December 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Enter Caption Here By Sadie Stein Here at the Review, we don’t run a “gift guide,” as such—though we do have our special holiday offers. Even so, I’m here to solve all your holiday present questions. I’m out of ideas! You say. What do I do? Where do I go? How do I live? All these questions have a single answer. The answer is this image of a dog in a fez and lounging pajamas, reading a newspaper. Read More
December 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Making Cameos By Sadie Stein Not a good gift. There was this shop in the neighborhood where I’d sometimes go. It was a good spot to find inexpensive gifts: small vases, lacquered boxes, a decorative dish where you could leave your spare change—noncommittal things just north of impersonal. I’d have gone there more, but for the saleslady. She was sour. I mean, really puckered—the sort of acerbic person whose life needs an injection of sunshine from a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or an Anne of Green Gables or a Pollyanna. The requisite plucky orphan never seems to have come into her life. The first time I visited her shop, there were some other customers there. “Can I buy these individually?” one asked her. “No, just as a set,” she said curtly. After the shoppers left, she turned to me. “Can you believe what assholes people are?” she demanded balefully. “This is what I deal with all day.” Read More
December 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A King-size Bust By Sadie Stein If you haven’t seen High School Confidential, a 1958 cult classic, then do so at once. But if you’ve only got a few minutes, do yourself a favor and watch the “beat poetry” scene, one of the squarest drags you’ve ever seen, cats. (And much less convincing than a similar scene in The Beat Generation.) And yet … strangely plausible as a poem? Heavy, man. Heavy. Read More
December 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Large Mouse By Sadie Stein Photo: Bachelot Pierre J-P A large rat crossed my path last night on Fifty-seventh Street. It came out from under a wooden fence at a vacant lot near Bendel’s, paused for traffic, and then streaked across to the uptown sidewalk, sat awhile in the dark, and vanished. It was my second rat this week. The first was in a Greek restaurant where there are lap-height sills under all the windows. The rat ran along the sills, straight toward, then past me. “See that?” Will said, sipping from his beer glass. ”Large mouse,” I said. —Renata Adler, Speedboat Last night, with everyone feeling the exhaustion that comes from following the news and doing nothing, I ventured out to the grocery store. I thought I might be “coming down with something” and had decided to get a grapefruit. This particular grocery store is more expensive, but it’s very close by and open at all hours. It was pretty busy. There were probably seven other people on line. And suddenly a little boy shouted, “There’s a mouse!” and legitimate pandemonium broke out. What we saw was not, in fact, a mouse—it was a rat. A very large Norwegian rat, scurrying around the decrepit produce section. Several people shrieked, and seemed to mean it. Others were shouting; there was sporadic running. Read More
December 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Do Not Mock Our Walk By Sadie Stein Tangier Island, Virginia. There have been many theories advanced about the accents of Alaskan Bush People’s Brown children. These theories often involve chicanery and sometimes speech impediments. Personally, when I first watched an episode of the controversial Discovery reality show, which chronicles the escapades of a family allegedly raised away from civilization, I was struck by the similarity to the accent of Tangier Island. Tangier Island (as well as Smith Island—they’re both in the Chesapeake Bay) is famous for its local dialect, thought by linguists to be an example of Restoration-era English. While the brogue-ish accent is probably far more diluted than it was when the island was truly isolated in the Chesapeake, to an outsider, it’s still hard to understand—and the residents still have trouble understanding outsiders, too. You can get a sense of it in this video; here, for comparison, are the Browns. Read More
December 1, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent No Known Remedy By Sadie Stein Illustration: Wellcome Library, London The flies have conquered the flypaper. —John Steinbeck The thing about a flyswatter is, there’s a limited number of places you can effectively wield it. Sure, it’s easy enough to whisk the swatter and even to make contact with your target—but it’s surprisingly difficult to find a surface on which to swat cleanly. And make no mistake: by swat, I mean kill, ruthlessly. Writing about the phenomenon of house flies a few years ago, the New York Times quoted the dipterologist Harold Oldroyd’s book The Natural History of Flies: A house or other building is … no more than a large flytrap. It is found that the same building is infested year after year, while the house next door may be immune. At present there is no known remedy for these visitations except to move. My home is, as I write this, benighted by flies; a neighbor said it was “because it’s getting cold” and that the flies come indoors to prolong their meager lives. Between seasons, and then all summer long, they’re an urban blight. They’re maddening in a way that feels personal. I bought the flyswatter and then some flypaper. Your modern flypaper comes on a little spool, topped with a small red loop and fastened by a brass thumbtack. One removes the tack, unrolls the tape, and then affixes the whole business to the wall or ceiling (“wherever,” as the packaging puts it, “flies are a nuisance”). It’s very efficient and strangely beautiful: it looks like a coil of amber hanging there, all the more so when it ensnares an unsuspecting fly. One small fly trapped himself almost at once, which was satisfying. An old boyfriend of my mom’s liked to call it “Jewish hunting.” I quickly swatted it dead and left the paper hanging—partly as a Spartacus-style warning, partly to attract this fly’s foolish compatriots, and partly because it seemed too extravagant to remove a strip of tape after only five minutes of use. But then the paper hung there with its single squashed corpse for days, and the flies buzzed in our ears, and it was not even worth invoking the devil or the Bible or Sartre or Jeff Goldblum, especially since I didn’t actually have anything much to say about them. They are, like bad weather, a banal nuisance. And besides, come winter, my husband and I knew they would all go away, and that we were, in any case, very lucky to be the humans. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.