Category: Uncategorized

[transformation: Daphne]

 

Who roots, flares into leaf, becomes tree.
But in the change before the change
Zeus’s son courses her like a hound
and Daphne is a hare, trying to leap free.
That day at the races a whippet lost its head
in the hold, its cries leaking out of the dark trap
like poisoned milk. Then clank and all the gates
lifted, and the dogs streaked out, hurtling after
a dummy on castors, which rattled over the sleepers
of a long, greased rail. The pack was an unreadable blur.
Once it was over, handlers hooked their legs
over the barrier and came for their dogs,
clipping on each leash. Zeus behind the scenes:
his electric-shock collar, his snippets of meat.
Out beyond the pale there’s no straight course,
just waterlogged fields and Daphne’s hectic
blurts of speed. She’s at the edge of her wits,
retching with fear, and he is everywhere,
stumbling her up, ahead of her, above,
his stink, his spit; he hollers and barks
in the rough of his throat, cuffs out her legs
from under her, tears at her flanks with his teeth
but still delays, and still she doubles back
and jinks and feints and flees.
By nightfall she is ragged in her hind-end,
blood-ebbed and frayed and wanting to be gone
into the gentleness, though there’s this bright light,
this dazzle in her eyes, that won’t let her sleep.
She cries for her daddy like any other girl
who’s run beyond her strength, whose heart has failed.
When a hare dies it screams like a mortal child.
Disconcerted, Apollo looks up from the field.
There’s Zeus in the dark holding the lamp,
keeping it steady for the rape, and the kill.

 

*

 

MENINGITIS

 

My grandmother, diminished in her bones,
loyal to her large-print Mills & Boon
and her soaps, bent perpendicular over her zimmer,
weeping, still weeping for her daughter June,
who was sweet, so sweet, the child of her heart –
soft blonde curls and forget‑​me‑​not eyes,
gentle and kind – how June took care of the evacuees,
holding out their towels as they stepped
from the disinfectant bath to be deloused.
How, after all that – the World’s War
and its shell-shocked peace, the Mickey Mouse
gas mask packed away at last, June
went to bed with half a soluble aspirin
for a headache and by the morning was gone.
The way my grandmother tells it, she didn’t know
there was anything out of the ordinary wrong,
and June died in the night in wet sheets, alone,
as the terrible roses bloomed beneath her skin.
My grandmother out of her mind with pain,
writhing and kicking on the kitchen linoleum,
while my uncle as a boy watched on.
Which is why my father came to be born,
to bring her back to the living, a baby to hold.
And this is my inheritance, this heirloom of grief:
the way my daughters’ fevers crush me,
how I check their skin obsessively
for tell-tale burns, how I scoop them
out of the flames where the devil eats them,
daughter like a hot poultice I hold
against my frightened heart, the marks I make
above my door that the angel of the plague
might pass, where my grandmother waits,
standing on the threshold in her red velour slippers,
unable to step over, peering fearfully into the dark.

 

 

These poems appear in Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson, published by Jonathan Cape, £10.00. Vertigo & Ghost has been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.

The post Vertigo & Ghost appeared first on Granta.

“Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel” (Excerpt)
by Julian Jarboe

The full moon is rising over an endless expanse of barbed wire and electric fences. They sit atop the city’s dark horizon of high walls, district and ward borders, checkpoints, gated neighborhoods, and private estates. Even the gardens of Stella Maris are jagged: armored groves and greenhouses of fruiting Scrub Nut and Atlantic Palm encased in wrought iron, the decorative Treacher Fern and Wandering Wasp collared in shrapnel. Sebastian would like to slide between the bars, over the bricks, and past the security cameras as easy as a shadow, let his dusk-tan skin turn gray-blue in silhouette, his shade-tree stature camouflage him among the delicate vines of Prophet’s Hand and fickle-twisted wands of Rare Pear on the branch, the temperamental nightshades, the sugar tubers. Root himself to the Earth’s surface.

His stomach whines like an obstructed garbage disposal and Yonatan says, “girl, same.” Yonatan promises to buy them both a late dinner when they get to Omens and Pour Tends. The moon looms above them all, flashes through their imaginations in panoramic view of the commercial compound and industrial complex on its surface. Everybody knows all the shitty jobs are headed to space. Sebastian knows he’s headed there eventually, inevitably, running out of earthbound dead ends, spinning in stasis and self-sabotage, though hardly losing the strength to deny and delay again; procrastination as the only working perpetual-motion machine.

“Whatever happened to applying to—what’s it called—seminary?” Yonatan asks. “I can’t believe that’s really the word for it. Still sounds like some weird sort of… cum thing.”

“Uhhhh, so,” Sebastian demurs. “I actually got pretty far in the process! They didn’t really tell me why it stopped, but it stopped after the psychological exam.”

“Oh.” Yonatan sounds a little insulted to not have heard this news sooner. “Shit. Did you literally fail an ink blot test? Is that even possible?”

“Yes? I mean, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure.”

Sebastian tries to keep a diary, but he has never been the type to recount what is happening, how he feels about it, or one moment’s connection with any previous or upcoming moments. Instead, he uses a Daily Examen app on his phone to keep lists of words. Each evening the app prompts him to review the day in the presence of God through five steps and input a short response for each:

1. Ask God for light.
2. Give thanks.
3. Review the day honestly, without delusions.
4. Face your shortcomings.
5. Look toward tomorrow and the days to come.

The program also displays his stats and leaderboard compared to other users, how many decades of the Holy Rosary everyone is praying and how many days since his last Confession and so on, but he skips these. Instead he records words he sees, reads, hears, writes, says, sings, or repeats. What difference between them is there, anyway? Slogans, idioms, quotes, allusions, prayers, marketing campaigns: anchors to the delicate vessel of his memory, some heaviness, a weight not unlike certainty, sequence, and significance.

