Prison Publishers
And a 1920s affair just discovered
Hey hey! Last night, I discovered one of my favorite new pastimes– it may even be more entertaining than scrolling. An old friend was in town and we were sitting on the sectional staring at our phones when she showed me satellite mode on Apple Maps. After just learning that zooming out on Maps gets you the globe—a revelation to this 2D Google Maps loyalist—she showed me that satellite mode displays the boundary between day and night. From here, we started zooming in and out of places where the sun was setting which eventually led us to finding remote islands in the middle of the ocean which of course led us down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Have you all heard of Tabuaeran aka Fanning Island!?!? Or did you know about the Hawaiian Island that’s uninhabited but was leased to a Cattle Rancher from Wyoming who sublet it to the Army who used it as a training grounds where they tested bombs? Some seriously wild stories of people setting out from Maui to occupy the island in protest– many getting arrested, others making the trek on just a surfboard. Next time you want to scroll, open up Maps and see what you find. Also, please let me know if you find any wild stories and maybe we can make a documentary.
Alright, today we’re reading about:
Why Iceland has the most authors per capita
Prison publishers
Emotional blackmail
An unexpected diagnosis
How a house renovation led to a secret box of letters exposing an affair
The English Heiress who stole a million dollars worth of art to fund the IRA
Black at Night and Read All Over
By Jonathan Margolis for Air Mail
Iceland is arguably the world’s most literate nation. About 10% of Icelanders write and publish a book during their lifetime. Comparatively, over here in the United States just 0.2% of Americans will publish a book. Why does this country have so many authors per capita? Iceland has a storytelling tradition that has been around some 800 years. The tradition was birthed from the darkness the country is enveloped in during the winter months which prompted Icelanders to entertain themselves during the 21-hour-long nights by huddling together to read and tell stories. An interesting economic factor helped the storytelling tradition live on, explains Heidar Ingi Svansson, chairman of the Association of Icelandic Publishers.
Back in the 1940s, when we became independent from Denmark, our economy was extremely poor, and there was a very strict quota of importing goods. So before Christmas there were very few gifts to buy. But there was no quota on paper. We had printing plants; we had authors. So the tradition of making books and gifting them was born, and it’s grown since. Now we call November and December the Christmas book flood—Jólabókaflóð.
This is helpful information if you ever exchange gifts with an Icelander and you both agree to “keep things simple this year” and just make something. Best not to show up with a knitted potholder because they show up with a bound original.
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How to Publish a Magazine in a Maximum-Security Prison
By John L. Lennon for The New Yorker
An inmate currently serving a life sentence interviews a since-released inmate who was on death row when he discovered writing. Wilbert Rideau, now eighty-two and an award-winning writer, revisits his days as the first black editor of The Angolite, an all-white prison magazine based out of Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. The interview covers the injustices leading Rideau to death row, his writing and how a piece he wrote became required reading for prison guard training academy, and how a Shakespeare scholar at Northwestern University, who learned about Rideau watching CBS, found the key to his case which lead to his release. I cried at one specific part and I need to know if you do too. I mean how could you not, the conversation is just so potent. Trigger warning, there is mention of rape in the context of prisons.
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Emotional Blackmail: An Affair of Every Heart
By Joan Didion for Vogue
Vogue started a “Vogue Nostalgia” newsletter that features pieces from the magazine’s 131 year-old archive. The first installment included this piece Joan Didion wrote in 1962, shortly after her college years. She makes the case that all of us partake in emotional blackmail and tend to demand an advantage. Disagree? Hear her out and you may find that you’ve been blackmailing yourself.
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Yellow Band
By Steve Edwards for The Yale Review
A sweet read about a writer working towards a PhD who finds that daily life is becoming increasingly difficult. He is eventually diagnosed with autism and describes the feeling of such a personal discovery that rings familiar to anyone whose been informed they have a mental illness. Something akin to putting on glasses and seeing an obstacle you had a hunch was there but had never seen in such detail before, because no one had ever showed you.
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Secret In The Walls
Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh for The Baltimore Banner
This one is juicy, so if you’re in need of some drama and the Cut hasn’t published a self-incriminating personal essay in awhile, here you go. During a bathroom renovation in a Baltimore house built in 1910, the contractor found a little black box made of tin and painted with gold stripes. Inside the box were a stack of letters wrapped in twine, signed simply with an R. Since they were addressed to Mrs. R.A. Spaeth, the homeowner assumed they were between the addressee and her husband. After loaning the letters to The Baltimore Banner for this story, it was discovered that the man sending the letters was not, in fact, her husband. (I know!!! It gets better, it gets better). The sixty-seven letters were indicative of an affair between herself and her HUSBAND’S COLLEGE FREIND. Really hope there’s a part two where they find the decedents of this family to see if anyone knew this secret.
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The English Heiress Who Masterminded a Multimillion-Dollar Art Heist and Built Bombs for the IRA
By Theresa McKinney for Smithsonian Magazine
Rose Dugdale curtseyed before Queen Elizabeth II as a 17-year-old debutant in 1958. By 1961, she was dressing up as a man to attend a male-only debate at the Oxford Union. Even though her childhood was spent horseback and attending the same finishing school as singer and actress Jane Birkin, she grew to become more politically active once she entered university (something she negotiated her parents allow her to do in exchange for being a debutant). Pass times included selling her house and give away her inherited wealth, stealing art from her parent’s estate to buy firearms for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and hijacking a helicopter intending to drop bombs on a police station. She passed away in March, just before her 83rd birthday, but her stories live on.
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That’s all for today, if you have any good reads send them my way :)