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technology + literature +art

CULTURE

CARBON

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CARBON CULTURE Editor Jessica Housand-Weaver Assistant Editor Molly Bradley Associate Editor Marie Becker Associate Editor Ingrid Jennings Associate Editor Alyssa Watson Editorial Assistants Kameel Mir Christine Teo Reader Joseph Digirolamo

Carbon Culture is distributed in the United States by Media Solutions. BIPAD: 29284 ISSN: 2374-412X ISSN (online): 2374-4111 Printed in the United Stetes Verson 1, Issue 1 Fall 2014 www.carbonculturereview.com

Editor’s Letter Each piece chosen for Carbon Culture Review’s inaugural edition reflects the human experience amid a rapidly advancing technological world—our daily lives, our relationship to change and to each other in an interconnected global community, our ideas about life and death, our associations with the natural world as well as our fears and hopes for the future. The writers and artists included here have conveyed in creative language, voices, and visual art what it means for us to be intimate with both innovation and nostalgia, to confront the idea of machine vs. humanity on a daily basis as well as the limitless possibilities that technology and science allows. Today, new technologies are changing the way that we live, communicate, express ourselves, create, practice medicine, learn, handle conflict, and even how we define ourselves and our existence on earth. Carbon Culture Review’s collection of voices and artistic work explores who we are in this modern world, despite and, often because of, technology’s importance in our lives. This journal strives to create a cultural imprint of our place in contemporary society with all its multi-generational, multi-cultural complexity. Though today we have advanced into the technological age and look forward to our future potential, we are consistently reminded of who we were—we, who with sustained effort and great skill, once flaked and chipped the edges of arrowheads into tools that ensured our survival, who in the dark with the wild all around learned to make fire, and we, who carried our children close to us in baskets slung over strong shoulders—all while we traversed the wide, unknowable world. In 2014-2015, we have maps, GPS, Google Earth—but perhaps technology itself is our uncharted territory now as we continue our uncertain and yet valiant trek into the hereafter. Carbon Culture Review hopes that this issue will take you to the forefront of that journey. Jessica Housand-Weaver

CARBON CULTURE Table of Contents 6

What We Are Missing in This World

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Laptop Diptych

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Wanted: Translator, English —> English

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At Age Seventy-One, My Father Gets an iPad

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Black Letter German

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What I Needed to Tell Her as She Poured My Coffee at the Tupelo Huddle House

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Tripoli, 1985

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Any Woman

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A Glossary of Lost Cults

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Outlaw Art

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Longitudinal Waves

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Grandmother and the SETI program

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Genetic Adam

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Genetic Eve

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Grey is the New Beige

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Blue Room You Saw Me Standing Alone Inspired by Nome Edonna’s painting the Blue Room

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Neurotypical

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Re-enactment and Performance Revisited in #Tweets

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Unreachable, Lost in Conoe Creek

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Pirated Love Poem

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Letters from a Lover in the Land Before Texting

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Trinity Test, July 16, 1945

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MICROSOFT EXCEL

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Binary Deposit

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Robot, Friend

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The Student

technology + literature +art 52

The Coup

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The Carrier

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Undivided

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James (Sitting)

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Alice

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Alien Planet

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The Cyborg and The Soul: anticipating the future of Bioethics and Intercultural Friction

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holy frick every entity or concept is made up of smaller entities or concepts

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chocolate-coated longing

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at least they were nice and put it right on the bag like that

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Robots and Microscopic Buckets

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Cell Phones and Leashes

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Clean Water Technologies Today

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Black box warning

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My Girlfriend at the Time

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Invasion

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Voices

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The Underbelly

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The Island

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About Time

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ASSEMBLY

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The Bark People: A Fable

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Bambi Explains It All

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256 Shades

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Wonders Adrift

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The Ruin

What We Are Missing in This World by James McAdams

Once Lonnie the Liar learned to control his memories, or not so much “control” them but rather fashion them out of withered husks of regrets and desires, he stopped lamenting his first life’s mistakes and began answering prayers, at least Elsie Mücker’s. His principle, he told me once, was that our imaginations and memories are all we have here, now—and it wasn’t until he was banished that I realized he was using the latter to generate the former, that all his stories about Elsie were obverse images, oblique reflections of events that could have been but never were, dreams of what he missed, or was still missing, events still existing as logical possibilities in that damaged world below. This is probably why this story has such a sad ending, or not so much sad but just weird or incomplete (you’ll probably think), because he never realized that his lying—and he was a master, no doubt, the best I ever met— didn’t so much conceal his feelings of pain and heartbreak, but rather prevented his ability to connect, to love and be loved, and that if he’d just told Elsie how he felt when he was alive perhaps none of this would have happened. Lonnie arrived as my assistant during the period when management had implemented a new policy intended to improve the financial health of the Institute, following centuries of declining revenue and profligate dividend sharing among the invisible Elders. The new comptroller, the sinister M. Beillume, blamed this on the former regime’s “spendthrift” attitudes towards the granting of prayers, arguing that in this economic environment of processing fees and declining tax write-offs, granting anything more than 10% of prayers was economically imprudent. “We’re not here to give away gifts,” he grunted. “We have a company to run.” As a senior APC (Administrative Prayer Consultant), it was my responsibility to collaborate with my assistant in the reception, recording, fulfillment, and archiving of all prayers requests. I was personally opposed to the transition from what M. Beillume called a “gift-driven pinko budget” to a “market-driven budget,” but during my 300-year tenure had never witnessed any APCs opposing the policies enacted by the company. When I complained to Lonnie, stating that the most rewarding thing about this job was granting prayers, he only muttered, “Nobody answered my prayers”—and in fact, he never did answer a prayer for the first 40 years he was here, not one single prayer, until that day I’m recounting, the day that led to his banishment. The first clue I had that something was, well, different with Lonnie was the status of his cubicle. Most of our cubicles, as you know, are cluttered with mementos from our respective planets, lengthy obituaries, picCARBON CULTURE

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tures of loved ones, Earth-Access Portals ©, and kitschy merchandise from Spencer’s Gifts (for those of us who lived during the degenerating years of the America Empire), like my coffee cup that says “At Least I Don’t Have To Pay Taxes Anymore!” Lonnie, however, simply pulled a creased photo of Elsie Mücker from his pocket and pinned it to the wall of his cubicle. The image, like all those of Elsie Mücker that would later appear, had the low-pixel resolution of digitally scanned images. He cleared his throat and said, pointing to his wall, “This is Elsie Mücker, she was the only one meant for me, her memories are all I have.” These pictures were the only things he brought from his life; and the words, the only statement he made about her until much later. Lonnie was an obese man with a hunched back and sneakers held together with duct tape. His hands were the smallest I ever saw on a man and gesticulated with tapering fingers when he talked about Elsie Mücker, reminding me of my son James trying to express things with his hands as an infant, and later trying to find the right word—or bon mot, as he would say— when writing his sad unpublished stories, whose prayers for publication I had not been able to grant (even after he died) because of the Acquaintance-Exclusion provision Lonnie would later violate. Elsie was, let’s face it, a Plain Jane. Her hair was shaped like a helmet and she had eczema, her left lower lip drooping because of a childhood case of Bell’s Palsy. But Lonnie was infatuated. When I tried to get him to talk man-to-man about other parts of her, or to show me pictures of her that revealed what I still even now want to see (you know what I mean), he said, “That would violate her memory.” It was only in her presence he felt seen, heard, real, he told me, when I asked what made her so special. Through the decades new pictures of her kept appearing, as well as notebooks from the stationary room he filled with writing, resembling a Bible. I was frustrated that he wasn’t answering any of his prayers, so I had even more prayers I couldn’t answer. I repeated to him that he needed to answer 10% of the prayers, that his failure to do so was messing up my stats, threatening that I was going to tell the superiors, but he just kept filling his Bible with anecdotes about Elsie Mücker and said, without looking up, “Nobody answered my prayers.” This was all he ever said to me—“Nobody answered my prayers”— until the day of his banishment. The anecdotes, I’d begun to realize, were works of desperate imagination, lies filling in the feckless voids of regret. They read like Hallmark cards of what someone who never loved might imagine love were like. He referenced picnics, flowers, Valentine’s Day chocolates, walks on the beach. Certain anecdotes were taken from postWWII American movies. Meanwhile, I spent more time outside in the park they used to have here—it’s parking annex H now—with a stapler on my office keyboard holding delete down to automatically to refuse all prayers, making deals with 7

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the other APCs for granting prayers to relatives on Earth without violating the Acquaintance-Exclusion provision, once again trying to find another APC to grant James’ prayer without involving me. (Usually these deals were customary between APCs and their assistants, but every time I questioned Lonnie about trading Elsie’s prayers for James’ he said, again, “Nobody answered my prayers.”) Lonnie continued to tack up new pictures of Elsie Mücker, write in his notebook, and spend more time under the hood of his computer, hacking down into the operating system and changing the software preferences, so that his monitor, I noticed once while he was getting another notebook from the stationary room, looked nothing like mine—I saw the name Elsie Mücker cascading from top to bottom, with prayers attached he’d identified and stolen from other APC’s computers, violating the Acquaintance-Exclusion provision. “My favorite memory of her,” he started from right behind me. I turned around and saw his walrus moustache and red acne’d face. He was reading from the podium’s notebook like an author at a reading. “There had been this storm and the power was out,” Lenny said. “From her apartment we could see the houses at the bottom of the hill, all blacked out and silent, so it was like we were all alone, like Adam and Eve.” He turned the page. “Elsie’s made candles we lit and arranged all over the apartment. It looked like those scenes in the movies where the guy follows the candles and roses to a bed and makes love to the woman, but actually Elsie Mücker and I never did that. Instead we laid together on the couch, her nestled on my chest under three blankets, and we talked about our future plans, our wedding, baby names. The whole time I was unaware of the tumor in my stomach that even then was metastasizing, as I was about to say I love you for the first time ever.” He came to the end of the page and then halted. I made no comment. I peeked at the notebook, and I could see that the “memories” looked more like the work of fiction than truth. There were lines scratched out, paragraphs with huge X’s, naked pictures of women in the margins, little question marks and squiggly words interposed between the actual lines. He started to talk again, saying “But,” and then he halted. He turned one empty page, then another, then picked up his pen and put it back down. He whispered, “I never knew that love could be so destructive, Elsie,” then answered all her prayers via an automated script before the Institute’s Overload software could prevent it. Immediately his computer shut down and sirens went off over his monitor and I heard the ominous swoosh of M. Beillume’s furious arrival, who now hovered over Lonnie, shadowing him and moving me with his eyes’ power to the Room With No Windows, where I felt the presence of the Elders. (I’m not able to talk about what happened there.) All I know is that Lonnie and all the pictures of Elsie Mücker were CARBON CULTURE

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gone the next day, and that the day after that he was replaced by a younger man with half a face who decorated his cubicle with pictures of himself with his wife and children, and talked about all his achievements on Earth and how much he enjoyed his first life. Being a happy person, he asked me about my first life (which Lonnie, being a sad person, never once did) and we became friends. Pretty soon we even began trading prayers, so finally my son James’ writings were published, although very few were purchased until we traded more prayers. At the end of his first month I said “Thank God you’re not like the last freak,” and told him the history of Lonnie Heckmann, at least as I could figure it. Anyway, when we talk about Lonnie now, we all agree that he was the biggest coward of all time, but even so he never hurt anyone, except himself, and it’s not like anybody misses him, because how can you miss someone who was never really there, don’t you agree?

Laptop Diptych by Daniel A. Hoyt

I. The Parts Man The Parts Man has thermostats, heating elements, cathode tubes, RAM. Back in the ’60s, he had black-market uranium. Don’t ask for it. Don't touch anything. Say please. He's got vacuum tubes and fuses. The Parts Man has dandruff and a case of the clap. He's got pig livers and pig hearts. He's got molars and bicuspids. He's big into fingernails. He’s got a Jenna Jameson bobblehead, Legos and lug nuts, drywall screws, floater balls and drain tubs. He makes jokes about motherboards. He glares, hands back the change, reminds us: we’ll all be replaced. II. The Brainstorm After the brainstorm, I went collecting. I found a deformed medulla oblongata. I found a wrinkled cerebrum. I rejected three inferior cerebellums. I had a cranial jones. And that’s when I saw dhoyt on the information highway. Undoubtedly, he was harvesting fresh new brains of his own. I couldn’t blame him. I waved him down. I had a story to tell. I disguised it in code, in error messages. I had all these brains, a bucketful, and I told dhoyt, and he told me about the restaurants in St. Louis where they serve brain sandwiches. All these brains, they were squishy, and there was nothing to say. I could have said, “Who’s there?” But dhoyt never said “knock-knock,” and the door never opened, and then his fingers put me to sleep, and I never ever computed the end. 9

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WANTED: TRANSLATOR, ENGLISH —> ENGLISH by Molly Bradley Code-switching, code-cover, and the hidden intelligence behind “poor” writing Im, like, pretty sure theres more to bad spelling than, u kno, laziness. Adam Gopnik wrote in July 2014 for The New Yorker about discourse markers — colloquial words that pepper speech that seem as empty of valuable substance as Skittles, but that may, Gopnik points out, actually imply far more than their definitions suggest. “The point of the ‘like’s and other tics,” he insists, including in the category other filler phrases like “you know,” “kind of,” etc, “is to supply the information that there is a lot more information not being offered.’” In other words, a word like “like” is loaded. For example, its use in a sentence such as, “It was, like, the worst thing that ever happened to me,” in reference to the breakdown of a hair dryer, is an acknowledgment that it was not, in fact, the worst thing to ever happen to this person. It was just kind of, like, “the worst thing.” You know? Similarly, the deliberate use of something as simple as a misspelled word (say, “rite” instead of “right”) or an omission of an apostrophe in a contraction (“i cant go”) in informal writing, and specifically in typing, is, more often than not, an adherence to a set of unspoken and nuanced socio-cultural rules. The key thing here is “deliberate” — and that’s what makes the phenomenon difficult to parse. Unless you know a person well, and know how correctly they are capable of writing — or, rather, how correctly they are prone to writing — it’s hard to say whether someone’s use of “u” rather than “you” is, for one, a deliberate choice. And if the choice is deliberate, it’s another matter to tell whether it was indeed made for the sake of efficiency, or instead to create a particular effect in the message conveyed, given its audience. The notion of making such deliberate decisions isn’t new: Among sociolinguists, it’s known as “code-switching.” There’s been a good deal of research that explains how, and why, people deliberately choose to use certain vocabulary, syntax, tone — even particular accents — in different contexts. For example, the way someone talks to his boss (“Yes, sir”) is not the same way he talks to his friends (“Sup bro”), and the way he talks to his friends is not the same way he talks to his girlfriend (“Hey sweetie/babe/ [insert pet name]”), and the way he talks to his girlfriend is not the same way he talks to his mother (“Hey ma!”). CARBON CULTURE

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NPR’s Gene Demby elaborated on the phenomenon, particularly in the ways that race, ethnicity and culture affect instances of code-switching — describing, as one example, “the gif of President Obama offering a conventional handshake to a white assistant coach for USA’s Olympic basketball team before immediately dapping up Kevin Durant, one of the team’s stars, and greeting him with ‘My man!’” Similarly to the way people will code-switch in person, using spoken language to embody their “coded” (as it were) personas, the way people manipulate language on the Internet or in texting seems to follow suit. But it’s about more than the habitual convenience of omitting letters or the cuteness of devising clever ways to abbreviate words. As a few more complex examples of why someone might use incorrect spelling or grammatical structure in writing: - To assume a casual attitude about whatever is being discussed, as a deliberate way of distancing the discourse from other modes of writing: - To assume a casual or humorous attitude as self-protection in expressing a loaded or risky sentiment: - To reference an established joke — whether an inside joke or, say, a widely known meme: - To “play dumb” as a sort of ironic assumption of an identity that starkly contrasts the writer’s usual persona: - To mimic the tone of a message in responding to it: This is by no means an exhaustive list of reasons why someone might choose to deliberately use feeble language in texting or typing — but it’s enough to suggest the array of hidden agendas behind the choice. And there’s far more to it than just spelling and grammar. Ben Crair, writing for The New Republic, broaches the territory of the “mad period” — the use of a very pointed period that connotes anger, disapproval, disappointment, or even a blazing rage too powerful to express in any words at 11

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all — hence the emotion is packed into the little dot at the end of a sentence that its user would not normally include. For example:

Capitalization comes into play, too: When a person who ordinarily doesn’t capitalize the beginnings of their sentences or proper nouns, it’s not only more notable when they do, but it’s likely to instill a wariness of the reasons they’re doing it — note the cold capitalization in the above example. Someone’s in trouble. Rich Novack, a high school English teacher and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has taken a close look at a number of instances of “mad periods” and other similarly subtle, nonvocal modes of communication. “Sociocultural literacy broadens the notion of literacy beyond conventional notions of text,” he says, “and, as such, the notion of text is broadened beyond words on a page to consider things like ‘mad periods’ and physical gestures as part of the literacy experiences of individuals.” Purchase of This iPhone Includes Charger, Headphones, and So Many New Ways To Get In Trouble. You might be thinking — correctly — that a lot of this coding was born of necessity: there’s a character limit, for example, in a text message, and there are also certain bodily constraints (tiny screens, large thumbs) that make abbreviations and shortcuts intuitive. Even typing poses a problem for some, since we’re no longer in the age of typing classes as a curriculum requirement (to say nothing of the age of, you know, adhering to the formal tenets of communication in the first place, which, though they don’t exactly overlap with the texting age, probably precluded texting your mom “hey i forgot to tell you im not gonna be home on time cya later”). The “texting age” itself poses a host of other social problems. An acquaintance of mine recently broke up with his girlfriend of eight years, which means that they got together in 2006 — and while there was some version of texting in existence at the time, it wasn’t the age of the iPhone/ iMessage, or the emoji, or Snapchat, or apps of any kind. (The first generation of the iPhone was released in early summer 2007.) I wish that friend luck: though he’s surely become at least a little familiar with general texCARBON CULTURE

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ting protocol as it stands, he hasn’t been exposed to the trials of romantic texting. God help him should he be the person who takes hours to respond to a simple “hey” from a girl he’s been flirting with and effectively signals, in that way, that he has decided within those hours that he loathes her and never wants to speak (i.e. text) with her again. In Which Texting Is Like Going Undercover. But there’s more, still, than just code-switching to be understood by a particular audience. There are uses for this written code which are more a matter of operating beneath the code — going “undercover,” as it were, disguised by the code. If being able to code-switch is like being able to speak another language — putting on the language yourself, so that you can be understood, and not stand out — then “code-cover,” as we’ll call its written iteration, is like actually assuming the nationality of that language, slipping into the body of a native so that you are in costume, so to speak; sort of like trotting around in another person’s body as in Being John Malkovich. It’s a transformation of your meaning rather than a mere translation of your words. It’s making your meaning through metaphor, in a sense, rather than explicit statement. And it takes a certain skill — a certain level of familiarity with different “codes,” and a certain level of intelligence in manipulating them — to pull it off, not to mention to recognize it in writing. As an illustration of the difference: Person A texts Person B to ask if B wants to come over and hang out. The exchange that follows between B and A:



The use of those extra letters (“ummmmmm”) suggests that Person A is sort of raising his/her eyebrows at Person B, as though to say, “You really think I want to study right now?”, as though Person B is being naive to think so, or even to deride Person B for being anxious to get homework done. But Person A chose to include those extra “m”s in the text, to make clear to Person B exactly how Person A feels about Person B’s response. Person A wants to make sure that Person B knows that A thinks B is being a square.

