August 23, 2017

Édouard Manet, Fishing, ca. 1862–63.

I don’t fish, but I enjoy being around those who do. They’re easy to find in New York, leaning against the railing of a Brooklyn pier or resting on the rocky banks of the city’s rivers. In Sheepshead Bay, the fishermen are often jolly and sun-beaten, as if they’ve just returned from a long voyage. By early afternoon, they fill the local bars, swearing off red meat and bragging about not taking their medications. The Battery Park esplanade is more relaxed. Sometimes the only sign of a fisherman is an unmanned rod cast out to sea; a passerby might assume that fish in the Hudson catch themselves.

One August morning a few years ago, I went out to Coney Island to clear my head on Steeplechase Pier, where fishermen gather in the summer months to fill their buckets with flukes, stripers, and porgies, much as they did a century ago. Coney Island is slow to change. Its busier blocks still have working pay phones on both sides of the street, and until recently, broken signs dangled off the facades of abandoned buildings, unmoored from their bracings by Hurricane Sandy. On hot days, the main stretch of Coney Island’s two-and-a-half mile boardwalk is crowded with visitors from the nearby amusement park. They eat mango on a stick as they navigate the performers dancing with snakes and rainbow-colored poodles. Down by the fishermen’s pier, the boardwalk quiets down. Elderly residents of the nearby towers read paperback novels and check the time on their digital wristwatches, and kids gather in the shade beneath the arches of an old terra-cotta building with a flaking portrait of Poseidon on the front. In the painting, the sea king is sitting alone in a rowboat, paddling toward the Atlantic. Read More

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August 23, 2017

First Person

Putting on the Veil: Boys Invade an All-Girls School

By Rafia Zakaria

From the cover of Veil.

I wore the full-face veil for the first time on my wedding day. I was eighteen years old and I had never worn it before. In Pakistani Muslim tradition, this was the day of the ceremonial giving away of the bride, the day I was to say goodbye to my family (theatrically, and before an audience of a few hundred) and go off to be with my husband and his family. The fabric I had chosen over a year before for my wedding dress had been selected for hue and sheen—a fiery red-orange—and it was utterly opaque. I could see nothing. For navigation, I had the assistance of two younger cousins, unveiled and full of giggles. It was September in Karachi, I was pouring sweat and also blind.

The story of how I ended up fully veiled and a bride did not begin that day. The skein connecting it to incidents past could be reeled back to an event a few years earlier, one that had led me to begin wearing the half-veil or the head scarf. Fifteen then, I was a student at an all-girls school that prided itself in being almost entirely free of the contaminating male presence, whose very existence made veils necessary in the first place. The hundreds of girls that were students there were instructed almost entirely by women. From the time we were six years old and began first grade to the time we were seventeen and graduated eleventh, it was women, women and all women. At five past eight every morning, the gates of the school would be locked and the man-free day would begin. The only men left inside were the very poor ones that the school employed, who mopped the halls, set up the nets for games of volleyball behind our high walls, or guarded the gates. The fact that they were poor seemed to cancel out their masculinity. Read More

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August 15, 2017

First Person

Exit Strategy: A Letter from Belize

By Bryan Washington

You can’t really escape your problems at home.

Mara Sánchez-Renero, El Cimarrón y su Fandango: Threshold, 2014. From Almanaque Fotografía’s exhibition, “Júpiter XL.”

Most summers for the past few years, I’ve worked in contracting. Sometimes it takes me places: usually the northwestern states or patches around the South. Last month, I spent a weekend shuttling around Wisconsin, where I didn’t see another person of color for about three days. But the morning before I flew back to New Orleans, I ran into a Nigerian lady tending bar in La Crosse. She was holding court at this diner decked out with WE WELCOME IMMIGRANTS! stickers. We were equally shocked to have found each other.

Flying into Belize City this month, on the other hand, damn near everyone was black or brown. I knew what most Americans know about the country, which is nothing. The plane touched down just beside the Western Highway, alongside the miles of marshland surrounding the city’s outskirts. The airport flanked a mostly dirt road, lined with signs calling for abstinence and grace.

