August 23, 2017 First Person Fish Story: Dispatch from Coney Island By Joe Kloc 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
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
August 22, 2017 Contests #ReadEverywhere Photo Contest By The Paris Review Two handsome reviews on the shores of Rydal Water, in the UK. Our dual-subscription deal with the London Review of Books is in its final days, but don’t worry—there’s still time to sign up! Act quickly and you can get a one-year subscription to both The Paris Review and the London Review of Books, along with access to our digital archives, all for just $80. (Already a Paris Review subscriber? Great—we’ll extend your subscription for another year, and your LRB subscription will begin immediately.) Every summer, in conjunction with the deal, we hold a photo contest, asking our readers one question, “Where are you reading?” Subscribers, readers, and friends are invited to post a photo of someone reading the London Review of Books or The Paris Review anywhere in the world for a chance to win a selection of prizes from our partners at Aesop. To participate, simply enter your photo on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram using #readeverywhere (and please remember to tag us! @LRB or @ParisReview). The contest expires at the end of August. Happy posting. Here are some of this year’s best entries so far: Read More
August 22, 2017 Notes from a Biographer Littoral Madness: On Kathy Acker By Chris Kraus Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes, 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker. Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago. But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Curtis’s memorial, standing up on the stage of La MaMa halfway through an evening of readings and monologues, blinking back tears as she faced the dark auditorium. She had no speech prepared. “I thought this was supposed to be a funeral,” she said to the room. “Not a variety show.” Speaking to Sylvère Lotringer, the artist Steve Brown recalled how the elegantly planned Nembutal suicide of Danceteria emcee Haoui Montaug among a small group of friends ended with a plastic bag over his head. He was a large man, in the late stages of AIDS, and whoever arranged for the pills had underestimated the dose. Before time accelerated, deaths among friends in the art world were like salt to a sting, bringing unresolved feuds to the surface. Now we care less, or are nicer. Read More
August 22, 2017 Our Correspondents Camouflage Is the New Black By Jane Stern I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime. With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part. I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession. Read More
August 21, 2017 At Work There Are No Small Fascisms: An Interview with Dasa Drndic By Dustin Illingworth Dasa Drndic. The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past—and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us—is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic. “I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences,” one character says in Trieste, Drndic’s most acclaimed novel to date. “I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing … I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic.” Drndic adorns her novels—ostensible fictions encircling the Holocaust—with rich archival materials: photographs, biographical sketches, transcripts, testimonies, making a kind of blackened garland of twentieth-century history. It is as if, for Drndic, the atrocities of the recent past overwhelm the capacities of both fiction and fact, that only in braiding the two can our proximity to such horror be countenanced. Her most recent novel, Belladonna, is forthcoming in English from New Directions. A ferocious book, it follows the life of Andreas Ban, an elderly psychologist, as he sifts through the remnants of his life—clinical research, books, his failing body, and the complicities of Central Europe—looking for “a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried.” Though she speaks English beautifully—in fact, she studied English Literature at the University of Belgrade—it is not her mother tongue. This was in no way a hindrance as Drndic adeptly answered my questions about the monstrous repetition of history, the mantle of “documentary fiction,” and the moral gravity of bearing witness. Drndic corresponded with me from Rovinj, a Croatian port on the Istrian peninsula. Read More