Bard Papers [PDF]

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b a r d pa p e r s

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2014

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BARD PAPERS

is an annual

arts and literary magazine drawing from undergraduate and faculty work at Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, NY. The magazine, originally an academic journal founded in the 60s, has evolved into a multimedia platform accepting poetry, prose, video, sound and webbased work. Submissions are voted on blindly by an allstudent staff in the spring semester of each year; printing and distribution occur in May. We will be reading submissions for the 2015 issue next February. A new form is available on the Papers website, www.bardpapers.org, along with accepted video, audio, and an archive of past books. questions and inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

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COnTENTS

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Collin Leitch • The Last Day of Winter

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Martha Fearnley • Canal

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Salome Dewell • Untitled

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Nora Deligter • Ricky

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Robert Kelly • from A Break in the Weather

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Tamas Panitz • from Exodus of the Pharaoh

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Elizabeth Pyle • A Provisional Mapping-Out of

Ways of Living is Attempted

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Lucas Baumgart • Musculus

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Jennifer Schwartz • from Switzerland

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Garrett Rosenblum • Half a Bag of Brach’s Heartlines

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Grayling Bauer • from HACKING DREYFUSS

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Parker Menzimer • Chapter 3 : Mark Rothko

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A Death • Josh Hodge

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Christel Vesters • The Anti-Encyclopaedia

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Celia Bland • Stanley

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Celia Bland • Dammed

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Anonymous • Savagely Held, Gratefully Trembled

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Collin Leitch • Chinese Basketball Elegy

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Nicola Maye Goldberg • Dream Protocols

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Grayling Bauer • from HACKING DREYFUSS

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Katy Schneider • Bat Houses for Sale

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Maya Osborne • Turn Up

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Maya Osborne • Rope Song

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Ed Halter • Berkeley, 1933

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Nicola Maye Goldberg • Gisant

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Kent Dunne • Untitled 13 (World’s Largest Model Railroad, NJ) Eliel Ford • Daytona 14 16 Peter Hutton • Berlin 1980 20 Anna Kline • 3 Amigos Emily Wissemann • Standard Synthetic 21 Replacement Head (x3) 29 Adelaide Ruff • Vestibules 30 Judy Pfaff • The Art of Flower Arranging 33 Rosy Warren • My Arm Holding Mom 34 Jake Nadrich • Untitled Richard Max Gavrich • Robert & Allen 35 David Sater • Man on Train 36 Miles Berson • Untitled (from New Isometrics) 38 Sam Youkilis • Mars 39 Charlie Hawks • Untitled 40 Madeline Porsella • Cardboard Boxes 41 Virginia Lopez-Anido • Toni Was Sure Her Pets Were Different 42 Sam Taffel • Missing Flight MH370 46 Jeff Gibson • Watching Forever 48 Jeff Gibson • Both Hands 49 Jean Wong • Hippo 50 Robbie Brannigan • U003CDIV DATA-ISID= 52 Lauren Barnes • Submission (Pedestal) 55 Ginny Hanusik • Barataria 56 Sam Rosenblatt • Forever Wild 57 Anna Kline • Lay-Z-Girl 58 Jake Nadrich • When Your Mom Come Homes and Makes the Spaghetti 60 Virginia Lopez-Anido Deluxe Champion 61 David Sater • from Ark 62 Anna Kline • Rebels Honkie-tonk 65 Rosy Warren • Year in Pictures 66 Enzo shalom • Psychocandy 70 Sam 71 8 Rosenblatt • Breaking News Robbie Brannigan • 592678026-0 73

Grayling Bauer • National Leisure Duodecaplex Charlie Hawks • Untitled Kent Dunne • Untitled (Chinatown, NY) Kent Dunne • Untitled (Celebration, FL) Roman Hrab • Kyiv Maidan, 28.01.2014 Marko Shuhan • untitled Alex Eaton • from Narrows Adelaide Ruff • Ode to Tinguely Ken Buhler • Shakespeare’s Garden #8 Lydia Meyer • Split Lisa Sanditz • Display Lisa Sanditz • Rainbow Hannah Beerman • Imitating Manet’s “Olympia” with my Grandma in my Dining Room Sam Youkilis • Dopo Lavoro Jacqueline Goss & Jenny Perlin • from The Measures Sam Smith • Bubble Boy George DuPont • Queen Frostine Garrett Rosenblum • #113 James Siewart • Analogue Mind Judy Pfaff • lakshmi Sam Taffel • Rjukan & Gausta Alex Eaton • from Narrows Ilana Dodelson • Streetsick in Maqiao Rufus Paisley • Untitled (Smoke & Mirrors) Sam Smith • Pit Stop Jake Nadrich • Blood Beach / Jake Nadrich Rufus Paisley • Deep Space Daniella Dooling • Trailer (for my Mother) Ruby Jackson • Untitled Madeline Scholl • Anterior Superior Iliac Spine Ginny Hanusik • Prytania Ginny Hanusik • St. Louis Cemetery #2 Garrett Rosenblum • 1.28.14 Daniella Dooling • Friendly Hills Ranch (for Nanny) Daniella Dooling • A Separate Reality Ivia Sky Yavelow • Stage 3

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The Last Day of Winter Colin leitch I should at least have something to show for it that way I didn’t just sit here counting my toes. Then what if I got used to it? I could do this every day until I die. There might not even be enough trout for that. I wake up early and comb through the roving motes of fluff and weird with enough time left to go bowling. Thousands of people have done this, why should I be deep in the ports over it? I blame my brothers, a broken vase beside the encyclopedia opened to Sarajevo through something about uranium, and those aren’t even mine—I just found them when I hatched from the clay. I didn’t know what I was. I was in this room and I thought it was raining.

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Untitled (World’s Largest model Railroad, New Jersey) KENt DUNNE DIgiTal Photograph

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Daytona eliel ford

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35mm photograph

Canal Martha Fearnley

It is summer; it is very, very hot. Seeping in to and out of the ground in seasick waves: two heads bobbing up between undulations, two young bodies running. A glimpse is had, and then lost. This up-anddown motion becomes feedback, a self-generated movement over dry dirt’s grooves and mounds. The woods at the end of the street. When considered from this slow approach, one makes more of the movement visible in the wall of leaves. Each one flips in the breeze like upturned palms, like the scales of submerged fish in the sun; a flicker in the corners of vision. Closed eyes: falling slowly at a tall angle into the chalky, dry edges of trees. Looking downward: through a perimeter of ruins, walls on all sides. Drifting east and filling. Low, two hundred and fifty miles North East of the Furrows, moving steadily north and deepening, nine hundred and eighty four, nine-eight-double-0 Sunday. Pour water over everything to get rid of the evidence. Now, bobbing above the surface the liquid has a smoothing effect. In one way, a buoyant equilibrium; in another way, a blunting. To move yourself forward: grasp for underwater roots, repeated tugging and muffled snapping. An umbilical pull at the band of the stomach, jerk after jerk after jerk progressively over the field. The act of ripping up is now also a kind of rowing. With the roots gone, piling up, there is nothing to reach for should you want to turn back. It is comforting to remember that the sentimental can, but should not, be confused with the sublime.

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Berlin 1980 PETER HUTTON 16mm film STILLS

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3 Amigos Anna Kline SHELLAC, GLUE, ACRYLIC, OIL, SPRAY PAINT ON AIR DRY CLAY [8 in • 6 in • 18 in]

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In an Instant Salome Dewell

This is the time I opened something. This is the time I saw the sky under a sheet of black shag rug no-thank-yous and then, when it cleared away, I realized I was flying and the world had, in my absence, walked away from me. I looked around and I saw stars. They were ugly up close; the great balls of gas were too raw, too new. Their fetal cores were millions of light-years from becoming the delicate pricks of infinity I saw on my back porch at night. I had found myself in a void where the world had given up trying to bring me back and had, in one, last, compassionate gesture, thrown me up into the cosmos, shrouded in a sheet of black shag rug no-thank-yous. A worm floated past me the day the earth walked away. We chatted for a while, but he had nothing new to say. Just bland pleasantries and old-hat puns. He told me he was looking for a wormhole out here, in space. I laughed politely and continued on. Along came an asteroid, and she asked for my feet. “I can’t,” I replied, “I need my feet.” “Why?” Was her response. “What for?” I remembered then that the world had walked away from me. She was right. I didn’t need my feet. “Okay,” I said. “You can have them.” I floated, buoyed by the non-wind wind of space. The inertia brought me to Venus. “May I have your legs?” She asked. “I can’t,” I replied, “I need my legs.” “Why?” Was her response. “What for?” I remembered then that the world had walked away from me. She was right. I didn’t need my legs. “Okay,” I said. “You can have them.” Mars came next and wanted my hands. Jupiter took my arms. Saturn sheared the hair from my head, and the moon took my skin to coat her hillocky face. Mercury ripped my breasts from my body, and Pluto timidly asked for my eyes.

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Of course Uranus stole my ass. The sun was late to the party. “Your heart,” it said, “give it here.” “I can’t,” I replied, “the hole would swallow me.” “And then?” said the sun, “You have nothing to fear. The world has walked away.” So I approached. The heat dried my bones, cracked my skeleton. The sun caressed my shattered ribs as it took my heart, still beating, in its fiery palms. And then I was a hole. And so the hole floated, buoyed by the non-wind wind of space. Until it passed a worm. “I am looking for a wormhole.” Said the worm, “Are you it?” “I am a hole,” said the hole. “Yes, but are you a wormhole?” “What’s the difference?” “A wormhole is exclusively for worms.” “I do not know,” said the hole “No worm has ever asked.” “May I?” said the worm. “Please,” said the hole. And the worm wriggled in, carefully, politely, so as not to disturb the hole. “It’s quite nice in here,” said the worm, “but I see someone has already settled. I must be off!” And so the worm wriggled out and wandered off into the endless void. “Wait!” cried the hole “I don’t want to be empty!” But the worm had already gone. So the hole floated, for a while, thinking. “Someone has already settled,” it thought. “What does that mean? Is there something there already? I must look and see.” But the hole was scared to look. It had spent so long assuming it was empty that the very idea that it wasn’t was unthinkable. What was a hole, if it was not empty? “I have two choices,” said the hole, “I can not look, and continue to be a hole. Or I can see if I’m not.” The hole thought for a long, long while. The fetal stars grew old, died, and were reborn again. The newborns played in the far off light of a supernova. Finally, the hole reached a decision. Taking a deep breath, or as much of a breath as it could muster, being a hole, it looked inside itself. At first all it saw was blackness. Then a small, blue dot, no bigger than the head of a pin, emerged from the blackness. The hole looked deeper. The pinhead grew, and slid into focus. Specks of green dappled its surface. Deeper still and the blue became oceans and rivers and floods and skies and from the green emerged mountains and fields and soil. “It’s the world,” thought the hole, “It didn’t walk away.” And slowly, deliberately, it made its way back to earth.

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STANDARD SYNTHETIC REPLACEMENT HEAD (X3) E M I LY W I S S E M A N N

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[14 in • 14 in • 4 in]

Ricky Nora deligter excerpt from “stuff: memory and the after-life of objects”

I’d heard stories about Rokeby and its patriarch, Richard Aldrich, a seventy-something-year-old Astor descendant. Some of the stories were strange and sordid: an unwieldy party held a decade ago in the shadowy parlor rooms of the grand stucco house, everyone swaying barefoot on polar bear rugs with twisted skirts and loose limbs. The night ended when a guest fell violently from the wrap-around porch and died. There were happier stories as well: a Midwestern college student offers to help Ricky maintain the house in March and ends up staying the summer—working under the floorboards, running lines, pulling wires in a tight crawlspace—until recently she drew up adoption papers, soon to become a more permanent part of their family. I’d been warned of Ricky in a way, of his tenaciousness and his candor. I was told that he was an autodidact and spoke ten different languages fluently. And that he would be nearly impossible to reach. If I were to call, it would have to be between six-thirty and seven o’clock in the morning. This thirty-minute window marked the time he spent in the kitchen, the only time he could be found indoors, in the only room with a landline. I began trying to reach Ricky on a Friday in early October, the morning after the first freeze. It was cold in my apartment, the heat hadn’t been turned on yet, and I was sitting with my phone cradled between my cheek and collarbone in front of my bathroom’s radiator. When he didn’t pick up, I left a message. I proceeded to do this again and again, making this Friday morning ritual a routine, until finally, one day in November, Ricky picked up. I had expected him to sound older, more serious—to have a baritone rough with experience. Instead, he was boyish and distracted when he told me to meet him at the house at 9 AM the next day.

