October 22, 2024 First Person Arachnids By Daniel Poppick Colored engraving of a large scorpion, Buthus granulatus. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, and Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. 1. In the weeks before I left for Mexico, the flies showed up. My apartment became overrun with them, the size of small red grapes, five to ten ripe orbs at a time buzzing around in any given room. A fly or two had never bothered me, so I was able to balance my pacifist instincts with a more rigorous approach to housekeeping; I took the trash out every other day, and if I saw an errant roach in the bathroom I would kill it, the way you wash a glass in the sink without thinking twice. The flies radicalized me. They wheeled through the apartment, attacking every cubic foot of open space, refusing to be ignored. It sent me into a fugue state of bloodlust. I wondered if there was a corpse they were drawn to that I couldn’t see. Maybe I was the corpse. I became obsessed with stalking and killing every last one of them, fantasizing that if I could annihilate them all before the sun went down, the problem would be solved. But it never worked. I slaughtered twenty-five at a time—my windows, ceiling, and rolled-up copies of The New Yorker splattered with gore. I’d wipe down nearly every wall and window in my apartment to keep other flies from coming back for the blood and guts. But they always returned. Read More
October 15, 2024 First Person Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship By Javier Cercas CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM CENTER, A. G. PORTA; LAUTARO BOLAÑO; ROBERTO BOLAÑO; JOEL G. MORERA; CAROLINA LÓPEZ; CERCAS; CERCAS’S SON, RAÚL; AND THE PUBLISHER OF QUADERNS CREMA, JAUME VALLCORBA, IN BARCELONA, 2000. Photograph courtesy of Javier Cercas. I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xavier Coromina when he stopped to say hi to a guy who was a bit older than us, looked like a hippie peddler, and had a Latin American accent, Mexican or Argentine or Chilean (back then I was unable to distinguish one from the other). They talked. At some point Coromina asked the guy how things were going with the novel he was writing. He made a skeptical face and answered: “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That was it, and the phrase remained etched in my mind, maybe because, although secretly I wanted to be a writer, at nineteen I had yet to summon up the courage to admit it, and I was impressed by how naturally that guy—the first real or pretend novelist I’d ever crossed paths with in my life—spoke of his projected novel. Of course, I was sure I would never hear of him again, that he would never be a proper novelist or would only be one of so many Latin American novelists of his generation, thwarted by displacement, bohemianism, and poverty, but seven or eight years later, while I was writing my second novel in the United States, I included a scene in which one character asks another how his doctoral thesis is going, and the other one answers, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” Time passes, and now the gap is not seven or eight years but fifteen or sixteen. We are in December of 1997. I’m living in Barcelona, but I’ve gone to Girona to write an article for El País about an exhibition of work by a childhood friend, David Sanmiguel. At the same time as the opening, in Llibreria 22—right across the street from the art gallery—Ponç Puigdevall is presenting the book Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño. By now, Bolaño has in quick succession published Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, and his name is beginning to resonate in certain literary circles. But I, who am totally outside these circles despite having published three novels, have not yet read him, and have heard of him only from Enrique Vila-Matas, who is a mutual friend. Before the exhibition opens, I have a coffee with Bolaño and Puigdevall. Bolaño tells me he lives in Blanes, that all he does is write, that he makes a living—“a very modest one,” he emphasizes—through literature. Suddenly, while listening to him talk, I have a hunch. I ask Bolaño if he was living in Girona in the early eighties; he says he was. I ask him if he knew Xavier Coromina; he says yes. Then I tell him of our fleeting encounter outside the Bistrot and, once inside the Llibreria 22, I show him the passage in my second novel where a character says his thesis is going, but who knows where it’s really headed. Bolaño laughs; I laugh too. Read More
October 8, 2024 First Person My Enemies, A–Z By Molly Young Ann-Margret in Tommy (1975). Screenshot by Molly Young. A list of all my enemies, in alphabetical order. ADMIN All the tasks I dread because I’m too weak or lazy to (a) find a way to not do them or (b) use my imagination to render them interesting. BELATEDLY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Studying a new language when you’re thirty-seven is an unbelievably inefficient use of time. It takes me weeks to grasp what a five-year-old child could pick up without even trying. This isn’t true of anything else I do in my spare time, like gardening or baking. I could crush a five-year-old’s learning curve in both of those things. When trying to speak a foreign language I am always catapulting myself out of a frying pan and into a fire. Last year, in Mexico, for instance, someone asked why I wasn’t speaking Spanish and I replied, “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally be rude”—except what I actually said was “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally become horny.” COFFEE HEART Some call it tachycardia. The New York Times named it “coffee heart” in a 1905 article with the fantastic title of “SMALL BOY HAS ‘COFFEE HEART'” and the subtitle “Child of Eight Is in City Hospital Slowly Regaining Health. HEART BEATS TOO FAST. Muscle Was Wearing itself Out — Drank a Dozen Cups a Day.” The article is about an eight-year-old named Johnnie Murphy, whose heart was apparently beating at “twice the normal rate” after its owner got into the habit of drinking nine to twelve cups per day. A suspiciously timed mention of the coffee substitute Postum at the end of the article raises the likelihood that the whole thing is sponcon, though there’s no way to be sure. Read More
October 2, 2024 First Person The River Rukarara By Scholastique Mukasonga Map of Richard Kandt’s expedition to find the source of the Nile, from Caput Nili. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother. The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday. Read More
September 26, 2024 First Person Control Is Controlled by Its Need to Control: My Basic Electronics Course By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J. D. Daniels. Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing. What is left of it now, my electronics project, other than the names of these things? A solderless breadboard, and another one, and another one. A fifty-foot roll of twenty-seven-gauge insulated copper wire. Tactile switch micro assortment momentary tact assortment kit, not clear to me what that means. All these jumper wires with their connector pins, I tend to blank on their correct name and call them pinner wires. (When I was a kid, a pinner was a tightly rolled joint. Its opposite was a hog leg.) All the resistors in the whole world, and enough alligator clips to fill the Everglades, and a couple of bags of fuses, and a sack of capacitors, and a box of transistors, and my multimeter. Read More
September 12, 2024 First Person My Childhood Toy Poodles By Tao Lin Binky and Tabby (left to right). Origin In 1989, my brother wanted a dog. He was twelve. I was six. We lived in suburban Central Florida. We found Binky in a newspaper listing. At Binky’s house, I pet Binky’s mom and she ignored me, walking away with straight posture. Binky’s parents competed in dog shows. We chose Binky over his brother because his brother seemed out of control, sprinting through the house, pulling down a lamp. I don’t remember what Binky was like that day. Four years later, I wanted another dog so that Binky would have a companion. When we went to meet Tabby one afternoon, she and her family of six or seven poodles were all lying flat on sofas and the floor, sleeping. Appearance Tabby weighed almost twice as much as Binky, who averaged five pounds. They both looked white to us, but veterinarians labeled Tabby “apricot,” which we found amusing. Binky was elegantly proportioned, like his parents. Tabby was awkward, doe-like, with long legs, a rectangular body, and a small-looking head. Read More