April 25, 2018 First Person Becoming Spring Brucesteen: My Quest to Meet the Boss By Toniann Fernandez This is a story about getting in the getaway car, driving fast toward your dreams, and then turning the car around. In this case, the getaway car was New Jersey Transit. One day, I was eating a can of chickpeas and drinking Aperol in my living room, and the next, I was on a train from Penn Station to Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was January, and we were in the midst of the bomb cyclone. I had received a hot tip from a loyal informant in the form of a text message: “This is tomorrow at The Stone Pony,” she said. Attached was a flyer for the Big Man’s Bash, a concert in honor of the life and work of “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, the musician and former saxophone player in the E Street Band. She went on, “A friend of mine (and more importantly, a friend of the Boss) says she would bet $$ that Bruce Springsteen will be there if he is in New Jersey.” I wondered how much money this friend was willing to bet and decided I would wager the seventeen-dollar train ticket. The NJ Transit North Jersey Coast Line train is one I have taken many times. I grew up in Manasquan, New Jersey, a beach town, alternately known as “Bruce nation.” Asbury Park, of Springsteen’s famed Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is just a short bike ride down the boardwalk, and during the summer months, virtually every bar hosts a Bruce Springsteen cover band performance every night. This sojourn, however, was the first NJ Transit ride I took in search of the Boss. My fandom was recent. The sound of “Born in the U.S.A.” used to conjure images of the muscular white boys of my high school years, drunk with testosterone and Natural Ice, clad in denim and American flags. They screamed along with E Street imitators in bars we were all too young to patronize. I had always found the Springsteen omnipresence in coastal New Jersey offensive. Read More
April 22, 2018 First Person The Difficulty in Writing About Murder By Cutter Wood Anna Maria Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. My mother-in-law enjoys quilting, prosecco, chocolates, family photographs, geraniums, skim milk, and the new children’s wing at the public library. She is a kind woman, and—as long as you don’t curse—an eminently forgiving person, with a bent toward digital ineptitude that is at once exasperating and endearing. “Okay, I clicked on it,” she says to me over the phone. “Now it disappeared.” “It shouldn’t disappear,” I say. “Nothing just disappears.” “Well, it disappeared.” When the whole family goes to the beach, she packs a sun hat and snacks and tells us about her childhood catching crabs at the shore with only a piece of chicken and a string. At some point, as the conversation trails off, she reaches into her beach bag (purple, she sewed it herself) and gets out a book, and for the next hour she doesn’t say a word. Such an innately garrulous woman, what is it that has so engrossed her? Naturally, she is reading about a murder. My mother-in-law is quite an aficionado of murders. She’s traveled the winding canals of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti, in the novels of Donna Leon, as he investigated the drowning of an American serviceman; she’s followed along behind Louise Penny’s chief inspector, Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, as he unraveled the mystery of the socialite CC de Poitiers’s fatal electrocution at a curling competition. At night, reclining in her easy chair by the living-room window, she takes out her hearing aid and falls so wholly into these stories—pages snapping crisply one after another, thumbnail chewed to a nubbin—that she forgets about the dog waiting by the door and the kettle whistling on the stove. What my mother-in-law does not read, however—and this is a point of pride for her—is true crime. She will read about the decapitation by snowmobile of a fictional errant insurance salesman (through the transmogrification of literature, she becomes the main character, literally stumbling on the head of the late insurer), but if a murder has actually occurred, it somehow precludes her interest. For my mother-in-law, something distinguishes the real murder from the fake, something prevents her from reading the former yet allows her to consume the latter with immense enthusiasm. She loves the characters in murder mysteries, she’s told me, their foibles and their deadpan philosophizing, but when she reads true crime, there’s a sense that the events are being sensationalized for her consumption, and she simply feels uncomfortable. This discomfort has been very much on my mind lately, because over the past few years, as I’ve undergone that slow process of becoming a part of my wife’s family, I’ve also been writing one of those very books, a book about an actual murder. Read More
March 26, 2018 First Person Farewell to Winter, Farewell to My Fingertip By Ben Shattuck I lost my fingertip in January while carrying a wooden boat across icy ground. When I slipped, the gunwale came down on my hands. About a half inch of my middle finger lay in the dead grass, which might not sound like a lot until you look at the geography of a hand—the cut went to the white crescent setting in the cuticle. I wish I could accurately describe the feeling of picking up the fingertip—how immediately protective I was, holding it in my palm, cupping it like I’d found a songbird egg; how I felt it was both numb and not numb because it was then an object, not part of my body anymore. It was of my left hand—my writing and painting hand. “We have to go,” I said to my friend carrying the other side of the boat. The surgeon couldn’t sew it back on. Before I was put under, he said if he couldn’t graft the skin from the lower part of the finger, he’d bend the finger and attach the open end to my palm, cleave it free later. I woke up to it not sewed to my palm but erect with a bulb of bandages, an aluminum plate apparently shoved under the nail bed. Read More