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That Saturday, a gray and cold morning, I pull cautiously into Rokeby. I take a right at the painted white sign on River Road, careful to avoid potholes that shine with the last night’s rain. Past a series of gatehouses and cottages, through a thicket of trees and overgrown grass, I make my way towards the house. I’m struck by the number of people around: a young woman with hair down to her lower back, an older man who watches me, his back pressed against a tree, a pruner in his left hand. Ricky is not at the house when I arrived. When I knock on the door, I’m greeted instead by his wife, a woman with a small mouth and navyblue eyebrows. She’s on her way out, eager to move past me to get to the grocery store. She tells me, while we stand in the dark and lofty entrance of the house, that she isn’t surprised that Ricky isn’t where he said he would be, and that I shouldn’t expect anything to come out of talking to him. “I mean would you take this man seriously?” She asks me, in a thick polish accent. She points toward a framed photograph sitting on the mantle next to the door: a man wears a soiled jumpsuit with a rusted chainsaw in his lap; Angel is written in script on his breast pocket. She does direct me toward the barn, where I can expect to find Ricky, “probably underneath one of his machines.” And this is where I find him, in his newly constructed garage, a sloping and thin structure housing a decrepit red pick-up truck, its cargo bed overgrown with dead weeds and junk. Ricky wears a work jacket and work pants, a faded Carhartt label on his thigh. His face and hands are stained by black skid marks, and he walks with a hunch, his back bends in a gentle C-shape. He begins talking to me about a friend of his who used to work at my school—a man who taught students to weld (“they called it sculpture”) on a level acceptable for pipeline work. He speaks about this man with reverence, attributing value to this sort of manual labor as a purely tangible form of knowledge. He speaks quickly and with conviction; he wants to know what I’m doing my thesis on and why. He doesn’t seem to understand why someone would want to write about objects—after all, it’s only stuff. When I ask him later if he might be able to think of a specific object that holds value to him, he tells me simply that it would be a machine. “A machine, or a boiler.” Ricky walks while he speaks, ushering me across the landscape while sharing information about the property like a disgruntled tour guide. The estate is expansive, and has housed eleven generations of Astor and Livingston descendants. It spans 420 acres of land trailing the lip of the Hudson. When we reach the house, I imagine what it might have looked like during the Gilded Age; its windowpanes in tact, its exposed brick painted over, the grass neatly cut. I can see a line of tightly packed carriages and horses in place of a disclaimed Chevrolet that sits in the front lot. The house in front of me appears almost ghostlike—gaunt and skeletal, sticking out of the shoreline like an apparition. Entering the house, walking through the front corridor and past the grand staircase, the room feels inanimate: the paintings hung high on the walls, the carpets laid down in lines, everything is saturated and dark. When we reach the kitchen, a renovated room that resembles any other kitchen, except with higher ceilings and more stuff, Ricky offers me some pop and a box of Dots. Sitting down and opening the box of dots he’s given me, in a kitchen that is modern and very much in use, I quickly discard any previously held idea of Rokeby and its patriarch. They are replaced by Ricky: the man who sits slumped in his jumpsuit across from me, playing with a yellow dot in his hand. Ricky is straightforward. Blunt. He begins telling me about his daughter, Alexandra Aldrich, in a way that spares any artifice or pretense. He tells me that she has recently converted to Orthodox Judaism as a means to irritate and alienate him. “Since she turned into a Lubavitcher (you know what they are? Hard-core Jews), she refuses to use this

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kitchen. She won’t cook with our pots and pans. It’s very annoying. It’s happened over the course of the past twelve years. She just gets more and more Jewish.” Ricky doesn’t mention that a year ago Alexandra published an unforgiving and vitriolic tell-all memoir, in which Ricky plays a villainous role. I’d seen the book on display at a local bookstore only days before. Inside the shop, on a table marked ‘Local Authors,’ I found five signed copies. I sat down and skimmed the memoir. Half an hour later, finished, I placed the book back on the table and exited the shop. Ricky continues past his daughter, and draws for me a vague silhouette of the rest of his living family tree. His brother, John Winthrop Aldrich, or Winty, lives in Albany, and his sister, Rosalind, in Cambridge. Winty’s two daughter’s work in Boston as “medical people.” Rosalind’s two daughters live on the property with Ricky. One in a barn diagonal to the house, making puppets and costumes with her husband for the annual Halloween Parade in New York City. The other runs a community-based garden, a “truck farm,” called the Shoving Leopard, which sells fresh produce and dairy. I notice, as we move rather quickly through Ricky’s explanation of his “family unit” (his relationship to its living members and their roles in and outside of Rokeby), that Ricky is prone to summary—and that he summarizes with particular detachment. He uses the same language to describe both his oddly segregated family and how he keeps the house warm: “It’s heated in isolated zones. One room at a time, basically.” He’s strangely automated in this way, factual and brusque. I’m oddly disarmed by this; perhaps unconvinced by his sense of remove. Even when he refers to the past (to a time when Rokeby was still flush), and compares it to the present (in its tainted and decayed state), Ricky sustains this air of indifference. Ricky grew up chasing the tail end of his family’s wealth. It was only after his grandmother died in 1963 that Rokeby lost much of its inheritance. The background of his younger life was marked by (a though fading) opulence. There were no tenants on the property, workers occupied the houses that littered the estate: gardeners, dairymen, maids. The number of servants fluctuated in relation to how many guests there were—during the summer, they would have up to sixty people to stay at a time. He tells me that this was a time when the house felt alive: packed with men, women and children, some familiar, most strangers. They were the years when every room was dusted and generally tidy— the pianos only missing a key or two, the portraits hung in orderly lines, the French wallpaper pressed and mostly stainless. Apart from Ricky’s voice, loud and staccato, and the stuff that covers every surface (stacks of bills, bowls of spoiled fruit, odd collections of ball jars), the kitchen is still. It’s difficult to imagine life within or outside this space—a space that is, apart from its everyday objects, empty and distinctly stale. The houses designated for the help, the houses that now sit complacent in their disrepair, are still occupied, “exact number is not clear of course,” but at a profit. Ricky’s family’s primary source of income comes from these small cottages. He also makes some money on the side, renting out a small apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn, a neighborhood cupping the far end of Flatbush. “I never go there. I just collect the rent. Too far to go.” Ricky spent much of his youth in Manhattan; weekends and winters with his grandparents in their Upper East Side mansions. His mother’s childhood home took up a small chunk of 80th street between Park and Madison. This was a house made from imported limestone, with a heavy marble Neo-classical facade, a stone portico and two Ionic 25 pillars. He describes it as “more up to date,” with a lot of light and three

living rooms. “I think it was a great idea. Having that much space. But it was a luxury I guess, an unusual situation.” His grandparent’s house on his father’s side, a house with a similar infrastructure, was six blocks away, on 74th street. And this is from where more of Ricky’s childhood memories stem—a place that sounds more akin to Rokeby in its present state, a place that Ricky compares to Mrs. Havisham’s dining room. Ricky recalls afternoons spent there with his cousins. They often played in his grandfather’s office on the top floor, a space that remained unchanged until his grandfather died, and sheets were thinly spread across the furniture. The house seemed more like a museum than a home to Ricky. But this wasn’t something he minded. “We used to go up there and play and it was ghosty. No one ever went there. We’d just take the elevator up to the top floor and just screw around. That house really was creaky. It was a great house. It was a house house. 30 feet wide, 150 feet deep and 5 stories high.” Ricky seems fond of the house’s decrepitude: its Flemish tapestries (ones that depicted marine or biblical scenes) that covered every surface, and that had been cut with scissors in place of windows and doors. As for its unseasonal temperatures: “The place was overheated. There was a Sicilian furnace man who kept it up around 85. In the winter the windows were all painted shut. It was really hot in there.” I can see Ricky in this moment as a boy, running up and down spiral staircases, sweating and ungainly. He pauses for a moment. “It was kind of fun, that place.” Ricky finishes his box of dots and asks me again what I’m writing my thesis on. He’s spent the past hour orchestrating the conversation; gesticulating and illustrating a century of life lived at Rokeby. I’ve sat quietly, sucking the candy out of my back molar, completely rapt and disoriented. I ask him if he wouldn’t mind showing me around, so that maybe I could use the objects he has as a way to contextualize his stories. He obliges, but emphasizes again that he doesn’t have a specific object in mind for me. Before we get up, I ask Ricky about Edgewater—an early 19th century classic revival house in Barrytown, a town roughly two-minutes away from Rokeby by car. Like Rokeby, the house is in use, but only during the summer months. For the rest of the year its doors open occasionally for small groups of visitors. And a week before coming to Rokeby, I visited Edgewater on a class field trip. We arrived separately, maneuvering our way across the property in large clumps. The house, which sits on a small peninsula and is bordered by weeping willows and shedding gingkoes, is kept in compulsive order. It’s not a large house, but its few rooms are oddly preserved: the furniture, all Duncan Phyfe (or made to look like it), is neatly arranged in semicircles and lines, as if awaiting use. Peculiarly, every table, chair and ottoman sits propped on gilded claws. Everything fits appropriately within a certain Southern Federal style—the desk in the drawing room is an exact replica of George Washington’s, and most of the glass and moldings are original. And yet, this strict preservation, this eerie maintenance, is not wholly obeyed. There are jarring signifiers the time, objects that take us out of the Neoclassical and drop us, without notice, into 1997: blockish television sets which jut from beneath embroidered throws, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, polyester blankets folded inside antique chests. Diagonal to the master bed, above a mahogany dressing table, hangs a life-sized oil painting of Richard Jenrette, Edgewater’s current owner. He wears a grey suit; a gold watch peeks out from his sleeve. I ask Ricky about Edgewater because I was wary of its artifice—mildly disturbed by its half-hearted veneer. But Ricky rushes to the defense 26Jenrette: “What would you do if you had all that money? And you of

were queer. And you didn’t have any kids, any grandchildren. Give it to OxFam or something? This house, all of his houses really, are like his children.” Unlike Jenrette, Ricky’s family and lineage is large and complex, densely tangled and broken in some places. Perhaps Ricky is able to relate to Jenrette’s sense of house-pride, to the “charge [Jenrette] gets out of working on a house,” because within a house, unlike within a family, most things that are broken have an easy fix. Maybe Ricky finds comfort within home improvement: replacing the shingles on the roof, spending his time beneath the floorboards, wiring and rewiring. This might allow Ricky to work in the way he knows best—mechanically, dutifully, until a solution is reached. Ricky does acknowledge that unlike Edgewater, where the flowers are changed regularly, and the front lawn is always mowed, Rokeby has more pressing concerns: “We have a different approach here. Because we have to keep the roof from leaking, and figure out how to stay warm. We have an old house on our hands. So what do we do? How do we keep it going? We need it for housing ourselves, for shelter, to store all of our family stuff.” Walking through the front rooms of the house, I begin to get a clearer sense of the stuff to which Ricky’s referring. And the enormity of it all is overwhelming. While Ricky sits down to explain the mechanics of an Edison gramophone that stands pushed against the back wall of the drawing room (a gramophone gifted to the family by Edison himself), I try to create a panorama of the space: of the tapestries, layered one on top of the other, of the two spinet pianos, pushed oddly close together, of the leather-bound books, obscured by sheaths of dust. “It’s wound up, it’s not electric. There’s a diaphragm in there.” Ricky begins to wind the mainspring of the machine, pushing out a faint melody, a jazz-standard. An operatic voice fills the room; its narrative tinny and slowed down. “The sounds are amplified by the fact that this horn gets bigger and bigger on the bottom. And it turns as the arm moves.” Ricky looks at me, awaiting a reaction. When I don’t respond he continues: “Its volume is controlled by this wad of felt. It blocks sound.” I’m shocked when Ricky tells me that these rooms are not as dense as they once were: “We got rid of some stuff. And I was sorry we did. But we didn’t really have anywhere to put these things. We have rooms full of stuff—stuff that goes up to the ceiling. But they used to be jammed. More full.” I’m also worried. Ricky seems unwilling, unable to spend more than a moment on any one particular object. He’s interested in explaining (with rehearsed speed) how his objects work and how they came to be there. Not his relationship to them. I notice, when I ask him about a portrait of a woman in the drawing room, a pattern in his descriptions of his things: he tells me who the woman was (his grandmother), when it was painted (1950s), and her relationship to him (very close). He doesn’t elaborate, he can’t afford to. There’s too much— too much stuff, too much history. And incredibly, Ricky has inventoried each and every item. He is able to remember even the particular items that have been displaced. A vase that stood in a window-seat on the far end of a room that was moved to the terrace, two sofas that switched places in the fall of last year, a smaller table that replaced a larger table in the library. I’m impressed but also lost within his knowledge of these objects and his illustrative language of them (the exact style and era, the material of the time). It feels sort of like watching a doctor’s show on television, where jargon is used to substantiate a subplot. You believe these doctors, you have no choice. They are confident and good-looking, and because they’re talking about something you don’t understand. Ricky shares this persuasive facility. His language is perfected, spilling out for me in neat and orderly lines, but I can’t help but feel as if I’m 27 missing a piece of the narrative: Ricky’s narrative. I wonder where Ricky

