A convincing lie needs to have facts; if you don’t know any your story falls flat. To distract from the feeling that I’m incapable of retaining knowledge or have any real imagination enough to even create facts I hit random on Wikipedia and focus on being able to see the connection between random events to make a story. Logic dictates that if it’s made of parts of truth, the lie, the story, will be all the more convincing. You choose a standpoint and view every fact from one angle, bending information the way you need it to bend, and a story appears. You just have to believe it, that’s all you need to do.

By Jennifer Calleja.

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1. Pospishil

Passage was taken in the arched left-hand ’61 Greyhound, a Pickard teacup out of the Gracie Mansion
in the backseat catching a ride. It was cocooned in a shiny article by Mary K. Trigg from a Fall publication of American National Biography; a good article, but unhinged in places. I had wanted to look up Simone, a relative of Alasdair MacColla, killed at Knochanuss, and send it to her, discovering she had slipped off to Dobârceni commune in Romania, rendering her semi-unerreichbar. Two months after I used the article to protect my cup she was found drowned in the Her-Vif in Garonne. I didn’t wonder why she’d left for Southern France, falling on the thought that she’d at least avoided a demise in the Hers-Mort. Since my evacuation from Plymouth, I hadn’t returned to Montserrat, I just felt it was finished with. My first stop had been to visit Pospishil to put forward a critique of his privately published Die Rechtsstellung des Patriarchen der Serbischen Kirche in der Kirchenverfassung von 1931-1947; it had been niggling at me forever, and now I had plenty of time to hunt the old priest down.

He’d seen the last timeless Test match played in South Africa in 1939, and had been writing a prose poem on it the afternoon I phoned from a Wataniya Telecom sponsored box five blocks from his house in Old Bridge, New Jersey. I’d somehow picked up a live program out of Sweden of something the Norrland Opera had booked on the Greyhound’s radio. Apparently an old drunkard, the presenter tiredly cleared up, was booming the traditional eighteenth century drinking ballad ‘Gubben Noach’ unbearably close to a musician’s microphone, drowning out the rock band, subduing even the singer’s modern shrieks. An awesome polyphony. Pospishil had also been called by Steven L. Kent by mistake, so was suspicious of me from the off. I explained that I wasn’t a video-game journalist, and that I wanted to have a fine conversation with him. I felt as Mowgli did, wandering from cosmopolitan jungle orphaned from the home flattened by a volcano, into the lupine arms of Akela, for a while at least. I ate a samosa over my Buckeyes record in the car before the call, felt enlivened knowing I would leave spicy breath on the receiver. The box was solidly attached to the exterior brickwork of a Mexican diner, a film, I think Confesión a Laura stuttered on a miniscule screen at the bar between whiskey and gin bottles. A man sat repeating persistently that he was waiting for Contacto Deportivo to come on, though the barman laughed manically that it didn’t start until past midnight.

2. The Binding Reach

I own Joe Bethancourt’s first banjo, the old S. S. Stewart his grandfather gave him at the age of nine in Phoenix. I am Bethancourt’s nephew, Tom Purtill. Bethancourt picked up the banjo after hearing his grandmother, C. H. Burnett, play the fiddle. I’ve never played the banjo, except strumming at his in time with the lunging steps of Li Ling the Chinese shot-putter during his winning throw in Osaka across my television screen in two-thousand and seven. Scratching at the strings was a remote distraction, something to ride on my mental hopes that he would somehow fall or fail. He got nineteen point thirty-eight metres.