By contrast, in “code-cover,” Persons C and D might have an ex13

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change more akin to playing dress-up. Say the two of them, C and D, are good friends in their early twenties. They are familiar with the trends of text- and internet-speak, yet they ordinarily use more or less correct spelling in texting each other (i.e., they tend to write “you” out in full, use apostrophes in their conjunctions, et cetera). Person C is throwing a party, and that afternoon, hours before the party, Person C texts Person D, and D responds.

Both Persons C and D, in this context, are playing roles — Person C, obviously, being the host of the party, is pretending to either be someone else, an invitee of the party, or else (in a manner even more metafabricated) is simply playing the host pretending to eagerly ask whether Person D is going to come to his party. Person C could also, depending, be playing the role of another, much more eager invitee, in which case Person D is playing a character unmoved by Person C’s eagerness who is forced to tell Person C she is not going to the party, and to do so in a way that reveals that she made the deliberate choice not to (as opposed to offering the kind of reply she might give if she were simply out of town). Or Person C could even be playing a jaded invitee putting on an eager voice because, as this fictive invitee, he knows that the character Person D is playing is equally jaded and unlikely to go to the party, and they are both deriding the party and satirizing its minimal appeal. In either case, though, the exchange reveals one thing very clearly: Person D is going to Person C’s party. If Person D were not going, given they are close friends, she would probably break the play-acting to say something like, “ugh I actually can’t!” and would likely both give a reason and express remorse at having to bail. These kinds of exchanges are completely contextual, and for that reason they’d be near-impossible for someone to translate without familiarity with either party. On that note, though, it could be enough to only be familiar with the personality or texting habits of just one of the people involved. Let’s look at Persons C (whom we already know from a prior example) and E. In this case, person E is inviting C to a party in earnest:

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Knowing nothing about either of these people, there’s little way of telling how earnest the exchange is, or even much about their relationship. Person C seems a little reserved in comparison to Person E, but this can happen when one person is simply not as prolific a texter. However, if we know Person C’s habits — mostly correct spelling, usually includes punctuation, ordinarily uses flawless grammar, save the instances in which Person C is in code-cover — we can infer that C is performing a role for the sake of Person E and mimicking his style, either in the interest of making sure E feels comfortable and comprehends F’s message, or even (though hopefully not) to mock E, despite the lack of audience for such a mockery. The latter case would be a shame, since despite the fact that incorrect spelling and grammar in texting does not, in fact, correlate with intelligence, as a number of studies have proved, it still provokes the knee-jerk reaction of, This person is dim — evidenced by the fact that those studies were conducted in the first place. Parents, teachers, and members of an allegedly more literate generation alike have long lamented the negative effects of texting and internet culture — yet there are certain kinds of intelligence that those cultures seem to breed, not in place of but in addition to traditional literacy. There are a slew of humorous articles, lists, and screenshots of, for example, parents texting with their children that demonstrate a kind of literacy that those very parents, teachers, et al. often seem to lack.

source: parentsshouldnttext.com

What I’m Really Saying That I’m Not Actually Saying At All: The Duplicity of Radical Honesty One of the more salient examples of this code-cover intelligence in action is the essence of the contemporary school of writers who write what has been termed a kind of literary “radical honesty.” Author Tao Lin, and the authors published via his press Muumuu House, practice a style and tone that ordinarily do maintain conventional spelling, and make use of a fairly wide-ranging vocabulary, but abandon capitalization, punctuation, and any manner of formality or boundary in 15

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terms of the information they share. The tone of authors who write in this style is frequently a sort of deadpan that could either be interpreted as stark honesty or a wry dismissal of — who? Their own feelings as they express them? Of the reader? It seems, at times, open to interpretation. Some readers love this blunt openness, or at least pseudo-openness; some find it even less accessible than other genres and styles that are deliberately a little more oblique. The difference in reaction is probably in the level of subtext or implication a reader discerns in a piece written in this style. One reader’s reaction to, say, Victoria Trott’s “crack ho” may be to wonder why she should care about this step-by-step description of a less than exhilarating morning scene; another reader might find Trott’s excessively accurate cataloguing of the minutiae of the interactions a person has in such a simple morning routine — interactions with passerby, with the person serving her coffee, with an ATM machine — revelatory of something about the way we process (or ordinarily don’t) such rote interactions. In other words, the piece, and others like it, could be bland, or it could be fascinating. It depends almost entirely on how the reader interprets the author’s style and tone — specifically, depending on what the reader does or does not deem deliberate. To point out how complex not just code-switching but this notion of “code-cover” can be is not to justify impoverished writing, or to defend the steady drop of the collective eye from the scenery to the screen, or to aggrandize some kind of “millennial intelligence.” Rather, it underscores an element in the written word that hasn’t had occasion to surface until more or less now. It’s almost a new level of theatricality in writing, and there wasn’t really a place for it before – at least, not on such a casual level. This kind of sly dress-up – a kind so natural at this point that its author may not think twice about it, and that could pass entirely over the head of an unmindful recipient – would be, in fiction, simply fiction, and the construction of a character; in theater, simply acting; and in person, well, in person it might just be a little mean. Some people don’t think quite that quickly on their feet. But situated in this casual mode of written communication, it becomes an exercise in wit in which anyone can engage. They’re little riddles that anyone can write and anyone can solve. It’s just a matter of cracking the code-cover.

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At Age Seventy-One, My Father Gets an iPad by Krista Lukas

Born in Bad Aussee, Austria in 1941, three years after the Anschluss, my father took his baths in the farmhouse laundry room, sledded to the all-boys public school, avoided beatings from teachers, ate meals cooked on a wood burning stove, meat not-so-well-preserved in jars, bread and milk when meat was scarce. He ducked beneath covered wagons when war planes flew over, accepted candies from American soldiers. At age six, he lost his father to diphtheria, carried wooden skis up hills. As a teen, he took a typing class but never typed again—no need for it at Austrian Steel, waiting tables in England, teaching Americans to ski, framing their luxury homes and lodges. In 2013, at the age of seventy-one, after years and years of hemming and hawing, having never in his life owned a computer, my father announces he’s getting an iPad. When I offer to help him shop around, he declares, “No, I like Apple,” goes to the Apple Store, and pays cash for a twelve-inch. His granddaughter takes a picture and sets it as his wallpaper, Charter comes over to install the line, a friend gets his modem connected, and my father proceeds to open fifty-six Web pages. He calls me asking how to get things off his screen. I try to walk him through, but he claims he cannot find a single “x”. “Do you know where you are?” I ask. “Are you on a particular Web site?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m surfing the net, but every time I type something in, I get Wikipedia.” “Do you know where it is you’re typing? Are you using a search engine?” “Yeah, yeah, a search engine, or Wikipedia.” I tell him Wikipedia’s an online encyclopedia, like the World Books we had on the living room shelf when I was growing up. “Oh, so Wikipedia wouldn’t be the place to look for newspapers?” Finally, he finds Google, and from there, Der Spiegel, but then a mortgage ad pops up and won’t go away. When it comes time to set up an e-mail address, he can’t believe [email protected] is taken, and so is Austrian. He settles on his legal name, but his American friends complain it’s too long, plus they only know him by his nickname. He comes over for help getting an alias for a new e-mail, tells me, “Go to iTunes, that’s where you find it. On iTunes.” And he won’t be dissuaded until we go to iTunes only to learn that he has no music. I teach him how to reply to e-mails, how to forward. He sends me a video of a dog riding ocean waves to the tune of “Surfin’ USA.” The Beach Boys blare through the phone when he calls to ask if I got it. Next time we’re out hiking, he says, “Apple saves everything,” and glancing skyward, “Up in the clouds. Everything is saved.” 17

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Black-Letter German by William Doreski

Rubber-colored rain dismembers the dark and throbs on the roof with heavy and solemn footfall. I rouse myself from dreaming of a garage full of machines too large for me to operate. A snowplow on a tractor chassis with six-foot tires. A chainsaw mounted on a backhoe, long and mean enough to topple the Statue of Liberty. A truck with grill as big as a house-front. My office in the rear of the garage greeted me with warmth and lamplight. W. H. Auden sat at the desk, smiling his wrinkled vinyl smile. He reminded me that the dinner I left early still awaited me although the moment of serving the entrée had passed. Intending to walk into the city I wept for lost proteins but felt I’d gained credibility by collecting excessive diesel machinery to astonish my nearest neighbors and incite the cruelest envy. Auden faded into the wallboard. The book he’d been reading lay open, but I couldn’t read the black-letter German text. The rain woke me CARBON CULTURE

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with a clatter of branches dropped from the pine above my driveway. Dead limbs, no feeling in them. I stumble to the bathroom and glance at my gray hair in the mirror and agree that I’m older than Auden when he died, his ghost trembling in Austria, Oxford or New York, his black-letter German text left open at a page describing the love of violence that impels us to dream as deeply as the rain.

What I Needed to Tell Her as She Poured My Coffee at the Tupelo Huddle House by Jeffrey C. Alfier

Damn if my wore-out self didn’t want nothing more than a well-deserved slice of quiet after foreman Hankins shouted all damned day about safety and how some fool mindless eons ago lost an arm or a foot to a machine no one uses anymore at our saw and timber mill. Everyone gets so tired of hearing that shit you’d think he’d know we all got it by now. But I guess he’s just gotta resurrect ancient horrors to keep everyone’s mind off the fact that what’s really killing us around here is what we inhale or guzzle when we ain’t humping the mill. I mean, shit—deck worker Gordon Mabry was just 35 when he started coughing blood one day, right after bragging how he was employee of the year for Weyerhaeuser. He dropped flat dead two weeks later. What the hell, you say? And Ernie Hankins, dead at 42 from chain-smoking Luckies. We just shake our heads and whisper a weak prayer that it only happens to the other guy, carry on and reel the paychecks in. I work as a grader. Also done my share of sorting and machine setting. Handled plenty of bull chains, to boot. I’m damn good at it all, girl. Union man too. You’ve like to heard all this before, on account you being a waitress for quite a spell now. Your boss must appreciate you. Sure as hell 19

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wish Hankins would do the same for me. He squawks big about goals and outputs. Production standards. Says we gotta conform. He forgets how loyal I am, humping logs down on the floor. Forgive me fussing on and on about him. But there’d be nothing like getting a kind word now and again from the man. Hell…people like you and me keep this damned town on the map. We work plenty hard, get wore-down from hours on our feet. I see it in your eyes just now, girl. I got aches that don’t care to take leave of my body. Enough splinters to burn my fingers, stinging like a voice begging to be forgiven. And please: heat my cup up this one last time.

Tripoli, 1985 by Jeffrey C. Alfier

In our AWACS, we followed an air route west over the Mediterranean, a seam on a chart that was nothing but a ghost-border to the Libyan Mig that hunted us. It drifted through our onboard radar scopes, a distant blip, a loitering electric shadow. We’d be nothing but tidewrack if its two tons of afterburning thrust made a game of us. But it kept distance, orbiting in an airborne cage— a leash held by its ground controllers, burning fuel away to finally throttle homeward. Dropping altitude, it faded off our scopes, like fluorescent smoke, re-crossed its own shoreline, familiar breakwaters, waking mosques, the soft groan of tethered boats.

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Any Woman by Ellaraine Lockie

L’Imperatrice, 2005 Now any woman can wear the title A royal cloud enveloping her like a lover Like Napolean after he commissioned the fragrance for Josephine The alpha male in him prohibiting it from all others for two centuries Now a woman can empty her vials of Diva My Sin, Taboo, Obsession, Edén, Allure Ambush, Elixir or Heat Fill her personae to full bloom of floral and peach at its ripest So soft it gives way at the slightest touch Or she can become boozy with the Bourbon vanilla As flighty as the hummingbirds that pollinated it Then warmed by the peppery spice of cloves and sandalwood And hot when the white musk frees its animal pheromones Perhaps Napoleon’s purpose But maybe Josephine sent him a peeled apple or pear kept under her armpit and wrapped in lace A custom of the time Which compelled him to write from his war zone I am coming home, don’t wash Exposing what he really desired was the scent under the perfume The one that doesn’t require a chemist The one that dogs know The one on any woman L’Imperatrice: The Empress

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A Glossary of Lost Cults by M.V. Montgomery

Autotrophians sought to live close to or amid as many plants as possible, fervent believers in the collateral benefits of photosynthesis. They were said to be responsible for crop circles, early attempts to carve out living space in cornfields. But the Cornfield Occupation was only a short-term strategy, an experiment in living “as a plant” before improved cloning technology became available. The group held that world hunger could be solved only when the flora-fauna barrier had been crossed and human beings had co-opted the ability to make their own food. Its predilection for cornfields was based on the immersive experience these afforded, and because of the presence of GMO seeds, thought to promote cell mutation. But the Occupation gave rise to a rash of unfortunate farm accidents which made national headlines and led to a crackdown. Bubble-Wand Theorists sought to replace String Theory, Superstring Theory, and Sir Roger Penrose’s Twistor Theory with their own model. But they were undone by a shape that, while supported by quantum equations predicting stereographic projections of 3-D spheres (“bubbles”) onto 2-D disks (“handles”), struck microphysicists as rather silly. To protest the lack of time allotted them at the 2011 Solvay Conference in Brussels, the group picked a moment just before President Jean-Marie Solvay sat down and Chair David Gross was introduced to rise from their seats, pull out soap bottles and wands, and proceed to fill the auditorium with bubbles. After a twenty-six-minute interruption, order was restored. Claustronauts sought to simulate conditions of space travel by spending extended “training periods” in phone booths, abandoned vehicles, and waste receptacles—the smaller the container, the greater the perceived act of endurance and derring-do. They wore hermetically sealed suits and oxygen tanks and took great offense if cited for trespassing or vagrancy, regarding themselves as serious astronauts-in-training. Dark Umbrists believed that to dwell in interstellar space, humans would need to develop dark-adapted eyes and become acclimated to freezing temperatures. A cave was considered an ideal evolutionary incubator; but lacking access to one, the urban-based DU group did its best to subsist without electricity and central heat. They objected to light pollution and made a particular point of switching off fixtures. This practice endeared them to office and apartment managers who appreciated the cost savings; however, when the DUs extended their repertoire to masking streetlights with black CARBON CULTURE

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tape, they were perceived as a public menace. Subsequently, they were rounded up and taken for questioning to police stations—where interrogations under painfully bright lights were usually enough to call them out of the shadows for good. Grodornians (fr. Swedish for “frog”) followed an active daily regimen of hopping in place. They were fond of trampolines and dancing the pogo. The theory behind this peculiar mode of locomotion had to do with evolutionary progress—a glib hope that over time, people might evolve wings—but of course, this supposition is thoroughly Lamarckian. It was thought to have been the M.I.T. Grodornian Student Club Noam Chomsky was ridiculing when he famously wrote, “saying apes can acquire language because they can learn some simple signs…is like saying humans can fly because they can jump.” Interferons were Luddites of the first order, worrying that radio broadcasts and TV telecasts, and later, telecommunications connections, were bombarding the human body with toxic influences, scrambling brain waves and producing all sorts of ailments, real and imagined. They quite literally lost ground, moving from the city to the suburbs and then out to rural areas, camping only where they could not receive a clear signal. Finally the Interferons vanished off the grid entirely, or gave up. One cannot take seriously the urban legend that they founded cities under the sea, as saltwater is an excellent conductor. Ionists were reactionaries who declared human experience the only measure of reality; that our senses provided us with all the data needed to navigate the world. Following the teachings of David Hume, who wrote that the atom, as a “least idea” of matter, must be perceptible to the senses (hence faintly visible, and even colored), Ionists claimed an ability to spot subatomic particles floating in the air. They favored old barns and structures which allowed chinks of light to bleed through, believing that in the beams were revealed “quarks” and “ions.” But the Ionist sect’s superstitions were roundly dismissed, and its members accused of a thoroughgoing lack of perspective—of becoming enamored with dust motes. Microcosmologists fabricated model universes for meditative purposes. Pebbles strewn on a dark glassy surface, droplets of water spritzed onto a photograph negative, or pinpricks punched into a black-tarp tipi to produce stars of light were useful in places one might not conveniently view the night sky. The Micros were fond of other simulacra as well: terrariums, snow globes, and ships-in-bottles. Too much the individualists to endure as a group, they became lost in worlds of their own creation. 23

