Return to the Secret Fort

January 13, 2021 in Story, Feature

Scott Rucker

The Woods, 1909

Our secret fort deep in the woods, was a real work in progress. It smelled like piss. Our gang was made up of neighborhood riff raff. Roger was the oldest, then came Benny, myself, and a boy we referred to as, The Jew. Each of us had our own special gift. Roger had charisma. Benny had the strength of an ox. I had the smarts. The Jew was a talented artist. For a penny, he would draw you whatever you wanted.

We kept our dirty pictures and a series of cuss words in a hole we had dug where we also kept our communal cigarettes, and cologne which we used to cloak the scent.

Through the Eye

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Kate Perruzzi

You are at a BBQ in your uncle’s backyard. Scores of tiny blonde cousins filter around table legs like frenzied fish in a shallow pond. One of them catches their chin on your knee and glares at you. You do not recognize her.

Your uncle is seated in a low lawn chair beside the buffet of mayonaised foods: potato salad, with and without egg, macaroni salad, chicken salad. None of these are salads, you think, and swig hard on a warm Miller Lite. Your uncle is quiet, transfixed, watching the sky. His eyes are cloudy security glass and the man working the space behind his face is a bank teller on qualuudes.

The God Game

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Colin Jacks

1. Categories

1.0.0 :: Does the ground consist of spires?

What is and what is not within the world that you are planning to create? Does the ground consist of spires that reach to the tips of the atmosphere, or is the entire orb made up of a teaming mass of encephalocapsules? (Brain capsules.) All of this begins with categorization. Create a series of types, beginning with animate and inanimate matter, or god and mortal, or up and down, and from these preliminary dichotomies you can create the great font of being, the million hordes and so forth.

*Click on Wes to read all our letters to him.*

The Wes Letters: Feliz, Letter 2

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series

Feliz Lucia Molina

February 9, 2012
12:54pm

Dear Wes,
Have you watched the 1960s documentary Endless Summer? After drive-thru at In-N-Out I went home and turned on Netflix. The sunny California male voiceover truly lifts my heart. And I never say lifts my heart. That two surfer friends went around the world searching for the perfect wave is a cute representation of a philosophy of sport or aesthetics of time. Do you know Roland Barthes’ little masterpiece What Is Sport? I wonder what he would have said about surfing.

The Wes Letters: Ben, Letter 2

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series

Ben Segal

Dear Wes,

Will you ever go bald? Do you worry about it? Do you worry that people won’t want to work with bald Wes Anderson, that they’ll see balding as a sign of antiquatedness, that your career might be divided between the haired and hairless eras?

I worry about it, but then again I worry about almost everything.

Her Holiday Walk

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Sayuri Yamada

Wendy McDermott was walking by a lake. It was her holiday. The sun was shining. She was happy. Her new white t-shirt and her new white jeans. Her twinkling blue eyes. Her bouncing brown hair. Her slender legs. Her long fingers. It was a nice sunny day.

There was nothing she had to do. She didn’t have to go to work. She didn’t have to ride on a crowded bus. She didn’t have to say, ‘You look nice,’ when her colleague asked about her new hair style. She didn’t have to smile at her boss when he told her that her report was full of holes that were big enough for RMS Titanic to go through. She didn’t have to say, ‘Sure,’ when snobby Jackie asked her to have lunch with her. She didn’t have to do the washing-up after supper in her small kitchen. She didn’t have to clean her room with lots of knickknacks.

There were many things she wanted to do. She wanted to drive around and park the car under a big tree and have a nap. She wanted to walk around and sit on the top of a hill and have a nap. She wanted to sleep in as long as she was pleased. She wanted to be up as late as she liked to. She wanted to watch TV if she woke up late at night without worrying about the next day.

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If You're Going to Shave Down a Seal

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Chris Braiotte

If you’re going to shave down a seal—and I’m seriously not suggesting that you do—you need to pay attention to the contours.

You see, most of a seal is smooth and uncomplicated, a long curlicue like a hairy Nike swoosh. You’ll get lulled into a long careless shave, and that’s when it’ll go wrong. Because there you are, zooming along, and blammo. Flipper changes the angle. You nick that seal right in the fold of his flipper, and then you’ve got a mostly hairless, bleeding, pissed off seal. And once that seal starts thrashing you’re both trapped in an upwelling cycle of blood and resentment.

