March 5, 2020 Happily Sleeping with the Wizard By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Illustration from a book of 1920s halloween costumes, Cole S. Phillips When I was nineteen I lived with a wizard. Her hair was like dandelion seed, and she had a map crookedly taped to her bedroom wall. She smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and her clothes were always wrinkled and she gave me Walter Benjamin and the poems of Paul Celan and she kept me secret. No one knew I lived with a wizard in an awful, cold apartment that cost $940 a month. She spoke many languages in an accent that seemed to originate from an ancient ruin. I thought she might give me a brain. I already had a dumb heart, and even dumber courage. She was the farthest place from home I could go. The first time we kissed I knew she would undo me. In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Great Oz appears as a head, a lady dressed in “green silk gauze,” a beast, and a ball of fire. The first time my wizard appeared to me, she was my literature professor. Her office had no window. I don’t remember her ever smiling, though she did laugh and so her laugh must have resided in a face slightly distant from her face. Like two cities over. I didn’t know then, as I know now, the difference between worship and love. The Wizard in Baum is a humbug. He’s a sweetheart and a fake. My wizard was no sweetheart and she was no fake. She needed no curtain because I was the curtain. When I pulled myself all the way back there she was. The Wizard of Oz’s real name was nine men long: Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. My wizard’s real name was a little girl’s name. It was the wrong name for her. Her name was the name of a drawing of a girl eating an ice cream cone in a soft pink dress. But I called her by her name anyway. And she called me by mine. What even is a wizard? A master, a father, a mother, a lover, a god, a magician, a rabbi, a priest, a president, a beautiful, enraged professor? Like Godot, the wizard can be a holding place for what we emit but can’t yet claim or name or know. Our dust in the sunlight. The spell we have but don’t yet know how to cast. Each of us wants something different from the wizard. I wanted to be undone. “On the fabrication of the Master,” writes Lucie Brock-Broido, “he began as a Fixed star.” Unlike the Scarecrow’s brains, and the Tin Man’s heart, and the Lion’s courage, Dorothy Gale didn’t already have home inside her. She had a strong wind. It was already in her name. It was a twister. By lifting her up, and whirling her around, it saves her from “growing as gray as her other surroundings.” It gives her life. “She felt,” writes Baum, “as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle.” The wizard was my twister. But I didn’t touch down in Munchkin Land. I wasn’t welcomed as “a noble Sorceress.” I landed only a few miles from where I grew up. I landed in a cold apartment filled with German philosophy and cigarette ash, where my wizard would eventually—on a sunless day—call me a parasite. A horsehair worm. A barnacle. A sponge. My wizard meant she was my host. She meant I was eating her. When I left the wizard I weighed eighty-eight pounds. I was as heavy as two infinities. I left the wizard, and went to my mother. Read More
March 4, 2020 Comics Long Weekend By Michael DeForge Michael DeForge’s new book Familiar Face imagines a society in which the acceleration of capitalism has reached a feverish peak. In the name of optimization, the world is constantly reshaping itself. Citizens wake each morning in unfamiliar bodies, their features wholly transformed; the map shuffles weekly, sometimes even daily, resulting in inescapable culs-de-sac and sudden dead ends. “The street you were driving on,” the narrator remarks, “would fold in on itself without any warning.” The nature of these mandatory updates remains shrouded in mystery, though they’re conducted under the guise of progress. In the excerpt below, the protagonist of the book returns home from her job, contends with her new bodies, and stumbles across an old photo album labeled “Long Weekend.” Read More
March 4, 2020 Detroit Archives Detroit Archives: On Hello By Aisha Sabatini Sloan In her column, Detroit Archives, Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. Interior, Detroit public library (photo: Jason Mrachina) When I went to my parents’ house the other day, in what has become a popular area of Detroit, a group of white twenty-somethings walked by in all beige—capes and boots and leggings—looking like they might have wandered away from a Burberry photoshoot. Less than two miles away, in a part of town with far fewer white faces, my father went to gather the last of his family’s belongings from his childhood home. “Check for Aunt Cora Mae’s photographs,” I asked him. But whoever bought the property after it went into foreclosure had already cleared the upstairs out and put a padlock on the door. The last time we drove around his old neighborhood, he recited the names of his neighbors, repopulating empty lots with a litany of remembered faces: “A guy named Jeffrey Martin lived here. There was a house about here, that’s where Danny Collins lived. And you cross Forest, that’s where Rodney grew up.” As he spoke, the streets came back to life with the remembered sound of boys screaming with laughter. Halfway between the house where he lived as a child and the one where he lives now, there’s a street called Goethe. When my father was young, he and everyone he knew pronounced the word phonetically, “Go-thee.” Later in life, he went on to learn German and began to pronounce the street with all the necessary “r” sounds. Whenever we cross it, it is as if we have located the exact intersection that would determine his life’s trajectory. A life filled with detours to places like Los Angeles and Sarajevo, only to return. That street is an inception point, ushering him into a bigger world. The discrepancy between these worlds has taken on a greater significance now that his childhood home sits on a largely vacant block, where squatting families power flat screen TVs with giant extension cords that reach out to whatever house still has electricity. Read More
