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Scorpio Rising: Gothic Hybridity and the Occult – A Discussion Between Laura Joyce and James Pate

My favourite Noir writers also suggest a greater mystery out there, something that can’t be solved, that maybe can’t even be articulated. Everyday experiences, everyday things – doors, windows, lakes, hotel rooms, corridors, beaches – become invested with a kind of unnervingly unknowable quality. To a certain extent, I like Noir for the same reasons I like the Gothic. I’m much more interested in what I don’t know than what I do know.

A Discussion Between Laura Joyce and James Pate.

The Policeman’s Beard is Algorithmically Constructed

Racter poses virtually no threat to human authors, nor does any other algorithmic author currently available. The question is hence not one of replacement, but of augmentation, of new responsibilities for the human author in light of the algorithmic one. When Juhl writes that computer-generated output lacks the intentionality of a text with a human author, he falls into a similar trap as Bök: both scholars fail to recognise the fundamentally human basis of algorithmic authorship. Human intention hasn’t disappeared, but is merely manifest in a new way. Indeed, The Policeman’s Beard’s apparent randomness is a rhetorical choice, and Racter’s nonsensical output pushes the limits of creativity by means of an intentional goal to be incomprehensible.

By Leah Hendrickson.

Emptiness and No-Self: Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka

The emptiness of emptiness is interesting as a response to the Madhyamaka dilemma because of its meta-philosophical implications. It forces us to re-examine our conception of what philosophical theories are and what they do. The theory of emptiness certainly looks like a very general and very comprehensive metaphysical theory. And if we consider it from the perspective of Western metaphysics we are all familiar with, it is unclear how we could say that such a theory is not making the claim that it is ultimately true.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jan Westerhoff.

How Not To Be A Frog In A Well: Chinese/German/Buddhist Philosophy

Hegel and Rosenzweig belong to what could well be described as the religiously motivated rejection of non-Western forms of thought; they lack the grandeur and height of God and the individual dignity of the person that they respectively associate with Christianity and Judaism. These narratives are not only historically problematic in the past; they concern the present. Each time someone claims that the Chinese are merely imitative and not capable of creativity, merely collective without any sense of individuality, that an idea does not matter because it is only Chinese, and so on, they are reproducing the Eurocentric and Aryanist (it should not be forgotten the common use of such terms across the West until 1945) racial schemata that emerged in the Enlightenment as reason and freedom were increasingly identified as unique capacities of a particular race and civilization that had the duty to rule over lesser ones.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Eric S. Nelson.

The Sacrifice Throw: SJ Fowler’s The Wrestlers

There’s a very old consciousness here, one wanting to create his own metaphor for poetry. Torn between realism, wanting to reproduce things as they are – the conversations, asides, fragmentary sights, because they’re strong and necessary as metaphors – and invention, via dislocation or substitution of materials or shape, or contrasts which by themselves take the object as it were away from both itself and the originals, there’s a sense of pushing and pulling both ways from all directions. And everything tends towards yielding materials that are being pushed around like this, and pulled, which are the very strong subjectivities in play but also a subjectivity you and I can have and share in, so this is push and pull, or fancy dialectics where ‘being clever is not armour’, as Fowler has it early on, where his ‘… hill of necessity turns to taste’, shows ‘taste’ as just this, you fighting with your other selves, or something like that.

Richard Marshall reviews SJ Fowler‘s The Wrestlers.

Low cost, big aims: An interview with Dostoyevsky Wannabe

What we publish has to be very good, very bad in a good way, or very cool — and that stands as our criteria. I suppose it’s similar to the “publishing” in inverted commas thing. A way not only of not setting ourselves up as appointed gatekeepers but also of not offering wholly fabricated standards to writers that nobody could live up to because they don’t genuinely exist.

Fernando Sdrigotti interviews Richard Brammer.

Poem Brut #39 – Langemarck

an asemic
poetic reflection
on WWI’s
Western Front

In the 39th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by ‘Nise McCullough.

While the Earth Remains: Brandon Brown’s The Four Seasons

I’m thinking that in a European language Brown could perhaps have been a kind of subtle prose writer; in this English, he’s consummately a poet. Maybe one of the reasons I keep thinking about what else Brown might have been is that I’m still surprised he is at all. Even so, he shows a strong swerve in the genealogy of North American vanguard poetics. Language operates as an apparently reliable vehicle for sentiment and event. A discernible “I” (or “us”?). Traditional narrative techniques recur, albeit scattershot, bent through the days. Lineation breaks out.

Dylan Byron reviews The Four Seasons by Brandon Brown.

An Interview Without Gordon Lish

The conditional nature of a work of art voiced in Lish’s regret—what he meant to do—is known to anyone who creates: very rarely are we not beset with contingencies, interruptions, and limitations that prevent untrammeled expression of our original intent. If we’re very lucky, the ‘something else’ that happens instead is an improvement over what we imagined we would make.

By Carrie Cooperider.

XXXTentacion: Should We Mourn the Death of a Bad Person?

Hip-hop fans were grappling with the murder of rapper XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy. Onfroy was a popular rapper with a reputation for horrific violence. Onfroy’s ex-girlfriend accused him of brutally assaulting and imprisoning her while she was pregnant in 2015. Onfroy also once confessed to assaulting his gay cellmate at a juvenile detention center for staring at him.

Erica Shumener asks whether we should mourn bad people.

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