fits in—if there’s space for him within these rooms that already feel so full. I ask him if he has a portrait: “No portrait. Not yet,” he says. “Ever go to a house museum?” Ricky asks me, moving forward. “Ever been to the Musee Carnavalet?” I nod affirmatively, because I have actually walked through the small and quiet rooms of this museum in Paris, a museum dedicated to its city’s history. But I was thirteen, dragged there by my mother, and only remember waiting for her in a warm patch of sun in the courtyard outside. “Well there’s a section with rooms from people’s houses. Like the room where Proust wrote his book, what was it, In Search of Lost Time?” I nod. “Anyway it’s pretty interesting. I mean these rooms have just been installed one right after the other.” I can see why Ricky finds this interesting. Why he might like the idea of a house museum—a strange concept that, to me, seems almost to contradict itself. It’s a museum that, while rich with history and its past lives, is at its core, lifeless. Filled only with the things people have left behind, the things they thought defined them. “It’s the same idea as the Bed and Breakfast, places filled with bric-a-brac and furniture. People feel good in these places. And I get that. I like things to be jammed with stuff around me. I’m not really inclined to strike out on my own and fill something that’s empty. I’d fill it up right away.” “I have two things to do today,” Ricky tells me. We’re standing in a strangely shaped hall, a recent addition made to the house, which morphed its square contour into a clumsy octagon. First, he’s making sonotubes, cylindrical paper forms used to pour concrete into. After that, he’s working on getting his wood boiler going at a higher rate. “This used to be an open courtyard,” Ricky says, pointing toward a cluster of forgotten plants by the door. The plants are potted and enormous. Variegated and prehistoric almost, splayed open like gaping mouths. Ricky tells me that they are plants descended from the Mexican War, and that they’re kept by the door for protection—used as guards to ward off strangers. “We used to have bigger ones. Took eight men to carry each.” Before I get into my car to leave, Ricky apologizes, “if you didn’t get what you came for,” and invites me to return for Thanksgiving dinner: “we have a kosher turkey, a vegan turkey, a chemical turkey, and my favorite, a butterball turkey. It’s traditional.” It’s difficult to imagine Ricky in a couple days time, pushing a cart through the iridescently lit aisles of Walmart, searching for a butterball turkey—determined to find the right bird, one that is heavy and substantial. It’s odd visualizing him outside of Rokeby, external to this place that is so proudly his own. At the start of the day, I thought of Ricky only in opposition to his past and his lineage. I’d worked, in a way, to pigeonhole him as the rejection of anything Gilded—with his oil-stains and his weathered skin. But actually seeing him within this house, a house whose pervasive objects take precedence, I get a clearer sense of Ricky. He’s a man who lives in tandem to his things, willingly suffocating inside the walls of his family’s history. He is not so much the contrarian I was expecting him to be; rather, he is a man whose embattled pride rests largely upon the past. He is a man who refuses to let go, and is holding on in the only way he knows how—operating a machine with one hand and holding a hammer in the other.

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Vestibules ADELAiDe RUFF OIL PAINT, tape, canvas [60 in • 48 in]

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The art of flower arranging judy pfaff

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photographs, printed images, framed drawings, melted plastic, expanded foam, paper, pigment

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from A B r e a k I n

The Weather R o b e rt K e l ly

alabaster wreath of clouds!  he cried that I remember when all the names are gone forget them anyhow they only work when you cry them out straining your throat on the hillside and the only answer surges in your gut   is it always winter where you are how come your breath is always warm how come the churchbells ring all night long you always come to me with a simple question it takes my whole life to unravel and by then the child has come and gone

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my arm holding mom rosy warren digital photograph

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Robert & allen Richard Max Gavrich 35mm PHOTOGRAPH

Untitled Jake Nadrich 35mm PHOTOGRAPH

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Untitled (Man on train) david sater Graphite on paper

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from E x o d u s o f T h e P h a r a o h TAMAS panitz

All poems start in Egypt, it’s your ship moored in the distance that gives way to you, the suggestion of a hip, far promontory into the skin of the here, you live from suggestion to suggestion stumble forward into maybe the same fact into another Egypt the lesson rising ahead, seek it the sign of a hill, a palm tree means ‘go this way’ you can’t get lost the ley-line is talking everything you notice is express to Egypt a divining rod every palm tree is a bat mitzvah the exodus has followed us lodged in these flimming particulars.

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U n t i t l e d ( from New Isometrics) Miles Berson DIGITAL COLLAGE

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mars sam youkilis medium format [11 in • 14 in]

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untitled CHARLIE HAWKS DIGITAL C-PRINT

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Cardboard Boxes MADELINE PORSELLA LEATHER , PACKING PEANUTS, APPLE JACKS

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TONI WAS SURE HER PETS WERE DIFFERENT V i rg i n i a Lo p e z-A n i d o

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MIXED MEDIA COLLAGE [8 in • 10 in]

A Provisional Mapping-out of Way s o f L i v i n g H e r e i s At t e m p t e d Elizabeth Pyle

(corrections

are being made by everyone. what is missing or incorrect is attributed to something that has not been named or defined. it was found that an instance in the spectra of road can be marked by a single black line, even if the road does not exist. this information is usually ordered by local authority to help census returns, gauge traffic flows and land uses. the photographs are available to anyone.)

FIGURE 1A. Certain highway signs are showing evidence of erosion due to weather, which mirrors the general ablation of the landscape. Repairs needed at 3am. how did I make you so unfinished all skin all blank surface your tongue a thumbprint I look for the places where you left your mouth open where you waited for something good you kiss a sign on Moon Valley Road that reads drivers wanted for the morning shift the sky clear liquor I could drink you right into heaven and leave you up there but this is just a description of work left unfinished a memory tossed over my shoulder like salt a footnote to the footnote of a sign flashed in headlights FIGURE 8F. The phrase “neither here nor there” is no longer a figure of speech but a sign constructed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Pictures are not allowed. caution signs are fickle and the language shifts three-point-turn on Tierra de Luna only dead ends on this vector reappearing to itself in a vacuum of well-kept roads I drive and she hums of her winter left out on the highway as if a season could disappear like that but she says it can and I believe her it’s the song you mouthed through the screen door when we left the sprinklers on all night and the car alarms with blue stains went off every hour we didn’t even need the lawn that time of year but we kept it anyway FIGURE 12C. The river current aggrades the shoreline threatening to create then undo the valley. Language absolves but cannot be seen for very far. The Freeways disappearing into River. I have been to the border but have never thought to cross it Tierra del Sol Rd. flashes in the rearview mirror 200 miles to the next junction of a thought you wouldn’t have believed 200 miles ago

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she who is not afraid of repetition resists total entropy and here I am on the same road repeating an action to replicate a feeling FIGURE 24 A. The freeways’ devolution into thinner versions of them should but cannot accommodate the blame they used to. Further, it has been raining out of sun rather than sky. (Take photo on late page /see it burn side/ but leave out the fire) the maps don’t make themselves like they used to streets made on borrowed animus most radio stations are only static out here sunlight has bleached the manzanita its branches appear in my lights animal bones too crooked to have held a body FIGURE 24 B. The rain here practical to bound language but still losing in frequency and vapors of catalyst like drowned ocean. What must is must. Road not new to loss for considering the nearest artifact and considering where you haven’t been lately all day. And still now. Light source beam and true digress listing in ways not wanted or ever. she sings as I drive the damp edges of Vista Del Cielo are lined with footprints of the people waiting for the waking dream of themselves to appear on the other side of the road but the maps haven’t reached this time of night and I keep looking through the glass like I have lost something bigger than the road tunneling into my brain I’m certain you left to make a new grid of yourself because at this time of night I know you’re not sleeping I throw my necklace out the window Nueva Luna absorbed into the noise of the engine greasewood melted into the tar you never thought I’d lose my myself to signs but the flat aluminum of a name can hold anything it wants FIGURE 41 E.  The front panel loosened carries the wave-change switch. Not broken-in real-time shows full reverberation, but it left its surface undone. The Dictionary of Electrical terms is now body and forever, and her luminous creates vein. The dark vein attuned to previous, however, it didn’t vilify the curve and the kept. Isn’t road that body pulse and electrical? Because everything. The road that body blood kept alive under skin, but isn’t the forever-skin now her? she has stopped singing lately I have been making up aphorisms while I drive to dissuade myself from a future tense and to forget that there’s always a road leading out

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a. That which is made evident is not automatically evident to itself. To desire is to break the screen door. c. If we plug up the sinks the ground only needs a few inches of water to be all ocean. FIGURE 77 F. Map found unfounded similar to the road of anything, river, and body. 12 am. No repair. Patience dissolves virtue and can’t spell virtue until time and letter‘V.’ Or maybe it was lightning continuing from the bleached air. River plus body salt, I taste bed. Bed-gone is the only gone and I’m here, aren’t you? Echo becomes “aren’t you” over and over for mist like dawn perennial dim. Yellow too yellow --she can hear it-- color too color because it punctures all that is close and for nothing. Nothing is not the same empty but might as well be. when your skin becomes the vacuum of the highway it means you’ve acquired a new body I want the whole document page after page, picture after picture of how you used to look in the mirror when you knew you were completely alone with the total sum of yourself your feet were wet from the lawn and your hands smelled like dirt you stared through me as if you were looking at a version of yourself only made in the night a person who returned your gaze from the other side of the road if there is two of everything then I’ll be sure to lose the other half of all the fake arguments so there can only be one sign of my losing and I’ll find a city known best for the people leaving it FIGURE 91A. No place like the memory shelf. The isn’t place creates the where now, and nothing now sparks all that is left, including what is bothered down to the bone of wire. That one line means upon sleeping. Whoever keeps anything here, whoever takes this picture of the far angle of night should do less mapping out of masses, less doing in order to be saved like ocean and wave after wave, cold and soft, and should too be ached long after a species of elusion and the primary grief has passed under itself; but the doing becomes the did, and the becoming becomes the has become. Being. A ratio of one to one to the map and the you is immediately an irretrievable distance when the distance is struck. Light.

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Missing Flight MH370 – Uncovered confidential documents / Tampered photographic evidence SAM TAFFel photoshop and crumpled paper [8.5 in • 11 in]

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Jeff Gibson (opposite page) Watching forever Deer rawhide, glass & plastic beads, wool blanket, quartz crystals, artificial sinew, tin jingles, drusy quartz, steel & brass studs, Silver wire [32 in • 23.5 in • 16 in]

Both Hands found canvas punching bag, wool blanket, artist’s own repurposed painting, glass beads, artificial sinew, tin jingles, nylon fringe [43 in • 14 in]

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Hippo JEAN WONG OIL ON CANVAS [72 in • 48 in]

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MUSCULUS LUCAS bAUMGART

That the back bears itself is one of its singular defining functions. The arms are beholden to the back (the torso altogether), as are the legs and the head. The back and its contents (the entire collected, though often invisible, history of the bearer) are beholden only to itself; the back is self-responsible. So with geography. And yet, within the domain of the back muscular tides constantly flow, tides composed of associative series: the stresses of labor and movement compile in the writhing dynamic system of musculature, and transfer energy from muscle to muscle for purposes of movement or the maintenance of posture. The original linguistic nature of the word corroborates this: from the Latin mus— mouse—we gained musculus. With the restrained chaos of a teeming rodential mischief, the muscles interact in a play of absorption, relaxation, tension, and release that predicate the back’s variability. Though not explicitly unstable, the machinery underlying the skin is in flux, twitching and contracting even during sleep. The spine defines the scope of the overall back’s motility, but it is through and by muscle that I bend, twist, arch, and buck. The spine serves the purpose of definition; muscle associates the definitional apparatus of the spine with the world around it. Muscle is metonymy.