December 14, 2017 First Person A Study of Kanai Mieko By Sofia Samatar Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on film and photography, although this is what we most desire. Kanai Mieko is highly acclaimed in Japan. She has also been described as noncommittal, apolitical, and frivolous. One critic laments “that the author, whose talent is comparable to that of Salman Rushdie, would take up such a light, meaningless subject as an ordinary housewife’s uneventful life when she could, and should, be concerned with ideological and political issues of import.” Kanai Mieko ranks Jane Austen higher than Dostoyevsky. She’s not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature. In 1997, Kanai published a novel called Karui memai, or Vague Vertigo. It isn’t available in English. I read about it in Atsuko Sakaki’s book, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature. Sakaki gave Kanai’s novel the English title Vague Vertigo. In an earlier paper, she called it Light Dizziness. Sakaki changed the title to Vague Vertigo to emphasize Kanai’s references to Hitchcock’s film and to Roland Barthes. Barthes, who wrote: “One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstance I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a ‘detective’ anguish.” Researching Kanai Mieko gives me a detective anguish. Read More
November 23, 2017 First Person Black History By Asali Solomon The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! From the cover of Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel. Back in the early 1980s, no one at the mostly white elite prep school I attended had heard of Kwanzaa, which I’d grown up celebrating instead of Christmas. This was a yearly hassle of explaining: yes, presents; no, Santa Claus. But absolutely no one had heard of Umoja Karamu, “a ritual for the black family” that we observed at Thanksgiving. This one I never volunteered to explain. Black families who celebrated Umoja Karamu (Kiswahili for “unity feast”)—and we were the only one I knew of—were to trade in the ritual of senselessly stuffing ourselves for one in which we used food and words to reflect on the grim, glorious trajectory of black people in America, to recall the crimes of the “greedy one-eyed giant” white man, and to keep the “Black Nation” energized and focused, struggling toward liberation from racism. During Umoja Karamu, which lived in a 1971 booklet (a mere two years older than I was) published by a fellow Philadelphian named Edward Sims, we sat at our special holiday table and took turns reading solemnly aloud from a pithy narrative of African American history that moved from the ancient kingdom of Mali to the Watts riots. Between readings, we ate a symbolic sequence of aggressively non-Thanksgiving foods, including black-eyed peas, rice, corn bread, and leafy greens, all served unseasoned, perhaps to make us more thoughtful. Blessedly, my mother always insisted on a normal holiday meal after Umoja Karamu. But Edward Sims was certainly about his business. Each Thanksgiving, as I waited to get to the stuffing and gravy, I did indeed taste the suffering we read about. I experienced the “bland and tasteless condition under which Black Folk lived during the slavery period” in the form of unsalted white rice and chalky black-eyed peas. But happily, enduring Umoja Karamu, unlike the suffering of the Black Nation, was a private shame, one about which my school friends knew nothing. That is, until I received a fifth-grade assignment to write an essay about family Thanksgiving traditions and to read it aloud. Read More >>
November 23, 2017 First Person The Nexus of All Despair By Jane Stern The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! Frances Brundage, Thanksgiving Day Greetings (detail), ca. 1913. I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, based solely on the fact that I adore turkey. But if I were to remove turkey from the equation, I would probably realize that this holiday, for me, has been nothing but one hideous thing after another. Why Thanksgiving is the nexus of all despair is a mystery. But to prove that it is, here’s a short list of some of the things I remember. 1956, New Haven, Connecticut The table is beautifully set in the dining room of the gracious colonial house on Trumbull Street, where my aunt and uncle live. I am ten years old, and my older cousins—Eric, seventeen, and his sister, Willa, thirteen—are my teen idols. After the family takes a few snapshots of all of us smiling, the food is spread out on the table and the shit hits the fan. Uncle Henry makes a snide remark about Elvis Presley, who has just been on The Ed Sullivan Show, and cousin Willa flings herself from the table in a histrionic fit. The whole table erupts into a pro- and anti-Elvis fight. The dinner is ruined, no one is hungry, and the gravy curdles as “All Shook Up” blasts from the phonograph in Willa’s room behind the slammed door. Read More >>