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Neo-Julianists took their name from a 16th-century resistance group which opposed the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. The historical Julianists protested the loss of ten days needed to make up for the extra time accumulated over the centuries, and demanded these be “put back”; they were forcibly disbanded after a failed attempt to kidnap Aloysius Lilius, one of the chief proponents of the new system. Latter-day Julianists declared all clock time a misleading approximation, always a millisecond or two off, causing us to live artificially. They were notorious for acts of thuggery: smashing clock faces, or removing batteries from wall clocks in offices and classrooms. Oozians sought to incubate themselves in the conditions out of which life rose; i.e., the primordial soup. They sought out bogs, swamps, and pig sties, sinking below the surface and breathing through a snorkel or straw. The moist ground was charged with a mild electric current—enough to invigorate, but not to harm. The group theorized lightning strikes had been frequent during primordial times, but calibrated to the level of low battery power by the mud. Here is where they believed works like Frankenstein erred: taken singly, a jolt of electricity offers nothing more than a contrivance for restarting a dead heart; to generate anything new, prolonged immersion in a charged environment is necessary. So too with creativity: a flash of insight is rare; most artists proceed incrementally, through steady contemplation, more akin to Soto Buddhists than Rinzai. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Oozians would attract artists and creative types of all kinds, who could be seen mulling about in mud baths at parties and mixers, spouting notes of great symphonies-to-be or compelling lines of drama and poetry out of their blowpipes. You could just spot their bodies hulking underneath like giant catfish. Quantametrics was a brief fad in Division AA football in 1970, associated with Head Coach Ernie “Pappa Hirt” Hirtzig of the Jacksonville Institute of Technology and his assistant coach, physicist Jacques Ondy. The concept melded a basic playground play—“Go out and get open”—with quantum theory (able to predict, with great accuracy, the location of particles). Ondy had observed that the team’s limited success that year was more often than not the result of receivers running broken routes and arriving to the ball by mere chance. With the recruiting lot fallen to him—receivers of limited physical gifts, but a quarterback, Sol Sukowski, who was an academic standout with a cannon arm—he argued the quantametric approach was worth a try. Together, Hirtzig-Ondy drew up plays assigning receivers to “zones” rather than patterns, randomizing the attack and exploiting the man-toman coverage of opponents. Thanks to hours of extra practice, Sukowski learned to predict his receivers’ positions, or the speed at which they ran (though not, generally, both simultaneously). What derailed Tech’s playoff CARBON CULTURE

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run was the hasty co-evolution of defensive coverages. Bill Arnsparger of the NFL Dolphins, attending the AA playoffs in Miami, was said to have been inspired by the way rival teams stood up to the Ondy-Hirtzig juggernaut. Sadly, the colorful Pappa Hirt passed away following a disappointing loss in the title game. It is rarely remembered today that his once-heralded zone offense led to the development of the zone defense. Supersaturationists were perhaps the biggest thinkers who ever lived, taking as read the Big Bang Theory that the cosmos arose from an explosion of a super black hole which had sucked in light until it could contain no more. But they reasoned that this light had to have been absorbed from a previous universe, and the light from that one absorbed from a still earlier universe; and so on, in an infinite regress. Not only that, but they argued who’s to say our dark star wasn’t just one of many, as plentiful as caviar in a beluga sturgeon’s ovaries, each egg designed to produce fish to produce more eggs, and so on and so forth? Some suspected Supersaturationists of being rogue Creationists hoping to defeat well-established theories by pushing them past the brink of human comprehension. The group had a knack for lampoons of the eye-for-an-eye kind, making a 13.8 billion-year estimate for the age of the cosmos seem equally nonsensical as the six thousand-year one: for on a scale of infinite time-space, the difference between any two finite numbers is negligible. They also aspired to make the idea of a “singularity” giving rise to a solo universe sound as exclusivist as that of a “deity” creating a single planetary system, hoping to frustrate further speculation and return more truth-seekers to the fold. But their ideas were simply too vast in scope to be widely embraced or understood. Quite the contrary—Supersaturationists made the Big Bang seem, by comparison, rather homey. Spacegrazers were an offshoot of older Breathairian and Sungazer sects, true believers in the benefits of absorbing sunrays directly through the eyes. Spacegrazers thought it was not only the sun that supplied nutrients, but other celestial bodies as well. Particular planets were thought to stimulate and nourish different systems: Mercury was said to have beneficial effects on the nerves, while Venus fed the skin and Mars improved the heart and circulation. You could catch the Spacegazers in parks lying out on blankets or in lawn chairs, seeking cures for particular ailments, or randomly “sampling” different planets like dim sum. But the practice was always intermittent due to inclement and seasonable weather. And restaurant owners and grocers lobbied officials to enforce standing laws against congregating in city parks after dark, perceiving the fad dieters were discouraging business.

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Outlaw Art by Diane Dehler

Vandal Canvas 900… these bricKs are a performance Of the graffiti artists of the Phoenix Theater Project. Painted hyacinth ghosts; a Vanished Artwork, cold pieces, FORMed today. Regenerated by a.m. into Remorseless Voice-overs of hello world - rich plum textured away and new. Stone washed boys and Une fille 3-D melt into painted, spiked ice. On the outer territory of TRAIN world sunset eyes peer through. The sherbet blitz of a garbage can; motif of a Phoenix spiral.

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Wonder… young men from Paris visit, paint A willing catalina mist To leave impressions dripping Bauhaus gold teeth View, Of their travels into tagger territories of the USA. Vandal art outlaw ghosts on balcony requiem for a HIST>RY performance. Stage inside a Hornet left tangerine molecule turned dust. Behind the age of global blue velvet curtain Rip the GRAF veil. You are invited to attend A Houdini Séance with a …Jade spray.

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BLITZKRIEG

BY JOHN GOSSLEE

Rain Mountain Press

“Within two weeks I’d designed and ordered 2000 stickers, created a false identity and implemented the plan.”

“...this book more accurately functions as annals in a greater war between art and apathy.” John F. Buckley “Blitzkrieg transcends genre and tries to evoke in the reader an understanding of something larger.” Los Angeles Review “The inspiration and dynamism of the small poem creates a larger project to spread poetry...” Gently Read Literature “...a new collection of multi-media non-fiction and poetry, is not for the traditionalist, but for the adventurer.” Adirondack Review

Read the book, watch the short film, listen to the music, weigh in with the critics.

BLITZKRIEGHQ.com

Longitudinal Waves by Scott Jessop

I moved back to Colorado when my dad got sick, my wife left me, and my restaurant in the bosque closed. All around it was a shitty year. Dad had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood and bone that was really a death sentence for anyone over the age of 60. Dad was 72. He was rebuilding the stone fence, a Ruxton Springs term for a retaining wall, in his terrace garden when he noticed a bad pain in his lower back. He was alone of course. Mom died in a car accident back when I was a teen and so it was just Dad, my sister Sarah, and I and there wasn’t much left of our relationship. He wanted me to go to college and become a political science professor like him and I wanted to cook. Sarah was his darling – prestigious liberal arts school, MBA, then law school and a high priced practice in Dallas. Anyway, his back hurt but that was nothing unusual for a man in his seventies. He peed a lot, which also was not unusual for a man his age, but together they added up to a round of blood tests and a diagnosis from the doctor. Actually, it was an expiration date. Dad called me shortly after Tammy left and told me the news. “Right now I’m doing okay but it’s spreading fast and I’m going to need some help,” he said with an air of regret. For my dad it was an amazing admission of mortality and the first time we had talked in five years. “God, Dad,” I said, “why didn’t you call me sooner?” “I just got the news myself.” “Did you call Sarah?” He paused, “Come on, she’s important. I called you because you can spend a few months with your old man until he dies.” “I meant did you tell her you have cancer but thanks for letting me know where I rate. Are you sure you want me as a caretaker.” “Oh, don’t be so sensitive,” he said. “I just thought you could use a new start on life after all that has happened to you.” It wasn’t what he really meant but he was right. Besides my sister was too wrapped in the trappings of the upwardly mobile bourgeois to tear herself away for several months required to watch dad die. I returned to Ruxton Springs up north in Colorado a few weeks later. Coming back to the village in the mountains was a bit of an adjustment after ten years in Albuquerque. Gone were the open spaces, theaters, and trendy eateries I was used to frequenting. Now I lived among tiny galleries of funky, roughly hewed art, coffee houses, and touristy, rubber tomahawk shops tucked in the valley of my childhood at the end of three cañons. Quirky, liberal, and artsy, the town always seemed like the polar opposite of my conservative, 29

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uptight father. Looking up at the hillside house with its 36 stairs and terraced garden, moving to something more practical and flat was the first battle with Dad. We moved into a small nineteenth-century house in a quiet neighborhood. The old house was on a gentle slope rising from the floor of Monument Valley to the prairie and overlooked downtown Colorado Springs. Cool winds would blow from the small manmade lake a few blocks away, built more than a hundred years before by the city’s founder as a water reservoir for this high-plains city. Dad spent the first few days huddled on the porch looking westward toward the mountains and the small valley tucked below the long scar of the Incline. I knew he pined for home but the disease left his bones with the resiliency of saltines and one slip on the stairs would shatter them. He settled in. I worked as a line cook at the local Olive Garden in the evenings and spent my days taking care of him. I cooked his meals, gave him his medicine, and drove him to doctor’s appointments. Free moments early in the morning before dad was awake, I would dig around the big shed in the back of the house. It was a large structure, almost as big as the house itself. The building was curiously empty, although I found a large collection of old-fashioned glass insulators and heavy, cloth covered copper wire. In one box, there was a collection of big, flat plugs of the kind used in stage lighting. In the yard lay sheets of rusted iron mesh and heavy, iron poles. After work, I’d find Dad on the couch watching Jimmy Fallon and wincing through waves of pain. After giving him a sip of water and tablet of Oxycontin, I would read to him until he fell asleep. He didn’t like Thomas Wolfe. I think the shortness of his days made him long for faster fiction – Hemingway, Vonnegut, Roth – mostly stories from his youth and salad days were the letters he craved. In the mornings when he woke, I’d move him outside but by afternoon he grew strangely cold even in the eighty-five degree heat of the Colorado summer. “Your sister was always so special,” he told me one morning. “Beautiful, smart… always quick with a hug.” I brought him a blanket. “I never worried about your sister.” “No,” I told him, “I don’t suppose she ever gave you cause.” “You. You played football against your mother’s instructions. Got drunk at senior prom, and then arrested before graduation. Arrested! You stayed out late, constantly defied me, and in the final insult refused the life I worked and saved for you.” I smiled, “Leave it to you Dad to end your days talking about all you’ve done for me, your ungrateful son.” “I worked. I studied. I made something of myself. I earned a respected position at a prestigious institution and trained the young men and women that would be the leaders of our country.” CARBON CULTURE

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“Like Sarah.” “Yes,” he stood and weakly pulled himself into the house. “She appreciated what I could provide as I valued my own father. He worked three jobs to send me to school. My father wore suits to church with popped seams and frayed fabric. He drove a car that was an embarrassment and I never thought of defying him. You, you had everything.” “Except respect, independence…” I was about to say love but could not bring myself to be so cruel. He grabbed a cup of coffee and made his way to the kitchen table. Disdain carved his face with the snarl I had come to expect when he talked to me. “You were independent. You did whatever you wanted regardless of the consequences.” “What I wanted,” I protested. “You think I wanted to wind up bankrupt, divorced, and nursing your sorry ass.” He laughed. “Ironic, huh?” I laughed too. He sipped his coffee and laughed again until he could not remember why. He looked old. Older than anyone I had ever known. He had always been athletic and strong and now he shook with tremors of death and wore his skin like a loose fitting suit. Hollowness had settled around his cheeks and his eyes were turning from a vibrant blue to a soft gray. “I was jealous,” he sighed. I listened as he sucked his teeth a habit that had annoyed me since childhood. Then he hummed. He hummed when he was angry. I had no idea what he was angry with, perhaps himself for admitting something to me that I had not known. Nevertheless, I froze not knowing how to react to his confession except to put an extra spoonful of sugar in my coffee and think about making soup. “Why political science,” I asked. He laughed again and looked at me from corners of his dying eyes. “Because I was too damn bad at math.” “Huh?” “Physics. I loved physics. Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger – these were my heroes, “ he said. “God, I loved science. But I was too damn lousy at math, too damn lazy, really. So, political science it was. I could consult. I could write. I was always so good at bullshit.” With that last comment he laughed so hard he couldn’t catch his breath and almost passed out. When he recovered, he looked around the room as if scanning the whole neighborhood. “You know Nikola Tesla did some of his research on the wireless transmission of electricity in a lab around here somewhere. When I was a boy I read about him and he became my inspiration. My father couldn’t understand it so I told him he was the man that brought electricity to the house. He smacked me,” Dad said with a wave of his hand like a punch from the past, “and told me it was Edison.” Dad thought about the useless violence of his beloved father before adding with a dismissive 31

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air, “It was a common mistake.” “Could be that big ass shed in the back has a Tesla connection,” I said indicating the building to the rear of the house. “I found a box of old insulators and some wire back there.” “I thought that was another house,” he pushed on the table until he was up on both legs and then looked out back. “That’s a shed?” I nodded. Moments later, dad was out back and we rummaged through the boxes touching the egg-shaped tops of the glass insulators and looking about the vast space. Someone had built a loft at one point but it was easy to imagine the space as one huge room. I remember looking at a famous photo of Tesla in his Colorado Springs lab surrounded by bolts of energy shooting from a massive coil. The naked rafters and soaring Norman-esque roof were like the structure surrounding us. If it was Tesla’s lab, the giant coil stood where Dad was and Tesla sat near my position. “History was made here,” he said swallowing the emotion in his voice. “Imagine… the transmission of electricity like radio waves. No wires. No batteries. Cars, trains, planes, cell phones – everything would be able to just pull the energy from the air.” I smiled and shook my head in disbelief. “Come on, Dad. Do you really believe that’s possible?” He raised his arms above his head. “He did it. Right here, son, in this room. Tesla was able to illuminate a huge bank of lights placed hundreds of yards away in a field near downtown from a transmission tower right here in this shed. Tesla mastered longitudinal and transverse electrical waves. Some reports claimed electric lights as far way as Cripple Creek glowed when he brought the transmission tower to full power.” He spent several hours wandering around the empty shed touching the walls and dreaming of a long dead Serb scientist who could do things only imagined in comic books and science fiction movies. He grinned and giggled to himself as his mind raced with the possibilities of Tesla’s experiments. For those minutes, I saw the dad of lost Christmases and camping trips. After he had seen enough of the shed, he nodded gently, I packed him in the car, and we drove back to Ruxton Springs. He stared at our old house perched on the side of a hill in Ruxton Cañon and remembered his life with my mother. His love for her allowed him to ignore the addictive drunkenness that took her from him. Stuck with a son that rebelled and a selfish daughter, he ventured through the rest of his life alone. The years drifted from his eyes and fell on his cheeks. That night I read The Dubliners. We talked about Gretta and the Morkan sisters until he fell asleep midsentence. As I laid him out on the couch and pulled a blanket up to his chin, I realized I had forgotten about work. It wasn’t a problem since there were very few Zagat-rated chefs workCARBON CULTURE

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ing as line cooks in chain restaurants. I also forgot about Dad’s oxi but he didn’t seem to need it. He was sleeping fine. I stroked his hair and cried for a few minutes before going to bed. * I made French toast for breakfast, Dad’s favorite, then walked him to the porch with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. He ate nothing but read a few pages and started bitching about the politics – same old self. His breathing was rough and he fell back to sleep before I could finish cleaning the dishes. The end was coming soon, perhaps a week, maybe two. I carried him back in the house and called my sister.

Grandmother and the SETI program by Kate Kernan

The names of the dead are exchanged for small pebbles, fragments different in polish and smoothness. And the space without such asteroids is full of lost frequencies bouncing off satellites and scrambling their messages. These messages coalesce into dense clouds, combust and then fall burning residual energy. Perhaps all stones are birthstones. Visit the planetarium to restore breathing. Perhaps all losses are painful, inducing variable degrees of despair. I think we once were a hardier people.