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u003Cdiv data-jsid= ROBBIE BRANNiGAN DIgital photograph

from S w i t z e r l a n d Jennifer Schwartz

Now I stand with shoulders slightly hunched forwards; I am determined; I am going to find out where the hell I am supposed to go! So I stand with my shoulders hunched in front of me, and I look straight ahead and I look to the right and to the left, mean, beady eyes peering like an overwhelmed dog— And Hey! En Suisse! I kiss the moon and I step up to a front desk where there is a suited man and woman shouting to each other in German Nous sommes en Suisse! they both stop talking and look at me, wide-eyed for a moment, before sweeping me up in their fleshy and hot arms carrying me away from the tunnel’s ears au Alpentherme, and strip me of pampered robe with a flash, and, like a peeled carrot into a pot of boiling water, dump me into the waiting mineral bath. The water stretches up to my chin with wet hands slightly sticky but it falls back into itself. I am still tied close to the pool’s steps and I look out at the different gatherings of swim-suited bodies, shouting, echoing, shouts held in various tongues; now I am wide-eyed and silent and I look back for the lobby man and woman but they have already disappeared, Ici, ils ne sont rien. Submerged benches, metal fastenings, skirt the pool’s edges like weeds along a wall, many people sit here. The backs are jets so that vats of bubbles sweep the sitting individuals up and Up and Up and Up as if the baths are drowning them. These bodies are no longer individuals—in the bath’s foam they become soggy and whiter, like pillows or marshmallows, but like wet pillows like wet marshmallows. They are sitting ducks. As they purify themselves in the healthful seltzers of the Leukerbad baths, they lose their flesh; they become phantoms with only splashes of their echoing voices, carried by le vent de les Alpes, felt on my face as a mist or a sticky residue. Hearty bellows to the right of me: A circle of fleshy builds, thick-skinned people. Bubbles gush around them, enveloping most of their bodies. Skin reddened and puffed from the water. But they do not seem to mind; they are very much engaged with— bewitched by—one man in particular, talking. They are all smiling and gazing at him as he tells them this story: Two buckets of flesh for male breasts, a blonde mustache as makeup for an equally abundant face, move to the shapes of vowels foreign to these winds. —Hey! Plus he speaks in shouts! A business endeavor en Suisse (on his part, he is a business man, here in this instant he is attempting to schmooze these German schmucks; he doesn’t feel too rotten about this, no not at all, in fact he is actually quite all right in doing this—En Suisse!). He is naked without his cheap suit but he still has his tongue. He is American. And those male breasts: (They jingle with the man’s rapid gestations.) He speaks to the crowd: I’m telling you, I ate so much on that cruise that—no, I didn’t get seasick—no but instead I ate so goddamn much that I had to lie down on one of those little benches just outside the restaurant, right then and there. Left my date sitting there like a goddamn confused bird, beak hanging open and

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everything. —Here the monologue temporarily breaks to allow for collective laughter— He takes the opportunity to smooth down his moustache with two red swollen fingers, wets his lips. Now he continues: Anyways, so I was lying there on one of those little goddamn benches for about twenty minutes, when finally my date gets smart and gets up from the table and goes looking for me. Well, it doesn’t take her long, and she walks right up to me, hands on her hips like I owe her an explanation or an apology or something, and she’s huffy and mad as hell, and I’m just lying there on one of those little benches looking up at her, feigned innocence, and here I really just throw in the towel, I can’t lie to that face. So I tell her, Look, you’ve got a great personality and all, but I can’t help myself, I’m a man—it’s just that you look like a dog, and I probably shouldn’t have ordered those clams, because I feel sick as hell. Then you wanna know what happens next? I lean over the edge of the little bench, and I throw up then and there, right at her feet. Had to pay a hell of a lot extra for another room just because she wouldn’t even stand to associate with me after that. Heheh. Then all of them together: Heheh. Whew That’s A Good One. I look away. And I, in turn, am engorged with these waters and I feel light and dizzy, like when I inhaled too much musk and cedar in my room, but there is a difference: Then, I still had agility; I was able to make an escape. Now, I am dragged down and Down and Down and Down into the bowels of the mineral bath and I am too heavy to make even the slightest movement. Alas! I am too lazy. There is a mist, here, that sweeps over everything and one, and I myself am included—but do I mind? Right now, no. My mind erases, it drowns into the water’s mists. Me: What have I become! I am an engorged sponge lost in these blanched-yellow confines. If I am a pillow, then I am a dirty pillow if I am a marshmallow then I am a slowly-roasted, faintly golden marshmallow. A lump of air. I am on the threshold of coddledom!— a toy dog whose shocks of matted hair have been broken. Finally I emerge from the seltzer waters and shake myself off of this lull. Big droplets hit a few bathrobed people near me, reclining on pool loungers. One man is asleep, Thomas Pynchon book spread out against his stomach, when he is hit; the splash wakens him into a bout of spasms. He makes an accompanying involuntary sound upon thrashing his body: Whah-huh…ah! He looks around, he is confused. Another victim, sharp woman, angular in every feature, is definitely pissed off from being touched by my body’s seltzered water, angler fish. Razorblade glances, she glares in my direction. Now she rolls her eyes. Huffs. Loud ones. En Suisse! I Am What I Am!–What can I do? I do nothing.

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submission (pedestal) Lauren barnes wood, found materials, paint [42 in • 18 in • 19 in]

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Bar ataria Ginny Hanusik DIGITAL C-PRINT

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forever wild SAM ROSENBLATT INKJET PRINT [16 in • 20 in]

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L ay-z- G i r l ANNA KLINE oil, spray paint, sharpie, paper on canvas [35.5 in • 30 in]

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Half a bag of brach’s Heartlines Garrett Rosenblum too cool no way dare ya marry me? too hot marry me? just one no way hey you don’t tell too hot got luv? too cool bff don’t tell first kiss see ya crazy 4 u my hero one & only lol just one my hero my hero xoxo hey you sweet pea be true too cool you rock kiss me dare ya one & only awesome dare ya one & only sup babe too hot mad 4 you bff sweet pea too cool you rock I’m sure I’m sure xoxo soul mate sweet pea I ♥ you one & only love you xoxo first kiss yes I ♥ you so fine lol my girl yes you rock mi amor my love marry me? mad 4 you mad 4 you yes mi amor one & only one & only first kiss xoxo you rock get real soul mate xoxo I ♥ you my love lol my boy mad 4 you yes be mine luv me ur mine got luv? sweet pea mi amor kiss me crazy 4 u yes crazy 4 u be mine so fine see ya xoxo kiss me crazy 4 u mi amor see ya bff get real dare ya urs 4evr I ♥ you you rock xoxo xoxo one & only luv me bff be mine crazy 4 u my hero too hot yes love you luv me got luv? see ya soul mate first kiss too hot urs 4evr xoxo crazy 4 u sweet pea hey you got luv? I’m sure xoxo first kiss soul mate soul mate xoxo gotcha bff one & only urs 4evr yes urs 4evr marry me? I ♥ you dare ya I’m sure one & only awesome just one no way too cool gotcha kiss me be true hey you xoxo got luv? crazy 4 u crazy 4 u mad 4 you my boy yes dare ya mad 4 you you rock urs 4evr sweet pea urs 4evr no way mad 4 you dare ya don’t tell lol gotcha

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WHEN YOUR MOM COME HOMES AND MAKEs THE SPAGETTI Jake Nadrich 35mm PHOTOGRAPH

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Virginia Lopez Deluxe Champion MIXED MEDIA COLLAGE

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david sater

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from ark 16mm FILM STILLS

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from H ac k i n g D r ey f u s s grayling bauer text, references from symbol sourcebook: an authoritative guide to international symbols by henry dreyfuss

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R E B E L S H o n k i e-to n k Anna kline oil, acrylic, house paint, oil pastel on canvas [84 in • 72 in]

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year in pictures Rosy Warren digital photograph

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Chapter 3: Mark Rothko parker menzimer

Neil woke up at 4:00pm and stared at the blue walls of his bedroom. They looked greasy in the very-late-afternoon sunlight that was dribbling in from behind the metal window shade. After looking at his tumblr and doing a few things on facebook, Neil changed into a new pair of boxer briefs, went upstairs and made some coffee in the french press. Colette wasn't home. He grabbed some baguette from the counter. He grabbed some jam, grabbed some butter, and put it all on a plate. He walked into the living room / dining room. He waited two minutes, pressed down on the french press, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then ate the baguette with jam and butter while drinking the coffee. He stood up and looked at his mostly naked body in the living room mirror that was tilted from the floor to the wall. He noticed that he had lost more weight. He texted Maddie "goodmorning im anorexic lol ." Then he sent her a pic of his body in the mirror and texted her "hm, v sexy." He smoked a cigarette on the brown couch while staring out the living room window at the apartment's courtyard, where a bunch of kids were running around and screaming things in French. He smoked another cigarette. He stared at the vaguely continental seeming artifacts strewn haphazardly around the apartment. He smoked another cigarette. He looked at things. He thought about Maddie. He went downstairs and looked at his weed stash. There was a ton left. "Sweet," he said out loud, extending the "e" sound. He decided to smoke a spliff. As he extracted a rolling paper from its little cardboard slot he reflected upon Maddie's failure to text him back in a removed, unsentimental manner. He rolled a spliff methodically, tearing up medium sized nug with his hands. He stared at the blue walls of his bedroom and wondered why people used grinders when fingers seemed equally capable of breaking up weed, his hands blending and then tamping down the weed and tobacco in a machine like fashion. Using a tarnished and weirdly industrial looking window opening crank he cranked opened the bottom panel of his bedroom window. It swung horizontally inward, and as it opened a cool, slightly unwelcome breeze filled the room. His bedroom was level with the courtyard outside; he left the metal window shade lowered so that the room would get fresh air but nobody would see him smoking weed in his underwear at 5:00pm. After a while he was "stoned as shit." He

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sat in bed huddled under his sweat-smelling covers, reading "The WindUp Bird Chronicle," and then he got bored and masturbated. He stared at the internet on his ipad, picked up his guitar, played some music, got bored and put it away. After fixing his eyes momentarily on a large poster of a sailboat that said some sailboat related things in French, he determined that more than anything in the world he wanted to sit alone in the dark and eat a "literal fuckton" of chocolate while xtremely stoned. Neil got up and put on a pair of pants, a shirt, his boots, and his expensive in-ear headphones. He looked at himself in the mirror and fluffed his hair into a shitty pompadour. He rolled the cuffs of his pants high to expose his cherry-red socks. He selected "Buckets of Rain" by Bob Dylan on his ipod, grabbed his keys and left the apartment. He passed by the weird cafe that was right next to his apartment and wondered why he never went in there for espresso. He thought "too expensive" and then instantly acknowledged that it was less expensive then the place he usually went for espresso. Stopping to grin insanely at his reflection in the cafe window, he wondered why he never took Tommas there for drinks, since the beer seemed relatively cheap. He thought "too fucked" which he instantly recognized as accurate, because the place really did seem "too fucked," although in a manner that he couldn't quite place. He thought that everything about his neighborhood was "excessively masculine" or at least "somehow masculine" in a way that was in vague conflict with what he identified as the mysterious and tepid source of his own useless and largely repressed masculinity. He stared at his reflection and felt like he was in a weird alternate universe where no matter what he did or said, everybody would instinctively know that he was "just a little faggot boy in a man's world." Neil tweeted "just a little faggot boy in a man's world," and then deleted the tweet. He refocused his eyes and looked past his reflection in the window. He realized that a pissed looking Turkish guy behind the bar of the fucked cafe was staring at him hostilely. Startled, Neil began to walk away. He bumped into a small table and then kept walking. He stopped at his favorite sandwich place and looked in the window. it was closed. It was always closed. He crossed the street, passed some empty boutiques, passed the asian seeming fruit store, passed the morbid / quaint butcher shop, passed a comic book themed pizza place, passed some kind of motorcycle themed location of unknown function. He arrived at Monoprix, and spent several seconds standing outside of the sliding glass doors, preparing to buy a "literal fuckton" of chocolate. Then he stepped inside and was immediately paralyzed by what appeared to be a vast, boiling ocean of grocery shoppers. Somebody bumped into him from behind. He blinked, cleared his throat, said sorry to the woman who had bumped into him, and moved further inside. The first part of the store was the veggie section. Neil approached it and looked at the greens. Everything smelled appropriately damp, pleasant and specific. Neil imagined a grocery-store-veggie scented perfume. It could be called "Verdure" or something to that effect. Under the wide fluorescent lights, the greens were xtremely visually appealing. Neil made several laps around a large island of lettuces, feeling unaccountably pleased every time the misters came on. He stared at the swirling fog that refracted the light in a way that wasn't exactly pretty, but seemed "very chill." He picked up a beet and held it in his hand, noting the weight and the contrasting reds and browns of the skin. He held it up to the light, looked around to ensure that nobody was paying attention to him and said "Mark Rothko," thinking about the colors of the beet. Then he said "ten million dollars, baby," and put the beet in his pocket. He bent down, put his head close to a bunch of scallions and inhaled deeply, in an effort to truly appreciate their sharp scent. He turned to the person next to him, who was also looking at scallions, and nodded seriously, saying “they’re good,” in French. Then he left the veggie area and noticed an enormous wall dedicated entirely to different brands of crackers with chocolate on them. The packages varied in color, but were mostly

