July 9, 2020 Dice Roll Unlucky Numbers By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. When investigators smashed through the concrete slab, they found his body six feet deep, laid out on a bloodstained towel. In a black jacket, shoeless, his hair in a stocking cap, he was partially mummified, embedded in lime. The detectives knew they were looking at the remains of Abraham Shakespeare. It was January 28, 2010, and Shakespeare had been missing for nine months. Rumors had swirled all through the Lakeland area, in central Florida. Some said he’d split town, tired of the constant requests for money, others that he was hiding from the woman who was his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child. But after months of no one hearing from him, it was clear that something was terribly wrong. Now, the detectives discovered he’d been shot and buried in a yard on State Road 60. What exactly had happened remained a mystery, but everyone knew it began with these numbers: 6, 12, 13, 34, 42, 52. * On the night of November 15, 2006, Abraham Shakespeare was happy to be working. He had five bucks to his name, no bank account, no credit card. He didn’t have a driver’s license, either, so he couldn’t operate the truck in which the MBM Corporation had sent him and a coworker, Michael Ford, to deliver meat to fast food restaurants from Lakeland to Miami. But every hour on the road meant another eight dollars. It was a meager living, but it was a living. In Frostproof, Ford pulled into a Town Star convenience store and asked if Shakespeare wanted anything. “Get me two quick picks,” he said. With his very last dollars, he’d play the Florida Lottery. The jackpot that night was $31 million. What possesses someone to play the lottery, when he’s never caught a lucky break? Many might say ignorance, but a 2008 study in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making shows how mistaken that would be. Participants of an experiment were asked to consider whether rich, middle class, or poor people have better odds of attaining various outcomes, such as being elected mayor, becoming a superstar singer, or receiving a promotion. Then they were given an opportunity to purchase lottery tickets. Compared to a control group, those who’d been asked to consider the relative advantages of different classes were more likely to play the lottery. The authors concluded that low-income individuals “are likely to perceive the lottery as a rare opportunity to compete on equal footing with people who are more affluent.” In a culture that showers benefits upon the already advantaged, a game of chance seems like the only thing that doesn’t discriminate. Just as lottery play tracks along class lines, so does it have a racial skew. A study of the Virginia lottery showed that 61 percent of its sales are made to just 8 percent of the total population, and more than one in three of that very small slice are Black. It remains an open question whether lotteries intensify marketing campaigns in Black communities—and how effective such campaigns would be—but it’s indisputable that the business would crumble without players like Abraham Shakespeare. It could never be said that he was among the advantaged. Born in Sebring, Florida, in 1966, Shakespeare dropped out of school after seventh grade, and was incarcerated in a state-run juvenile detention facility from the age of thirteen to eighteen. He was never taught to read or write. Afterward, like many formerly incarcerated people, he couldn’t regain his footing. For much of his life, he struggled to stay afloat. But everything changed for Shakespeare with the bounce of a numerized ball. His quick-pick ticket hit the jackpot. All at once, he was rich. Lottery winners are advised to remain anonymous and secure the services of a lawyer before presenting themselves, but Shakespeare casually appeared on TV from Tallahassee, holding an oversized check in a Florida Lottery T-shirt. This unlikely millionaire couldn’t have been a better advertisement for the lottery: a day laborer down to his last dollar, suddenly rocketing to exorbitant wealth. No matter how bad things get, Shakespeare’s face seemed to say, don’t despair. Today could be your lucky day. Read More
July 8, 2020 Sky Gazing Where Does the Sky End? By Nina MacLaughlin Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist. First appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888) Rare right now, the airplanes. Before, the planes taking off from Logan tracked a path I saw from my pillow in bed, high lights wing-blinking in the night sky in ascent from Boston. Not anymore. Not for now. Before February of this year, the planes blurred into the texture of the everyday, cigarette wisps of contrails, sky-height roar, as regular as the honking geese, which sometimes I notice and sometimes disappear into the familiar static of any afternoon, by the river. Now, I see an airplane and think: Who’s going anywhere? And why? Then I remind myself it could be cargo, small packages, love letters. To see an airplane now is to be aware of both presence and lack: Oh, look, there one is; oh, gosh, I notice because they’ve been mostly gone. And then comes the press of knowing, the weight across the chest, the reminder why. The gravity of knowing. “The more you know the more you think,” Anne Carson said recently. And the more you think the more you question. What are we supposed to know? What’s better sensed than understood? What happens when the gravity of knowing threatens to tear apart and turn upside down the way the world has existed for you? Do you run away? I pursued some