Newsletter: Great Reads: Of love and loss, of hawks and holidays
Hey there. I'm Kari Howard, and I edit the Great Reads (a.k.a. Column Ones) for the Los Angeles Times.
Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and I'm lucky that my days are filled with both: When reading the stories, I get inspired by songs I think fit the article's theme — a soundtrack.
This week, much of the staff is still devoting its talents and resources to the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, and only one Great Read ran. So here's an abbreviated newsletter, focusing on a few of my favorite things outside the lovely world of the L.A. Times.
She decided she didn't want to be a "white madam" anymore
I've been to South Africa three times now, and I've loved it deeply while at the same time been made deeply uneasy by its inequality. Its racist privileges may no longer be mandated by the government, but they linger poisonously on. This story by the wonderful Robyn Dixon tells of a terrifying home invasion, and how it changed one woman in unexpected, and inspiring, ways. Tracey Lomax was a liberal white lawyer, known for taking on pro bono work for poor blacks. Yet during the attack, she found herself, instantly and uneasily, assuming the apartheid-era role of the “white madam”: calm, firm, in control and used to telling black people what to do, even if they had guns. As the ordeal wore on, the most aggressive of the gunmen forced her into the master bedroom. “He threw me down on the bed and said, ‘If you don’t give me jewelry now, I’ll stick you.’ I knew he meant rape.” She replied firmly, “We don’t behave like that. We’re not savages.” After that night five years ago, Lomax decided she didn’t want to be that person anymore. “Your instinctive reaction is to lock your windows and recoil and yell, but if I’d gone that way I’d have ended up a very bitter person,” she said. “I started keeping my car window open when hawkers and beggars came up. I started greeting them and asking them how they were. I started reaching out to people of color in a way I hadn’t before.”
Tracey Lomax, a South African lawyer, with daughter Jaime at their cottage home, where the family moved after a terrifying home robbery five years ago outside Johannesburg. (Robyn Dixon / Los Angeles Times)
The soundtrack: "Never Goin' Back," by Spiritualized. I've probably used Spiritualized for more soundtracks than any other band. They just speak to me, somehow. Pain and redemption and vulnerability and joy.
What I'm reading online
When was the last time you went to an old-fashioned newsstand? Not one inside a bookstore, or, worse, an airport. No, I mean one with the word "News" in its name, the kind where you walk in and are hit by the smell of ink and paper. My favorite one, Bungalow News in Pasadena, died a slow death years ago. My replacement newsstand was in the Montrose neighborhood, and it too endured a painful descent marked by thinning shelves and late-arriving issues. Still, its death was a shock. I remember the day I found out — I always parked behind the shop and came in the back way. On that Sunday morning, the back door was locked, and I thought the owner must have forgotten it when she opened up. I walked around to the front and saw that the shop was empty, like the Grinch had swept in and taken even the last crumb. For years I had coveted the vintage tin L.A. Times sign inside, and always intended to buy it from the owner if I ever left the paper. I felt a strange loss when I knew that would never be. All of this flitted through my mind when I read the Columbia Journalism Review piece headlined, "Print is the new 'new' media." Everyone who has bought a magazine just because it feels good in your hands will love this piece. It even name-checks a magazine I've done just that with: Kinfolk (ahh, that thick, uncreasable paper). "Old people like it because they’re nostalgic," one back-to-the-future maverick says, and hipsters "swarm all over it like they just found this new, trendy, nostalgic thing." Print — it's the new vinyl.
What's on my bedside table
Loss and love and endings and beginnings have been on my mind lately, so I started reading a book that had long been on my wish list: "H Is for Hawk" by Helen Macdonald. Written after her father died suddenly of a heart attack, this book is a meditation on all of those things. This passage near the beginning of the book captures the feeling of love through the flight of two hawks: They were loving the space between each other, and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances. A couple of flaps, and the male, the teircel, would be above the female, and then he'd drift north of her, and then slip down, fast, like a knife-cut, a smooth calligraphic scrawl underneath her, and she'd dip a wing, and then they'd soar up again. And loss: Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning "to deprive of, take away, seize, rob." Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try. I'm a third of the way through the memoir, and it's impossibly, impossibly lovely.
The soundtrack: I don't usually offer a soundtrack to a book I'm reading, but a lyric from the Nada Surf song "When I Was Young" has been circling in a loop through my head with "H Is for Hawk": "And my aimless dreaming has found a target." The line is about love, but it fits with Macdonald, and finding her purpose, after loss, in a goshawk named Mabel.
What's on my turntable
Although I spend most of my time listening with headphones to Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. That's why I have a turntable in my office — and two at home (one inside, and a battery-powered one outside when the weather's fine — which it usually is in Southern California). This week's vinyl: "To Wish You a Merry Christmas," by Harry Belafonte. My latest thrift store purchase (along with "A Swedish Christmas," which may be unlistenable but has an irresistible cover). I haven't felt the holiday vibe yet this year, but Belafonte is so easy on the ears — and the eyes — he seemed like a good place to start.
Want to chat? Have a great idea for a Great Read? I'm @karihow on Twitter and kari.howard@latimes.com on email.