Back then, as I had done for many years previously, I enjoyed driving around making faces at on-coming drivers, stretched wide-eyed smiles, dramatic and painful frowns, screaming mouths, that kind of thing. I didn’t bother doing this on my way into college, Bryn Mawr. I was always feeling drained of mischief in the morning and early afternoons after nights away in the city minutely adding to the spreading tattoo on my stomach at Roy Chamb’s, or laying around on my ex-girlfriend’s bathroom floor reading out-of-date photography magazines while she had four-hour baths. My mother was from Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro. She left to study the genus of moth called Melgona, in spite of her simple family’s assurances that this would only end in trouble. Within months of landing in America she starred in Maxwell Anderson’s play Valley Forge, playing George Washington’s wife. She could play any nationality, so long as she didn’t have many lines. It was her particularly sublime features, beautiful in how striking she was, that detracted from a question of nation. Only mother could help me when I murdered Stefan Ekberg. Murdered him from my past. Stefan had returned from the motorcycle speedway championships in Great Britain having won in the Premier League that season. He came to me, me in my shabby smooth suit and flat shoes, him in his bad skin, to tell me he was leaving me for Herbert Kraus’s grandson, Thomas. Mother and I took this as a personal familial insult, us being cousins of the Oehler Brothers, the true masters of Nietzchean scholarship, unlike the disgraced Herbert Kraus, a weakminded Joo-sympathiser. I completed my studies full of rage and insecurity, and became junior head of Remote Surgery at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. To think I’d only gone into telepresence purely because of the Lindbergh Operation, the first remote surgical procedure, which I read about in the newspaper. Dr. Jacques Marescaux removed the gallbladder of a man in Strasbourg from New York in two-thousand and one.

I kept a copy of the opera, or rather drama per musica, Scandebeg in the second drawer of my desk. I was consumed by how much the picture of Vivaldi on the inside cover looked like both my old lover and my mother. I couldn’t read the actual opera very well. Vivaldi’s white hair didn’t so much grow from or seem even attached to his scalp, but sat on top in obvious wig-status; floating and emitting a yellow-grey light from his young-man-old-woman face.

My first operation would be on Adam Silverman. Silverman. Silverman. It wasn’t successful, this silvery man, he went the colour of money. Someone in Atlanta brought him back to life, mistaking my smile on the videoscreen for mild hysteria at my remote robotic hands subtle fuck up. I kissed my own hands post-op. I’d read up on this man. He’d written an opera, found on the same shelf i’d accidently come across Scandebeg: Korczak’s Orphans. Janusz Korczak, or Henryk Goldszmit, supervised orphans in the Warsaw ghetto, his death march with the two hundred young Jews was seen by Wladyslaw Szpilman himself. An opera for a martyr-Jew? And a Theaterstück inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita? I shook my head in sorrow. Four months after the operation, Adam Silverman stood in the foyer of my apartment building, seven floor’s below me, while I watched The White Tower, drawn in by Alida Valli, counting out her ancestry in tears.

I.
If Modernism was the creation of a universal and psychological truth, and if Postmodernism represented the fracturing of that truth into millions of tiny disparate truths then the Off Modern is a reassembling of those truths into a new kind of artistic truth that allows all truths their existence in one universal, kaleidoscopic truth.

II.
The art of writing is the only art form that has stubbornly denied itself the huge technical advances that the twentieth century allowed art to accommodate into itself because of the upheavals of Modernity; it is now an art in a state of degeneration. The novel has reverted to a pre-twentieth century outlook. The first and second vanguards of modernism have failed and with them the avant-garde tendency in literature has diminished in the volume of people consuming and producing works. We are now in a worse state than we were one hundred years ago because radical innovation has happened and been repelled.

III.
The art of writing has become an art primarily of commercialisation, everyone is taught to write a literature of sellability; that is to adopt a style of writing that foregrounds the lowest-common-denominator of the audience over the act of writing itself; or to paraphrase, the goal has become units shifted not ideas created.

IV.
The novel’s dominant style has become realism with either an ironic detachment or a slight post-modern awareness of form. In addition to this we see small and regressive niches of activity, Women’s Writing (Moons and Periods, safe areas of little artistic activity, might as well be painting landscapes with watercolours), or within the accepted and static genres of Crime, Thriller and Celebrity Autobiography. Literature is increasingly becoming a little clique with a lot of history; a form of soap opera devoid of the joys of endeavour and adventure.