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GENETIC ADAM 2012 22” x 34” Charcoal, white charcoal, rust, pencil, archival paper Zephren Turner CARBON CULTURE

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GENETIC EVE 2012 22” x 34” Charcoal, white charcoal, rust, pencil, archival paper Zephren Turner 35

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Grey Is The New Beige by Frederick Pollack

She may have said “hot new beige” or even “hot new neutral,” though the sale was already made: paired armchairs as grey, raked, and seamless as a missile cruiser. A need to keep propaganda and enthusiasm flowing – less, possibly, store policy than that of whatever old country watched from her accent and the trenches around her eyes. Thunder from an obscure direction beyond the wide bright floor may also have scared her. And the big blonde cashier she somehow supplicatingly bullied as the credit card slipped, was rejected, accepted, delivery scheduled. The grey chairs with their Deco echo – not, finally, the earliest-spring-green wingback, its wings too extended, like a bug of prey. Nor the rotating rocking command chair of a fully-automated starship; it was beige, the old grey. Nor the irrelevant lost rhetoric of tufts. With no attention, need, or money for lacquered and slate end-tables, melamine credenzas, leather and mesh magazine racks that seemed to seek interwoven lively conversations with each other under the lights of the showroom, empty now this late. Though during the battle of the Mastercard two more customers entered; stood like damp, downbeat elements considering the dark multiplerecliner couch with cupholders. CARBON CULTURE

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Blue Room You Saw Me Standing Alone Inspired by Nome Edonna’s painting The Blue Room by Cassandra Dallett I’m looking out my tiny hole my tiny, tiny peep hole all of the things the dark things from under the bed breath down my neck I can’t turn it off, the 24-hour hate the self-hate, the need to Botox my buttocks Disney’s greedy python hand in my purse ham over fist surveilled, sir survived, reviled, surveyed singled out, single, un-informed, informant pressing all that I have into the blues I’m on stage, I live on stage in the house of red curtain raise the curtain, raise the roof is on fire they are watching the eye rolling behind its tinted glass back and forth with the banana hammock of empty heart I just wanted them to love me love my face off the machine is here for me, the machine at my back the atmosphere sizzles, the oceans rise the advertiser’s enticement grinding into me doggy style on the screen for all to see I’m watching my own sex tapes the world watching me watching my own sex tapes tweeting my face/space book/sex tapes my sex lies-n-videotape my twitter-quiver-tinder-cupid sex-rape And I’m bad and nasty, rich and famous 37

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they love me they love to see me crying behind bars, wrecking expensive cars shave my head, pull off my tits 4 whatever makes it, rakes it in, ratings for the haters mule deer diamond rings if I can just dig them out of the ground fast enough out of the cold, cold ground one handed I can bling see you shoulda put a ring on it cover my naked shameless downward dog ass in your blue vinyl flag red particulate, white supremacy microbead seaweed slithering subconscious more more more how do you like it how do you like they are watching the focus of focus groups what we are thinking wearing manufacturing our creativity to sell it back to us I’m locked in I’m in here a naked boned consumer Halliburtan bottled water rolled up with my casual-yoga-pant-skinny-jeans I’m looking but here is not here out there I’m watching my gentrification through a hole in the wall my eyelids Scotch taped open my eggy weggies bounce bounce bounce bloody window to the wall bloody horror show lewdies at the door how you gonna come hands on your head or on the trigger I’m fresh out of bath salts and my luscious glory is lying limp biscuit please quit this me no crime think me no doublethink I belly feel and we, we hungry. CARBON CULTURE

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Neurotypical by Tim Kahl

The second self on the screen networks to a third and bids are pushed even higher online. The hundredth monkey quickly moves from node to node and asks for love like it would for a toy android bird with fake fur. Then the social robots are introduced into nursing homes. A servo-driven baby seal comforts an old woman with jam on her sleeve. It is normal to project on a machine. The salesman tells his secrets to the dashboard, believes its gas pedal can set him free. The dressmaker dances with her vacuum all day at home. Life is a strategy for establishing an archive of others, and after that, attachments. Examine the spreadsheet of smiles, the sorted files of eyeballs, the shapes of the face collected on the cloud. Take a screen shot of the Skype chat and clear a path through the data to the subtropics of Aspergia . . . if you're on the spectrum, you know it, and you can find someone there who will share their passion for a technotopia, where everyone hovers onscreen and sends e-mail. The puzzle of the pixels provides satisfying detail. It's where the geeked out go to blow their trumpet and concentrate on remembering obscure license plates. And your son will never say so, but he has gone home to live amid the code, into the voiceless waltz of the signal chasers joyously pinging distant servers where faces have dissolved into addresses.

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Re-enactment and Performance Revisited in #Tweets by Marie Becker

Historical re-enactments may conjure up solemn period dramas or visions of a visit to someplace like Colonial Williamsburg, where bonneted tour guides demonstrate butter-churning, but Twitter re-enactments have put a new spin on traditional costume-style restaging. In our tech-savvy world, tweets timed to correspond to the real passage of time during past events mimic today’s 24-hour news cycles. These Twitter-style historical reenactments attempt to combine theatrical storytelling, pacing, and emotional resonance with historical data, education and commentary. Today, we are less likely to gather as a family to hear a news report over the radio or the television; we are far more likely to be tuned into our computers, tablets, and smartphones, following a breadcrumb trail of retweets, hashtags, and likes. Rather than an epic drama with a sweeping soundtrack and A-list actors, a Twitter re-enactment arrives in bits and bytes as events unfold, historical mistakes are made, and the unthinkable becomes the inevitable. Twitter re-enactments have the potential to not only evoke tense and significant moments of history but to critique the way we’ve been telling those stories and the way we tell the ones that haven’t become history yet. Although the idea may sound silly at first, Twitter turns out to be a surprisingly rich medium for this blend of history and theater. The platform allows the easy creation of accounts for multiple historical figures (or characters), who can interact with each other, immediately moving the narrative into an active dialogue. The 140-character limit keeps heavy-handed info-dumps to a minimum, as well as creating a sense of tension in each terse utterance. Each figure can have their own photograph or other icon and a brief profile, helping our social media-tuned minds to quickly identify figures who—particularly among the homogenous white male British diplomats of 1914, for example—might easily blur together. At the same time, within those terse tweets is an enormous breadth of options for quickly and seamlessly linking to primary source documents: photos, transcripts, maps, audio clips—the kind of information that in a book might be buried in footnotes, if provided at all. These links not only allow a Twitter re-enactment to easily cite sources, they can entice people to look at material they might otherwise bypass—seeing the blue text of a hyperlink can be a temptation that’s hard to ignore. Performance by social media is unique in that it is both simultaneously performed and archived. Live theater and performance art are traditionally defined in part by an ephemeral quality in which part of the impact CARBON CULTURE

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is the irreproducible aspect of a one-time only experience. Even an encore or a video recording never quite captures the energy of the live performance. But on Twitter, to perform live equates to being recorded. These historical re-enactments do gain a lot of emotional power when viewed “live,” almost inevitably drawing on our memories of tragedies we’ve watched unfold in our own lifetimes as well as giving us an almost tangible context for how quickly—or how slowly—the wheels are turning. However, if you weren’t following a re-enactment, you can still scroll down and read the whole performance in a single sitting, an experience that differs from both witnessing it in real time tweets and the more traditional reporting of an event. The staccato feeling of the dialogue remains intact, even when the real-time noise or ambience has passed on. Although some of the immediacy is lost, you can still experience the uneven ebbs and flows of a story told by through dialogue and fitful starts and stops rather than a smoothed-out summation.

The Lamps Are Going Out

From June 27 to August 4, a dozen Twitter feeds depicted a disastrous breakdown of diplomacy leading inexorably to war—not war in Iraq, Syria, or the Ukraine, but the onset of World War I, beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, while they traveled in Yugoslavia. The accounts were created by the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), using a central account @WW1FO as well as individual accounts representing eleven key British diplomats, most prominently Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, working in the summer of 1914. The tweets were drawn directly from diplomatic dispatches, letters, and telegrams sent over those 37 days, beginning with the devastatingly understated “J.F. Jones @WW1Jones • Jun 28 News received here heir apparent and his consort assassinated this morning by means of an explosive nature.” Over 10,000 people from all over the globe watched from the first announcement of the assassination to Grey’s confirmation of a state of war on August 4. What is compelling about this Twitter feed is as old as the drama in Greek tragedy. We know from the beginning that nothing Grey and his colleagues can do will avert the crisis, and we know that despite the anxiety in those restrained, stiff-upper-lip statements, the oncoming war will be more brutal and bloody than those voices from 1914 could have imagined. At least a few of those tweets, going so quickly from hopes for peace to grim preparations for war, might makes us look anxiously at our own contemporary newsfeeds as well. Give me a sec to wipe the blood off my speech @SarajevoMayor, and then I’ll respond to your totally deluded remarks 41

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Also marking the centennial of World War I was a sprawling, complex set of Twitter re-enactments by students and faculty at the University of Kansas, consisting of not only a re-enactment of the Archduke’s assassination, but several smaller simulations in the days immediately before and after, including affectionate Twitter exchanges between the Archduke and his wife, excited chatter between the chauffeurs, and a meeting set up by the conspirators at Vlasjić’s Pastry Shop. (Completed simulations can be viewed here at kuwwi.com. Although it is evident how much the #KU_WWI tweeters drew on primary sources, their project was clearly created with the intention of using a more overtly creative and interdisciplinary interpretation than the firm primary source focus of the FCO project. (You wouldn’t see Sir Edward Grey tweeting a music video, even one by Franz Ferdinand, as KU’s assassin Gavrilo Princip does.) As explained on their blog, where they collated the process, the re-enactments, and the public responses: “The #KU_WWI Twitter Project never intended on being a strictly historical representation or chronological timeline of the events that occurred in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. . . it was intended to be a social media performance piece that might inspire followers to learn more about World War I history.” In this approach, the historical personages are more clearly interpreted as characters, drawing on a multitude of sources—and some dramatic flair on the part of the tweeters— to make them come alive as fully-fledged people, whose every utterance isn’t part of the official record. There’s also a dash of what it might have been like, or how it could have happened, tweeted alongside how it really was. The KU tweeters took a bit of artistic license in a Twitter “staging” of the opening chapter of The Good Soldier Švejk, the satirical novel about Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy published in 1923. Although Svejk and his cleaning lady Mrs. Muller are fictional, they can interact on Twitter as fully as the historical figures. For the reasons stated above, some of the tweets have an informal and jaunty approach mildly akin to Comedy Central’s “Drunk History,” wherein the assassins are baffled by the logistics of setting off their bombs, and the Archduke arrives to hear the uninformed mayor’s speech welcoming him and blurts out “@SarajevoMayor Are you kidding me?!! ‘I come here as your guest and your people greet me with bombs!’” Even the car the Archduke rode in that fatal day was given an account, @luckystift1911. In a way, the messiness and seemingly random inclusions of minor characters and primary sources helps convey the fractal confusion of the events in the summer of 1914.

Breaking News, 50 Years Later



Another re-enactment strategy was played out last summer by Kat

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Chow and other writers from NPR’s Code Switch, who faithfully tweeted @todayin1963 to reflect on events from that tumultuous summer through the end of the year. Unlike the WWI re-enactments, @todayin1963 wasn’t a direct dramatization; there were no in-character tweets or conversations. The feed drew on media sources from the time to attempt to paint a picture of the year that, with hindsight, could show both the highs and lows, documenting well-known events alongside those that were overlooked or forgotten as well as poignant cultural snapshots of the time. (Chow noted in an interview her surprise in coming across a small report of the death of C.S. Lewis earlier the same day as the Kennedy assassination, which she included in the feed.) Some days, this would result in just a few tweets, and on other days—most notably August 28, the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, and again on November 22, the day of the assassination of President Kennedy—the Twitter feed provided moment by moment documentation of these events. In the case of the March, this provided not only a vivid timeline punctuated by transcripts and clips of the speakers and singers but details of the bus schedules and the boxed lunches. In a sense, @todayin1963 was more like a journalist with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, accessing huge amounts of material in order to form a narrative—although as JoElla Straley, one of the NPR librarians who curated the Twitter feed observed, their modern social media narrative itself is shaped by what was neglected and overlooked fifty years earlier. In all these re-enactments and recreations, we come over and over again to the idea of “real-time.” Traditionally, this has described a narrative form that tries to eschew the comfortable time passage conventions of storytelling—fast-forwarding through the dull bits, lingering on a pivotal moment of heartbreak. Often it can seem almost like a gimmick, a meta-joke that calls our attention to the form as well as the content. When it comes to the much-maligned cable news cycles, the media is regularly disparaged for its painful and embarrassing attempts to fill perpetual airtime in a world where news still comes in bumps and blasts followed by long periods of dread and doubt: say what you may about the dignity of Archduke Franz Ferdinand tweeting a century after his death, it’s still better than watching CNN anchors speculate on air whether a black hole or “supernatural forces” were responsible for the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370. But Twitter, in those 140-character keystrokes from the past, may be doing something more. “History never looks like history when you are living through it,” John Gardner said. There’s something oddly affecting about these Twitter feeds, the flashpoint moments of the past mixing in a sea of hashtags about celebrity faux-pas, evocative one-word placeholders for breaking news, and waybackwednesdays. #livingthroughhistory? It can’t hurt to check. 43

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Unreachable, Lost in Canoe Creek by A.M. Feathers over the lip of a cliff a dogwood juts out like a two-finger peace sign rooted in the dirt, with space just open enough to cradle the width of my shoulders & closed on an angle flush with my legs lying out over the lake watching osprey make their rounds, polarized eyes locked on to ripe pickerel too meaty to fly away with or forget about the hills clear their collective throat & a warm wind plays on the brown cuffs of the water, a newt buries himself in the mud at the motion & my phone vibrates, to tell me about an acquaintance’s great new recipe for low-fat cupcakes

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Pirated Love Poem by A.M. Feathers you’re my illegal download. that bite by bite bar filling up with each decimal percentage point of you that i sneak listens to until i finally Get the whole hit song. actually fuck it. you’re the full program. you are so, so, software; my vuze, my torrentz my limeWire-napster-girl my all-access pass to the sounds Our parents only dreamt about at Our age. you hit my spotify. i Get lost in yourtube when you search me so fast baby even a russian balalaika master can’t keep up with you. & the government only wishes they could fine us for the fine seek-and-find things we do. who needs the music industry anyway when our sound flows grows and tangos from our heads Like mango yellow mohawks? what else can we reinvent together? how much longer do we have before time hacks us apart and sues us for all we’ve got: my hard and your drivE?

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Letters from a Lover in the Land Before Texting by A.M. Feathers Looking through the paper held up to the light, adding to the suspense, like pressing your eyes against a deep sheet of ice to see a fossilized heart frozen in a time— the image of their hand, their words laid out in loopy strokes on the page inside, appearing as a friendly face might before an embrace: spotted behind the mob on the opposite side of the bar; clear enough only to say: “ Is that? … It is … ”

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Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 by Ellen Goldstein * I am become death, become the high desert, Jornada del Muerto, four days without water. The sun rose and set again above the McDonald ranch. All that remained was a crater of radioactive glass. * Men swept dust from the northeast bedroom until the floorboards were naked in the light. A clean room, awaiting the union two halves of the plutonium core General Groves took in his hands, fruit of a terrible labor, and they were warm. * For I, except you enthrall me never shall be free. Now we’re all sons of bitches.

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MICROSOFT EXCEL by Jennele Clausen His wife no longer kissed him at the door. Outside the nine-to-five routine, he wished the laptop’s System Restore could downgrade to life six months ago, when bills and postcards sent by friends abroad still fit in spreadsheet cells, even if the formula yielded what he thought was mid-life crisis, the need for change, the extra variable in woman’s shape. He ached from long nights spent at the kitchen table hunched in LCD glow, adjusting accounts so he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa. In his cubicle, uploading workbook files to the ancient work computer caused an error, revealed a “minor loss of fidelity.” Oh, that clicking “Continue” could delete it all.

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BINARY DEPOSIT 2014 5.8125” x 2.34375” German gold leaf, $2 bill John Gosslee

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Robot, Friend 2014 5.8125” x 2.34375” German gold leaf, $5 bill, $10 bill John Gosslee

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The Student, 2012, 105cm high x 41 x 33cm, Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, books, Patricia Piccinini 51

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The Coup, 2012, 116cm high x 60 x 55cm, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, taxidermied parrot, Patricia Piccinini CARBON CULTURE

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The Carrier, 2012, 170cm high x 115 x 75, silicone, fibreglass, human and animal hair, Patricia Piccinini 53

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Undivided 2004 74cm high x 101 x 127cm Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, flannelette, mixed medium Patricia Piccinini

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James (Sitting) 2006 57 x 77cm Graphite on paper Patricia Piccinini

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Alice 2005 57 x 77cm Graphite on paper Patricia Piccinini

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Alien Planet by Ellen Goldstein The planet whips around its sun in just 18 hours. Oil rivers wind in great greasy curves, gas seeps through the rocks a dry cascade, too much heat for water to exist. A shell of diamonds shields the planet’s core. The Earth is made of granite and water, like New England. A meteor punching the Earth can leave diamonds instead of bruises. Helping you do it right says the diamond advertisement, a punch in the face, as if a person might stop loving you for buying the wrong shape of latticed carbon. On our second date, he handed me a stone, smooth and cold from the ocean. I never wanted to get married, that hard white shine of domesticity, like my mother’s kitchen clean and quiet at the end of the day, but I took that stone and let it warm in my hand. The ring I wear is gold and my garden is messy, spitting out granite in distaste. Who are you to think you can walk here?

