classically deemed that a man needs penetration to obtain the desired narcissistic gratification, he then feels something akin to the bonus round sounds of old pinball machines. Women, most often, settle for the certainty that one wishes to penetrate them). If this sort of game turns your stomach, or if you feel you won’t make the cut, there’s only one solution, leave as quickly as possible.

Gathered for the good fight

The idea, off the bat, is ingenious; indeed, the felicitous glue of a common cause can generate a group effect, a sense of belonging, an authentic collective euphoria even. Sadly, crowd psychology follows an invariable rule: in the end, it’s always the stupidest and most brutish who dominate. So, you end up among a bunch of braying boors, dangerous even. The choice here is the same as at the nightclub: leave before it all starts to fall apart, or hit on someone in a context that, in this case, is more favorable: the presence of common convictions, feelings provoked by how the protest plays out have been known to slightly rattle the narcissistic shell.

Gathered to fuck (sex clubs, private orgies, certain New Age groups)

One of the simplest and oldest formulas: gathering humanity based on what they actually share. Sexual acts take place, even absent pleasure often. Still, it’s something, but that’s about all it is.

Gathered for worship (church services, pilgrimages)

Religion offers an altogether original formula, audaciously denying partings and death while affirming that, contrary to appearances, we are all bathed in divine love while moving towards a happy eternity. A  religious ceremony where the participants have faith therefore, provides the sole example of a successful party. Certain agnostic participants might even, for the duration of the celebration, be overcome by a sentiment of faith, but they run the risk, afterwards, of a terrible crash (a bit like sex, but worse). One solution: to be touched by grace.

Pilgrimages, combining as they do the benefits of student protests with those of youth travel, all in an atmosphere of spirituality aggravated by fatigue, further foster the ideal conditions for the pick-up which, as a consequence, becomes involuntary to the point of being sincere. The best case scenario at the end of a pilgrimage: marriage plus conversion. At the other extreme, the crash can be dreadful. Plan to book a package winter sports vacation to immediately follow. You can always cancel if need be. Make sure to read the small print when making the reservation.

Keep reading

[slaughterhouse90210]

MY FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2015

BEST FINALE (ALONG WITH MAD MEN, OF COURSE)

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Ferrante Fever is real. The fourth and final book of the Neapolitan Novels may not be the best (Book Two 4 EVA), but it closed out what was one of the most profound and satisfying reading experiences I’ve had in recent years. Ferrante’s Italy is where the personal is political, the male gaze is visceral, and the past clings to the present with potent force. Bonus points because the flimsiness of the central romantic relationship of the series can be consummately mapped onto Angela, Jordan, and Rayanne from My So-Called Life.

BEST DIALOGUE

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

It turns out that the most important political novel of the year is also the most hilarious. What Beatty’s satire about “post-racial” America lacks in cohesive plot it makes up for with a voice that is so unabashedly profane, so unflinchingly silly and smart that it’s impossible to look away. And I could not believe how many perfect jokes are embedded within so many individual sentences.

BEST LITERARY FEAT

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Trigger warning: literally every other page of this hefty novel about the bleak lives of four college friends requires a trigger warning. But Hanya Yanagihara’s greatest feat is that she makes A Little Life’s unrelentingly devastating subject matter so compulsively readable. I can’t remember ever being so addicted to despair, and I listen to a lot of Fiona Apple. Prepare to put the rest of your life on hold while this book destroys your weekend.

Side note: If you loved A Little Life but want a more realistic yet similarly artful, captivating take on what it’s like to love an existentially unhappy person, might I suggest All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews? The 2014 novel contains all of the anger and frustration and real talk that  around the discussion of suicide that the weird alt universe of A Little Life sometimes lacked. And yes, it’s even funny, at times.

MOST EPIC

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

It’s so much more than the story of a marriage! Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that Fates & Furies is a domestic drama, a Gone Girl without the psychosis. Lauren Groff’s novel is epic in scale and subject matter, and it’s got some of the best, most perfect sentences I read this year.

BEST NEO-NOIR

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Suspenseful as shit, Eileen is the story of a prim little nobody in a small town in 1960s New England whose interior life is full of anger and lust and just the right amount of perversion. How Eileen went from meek mouse to a tougher (and perhaps wiser–unclear) city lady is one of the most satisfying mysteries of 2015.

BEST SUBURBAN ANGST

The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak

Contemporary American literature is rife with novels about the lives of the aging, booze-swilling denizens of fancy suburban towns where country club politics rule. Karolina Waclawiak gives new life to the genre by adding little shocking bursts of violence that jar the reader out of typical angsty novel expectations. The Guardian’s review of The Invaders called the setting “Lynchian” (which we all know is the greatest compliment in all of suburbia) and I’d have to agree.