---

Omens and Pour Tends is a long room in the basement of an old six-story row house, and Sebastian and his friends prefer to meet at the loudest, darkest corner of it. The booth seating along the tin-tiled walls is comprised of antique oak pews surrounding scavenged work benches, discarded kitchen counter tops, and one foosball table that the owner insists is from a genuine Two-Thousand-And-Ought-Naught era tech startup, but Yonatan and the other servers suspect it’s just from the owner’s old fraternity house where some of his roommates happened to work in tech startups.

Kero is already there when they arrive, her piles of impractical novelty backpacks and totes stuffed onto one side of their usual booth while she sets up her DJ rig on the platform of shipping crates and road cases that designates the “stage.”

“Love the new hardware,” Yonatan remarks on Kero’s robotic left arm, where tonight she’s switched out her usual claw for a flayed and circuit-bent Furby.

“Thanks dude,” she says, and uses the terrible little beak on the toy to pincer audio cables and records.

Yonatan brings them all dandelion toddies and places down a caddy on the center of their table crowded with bottles of hot sauce, packets of tapioca pearls, salt, utensils, and miniature divination games: a pocket-sized magic eight ball, a fold-out Ouija board, a scattering of fortune cookies, dice and cards and so forth that all came standard with a table at Omens.

Usually the friends read their paper cookie fortunes aloud to each other, always adding “but at what cost?” to the end of the fortune. If you performed the whole thing with high-volume melodrama it was called “fortune yelling” and whoever else laughed first had to give you their fries.

Sebastian cracks a cookie open and announces its contents to Yonatan, waiting for a grin of recognition, but Yonatan’s attention has already shifted to the televisions above the bar.

Sebastian itches on the inside of his stomach as he watches his friend entranced by some pointless commercial. Yonatan’s eyes are deep hazel flecked like bloodstones, armored by dark lids, broad brown cheeks, and eyebrows thick enough that Sebastian could take shelter from a rainstorm beneath them, and Yonatan might say, “my goodness, you’re soaked through, let’s get you out of these clothes before you catch your death a cold,” because for some reason, in this fantasy, Yonatan talks like a cross between a simple country nurse gone to tend the wounded soldiers on the field and a Byronic anti-hero finally deciding to sow tenderness upon his vast estate.

Kero dims the overhead lamps and sets off a chase of small rainbow pin-lights around the room, and there’s a moment, right as everything is ready to go but nothing is happening, where time pauses entirely.

Sebastian has—or had, or will have—a difficult time with time. Sometimes it moves in a different direction or not at all, he was sure of that much, or it was naked anticipation. He could lay down and live there.

---

Witching hour comes and the room packs with late-night regulars, mostly older goths and punks, some of the Jesuit brothers from the nearby parish, the community college theater club, and a handful of that particular kind of tourist who pride themselves on seeking “authenticity” in their travels. Omens and Pour Tends is not on any visitor’s guide, which is precisely its appeal for this type, usually single white dudes in their twenties and thirties, but also hippy couples, awkward graduate students of all stripes conspicuously looking for a narrative in their observations. Sometimes, even poets come, already three sheets to the wind and clearly hoping for something violent to occur so they can possess and decorate it, but there’s rarely fights. There’s never sports on the televisions. The staff are fearless, the regulars are friendly, and the rowdiest it ever gets is when the theater club kids bring new members to initiate and think everyone else is their captive audience. But nobody minds, really. One of the Jesuits always claps politely for the singers.

The tourists stick out by how they carry their assumptions. Sebastian can always tell when someone comes to bask in the atmosphere of the dive. Their faces curl and glint with the masochism of standing too close to the blown-out speaker, finishing the odorous well draught, earning themselves a little bit of damage to escape their own minds, but with a wink, like they were regular people trapped in the onslaughts of their daily lives and not jerks on vacation.

It gets later and then too late. Sebastian misses the last bus home until morning. His friends are busy during these peak hours, of course, so Sebastian has a lot of time to eat fried food and gently disassociate, or to watch who in the crowd watches him, and to contemplate the way his presence becomes the subject of other’s contemplation.

Some part of Sebastian wants to tell these people, “I have nothing against you, but other sorts of people, who are not here, would steal your wallet and kick your butt all the way to Pizza Hut if they were. I just think you should know that. Maybe you can put it in your autobiographical road novel? But I don’t know anything, really. I’m only a local character. I’m the atmosphere. I’m the vibe. By my very definition, I’m somewhat naive. Not creative in any way. Not like you.”

A scruffy, kind of waxy-looking guy with his collared shirt tucked in and a yellow lanyard hanging from his back pocket comes in and half-waves at Yonatan, orders an expensive sake. The man is unfamiliar, but carries himself with less transience than tourists, so must be new to the city for an office job that keeps him long hours. Something thin, hard, and rectangular sits at the end of the lanyard, an ID card for the job most likely, but Sebastian doesn’t need to see what it says to know the company. The shade of yellow is trademarked. The color belongs to the same people, or entity, or whatever they are, who are running the recruitment ads for the moon, looking to staff it with the huddled masses yearning to break into the bourgeoise.

Their logo is everywhere. Their name is a household one. But Sebastian resists speaking or writing it as much as he can. Power that omnipresent should not be permitted something as volatile as a name, not even a codename meant in parody. Taking God’s name in vain was one thing. But there is no safety in naming mortal power, least of all to satirize it, when all the good that does is inspire the power to take you at your word, enact your dystopian exaggeration as their next move, turn your hell into your next reality.