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The Cyborg and The Soul: anticipating the future of Bioethics and Intercultural Friction by Alyssa Watson

Our society is polarized over the definition of what it means to be human. For this reason, it is short-sighted to write off fiction merely as trivial entertainment, especially stories involving the hybridization of man: the cyborg. These stories, in science fiction as in popular culture, are a means by which our society attempts to work out what defines ‘being human’ and the social, judicial, and moral dilemmas that come with that definition. The bioethics proposed in Masamune Shirow’s manga, Ghost in the Shell, and C.L. Moore’s story, No Woman Born, not only grapple with the meaning of humanness, but underscore the potential intercultural dilemmas that can arise between two societies that come up with differing, and even somewhat contradictory, definitions. Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell reflects an eastern Buddhist conception of the body, soul, and prosthetics, whereas Moore’s story reflects influences from a Western-Catholic model. Cyborg stories often mirror our current social divisions through the motif of the anti-group. The name of this anti-group changes from fictional world to fictional world, but what remains constant is its general opposition to allowing technology to change or destroy an individual’s humanity. They were called the “Anti-Augments” in the cyberpunk videogame, Deus Ex, and the “robot-biased” in Isaac Asimov’s short stories, I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, and Caves of Steel. In a series of Star Wars books, The New Jedi Order Series, the anti-cyborg group is an entire race of aliens called the Yuuzhan Vong, who find the idea of mechanical arms and prosthetics to be the deepest form of profanity and disgrace a human being could undergo. The problem with these anti-groups is that they are often the extreme invention of writers whose viewpoints are determined by their cultural background. Yet in order to have a constructive dialogue in any society, it is vital that each side understand one anther’s viewpoints as best they can. In a world in which different social, political, and religious beliefs yield diverse ideologies surrounding the issue of bioethics and technology—specifically, different ideas about what would and would not be permissible to do to a human body—there is enormous potential for cultural conflict. Comparing cyborg stories from around the world can highlight these cultural contrasts and yield a better understanding of the possible alliances and oppositions that could arise in a future world altered by technology in ways we have yet to see. This article will be the first in a series that compares and contrasts cyborg stories from different parts of the globe. Of course, American author Moore and Japanese manga artist Shirow do not, in their respective works, represent views that are necessarily typical of US or Japanese culture. In CARBON CULTURE

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fact, it would be just as plausible for citizens of either country to adopt other attitudes toward these issues than those presented in the works. Ghost in the Shell was first written as a manga (a Japanese comic book). The manga and subsequent two-season-long animated TV show, as well as two full-length animated films, follow the adventures of the fictional Japanese anti-terrorism unit, Section 9, in a future where cyborgization has become an accepted part of daily life. The only people we see who do not have any cyborg implants are society’s most poor and disenfranchised. In fact, one character, Togusa, has only the most basic implants, and consequently, is often teased by his coworkers, who say that he would be better at his job if he accepted more upgrades. However, few characters are as cyborized as the head of the unit. Kusanagi, Matoko, or “The Major,” as her compatriots call her, suffered traumatic injuries in a plane crash when she was young. To save her from a paralyzed and comatose existence, doctors cyborized her brain into a fully robotic body. The exact science of how they did this remains vague and, fortunately, free of techno-babble in the story. However, the assumption seems to be that since the electrical patterns of her brain were uninterrupted and active during the exchange, she is considered alive and mentally undamaged. Despite her similarities to robots and artificially intelligent beings (AI), she is still considered a human being with a soul, or “ghost.” At the end of the first movie, written by Kazunori Ito and directed by Mamoru Oshii, The Major chooses to merge her ghost with that of an AI, thus creating a whole new being. Unfortunately, this birth is like that of squids whose parents die shortly after their child’s birth. Both The Major’s life and the life of the disembodied AI end in their act of procreation. The resulting child shares pieces of the ghost of each but is itself a completely autonomous being—a post-human being. Ghost in the Shell echoes some aspects of Buddhist philosophy. In Buddhist philosophy, for example, a body is a shell that a soul passes through each reincarnation cycle. The body itself does not drastically affect the eternal nature or health of the soul, though the soul does affect the health and nature of the body into which it is reincarnated. Ghost in the Shell makes this relationship physical. At one point, injured in the line of duty, The Major chooses a new prosthetic body for her mind to be placed into, though in this case it is her choice—rather than karma, which in Buddhism determines the next physical shell in line—that chooses the nature of her new body. According to the language used by Thubten Chodron, author of Buddhism for Beginners, Interfaith Insights, and many other books on Buddhist philosophy, “the brain is a physical organ and is atomic in nature. The mind is formless and is characterized by clarity and awareness.” She uses the word “brain” to refer to the physical organ in the body, while the word “mind” denotes the idea of the soul. While the brain and mind affect 59

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each other on many levels, in Buddhist philosophy, the brain (or body only) “provides the physical support for our sense consciousness, and gross mental consciousness.” The parts of the mind/soul that continue on after death are independent of the body. Chodron characterizes this part of the soul as “subtler levels of the mind that, according to Buddhism, do not rely on the physical body as a support. The subtlest mind, which continues on to the next life, is an example.” This makes the idea of a cybernetic body or even the idea of an AI having a soul easily compatible with Buddhism. “When asked whether computers could ever have consciousness, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama responded that if at some point computers had the ability to act as a physical support for consciousness and if a person had created the karma to be reborn inside one, then a computer could become a sentient being!” (Chodron 56). However, the way that cyborgs in Ghost in the Shell treat their bodies as replaceable and inconsequential goes beyond what Buddhism advocates for the body. When Kusanagi, Matoko is shot, she is unfazed by the damage done to her body. In one part of the story, she voluntarily rips open a tank hatch to catch a criminal, even though doing so also tears her shoulders from her sockets. The scene is gory, in a nontraditional sense—sparks and frayed wires take the place of blood and ripped tendons—yet The Major assigns little importance to a body she can repair and improve in this life. This is where Ghost in the Shell breaks with its Buddhist influence. In an interview discussing professional healthcare and Buddhism, Richard Johnson, RN, a teacher of meditation at and a member of the Sangha Council of Ontario Buddhist Ministry, made it clear that a flippant attitude toward the body, as in Ghost in the Shell, falls outside current Buddhist bioethics. “Buddhists believe that the body, which is a temporary shell for the spirit, should be treated with great respect and care so the mind can concentrate on pursuing enlightenment.” If a culture or country were to adopt Masamune Shirow’s interpretation of what it means to be human—in other words, the persistence of the soul (the “mind,” or the “ghost”) regardless of its physical container—they would likely accept cyborgization into the everyday lives, and bodies, of their citizens. Like the civilization in Ghost in the Shell, if people were convinced that cyborgization could occur without drastic changes to the brain, they may not find the notion ethically problematic. C.L. Moore’s No Woman Born presents a slightly more guarded attitude toward cyborgization. The story begins when Deirdre, a world-famous dancer, is badly injured in a fire. Like The Major in Ghost in the Shell, Deirdre’s preserved brain is encased in an artificial body. The story begins when her friend Harris goes to meet the new Deirdre and is taken aside by Dr. Maltzer, who designed Deirdre’s prosthetic body. He confides to Harris that he fears he has done her an injury worse than death—that he has made CARBON CULTURE

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her into another Frankenstein, a sub-human doomed to be despised and rejected by the human race. He worries that because she has gone through so much trauma, Deirdre will be pushed over the brink into madness when she fully realizes how alienated she is from humanity. But it is Maltzer’s mind that is on the brink of insanity. Eventually his fears overwhelm him and, in the last scene he attempts to throw himself from a skyscraper to avoid having to see Deirdre suffer a doom he feels responsible for. At the last moment, Deirdre reveals superhuman strength and speed as she runs to catch Maltzer and carry him effortlessly across the room safely away from the window. Deirdre then speaks openly about what she thinks she has become and whether or not she has lost her humanity, saying, “I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy–too easy….” Yet even as she affirms that she retains her humanity, she admits that losing it is also a possibility. When she speaks these words at the end of the story, her distress is evident, but so is her acceptance. She tells her friends that she wants to return to theater and dancing precisely because she hopes that art will keep her in touch with humanity. However, she is not entirely optimistic about the change she has undergone, and certainly doesn’t seem to wish her state of being on anyone else. Deirdre admits to Dr. Maltzer and Harris that, “I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation half way between flesh and metal. Something accidental and… and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end” (Moore 32). In using the words “mutation” and “a wrong course of evolution,” Deirdre is clearly of the opinion that if the soul does exist, hers has suffered harm and may suffer more as a direct effect of her cyborgization. Foreseeing the possible loss of her humanity, Deirdre confesses, “I’ll change…I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change—That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” Yet even though Deirdre did not choose to be injured in the fire that consumed her body, or to be made into a cyborg, she does not speak as a victim. Her sense of responsibility for her own soul, her own humanity, remains intact. This becomes evident when she contemplates jumping out of the skyscraper window herself—a literal fall to prevent her own spiritual fall—but she is stopped by simple human curiosity. “She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. The wind whined around its edge. ‘I could put a stop to it now if I wanted,’ she said. ‘If I wanted. But I can’t really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though…I do wonder—’… ‘I wonder,’ she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.” (pg. 33) That Deirdre’s curiosity is so quickly juxtaposed with the foreboding “taint of metal” suggests that her inquisitiveness is not unlike that of 61

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the Hellenic myth of Pandora, whose own curiosity drove her to open the forbidden box, letting loose famine and plague and all the evils of the world. At the same time, the text does not demonize her choice, suggesting that curiosity and the drive to explore existence—even an inhuman, cybernetic existence—are an indelible part of what makes us human. While No Woman Born does not condemn cyborgization outright, its approach to this subject is much more wary than the attitude presented in Ghost in the Shell. In the latter, the body is a tool humanity can use and alter as needed with very little moral danger as long as the brain remains untouched. However, No Woman Born holds onto the possibility that just as Deirdre’s mind could impress her humanity and personality upon her metal body, the robotic body itself could likewise erode her humanity. After Deirdre explains to Harris that she still is mortal—a fact she is grateful for because “she could still feel that this exile in metal was only temporary in spite of everything”—the narrative suddenly breaks from Harris’ viewpoint to the narration of an omniscient future voice, which says, “(And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity, as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that at the time).” This attitude toward cyborgization is not unlike the Catholic Church’s views with regard to bioethics: that a human person is both a body and a soul, and that the way the body is used and the distinct sensory input received can affect the moral character of the soul. For example, the Catholic Church defines euthanasia as murder. While it acknowledges that euthanasia can be motivated by good intentions, it believes the very act of destroying a body in this way implies that avoiding pain is more important than human life. This relationship between body and soul is best expressed in a summation of Catholic theology, in the following Catechism: The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body, i.e. it is because of its spiritual soul that a body made of matter becomes a living human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united but rather their union forms a single nature.

Deirdre worries that by existing in a machine body that gives her such great power, she could potentially forget the experience of being fully human, and thus lose her empathy for humanity. By losing her body, she may have lost an irreplaceable part of her nature. In a society adhering to the same assumptions as those in No Woman Born, cyborgization is likely to be met with much more resistance than in a society that accepts the views presented in Ghost in the Shell. This could lead the Ghost in the Shell-influenced society to see the No WomCARBON CULTURE

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an Born-influenced society as too conservative and perhaps prejudiced against cyborgs. The No Woman Born society, on the other hand, might simply see itself as cautious, analytical, and protective of human nature. Even if cyborgization were to be eventually accepted in a culture similar to that in No Woman Born, tolerance would more likely occur for those who, like Deirdre, have suffered grave injuries. Cyborgization would be less likely to be accepted as an option for any individual without extenuating circumstances. Furthermore, these cyborgs may be perceived as something other than human, while a society similar to that in Ghost in the Shell may be disinclined to use such a label. This could strain relations between the two cultures as the latter society’s commerce becomes increasingly involved in cybernetic platforms, treating the upgrading of human parts to cybernetic ones like any other technological update. This could even cause a reactionary movement in the opposing society and push them toward prejudice or to favor the biological in both culture and industry. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that differences in worldviews—even with regard to something as fundamental and yet complex as the definition of what it means to be human—need not lead to violence. Anticipating the possible challenges to cultural alliances in the bioethics debate—by means of, for example, representations of multicultural bioethics in cyborg literature—could be the key to recognizing potential conflict on the subject and, ultimately, resolving it.

holy frick every entity or concept is made up of smaller entities or concepts by Philip Gordon

in a picture of the earth from space you can literally see like two-million people doing it. the significance of any action seen from high altitude can be equal to or less than that same action transcribed onto a piece of paper. imagine a method of interacting with other people in which your exchange of sociological data was recorded permanently on your body, like a facebook post etched into your skin. now you need to make every conversation count. now you need to kiss a lot of people. now your body is made up of a billion cadbury mini-eggs, and these are the particles through which we define existence. now, when i kiss you, i will taste chocolate more than usual. 63

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chocolate-coated longing by Philip Gordon there are few environments less conducive to romantic thinking than an overcrowded coffee shop. i wonder what shakespeare would have thought of gangsta rap? Will was a real G. i wonder if i should dedicate a rap album to the moon? does the moon think about me when i sleep? does the calligraphy of a question mark convey anything its function doesn’t? this question re: life? what is the threshold of facebook likes for personal validation? i would like for every kiss to be an unusual punctuation mark. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ heavy makeouts. drop the mic after mackin’ (out[in]out). throw a bucket of flowers into the crowd after spittin’ some ill verse (verbs). kissing you after everything. i tried to stop writing about you, but i speak with my pen, and my mouth misses your face, and my misses your you.

at least they were nice and put it right on the bag like that by Philip Gordon label on a bag of hot-dog flavoured potato chips: warning: this product contains carbon (and a universe in which regret exists)

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Robots and Microscopic Buckets by Sonya Groves No more babies for me not at forty-three. The tentacled iron monster took my earthly power. Its robotic fingers probed four punctured holes – grabbing, cutting, slicing, pulling my cradle into offal. After the monster is sated and the incubator removed, where do my eggs go? Nothing to catch my genetic deposit each month. I have dreams that the gods left microscopic buckets to catch my existence tethered by cauterized veins. Little sacks filled with me, harvested each year for testing.

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Cell Phones and Leashes by Sonya Groves

Last night I kidnapped two people. I keep them at my house in cages bound not by cuffs, tape, zip-ties, or rope, but by their cell phones. They made me kidnap them, their incessant jabbering in a line at Krispy Kreme. They gave their order between conversation lulls, held the line longer than necessary. So, I snatched their phones and ran simply enough, they followed, their jaws open gobsmacked with surprise. At first they chased as though I were a common thief, screaming like medieval fishwives, but then it hit me. I was not a thief, but a purveyor of peace. I stopped. I threatened to smash their phones. The chase turned into begging and these two People turned into poodles. They began to whine to nudge their heads against my legs – disgusted, I returned The phones, placed them in their mouths, but canines did not return to humans and I realized that these dogs were mine. Home we went, no leashes needed just the techno pop ring tone to bring them to heel.

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Clean Water Technologies Today by Molly Bradley

As you read this, there’s something huge happening in the world of clean water technology—literally huge: A seawater desalination plant is in development by Carlsbad Beach in San Diego, California. It will be the largest of its kind in the Western hemisphere, capable of producing 50 million gallons of clean water per day. It’s not the first attempt at large-scale desalination—the process of rendering saltwater clean and safe for drinking. A seawater desalination plant in Singapore has been toying with biomimicry for a number of years, attempting to artificially emulate the conditions that certain underwater plants and fish create in order to efficiently extract seawater. Progress in this domain would revolutionize clean water movements, making reliable resources of water a real possibility for far more people than any other single invention likely could. The tricky part is the energy cost: desalination consumes a huge amount of energy. Energy consumption can, in theory, be as low as 3 kWh/m 3, but it’s a hefty cost compared to what it takes to purify supplies of freshwater, which can be as low as 0.2 kWh/m 3. Needless to say, projects of this scale require a huge amount of resources and, of course, funding. That said, there are a number of brilliant technological innovations in the production of potable water that require fewer resources, and that are moving along with surprising swiftness. One in particular is as simple as the sleek white wind turbines that have surfaced in the past decade or so, which look sparse and unobtrusive even on farms that contain up to fifty of them—but this new technology won’t really alter the landscape at all. What’s happening is that billboards—simple highway billboards, the same ones that advertise products, events, et cetera along the side of the road— now have the capacity to provide clean, drinkable water twenty-four hours a day.

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The University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC) is the pioneer behind this design. They developed a billboard that can convert air into potable water around its capital, and largest city, Lima. The billboards house a mechanism that condenses atmospheric moisture as a water source. These mechanisms filter the outside air with the use of antistatic agents, activated carbon, and other minerals. The filtered air undergoes reverse osmosis and is released into a collection tank. Here, the water’s purity is maintained by UV lamps, and is the tank from which clean water is ultimately released to thirsty citizens at the bottom of the billboard’s pole.

One of the particularly clever things about the technology is its self-mediation via sensors and ability to be regulated remotely. The tank in which the purified water is stored has a valve that releases water as needed into the collector tank. Sensors in that subsequent collector tank keep the water levels stable, so that there is neither an excess of water nor a shortage at any given time, depending on the water output. The sensors send information wirelessly about water levels to another control center, which is able to analyze the patterns of the water levels over time. Once the mechanisms and technology are in place in the billboard, everything can be controlled and assessed remotely. Another unique thing about this particular technology in terms of aesthetics is its potential to act as a source of information, advertisement, or even art, on view for an ample audience. The billboards, as pictured, currently provide a description of how they work, but there’s a wide array of possibilities in terms of what could be displayed on the billboards: Lima could take advantage of their prominence to display information about local events, city initiatives, and even to give the city’s arts and culture more CARBON CULTURE

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exposure. The neighborhood of Barranco alone—an area the New York Times compared, in its “36 Hours” series, to Greenwich Village—is home to fourteen art galleries. The billboards could be an excellent way of announcing installments or featuring budding contemporary artists. A number of other inventions have been in development in the realm of clean water, and the minds behind them are taking steps toward making their designs affordable, accessible realities for countries and communities that don’t have reliable access to safe water sources. For example, Hadi Ghasemi of the University of Houston is working on making the process of desalination and sterilization of water more efficient, thus making it another realistic way for people to access potable water. The process sounds much simpler than it is: evaporating saltwater (say, from the sea) and capturing the steam, now rid of its salt, to condense back into water. Ghasemi and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a way to make efficient use of solar energy—and, a sort of “sponge” made of graphite, as from the lead of a pencil—in order to speed the process up by heating up only concentrated spots in the target water, rather than having to bring all of the water to the point of evaporation to begin to obtain steam. A more immediate fix for rendering freshwater safe to drink is the “LifeStraw,” created by Vestergaard Frandsen, which is a portable little tool that a person can use to render a small source of water safe to drink, as it strips the water of 99.9% of bacteria. The advantages of the LifeStraw are its portability (at a weight of 2oz, even children can handle them themselves), its affordability (they cost $5 each to manufacture), and each one is effective for about a year. It’s a quick fix, but a good one. The inventor of the Segway—the two-wheeled, self-balancing upright vehicle—has spent the past decade developing another brilliant invention, and an enormously resourceful one at that, when it comes to communities in which access to both clean water and power is problematic. Dean Kamen first unveiled the SlingShot, a machine that can purify water powered by a generator that runs on cow dung, in 2004 (when he apparently purified—and drank—his own urine). Kamen’s invention also works 69

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by means of vapor compression distillation. The machine was test-run in a village in Bangladesh for six months in 2005. It’s not a particularly affordable solution at the moment, but developers are shooting for a more manageable production cost of about $2,000. We’re a long way away from making clean water a reality for everyone, but we are certainly optimistic about current and future prospects in design and technology that are working to solve important issues around the globe—not to mention merging those issues with the art and literary world, as a way of bringing them to a wider audience and into a more immediate public awareness. Images provided by UTEC.

Black box warning by Kate Kernan

I wanna write poetry like Freud weave spells shit deep from id for the modern American who drunk the punch of Honey Boo-boo to shake them catatonic from their TVs realities and offer them a black box warning. Life —and this poetry— is associated with serious risk of but not limited to the following: Death, War, Cancer, Motor Vehicle Collision, Cocaine addiction, Eviction, Lack of Conviction, First, Second and Third Marriages, Polygamy, Pain, Plague, Pessimism, Unprotected Sex in Cars, Atheism, Homicide, Fratricide, Suicide, Ring Dings, Happy Meals, Cannibalism, and Spontaneous Human Combustion. Leave to the psychiatrist their boxes, their relentless obsession with sex and of naming. CARBON CULTURE

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My Girlfriend at the Time by William Fatzinger Jr.