V.
The quest for the new in the novel (a form that relies on NOVELTY, on the new, that will die if it doesn’t get at it) now requires that we go past modernism and formulate a new approach to literature. This just isn’t in the way we approach the writing of our novels, poems and plays (but that is part of it) but also to the way we disseminate them, and we don’t mean just alternative methods of distribution (but that is also part of it too).

VI.
We believe that the main thing we must be doing with literature is examining the peculiarities and ontological questions that the twenty first century is posing us. We must circulate the answers we come up with into the mainstream of the literary world as we cannot allow literary experimentation to only exist as an inconsequential and moribund niche of the avant-garde. A literary vanguard must exist in a state whereby it can act as a real challenge against the dead forms and modes of modern literature.

VII.
ONTOLOGY: n the branch of metaphysics dealing with questions of being. The current waves of mainstream literature when examined allow us to formulate a cultural theory as reflection on the state of modern, western society. The books themselves do not do this. They have become a secondary source of information, not to be circulated and dissected but formed into groups and used to analyse certain trends of decadence in the artistic practice of the novel and in society itself. Chick Lit for example, or adults who read the stories of J.K. Rowling (we are fully aware that in criticising these things we are opening ourselves up to accusations of snobbery). It is the fact that the novels themselves do not examine the new ontological questions that the century of mass communication is posing us; a new literature must evolve that re-evaluates man’s collective and individual role in a new society.

VIII.
We wish to see a new novelistic discourse that destroys semiotic textual relationships. New meanings and new truths must be found from the assembled fragments of history, poetry, politics, modernism and the classics. New meaning must be created from disparate elements of influence, theft and technical skill. The novel must only relate to itself as a concept and only then can it relate to life. Realism does not necessarily mean real. The real in literature, as in the trompe l’oeil is an effect.

IX.
The new discourse is only a new reality effect needed to examine a new ontological reality.

X.
‘Ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.’

I found the book in an old bookshop, you can imagine the shop quite easily, dusty, full of tomes, impossible to find what you came into buy but easy to find curios and oddities. It was a short book called Fables and Scenes From The Life Of Monty Catsin, who was easily identifiable as a roguish character, part Quixote, par Joan of Arc, never successful but always paying for his mistakes. An idiot-martyr. I turn to Chapter One and begin to read a little.

Monty Catsin was the prodigal son of a prosperous cork merchant from near the Spanish/French border. After excelling throughout eighteen years of schooling at the extremely well regarded San Christopher Insitituta, Monty travelled to France, to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. This was 1918, war was over. It was whilst living in Paris that he met and became a confident of the writer and theorist Andre Breton. Unlike Breton though, Catsin only wrote this one book, and as we will later find out, he wrote it in very unliterary circumstances. Andre Breton added a final memorial chapter after Catsin’s death in 1936. The book, composed of twelve other chapters, deals with a succession of unrelated events from Monty’s short life, we are recounted his homosexual liaison with Lorca as well as fist-fights with Hemingway, his pursuits of women seen about Paris and a million other divulgences of the mind. The first chapter deals with an episode in which Monty is fifteen and by his own admission was becoming a bit rebellious. The incident deals with his Aunty Marcia’s suspicions that Monty might be becoming a bit psychopathic. He was exceptionally bright, but he was within spitting distance of being an idiot savant. His mind was a dark room filled with treasure, he was beginning to explore all the different avenues of intellectual exploration open to him.

And so it was when he was fifteen that Monty became obsessed with the idea of anatomy, a right little Frankenstein; he wanted to explore the insides of the animals that roamed the expanses of their cork tree orchards. He would catch little mice or cats and splice them open, with a long cut from neck to rump, and another running horizontal to that. Monty really saw what they were made of. Lots of blood. Indeterminate and warm, organs, unspecific. He’d cut out the oesophagus and the trachea, remove them, inspect and leave them to bake on the hot, cracked and yellow soil.