Here is what to do instead:

1. Write down the longest verb you can spell, in any language, without a dictionary: __________.
2. Write down the last, family, or formal name of the worst boss you’ve ever had. Or if you, like Sebastian, have never been employed, choose any other authority figure who sticks in your memory like thorns through the palms of your hands; one who lacerated your motivation, you idealism, or your benefit of the doubt: __________.
3. Now take (a.) a syllable of choice from each word and write them together as a single bicapitalized word, or, (b.) if you’re feeling that big pharma energy, with a hyphen, or, (c.) for a dash of software-as-a-service, drop consonants and swap vowels for emoji. Whatever it is your decide, write it down but keep it secret: __________.

And if you cannot keep a secret, you may still write it down, but then you must—you simply must—erase it immediately.

Give it a try in this following paragraph: __________ (fill in the blank) are establishing their second North American headquarters in Stella Maris following a years-long bidding war between cities across the continent, the governing bodies of each locale genuflecting before the promise of “jobs,” courting with tax incentives and exemptions, ceding public lands, extending eminent domain to cede more than a few private ones as well.

Most people in Stella Maris are as surprised as anyone else to be the chosen site. Some are very angry. Some are very excited. And enough are trying to find hope and positivity in their lives to tune out the anger and ride the excitement instead.

It doesn’t seem to matter what else __________ produces if it produces jobs; it started as an online-only clearinghouse for novelty infomercial products and light consumer gadgets, then it had outposts nationally, then globally, now extra-terrestrially, expanding to include a private mail service, a coffee shop franchise, a bank chain, weapons manufacturing, raw materials speculation, and a popular subscription box of shelf-stable food and nutrition supplements. Their business on the moon is vaguely described as “research.”

But it also doesn’t seem to matter to most people in Stella Maris what manner or quality of jobs this development entails, if there are a high enough quantity of them. Technically, thousands of jobs appeared virtually overnight for the fancy, lucrative positions, but if Lanyard Guy is any indication, they were just as quickly filled by internal transfers. What’s left are the contracts, the subcontracts, temping and testing and data entry and other garbage gigs, also some literal garbage gigs.

Sebastian thinks, hello, yes, his skills and qualifications are that he knows how to cross a floor of any material without making a sound. That he is quite adept at evading blows, for example to the face, for example he can cross his arms over his face in such a way that bruises can be hidden by long sleeves. That he is proficient at being anywhere and feeling like a visitor to a distant relative and that he should not touch anything. That he is an expert at crying for no reason, or used to be, though he hasn’t cried at all in a long, long, long, long time but that he is confident he could pick it back up again at any time, like riding a bicycle, as they say, though he wouldn’t know, as he never learned to ride a bicycle. Or drive a car. Or swim. Since he’s not supposed to go in the ocean past his chin, he’s probably not allowed in space, either, at least not into the sky past the top floor of a building, really, and even then, only if he leaves enough room for the Holy Spirit between his restless, impulsive body and any open windows.

The moon has always been there as a motif in art or a glow sticker on his bedroom ceiling, but now it grows, becomes the distant shore of his impending future, and he understands that the walls of Stella Maris are his mother. The border is her body. “Here” and “her” lose all meaningful distinction. Is he trapped? Could leaving a place ever really be an escape from it? Is what happened before still happening and will it happen again?

Time forms a circle, and then another circle along a different axis, and then another, until time is a mesh sphere pulsing through darkness to synthesizer arpeggios, a crude computer model on an old tape about the future, but the future in the video is from the past, and so everything collapses, flattens, and tomorrow and the days to come are already here, and you are certain of three fates at once:

1. You never leave home and never defy your mother.
2. You leave the entire planet in defiance of your mother.
3. Your mother is waiting for you on the moon when you arrive. She is in her pajamas and raises one of her slippers, hurls it at your head, and the slipper thwacks you in the face as she shouts about how dangerous this is, that you will definitely, absolutely die if she doesn’t kill you first, how since she made you that she can unmake you, how she saw you before you saw yourself, and meanwhile the slipper ricochets off your forehead and twirls off beyond the ends of the solar system, until aliens find it and study it to better understand human kind. And you cry out, please, yes, hello, your skills and qualifications for this exciting and rewarding opportunity are that you still have a pulse, and you excel at forgetting entire years of your life, and laying in bed any time of day, and laying awake any time of night.

---

Are you there Sebastian?

It’s me.

Sorry I’ve been kind of distant lately. The reason for that is that I’ve been kind of distant lately.

Follow my instructions. Message one of the contact codes from the recruitment materials. A billboard, a targeted ad, a commercial, it doesn’t matter. They all take you to the same inbox. Receive the automated response with the link that says “get started.”

Get started. Install their proprietary software. It’s a personality assessment. It really is that long. Maybe the duration screens out anyone who isn’t serious about serving a global community for flexible pay. Maybe it’s just a way for them to better understand your judgment and ability to sort important information from unimportant information.

Press “acknowledge.” The light on your phone’s camera and microphone pulse blue. They are recording you taking the test, to ensure that you don’t cheat by looking up answers about your own judgment and ability to sort important information from unimportant information. Maybe they analyze the feed in real time. Maybe they have those graphics analysis A.I.s that can tell them about your vital statistics, or if your face matches the face on any watch-list, or what your expression implies about your intentions.

NOTE: You may now begin.

NOTE: Check all that apply.

Q: What is your age?

• Like, twelve.
• Youth.
• Old enough to know better.
• Vanishing into obscurity.

Q: Are you a robot?

• No, I am not a robot. 
• I’m unsure.
• Cyborg (Registered). 
• Cyborg (Unregistered).
• Android, Virtual Assistant, or Electronic Companion.

Q: What is your race?