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shades of red or shades of blue. Unfocusing his eyes, Neil imagined walking through the wall and entering an alternate world where the only thing to do was eat chocolate covered crackers. This seemed xtremely appealing to him. He wanted to rearrange all of the packages so that they formed a gradient from red to blue with the darker shades in the middle, and then he thought “Mark Rothko.” He imagined that he was standing next to Mark Rothko, and then he imagined that they had come to Monoprix together to discuss the best way to arrange the packages so as to create xtreme aesthetic impact. Neil imagined somebody standing in front of the newly arranged wall of crackers and crying, as Mark Rothko nodded approvingly. Neil picked out a bright red package of chocolate covered crackers and walked towards the candy area. A cute, sad looking girl who seemed about his age or a little bit younger was standing in the candy area, wearing a Monoprix shirt. She said “do you need help?” in French. Neil thought, “Yes, jesus, I need help.” He said “no, thanks” in French and smiled a little bit without making eye contact, trying to seem neutral and immediately forgettable. She kept doing whatever she was doing. Neil began examining and comparing different chocolate bars, noting their net weight, their cocoa content, the inclusion of fruit and or nuts, the quality of their graphic design, and the amount of added sugar. Because he had a fixed amount of cash, and because he simultaneously desired the most possible chocolate and the best possible chocolate, he surmised that, if he were to get this right, he would have to select a relatively diverse range of chocolate bars, from lower- to higher-end. He felt suddenly relaxed and alert. Immobile, eyes darting over various chocolate bars, noting ingredients, attempting to recognize various brands from advertisements and other grocery stores, Neil felt like a computer designed exclusively to engineer an ideal chocolate eating experience. Except, he acknowledged, computers don’t know shit about chocolate. Neil felt acutely important, aware that only he could make a decision as delicate as this decision. Neil, the highly sensitive chocolate aficionado. The veteran connoisseur. A true chocolate Man. At last, he found himself stuck between a mid- to high-end dark chocolate bar with coconut and almonds, and a truly deluxe milk chocolate bar with an “insane” number of whole roasted hazelnuts. Double fisting the two bars, Neil found himself longing, with a sudden and surprising intensity, for Banu, a brand of coconut chocolate that Maddie had recently sent to him from Berlin. Banu didn’t exist in France; Neil had looked everywhere. After choosing the deluxe milk chocolate bar, a two-pack of Milka bars, an off-brand looking chocolate bar with toffee, an expensive Belgian chocolate bar with dried fruit, and two packs of Haribo gummies (sour spagetti and an “assortment” that seemed to include licorice and other things), Neil left the candy area, noting that the cute sad girl was gone. He selected A Case of You by Joni Mitchell on his ipod and bobbed his head slowly while waiting in the checkout line. Five to ten minutes later, the checker guy was ringing up all of Neil’s candy. The guy said “do you have a Monoprix card?” in French. Neil said “yes,” in French, hoping the guy wouldn’t ask to see it. The guy said “Can I see it?” In French. Neil thought “fuck,” and then said, “I don’t have one, sorry,” in French. The guy looked at him blankly, and than said, “uh.” Neil said, “Sorry, I don’t have one.” In French. The guy said, “Okay,” in English and Neil paid around 10 euros in cash. Neil thought “fuck.” Back in the apartment, Neil sat at his desk in the glow of his MacBook. His room seemed preternaturally dark. Primeval. A true dungeon. Très dank. Ideal. He cuddled all of his candy in his arms and took a selfie. He emailed the pic to Maddie with the caption, “some candy.” Then he relit the spliff from before, took a few hits and put it out. He closed his MacBook, sat down on his bed in and began to unwrap a Milka bar. Before taking a bite he closed his eyes tight and focused on the changing colors behind his eyelids. He thought “sexy.” He opened his eyes and said “Mark Rothko.”

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psychocandy enzo shalom ACRYLIC ON CANVAS [64 in • 52 in]

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breaking news sam rosenblatt INKJET PRINT [16 in • 20 in]

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A Death josh hodge These weeks of minutes tick dimly by the tact of polite exchange: calculated social solemnities cover the dark shimmering of an eye— stifled sense cannot illuminate the light astringency of your hands after peeling a grapefruit with pauses of unrelated shame regret and doubt not heard— those lost volumes in-between words.

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592678026-0 Robbie Brannigan DIGITAL C-PRINT

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national leisure duodecaplex grayling bauer PROJECTION MAPPING PROCESS STILL 12 channel video

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untitled Charlie Hawks DIGITAL C-PRINT

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Kent Dunne Untitled (chinatown, ny)

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Untitled (celebration, fl)

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Kyiv Maidan, 28.01.2014 roman hrab

79 Inkjet print, watercolor, pencil, mylar [8 in • 10 in]

THE ANTI-ENCYCLOPAEDIA From Poetic Disorder to Political Anti-Order (and back again)

Christel vesters Encyclopaedia,

also spelled encyclopedia: reference work containing information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner. - [Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, accessed March 10, 2013]

In his introduction to The Order of Things (1966), the philosopher Michel Foucault quotes a passage from ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia’. The fragment describes how ‘the animals can be divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor b) embalmed, c) tame, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.’ 1 When he read the passage, Foucault said that he burst out laughing. This arrangement, in which domesticated animals and mythical creatures exist side by side, ‘shattered all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought – the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography...’ The bizarre classification system transcends what is logically thinkable and imaginable, confronting readers with the limitations of their own thinking. At the same time, says Foucault, there is an exotic charm to this heterotopic and heteroclitic classification of things: disorder as a poetic argument, as it were. The paradoxical listing of animals to which Foucault refers is from an essay by the Argentinian poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who cited it in El idioma analítico John Wilkins, published in 1942, claimed that the fragment stemmed from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia that bears the equally enchanting name, Emporio celestial de conocimientos bene volos (Celestial Realm of Goodhearted Knowledge), and attributes its discovery to the German lawyer Franz W. Kuhn. To date, the actual existence of either the Chinese encyclopaedia or the surreal taxonomy remain unconfirmed, but both their alleged discoverer, Franz Kuhn, and the protagonist in Borges’ essay, the Englishman John Wilkins, certainly did.2 3 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966, Editions Gallimard, Paris, p. xv 2 John Wilkins (1 January 1614-19 November 1672) was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, founder of the Invisible College, co-founder of the Royal Society and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death. Wilkins was one of the few people to have headed a college at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was a polymath, was instrumental in reducing political tension in Interregnum Oxford, founding the Royal Society on non-partisan lines, and in efforts to reach out to religious nonconformists. He was a founder of a new natural theology compatible with the thinking of the time. He is best known for An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, in which he proposed a universal language for scientists and philosophers and a decimal system of measure not unlike the modern metric system. [Wikipedia, accessed March 19, 2013] xv 3 Franz W. Kuhn – not to be confused with the American scientist and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn – lived in Germany between 1884 and 1961, where he worked as a lawyer and translator. After he studied Law at the University of Leipzig and Berlin, he as send to Peking as a translator to the German delegation in China. After the First World War, Kuhn began to translate classic Chinese literature into German. Eventually he ran into conflict with the Nazi authorities, who considered his works to be harmful. After the end of World War II, Kuhn’s work began to be more widely known and appreciated. Kuhn is best know for his translation of Der Traum der rotten Kammer (1932). [wikipedia, accessed March 19, 2013)

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Encyclopédie – Agriculture et Economie Rustique – Art de faire éclore des poules, Plate II, in: Plates vol. 1, 1762

John Wilkins lived in the 17th century. In addition to being a clergyman and natural philosopher, he was a co-founder of the Royal Society (for Improving Natural Knowledge). In 1668, he published An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, in which he explained his system for a universal, philosophical language. This new language would make it possible to construct and express ‘any possible idea or thing in the universe’ in an unambiguous way. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Wilkins aspired to a lingua franca that would enable and promote the exchange of scientific knowledge. His utopian project was an outstanding example of the enlightenment ideal of a universal system in which all human (read: objective and rational) knowledge could be conveniently and accessibly organized. In his essay, Borges reflects on Wilkins’ universal language, comparing its system of classification with that of ‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia’. As Borges often merged fiction and pseudo-scholarly references in his writing, it is highly likely that the paradoxical list of animals was born of the imagination of the writer.4 Borges’ main purpose for introducing the fictional system of classification seems to have been to introduce a counterpoint and alternative to Wilkins’ analytical organization of the world. By doing so, he indirectly questions the arbitrary – and culturally determined – nature of any system, scientific or otherwise, Western or non-Western, which claims to offer a universal categorization of all things in this world.5 4 Borges’ oeuvre features many more fictive encyclopedias: The encyclopedia of Tlön, for instance, from the novel Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius which allows people to discard of all their worldly books, cultural arte facts and languages; El Libro de los seres imaginarios contains 120 descriptions of fabulous animals originally found in folklore tales and literature. The Greek artist Christiana Soulou, whose work is included in the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, recently created a series of drawings in which she animates the animals mentioned in Borges’ 5 From the 18th Century onwards most modern encyclopaedias included a preliminary discourse on the nature of knowledge it contained, its origins – and thereby its authority – and the systemic relationship between the different areas of knowledge. A well-known representation of the logical order of the presupposed knowledge system is the so called tree of knowledge in the Encyclopédie van Diderot en d’Alembert, which shows how knowledge can be classified according to a certrain hierarchy and genealogy. Subsequent knowledge systems were represented as labyrints, maps, networks or rhizomes.

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Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, Abbeville Press Publishers, New York (1983)

Fictional Encyclopaedia as Anti-Encyclopaedia Borges’ essay and Foucault’s critical analysis of the history of our thinking tell us that encyclopaedias are more than just catalogues of knowledge. They not only reveal how, ‘in a certain age and geography’, people interpret and give meaning to the world around them, but they also reveal the prevailing ideas about the (true) nature of knowledge, which knowledge was/is considered important enough to be collected and disseminated in the encyclopaedic canon, and the beliefs that underpin these decisions. The history of art and literature includes many examples of fictional encyclopaedias and other fictional reference works (lexicons, dictionaries, indexes, etc.) that ridicule and undermine efforts to establish any systematic classification of all human knowledge. They sometimes poke fun at the utopian notion of omniscience and the desire for total knowledge (as in Borges’ essay or Gustave Flaubert’s posthumously published 1881 novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, which Flaubert himself dubbed an encyclopaedia of human stupidity). Other examples speculate about the true nature of knowledge, for example by indexing an absurd ‘field of knowledge’, such practical jokes, prehistoric life or conspiracy theories. Finally, there are also fictional encyclopaedias that map a world that can only exist in the imagination and where everyday life follows completely different rules. One of the most evocative examples of this is perhaps the Codex Seraphinianus, published in 1983 by the Italian architect Luigi Serafini.6 Although these examples toy with the official status and authority of the encyclopaedia and the knowledge that it represents, the idea of a fictional encyclopaedia becomes all the more interesting when writers or artists take over the structure and modus operandi of the

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encyclopedia and apply it to a radical political agenda. The enchanting appeal of this poetic disorder becomes a ragged-edged, dystopian anti-order. In these so-called anti-encyclopaedias, the criticism is often of a more social or ideological nature, addressing such questions as who decides what knowledge is, and on what authority. Whose encyclopaedia is it, anyway? And whose worldview does it represent? Da Costa Encyclopédique One of art history’s more illustrious – and obscure – examples of such an anti-encyclopaedia is Le Da Costa Encyclopédique. The Complete Da Costa was presumably a project by Acéphale, a secret society of left-wing intellectuals and artists centred around Georges Bataille. The identity of the authors has never officially been confirmed – the participants swore anonymity – but from various memoirs, one can conclude that at least Georges Bataille, André Breton, Robert Lebel and Michel Leiris contributed. Marcel Duchamps was reportedly responsible for the encyclopaedia’s design, as well as for the famous ‘License to Live’ illustration and the article on chess/echecs. The first – and only – printing of Le Da Costa Encyclopédique appeared unannounced in the autumn of 1947 in selected bookstores near SaintGermain-des-Prés. Designed to look like a conventional encyclopaedia, the ‘Fascicule VII, Volume II’ (Instalment VII, Volume 2), as its cover sheet announced, contained a series of articles on various subjects, including economics, education and the church, with and without illustrations. Remarkably, the text on the first page began not only mid-sentence, but also in the middle of a word: ‘…festations that are unexplained in the context of modern science’. This incompleteness certainly threw any number of potential readers off guard. The abrupt onset, the contents of the first sentence and the subject of the next article – Echecs, which means both ‘chess’ and ‘failures’ – all seem to hint at the (dis) illusion of total knowledge, which was of course the aim of the modern encyclopaedia. But there is a deeper checkmate or failure to which the Da Costa also alludes, which is the failure of utopian and positivistic faith in science as the driving force behind human progress. The Da Costa’s rarity and the lack of information about its creators have undoubtedly contributed to the myths that the publication has generated, but the controversial nature of its contents certainly enhanced its cult status. In the most direct manner, and not without humour, the authors bluntly criticize social institutions, including state, church and education. Da Costa’s definition of ‘school’, for example, is, ‘an institution where people are taught that it is prohibited to use both hands, and where the left (hand) has no right, even if it is more adroit than the right.’ The articles in the Da Costa differ in style. Some are literary or pseudo-scientific, while others read more like broadsheets. Despite its conventional appearance, the Da Costa broke with all encyclopaedic conventions. It is fragmentary and incomplete (after the letter E, no further instalments appeared), the texts are very personal and subjective, and their veracity (scientific authority) is questionable. But 6 A small selection: the German author Novalis worked on his Encyclopedia of the Romantic Movement, titled getiteld Algemeine Brouillon (1798/99) in which he explained his ideas of a holistic science; Ambrose Bierce published his Devil’s Dictionary (1911), in George Perec’s Life A Users Manual (1978) the protegonist Cinon worked on the big dictionary of forgotten words; in 2002 Herve Le Tellier publiceshed his Encyclopedie Inutilis and Koen Brams recently published his Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists and also the catalogue which accompanied Manifesta9 ‘The Deep of the Modern’, titled Subcyclopedia. adopted an encyclopedic format.

