April 2, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: Madame Mustache By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s new monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration ©Ellis Rosen “You will play, M’sieur?” was how a woman with a black mustache greeted gamblers at the Wild West Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. The year was 1877; the gold rush was on. Miners flocked to the saloon on the corner of Main and Gold to put the day’s earnings on a game of twenty-one. The elegant dealer with the musical French accent was one of the most notorious women in the West—Eleanor Dumont, whose life pursued two dangerous prospects: the action on the table and the riches underground. “No one knows her history,” wrote a local journalist, and that’s remained true to this day. As with so many figures of the Old West, Dumont’s life is shot through with disputed accounts and fictional flourishes. Only two things were for certain, according to the journalist: she was always alone, and always making money. * The chic Eleanor Dumont first materialized one night behind a roulette wheel at the Bella Union in San Francisco, already a virtuoso with cards. She’d come from New Orleans, a city on the cutting edge of gambling at the time. In addition to countless dens, where the rudiments of the art could be learned, New Orleans boasted luxurious gambling palaces that innovated modern casino mainstays, like free buffets. Read More
April 1, 2019 Arts & Culture A Storm Is Blowing By Brian Dillon John Ruskin, Study of Dawn, 1868 It’s said the British never stop remarking on their weather. How will they cope in decades to come, when life is all weather, all the time? The country ran a brief test a few weeks ago: in mid- to late February the sun blazed, spring surprised itself, and the temperature in London, where I live, reached over 20°C (68°F). Boon or portent? Meteorological holiday or climate-change hell? Beautiful or sublime? Britons could not agree. It’s now mid-March, and I was awoken at five this morning by rattling windows and the rising shriek of a storm called Gareth (not the direst of names). Abruptly, spring is canceled, and London’s squares are littered with the corpses of premature blossoms. As the wind died in the morning, I wandered around to Finsbury Circus, on the north side of which the London Institution once stood. It was here, on February 4 and February 11, 1884, that the essayist and art critic John Ruskin (who was born two hundred years ago last month) delivered “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”: a pair of apocalyptic lectures on modern weather. Ruskin was days away from his sixty-sixth birthday when he rose to address a skeptical audience on the subject of “a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weight existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times.” His powers as writer and orator were not yet depleted; such masterpieces as Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice were behind him, but the autobiographical Praeterita, his last great work, remained to be written. Still, Ruskin’s psychic weather was on the turn. In 1878 he suffered the first of several breakdowns, and was unwell enough, later that year, to miss the infamous libel case that James McNeill Whistler brought against him after Ruskin accused the artist in print of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Read More
April 1, 2019 Bulletin Deborah Eisenberg’s Life in Comics By Liana Finck This year, The Paris Review honors Deborah Eisenberg with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Eisenberg is a writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first four collections of stories—Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)—were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published last year. But if you really want to know about Deborah Eisenberg, please enjoy an abridged biography by the cartoonist Liana Finck: Read More
March 29, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spells, Cephalopods, and Smug Salads By The Paris Review Sarah Moss. Around Christmastime, which seems as far away as the late Iron Age by now, there were whisperings of a book that was as yet hardly known on our shores: Ghost Wall. The slim novel by Sarah Moss is about a small knot of students doing extracurricular research credits for their college archaeology course by living like Iron Age Britons for a few summer weeks. They are joined by an amateur enthusiast and his family, and I set the book down at first for being too pedantic. Even the fierce loyalty of our grade school narrator toward her father can’t hide her nascent skepticism—or is it the author’s?—regarding his monomaniac devotion to a pure British past. A large portion of contemporary writing is a critique of the bourgeois condition: comfortable linen tunics, smug salads, and sparkling résumés. Ghost Wall left me feeling fine about food co-op bulletin boards and Dan Barber books, but the real treat of the novel is the fucking desecration of all men. The men in the book are bad—all of them. They are bad because they are abusive or objectify women or are complicit in these crimes. They are undeniably bad, and it is women who plot and pilot their escape and the rescue of other women, and it is women who provide nourishment, comfort, and, in the distance, the sweet, warm light of sexual gratification—finally. —Julia Berick Read More
March 29, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War By Lucy Scholes In her new monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, became an international best seller. The blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached the children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked whether she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title—“All Quaint on the Western Front”—and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories that mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of making light of such a serious subject. Instead, she offered to write a realistic account of a woman’s experience in Flanders. In a bid for verisimilitude, Price relied heavily on the diaries of a woman named Winifred Constance Young, an Englishwoman who had served as an ambulance driver behind the front line. Price, ever the consummate professional, wrote quickly, and the novel was finished in only six weeks. Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War (1930) is a shockingly visceral and realistic documentation of the cost of the conflict written as the firsthand account of a woman ambulance driver. It is a world of “wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise … of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair,” and the book is a shattering denunciation of the jingoism that kept the war machine turning. Although last year marked the centenary of the end of World War I, Europe is teetering on the brink of a new era of incendiary nationalistic fervor. As such, a new generation of readers would do well to turn to Price’s novel. It’s as much a warning for our future as it is a reminder of our past. Read More
March 29, 2019 Arts & Culture To Believe or Not to Believe: That Is Not the Question By Peter Bebergal Photo by Dialog Center Images via Flickr (Creative Commons) Many years ago at a dinner party, I met a couple who had brought along their two-year-old son. The mother was Jewish, and the father was a practicing Buddhist from Tibet. Making small talk in the kitchen, the mother began to tell me about how she had been unable to get pregnant, so her husband had gone to their lama to ask him to bless them with a child. Some months later the couple successfully conceived, but before they broke the news to friends and family, they received a call from the lama, who told them that their unborn son was a bodhisattva—a being who has achieved enlightenment but chooses to reincarnate for the good of the world. As she told me this story, I felt dizzy and entranced. All I could see was her suddenly illuminated face; all I could hear was her voice. Now, I am not a Buddhist, but I experienced what she said about her child as true. He was beautiful and played quietly on the floor at our feet. For me, this was an encounter with the numinous, a realization of holiness and magic that didn’t require what religious people call faith. Moreover, when my trance broke and the other voices and sounds of the party returned to my awareness, I didn’t immediately begin to rationalize what I had been told or how I had felt about it. That spirits of the dead might move through the heavenly spheres and reemerge in new earthly forms seemed as real to me as the food that was being prepared for us. The language the family used to convey the story stirred all our imaginations. Read More