• Passively invested in structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
• Actively invested in structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
• Passively resistant to structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
• Actively resistant to structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
• Guilty, confused, opportunistic, and/or defensive about this question.
• Actually, it’s about fairness in video games journalism.

Q. Optional but strongly encouraged: How do you identify?

• Goth.
• Prep.
• Jock.
• Nerd.
• Top.
• Bottom.
• Verse.
• Sefile.
• Cranky.
• Furry.
• Hexagon.
• Everything but rap and country.
• Womxn, womyn, fem/me (including fatal-spectrum), bimb@, or sugar baby.
• Call me Cis Male. Some years ago—a lady never tells—having no cash, no class, and neither gas, ass, nor grass to pay my way around the old count-ray, I went to sea for a fee and to see if the sea would agree with me. Anchors a-weigh for pay; it is a way I have of driving off panic attacks and a very long list of other ailments and self-diagnoses. Anyway, I got gone; I prayed, got paid; I did not get laid. With a philosophical flourish, I sashayed to the ship. If they but knew it, almost all men, women, enbees, robots, and probably dogs, in their degree, some time or other, are horny for the ocean, which is our collective wife. This is also the extent of my bisexuality.

Q. Suppose that an explorer boards a galleon headed west across the Atlantic, at a maximum speed of nine knots but an average speed of five knots. Suppose he possesses an outdated map which indicates the trajectory of a floating island off the coast of the New World, somewhere between the Chesapeake Bay and the Saint Lawrence River.

The island is said to have black sand and lost treasures from every sea-faring civilization. The island is said to be strewn, as well, with skeletons. Among the pebbles and the gold are the blanching bones of men and women who followed the call of sirens or mermaids or their own death wish, or so it is said. It may also be said that they are the bones of those who have been kidnapped, enslaved, thrown or leapt overboard, those who drowned in failed expeditions, forgotten would-be conquerors, pilgrims and pioneers, whalers, sailors, pirates.

And growing in the black soil, thriving on the constant fertilization by human remains, is every manner of vegetation: taro and pineapple and pumpkin and corn and saffron and cocoa and tea, lush and wild as mud boils in a hot spring.

Suppose the explorer’s ships are wrecked along seven treacherous rocks in a gulf, a body of water he dubs The Sorrows, where he establishes a village which grows into a fortress which assimilates, eventually, into the American empire. Suppose, in letters, the explorer claims to have discovered the island he sought after all. Arguably, his star-shaped fortress comes to hold many of the world’s wonders within, especially beautiful gardens and orchards, and in the ground beneath it and in the sand all around it, just the same, lay the bones of the less fortunate. Assuming the above statements are true, which of the conclusions follow logically for why the explorer claims to believe in his own folly?

• It will increase profits.
• It will encourage everyone to work harder.
• It will support the spread of common values.

Q. When you consider your earliest memories, whose love ensures survival and whose attention is a force to be dodged?

• Childhood is a void to be approached and circled but never ventured into.
• Recovered memories come back emptier and more fragmented than when you started.
• None of the above. Childhood is a myth invented by the Victorians.

Q. When you consider that the responses and habits of trauma can be passed down for generations without conscious knowledge of their origins, whose fear is it when your throat shuts and your joints lock?

• Cold sweat (a plague permitted to ravage, for you are undesirable).
• Night terrors (a destructive dynamic that goes excused and normalized).
• Black out (taken by force, taken by night, suppressed by law, by drink, by your own hand).
• White out (a language and a custom eradicated softly by means of conversion, re-education, love and marriage and sex and family where blending means blending away your distinguishing features).

Q. Who by fire and who by flood?

• Learning to burn.
• Learning to drown.

Q. Whose words do you hear long after they are spoken? Whose opinion of yourself do you hold to be true? Whose fault is it this time? Who is going to pick up the tab? Who is going to fix this? Whose walls protect them and whose walls confine? Who has the luxury to worry about the future? Whose homeland and whose frontier? Whose natural resource and whose unmarked grave? Whose memory of a motherland and whose mother? Whose extermination, whose relocation, and whose assimilation is written on your body but redacted from the records? Who wanders and who is lost? Who is willing to accept pain and who is unwilling to acknowledge their power because of their pain?

• Ask God for delusions.
• Give up.
• Review what is at stake.
• Face your light.
• Look toward tomorrow and its shortcomings.

Q. If you take tomorrow as a true statement, which of the conclusions follow logically?

• There is no such thing as the end of the world, but this also implies that there is no such thing as saving the world, either.
• There are no open spaces in North America, only opened spaces.
• All times are troubled times, troubled differently.
• Delusion is the true nature of evil.
• Hope is a delusion. It will encourage everyone to work harder.
• Despair is a delusion. It will increase profits.
• Not by faith alone are we saved but through Good Works on Earth.
• Not by faith alone are we saved by through Good Works in outer space.
• Aliens might be more likely to find you if you are in space already and some of them could be good looking.
• Slap yourself across the face where your mom can’t reach to do it anymore and cut this out, drama queen.
• Focus!
• God’s light might also be found staying in bed and having a robust panic attack.
• Jesus H. Christ himself is not administering this assessment.
• When the moon is out, clap for it. Tell everyone to applaud. Shout, “ladies and maties, tonight’s entertainment!” Tell everyone that’s where you’re going. It will support the spread of common values.

Q. Look at the shape of your city’s outermost walls. Trace the fortified star. Star like a distant sun, like a compass rose, like the Queen of Heaven, like the fruit of salvation missing from her outstretched hand, the apple sliced lengthwise revealing five seeds arranged in five points. Look at her tin crown of seven stars with five points each, atop her painted head, above her painted feet, pressed onto the silver face of a crescent moon.

