{"id":92435,"date":"2015-12-01T16:30:03","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T21:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92435"},"modified":"2015-12-01T16:16:39","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T21:16:39","slug":"no-known-remedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/01\/no-known-remedy\/","title":{"rendered":"No Known Remedy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_92448\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/fly.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-92448\" class=\"wp-image-92448\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/fly.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"497\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/fly.jpg 638w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/fly-300x248.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-92448\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Illustration: Wellcome Library, London<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u00a0The flies have conquered the flypaper. \u2014John Steinbeck<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The thing about a flyswatter is, there\u2019s a limited number of places you can effectively wield it. Sure, it\u2019s easy enough to whisk the swatter and even to make contact with your target\u2014but it\u2019s surprisingly difficult to find a surface on which to swat cleanly. And make no mistake: by\u00a0<em>swat<\/em>, I mean\u00a0<em>kill<\/em>, ruthlessly.<\/p>\n<p>Writing about\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/11\/10\/garden\/coping-with-the-flies-of-fall.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">the phenomenon of house flies<\/a>\u00a0a few years ago, the\u00a0<em>New York Times\u00a0<\/em>quoted\u00a0the dipterologist Harold Oldroyd\u2019s book <em>The Natural History of Flies<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A house or other building is \u2026 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.\u00a0At present there is no known remedy for these visitations except to move.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>My home is, as I write this, benighted by flies; a neighbor said it was \u201cbecause it\u2019s getting cold\u201d and that the flies come indoors to prolong their meager lives. Between seasons, and then all summer long, they\u2019re an urban blight. They\u2019re maddening in a way that feels personal. I bought the flyswatter and then some flypaper.<\/p>\n<p>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 (\u201cwherever,\u201d as the packaging puts it, \u201cflies are a nuisance\u201d). It\u2019s very efficient and strangely beautiful: it looks like a coil of amber hanging there, all the more so when it ensnares an unsuspecting fly.<\/p>\n<p>One small fly trapped himself almost at once, which was satisfying. An old boyfriend of my mom\u2019s liked to call it \u201cJewish hunting.\u201d I quickly swatted it dead and left the paper hanging\u2014partly as a\u00a0<em>Spartacus<\/em>-style warning, partly to attract this fly\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review<em>, and the <\/em>Daily<em>\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; \u00a0The flies have conquered the flypaper. \u2014John Steinbeck The thing about a flyswatter is, there\u2019s a limited number of places you can effectively wield it. Sure, it\u2019s easy enough to whisk the swatter and even to make contact with your target\u2014but it\u2019s surprisingly difficult to find a surface on which to swat cleanly. And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[17247,11537,20386,20387,20390,20391,12594,5151,125,20388,20389],"class_list":["post-92435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-domestic-life","tag-flies","tag-fly-swatters","tag-flypaper","tag-harold-oldroy","tag-houseflies","tag-jeff-goldblum","tag-john-steinbeck","tag-new-york-city","tag-nuisances","tag-pests"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>No Known Remedy: My Problem with Flies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein does battle with a time-honored nemesis: the housefly.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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