It was snowing on Grape Street and we were laughing and burying the needle in an enormous wine-colored car, sliding over crazy panes of black ice. The vehicle (Chevy Lumina, if memory serves?) had been sitting unaccompanied in the 7-Eleven parking lot. And the place was lit up like a crime scene, but nobody expects car thieves to be so bold, I suppose. Element of surprise, and so on. She was driving, laughing. I was playing with the tape deck. The glove box was full of hilarious old crooner tapes. What dumb music! We did an accidental donut in the middle of the road. Whooops! She had a great, melodious laugh. When I met her, she was on a big “car stealing” jag, which, for me, was a massive turn-on. She was unlike Patty, my previous girlfriend. Patty had no sense of humor! So obsessed with grades. Practically abandoned me when her acceptance letter from Bryn Mawr arrived. Her and her goddamn big plans and her dumb vision-board of magazine cutouts and “realistic aspirations” written in colored pencil. At the start of winter break she said she that we “needed to talk” and that she “had been doing some thinking” and blah blah blah. I said, “Burn in Hell you heartless succubus!” and broke a window in her parents house and stole an important African drum from her father’s study and threw it (the drum) into Lake Wallenpaupack. Patty, God. When I think of her I feel, like, a “too much gravity” feeling? Like, heavy air? That kind of thing. She was too smart. Impossible-to-beat SAT score. A vapid joke of a person, I realized almost immediately. Was she “evil” per se? Yes, sure. But I wasn’t really regarding Patty much at all anymore, least of all then in the stolen Lumina on Grape Street in the snow, speeding out of control as my new girlfriend and I were huffing whip-hits, laughing and laughing and flipping off pedestrians. Speeding and swerving and eating gummy worms and spray-painting pentagrams on whatever. She put down the driver-side window, frigid gusts rushing into the car as she lobbed a wadded web of therapeutic back-beads into the black screaming cold. They caromed off a yellow street sign and fell into a ditch. On we went, blasting old crooner tapes and cracking up hard. We parked in an elementary school parking lot and climbed aboard a vacant jungle gym. I didn’t go to that elementary school but I noticed the jungle gym had an identical layout to the jungle gym of my alma mater. The fireman pole, the rope ladder, the big steering wheel connected to nothing. I watched her run, thinking, to be honest: sex, sex, sex. But, like, respectfully? 71

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We’d met only one week earlier. She was playing the role of Ruth in our community college drama department’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Electric and thrilling and strange. Never seen anything like it. “This is my boyfriend,” she’d said to some fellow cast members and stagehands at the after-party, putting an arm around me. I was like, Well alright then! Presently, she slid down a sliding board, flipping the bird with each hand and saying, “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” which is from Blue Velvet. She then took out a medium-sized hunting knife and carved her own name and social security number into the red plastic sliding board. “Why do you hate me?” she asked. “What?” I said. “I think we should have sex right away,” she said. “WHAT?” I said. She began to whistle a familiar song and to scale the jungle gym rope ladder with astonishing speed. I couldn’t place the song but felt dumb asking. I should’ve known it. She had put away the hunting knife and was now brandishing a small pair of safety scissors, occasionally cutting small chunks of her own hair with abandon. We should have sex, she’d said. Was this meant to intimidate me? I decided I had better change the subject ASAP. “What should we do tonight?” I asked. “Crash a party,” she said, spitting on the cushy AstroTurf below. “Haha,” I said. “Take my purse,” she said, tossing it. “This is heavy. What’s in here, like, several bricks?” “A hand grenade,” she said. “Hahaha,” I said. At the time, she was also on a big “Dramatic Exercise” kick. This meant portraying made-up, improvised characters in public places where people have no idea they are watching a play. Like, for instance, earlier that day we were at the Whitehall Mall when, apropos of nothing, she portrayed an out of control, escaped robot and bit the leg of the guy who ran the Piercing Pagoda. I was like, Wow, what a woman, etc. “Beep-boop! Beep-boop!” she said. “Ahh! Let go of my ear! Help!” said the guy. 7pm. We drove around Bushkill Township. This was a real neighborhoody type of neighborhood. No trash or rusted cars in tall grass. No felled sheds or abandoned shopping carts. New pavement, here. New houses, far and wide. Winterized pools. She lodged the Lumina harshly in a ditch. “You got AAA?” I said. CARBON CULTURE

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“Haha,” she said, getting out, leaving the door open. Keys in the ignition, the car made the bing-bing-bing sound. I followed, feeling stupid somehow. Bing-bing-bing went the car. All the houses were dark but one. Rows of cars, evidence of a crazy party. Nice cars. A high school party, it looked like. We heard the dull, underwater sound of loud music far away. “You know these kids?” I said. “I was reading Facebook. Eavesdropping, really. Mark Luzader’s parents are on a Carnival Cruise, so, thus, behold this wild fucking bash we see before us. In this exercise, my name will be Cara Cromby, the high school’s outcast misfit who is constantly e-bullied and bully-bullied by everyone.” “Mmm,” I said. “But, so, these people. You don’t know them?” “Cara has been invited to this party as a prank,” she said, “The bullies have told Cara the wrong location, giving her the street address of the abandoned state hospital as a joke. But Cara is resourceful and found the correct address using deft computer knowledge. She is coming here to show them all. Once and for all. These popular bastards.” “Who will I be?” I said. “Nobody in particular. Maybe give me feedback?” She handed me a small pad of green and white paper. Weird ledger paper. Spots for debit, credit. “Okay,” I said. Inside was an eye-rolling cartoon of debauchery. Grinding music, weed stink, huddled kids crushing and snorting Adderall. Classic ocean of bobbing red plastic cups. Casual exhibitionist lesbianism goaded on by fathead bro dudes. These popular bastards, I thought. Studio portraits of Grandma and Grandpa Luzader on the wall. An elegant urn of combined ashes on a wooden hutch. Here, a ship in a bottle. There, a framed jigsaw puzzle of a painting of a cottage. She took the purse from my hand and strode through the crowd, disappearing. I gathered that she then punched or kicked or doled some form of karate upon the music source, because the song quickly stopped. This development put the brakes on the whole party, relinquishing the floor to this evening’s production of Cara Cromby’s Final Revenge Soliloquy. The party watched her, rapt, saying nothing. “You people…” she began, nearly breaking down, “You laughed at me for lo these many years. Oh, the bleak parade you hath wrought!” Muttering from the crowd. Who is this lady? Does she even go to our school? Go to our school? She’s like 35! 73

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I noted these comments in my feedback log, wording the age issue as delicately as I could. “You don’t even remember me, do you?” she said, pulling a real-looking hand grenade out of her purse. Drama Department prop room, surely. “My… name… is… Cara… Cromby!” People froze, confused but not terrified at the sight of the weapon. Who among them had ever seen a real hand grenade? Who among them could mentally equate its shape with its grave purpose? A gun would have been more striking, it occurred to me. A large knife or a sword, even. A hatchet. I wrote this in my feedback as she pulled the pin. “Arrhhhhhh!” she said, sounding beast-like as she threw the grenade (with surprising, beast-like strength!) through the closed bay window. It crashed through the glass and sailed into the winterized pool, kerplunking into the black tarp. The party looked at itself. Silence. Then an explosion. Hot and loud and real, heralding debris and ringing deafness. She took my hand and we ran through a laundry room, out a backdoor, over snow, over a frozen pond, through a farm field, into dark woods. Hand in hand, running, laughing, screaming at the moon. If Patty could see me now! Bold, alive, and not thinking of her! Aha! Haha! Ha!

Invasion by Nels Hanson Where did they all come from? Who sent them here? And why instantly, no warning, invisible to radar and satellite, filling sky with clouds of arriving wings and folded wings on ground and every empty perch? Cypresses bled pale, asphalt roads, pitched green roofs blazing color of a bleached sheet? Secret weapon of our old enemy? The more that come the more we kill the more coming and we no longer fire, both armies stalled, gun muzzles clogged by invading CARBON CULTURE

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feathers as jet fighters and rockets suffocate, fall back in self-assault. Everywhere doves, doves cooing, deafening now, louder each hour, hurricanes of doves turning black night, bright day so white that we retreat to cellars to survive heavy pairs of gathered three-toed feet like smart bombs pounding Earth that’s occupied without space to stand. What do they want? When will they leave us, so all ripe fields and cities return, uncovered finally by watching snow? They call, keep calling, beat air to a million drums, spreading now, wings hovering like suspended flakes, and eyes, the eyes staring, this white sky of pink stars.

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Voices

by Nels Hanson

Faulkner said “the voices” spoke to him his many unhappy books. To invent radio and alternating current, remote control, Tesla received messages from Mars. The German chemist August Kekule dreamed a snake biting its tail and discovered the benzene ring. Self-taught Ramanujan, Indian master of analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions, learned from his family’s goddess. When he saw blood drops, her consort’s presence, scrolls of calculations unrolled before his sleeping eyes. The wise and logical Socrates listened always to a daimon who advised him only what not to do. Holy messages reoccur. Marching bloody Constantine beheld a cross of light above the sun, the words “In this sign you will conquer” written on the sky in Greek but didn’t understand until in slumber he heard Christ explain he use the Chi Rho to crush his enemies. From blinding white flash a questioner spoke, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” as unborn St. Paul hurried to torment more Christians in Damascus. President George Bush the Younger said he prayed and God told him to invade Iraq. Once I ran at will, so easily with no failing breath smoothest curving path, now rising, descending, rising again, spreading endlessly until I realized I raced along polished branches of a single giant tree. I woke happy and remembered many hours as forever unreal day wore on and on.

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The Underbelly by Ryan Francis Kelly

Last month, a “troubled” fan of mine tried to smother me with a chloroform rag outside of an Aerosmith reunion concert. She was middle-aged and all spare tires. Heavy Windex veins and lightening-bolt stretchmarks on her arms and legs. Clumps of mascara nestled in the crannies of her tear ducts. I still shudder when recalling the look in her eyes, as the security guards dragged her away. Like she wanted to suck my dick until I died. That’s when I knew it was time to quit—when I felt even more washed-up than Aerosmith. “I’m getting too old for this shit!” That’s me, sounding like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. I’m on the phone yelling at my agent, Tristan. Much younger than me. Better looking. Soon to be more than just an agent himself. Tristan tells me to calm down. That I’m not old. That 55 is the new 35, or that age is just a state of mind. Something like that, all sugary and pussyfooted. “Did I mention the look in her eyes, Tristan? Did I mention the look?” Tristan says, yes, I did mention her look. Several times. He tells me we’re having lunch today with Fanning, or Harper, maybe Montana. Some girl from EmpTV-Films whose first name sounds like a last name. I sigh audibly into the phone. I want Tristan to feel the hot hiss of my exhausted breaths. “Fine. But I’m not playing the ‘hot dad’ in any more teenie bopper rom-coms.” Tristan laughs at that. Not ha ha you’re funny, more like ha ha yeah right, you’re delusional. Ha ha you’re pathetic. Ha ha this is just getting sad. Ha ha let’s take what we can get. Not really ha ha at all anymore. The two of us meet the EmpTV-Films girl at a chic restaurant, where you order food on iPads. I loathe the impersonal dragging and scrolling of edamame and caramelized prawns onto my little electronic plate. I’m pretty zombed on percs and vikes during the meeting, so Tristan does most of the talking. My silent affirming nods allow me ample time for several of the restaurant’s Bottomless Bloody Mary’s. Apparently, EmpTV-Films is tickled pink over the idea of an Underbelly anniversary special, a one-hour doc filmed in the original exposé style. It’s part of EmpTV’s 40th Anniversary celebration. As Underbelly’s former host, I take the opportunity to suggest covering the Playboy Mansion, which conjures the same ha ha’s from the phone. Fanning Harper Montana gives me a don’t-be-silly and asks me how I maintain my razor sharp wit. Tristan squeezes my elbow and whispers that I’m really dating myself. Better than dating you, I say, to the whole restaurant. F.H.M. flashes her perfect teeth one more time before refolding the napkin in her lap. 77

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The last thing I remember before my brownout is Tristan sending back my mimosas. * It all started in the middle of college when EmpTV saw my videotape. A skit of my gay friend Carl rummaging through random people’s closets and guessing their sexual orientation based exclusively off wardrobe. It was my idea, but Carl’s acting really sold it. He was normally very mild-mannered, but in this case he lisped his words and gestured flamboyantly to the camera. “Oh my gay,” Carl would say. “All these single earrings with no matches. Dead giveaway. You know what they say, honey: No Pair, Don’t Care! What a dead giveaway. Deader than disco. Deader than a Flock of Seagulls. Deader than headbanging and flannel, baby!” He would go on like that, and I’d stifle laughs from behind a clunky shoulder-mount camcorder. We named the bit Closet Cases, thinking ourselves pretty clever in between wheezy coughs of bong smoke. The tape gathered dust on my dorm room bookshelf for months, until Carl and I took psychedelics and decided to mail it to the EmpTV headquarters in New York. This was right before the cultural mushroom cloud of reality television. Back when EmpTV was still more known for music countdowns than shockumentary shows about octo-moms and billionaire teenage investors. Before programs called My Freaky Roommate’s Twin Sister is the Devil. Before television became addicted to its own bizarre voyeurism. Closet Cases was original for its time, something novel that EmpTV could pounce on and penetrate into submission. We were flown out to New York. They picked it up for a season, and when it did well enough, signed us on for two more. To the mushy cathode minds of Heather HeartPinks and Marty MuscleMilks, it was truly groundbreaking stuff. At first I rode Carl’s coattails, but then he got in trouble for sleeping with some underage coffee-errand twink. There was no hesitation from EmpTV. They asked me to fill his cancelled time slot with my own show two days later. That’s when I officially dropped out of school, and never saw Carl again. Last I heard he was doing lewd voiceovers for a dildo character on a Canadian network’s late-night cartoon series. I pitched a show called The Underbelly, where I would travel around and interview people with alternative lifestyles. People who deviated from the mainstream or purposely vanished from the grid. EmpTV loved it and budgeted me a modest amount of money. A week later, I found myself flanked by stoned cameramen, interviewing some pasty Anna Nicole Smith impersonator. Then it was a fork-tongued reptilian dude completely covered by green tattoos. After that an eccentric old man who did nothing to make money other than recycle his old household products. Okay—so we didn’t get off to a great start. I spent many debauch nights of tequila drinking and coke snorting with bearded ladies and shiftyCARBON CULTURE

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eyed snake charmers. There was the messy business of the LSD, where one of my cameramen geeked out and tried to inhale the sword swallower’s blades. We nearly got cancelled twice, but the show finally picked up after we filmed an hour-long special on a midget porn star. That got people’s attention and pulled us from our early grave. After Cindi Shortstack’s heartfelt story of upright standing fellatio, viewers from all over the country began mailing in their own audition tapes, trying shamelessly to sell EmpTV their personal brand of oddball. Critics railed against Underbelly’s first two seasons, calling it a “cheapened version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” But believe it or not, the ratings soared, securing me a place in the D-List Hall of Fame. It’s been strange growing old and obsolete on screen, broadcasting myself LIVE in decaying color for the whole world to see. I’ve been assaulted by the highpitched squeals and bedazzled talons of fawning high school girls. Met lots of self-aggrandizing jerks and brown-nosing sycophants, but also a few friends. EmpTV even came to my house one time for the show guyPad, just so fans could see my Maserati and the mirror I had installed above my bed. That was 20 years ago. After Underbelly’s ten seasons, EmpTV gave me a position on their executive board for reality programming. Picture a bunch of grown-ass men sitting around a conference table, discussing topics like cameltoe or how to achieve “the jiggle without the wiggle.” I only recall the hazy placation of drugs, as pompous cocktailed suits blasted off one audacious pitch after another. Teens inspecting each other’s rooms with black lights, checking for bodily fluids on bed sheets; contestants being forced to choose between eating live crickets or running across burning coals; parents following their adult children around on awkward first dates; husbands and wives swapping spouses for the weekend; superhero nannies and psychics who whisper to dogs. I signed off on most of these mind-numbers, and hosted probably half as many. Some lasted, some didn’t. All that mattered were profit margins and keeping my hairline in check. * I’m pretty sure it’s Friday when I wake up, but only because that one Cure song is playing on the radio alarm clock. I’m in a motel room, sprawled out on a pristinely made bed. Over the voice of Robert Smith, I hear a blaring car horn, and know that someone must be leaning on the steering wheel. Helluva bender. There are seventeen messages in my voicemail box. I’m working that prunish feeling of hangover, all freeze-dried and cotton mouthed. My insides do the Monster Mash when I roll out of bed. My ravenous pickled stomach churns and starts to eat itself. I’m stilted stiff and waddling about like some recently flipped hourglass, upside-down with tingles of chakra and Qi pouring in the wrong direction. I white-knuckle the coat rack until I’m sure I won’t faint. Then I throw on my giant arachnid sunglasses and peep myself in the mirror. My 79