MOST UNDERRATED

The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida’s slim and fast-paced novel is as unsettling as that nagging feeling when you leave your home and realize you’ve left something important behind–your wallet, your phone, your keys. You’d think this would be a recipe for a panic attack, but the humor found in these pages keeps the unease from getting too out of hand.

BEST RIDDLE

A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

In trying to sum up Jesse Ball’s work for a friend last year, I said, “He’s kind of what would happen if M. Night Shyamalan was actually good.” I don’t mean to solely invoke a mostly mediocre screenwriter to describe an author whose work also brings to mind Kafka and Orwell, but Ball’s high concept experimental writing feature the kinds of philosophical riddles that Shyamalan seems to want to solve, complete with revelatory endings that might make you cry.

BEST VIGNETTES

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick moves to the top of the list of writers (Patti Smith, Teju Cole) with whom I’d wanna walk around NYC. The cultural critic captures the cadences of the streets so well, as well as the many characters she’s encountered on her journeys.

BEST HEROINE

Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg

I love unlikeable characters–that’s how I usually distinguish myself from most Goodreads reviewers! But every now and then a protagonist comes along who is smart and complicated and witty, but also so earnestly, unabashedly good that she might make you wanna be a better person. The title heroine of Jami Attenberg’s luminous novel set around the Lower East Side of the Depression era is a tough dame with a proverbial heart of gold, a perfect antidote to the snark I so regularly ingest.

BEST JUXTAPOSITION

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Many attempt but few can pull off what Maggie Nelson does so beautifully, combining the academic and the personal to examine and elucidate both. The story of Maggie’s pregnancy combined with her partner’s gender transition provide plenty of opportunity for comparison and contrast and metaphor, and her intimate observations are footnoted seamlessly with great works of theory and criticism.

BEST SUBTEXT

Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine

I read so many pages about death and loss this year that it came as a relief to consider the subjects in a different way. Adrian Tomine was my gateway into the world of graphic novels many years ago (as I’m sure he was for many readers), and he continues to innovate in the ways that he combines images and colors and words to tell stories that have new layers of sentiment and subtext.

Other Books I Loved in 2015

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

Outline by Rachel Cusk

After Birth by Elisa Albert

The Story of My Teeth by Valerie Luisella

The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray

The Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont

The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

And please remember that You Blew It is a brilliant masterpiece that makes a great gift for anyone who’s ever exited a public bathroom with toilet paper stuck to their shoe (literally or figuratively).

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Thanks Maris!!! What a list to be on.

[dustedmagazine]

Jon DeRosa — Black Halo (Rocket Girl)

Photo by Julia Henry

If you hadn’t heard anything from Jon DeRosa in a while, he might not be the most obvious pick to collaborate with Stephin Merritt. After losing hearing one ear, DeRosa formed (the mostly solo) Aarktica to channel the aural hallucinations he was experiencing, and under that name specialized mostly in beautifully drifting soundscapes, although through the years he also proved to be a capable songwriter in more conventional molds with songs like “Aura Lee” and “Hollow Earth Theory.” The latter provides the most obvious connection between his work as Aarktica and his officially solo material, appearing both on the former’s last LP to date In Sea as well as his first LP under his own name, 2012’s A Wolf in Preacher’s Clothes. The latter version was a bit warmer and sweeter, but mostly revealed how skilled DeRosa has gotten at blending the various facets of his musical life (ambient/drone, including studying with La Monte Young, post punk, 1960s pop, Americana) together. 

Keep reading

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

A great review in Dusted for Jon’s Black Halo.

[believermag]

The Watts Consolatio

By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

All must die. When my grandfather died, in the fall of last year, at the age of ninety-six, I realized for the first time just how much he shaped my understanding of America, and even more so of California—with its promise of sunshine, beautiful people, dashed origins and rebirth from their ashes. My grandfather was as much a product of the state he hailed from, Louisiana, as he was the state where he found refuge, California.

He was born during a flood. He learned carpentry as a young boy, because how else could his family live way out there in the woods as three generations of free black people unless they knew how to build their own homes? From his people he learned to avoid snakes, dark water, and empty roads. As a young man, he watched two of his uncles ride off into the woods, never to be seen again. And when it seemed like it was his time to go the way of the ghost—as so many black boys do, despite having been told to say yes, sir, and keep their dignity so low to the ground and small that almost nobody can see it—my grandfather fought back. He refused to obey the man who told him to jump from that bridge into the bayou, or else. He couldn’t swim, so my grandfather kicked that man’s ass and invented a third option: Los Angeles.

They used to say that the little LA (Louisiana) had a direct line to the big LA (Los Angeles). That sooner or later, if you wanted to dream big, live free, and watch the stars, you went west and left everything behind. So that is what he did: he left. He left his blind mother, his fiddle-playing father, his eleven siblings and their small island in the swamps, and went west. When my grandmother joined him in California and didn’t think she could raise their child out there, he let her leave, too. My grandfather wanted to be a man more than anything. To him, California was the only place where he could do that.

