‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’

Longreads

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also…

View original post 3,408 more words

Advertisements

Ghosts: Is Your Old House Haunted?

Book 'Em, Jan O

Readers, this is a great article from Old House Journal, which I used to read lots during a past life in a 1918 craftsman style home.  Whether or not your house is old, you’ll appreciate the author’s tips on what to look for and what to do if you suspect a haunting.  Also the house photos are superb!  Enjoy, and read on here:  Is Your Old House Haunted?

A note: new homes may have ghosts, too – so the words in the article apply regardless of the age of your home!

Copyright © 2018 Bookemjano – All rights reserved

To learn more about real ghosts, please see About Ghosts: A Useful Handbook.  For some great ghost stories, please see Death Be Not Loud, Rest In Fleece, and Sepia Seepage.  To learn about ghosts in modern fiction, please see Infectious Ghosts. And so much more, at: Jan’s Amazon…

View original post 2 more words

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Here’s a List of Longreads about Love for You

Longreads

Valentine’s Day always brings me back to the halls of my high school, which, on February 14th each year, teemed with roses by the dozen, glittery cards taped to lockers, oversized teddy bears, and prolonged goodbyes between couples before every class. As a shy high school student, I was more interested in the characters in the novels I read than pursuing my peers, but the holiday always brought an intense anxiety. Even when I told myself I didn’t want a cache of hot pink roses from the Kroger down the street, and even when I convinced myself that the holiday was a celebration of consumerism, I still felt like I was missing out in some way.

When I look back, I’m able to realize that my sense of loneliness didn’t come from any true sense of isolation, but rather the fact that I only recognized one type of relationship being…

View original post 1,228 more words

Shelved: Sonny Rollins Live at Carnegie Hall

Longreads

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,055 words)

Sonny Rollins was busy in 1957. The tenor saxophonist was present for about sixteen recording sessions, some private, most released, with his own bands as well as with groups led by Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Dorham. His landmark A Night At The Village Vanguard, a live recording of two sets, one in the afternoon and one in the evening performed on November 3rd at New York’s legendary jazz club, became a standard by which other improvisers are judged. In addition, Rollins debuted at Carnegie Hall and headlined the first Monterey Jazz Festival the following year.

“When I look back, people say, ‘Oh, you did a lot of records in 1957…’ Well, I mean, I had to be told about it,” Rollins recently told an interviewer. “So, I guess it was more or…

View original post 2,777 more words

Joe Scapellato on “The Made Up Man” and the Myth of the Self

Longreads

Kate Watson | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,326 words)

Joseph Scapellato’s new book The Made Up Man is a darkly comic, noir-styled novel powered by an energy that’s equal parts mischief, good humor, and measured cynicism. Based on conventions lifted out of the old detective story playbook, the novel is told from the perspective of a slippery narrator, whose sense of identity expands, collapses, and shatters against a series of nagging moral questions that are less situational than they are existential. The result is an intoxicating alchemy, something genre-blurring and philosophically riveting.

The Made Up Man’s main character and pseudo-protagonist, Stanley, slips into a waking nightmare when he agrees to an apartment-sitting opportunity in Prague. Stanley knows in advance that, if he goes to Prague, he’ll become a pawn in a twisted compression of psychological torment and performance art that his Uncle Lech has waiting for…

View original post 2,278 more words

Lean On

Longreads

Briallen Hopper | excerpted from Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions | February 2019 | 25 minutes (6,215 words)

I like to lean. Too much of the time I must hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.

In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home…

View original post 6,214 more words

Ghosts: Lovelorn Apparitions

Book 'Em, Jan O

Readers, here are some stories about folks who didn’t Get Over It when they Crossed Over.  Like diamonds, Love is Forever for these haunts.  Read on for more, from the Travel Channel, via Ghostly Lovers and Soulmates

Copyright © 2018 Bookemjano – All rights reserved

To learn more about real ghosts, please see About Ghosts: A Useful Handbook.  For some great ghost stories, please see Death Be Not Loud, Rest In Fleece, and Sepia Seepage.  To learn about ghosts in modern fiction, please see Infectious Ghosts. And so much more, at: Jan’s Amazon Page

 

View original post