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it is precisely here, in this combination of conventional form and controversial content, that the political and subversive agency of the Da Costa lies. Disorder is instrumentalized as anti-order. Art as Alternative Knowledge – The World Explained In the current debate on art and knowledge, artistic research and the discursive turn, the idea of art as a different form of knowledge often functions as a critique. Art as an alternative system of knowledge offers resistance to the prevailing idea that all knowledge production should serve a particular purpose or need, or should strive for ‘value’ according to the dictates of the neoliberal knowledge economy or ‘cognitive capitalism’. The much-cited discourse says that art can provide a platform for ‘the other’, the unknown, and thus create room for new, speculative forms of knowledge. But what in fact is this other, ‘holistic and non-logocentric’ knowledge? A recent example of an encyclopaedia-cum-art project, which speculates about another form of knowledge, is The World Explained, a project by the Mexican artist Erick Beltrán. For this project, initiated in Sao Paolo in the fall of 2008 and recently completed at the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam, the artist interviewed people in the streets and in the museum. On the basis of such questions as ‘What is power? How do you explain the cold? Can we avoid disappointment? Can the blind see colour?’, Beltrán collected what he calls personal theories: forms of everyday, unspecialized knowledge. The questions were formulated in such a way that it was almost impossible to come up with instantly logical and rational answers. People were sometimes confronted with combinations of questions, but in any case, they were challenged to call on their imaginations and speculate on possible explanations. For Beltrán, this informal, unspecialized knowledge is as important as formal, learned knowledge, and it is in fact these ‘personal theories’ that largely determine our social reality. In Beltrán’s intricate epistemological theory, clusters of personal theories provide us with systems of thought and ultimately evolve into cultural patterns that we consider as ‘true’. Beltrán collated the personal theories he collected from the interviews into texts, which he then published in The World Explained: Micro Historical Encyclopaedia. He deliberately selected the encyclopaedia format, modelling the cover after the Cyclopaedia, [a] Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1728 by the Englishman Ephraim Chambers, which is considered the first modern encyclopedia.7 But Beltran’s Encyclopaedia is anything but an official canon of objective facts and absolute knowledge. The articles bear such titles as ‘Blind / Colour / Backstage’, ‘Tickling / Evolution / Glamour’, which refer to the configurations of questions, as well as the genesis of possible knowledge: Knowledge is not static or universal, but is continuously changing and subject to personal impressions and experiences. By copying the design of the first modern encyclopedia, Beltrán explicitly positions his project in the context of the Enlightenment ‘project’. Beltrán’s Encyclopaedia, in which he brings informal and non-specialized knowledge to the foreground, should not so much be understood as an antiencyclopedia, but as a döppelganger.

7 Ephraim Chambers (1680 - 15 mei 1740) was an English writer and encyclopedist who is best known for his Cyclopaedia, (or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences). Chambers’ Cyclopaedia was the inspiration for the famous Encyclopaedie by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert.

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The World Explained. A Microhistorical Encyclopaedia, by Erick Beltràn, Roma Publishers, Amsterdam, 2012

As in the Chambers Cyclopaedia and the later Encyclopaedia edited by Diderot and D’Alembert, all the items in Beltran’s Encyclopaedia are illustrated with explanatory diagrams and drawings. In topological studies of encyclopaedias, much has been written about the relationship between text and image and the ways in which knowledge is organized. In both traditional encyclopaedias and Beltran’s interpretation, the combination of text and image provides a certain aesthetic and ‘enchanting attraction’, which simultaneously opens a parallel, imaginary space where the imagination has ascendancy over reason. Parallel Encyclopaedia One artist who understands the power of images as carriers of encyclopaedic knowlegde and has followed it through in its most radical form is the Swiss artist, Batia Suter. In her 2007 book and exhibition project, Parallel Encyclopaedia, a window onto the world in which we live unfolds through a myriad of found images. From images with geometric and circular motifs and pictures of round shapes (like planets or blow-fish), we seamlessly continue on to images of oil tankers, landscapes, bridges, various sorts of upholstery, typewriters and insects, to finally arrive at the final section, which contains representations of humankind in all its guises.

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Parallel Encyclopedia, by Batia Suter, Roma Publishers, Amsterdam, 2007

All the images that Suter has brought together in her Parallel Encyclopaedia are taken from other books and publications. This recycling and appropriation of ‘found knowledge’ is a strategy used by many artists (think of the numerous archive-based works as outcomes of artistic research projects), but in Suter’s case, the focus is primarily on the associative connections between the different images and the various narratives and patterns that emerge in the space of a single page, and in between, within the space of the encyclopaedia as a whole. Back in his day, Diderot had already spoken of the idea of a dialogue between text and image, and the possible metonymies that could result from the juxtaposition of topics, or of texts and images, which would normally never appear alongside one another. He, however, considered this a shortcoming of his encyclopaedic project. In Suter’s work, in contrast, the heraclitic arrangement of visual information is at the core of the project’s poetic power, inviting viewers and readers to a ‘multilateral’ reading or browsing of information. In this respect, Suter’s Parallel Encyclopaedia recalls the ‘exotic charm’ of the cabinet of curiosities, the encyclopaedic predecessor of the museum, in which the owner – driven by curiosity – collected mostly exotic and strange objects, brought together with no particular or logical order. Like the cabinet of curiosities, Suter’s Parallel Encyclopaedia embodies a space in which lack of order creates a space for wonder, for not knowing, for another form of knowledge, or in short, the (non) order of the imagination.

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JACK MARKO shuhan oil on PaNEL [50 in • 36 in]

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alex eaton from n a r rows 16mm film stills

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adelaide ruff ode to tinguley paint, wood, steel

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Shakespeare’s Garden #8 Ken BUHLer watercolor on rives bfk [30 in • 22 in]

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split LY D I A M e y e r MIXED MEDIA

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Stanley celia bland

They cut you from the crimped steel of the unstrung Chevy with shears pretty Cherokee and scotch-taped lugnuts gristle knucklebones and yr backbone to a buckboard. Breathe. A bike pump inflated yr lungs as I keened by yr bedpost, hymn-singing in a whisper as yr eyes bent like hospital lilies to my faith and they set you: thighs set, ankles set, wrists set, femur tibia and Adam’s apple set on Blackhawk Rd again. You said: memories hold on to time but who holds on to me who is brave enough to let me go? Not me, Cousin. Dawn treacles thru Nantahala’s trees & these bridge truss railings. Who is brave? Not you, after 13 beers thru a Dixie straw a broken jaw-bone thru a constellation of broken thru Impala’s wind-shield and a hood kleenexed against the pylons. Crows flap from brackish nests. The new moon will not set.

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lisa sanditz

display ceramic, found planters, porcupine quills, semiprecious stones, & other found materials [60 in • 54 in • 46 in]

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rainbow

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ceramic & rocks [13 in • 9 in • 22 in]

Dammed celia bland

When Nantahala Lake was created in a 1940s WPA project, its waters subsumed the Carolina Cherokee settlement of Aquone, first described by conquistador Hernando de Soto in the 1540s.

It is here we call from seed beds. It is tso-la tobacco shag black as kale and scented with truffle of coin. It is red as limbs, as the wet tips of our eyes, as the lightening bolt uga, wall-eyed trout & crappie striking the sides of cedar- shingled cabins, the door jams of smokehouses open and glossy in the under-water. Tobacco weeps. Rank as dam-maw, as hardpack unpacking under hard feet, as Ka-ga-li, cussed cash crop electrification. A kilowatt against the dark as Duke Power turns stars to dim. Suck Cheoah & spurt to an echo flat as snakes striking then boil back into the Nantahala.

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Imitating manet ’s O ly m p i a w i t h m y grandma in my dining room HANNAH BEERMAN digital photograph

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dopo lavoro sam youkilis medium format photograph [11 in • 11 in]

(following pages) from t h e m e a s u r e s jacqueline goss & jenny perlin

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16mm FILM STILLS

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SAM smith

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BUBBLE BOY 35mm photographs

(following pages) queen frostine george dupont digital photograph101 of animation on television

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#113 g a104 rrett rosenblum

drum machine, crt, camera, video mixer, vcr, vhs tape, vhs editor, photocell oscillator, RCAs

S a v a g e ly H e l d , G r at e f u l ly T r e m b l e d Anonymous

Certain people are missing from my mother’s dissertation. This might stem from her nearly biological focus on my twin brother and me—a focus that holds together each page. It’s a state that any new mother might experience. So it started: the black hole of ordinary motherhood. No light escapes. But within our enchanted circle even the commonplace shimmers. I spend the daytime hours sitting on the couch nursing newborns. At night, I move to a futon; I roll one direction to nurse Sam, the other… Willie. Within this magic circle, two marvelous, mesmerizing babies teach me about who they are. The occasional character hovered near the perimeter—our babysitter, neighbors, our grandparents all make multiple appearances. But they never fully step into focus. Even my father remains on the outskirts. Like all writing, some things had to be left out. But there was another child. In every scene, every anecdote, every memory, he was there, just somewhere off the margins. Henry, the oldest. He was five when we were born. Henry, like the rest, mostly goes unmentioned. Henry wants me to write about him. Enough of this preoccupation with Willie and Sam. ‘I could tell you about my day but you might not care,’ he says. I think I know why some women have baby after baby; babies are easy. They may wake you up at night or imprison you on a rainy day but they do not force you to look at yourself, revealed. I get so angry with Henry. As I read her writing, there were moments I regretted his absence; his inclusion in her work may have helped answer a few question. Mostly, though, his absence felt familiar. Henry goes through phases. He always has. He loved the Ninja Turtles. Then Star Wars. Then the CIA. Then Larry McMurtry. Each topic felt more than a phase — they consumed his speech, his actions, and his thought. It was hard to imagine him ever leaving one behind. His appearance is just as fleeting. In middle school, during his 105 obsession with Eminem, Henry bleached his hair with peroxide and