LA was a black Shangri-La—all Marcel waves, the art deco lights of the boulevards, Okeh race records, and limber legs kicking up from pretty dancers in the nightclubs along Rosecrans. In California, my grandfather encountered and experienced things he couldn’t have imagined. On a whim, one day he walked into a store and purchased his first suit. Years later, he purchased a nice car—a cream-colored Oldsmobile convertible. These were things that he had never done before, and in Louisiana they would have required a great deal of planning, if not subterfuge. If the South was about bondage, here we are talking about freedom. If the South was a blues song—fated to sing of bad loads, failures, devils and the divine, cotillions, lost lovers and love lost, lynchings, cotton fields like Elysiums, magnolia trees dreary with heavy ivory bulbs, and the sweet stink of cedar—then the city of Los Angeles was a place that sounded like jazz. He met exotic girl thieves who taught him tennis but stole his quarters (earnings from his other pastimes: poker and the horse races at Hollywood Park) from the floor of his car when he drove them home. He commuted to Anaheim to work construction on a theme park that seemed to be made of magic. To earn his keep, he helped his brother build an addition on his house. At his funeral, his niece recalled a night when he went to bed bone weary from all of this work, and, when the entire house began to shake and the clapboard floors rolled like waves, my grandfather, equal parts fearless and exhausted, just pulled the covers over his head and told them that he promised to hold on tight. He would see them in the morning. That was how he passed his first major earthquake.

Keep reading

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah wrote a beautiful piece about her grandfather, the power and pull of Los Angeles, and the Watts Riots. Take a look.

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

This was really fun.

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

It’s difficult to break free. It’s difficult to think about what’s next and face the unknown. Over at The Barnes & Noble Review, The Rumpus’s Essays Editor Emeritus Roxane Gay interviews the ta...

Roxane Gay and I talk about all the important things — The Invaders, women in fiction, sense of place, and the art of breaking free.

[gostzvuk]

[architectureofdoom]

Moscow, 1972

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

So fun talking about Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, THE INVADERS, and which literary character I’d like to punch in the face. (via The Millions : Episode 26: 7 Millions Questions with Karolina Waclawiak)

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

For your listening pleasure, a twenty-minute preview of THE INVADERS. Purchase a copy of the book or audiobook here.

[dappledwithshadow]

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Same, daily, trying.

Man Carrying Dice, Odilon Redon, s.d.

Pen and ink with gouache 

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

I had the pleasure of talking to The Hairpin about THE INVADERS and we went deep on groupies, peep shows, kept women, transactional relationships and my 5th grade love affair with Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil. Here’s a snippet:

Do you think you had an early understanding that sexuality was a currency? Yeah. I knew that to be beautiful had a certain social power, and I think it’s because I grew up watching MTV at the beginning of MTV. I was five years old listening to Madonna. And it seemed like the easiest way to get to where you wanted to go was to be beautiful—not just Lauren Hutton beautiful, but like, walking sex. It was so fascinating to me, for these women to be so brazenly sexual and also to be so lusted after by these men who were in positions of power, and you could see their lust in such a cartoonish way. If you look at “Hot for Teacher,” these men are falling over each other in a way that just felt really empowering. To, like, a child. [Laughs.]

Was it fascination, or coveting? 
Coveting. I wanted to be them. In fifth grade, I started wearing makeup, and I started using a ton of hairspray and trying to model myself after a video girl. And my parents are strict, and my dad was like—What is happening, this is not OK! I was hanging out with friends of mine who had older brothers who were in metal, and their girlfriends would coach us on how to get backstage. I remember so vividly, this girl, my friend’s brother’s girlfriend, was like, “You can get backstage if you blow a roadie.” We’re fifth graders, and we’re nodding our heads like, That sounds great! What, you blow on a roadie’s penis? I had no idea about sex. And then she was like, “Just pull up your shirt and you’ll get picked at a concert to be backstage, and then you navigate how you get to the band.” And my friends and I were like, Great, we’ll do it! I always wanted to be older. I remember I told my mom, I’m running away to LA! I’m going to lose my virginity to Vince Neil, you can’t stop me!

The rest of the interview can be found here.

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Frenchie approved.

[housingworksbookstore]

The brilliant and wonderful Karolina Waclawiak welcomes a full house to tonight’s event for her second novel THE INVADERS. I love this book, buy it immediately!

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

The funnest book launch EVER.

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Tonight! Tonight! Tonight! Come by HousingWorks and get your socks knocked off as we read sweet tales of mayhem to you.

[slaughterhouse90210]

”These women didn’t own me; they weren’t better than me. They were just younger versions of me and soon they would be me.”

–Karolina Waclawiak, The Invaders

[deadhorsebrooklyn]

Perfect.