Monty says that for a long time he didn’t know that anyone knew about his strange childhood urges to cut open animals, for a long time he had forgotten about it too, he matured, stopped slicing animals open and moved onto other things, as we know he did well in his final exams and went to Paris to study. It was on his Aunty Marcia’s deathbed in 1929, that she uttered her final words to Monty – Monty – she stammered – no matter how much you’ve failed in your life and have had to be bailed out by your poor father, I’m just glad you didn’t turn out to be a serial killer or pervert like I thought you would when you were but a teenager.

Perplexed by this, Monty, who it must be said had failed in certain areas of his life, he had been bankrupted twice and married three times (one wife gone the mad and another to a remote Scottish island), did not know what she meant by suggesting he might’ve become a psychopath, his mind having subconsciously repressed the memories of his days as Doctor Death of the Cork Orchards.

He returned downstairs, left Marcia’s daughter, Maria, with her. He found his Father, half asleep in the red armchair, and asked him about Marcia had said. He half-smiled and said – when you were younger, this was during the war, just before Uncle Juan died, his sister, your Aunty Marcia, was accustomed to taking long walks in our orchards. There, on a now indeterminate day in summer, she saw you kill a cat. She was so shocked that she ran back to the house and told me immediately. Monty recalls here, how a whole pile of repressed memories rushed upwards to him, like a beam of light piercing the dust of an Andalucian church.

He remembered the way he used to cut those animals, down and across, and examine them.

Monty asked, ‘Why hasn’t she said anything till now? I’m horrified that she knew all this time, I had completely forgotten about it.’

To which his father replied that they had considered questioning Monty about it, but only if they’d caught you doing it again, and for awhile Marcia wanted to keep an eye on you, but then Uncle Juan died, and she must’ve forgotten about it because she didn’t bring it up for almost three or four years. Maybe longer actually, because it was just after you’d finished your studies at the Sorbonne and she said ‘I’m glad he didn’t turn into a psychopath.’

Sometime, after his Uncle Juan died, he must’ve lost that ‘killer instinct’, his Dad joked, which was clearly a reference to his financial misfortunes in the proceeding years, something that was of much shame to his family.

Despite the at times shoddy writing of the piece, I was gripped by the absurdity of this situation, the actual lack of the moral in the fable, leaving me to make my own equally absurd assumptions to fill the gaps in it.

The next chapter dealt with equally absurd homosexual fumbling with Garcia Lorca and his two encounters with Ernest Hemingway. The first was at a bullfight in Madrid, after which Hemingway, Catsin and a few other fellows embarked upon a game of cards. Monty had to escape out of the bathroom window, fleeing scarily large gambling debts to Hemingway. Their second meeting occurred in Paris a few years later in which Monty lost two teeth.

Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin, was given the name Montgomery after the now obscure Montgomery Ward, who in his day was a famed entrepreneur, he was the man who set up the first mail order business in the U.S. He gave his name to Monty Catsin through a bet between Montgomery Ward and Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin’s father, which stated that the first of them to make a million dollars would give their name to the next child to be born to either family. And two years later, in 1887, when Montgomery Ward made his first million dollars Monty Catsin’s father agreed to name his child, his first born, Montgomery, in his honour.