knowing recently, and regretted it. The amount of feet in a mile is a number that’s never stuck with me. I asked a distance calculator to convert 35,000 feet—classic airplane cruising altitude—into miles. When it delivered the answer—6.6287879 miles—I thought, I’ve made a mistake, or it has. This cannot be. Six point six miles up into the sky? If I were to take a 35,000 foot walk, I could leave my apartment, head more or less due south, and in a little over two hours, reach the Franklin Park Zoo. Two hours on foot and I could look a tiger in the eye. Seems like dreaming. (It’s not an option now: the animals are all locked in.) But six point six miles up? It is a fact I wish I could un-know. It disrupts my comfort. Am I initiating some of you into this distress? If I suffer in knowing, does it mean you ought to as well? You can forget I said anything. When you dream of flying, do you have wings? To take flight in dreams is an experience of uplift, of thrust, an unburdening of weight and an entering into the voluptuousness, as Gaston Bachelard calls it, of the soar. We’re bathed in the pleasure of defying the pinning laws and drinking in new views. Freedom! Lift! A human impulse, a shared experience in our dream life, to move as seagulls, petals on wind, superheroes, gods. “Dreamtime,” writes poet Nathaniel Mackey, “is a way of enduring reality… It is also a way of challenging reality, a sense in which to dream is not to dream but to replace waking with realization, an ongoing process of testing or contesting reality, subjecting it to change or a demand for change.” How high can we go? How free can we get? Read More
July 7, 2020 Redux Redux: This Satisfied Procession By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Joan Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival. Photo: David Shankbone. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). This week at The Paris Review, we’re announcing another year of the best deal in town: our summer subscription offer with The New York Review of Books. For only $99, you’ll receive yearlong subscriptions and complete archive access to both magazines—a 38% savings. To celebrate, we’re unlocking pieces from the archives of both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. Read on for Joan Didion’s Art of Fiction interview, paired with her essay “California Notes”; Zadie Smith’s short story “Miss Adele amidst the Corsets,” paired with her talk “On Optimism and Despair”; and T. S. Eliot’s Art of Poetry interview, paired with two uncollected poems. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read their entire archives? And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71 The Paris Review, issue no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978) Sometimes I’ll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I’ll still be calling a character “X.” I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don’t want to leave them ever. Read More
July 7, 2020 Off Menu How Neapolitan Cuisine Took Over the World By Edward White Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. When a devastating cholera pandemic reached Italy in 1884, the disease took its heaviest toll on the sharp-edged, unpolished jewel of Naples. The authorities’ response was disastrous, and as panic and anger rose, a conspiracy theory circulated that the suffering was an orchestrated attack on the city’s poor. Physicians and public health officials were attacked in the street; a popular rumor had it that doctors received twenty lire for each person they bumped off, and that some were greedily chucking patients who were still alive onto funeral wagons. One man was arrested for inciting rebellion when he spread the notion that tomatoes, a symbol of Neapolitan peasant identity and a staple nourishment, were being laced with poison. The discord caused alarm in the government. The Risorgimento—the movement behind the creation of a single, unified Italian nation in 1861—had promised a new era of prosperity and progress for all. Events in Naples made a mockery of that. Italy’s King Umberto I became a passionate advocate of a radical transformation of Naples that would improve the health of the city, and tie Naples closer than ever to the Italian nation. Corruption and chaotic administration kiboshed the plans, but the royal desire to celebrate the Italian-ness of Naples remained. When Umberto and his wife, Queen Margherita, visited the city in 1899, the queen, bored of overly complex French food, supposedly asked for some real food, a true taste of Naples. A local chef served her a pizza in the colors of the Italian flag—the red of tomato sauce, the white of mozzarella cheese, the green of fresh basil—which Margherita loved so much that it’s been named after her ever since. Whatever the precise truth behind the yarn, its intended message is unmistakable: the experience of being Italian is baked into the food of the ordinary Neapolitan. It’s a story that would have intrigued Vincenzo Corrado, a man born and bred in the south a century and a half before Queen Margherita’s supposed conversion to the delights of Neapolitan cuisine. Corrado explored that cuisine in the pages of his series of cookbooks, which are a vivid testimony to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Naples, a city of dizzying social disparities and abundant artistic expression. Unwittingly, Corrado did more than almost anybody to define what we think of as Italian food, in which—especially as the food exists in its international incarnations—the flavors of Naples are so prevalent. Yet, one wonders what Corrado would have made of the ways in which food has been used as an important binding agent in the creation of an Italian national identity. Sincere as he was in his passion for the food of his homeland, he recognized that a plate of food is layered, like a Neapolitan timbale, with meanings and associations. As his recipes testify, much of what we consider to be authentically local, regional, or national, rests on small acts of self-deception and selective memory, the endless making and remaking of myths. Read More