Look at the cold-cold moon over the burning Earth. Look at the rockets that go to the cold-cold moon from the burning Earth. Visualize yourself strapped into a window seat. Accept the chances of critical malfunction and fatal catastrophe in any form of travel but most of all the kind beyond the atmosphere. Decide that you will definitely, absolutely die and make a sign of the cross that turns into a shrug halfway through.

Look for trouble and find it. Look at the word “revolution” in every advertisement for soft drinks and sneakers, at “compassion” contained in a forty-five-minute weeknight yoga class with the pretense of spiritual practice. Look at these promises accumulate onto your body and then be ritually shed from it. Look at the world outside your body, and remain the same, regardless.

Look at your mother’s limp and your city’s plans for redevelopment. Look at the places along her kneecaps and her spine where the revolution failed. Look at the places along the side of the road where compassion has died on a night with record freezing temperatures.

Look at yourself in the surveillance video and compare it to the last picture you took of yourself: defiant, “reclaiming” your beauty and your presence against the advertisements for soft drinks and sneakers that would have you feel ugly, against the weeknight yoga class that would have you remain absent. Look at the filter that produces an algorithmic light leak and the suggestion of grease on the lens. Look at how it has lightened your skin and widened your eyes and narrowed your nose. Look at how it memorizes and recognizes you and how well it looks out for you by knowing where you have been and where you are going. The bars close and your friends go home but you stay downtown. God has granted you free will, but the police tell you otherwise. They think you loiter too long outside a bodega, so you buy a juice barrel with your bus money and walk home. It’s sunrise when you return. Your feet are blistered over and bleeding with free will. Your mother may not ask where you’ve been all night, but she already knows. There are eyes on the back of her head.

Look how fondly you take to your childhood bed even though your childhood was anxious and unhappy. Look at yourself in the mirror constantly or not for weeks on end. It is possible to be conscious of the myriad overlapping systems of oppression that are against you and still be wrong. It is possible for one’s anger to be justified and one still to be a jerk. It is possible to learn the less humane lessons from so-called practicality, to fall in love with your own sadness even as you long for relief. Look how nostalgia appears to give meaning to this tragedy, give purpose even to despondency. Look for salvation in personal liberation and a revolution of the spirit. The cyberpunks lost, and all that remains is nostalgia, which is an acid that eats meaning.

Your deity rolls back her eyes in every icon and statuary. Look at her from the periphery of your faith so that she can see you in return. Do you love her, or, are you so desperate for recognition that you will seek it even when it destroys you? Stand behind your mother when you decide to leave here—her—and look into the eyes on the back of her head. Tell her where you’re going and break her heart.

Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it.

Press “save.” Press “submit.” Press “submit” again to confirm. Submit as in send, submit as in surrender. Confirm as in verify, confirm as in initiate.

Hello?

Are you there?

Are you still there?

Are you still with me?

Can you hear me now?

Come back, Sebastian. You are shaking. That is not a productive movement. It’s time to hold still again, to quiet our body, and give it over wholly to the future.

The post Everyone On the Moon Is Essential Personnel appeared first on Electric Literature.

What is an allegory? And what examples of allegory are there in English literature? An allegory is, put simply, a story that has a double meaning: as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory puts it, an allegory has a primary or surface meaning, but it also has […]

The post What is an Allegory? appeared first on Interesting Literature.

Electric Literature internships introduce undergraduate and graduate students, emerging writers, and aspiring publishing professionals to digital publishing and the New York literary scene. Because we are a small, not-for-profit publisher, we provide unique opportunities for professional development and resume-building.

As an Electric Literature intern, you are encouraged to become involved in any aspect of our work that interests you. You’ll sort mail and go to the post office, but you’ll also have the opportunity to contribute to editorial decisions, write for the site, and attend cool literary events. Our interns have gone on to work for places like Publishers Weekly, Oxford University Press, Penguin Random House, and… Electric Literature.

Responsibilities

● Comb the web and social media for breaking literary news
● Write book lists and news items for electricliterature.com
● Staff events
● Select images to pair with articles
● Format, copy edit, and draft articles
● Update contact databases
● Fulfill online merchandise sales
● Transcribe interviews
● Perform other administrative tasks
● Open mail and catalogue books

Skills

● Personal experience using WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—professional experience is a plus
● Excellent writing skills and a unique point of view
● Basic understanding of Photoshop and inDesign
● Firm grasp of grammar and spelling
● Organized and fastidious

The ideal candidate

● Has an educational background in journalism, literature, or creative writing
● Has prior internship or entry-level job experience at another publishing, media, or non-profit organization
● Participates in the contemporary literary scene
● Regularly reads literary magazines and literary websites (including but not limited to Recommended Reading, The Commuter, and electricliterature.com)
● Believes strongly in the Electric Literature mission to make literature more relevant, exciting, and inclusive
● Is hard-working, pays great attention to detail, and can work independently
● Writes clearly and with personality
● Has an eye for design and knows what images will grab a reader’s attention

Details

This is a part-time internship (10–20 hours/week) with a $200 per month stipend to cover transportation and meals. Candidates must be able to come to our office in downtown Brooklyn at least two days a week. We are happy to work with universities and graduate programs to provide course credit, though you do not need to be a student to apply. Interns will start ASAP and work the summer, though exact dates have some flexibility and there may be an opportunity to extend.

How to apply

Please submit the following through Submittable by 11:59 pm on March 23:

1. A cover letter and resume
2. The headline and 2–3 paragraph introduction for a reading list (you can look at the lists section on our site for inspiration). Include 5–7 book titles that you would include on the list, and a short capsule description of one of those books.

The post Electric Literature Is Seeking Spring/Summer Interns for 2020 appeared first on Electric Literature.

