Over the years that Lee spent working on his latest novel, “My Year Abroad,” there were many moments, he said during a video interview from Honolulu, where he has been spending most of this month, “where I was absolutely sure I was on the wrong track, and that I was this close to failure and throwing it away.”
That teetering sensation, the anxiety about his capabilities, is familiar to him. “Maybe that’s an immigrant alarm, an immigrant boy’s alarm: ‘I don’t belong here. I don’t really know the language, figuratively and literally,’” he said. “I don’t want to feel it, but I also kind of think that if I stop feeling it, that’s when something really bad happens. I don’t want to feel too comfortable.”
Why has this trick survived, when so many others haven’t? If you ask magicians — I spoke with six — they eventually land on one answer. “It’s just the simplicity of it,” said Mike Caveney, a magician who’s writing a history of the trick. “Magicians say a good trick is one that can be described in a few words, and ‘sawing a lady in half’ is very few words,” he added.
But the secrecy around how the trick is done obviously adds to its appeal, too. As much as everyone thinks they know how it works, “There might be 20 different methods in popular use,” Flom said.
This absurd relic of an antiquated era is technically part of Route 66, that mythical symbol of car-culture manifest destiny, and if you’re heading from downtown, it spills into the City of Pasadena, a mostly pleasant offshoot of LA that actually feels like its own city—a rarity in the larger county makeup. After landing at a merciful stoplight welcoming you to safety, the Arroyo Seco Parkway slows down to become a street named Arroyo Parkway, a main thoroughfare with a large number of businesses, including the first Trader Joe’s and the popular fast-food spot Lucky Boy. It’s a street that has history, but for the most part, it doesn’t feel all that historic. If you were to refer to it as “Route 66” to locals, they’d think you were a looney.
But it was on this street that a timewarp recently opened up, and Route 66 was briefly reborn. While renovating a building over the summer to become a new location of Howlin’ Ray’s hot chicken, a false facade was taken down, revealing underneath it a subtle miracle of the past: a massive neon sign reading “Adohr Milk Farms,” its script featuring custom ligatures, its red paint still relatively sharp, having been hidden from the sun for who knows how long. Just like that, a nondescript building on a nondescript block stuck out like a beacon, the sign bringing back to life a different time—a portal to another world. The sight of it was so jarring that it had commuters pulling over to gawk.
The black-clad members of a heavy metal band matched the color of the central Taiwan Legacy Taichung concert hall’s hulking amplifiers. But one member of the band stood out more than the others. Head shaved and dressed in her religion’s traditional orange robe, a Buddhist nun stood among them.
It all started with a single sentence in a blog post about Iceland: “A farmer is looking for support at a weather station and sheep farm.”
It was 2012, and, after studying photography in the industrial German city of Dortmund, I was ready for a change. I’d long planned on visiting Iceland, and when I read about the secluded farm, everything came together. I replied to the post, landed the job, sold most of my things and booked my flight.
In just a few years, she struggled through a hellish experience of IVF that included being mistakenly told that the baby inside her did not share her DNA, leading her to fear that the wrong embryo had been inserted, a sexual assault on a train while pregnant that went to trial, and the axis-tilting experience of her then-husband transitioning. In the very early stages of motherhood, Heminsley found herself unwittingly married to a woman. All of this contributed to an unsettling lack of agency over her own body and sense of womanhood, which forms the narrative of Some Body to Love.
This is a lovely book: lyrical, rich, full of wit, innocence and charm. They are the retelling of folk tales—origin stories—passed down to Irish Traveller children around the kitchen table or campfire as recalled and preserved by Oien DeBhariduin and beautifully illustrated by Leanne McDonagh.