The only problem was that Monty’s father was not yet married, and thus was not in a position to be naming anyone’s children, and so he began his search for a wife. So desperate and depressed did he become to find and marry and beautiful senorita that he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome to receive a blessing from the Vatican. He walked from his villa in Spain, across the Riviera, crossed the Alps and made his way south to Rome. On one freezing cold night, after crossing the Alps and now being somewhere in Lombardia, Monty’s father took shelter in a tiny barn. It seemed perfect to him, and nestling in the warmth of the hay he quickly fell asleep. Morning shone through the rafters, the storm was gone and left clear skies in its trail, the air was still cold, but clear, crisp and refreshing, Senor Catsin breathed deep, filling lungs with Italian air. As Monty’s father stirred and awoke fully he was shocked to see the most beautiful woman he had ever set his little dark eyes upon stirring the donkeys from their slumber. This woman was heroically gorgeous, an Italian maiden stirring his passions along with the donkeys, buxom, dark hair, fair skinned. He quickly jumped down from his sleeping hole in the rafters and introduced himself. Her response was one of fear; she turned and ran away from this terrifying man who had been sleeping in her barn, and who was now accosting her in a strange foreign tongue, straw in his hair, dressed in dirty clothes, shoes almost falling apart. Monty’s father was devastated.

In Rome, he struggled, penniless, almost in rags, (conducting his journey in the true spirit of a pilgrimage, he hadn’t bothered to heavy himself with the assorted stuffs of life, he survived off apples and vegetables and the kindness of strangers). One day, wearing more suitable clothes now thank God, he joined the procession of people waiting to be blessed by the Pope. Whilst in Rome he had picked up a little Italian, and having grown quite accustomed to the culture he decided to stay for a few months. Juan and his Father were taking care of the Cork Orchards, and he decided that he could justify extending his excursion a little longer, so he rented a small room for two months and settled in. He got a job with an antique dealer looking for someone who could speak fluent Spanish in order to translate the rare books being shipped to him from the Iberian Peninsula and estimate their worth.

One day in the shop a woman walked in. Not just any woman. But THE woman. The one from the Lombardian barn. Astounded, he shouted! CIAO BELLA. The woman was taken aback, the lunatic from the barn was here, dressed and combed and cleaned, speaking Italian, working in a shop. Out of his rags and without the straw in his hair he almost looked quite attractive. Dark skinned, dark haired, with mottled grey about his young temples, quite dashing almost.

The rest as they say, is history, Senor Catsin and Beatrice were married, and in less than a year little Montgomery Catsin was born, and all of this from a bet and a Papal blessing, such auspicious beginnings and such strange adventures to follow. He was doomed to live an inversion of his fairy tale beginning. Such strange adventures, all with unhappy endings, such suffering and persecution, bad luck and bad decisions plague our Monty’s life, and he records them in this little memoir. Hairy escapades in South American with lepers and native Indians, being chased through Mexico by banditos and bulls, being shipwrecked on an island in the south pacific for four months and finally a chapter on his adventures with the French Foreign Legion. It is in this penultimate chapter of the book, the last written by Monty himself, where he describes what turned out to be his final adventure, and how we are able to have this little book and how we are able to read it.

This was after his second bankruptcy; he had to close down his publishing company, sell up his house and car and selected items from his luxurious collection of antiques and objects d’art. He was in a rut which even Monty realised he needed to get out of, but, like everything Monty did, he did it in a very oblique fashion. Instead of maybe trying to work his out misfortune, or possibly even join the family business back in Spain, he instead joined the French Foreign Legion. And so in the hope of heroic adventure he set off to Africa, to find fame and (hopefully) fortune, and maybe even (please God) a wife.

The Legion was not as great a success as Monty had originally hoped. His romanticism was quickly quashed, trodden face down into burning African sands. Monty deserted in Cairo. It was after a brief period of travel throughout Africa that he found himself in search of diamonds on one of the small Comoros Islands in the Mozambique Channel, just off the south-western coast of Africa.

In a little and very isolated village he ran into trouble with a tribe of cannibal natives when he tried to sexually engage himself with a local girl. The elders locked Monty in a treehouse cage high in the canopies whilst they debated his fate in tongues poor Monty couldn’t understand. Here, Monty had time to think, to mull over his life and his adventures. He still had his little note book with him and scratched out his memoirs in it whilst the silvered haired men talked back and forth for twenty days. It was on the twenty-first day when a soldier from the Legion disturbed them. He was hunting for a deserter by the name of Montogomery Juan Angel Catsin and, following a lucky lead from an informant on the mainland, he had found him, bearded now, looking a little rougher, much thinner. The Legionairre promptly sentenced poor Monty to death, by shooting, for treason and desertion.