On the morning I moved in with Johnny, it rained incessantly. The heat warmed the rain, making the asphalt, the house walls, and even the tiles on the roofs seem to sweat, and a haze overhung the city. It was impossible to ride a bicycle through the streets; you had to get off and push, because the earth itself had turned to liquid.

Seoul was not a labyrinth of the indicative back then, there were only subjunctives and what-ifs; back then it was possible to have and try out numerous different lives, and often one of them would implode: the victims of the marriage fraudsters, who one day would have to defend themselves against lawful spouses, the innocent bigamists who had trusted a forged death certificate, the mix-ups that made children into orphans on a daily basis, the refugees from the North, arriving without any papers, who were branded as communists and persecuted. Back then it was inadvisable to depend upon just one life story, and it had never been easier to acquire several or exchange the one you had for another. Seldom had identity been so fragile; it could be shattered by a piece of paper.

 

Johnny cleared some space for me in his cupboard, where I stored the thin mat and blanket I used for sleeping; initially   I didn’t have even a change of clothes. I left the house early in the mornings, watching out for the landlords in the hallway. The last thing I wanted was to run into them, for Mr Pak wasn’t too pleased that there were now two people living in the room, and only one paying.

At night, Johnny and I sat by the window, smoking and drinking beer, the one bottle which we allowed ourselves each week, and which we drank very, very slowly, to make it last. By daybreak, the final dregs were warm, but we drank those too, because it was still beer even if it was bad beer, and all the while music played on Johnny’s valve radio. The word ‘Zenith’ was embossed on it, above the speaker grille, and the songs it played back were heavenly, heavenly in their acoustic excess. From the neighbourhood outside came the faint sound of voices, the muffled cries of street traders, the faraway drone of car engines, the barely audible buzz of insects. Johnny and I had got ourselves a filed-down, halved grenade as an ashtray, bought from a stall holder who specialized in taking war relics, remnants from the civil war, and transforming them into household items. He also had water buckets made from helmets with welded-up bullet holes, military signs that had been painted over, as well as tea trays made from compressed tin cans (Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were his bestsellers).

From his friend, I purchased a jacket and a pair of trousers that not too long ago had been a soldier’s uniform; after the end of the civil war they had been compelled to turn another colour in one of the numerous dye-works along the Chŏnggye River, for only then would they be acceptable as everyday clothes. You could see them even from a distance, the long washing lines with the sombre-looking, dripping-wet clothes and the large, steaming vat. Once a week, used uniforms were delivered and dyed black (there were innumerable corrupt officers and generals in the military who wanted to make a little something on the side; this profession’s business acumen was legendary). Black was the students’ colour of choice, the dyer explained, and they were his main customers, with the plethora of new universities springing up everywhere he would make a mint; his daughter had to take her entrance exam outside, sitting on a scrap of old newspaper, with the questions next to her on one of the few patches of grass that hadn’t yet been trampled.

He nodded to us and went back to sorting items of clothing, trousers with trousers, jackets with jackets, checking the pockets before the wash. Most were empty, but in one he found a pencil stub, in another some old chewing gum and in another still a small photograph, the portrait of a young woman. He studied it as he stirred the dye with a pole. After the clothes had been immersed in the water for a while, he hung them up to dry on a line he had strung up between the trees and the electricity mast; he burned the photo, along with the chewing gum. The pencil vanished into his trouser pocket.

 

On some evenings, Eve joined us, and we would go to the small bar around the corner that made do with three drinks on the menu, and a home-made radio whose makeshift technology cut every song in half. Next door was the mini-market, where Johnny stocked up his cigarette supply and Eve bought the American gum she was always chewing, yellow Wrigley’s. As soon as we were inside the bar, the owner shut the door behind us and turned the key in the lock; bars weren’t allowed to open after curfew. Then, in the candlelight, we mostly discussed the details of my private life. Every one of these conversations ended with Eve telling Johnny to find a wife for me, and with me protesting in vain until, ultimately, I had no choice but to navigate the debate away from me and into the abyss of politics. ‘Japan,’ I said one night, ‘has been sending thousands of Koreans to North Korea for months now. Have you heard about it?’ Eve shook her head, grimaced and suppressed a yawn, while Johnny nodded eagerly and fished an old newspaper article out of his jacket pocket. He pointed at the headline and said that the campaign was even being advertised in the papers in Japan, ‘the Great Homecoming’ they were calling it, how ridiculous, the Great Homecoming! How many of these home-hungry people were really from North Korea, he said, it could only be a fraction after all, most had been wrenched from their villages in the south during the Second World War and loaded onto Japanese ships as slave labourers, forced to work from the day of their arrival – in mines, in munitions factories – but now the Japanese government wanted rid of them, to avoid having to pay compensation. Johnny spoke quickly, stumbling over his words, he was upset and thought I should be too – but I wasn’t sure what to believe.

I had heard that North Korea was doing better economically than the South, that the recovery was progressing rapidly, that there were jobs, that Pyongyang was now modern and clean. I had been told all this by my neighbour in Daegu, who had disappeared soon after along with his entire family. I wondered whether he had been lying or telling the truth. Why shouldn’t things be better in the North than here? It had been richer than the South even before the division; it had the natural resources, the industrial plants. Perhaps the politicians living there were more intelligent, more competent? I thought all of this, but didn’t dare say it out loud; Rhee’s spies were everywhere.

‘Those communist pigs can’t just kidnap our people,’ Johnny blurted out, ‘the president has to do something about it.’ ‘What, Rhee?’ I interrupted him, ‘the man who refused to take them in when Japan declared them to be foreigners and took away their rights? He could have brought them to the South, remember! Kim Il-sung just got there first.’