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bronzed skin hangs around me like a worn leather coat. I wish I could shed it like a copperhead or leave it behind like the crusty shell of a cicada. I have battered to a haggard age well beyond my years. When I frump up my face, I’m reminded of the cobweb wrinkles forming in the creases of my lips and eyelids. The sun is as oppressive as ever, even when I salute it to achieve shade. Florida again, I think. The state that’s shaped like a thumbs-down. EmpTV-Films has sent one of those white vans with no windows. The camera crew and driver are nice enough guys. Hipster soldiers and greasy gearheads. They eat up my one-liners and bum me cigarettes; they’re eager to laugh at anyone who could promote them. I tell them I need to make a pit stop for my “patented hangover cure.” They almost lose it when I emerge from CVS with a bottle of Pedialyte. “Dude,” one of them says. “Isn’t that for, like, babies who won’t stop shitting and puking themselves?” “Bingo,” I say. More cackling and sidesplitting. The kid with the most expensive camera introduces himself as Benji, and tells me we’re heading to Corona, to some community called Eden’s End. Apparently, EmpTV has arranged our access in advance. “Oh,” I say. “So they’re kool-aid drinkers?” I try to recall slivers of the conversation from the restaurant, but the details of my assignment have been lost in the recent fugue of binging. “Not sure,” Benji says. “I was told we needed 90 minutes. Fanning said you’d do the rest. She said you were, uh… consummate.” “Yeah yeah,” I say. “Ninety minutes. Are you sure they can postpone their mass suicide for that long?” The crew is all ha ha again. This is going to be easy, I think, breathing through my nose again. The Pedialyte burps me to a sleepy nap. One of those hollow dreamless sleeps, where your brain is too busy playing catchup to imagine much of anything. I awake later to a shirt collar dampened with drool. There’s a red divot on my nose from snoozing with my sunglasses pressed against the seat. Benji hands me a Kleenex and tells me we’ve made it to Corona. It’s now the middle of the day, and the light casts a hazy aura around everything. Through slanty squinting, I’m able to read the sign in front of us, on the tall iron gate: ~ Eden’s End ~ A Resort of Options The mounted security camera rotates and recognizes us. Its little red light blinks twice, and the whole crew cheers as the gate begins to open. The young bucks in the van toss out their dirtiest hypotheses, about how we must be filming porn stars or fetishists or some other kink. The driver, who has spoken very little, suddenly says he wants to hunt down some cougars, CARBON CULTURE

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and even I have a few guffaws over that. We drive on a long narrow road through acres of mangrove, pine, and palm. After a few miles, I realize that the landscape must be designed for privacy. To keep out voyeurs and peeping creepers. It’s quite a hike into the resort. The van eventually goes quiet. One of the cameramen keeps clearing his throat in the dead air. We finally see signs of civilization. A clearing around the corner of a large bend, then an archway, then tiny identical rectangle houses with screened-in lanais. The condos sprout from the fringe of their golf-green lawns. Immaculately cut grass. Exquisite gardens of exotic flowers, complete with A-frame trellises and marble bird feeders. The chintzier ones covered with porcelain gnomes and plastic flamingos, the swankier with aboveground pools and jacuzzis. At the first four-way stop, the world seems to halt. We’re revving and humming idly when the driver first notices them. “God damn,” he says. “I’ll be fucked sideways.” A family of three—a couple in their 40s and a teenage son—strolls through the crosswalk. They’re completely nude. Unabashedly naked. I’m fairly certain no one in history has ever walked in such an unaffected manner. When they reach the middle of street, we all get a full and clear display of their fleshy gait. An epidermal portrait of digits and glands. Some of their bare features are disproportionate. Bulbous, veiny, and lopsided. A smattering of pubic mounds, bristles, patches, and brillos. Knobby appendages are visibly swinging. It’s all so horribly beautiful, and none of us can look away. “Oh yeah,” I say. “Nudists, that’s right.” “I thought you said kool-aid drinkers,” Benji says. “Same difference,” I say. “Let’s pull over and ask this family for directions.” The family isn’t startled by the van, but they retract violently when they see our cameras. Each of them bolts in a separate direction to hide. The son is spry enough to hop the closest neighborhood fence and disappear from sight, while his mother opts to run across the street and crouch behind a mailbox. The father suffers a gruff coughing fit as he scampers into the shade of a nearby palm. When he’s recovered enough breath, his shiny pale torso wraps back around the tree to yell curses and shake a hamhock fist. “Announce yourselves,” the man says. “Announce yourselves, damn it. With your fucking cameras. This isn’t some free show for you slicked-up perverts. This is a private community. You, with your fucking cameras... you fucking…” I feel bad for this man, so I pull open the van’s sliding door and start to get out. “What are you doing?” Benji asks. “Let’s go find the visitor center.” I ignore him and step out onto the sidewalk. I flip my sunglasses around to the back of my head, and put my hands in the air like a common criminal. Each step I take toward the naked man is gingerly cautious, as if 81

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I were approaching a wild beast in the savannah. “I’m a man from the television,” I say to him. “Name’s Cody McClear. There’s no need to be alarmed. We come in peace.” I’ve taken on the persona of diplomat, addressing these nudists from Neptune as an earthling ambassador. All I can muster is a kind of bouffe. My instincts encourage me to follow rehearsed conventions in these situations. But I eventually realize how intrusive this must be, and start to wonder how often this happens to his family. “Bleck,” the wife says, from behind the mailbox. “Not another talking head from the fiend screen! This’n sounds like he’s got bats in his belfry!” That’s how this woman sounds, like a hillbilly witch from a trailerpark nursery rhyme. She’s squatting naked behind a mailbox, and yet somehow I’m the crazy one. “Excuse us,” I say. “My apologies. We’re supposed to be filming a doc here. But I can assure you I’ve told my men to stop recording. Please, I’m serious. You can check the equipment if you’d like.” I can tell Benji misinterprets my olive branch as trickery. The smirking of his shit-snarfing grin, as if we’re in the midst of capturing pure gold. The red light on his camera never blinks off. He gives me a sly wink and continues filming through the open passenger window. “How do we know we can trust you?” This whiny yell belongs to the son. A cracking pubescent bravado shooting through slits in the fence posts. His question is a good one, though, and has me snagged in my reeling. I cannot say what comes over me exactly, or why I so desperately want them to trust me. Two hours ago, I couldn’t have given fewer fucks, but now it feels like much is at stake. My aimless, desperate longing for something meaningful. The worst part of me has interpreted their nudity as a challenge, a subtle middle finger to my life of hardcore overcompensation. Years of the fisheye lens have eroded my shame and timidity, so I up the ante of negotiation to show these nudists my good intentions. I decide to call their bluff, in the buff. The first thing to go is my pair of sunglasses. I buck them off the back of my head without using my hands, and then shrug out of my blazer. It could almost be a dance, if I was at all provocative and could shake off my arrhythmic Caucasian tautness. Next I peel off my black v-neck and lasso it around my head, before undoing the buckle of my belt. I’ve become so frail during my recent binging that my trousers simply drop to the sidewalk. I slide off my boat shoes and step extra carefully out of my crumpled heap of clothing. My toes grip the concrete through the thin material of my dress socks. I’m aware of the weight of my junk, hanging humid in the banana hammock of my boxer briefs. “Hey wait,” the man says from behind the tree. “You don’t have to do that. My wife and son don’t need to see…” It’s too late, sir,” I say solemnly, like we’ve just crossed the final CARBON CULTURE

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flesh-hold. “This is how it has to be. How can I say I’ve experienced Eden’s End without proper solidarity?” I feel for the man, but his objections seem unwarranted given the circumstances. My sympathy turns instead to the camera crew, who receive a full-moon shot of my peppery cantaloupe ass when I abruptly drop my drawers. As I kick away my boxers, I attempt a subtle shimmy in order to free my sticky parts from the inside of my thighs. It doesn’t really work. My bits and pieces remain smooshed together like a lumpy beanbag. I decide not to bother with the dress socks, which at this point feel like a formality. The tall man sidesteps out from behind the tree. His leggish member wears a broccoli sprout of burnt orange pubes, and hangs like a knotty gym rope. It’s how I imagine a human flagellum would look. He saunters over to me with a bouncing nod and ignores my formal extended handshake. I think he’s taken a liking to me. As I stand level with his nipples, I try not to stare at the satyr’s tuft that decorates the cleave of his chest. “The name’s Stu Fulsome,” he says, and then gives my open hand a paddy-cake series of slaps and snaps, like we’re old friends from a secret guild. The routine ends with him wiggling his fat bowling-pin thumb inside my bellybutton. “What a heckish time in tarnation,” the wife says. Her loose bob of brown hair flits above the rim of the mailbox. “Is this peckerwood in his bubble britches yet?” “Yeck,” the man says, joining her game. “He’s nekkid alright. Better put a kettle on, Carolina. It looks like we got a fourth for game night.” * Stu invites me back to his condo for tea and board games, which sounds downright quaint to an aging hipster schmuck like me. I decide to enjoy a casual stroll with his family in the wet heat. Unfortunately, our single-file march lends me nothing but Stu’s hindquarters. A broad back like canvas, an ass like speckled plaster. “You seem pretty cool, Cody,” Stu says to me, as if he knows I’m peeking at his ass. “You cool, Cody?” When Benji and company start trailing us from the road, Stu glances over his shoulder at the van and hocks up a globby wad of phlegm. When we reach the next intersection, he barks out a football audible. “Quick ace scat,” Stu says. “686 pump f-stop on two.” The family abruptly deviates from its path and cuts through a gap in a row of hedges. I instinctively follow suit and try to keep up. We jog through a courtyard with a checkered pattern of linoleum and buzz-cut Astroturf. I’m suddenly wishing the gods had equipped man with a natural jockstrap. But despite the uncomfortable swinging, I cannot recall the last time I had so much fun. We weave and slalom around the courtyard’s topiary shrub sculptures—squirrels fashioned from bay laurels, elephants spruced from yew and privet, wire-cage chess pieces mummified by tendrils of clove and holly. 83

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The son, Topher, is like a stick of chewing gum on stilts. He hurdles the pawns with ease, but I’m truly amazed when he hops over a bishop. He puts the shoulder-high obstacle behind him with a vertical leap and then hits the ground sprinting. There’s a very narrow clearance between the bishop’s miter and his adolescent gooch. I can’t believe he avoided scraping the wrinkles right off his grundle. Carolina, the wife, keeps pace with her waddling thumps, a dimpled and jiggled tromping. She’s roundish, like a ripe piece of fruit. A pear or mango with juicy bumps and divots, a few noticeable blotches bleeding into the skin. After the courtyard, we end up in a recreation area with outdoor exercise equipment and a tiny endless swimming pool that simulates a downward current. Two paunchy geezers toss horseshoes in a sandbox pit. One of them shouts, “Another ringer.” We temper our run when we pass by a community yoga class, an unflattering display of two-dozen naked sun salutations. I catch glimpses of the swami patrolling between the mats to inspect the students’ tautly drawn sphincters and hoohaws. I’m out of breath by the time we return to the street. Hunched over, panting, trying to huff my way out of a cotton-ball throat. I grab Stu by the wrist, and notice that my hand is too small to wrap around it. Several of his freckles fill the gap between my thumb and forefinger. “I think we’ve lost the van by now,” I say. “Ding ding ding,” Carolina says. “We’ve got ourselves a winner. An all-inclusive romantic getaway in Sandals, Jamaica.” “A lifetime supply of Rice-A-Roni,” Topher says. “A brand new Fiat Bravo,” Stu says. “It doesn’t stop there,” Carolina says. She points to each one of us. “You get a car! You get a car! Everyone gets a car!” “You don’t understand,” I say, as if they really don’t. “They’re my ride. I left my clothes, my phone, my ID. How will they find me?” “Gee,” Topher says. “I guess we kidnapped you.” “Yeah,” Stu says. “Boy, did you put up a fight.” The three of them turn and amble toward a white condo with a steep and narrow roof. Cowboy saloon shutters on the windows, each decorated with red trim and the stencil outline of a rooster. The family steps carefully along the path of lily pad stones leading to the front door, and I hesitate to follow. But when I look down the street, I see no sign of Benji and the gonzo gang. I smile and shrug at the idea of putting life on hold. And then I hop toward the condo without missing a stone. Like a child, I pretend that the grass is molten lava. * To finish The Underbelly by Ryan Kelly visit carbonculturereview.com

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The Island

by Katherine Brabon The plane arrived with dawn. Mai woke to see the silver towers of Tokyo reaching through collars of pink haze. She adjusted her wristwatch and thought of Hikaru, wondered if he had arrived yet. In her left-hand view, she could see the deep navy of night as the plane coasted east. In the other window was sunrise and the sea. She recalled the scalloped curves of choppy ocean seen during the many times she had traveled from London to Tokyo and back again. She looked for the trace of an island in the expanses below. The clusters of stone had, through the stormy centuries, held onto their post. The views reminded her of a living map rolled out underneath her. Mai thought of the disputed Senkaku Islands, also called Diaoyu to the Chinese. The Japanese and the Chinese both laid claim to the islands—five uninhabited islets and three barren rocks they might never set foot on or even see. Staring down at the vastness, she recalled a childhood story by the author of Alice in Wonderland, in which a mapmaker was so determined to have the truest representation of a place upon his map that he made the paper as large as the territory itself, until it obscured the real lands beneath it. Mai entered the subway an hour later after the plane landed at Narita airport. Commuters pressed forward, and she stepped with them into the tightly packed train carriage. She saw a morning sea of people on the platform through the window before the train heaved out of the station. Alone, in the mass of those off to work and school, Mai thought of Kawabata’s story. He had described two flowing courses of time, one of greater proportions, encompassing all, the other of a single person’s time, an entity within the whole. “Time flows the same for all people,” Kawabata had said, “but each person moves through time at their own pace.” Mai felt then her separateness, arriving in Japan as she was in the aftermath of the tragedy—the nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Each time she returned home, her grandmother would tell the old stories about Kawabata, using very formal Japanese speech. Mai’s memories did not feel like her own but came to her with the sound of the rapid Tokyo accents of young business types on the street or at the sight of the old man beside her on the train folding his handkerchief neatly with steady hands like a tailor accustomed to the fragility of silk under his needle. In March Mai and Hikaru had watched the disaster befall Fukushima Daiichi together on the day the nuclear reactor exploded. It had been afternoon in Japan when the earthquake first began—but for Mai, in London, a slow dawn was breaking as she scrolled through the news sites on her phone. She called Hikaru in New York and his voice was still thick with the midnight sleep she had disturbed. 85

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For nine agonizing days Mai and Hikaru sat before their computer screens on Skype, she in London and he in New York, rarely hanging up the call. After the tsunami, the news came that Hikaru’s brother and sister could not be found, and they stayed online together in silence for three hours or more. Hikaru sometimes sniffed, or left the screen’s view to make tea. At times they both slept, he on a crooked elbow at his desk, she upright on the couch with the dim glow of the screen on the seat beside her. If he left his apartment, Hikaru would leave the computer open, the call active. He would turn the screen to face the window and leave with a small wave of his hand while she watched his New York nighttime fall. Mai opened her door to go outside a few times to a windy or grey London street. She walked paths rendered unfamiliar after the long hours inside her apartment with Hikaru’s face or voice, or simply the view of his empty room, always present on her screen. She came to think of cyberspace as their island. As the days progressed, Mai and Hikaru watched the news together and witnessed from a distance all that was happening at home. Their views moved between updates from CNN, the BBC, occasional NHK videos in Japanese, and the words of friends, both in Japan and others abroad. “We had a false confidence,” the Prime Minister later lamented, “in the technological infallibility of the country.” A myth of safety had blinded officials. “Is it strange,” Hikaru asked her one night, “that I prefer to hear it all in English?” “Perhaps it’s easier when there is more distance.” “My parents still do not want me to book a flight,” he said. “The information over there is vague about which areas are safe. Let’s have our flights arrive the same time, if we can?” “Of course.” His face left her view for a moment as she saw him lean into his palm. “Did my grandmother ever tell you the story of the vanishing face?” she asked. “I don’t think I remember. Tell me.” And so she told him of the time that the resting place of Princess Kazunomiya was opened during the excavation of the tombs of the Tokugawa Shoguns in Shiba. In the tomb, the excavators found the skeletal princess holding a small glass plate covered with the remains of a photograph held between her fleshless hands. The image showed a young man dressed in ceremonial robes and a court hat. His face was barely visible because the fading was so advanced that it could only be seen when held at certain angles in the light. The researchers kept the photograph in a museum overnight. They hoped to investigate the identity of the man depicted there. It was thought that the image could be of the Princess’ lover, whom she had taken with her into timeless death. But the following morning, when the glass plate was unwrapped, they found that the image had faded completely due to its sudden exposure to air after countless years beneath the CARBON CULTURE

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ground. Only a pure glass plate remained. “And my grandmother says how, at the moment the image vanished forever, it became the most beautiful face in the world.” “I like it,” Hikaru said after a long moment. “Although I am sure I wasn’t listening when your grandmother told it to me.” Mai noted then that his smile looked sad but she thought her perception may have been changed by all that he had lost. As her clock turned to midnight, to a day which would in Tokyo have ended when she arrived, Mai watched the sky over Hikaru’s shoulders as he told her he was not nor would ever be ready for the flight to Tokyo. The square apartment windows shone gold as the sunset flooded New York on her computer screen. It seemed to her that time had lost its way over the nine days on their island. Mai arrived from the subway at her grandmother’s house in Tokyo. She removed her shoes and felt steadied by the rough carpet. There was a clean scent in the air, something she had rarely sensed in London, only when she visited a spa and her skin remembered a perfumed smoothness from childhood. She stood at the window. The thin wood lining the glass, the lightweight sliding doors that gave a gentle groan when opened, the painted screens instead of walls were all signs of a home built on earthquake-prone land. The exquisite stillness and sparse beauty of the interior veiled the peril that might soon come again. As Mai stood by the sunlit glass in her grandmother’s house she sensed a warning in the air, as though the utter stillness was simply a pause between storms and madness. Mai’s grandmother and Hikaru’s grandmother were old friends. In the morning they would all go together to see Hikaru and his parents in Nikko. Mai moved from the window into the bathroom and threw thin streams of water over her eyes and cheeks. She heard the gentle scrape of aged cups and the lid of the pot as her grandmother prepared tea. She walked out so that Mai and her grandmother stood together in the kitchen. “How do you feel? Are you hungry?” her grandmother asked. “It feels strange that I wasn’t here when it happened,” Mai said, “As though I am now catching up.” Her grandmother nodded. “You have seen from afar, now you will see with your eyes.” When they were teenagers, Hikaru wore the same Boston T-shirt every weekend, listened only to the Rolling Stones. Mai was not surprised when he applied to work in America. Often during their university years they went out together in Tokyo and walked through the crowded nights. He loved the pace, Hikaru said to her, as his small hometown was too quiet. The final night before they left, she for London and he for New York, the two moved through the city, pausing to eat yakitori, then for drinks at Hikaru’s favorite whisky bar, and finally to watch streams of people part slightly around them, an islet of two beside towers of lights, already separate in 87

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knowing they would, tomorrow, be parted by distance as well. At Mai’s grandmother’s house there was a photograph of her grandparents in the spare room where she was to sleep. It was a formal blackand-white studio portrait in which their young faces were both luminous and shadowed, the irises of the eyes like black pearls with a single point of light. “In my memories, I see that day only in black and white,” said her grandmother from the doorway. “Even the remainder of that day, when we walked through gardens I know were full of autumn brightness, my memory is as colorless as the photograph.” “I sometimes think that I remember Grandfather,” Mai said to her grandmother. “But then I think I am only remembering stories.” “Yes,” said her grandmother. “Many times I have wondered which hairpin I wore that day to fix my hair at the back, for I intended to give it to you. But I can only see the front view, it seems. We only see what we remember, and remember what we can see.” Mai slept early and woke to the uncanny silence between night and dawn. She brought her phone to her face and in its tapered glow she read a message from Hikaru. “It will be good to see your face,” he wrote. She wondered whether Hikaru’s own face would be changed somehow by his suffering. Or perhaps such changes would only be visible to her because of the days they spent in those strange and sad waiting hours, before they flew home to Japan. Maybe one could only know another in the light of other things. Mai walked with her grandmother to the car bound for the house of Hikaru’s parents. It was early spring. In the car window’s bright glare, Mai’s reflection stared inside while she looked out at clouds drifting like uncertain islands in the vast sky. The cherry blossoms held quivering to their branches like pale butterflies suspended in the air.