This was of much annoyance of the elders, who were also busy sentencing Monty to death. The Legionnaire joined the elders and busily began talking to them in French about whose jurisdiction poor Monty’s life was in. Both sides made impassioned appeals, to have Monty tied to a tree and shot or alternatively to burn him alive and pick the nicely roasted flesh off of his bones. The Legionnaire’s rebuttal focused mainly on that he didn’t very well mind what they did to him, but only after Monty had been shot as per the regulations of the Foreign Legion. But where would the fun be in roasting alive a dead man? Where indeed, argued the Legionnaire back, would be the justice in shooting a man after he’d been cooked? They had almost reached a stalemate when the Legionnaire, hot, sticky, tired and bored of chasing after a rogue Spanish deserter, capitulated and said he didn’t particularly mind how he died to be honest, as long as he was dead. The little troublemaker.

Monty gave him his artefacts and instructions, sent his crucifix and Saint Christopher’s medal to his father, his memoirs, explaining what has happened to him, to Andre Breton. From which the document I just read is based upon. Breton’s epigram focused on what Monty’s last thought would’ve been as the flames crept slowly towards him, as he begins to slip away into death. Breton suggests that Monty’s mind begins to think of a way out of this debacle; that surely this isn’t the last adventure of Monty Catsin.

I, the algorithm, I’m not an easy thing. In fact, I am very complex. You don’t know me? You say you don’t know what an algorithm is. Ha! I’m all around you. And that, that, my friends, is why I didn’t understand myself. Well, I still don’t, no; I do understand myself, now.

Sadly I didn’t use to; in fact, I had a bit of a whammy a few years back. When Reagan and Gorbachev were threatening to play darts with nuclear warheads, I was presented with a serious spiritual struggle. You see, Reagan, he did press that big red button, and for some reason, for some bizarre reason I just wasn’t up to the job. That’s right, you heard me, I, the algorithm; a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, I just didn’t work out.

My fallibility perhaps saved everything, or at least, chunks of the Eastern and Western hemisphere. However, my failure as a mathematic process, a foundation of knowledge in the age of man forced me to turn in on myself, to untangle my id in the quest for understanding.

With revolution comes hope but also despair; hope does not generate knowledge and thus understanding continues to linger far away.

This was my antithesis, and gone were the days of my enlightenment; lost somewhere in the arguments and counter-arguments of Kleene, Church and Turing, with their lucky identities, families, domesticated animals and tea cosy collections. I existed in an evil world, where the revelations of maths and science were used against mankind, as catalysts for humanity’s eventual self-destruction. How did I even attempt to comprehend it all? Fate? Religion? This ontology? That ontology? And what is New Age Spirituality?

I went to the library. Well, only because I was already there. I withdrew some books about ‘The New Age’ but couldn’t read them, so I withdrew Siegfried Englemann’s Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Having developed the basic skills required for learning I began my crusade for knowledge by reading Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. The Bible, an ancient book of universal popularity was mentioned a number of times in Donald’s book. I withdrew The Bible and marvelled at its tales of ancient chivalry, its forewarnings to man and its opulent fantastic style, but my ontological musings were complicated; once I had completed The Bible it was only fair to read The Quran and once that was done with the Bhagavad Gita and then The Science of Survival.

It soon became clear that the library could only hold so much information within its confines and I, of course, read very fast. Using the internet to expand my knowledge; I encountered the Neosexual, Tetrapyrgia, Paul Westerberg, Valentino Rossi, the Diatonic scale, organic chemistry, the pinball machine and Fearne Cotton within only a few minutes of research. Fearne Cotton is, unlike me, a living and breathing organism and understanding her own blossoming career in British television did not guide me towards self-understanding.