Eve looked around hastily; I had raised my voice. She took the chewing gum out of her mouth, disposed of it in a tissue and looked at me, then at Johnny. ‘What would you know,’ muttered the latter, turning his attention  back  to drinking his soju.

 

For three months I searched in vain for work. I did the rounds of the same shops at the South Gate Market, in Namdaemun, the part of Seoul which is closest to the main station and therefore offers ample opportunities for stealing and working, for little jobs with which one can earn some small change, enough for a meal. The market had reopened just a few years before, having burnt down during the Korean War; prior to that, until 1945, it was out of bounds to Korean vendors. It snaked its way through numerous side streets and alleyways, and everyone who set foot in this quarter had come either to buy or sell something. There was no real entrance, nor exit; the market began suddenly and stopped again just as suddenly, and it was never closed, especially not at night, when smuggled goods were brought out and offered in hushed tones, when the murmured lists of products and prices would drift from dark corners, and haggling was conducted at a whisper. As soon as a policeman or government spy approached, recognizable by the very fact that no one recognized them, the wares would disappear back into the darkness, and the candles, flickering on the stalls just moments before, were extinguished.

Dried squid and seaweed dangled from the roofs, barley and rice grains shimmered in hip-height sacks like tiny golden and white pearls, watermelons and honeydew melons lay in woven baskets. Suddenly, the light bulb that had illuminated an entire section of the street exploded, and for a second every- thing went still and I was liberated from my eyes; I sniffed my way through the market, groping past the spices, the chilli peppers, whose herbal, spicy scent never left this part of the city, past the ginger roots and cinnamon bark, past the black peppercorns and freshly roasted sesame seeds. I could hear thin rice-flour flatbreads being fried, the vegetables and the dough hissing in the hot pan, and finally my eyesight awoke again, revealing the little blue flame of the gas cooker in front of the tin containers where the marine creatures lived: the sea bream, scabbard fish, mackerel, sea urchins and spider crab which hadn’t yet been sold.

I felt safe after dark, when my gaze didn’t get lost in the flood of images; in daylight I was constantly losing my bearings because my feet followed my eyes. The streets were lined with little shops beneath long black awnings with white lettering; in the middle of the road sat the merchants, farmers’ wives and children, they crouched on the floor and offered their wares, their baskets filled with potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, gherkins, Chinese cabbage, tomatoes, courgettes, peaches, raspberries or apples, depending on the season – in autumn I kept a lookout for my favourite fruit, persimmon. Many of the younger women wore headscarves and caps to conceal their shaven heads; they had sold their hair to wig- makers. These could be seen at the market too, usually in conversation with their customers or the sellers, women who didn’t look up if anyone came close to them, but then again hardly anyone did, not even the boys foraging for glass bottles in the mountains of rubbish that formed between the shops and on the paths, in order to wash them and sell them on. Whenever a truck drove through the market to bring a fresh delivery, old women and children went in pursuit, collecting whatever had fallen to the floor. Some even tried to swipe the fruit and vegetables directly from the loading bay, and were chased away. The same men would later devour the meals that these women had prepared, then, the next time, drive them away just as mercilessly as before.

I saw veterans who had lost both legs in the war, and now navigated their way through the narrow alleyways on a board with wheels strapped to it, balancing a plastic bowl for alms between their teeth; little old women who chewed and sucked on long pipe stems, clapping their hands and singing loudly whenever they spotted an American in their labyrinth who seemed to need Korean money; old men huddled over a small square table playing janggi; vendors who had fallen asleep over their wares and were being robbed blind by everyone who had noticed: the socks, undergarments and undershirts would turn up in another corner of the city, in another neighbourhood, beneath a bridge in the north, or in the slums in the west. Nothing disappeared forever in Seoul; objects had a longer life expectancy here than people.

I didn’t find what I was looking for. At the beginning of October, when the trees were slowly beginning to change colour, a street trader told me to make enquiries on the other side of the city, at the East Gate. He said that factories and workshops were cropping up near the Chŏnggye River, a bicycle factory had opened just recently, and I should keep a lookout for posters; it was five in the morning, and the vendor had just washed his face with cold water from a bucket. Almost as soon as I nodded and turned around, he and the other merchants all emptied their buckets as if on command, and I suddenly found myself stood in a raging river.

 

Photograph © Gary Millar

The post The Great Homecoming appeared first on Granta.

Early in 1886, Vincent Van Gogh was given a painting task by his teacher at the Antwerp academy. With no money to purchase the required large canvas, new brushes and paint, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo. Theo supplied the materials, and within a week Vincent had painted a pair of wrestlers. He wrote again to his brother to say how pleased he was with the image.

Vincent then moved to Paris, where Theo lived. He took the wrestlers with him, and in the summer, reused the canvas for another painting. Over the human figures he painted a huge bunch of flowers, selected from those that were in bloom: poppies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, pink roses, larkspurs, camomile, calendula, chrysanthemum, asters, ox-eye daisies and hydrangeas. The large canvas – which he turned, ironically, from ‘landscape’ to ‘portrait’ orientation – presented a challenge: the flowers in the vase were high up, leaving a large space underneath. When he came back to the painting, he filled this space ‘with an opulent foreground’[1] of loose blooms.

Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses

The image that interests me is neither the one painted for the Antwerp academy, nor the one painted over it in Paris. It is an image authored by the great painter, but which will never appear in an auction of his works. Its subject is neither the wrestlers that he painted first, nor the flowers that he painted second. It contains both of these, and more.