wrote rap lyrics all over his walls. In high school, after discovering Bob Dylan, Henry grew his hair out, started smoking Camel filters, and decided to only listen to music on a record player. He is unpredictable in another way. Henry has a temper. When he was young, his mood swingers were called tantrums. As he got older, they received new names: Henry’s fits, Henry’s meltdowns, Henry’s rage, Henry’s violence. Regardless, they always felt the same to me. For the most part, I experienced his temper a few steps removed. When my parents sensed trouble, the protocol was to send Sam and me to our bedroom or a bathroom or their room— anywhere that had a door and a lock. Once we were out of sight, my parents tried to work with him, talk to him, calm him down. But this always took long stretches of time that created plenty to hear. It was safer for us to stay out of it. In some ways, though, our relocation made these moments worse. Fighting gets distorted through walls; it becomes more frightening. Muffled guesswork replaces understanding. You can still hear movement—the distraught sound of feet that aren’t sure where to step next. Or the back and forth thuds of limbs trying to get out of the way. You can hear pitched pleas and baritone sincerity. You can always hear screaming. But everything else is hidden. Each noise is just out of reach, without beginnings or ends. The fighting always seemed to go on forever. It was rare for Henry to turn on Sam or me. Still, he made me feel afraid: I was afraid of the way he made my mother’s voice shake. I was afraid of the way he made my father quiet. I never got used to hearing them cry. I remember one morning I went outside, and saw the contents of his bedroom draped across our backyard. He must have thrown everything from his second floor window. It all lay scattered, ruined, and damped by sprinklers. More than anything else, I wanted to pick everything up before my parents saw. When Henry did turn on us, it was in less violent, more calculative ways. The night of our eighth birthday, for example: we were celebrating at home, eating dinner around the dining room table. Sam and I must have just blown out our candles because my mother had left the room to grab plates. And then something set Henry off. Maybe he had been upset all night. I was never sure about these things. Either way, he turned towards Sam, who, at that moment, was smiling. But then Henry smashed Sam’s face down into the birthday cake. Candles and all. Henry wouldn’t take his hands off Sam’s neck. He just gripped and held, until my parents grabbed him. As the three of them screamed, Sam and I stayed seated at the table. The candles had melted and the cake was scattered. Sam sat silently —blushing, half-sick, and heart sunken—looking away at something else. He still had frosting on his eyelashes. Or, the night I woke up with something on my face. As I lifted my head, I could feel it more: a sticky spread that kept moving over my skin. I opened my eyes and saw him, standing over me, pouring a bottle of maple syrup. Next, he started cracking eggs. I coughed and spat, hoping my mother would walk through the door. Rarely were there motivations behind these outbursts. Still, our family revolved around him, carried by his ups and downs. Bad days for Henry were bad days for us. But, maybe more importantly, good days for Henry were good days for us. When he calmed down, and his anger resolved, I didn’t hate him for before. I liked him for stopping. He became himself—funny and loud and sarcastic. I’d want to sit in his room and watch him play computer games. I’d want to hangout upstairs with him and his friends. I’d want to be around my brother.

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There is only one fight whose origin I fully remember. It happened when Henry was in eighth grade, and it was with my father. They were arguing about school supplies. I was watching a movie in the back of the house with the door closed and lights off. Like those that came before, I heard the argument beyond a wall: I’d pause the VCR when I heard screaming increase, or just felt too worried to watch my movie. I did this again and again, hoping for some indication that Henry had calmed down, or the fight had ended. Pause, listen, play. Over and over. Eventually, the other room grew quiet; I stopped feeling sick. Then my mother came into the room and said I had to go to bed. As I walked upstairs, I didn’t see Henry or my father. In a way, I felt relieved. The next morning, I found my mother sitting alone with the cordless phone on her lap. When she saw me, she began to explain why the house was still empty. The fight had ended when Henry pulled out a knife from his jean pocket. He started to stab my father. Back and forth, until my father collapsed. Dad was in the hospital. Henry was in custody. Then the phone rang, which she answered quickly. There’s only one moment in the dissertation that solely focuses on Henry. My mother writes about picking him up from school. He must have been six years old. “Does my teacher have my phone number?” Henry asks. “If she needs to reach you, I say, “she can.” Henry persists, “Can she? Can she really?” I am missing something. As I pull into the driveway, Henry says, “I was in time-out for half the morning.” Now, with a start, I get it—he hands me this information, the piece that solves the puzzle that I did not know I was putting together. My heart sinking, Henry has my fully attention. Then he, without smiling, only reporting, says “I answered every time she called any kid’s name. It was just a little thing.” He waits for my reaction, but then quickly adds, “I ate my whole snack.”

I only underlined that last line: a six-year-old’s hope that he wasn’t as bad as he felt. It made my stomach turn. My father came home first. He seemed fine, only skinner. Henry managed to miss any vital organs. The main difference was that he hung one of Henry’s necklaces on his car’s dashboard. He told me it was to show he supported his son. Later on, Henry came back too. My parents managed to get the criminal charges against him dropped. On the night he returned, we ate shrimp on the patio. We must have been celebrating. I didn’t tell any of my friends what had happened. I didn’t talk about it with my parents. Sam and I never mentioned it. This was made easier because everything returned to normal. Like every fight before this one, Henry was himself afterwards. If anything, he was better. Maybe he felt bad. The only difference was that, after this fight, I couldn’t look at him. Maybe I just didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t a greeting or phrase or conversation that could reset our equilibrium. He didn’t seem to know either. Instead, we said nothing. We looked down when we passed each other in the halls. We didn’t acknowledge one another at the dinner table. Henry only existed in peripheral glances. This strategy did not factor in the future. Still, this habit stuck. For months, we didn’t speak. Then, years. Soon he graduated high school and went to college two states over. I saw him on Christmas and Thanksgiving, and we were forced to exchange limp hugs. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why my parents loved him. They even seemed to love him more. I wanted my father to talk to me in the way he talked to Henry—with a sense reverence. I wanted them to hate him, too.

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The only problem with anger is that it goes away. It’s sometimes hard to know why you were angry in the first place. Even when you do, it’s hard to pull from those feelings that once reignited resolve. As we grew both up and apart, my resentment began to feel less stoic. He looked different: at college, he made friends, more than he had ever really had. He seemed happy. He learned Greek. He got a girlfriend. He read and wrote. Maybe it was a phase. But maybe it would last. As my anger faded, my discomfort stayed. By the time he was in college, there was still a gap between us, but now it existed in an empty and civil sort of way. We gave each other the same courtesy you give a stranger on the street. Occasionally, I’d even miss him. // In the fall of my freshman year of college, we had dinner together. He was living in New York, and I needed a place to stay for the weekend. I texted him if I could sleep on his couch. He responded with a formal “Yes.” Maybe I had been feeling different. A month before, I came out to my parents. I was living in a new state on a new coast. My parents had sold our house and moved across the country. It wasn’t just that I felt untied to year’s before; it sometimes felt like none of it ever happened. I was probably drunk by the time we sat down to eat. The restaurant was loud enough to make the breaks in our conversation not matter. We talked through pleasantries. I asked him about his work, and he asked me about college. He told me why he hated his boss. I told him about reading The Aeneid. It was a conversation about nothing, but it still felt good. Or it felt better. Out of our house, away from where we grew up, in a strange city surrounded by strange people, it began to feel more like it was supposed to. There were more of these meetings over the years: I met Maxine, his girlfriend; I met his friends; we talked a bit more. We were never comfortable around each other; we weren’t hostile, either. So when I found out I had to spend the summer before my senior year in New York, I asked to stay with him until I could find an apartment. Maybe a week. Two at the most. Henry and Maxine had recently moved to Queens together. They had adopted a cat. Every morning, they took the 7-train to work. They seemed happy, and a week seemed manageable. It seemed like it could work. It might even make things better. I was half-hopeful and half-determined that it would. They said I could stay. // I tend to learn about Henry’s life through my mother. She told me when Henry was rejected from his choice for graduate school. She told me when Henry stopped writing. She told me when Henry admitted that he’d been feeling worse lately. But that April, it was my father who told me about Maxine. He did this through a text message: three lines, twelve words, ending in “big bummer.” The night before, Henry had arrived home and found Maxine packing. She left. He crumbled. I learned the rest later. After she had gone, he did a couple of things. He began by destroying the apartment. He tore up the couch. He ripped up his books. He threw his type writer against the bedroom wall. He ripped every page of writing he had ever typed. He tore down artwork; he flipped chairs. He’d only pause to open bottles of whiskey.

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In the middle of the night, a friend found him. She called my parents, who woke up after the sixth ring. Five states over, my father walked out to the driveway, got into his car, and begin driving. He arrived in New York that morning, and found Henry curled and crying, hysterically drunk, in the corner of the kitchen. The apartment was in pieces. My father didn’t bring a suitcase—I doubt he knew how long he’d stay. He just wanted to be with Henry until he seemed better. But each day, he extended his trip more. He cooked Henry dinner. He bought him whiskey. He drove him to work in the morning. He chatted with him at night. He slept on the sofa and bought some extra clothes from Target. When I arrived a month later, he was still there. I felt bad. Henry would sob every night; I had never seen him like this. When we were younger, his anger manifested with assuredness —he’d get angry because he was right, and you were wrong. Now, he seemed uncertain. But also familiar: the mercurial moods, the flares of aggression, the altered states. I’d come back to the apartment, and he’s be hysterical: either angry or sad or both. I never knew what to say to him, so I did what I did before. I ignored him. Most of all, I began to hate how my father spoke to him. He’d do anything just to make sure Henry was happy. And even though Henry never was, and that still seemed okay. He only tried harder. He spoke to him with love. One night, Henry and I were supposed to go meet one of his friends for dinner. He seemed to be feeling better, so everyone else was, too. We were putting on our shoes when Maxine called. He took the phone into his room while I waited outside. I could hear him screaming and pleading and crying. I offered to go pick up food and bring it back. He didn’t hear me, but I went anyway. By the time I returned, Henry was drunk and miserable. We sat uncomfortably in the living room, eating our takeout in silence, before he stormed back into his room and slammed the door. I wouldn’t let my days depend on his moods again. I didn’t want to have to tiptoe around him. So I tried to spend as little time in the apartment as I could. After getting off of work at five, I’d often just sit in a coffee shop, delaying my return. Every time I started back, I’d hope he’d be asleep. Sometimes he was. Mostly he wasn’t. One night, I came back past midnight. I just wanted to go to bed. When I walked through the door, I saw Henry slouched in the living room. He was screaming along to music that was blasting on his Technic stereo speakers. Somehow, he managed to be louder than the record player. He kept banging his feet on the floor, manically off-rhythm. All the while, he drank. My father was reading on the couch, a few feet from him, pretending not to notice. I think I was supposed to do the same. I couldn’t. I wanted him to turn off the music or go into his room or just to calm down. I didn’t want to let him make me just as miserable as he felt. But he kept singing and thumping his feet and wailing; my father kept staring at his book. It was either his screaming or my father’s silence that made me finally look at Henry. It was probably the first time I looked at him in days. I asked him to turn off the music. Or really, I told him to turn off the music. My voice shook. He squinted and turned towards my father. He started slurring and swearing about both of us: he screamed that we were bothering him and taking up space; he screamed that we should be grateful that he’s let us stay with him; he screamed that he wanted us gone.

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My father began to reason with him. But I didn’t want Henry to talk at my father; I wanted him to look at me. So I swore back at him. And I got my reaction: he got up and walked towards me, the music still blaring, and asked me to repeat myself. I did. He stared at me for a minute; maybe he didn’t know what to say, because he just walked off. He seemed to close his bedroom door with calculation. My father looked at me. I could tell he was angry. He also seemed worried. Before he could say anything, Henry yelled for him from the other room. He slowly got up and met Henry behind the closed door. I listened through the wall: fast talking and elevated tones, just audible enough to tell it was bad. My father came out, and just said I should go to bed. He turned off the lights, and I lay down and tried to be still. I kept listening. I could hear my father walk into the kitchen. He was collecting objects, or maybe cleaning something up. Drawers slid open and closed. The clang of metal and aluminum. He was collecting all that was sharp. Then I heard him go into the hallway closet. He gathered up more things—heavier this time. Tools. Maybe a hammer, a screwdriver, a wrench. Last, he walked towards the bathroom. He searched around for a minute, and then found the crow bar, tucked behind the sink. Large and heavy and dense. He carried it over to everything else. Quietly picking up his car keys, he took everything outside. He came back empty-handed and sat down nearby. I could see his shape outlined in the chair he’d been sitting in before. He wasn’t reading anymore. He was just looking ahead. Every so often he would rub his hands or quietly clear his throat: soft sounds that told me he was watching the room, and that it was safe to close my eyes. I woke up at 6. Henry was still in is room. My father was still watching, now just crooked and slouched. In hushed tones, he asked me to get my things. We gathered our bags without saying much else. I had only lasted a week there. With just a few words, I had ruined it. He ruined it. It was just a little thing. I knew how these situations worked themselves out. There would be no phoned apology, or reconciliation over lunch. Neither Henry or I would know what to say. We’ve never been able to figure that part out. We’d probably avoid eye-contact and exchange limp hugs on Christmas. We’d get used to this. Maybe we already were. Things were easier this way. Maybe they were better. Either way, my bag was packed. I followed my father. Door locked, keys under mat, bags in hand, out the door. Henry slept. We left. As it was before.