Organic Chemistry, or Fearne Cotton’s career? Which is more important? What of the other Fearne? The gastric band? Gastric flu? Swine Flu? How does Lord Byron fit into all this? My powers of digital problem solving were futile again; but in attempting to understand the unrelated spheres of discourse in mankind’s culture I slowly unravelled my own significance.

I was complicating an already intricate globalised world with my ontological musings!

I could see that the digital age had already plunged mankind into a cess pit of self-searching. Man was constantly looking for keys to a car he no longer owned. Considering Fearne Cotton and organic chemistry would in no way help me to enrich my own reality or enhance personal understanding of my existence as an entity. I was, am, a creation of man and shall continue to be so until the fleshy author of my identity ceases to exist. And thus I ceased to search, to learn, to yearn to understand, and vowed from that moment on that I would never speak as man does, that is, only in self-reference.

I tried but I gave up. At least I tried; at least I’m an algorithm.

By William Hunt

Another short piece from young writer Kendal Atcliffe, expect great things.

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“Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!”

“Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!”

If that woman smiles any harder, the muscles in her neck are going to snap.

Eventually, she’s settled into a rhythm. Not just any rhythm, God no; the rhythm of If I Can’t, by 50 Cent, which to the audience in question (which features the daughter of an 80s rockstar, three footballers of varying international relevance, minor royalty, a pair of artificially inflated breasts who has recently had a divorce and the director of the piece-of-shit film I just sat through) is an instant classic. A loud “woo” sounds through the teeming mass of their entourages, digital cameras play their pre-recorded shutter sounds, and women spray-tanned to within an inch of a Satsuma push silicone body parts against inflated egos on the large space laughably called a dancefloor.

VIP-hop, they call it. Hiphop so ubiquitous, so mainstream, so fucking soul-rapingly awful that it penetrates the bullshit bubble around these creatures and to it they dance. Music so bland and uninspired – music that betrays the roots of hiphop so comprehensively – that it forms the perfect musical accompaniment to the utter death of dignity. They are photographed as they enter, date on arm; they are photographed as they meet a lump of meat alternative to the one with whom they entered; they are photographed exchanging saliva with the second lump of meat; they are photographed as they leave.

The next morning, when I’m on the train home, I read the same pages you do in whichever free newspaper ends up in front of my tired little eyeballs, about their dalliances. I can tell you now, the newspaper account is usually 100% accurate. How do I know? Oh, I sell them cocaine. People will tell you anything if you sell them cocaine. They’ll think you want to hear every detail of their night, if you sell them cocaine.

Do you have any idea how much of a twat you sound on cocaine? Yes, you, the one at the back. Reading this. You’re a twat. You have too much money. Spend it on something. Buy a subscription to “the Economist”. Get a library card. I don’t know. Learn something.

I am one of very few people willing to admit that I make decent enough money and have little need of your custom, but then, I have always suspected that to be the reason I am not in prison. Also, the accent helps. When you sound like a barrister, the police are kind to you. I would also say that bribery helps. People in Britain never realise how far you can get, with bribes. They seem to think it’s a sordid little thing for Italians and the Chinese. That’s a bit racist, don’t you think? Timothy 6:10 doesn’t come with a footnote saying “…but not if you’re from Blighty”.

This little chain of thought runs thin; Danika’s constant bubbling drone wears at me, but I know I must keep to my spot adjacent to the entrance, and never risk movement. If I move, I demonstrate need, and they come to me because of the crippling atmosphere of indifference. I’d leave, but I do have to pay rent. Not like that lucky little prick, Irwin.

My name? Good grief, have you listened to a very word of what I just said? Danika, dearest. We’ve another one begging for the pavement.

It’s a shame; I was getting to like you.

In preparation for the launch of our second zine this summer, a literary treat courtesy of young writer Kendall Atcliffe.