March 3, 2020 Arts & Culture Oh, Do Tone It Down, Ladies By Rachel Vorona Cote Auguste Toulmouche, The Reluctant Bride, 1866. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Docile quietude has long been wielded by conduct books as a specifically feminine virtue. In 1946, the magazine Photoplay published the article “That Romantic Look,” an instructional piece for women who were aiding their soldier husbands in acclimating to civilian life after World War II. The paramount goal was to minister to one’s head of household without injuring his proud masculinity: Listen to your laughter too. Let it come easily, especially when you’re with boys who had little to laugh at for too long. Laugh at the silly things you used to do together. Laugh for the sweet sake of laughter. And if you hear your laugh sound hysterical, giddy, or loud, tone it down, oh do tone it down! Easy enough to say, “Speak gently. Laugh softly,” I know. The tone of our voice and laughter generates within us. When we’re worried or rushed, it’s in our voice and laughter that hysteria will manifest itself … Serenity is the very wellspring of a romantic look. In it you have the beginning of the smooth brow, the easy carriage, the low voice, the gentle smile. This Christmas with our men home, surely we should know serenity. So let us look happy and contented and starry-eyed. Historical context aside, these directives might have come from a Victorian lady’s etiquette book. Midcentury America draws liberally upon the rhetoric of hysteria in admonishing its women to cultivate placid demeanors and soft, dulcet tones. And yet, with a more modern and progressive approach, this conversation—how to aid someone in the transition from a violent, traumatic context to the routines of daily life—would be a productive one. It would not be until the Vietnam War that we began even to discuss how to engage with those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: these early efforts to soothe those who had recently endured the unthinkable are well intentioned but, unsurprisingly, entrenched in gender-normative philosophies regarding femininity and distribution of emotional labor. Oh, do tone it down, ladies. Read More
March 3, 2020 Redux Redux: Monologue for an Onion 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. Jane and Michael Stern at home in Connecticut in 1975, with the manuscript of the first edition of Roadfood. This week at The Paris Review, we’re weeping over the alliums in our archive. Read on for Jane and Michael Stern’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Aleksandar Hemon’s short story “Fatherland,” and Sue Kwock Kim’s poem “Monologue for an Onion.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) We were eating in all these road-food places, which didn’t have a name then. There wasn’t the concept of “road food”—there were just these little mom-and-pop cafés, and we kept a little notebook of these places. Read More
March 3, 2020 Dice Roll The Pioneer of Online Gambling By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original Illustration © Ellis Rosen In April 1995, traders on the floor of the Pacific Exchange were in a frenzy. The jury in the O. J. Simpson trial had refused to come to court that morning. In the Washington Post, a law professor said that the probability of a hung jury had increased. And so at the exchange, if traders had shares in guilty or not-guilty verdicts, they wanted to dump them; a hung-jury share was looking a lot sharper today. Everyone was looking for Steve. This had nothing to do with the stocks on the ticker, and everything to do with an elaborate, parallel marketplace operated by Steve Schillinger, an independent broker, who sold futures on the side for countless things you couldn’t find at the exchange: Who would win baseball’s MVP award? Who would make the Final Four? Would O. J. go to prison? Although Schillinger was a decent enough stockbroker, his real talent was in figuring the odds for nebulous outcomes like that of the O. J. verdict and revising them as events unfolded. His colleagues placed bets with him, and he’d pay out on the basis of whatever the odds had been at the time of the wager. He was, in short, a bookie. “People were leaving their stocks to come bet on the NCAA,” Schillinger said, explaining why he was quietly asked to leave the exchange. But by then, he had a dream. In his covert marketplace, he’d glimpsed not just his own future, but the future of gambling. That vision would lead him to become the pioneer of a multibillion-dollar industry, and then a fugitive from justice who would die in exile. Read More