The Scenarists of Europe

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Michael S. Judge

People are the first indication that you’ve moved from Djuna’s city to Tom’s. People: better to call them figures. They behave in only one way, not the same way but one way each. They’re doing what they do whenever you look. Unobserved they likely hide, lay folded or at length in canisters under the street like tanks of obsolete poison.

The ones wrapped in on themselves may burst with new selenotropic buds that spring up where brows rub wrists. Dirt-caked blooms with stiff seaweed fans, picked by other flowers and other fish into a comb of rigid tendrils. Fed by cool milks of the moon. Fed on white drink with ribbons curling through it, blue and moonflecked like Pierrot’s face.

The ones laid out full-length must grow by diminution, like corpses getting bigger. Their chests will rise to lower points and filter out less yeast; their eyes will sink nearer to the tank’s tarnished surface and take root in metal clefts. With their other flesh laid aside, stretched full elsewhere and eyeless, such eyes would stand like glistened marshland plants. An eye unglassed, unglazed, still shocked by sight, atop a stalk of greasy nerves. And every slump toward the floor makes these bodies longer. When they die, we think, they die as man-shaped patches of damp. Not a fingernail thick, but thirty feet between their toes and the eyes that stand still upright.

Cave paintings made with human soap.

*Click on Wes to see all our letters to him.*

The Wes Letters: Intro

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series

Feliz Lucia Molina, Brett Zehner, & Ben Segal

January 25, 2012 2:00pm

Dear Wes Anderson, I heard you took the train from Chicago to southern California. I thought it was kind of cute to hear you don’t like airplanes. They scare me too, somewhat, but not enough so that I can’t ride them. The other night, Brett told us the story. He’d been gone for Christmas to Columbus, Ohio. He didn’t mention the train story until after a couple beers at the kitchen table. I showed him I Love Dick by Chris Kraus—a series of billet-doux glitter bombs from a married couple to a man named Dick.

Rock Albany!

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

Rock Albany laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. His windswept hair was neither blond nor red, but black, as black as a melon. His face was like a law of nature, like the call of the herd. He had the mouth of an executed saint.

Rock laughed and shook his head, then dove into the lake far below. He swam easily to the far shore, where he dressed, then strolled down a path. He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road on the sun, the sun’s only road. The sun was his home. He had lived there for seventeen years. Most men would die if they tried to live on the sun. They would burn up at once. Rock laughed at this thought. He found the sun charming. The sun, he thought, has been waiting here just for me. Waiting to be ripped apart by my dynamite and drill. Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it. He would paint it pigeon blue. He would install a Pekinese buttress. He would hand-raise pudgy canaries. Rock liked canaries. Their eyes never missed a thing. They made a man feel as though he did not exist. They stared with a sudden resentment. They knew that they were naked in their cage. They suffered in this world. Rock knew that the canaries would suffer to live inside cages on the sun. He didn’t know how long they would hold out, staring at him with their damned eyes, before they burned up. He would go through a lot of canaries. He’d have to skimp and slave to afford so many. He would need them at once. He resolved to call his best friend and supplier, the Duke. But then he forgot. He didn’t give a damn.

Three Poems

January 12, 2021 in Poetry, Story

Kristina Marie Darling

Noctuary (i)

The brass locket, which contained only an empty frame, was the first in a series of ominous love tokens that appeared beneath her window.

When he fastened the clasp on her necklace, every nightingale seemed to sing. Their swollen throats and colorless eyes.

He reminded her of Petrarch, driven by the necessity of pursuit. The beloved as interchangeable, a vessel. A bird heaving under the weight of an otherworldly song.

Last Week's Broadcast

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series, Bedroom Theater

Gabriel Boyer

[The excerpt below is from Mutable’s most recent release, a memoir of the summer Boyer spent touring America with a woman named Jill, performing plays with strangers in their bedrooms as the two made their way south to New Orleans, west to LA, and north to Seattle, the madness that ensued, and how it all began.]

Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom, or rather, it began when he pointed out to me that he had changed the light bulb and for a moment I thought the bare bulb made my room look like an experimental theater space or heroin den, and then I thought that I should do that someday (start an experimental theater in my bedroom not start doing heroin) and then I forgot, for I was constantly slipping in and out of depression in those days, or rather, mostly slipping in and very rarely slipping out of the yearlong depression I was at that moment in the middle of. Most days it would take me a good half hour to put on one sock and even when I was fully clothed in socks, I would still spend hours sitting in the dark of my room contemplating literally nothing while staring at the brick wall facing my couch and the word “Safety” painted on it and above my queen-sized bed.

Moon Child's Dream Dictionary

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Lesley Dixon

[Appendix: Recurring Nightmares]

Knife

(See also: Mack the Knife, teen dance craze, penetration.) Knives symbolize power. The knife is a phallus. If you are cut with a knife, you are afraid of a man in your life. If you are stabbed with a knife, you feel intimidated by a work situation. If you are chased down an alley into a dead-end and stabbed with a knife, you are afraid of the death of your parents. If you cut yourself with a knife, you are looking for release. If you cut yourself with a knife and you do not bleed, you are lacking in vitamins. Moon Child suggests drinking tart cherry juice, and calling your father on the phone. Note: in non-American cultures, the knife may symbolize entirely different vital organs, and this guide should be translated into other languages only at great risk to the Dreamer.

Ubixic

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Michael S. Judge

ubixic [ubi’∫ikʔ], n.: the “reading” or signification of a sign
(Quiché Mayan)

Diviners are semioticians by profession; they start from signs (etal), in this case signs that take forms other than those of spoken words, and try to arrive at a “reading,” as we would say, or ubixic, “its-being-said” or “an announcement,” as is said in Quiché.
—Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 132.

Black boughs etch the nightblue’s magnet fluid. A fleshed lithograph: how wasp-star veined our eyes.

The photographs of undeveloped cities still lie in wellwater’s black feather-silt. Compost of river-birds and what of river they managed to take with them. This is a linguistics: etymon was water cutting through the continental shelf, and now syllable will molt, and now vowel’s bone or system of cartilage locks will spread out the homology of wing drowned in the meat of different hands.

An Excerpt of Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Colin Winette

From the cliff, it looked like an enormous pecan shell. As they climbed down the rocks, Marcus could better see the soggy outline of each broken plank. Below them was a wooden hull, flipped on its side.

The old water had worn a smooth stone grotto into the cliff set. It also left pieces of a ship there.

Most of the planks came loose with a tug. Marcus removed four pieces and laid them beside one another on the stone at their feet.

“This ship,” Colin said, “was a model ship.”

“How do you mean?” Marcus rearranged the boards into a square, brought together the corners. “It was a battleship or something.”

“Someone built it like a battleship. Someone built this thing to look exactly like a Roman battleship. See, these are the oarlocks, below deck, because warriors didn’t row. Slaves did.”

Excerpt of Giant Slugs

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

A D Jameson

(A D Jameson has a new book out by Lawrence & Gibson, a remarkable little outfit in New Zealand renowned for their beautiful hand-sown craftsmanship. Jameson’s new book, entitled Giant Slugs, is a strange and alluring creation; it’s narrator exiled, ousted, put out by those oozing outsized interlopers, denied his true inheritance, his due kingly crown. So begins this epicene narrator’s epichorial wanderings (part epicrisis, part epicedium) in this largely silly, slightly filthy, pun-laden Epicurean retelling of the ages-old Epic of Gilgamesh.)

On the fifth day, our class was taken on a field trip to Ninja City’s secret portions, the developing suburban bailiwicks, expanding eastward at the rate of three blocks per year. The slogan of these newer parts was, “Virus-Free Since ’93!” Their motto was, “We Will Find the Serum.”

The ninjas who lived there, global warming enthusiasts, threw webbed geodesic domes over desolate tracts—the war-scarred landscape it had been left to them to develop. When the finished dome was turned on, it generated an interior rain that lasted for forty days and thirty-nine nights. When the domes were taken down, the desolation had been transformed into normal, productive topsoil, rich loam like you’d find in a national forest. Other ninjas, the ones whose talents disposed them to comprise the follow-up crew, paved over the mess and poured concrete sidewalks marked with their handprints and the date. Then they built roadside stands from which they sold pints of Noby Sheets’s coleslaw. (She used her spare time once a week to make big vats of the stuff, the most delicious slaw I’d ever tasted.)

