Latest Features
Calling Amanuenses Everywhere
Fresh shame pooled in my face, shame that blended with alarm as the woman pursed her lips and spat. Her spit glistened in the warm spring sun and pitched inches from my sandal. There was a weightiness to the occasion, a momentousness. She held my stare as I withered brown and lowered flimsy eyes. Then she turned and stalked away. I would like to say I staggered to a stone and slumped, the cold reaching along my spine and grabbing at my throat, but such encounters have been in keeping with my weeks. Many have crossed to my side of the street to insult me by hand; others have left hateful carvings in my car, while the masses burn electric effigies in countless online mobs. Yet where can I complain? My secret is unleashed.
A short story by Ben Walter.
Sports and Social
The detail is always starkly named, never given a memorial resonance or referent, and this has more than comedy value — the style becomes the substance, the showing is the telling, the logos becomes pathos. The accumulation generates its own narrative, its own referential and emotional field. Boniface his having his (barm)cake, and eating it too.
C. D. Rose reviews Sports and Social by Kevin Boniface.
Minute 9: Twin Peaks
As if in the 25 years both fictional and real that have transpired between season two and season three of Twin Peaks, those two now-quaint categories of perception and experience have been on a collision course with each other — the real, unfolding in painstaking and incessantly cached broad daylight, while the fictional has festered about its Twin Peaks business in parallel, a black box stashed beneath the underside of some forested log — only to emerge and converge upon the temporal coordinate of each other, a coordinate or frame rate at which neither is resolvable as itself nor indistinguishable from the other. Reality and fiction as a single doppelgänger for itself. This is the encounter with which Lynch besets his audience: an audience watching itself watching, before the cubicle multiplex of a two-way mirror. Neither a plot to solve nor a puzzle to be solved, but a seeing with into the black anatomy of where we have arrived — the exact and unbreakable code of that coordinate.
Jeff Wood on Twin Peaks: The Return.
Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro
The still-nascent field of Forensic Literature takes the useful mis-quotation of Walter Benjamin (‘every photograph is a crime scene’) and looks at a range of objects very carefully, looking at the marks upon them which show how they came to be and how they may have ended, at their erasures, lacks and scars, what is missing from them, and considers how they can reveal unexpected connections which shape our world. Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro is a vital addition to it.
C. D. Rose reviews Melissa McCarthy‘s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro.
Gnashers
By the time he was thirty his teeth were loose, the back molars showing early signs of disintegration. Mum used to say to me: You’re lucky you’ve got my teeth. Around forty they started to drop out, evenly, one side and then the other. Soon after, he gave up smiling. Even with his dentures in—a rare concession—he refused to smile. It wasn’t only vanity. Mum died and he found he couldn’t work anymore. I tried to tell him he was depressed but he wasn’t having it. I sent him books about grief. We lost touch for a while. I was out on the road. I used to do the circuit as a singer, back in the late nineties. Nothing glamorous. Johnny Cash. Roy Orbison. When I say the circuit I mean seaside venues, a few city spots here and there, functions, birthdays, anniversaries, with the occasional wedding if it was an older couple. I still sing, the way most people sing when they’re alone, but these days I prefer to walk. Performing took something out of me that only walking can replenish. Father never came to see me.
A short story by Benjamin Wal.
The New Humans
Everything changes. When I was a kid growing up by a naval base, you couldn’t move for submarines, but when I go back now it’s deserted. What happened to them? Maybe, like the USS Tang, they sank themselves with their own torpedoes, or maybe they shrank like the Proteus in Fantastic Voyage. Most likely, though, they just evolved and now they walk unnoticed amongst us. Everything changes. New
Poetry by Oz Hardwick.
Dignity
Maybe if he had more work to do his mind wouldn’t wander as much. Maybe it would. Maybe if he had more work to do he would have quit his job, because as bored as he was, the only thing worse he could think of was actually working. There’s no dignity in work, he thought. He had known that for a while. His new and more interesting discovery was that there was little dignity in anything else either. Art was undignified, especially if you went looking for dignity in it. Love too was undignified in the end. How can we possibly have dignity when we all care so much about ourselves? It’s disgusting, he thought, how much we truly, genuinely care about our tiny little selves.
A short story by James Bennett.
Kristen Pfaff Hovers at the Edge
Kristen Pfaff was unusual. She was someone who, throughout her life, ingratiated herself into new situations that turned out to be influential, and she often became the figurehead of such situations as a result of her natural talents. But on her diary tapes, dark undercurrents within her are revealed. People predominantly know Pfaff for dying of a heroin overdose at 27, but not of the undercurrents which might have led to that. Before writing this book I carried the same misconceptions.
Read an exclusive extract from ‘I Know How To Live’: The Life of Kristen Pfaff by Guy Mankowski.
Did You Hear About Laura?
Both men took sips from their water bottles. The sun was bright and hot on their backs. One man wore sunglasses; the other wished he had remembered his, for his eyes ached and watered against the clear day. They were high up, so high they could see the pale distant mountains standing stagnant in the afternoon sky. There were clouds, there were trees, and there was that sun. The men sweated in the heat and surveyed the expanse that lay before them: from the bottom of the cliff upon which they stood, across to those faraway mountains.
A short story by Emma Campbell.
Delta Blues
But there’s something about the Atkins cyanotypes that place them in a liminal position, strangely at the delta. They are remarkably accurate depictions of the specimens, but they look like… well, what? Like everything. Browsing the collection, we can see intricate, branching shapes to her seaweeds, like the complex networks of neural connections in the brain, the routes through which electricity, ideas, and memories run. There’s one among her images that just matches the weeds of the famous shot in The Night of the Hunter (director, Charles Laughton, 1955), when Shelley Winters’ character is dead underwater, in the car, her hair waving and the long weeds flagging around her. (Though this is black and white.) The blue of the cyanotypes also looks like blue skies, with white clouds. Atkins would be familiar with looking at clouds. But to me, the straighter lines in her images look like aeroplane contrails, the lines that follow planes through the blue sky. This was not a visual experience Atkins herself could have had. But how we see is cultural, contextual. Some images become, if not icons, then containers of much more meaning.
Read an exclusive extract from Melissa McCarthy‘s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s The Pavilion
As we move around The Pavilion, as we move around the Mithraeum, we consider the losses and gains involved in delivering us to this moment; we comprehend the sacrifices integral to our stories, to the myths of yore both reposited in and recounted around museological and archival spaces. And we contemplate our part in it all, our lot and vesseled contribution, the sacrifices we are willing to make and be part of in the telling of our tales.
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reviews The Pavilion exhibition by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.
Q&A: Jared Pappas-Kelley, Stalking America
There’s this impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s something else.
Jared Pappas-Kelley interviewed by 3:AM’s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.