The new, composite image was created by three different scans of the canvas, from both the front and the back, using both X-ray technology and the newer, crisper ‘MA-XRF’ (Macro X-ray Fluorescence Scanning). In these scans, the sumptuous colours of the original(s) are radically reduced to itchy monochrome. Two men console one another in flowery combat. They grip their taut, vulnerable bodies in attack and restraint. Their flesh is withered. Everything is alive and ghoulish: the wooden frame – both above and below the figures – is weirdly animated; the left wrestler’s pert black nipple stares back with greater intensity than the space where his eyeball should be. Petals sprout from white human sinews. White flowers explode like fireworks around them, like they are seeing stars. Aggression and competition are indistinguishable from the simple generosity of a summer meadow.

The Third Image © Kröller-Müller Museum

This third image, constructed through the most unromantic of artistic processes – a pan-European collaboration between large research institutions –seems to me to be a masterpiece.

 

Connection One

In the Netflix comedy show Nanette, Hannah Gadsby tells a story about a man who cornered her after a performance and gave her some helpful advice. He tells her that she – the comic Hannah Gadsby – should stop taking medication if she wants to be a true artist. Artists must suffer, the man tells her. To make his point, he refers to Vincent Van Gogh. We wouldn’t have ‘Sunflowers’, would we, if Van Gogh had been on antidepressants?

Gadsby unpicks the man’s argument. She tells the man that Van Gogh was indeed on medication. (The drug was digitalis, extracted from a flower, the foxglove.) In fact his particular medication was likely to have had a side effect known as xanthopsia: a predominance of yellow in vision. The medication may have helped make Van Gogh’s sunflowers perversely, groundbreakingly sunny.

Gadsby says that Nanette will be her last comedy show. Gadsby explains that, as an openly lesbian woman growing up in a largely homophobic Tasmania, she learned to be funny as an act of self-preservation. A punchline, she says, is a relief from the tension created, intentionally, by the joke. In the face of homophobic aggression, she told jokes as a deflection technique, to make others feel more comfortable. But telling jokes, she says in Nanette, is a form of self-deprecation that she is no longer willing to entertain. She does not feel able to relieve the tension, because it is not her tension, it is the tension of a structurally intolerant society.

At the end of the show, Gadsby reveals that jokes she has told during the performance have been designed to conceal and smooth over the truth of the anecdotes they stem from, a truth which is not funny at all. The truth is that she has suffered shocking homophobic violence. This is trauma that has been concealed – as flowers conceal wrestlers – by punchlines. She then tells these hidden stories straight.

In her final line, Gadsby returns to van Gogh. She says, ‘Do you know why we have “Sunflowers”? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world, and that is the focus of the story we need. Connection.’

 

Connection Two

 

Van Gogh painted ‘Still life with Meadow Flowers and Roses’ before the zinc white of the figures underneath had dried, so there are cracks in the outer layer of paint. The toxic bodies of the wrestlers break the surface of the meadow flowers into a fractal craquelure that is a replica, in miniature, of the mazy medieval street pattern of the city to which I had recently moved when I started writing. I explored my new surroundings on foot, pushing a buggy with one hand and holding up the third image on my phone with the other. 

I was moved by Gadsby’s story about where art comes from: not from isolated individuals, but from their connections to other people. In the third image, that story is made into matter. In the third image, the structures that support (and are concealed by) the paint are suddenly afforded the dignity of participation in a continuous foreground. In this image, it seems as though all matter is granted an equal and undiminished right to exist. The artist himself never got to see the stitching, the frame and the layers of toxic paint all at once in their singular glory. The image is a collaboration between Van Gogh and generations of scientists, art historians and institutions he never met: from Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered and was killed by X-rays, to Ellen Joosten, the curator of the Kröller-Müller Museum, who admired ‘Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses’ but could not make a definitive attribution.

I wondered if it might be possible to write a book in the spirit of this third image, intentionally. After the birth, the bedroom is full of flowers and naked torsos. The globalised flower industry collapses geographical foreground and background: someone brings a bouquet of tulips which have arrived on a lorry from Zundert, where Van Gogh was born, and another person brings carnations which have been air-freighted from Kitale, Kenya. The baby’s eye, which has no depth perception, cannot differentiate between her father’s face and the bright petals that wave and smile from their vases. Every detail, whether close or distant, is potentially vital, a curiosity, a threat.

It felt necessary to write the joy and gentleness of flowers alongside the starling aggression and vulnerability of a man stripped naked, and it seemed imperative to let the baby’s perspective shadow my own. Like an eye stuck in what it sees, the technology that produced the third image is visible inside its surface. The white lines that scar the image have the associations of an X-ray: the air of bad news, held up by a doctor on a backlit screen (I’m afraid it’s broken. Every bone is broken). In the same way, I felt the baby’s eye lodged in my chest. I wanted to write a fiction using her grammar.

 

Connection Three

In the third image it looks as though the flowers grow from the wrestlers’ bodies. Their muscles are like a soil. Their skin is a habitat. In this way, the third image makes visible an invisible truth: that long before they become parents, if they do, all persons everywhere support the lives of much smaller creatures on their bodies. If this third image were a book, I thought, you would open that book and the grubs that lived in the trees that were pulped to form the pages – these grubs would crawl out onto the desk, alive, in front of you.

Towards the end of the novel that came out of those thoughts, floodwater drenches the narrator-father’s notebooks. Life on paper, I wrote, was nourished by fertilizer, washed into the river from fields upstream. For the father, this is a bad kind of thriving. But it is also a new way to discover his privilege. The catastrophe makes way not for destitution but for the collation, from the debris, of a new book, with the title Fatherhood.

 

[1] Flower Still Lives, Kröller-Müller Museum, 2012

 

 

Caleb Klaces is the author of Fatherhood, available now from Prototype Press.

The post Caleb Klaces | Notes on Craft appeared first on Granta.