Wilfred Owen's War

January 12, 2021 in Poetry, Story

Poetry

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo

I, too, saw God through mud, —
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there —
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear —
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging light and clear
Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

Seven Movie Reviews

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

1.
At the stroke of three-thirty the missile lurches from the ceiling and forcefully imbeds itself inside the giant globe. Only the missile is the prong of a fork, and the globe is a sugar gum-drop. Welcome to the miniature world of THE MICROS, a likeable little people whose adventures are recounted in this amazing series of family films. No more than one centimeter in height, the Micros experience one exciting adventure after another, as they make their way in a world so much larger than they are. Now, experience that adventure and dream about being as miniscule as a Micro. In the first tape, we are introduced to the world of the Micros, in which many of the everyday objects we take for granted are shown to be treacherous hazards for our miniscule heroes, because they are so small. A drop of water is a giant pond, a speck of tin foil a dangerous open blade. We meet various prominent Micro citizens who serve as the major characters in the series. In the second tape, Scrunchy is discovered to be missing, and the other Micros fear the worst. Meanwhile strange new objects keep appearing in Lothar’s hut. In the third tape the Micros confront their murderous arch-foe Pepperton, who has sworn to rid the earth of what he considers “disgusting, disease-causing Micros.” In the fourth tape, the Micros must work in concert to save an orphaned boy from the bitter reality of life on the street. Through their efforts, a new home is found for the boy, but not before many exciting adventures are had. These and other wonderful videotapes form the collection of MICRO films now available for home viewing by you and your family. Welcome to the miniature world of THE MICROS, where the people are small in stature, but big in caring, and in courage.

3 Pieces by Gert Jonke

January 12, 2021 in Austrians in April, Story, Series

as translated by Vincent Kling

Gert Jonke, who died last year just shy of 63, depicted with grace and mad humor what his fellow Austrian Hermann Broch once called the “jolly apocalypse” (“die fröhliche Apokalypse”) that accompanied the collapse of Europe from 1914 to 1945 and that’s anything but past and gone in the era of the European Union. The three short works here are a farewell tribute meant to show various related aspects of Jonke’s art. The first is a letter to his baby son Hans, who died suddenly at age four months, and is taken from a book that mingles fiction, autobiography, reminiscences, tributes to friends, and brilliant essays on music. “Hyperbole 1,” from a series of snapshots or vignettes in drama form called Insektarium, is one of several studies by Jonke showing the social origins of perception and memory. In his last few years, “Leavetaking” became Jonke’s much-anticipated signature piece.

Pavol Janik

January 12, 2021 in Poetry, Story

NEW YORK

In a horizontal mirror
of the straightened bay
the points of an angular city
stabbing directly into the starry sky.

In the glittering sea of lamps
flirtatious flitting boats
tremble marvellously
on your agitated legs
swimming in the lower deck
of a brocade evening dress.

Suddenly we are missing persons
like needles in a labyrinth of tinfoil.

Some things we take personally —
stretch limousines,
moulting squirrels in central Park
and the metal body of dead freedom.

In New York most of all it’s getting dark…

The glittering darkness lights up.

The thousand-armed luster of the mega city
writes Einstein’s message about the speed of light
every evening on the gleaming surface of the water.
And again before the dusk the silver screen
of the New York sky floods
with hectolitres of Hollywood blood.

Where does the empire of glass and marble reach?
Where do the slim rackets of the skyscrapers aim?

God buys a hot dog
at the bottom of a sixty-storey street.

God is a black
and loves the grey color of concrete.

His sun was born from himself
in a paper box
from the newest sort of slave.

(Original Slovak translated by James Sutherland Smith)

Pavol Janik, was born in 1956 in Bratislava, where he also studied film and television dramaturgy and scriptwriting at the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VSMU). He has worked at the Ministry of Culture (1983-87), in the media and in advertising. President of the Slovak Writers’ Society (2003-07) and the Secretary-General of the SWS (1998-2003, 2007—). He has received a number of awards for his literary and advertising work both in his own country and abroad. The below poem was originally published in the Indian literary review, Kritya.