July 6, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 16 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “As the pandemic set in, a peculiar thing happened to me: I found myself unable to read fiction, despite having always been drawn to novels and short stories over essays or poetry. I suppose I like the escapist element, or can appreciate a good lie; as Gabriel García Márquez, a former journalist, said in his Art of Fiction interview, ‘A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.’ In those early days of panic and uncertainty, the appeal of nonfiction, of facts, figures, and interviews—of real people and real events—was obvious. Public understanding of the coronavirus was murky at best, and I didn’t quite know who or what to believe. Months have passed since and we have learned more about the particulars of this disease, and how best to prevent its spread; I’ve also returned to reading fiction. But I still find myself intrigued by reportage, essay, documentary, and the like. This week’s Art of Distance highlights some of the boundary-pushing nonfiction that the Review has published over its sixty-seven years, and pokes at that sometimes tenuous border that separates fact from fiction. (It’s a border that has at times stretched and changed even within our own pages: this excerpt from Jean Genet’s novel A Thief’s Journal was published as a work of nonfiction in issue no. 13.) Read on for all the news that’s fit to print—or, at least, to be unlocked from the Paris Review archives.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Gabriel García Márquez. I’d be remiss if I didn’t open this survey with The Art of Nonfiction No. 1, in which Joan Didion speaks with Hilton Als. While Didion constantly dances between nonfiction and fiction (she was also the subject of an Art of Fiction interview), there is something especially fascinating in the way she describes the differences between the two genres: “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with.” Read More
July 6, 2020 Arts & Culture Into the Narrow Home Below By Darcey Steinke Branwell Brontë, The Brontë Sisters (Anne Brontë; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë), ca. 1834, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 29 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Well there are many ways of being held prisoner. —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay” Twenty years ago, the writer Douglas A. Martin was a student in my fiction workshop at the New School. He was in his early twenties then, an extravagantly gifted young man who sometimes wore a white feather boa to class, his face regularly shining with tiny bits of pink glitter. His stories about young gay men struggling for a place in this world, erotically and artistically, were shot through with a raw and supple longing. Martin often came to my office hours, where we’d talk about books and films. I learned about his childhood in Georgia and his alcoholic father, a man he was estranged from and hadn’t seen since he was little. In one of these discussions we talked about the Brontës. I was doing research for a talk on Wuthering Heights. I’d been surprised, as Martin was, to hear the Brontës had a brother. Branwell was a ginger, with “a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead … to help his height.” He fancied flowing white shirts and was both freckled and bespeckled. “Small but well formed,” he was unable to control his emotions and had spells of what was called then hysteria. His friend, the sculptor Joseph Leyland, said Branwell’s conversation, his “beautiful and flowery language,” he “never saw equaled.” Like his sisters, Branwell wrote poetry and he sent poems along with long, pleading, naive letters to the literary men of the day—Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Coleridge—asking for feedback, for affirmation, even for love. In one letter to Wordsworth, which the great man kept but did not answer, Branwell wrote: “I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this the nineteenth year of my life I have lived among wild and secluded hills where I could neither know what I was or what I could do—I read for the same reason I ate or drank—because it was a real craving of Nature.” Martin was drawn to Branwell’s feminine qualities. “The idea that being a poet,” Martin tells me, “one could be fem.” He did some research of his own and decided to write Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother. The Brontë siblings’ intense circle fascinated him—the way they bled into one another. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine is Heathcliff, and Branwell, it seems, was his sisters, leaning into their gender and leading their literary aspirations. He was the first to publish poems in the local newspapers, first to cut the path toward a life of letters. The Brontë boy was grandiose, emotionally unstable, and eventually a drug addict, but his model of creative engagement opened up a dream space that Emily, Charlotte, and Anne walked into without him, an imaginary room his sisters eventually made their own. Read More