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About Time by C. John Graham

1 Galaxies effloresce in frequencies of never seen. The shine coalesces in time—to flower infrared, to sing like brindled bees, to wax to the apogee of elliptical orbit particulars (your nearest neighbor out of line). 2 All about antics, are we? It’s well to be leaderless, meet people who seize the need, yet: rinse your feet at the river’s edge, at least simulate a sense of peace. 3 Little labor is needed for sleeping outside the flock, so to speak, so maybe nestle grateful. 4 Insensitive, or shock sensitive, like the high-order explosives of old, like a tank battle finally subsided. 5 So often in spacious time, so out of any time at all. 89

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ASSEMBLY

by C. John Graham or MH 370 Reports of pilot error are planned well in advance. See the way the horizon thins into nothingness? I blur the edge of vision by looking straight ahead. * There’s no time to wait and figure it out. Let’s crash the party down the block, after which nothing will happen for a while. My mind is made up against itself. * Too many hands in the air confuse the commander. “Situational awareness” swirls into a translucent foam. * What is the noise-cancelling frequency? Following the investigation, “fade to white” was added to the checklist. * I had it in me to instruct, but didn’t give it a chance. Piece by piece, we reassemble the present. CARBON CULTURE

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The Bark People: A Fable by Emily Strauss

Ages past there were trees in a forest, spruce in colder realms, hickory, beech, and hemlocks on rolling grass uplands, kapok and tualang against blue beaches and some old seers witnessed the vast reaches of canopy at the horizon while more practical men saw whole trees rising thickly and imagined boats, beams, totems, spears, carved thrones, church pews— hence the forest people and the tree people. However, one day came an augur, a transcendentalist who believed that reality is discerned through intuition who thought the forest too wide to know a single tree but one instance of an unknowable aggregate he would study instead the mere bark of trees worn by elks’ horns, this would suffice to ken the truth without reference to a tree or a forest and he became rich with bark beetles and budworms forgot the boughs and branches 91

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forgot the understory and canopy lost the sun, bromeliads, acorns, catkins, shadows winds and mists, snow collected in the notches— he became a bark person and was shunned for his blindness forced to sail away alone until one day he landed on the salt marshes by the Google parking lots, gasping, and he was welcomed.

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BAMBI EXPLAINS IT ALL A Downtown L.A. Poem by Alexis Fancher When I ask about living in pockets of squalor, Bambi explains it, says it’s a matter of stare straight ahead, navigate the gutters and don’t wear any good jewelry. I’ve seen her svelte self on Spring Street, a determined click clack of four inch heels, both thumbs texting. I’ve hailed her by name from yards away. Perfectly aloof. No reaction. Both eyes glued to the screen. When I ask about walking her dog after midnight, Bambi explains it, says she feels safe at 3 am (in a 2-block radius), says people with dogs have disposable income, tend to stay put. When I ask about living with her gay best friend, Bambi explains it, says their devouring passion goes beyond the sexual. But still, he brings men home. I’ve seen her stand lost in her kitchen, when she thinks no one’s looking, seen the calm acceptance in her eyes. 93

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When I ask about singleness in a cruel city, Bambi explains it all, says every ten years, reinvent yourself. Get a gay husband. Stay lonely. Buy a dog.

256 Shades by Lenore Weiss

I sat at my desk for four months waiting to be transferred to another department, and because none of my superiors exactly knew when that was going to happen and since I no longer belonged to them as a real resource who could be counted upon as a full-time equivalent, the best they could do was to ignore me. Of course, every so often they requested I format a letter or design a brochure, drawing me into the verbal world of doing things, but it was with such infrequency that I saw these occasions as mere anomalies in my otherwise unscheduled time. The truth of the matter is that no one gave a good triplicate form what I did during the day, and this, more than the fact that I had no work to do, came close to corrupting my spirit. Instead, I decided to become a desk. Not a real desk, but a piece of furniture quiet with drawers I could retreat where no one could give me the latest gossip about which department was being dismembered or who was on the cut list. I counted the number of pushpins residing in my stationery tray. I arranged my paperclips so that they faced in the same direction. Sometimes I worked on my computer, but I’d been through the tutorials so many times before that I chose to turn on the screensaver and remain inside my desk. Comparisons with the womb are obvious, a place where essentials are hidden, but it was the construction of the drawers that really fascinated me. I’ve always liked to know how things are made. Rabbet joints are common enough but it’s the fit between two planes of wood that’s crucial to the longevity of a piece—for example, if the wood was originally sanded with several grades of paper, and whether the glue was allowed to set. The handle of one drawer of this desk was lost in the last reorganization, and another was coming loose, its screw revealing spirals of pink paint. Any adjustment I make must be done from the inside. Each day I review my progress, move paper clips closer to the front CARBON CULTURE

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of the drawer and discard copies of my time sheets. This frees up more room. I tear them into confetti-size pieces, toss them to celebrate a new order in which our days are not divided into REG hours, a piece of paper that has no meaning other than to name our time with days of the week. The pieces of the time sheets settle around my waist and orbit. This makes it difficult for me to sit in my chair. I reach for my purse so I can go grab a cup of coffee. I barely fit inside the elevator. I drink my coffee decaf with low-fat milk. I return to the cubicle after my coffee break and I see that someone has swept up the time sheets from the rug to hide my indiscretion. Today I do whatever I want. I innovate my own meaning. I am building my own business. I encourage people to call me at work. My voice mail system answers messages perfectly. I am listening to my own inner voice. Somewhere there is bliss. But I am lost, left without instruction, trying to find my mother at the amusement park and all I see is the tattooed man and the fat lady, and I have this really sick feeling in my stomach knowing that I’m going to dissolve like cotton candy. I want to be an entrepreneur, but I know we came to the park together and that we’re supposed to go home soon. Lawrence is angry. He said I waited too long to answer him. He says I don’t listen. He’s an actor who keeps thinking his partner forgot her lines. I need time to find words. I reassure him that I’m thinking, but it doesn’t help. I shuttle back and forth between the loom of work and home. Radio countdown to destruction liquid cool underwear duck my head in traffic waiting for the red light too long while a driver meanders between lanes, doesn’t he know, I swerve, use the blinker, something in the car’s back trunk thuds, doesn’t he know; there’s a run down my tights, a check I have to write, a phone call to make, and who knows what are we going to eat for dinner? These days, it’s on me. Lawrence is applying to get his Master’s degree in Business Administration. It’s so not like him. I’m not sure what he’s turning into. Maybe I’ll be surprised. For a week I didn’t sleep, slowly admitted the truth to myself about a period that would never come, did what I did when I was a nervous girl wondering if this month I had really gone too far, crunched a ball of toilet paper in my hand and rocked the top of my uterus, hoping to strike it rich. At every street corner, I wanted to eat, hungry, smelling out thick barley soup, shiny with rafts of white mushrooms. Why am I having another baby again now? Two children eight years apart. An unanswered question, a need, an urge. This morning when we made love with the sunlight filtered through the white muslin curtain, my nipples were as sensitive as 95

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two joysticks to the pressure of his touch. And I remember, disengaging for an instant from the circular motion of my hips to introduce him to the baby. We’re back together after a year’s separation. June and Helen have died. Every night we have been making love. “Your bedroom or mine?” There were 256 shades of grey in the sky this morning, radiating outward from the bridge, a halo that encased me on the toll plaza. Sunnyvale doesn’t even desktop publish their employee newsletter and they are at the center of the Silicon Universe Valley. Plus they don’t have a whole lot of use for PG&E either, sending out their own utility bills and generating electricity while the carekeeper’s daughter’s taking care. The calendar is looking dated. We’ll transmogrify the California Living publication into a community awareness piece and not even talk to the people who’ve been doing it for the last six years. Why does it become the norm for everything not to make sense (because sense is composed of a myriad of pot holes and overlapping roots all competing for water)? Research: root systems, what are they like? My job forces me to research details and get them right. I’m posting this note for you, babe. Today I understand government. It comes down to maintaining the appearance of a functioning and responsible organization because there are just too many other things. Like this morning, when I put on my opaque stockings, I discovered a run, thigh-level. I reasoned that since I had no other stockings (I hadn’t had time to buy any), the rest of my clothing would simply cover up the tell-tale rip. Next came a blouse that I reserve for the purpose of wearing with the black skirt I already had on. The clock was ticking. I had to get my daughter to school and myself to work. The blouse had a stain over its right pocket that I hadn’t noticed. I was miffed that it was one of my favorite blouses. A coffee drip, maybe a stray pen. The kettle was boiling and I lunged toward the kitchen as my daughter cried because her hair was tangled. I began to brush, listened to my daughter’s entreaties to make the tangles go away. I looked at the clock. This forced a compromise: after I helped my daughter brush her teeth, I decided that instead of removing what I was wearing and starting all over again, I would go as is. I press the gas pedal and ride my memory. She was born in an aftershock of an earthquake, people still buried in the rubble of the Cypress Overpass. No one believed in having babies that night. I watched her breathe for several hours, lips blistered with milk. CARBON CULTURE

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Twice she opened her eyes and smiled at me. There were no words, just milk. Under the blue tensor light, the divining rod of her mouth seeks my nipple. An umbilical cord is a silk rope wet with the dew of birth, a blue horizon unwinding to the very ends of her, a tassel. Phone calls to make, rooms to vacuum, the wash is in the drier; we listen to music, her five fingers pressed to my hand. She recognizes the plaid of my bathrobe. I’m the magician who turns off and on the light bulb while she plays kiss with the sun. Dead jellyfish wash up on the beach. We find the snaky remnants of sand worm poop, a coiled basket of cobras. A shark float bounces along the sand. She collects wads of seaweed to make salad on the beach. My friend shows me the six rolls of toilet paper in her new bathroom and jokes that it’s time to go back to Costco to buy a new package of 24. Jiggedy-jig. I’m going to tech seminars. My squirrels are running up your tree. He would climb a mountain to punch an echo. He could throw a lamb chop past a wolf. Are we getting on the edge of the diving board here? I crush my body with my mind until the shaking is squeezed out. My friend has bought a cardboard condo in the valley and left me with one word of advice: don’t let a witch woman take care of your baby because she will feed her chewed rice and uncooked beans and change her liquids to salt. I sit near the telephone and hate everyone who returns my phone call. I am going to work tomorrow. Michelle will be in childcare. Lawrence says it’s all right. He is trying to comfort me. Do you want to stay home? We both know I can’t, but he says I can do whatever I want. I don’t know how to give myself that courage. Do you want to get a nanny? he asks. This is getting ridiculous because we both know we cannot afford a nanny. But I know he is trying to be kind, and takes my hand over the dinner plate. My answer like the software programs I work with is Yes/No, a branching pattern that lets in no sunlight. Yes, because who wouldn’t want to in my situation, and No because I don’t want my Persephone bathed in fire and made immortal. I long for my mother to be on this earth because then she would know, from a generation of women who were involuntarily joined at the hip to their children. A doctor commemorates the death of a Siamese twin who was about to reach her first birthday. He says she knew how to laugh and had a great smile. I read 97

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a newspaper article about the emergency room at Highland Hospital where doctors deliver guns wrapped in plastic bags from the vaginas of 15-year old girls. I try to tell you, I am afraid of the violence that freezes our hearts. Isn’t leaving our daughter so young an act of violence? I’ve already gone through this with our son, Ivan. I have to get up from the table because the baby’s crying. Time is the fourth dimension and I am living in fiscal year end budget time. I burrow inside my life where there are no budget hearings and let others compose agendas so they can sculpt their time according to bullet points. Each issue takes an hour to discuss. Council goes around the table wearing plumed hats and t-shirts, thumbing through their packets for a paper to explain everything. Lawrence calls and says he has gotten a job in the Tenderloin working at the YMCA with kids. A new ice-skating rink is going to be built on San Pablo Avenue and legislators look inside their briefcases for pom-poms. I am studying field theory inside my burrow. I have been released from linear time. A worm shares my apartment. She eats and excretes soil, which makes a lovely mound right next to my desk, a place for my feet. Sometimes I find items that she cannot use, a gold ring with a turquoise stone. Today there’s a new flowchart beneath the door. “This is the way we make our decisions so early in the morning,” sings the daily gossip column. I’m not sure which way is up. I decide that I’m going to be a worm also, a bosom buddy while the air smells of cinnamon and spice and white plum blossoms float down from the sky. For every action, she does something else. That is what is so maddening. I curl myself into another dimension and compress my time into an envelope the size of a paperclip. I wonder where I’ve been all these years. I have a twin that exists between the hours of 9 and 10:30 p.m., maybe until 11:00 at night if I’m lucky. On the morning train everyone is folded into an accordion. I hear phone messages. Time and money warp me out of shape. Woman Travels Through Wormhole to Escape Creditors. I start at Primos, next to the BART station, a small regular, please. Several counter people are in their early twenties with pierced noses and tongues. The barrister is Victor from Sarajevo. He makes a great latte. For less than a buck fifty a day, I discriminate between different kinds of coffee beans, decaf and regular, foreign and domestic. It’s all about choice. That’s why I took a cup along for the ride into the wormhole.

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Wonders Adrift by Brian Lance

What if Ishmael never hunted that whale? If he opted to shove Ahab over a gunwale? Or perhaps to his better judgment, he’d decided to allude Melville altogether, shunning him (I love that word: shun, like shovel, like chauvinism) in favor of something more modern since today the Pequod is no longer a ship? Much like the Pequot is no longer a homogenous tribe, but a collective exacting revenge upon man and his widows, exploiting their prized vulnerability—disposable income. Or is it the rent money slipped in slots, money for food. Broccoli lasts the longest of all greens. At least it did when our money disappeared. Anyway, modern. And not postmodern. What good is metafiction anyway? Fake is fake is fake, like that feeling of a lost finger, the wedding ring sent home in an envelope. Besides at the end of the seven seas juts Cape Reinga, north northwest of Auckland—the city Kiwis love to hate, but better suits the American sensibilities, which months at sea fail to strip, chip, and paint; or cover with South Puget Sound barnacles, ship to sea and scuttle with one Mark 48 torpedo. You know it’s not the impact that cracks keels, but the concussive force, the air bubble that dislodges a vessel’s displacement, suspends its hull, and uses its own weight to sheer the steel. Judo is Japanese for “the gentle way.” I wonder about that. I wonder about Midway. I wonder about Coral Sea, where the ships never saw each other? To me all oceans look the same—gulls and squalls and waves, and little in the way of lore. The rain makes rambling easier, makes time seem less awash, somehow less adrift, moored to an endless line.

The Ruin

by Frederick Pollack A giant sat in that chair, burst the armrests, torqued the legs, and flung it at a wall. Then he played with the desks – steel skittles, bumpercars! – except, with strange solicitude, 99

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for one still piled with moldering files. Then he tore out the phones – but no, they must have been taken earlier, buried elsewhere – and ancient massive broken calculators. Breathed deep the asbestos, if that was the powder sifting from the tiles of the low ceiling, which his head dislodged with every step. Outside he cracked the empty parking lot and creased the realtor’s sign. But because this giant’s name was Time aka Money, he left no particular pathos behind, no air of loss or of anything. Let it not be said that anything important happened here. The Bomb did not fall. Baseball presumably was talked around the vanished cooler, retirement, and the hang and height of skirts. A boss felt like the lack of a son his unconnectedness to bigger money and loftier views; emerged from his now glassless corner to bestow terror and humor. Something was made because of these torn strewn unshredded papers, and men and women for eight or ten hours edited their lives into a sort of film of life. Uncles were here or people like them; and to mistrust nostalgia for them, or a sense of their relative innocence, implies a critique as unremembered as this office.

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CARBON CULTURE technology + literature +art

carbonculturereview.com Read more about our artists, authors and technology in art and literature on our website. Read the interactive Carbon Culture on your device.

On the cover Patricia Piccinini’s front and back cover work courtesy of the Artist, Tolarno Galleries and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Front cover art by Patricia Piccinini: The Strength of one Arm (With Canadian Mountain Goat), 2009 silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, Canadian Mountain Goat 180cm high x 154 x 56 cm Photo by Graham Baring Back cover art Patricia Piccinini Eulogy, 2011, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing 110cm high x 65cm x 60cm Photo by Graham Baring 101

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Ode to Early 21st Century Tech by John Gosslee

the hologram sings the social network post the alphabet pops under a cheerleader’s thumb circuit boards fret under virtual buttons a television inside a mausoleum

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Front Cover: The Strength of one Arm (With Canadian Mountain Goat) Back Cover: Eulogy

by Patricia Piccinini