Belize is predominantly English speaking. Nearly half of its population is multilingual, and many speak Kriol, the local patois. Most of the country remains undeveloped. Charles Portis called it a “beautiful blue map with hardly any roads to clutter it up,” and folks fly down from wherever to see the Mayan ruins scattered throughout the country. Or they’ll lounge around Caye Caulker. Or they’ll fuck around with the reefs strafing the Caribbean Sea. When the rental-car guy asked me which I was here for, I told him neither, and his eyebrows kick-flipped from his face.

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August 3, 2017

First Person

Meeting Sam Shepard at a Friend’s House on Eighth Avenue

By Brian Cullman

The violin was psychedelic green, green as a shamrock, green as Kermit the Frog, a take-no-prisoners green. I bought it for thirty dollars at a yard sale in Providence.

“The violin’s free,” the owner told me, though he counted the money more than once: four fives and a ten. “I’m just charging you for the case and the bow.”

His girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, had painted it with acrylic paint one night when she was high, and then she’d painted it again. It was green to stay. Even when it was in the case, he could see it glowing in the dark. He’d wrapped it in newspaper and kept it at the back of the closet along with ice-skates and the broken Crock-Pot. He was selling those, too.

I had no need for a violin, green or otherwise, but it seemed like a good investment. When I brought it back to the dormitory, my roommate grabbed it, tuned it and was playing along with a Taj Mahal record within the hour. A week later, I still hadn’t figured out how to hold the bow. Read More

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August 3, 2017

First Person

Fantasy and Reality

By Sheila Kohler

Ironically, one of the questions a writer of fiction hears most often is, How much of the story is true? It is a slightly annoying question. One is prompted to ask whether the story does not stand on its own. Yet it is an understandable query. What is being asked is, How did you do it? Where does it come from? These are questions we all wish to ask but can rarely answer. Behind them lies all the mystery of art.

Sometimes, though, the answer is straightforward. In the case of a story I wrote some years ago, “The Transitional Object,” fiction enabled me to reverse what had happened in reality, with impunity, to make my protagonist active—always more satisfying in fiction—when I had actually been passive. It was my passivity, my inability to defend myself, that galled particularly over the years.

In order to do this, I made my protagonist younger than I was, a psychology student at the Institut Catholique, in Paris, who goes to her professor to discuss the paper she is writing. When the student rejects her professor’s sexual advances, he gives her a low grade so that she’ll lose her scholarship. Having no other means of support or protection, she goes hungry. All of this prepares for and makes possible a dramatic act of revenge. Read More

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July 27, 2017

First Person

Excerpts from a Grumpy Russian Poet’s Diary

By Igor Kholin

Igor Kholin. Illustrations by Ripley Whiteside.

The Russian poet Igor Kholin died in 1999 an underappreciated talent, but his literary star is on the rise. His Selected Poems were published in 1999 to wide acclaim, followed by his collected prose. This year, a new collection of his diaries and prose will be published in Russia. Ugly Duckling Presse released Kholin 1966: Diaries and Poems this past spring. We’ve published an excerpt of these diary entries—selected from his 1966 diaries and translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich—below. —Ed.

August 17

I remember that as a kid I was particularly sensitive to verbal insults.

I think that poems should adhere to three rules. They should be:

1) Formally solid.

2) Emotional.

3) Intellectual.

I came to these conclusions in part after reading a piece by Krishnamurti.

Both my neighbors were utterly drunk. One of them dragged the other one home on a horse. They’re both around 70. Read More

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Category Archives: First Person

First Person

Fish Story: Dispatch from Coney Island

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First Person

Putting on the Veil: Boys Invade an All-Girls School

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First Person

Exit Strategy: A Letter from Belize

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Fantasy and Reality

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Excerpts from a Grumpy Russian Poet’s Diary

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