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ANALOGUE MIND JAMES SIEWART MANNEQUIN HEAD, PLEXIGLASS, SPRAY PAINT, HARDWARE

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lakshmi

judy pfaff melted plastic, paper, pigment, 112 expanded foam, fluoresent light

CHINESE BASKETBALL ELEGY Collin Leitch

中 国 篮 球 Many winters pass on Foul-Line Mountain, 的 silent if not for the snow on the television. 挽 In fifty years you will become the yellow dust, 歌

leaving behind only a painting of the goat, and a collection of hats. There is a place beneath the vaults of forgetting for those



who have never known the affairs of this world, the man who, on his deathbed, regrets only that he could not watch more basketball.



On that day, there will be great clouds over the river towns, your number



etched into the side of the gorge.

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SAM TAFFel 114

rjukan & Gausta 16mm 115 FILM STILLS

Dream Protocols NICOLa maye GOLDBERG

1. When you arrived, my ghost was appalled. She banged on the door of my chest to let her back in. The ghost put her hands over my ears, but still your voice left burn marks on the back of my neck. My ghost was full of opinions about you, about the dead fireflies in the pocket of your winter coat, about the ashes in the corners of your eyes. In my arms you were a wolf, a cat, a child. We slept as if in the big beating heart of a whale. In the morning, you couldn’t wake in time to pull your teeth out of my hair. My ghost sat quietly on the floor, watching the windows turn yellow, the sky go pale. 2. I am easily lost, like car keys in a snowstorm. Meanwhile, my ghost is already at home. The television is on. She is licking honey off her fingers. I thought that if I hollowed myself out, I would get there sooner. Not so. My heart is a raincloud & the days you don’t touch me are the ones I wish I’d spent in bed. 3. Sat by my loom all day awaiting your call. Sat in the kitchen until noon with my ghost, playing cards. (I won.) Slept until it was dark, pressed my fingers into the wound for an hour & a half to see what might happen. (Guess.) My ghost wanted to go out for a drink. I had to tie her to the bed by her hair. For you I empty myself into your jewelbox mouth. For you I bathe in kerosene. 4. My ghost is a lovely dancer, graceful, as all ghosts are. I place my drunkard’s fists on the piano one by one. She keeps spinning, lighter than light. Come on over. She’ll put on a show. The two of us will watch from the bedroom, sick with wonder, kicking one another in the stomach just to remember that we’re here: a cavity with a hole inside it, the darkness so enormous it takes on a certain warmth. 5. Bite my arm to remind me: you’re radiant & I’m roadkill. While I was watching the moon you were untying all the strings inside me. My ghost had nothing to say. I spilled out, stained your favorite shirt. My ghost offered you a towel. I’d rather have the dirt under your nails than a thousand white flowers.

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from N a r rows ALEX EATON 16mm FILM STILL

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STREETSICK IN MAQIAO ilana dodelson OIL ON CANVAS [60 in • 72 in]

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from h ac k i n g dreyfuss grayling bauer text, references from symbol sourcebook: an authoritative guide to international symbols by henry dreyfuss

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UNTITLED (SMOKE & MIRRORS) RUFUS PAISLEY FOG MACHINE & VACuUM CLEANER

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PIT STOP SAM SMITH 35mm PHOTOGRAPH

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(opposite page) BLOOD BEACH JAKE NADRICH 35mm PHOTOGRAPH

Bat Houses for Sale KATY SCHNEIDER

The summer after my first year in college I got in my car and drove to Hidden Valley Camp, where I’d spent five childhood summers. I got lost on that drive. I had no service on my cellphone and my navigation system was untethered and coiled somewhere between suitcases. Cement roads tapered into dirt trails, pocked with holes and birch roots sealed under thatches of moss. When I finally found camp it was dusk. I was late. When I was young and it was winter, I’d sometimes draw little maps of camp: red boxes for the cabins, a penciled swinging chair, a sloping line for the hill where, 12-years-old, I’d kissed a boy and burst, like a flock of startled starlings, with my cabin-mates back towards camp. It looked like that map now: stark, teeming with ghosts. I found the other counselors in the rec. hall. All the other buildings were dark. The inflatable dragon that hung from the ceiling in the dining hall lay limply across the linoleum floors, tail curled flatly. The counselors, I could see through the mesh window, were partnered up: elbow to elbow in a straight line down the middle of the hall. A man stood at the helm, jauntily strumming a guitar. I watched everyone dancing, dust obscuring their ankles. Anything but country dancing. Everyone looked terribly enthusiastic. A woman, sweat stains seeping down her cotton shirt, waved me in. Another shouted instructions (do-si-do!) and wouldn’t make eye contact with me, even when we were forced to skip hand-in-damp hand under a bridge made of the other counselors raised arms. It was so dark outside, and so dimly lit in the rec. hall. At the end of the night we walked to our assigned cabins. I unfurled my sleeping bag, laid it down on a rubbery mattress, and fell asleep fitfully listening to three counselors from New Zealand talking about the best way to care for an ailing llama. The other counselors, I came to realize, were fleshy and hippie-ish, and I had difficulty connecting with them. There was a couple, Shannon and Shawn, who recently built a house nearby using the trunks of the trees on the property. I went to see the house one evening and it was oddly thin and straight, like a tree itself. It had four stacked rooms cut cleanly into the wide Maine sky. Above, it was so wholly dark that all you could see were the lightning bugs, like pinholes in a black sheet. On the night that I went to the house, we lit a fire outside and sat in a circle and someone offered me beer made out of birch sap in a glass jar. It tasted salty and bitter but everyone else was nodding appreciatively so I puckered my mouth to take a second sip. Shannon was talking to someone about the importance of organic faming and Shawn was mock-demonstrating how he tapped the sap for the beer on a tree. Shawn’s dreadlocked brother Adam was guiding potato bugs off a log and onto his thumb. I sat alone. I tried to interject something meaningful, but I was nineteen and brought a blow-dryer to camp: no one was interested.

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Three weeks into camp, about six bonding exercises later, my car broke down in front of a legless man. He wheeled cooly back and forth in his chair. He drank a beer. He watched my car falter and stop in a patch of dogwood. He wore only a thin cloth that laid across his groin and his bare legs jutted from the soiled fabric in a V. It seemed to me that he lived alone. He was selling bat houses. A purple sign, hand written, was propped against the paper birch tree that shaded his trailer. It read “Bat Houses for Sale.” And they were actually sort of lovely: simple and poorly constructed and the yard was flush with them. I imagined that the bats rested inside, downy bodies wrapped in papery black wings. I watched the legless man for a while and he didn’t ask if I needed help. So I called camp and three nurses eventually brought me gas in a peeling green truck. They were middle-aged women with uncut hair and children that swam naked in the marshy lake, surfacing with sputters, thrilled with the little blue fish that darted beneath the dock. I was living in something close to my worst nightmare. A peeling red cabin. A sloping loft for the counselors, where spiders clung to their webs above my bed. But mostly: 18 thirteen-year-old girls, who were getting their periods, falling in love, and pulling tight skirts up onto their thin, curveless hips before tennis lessons, like I had nine years before them. Before they came off the camp bus, in a girlish mass exodus, we were told that one of the girls (Maya Ponzini) was recently caught “sexting” with an 18-year-old boy. And sure enough, we heard her talking about blow jobs in a whisper to our circle of campers on the first night. So we had her on a tight leash. Too much time with the oldest boy cabin was bad. The boys masturbated in the bathroom and high-fived each other on the way out. And we were teaching Maya innocence, our camp director Meg told us dulcetly. “We’re letting her have her childhood.” Meg had flowers perpetually pinned to her hair that she picked from her garden. Which she called, and still calls, “Meg’s Garden.” Her hair touched down to her thighs, so long it made me shudder. On my days off, I got in the habit of driving alone to watch the legless man and his bat houses. The weather in Maine was uncertain. It rained in the morning, and little pools formed between the planks on the cabin floor. The girls walked around in tall rain boots, trailing dead worms in their wake. And by afternoon the sun would shine and the girls took out their handheld fans and changed into their pink bikinis, so small a doll could wear them. No matter the weather, the legless man sat outside. If it rained, he wheeled himself just inside of his garage, not far enough that he couldn’t see the empty street. The bat houses didn’t seem to sell. So one late afternoon, a fog settling thickly across the ground, I got out of my car and went on foot to his trailer. For once, he didn’t seem to be home and I wondered where he could have gone, legless, with only a little cloth to cover him. I knocked on the door and a dog barked. I stood where his chair usually sat, and watched the road. By mid-July, I’d worked myself into a deep panic. As a camper, I’d rarely felt homesick. When girls sat around the campfire, tears welling in their eyes, I’d felt irritated that they were ruining my s’mores experience. When I woke, tucked into my sleeping bag, to the sound of a girl sobbing quietly, I huffed— now, I would think, I’ll never be able to wake up and enjoy my breakfast. But as a counselor, I felt constantly the familiar aches I’d felt only occasionally as a child, when my mother would send me a long letter or when, at rest hour, I’d make the mistake of flipping through my family photo album. And, worse, I was becoming mean. At noon, when the bell rang for rest hour and the girls

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stayed clustered I grew furious. “Girls,” I would yell (and when before in my life had I said that—“girls,” in one sharp syllable?). “When the bell rings, you will be here, at the gazebo. It is a waste of my time to wait for you. Hear me?” And the girls would stand defiantly, their arms crossed across their chests, hating me a little bit. After lights-out, I’d lay, mosquitos humming in the damp air of the cabin, and listen as the girls crept into one another’s bunk beds. And then, before I’d even thought of the words, I’d sit abruptly up in bed: “I can hear you. The rest of us are trying to sleep. Stay in your own bed or you will have a silent rest hour tomorrow.” I meant it too: on silent rest hours I began to enjoy watching the girls write letters dourly on their beds, mouthing bitterly at one another, glaring up at me with a wordless fury. All the while, after the girls fell asleep, I would call my mother from the wooden swing outside the cabin, pushing myself frantically back and forth. “Oh my god mom,” I’d say. “I hate it here.” Once, on a night I’d called my mother three times, my father picked up. “Katy,” he said, “we love you, we’re sorry you’re miserable, but you have to pull it together. You’re 19. You’re not in a concentration camp.” I paused, considering this. “But daddy,” I said, irritated, “I am miserable.” One night I read the girls a chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It softened all of us. I loved to read out loud, and, like a miracle, the girls would quiet, curled in the hollow caves of their bunks like sleepy wolves. When I finished the chapter, they’d ask me to read another. “Okay,” I’d say, my voice hoarse. As I read my mood would brighten: ‘I can do this!’—I would think enthusiastically. ‘They like me again! Tomorrow is a new day!’ But then, the next afternoon, Delaney grabbed at my underwear and said, “black—someone is ready to have S-E-X,” and the Chinese girl in my cabin who didn’t speak English was diagnosed with a contagious vaginal infection that forced me to scrub our toilets with heavy-duty clorox. And, all patience and affection promptly forgotten, I wept in the bathroom and ask my co-counselor why we even allowed non-English speakers at this camp. Camp ran two terms–after a month, my girls were to get back on the busses that had delivered them to me and they would go home. Then new girls would come. I would move cabins; I would plan get-to-know-you activities. I couldn’t bear it. So I decided that when the girls left, so would I. I quit camp sitting on a sprawling field where I, at 12, had once spent an afternoon sliding down a hill on blocks of melting ice. It was Peter, Meg’s husband, who I told. It was warm, but meant to rain later—I’d told the girls to bring their slickers to Activities. Peter had not changed much from when I was a little girl. He was thin, his bones spare and sharp under practical clothing. I had not been nervous to tell him, but when he sat down on the lawn beside me I began, like a child, to cry. “I am not happy,” I said. “I have to go home.” He looked stern and disappointed. “You were such a lovely camper,” he told me. “We really thought you’d be well suited for this job. I guess not.” On the night I got home from camp as a child, I would lay in bed and feel terribly alone. From my backpack I would withdraw the notebook where my bunkmates had written to me notes I was meant to read when I was home (“seriously,” they would say gravely, “only when you’re at home”). I’d read and I’d grieve for all I had lost. But there was hope, because in ten months I could return. In the dull light of my bedroom, I’d fall asleep fitfully. When I woke, before I’d opened my eyes, I’d have forgotten where I was—I’d shield my head from the top bunk with two hands and would sit up baffled by the empty space above me.

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// DEEP SPACE // © Rufus Paisley 2014 float x = 0; float y = 0; void setup() { size(screen.width/1.2, screen.height/1.4); noFill(); smooth(); strokeWeight(1); stroke(255); noCursor(); } void draw() { background(0); x = map(pmouseX, 0, width, -width/2, width/2); y = map(pmouseY, 0, height, -height/2, height/2); float d = 0.025; //DEPTH pushMatrix(); translate(width/2, height/2); for (int s = 0; s