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Soft light’s a bitch, because I know it means I’m waking up at Maria’s place again. You know what it’s like, when you wake up but don’t open your eyes, and realise you aren’t in Kansas anymore? (In this metaphor, Kansas is your own bed)

You’re trapped there, vision suspended in swirling colours and blackness, floating in your little world of sheets and pillows, certain there’s a world beyond your eyelids and totally unaware of what it is. That’s the great thing about waking up and not knowing where you are or who she is. You have those few seconds – I’ve stretched them out to almost a minute before – where it’s all potentiality. I try not to imagine where I am as being too awesome, because it’s only something truly special (studio apartment with Monet prints on the wall and flatpanel B&O A/V equipment, hotel room with huge bay window view of skyscrapers, empty white minimalist show-flat with more than one girl) every once in a while. If I imagined it was a place like that, and it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to shake the sense of failure for the next week.

My name’s Irwin, by the way, pleased to meet you.

But you have to open your eyes before the memory rush, when it all comes flooding back, and various cringe-moments or dancefloor mistakes start to ruin your buzz. When you’re in the middle of a moment like that, you have to force it to an end, or else it’ll fizzle out. Better a bang than a whimper. (As the actress said to the bishop)

Eyelids are only so good at shutting out light, though, which is why I always know when I wake up in a soft, white-golden glow, that the moment’s been denied. I can’t stop my skin from checking the texture of the sheets, my nose from detecting the blend of her perfume, her floor cleaner and just… her, and my tongue from tasting the hangover-mouth that comes from drinking enough alcohol for she and I to have conversed at all. My senses won’t wait. They’ve got a casefile a foot wide proving the girl in this bed next to me is Maria before I’ve opened my eyes.

Son of a bitch.

I’m a leaver, if that’s a word; leaving is what I do. I left my hometown, I left my one true love, I left Titanic halfway through; I left my ambition behind when I embarked on this stupid mission to get rich. I left one girl to her own devices as she got down to her underwear because I realised she looked like Liam Neeson (an extremely pretty Liam Neeson, but Liam Neeson nonetheless). I used to leave my lessons during high school to go to my locker and drink a swig of rum. I left a detailed deconstruction of my friend Steve’s personality written on a toilet wall at my old job. I left a note saying “I quits” on the front door of my last houseshare (I denoting Irwin, I does speak English as a first language). I left before the main course of a date once because Abbi texted me saying the girl didn’t wax. I’m left wing. I’ve left more jackets in more club cloakrooms than I can count. I leave things. I depart. Je departs, or whatever the French would be. But no matter how many times I leave Maria’s damn bed, I always stupid fucking damn shitting balls end up there again.

C’est la vie.

I.
This one goes out to Leó Szilárd, conceiver of the chain reaction. This one’s for Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, bombardiers of uranium with neutrons, discoverers of atomic fission. We’ve got love for Julius Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project.

II.
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” The Bagavad Gita

III.
Truman’s first maneuver, this one goes out to Alamogordo, the ushering in of the nuclear age. Using beautiful euphemisms, we could target built up areas. August 6, 1945, Hiroshima. August 9, 1945, Nagasaki.

IV.
But nuclear weapons have prevented the large-scale wars that defined the first half of the twentieth century from happening in the second half. The reason the USA never started a war with the USSR was because of the atomic bomb, because of the hydrogen bomb, because of mutually assured destruction. And if we’re all going to die in a flash of beautiful, blinding light I can die happy knowing that the peaceniks are getting their eyeballs ripped out too, without anytime to be smug about their having predicted the destruction of the world.

V.
London, Paris, Moscow, New York all reduced to giant post-apocalyptic playgrounds. A whole lot of useless history turned into useful rubble. Let’s give hardcore social Darwinism a chance. We want to see the survivalists stock piling anti-radiation pills and canned goods in out-of-town nuclear bunkers proved right. We want to see them come out of their holes and rebuild society, and what a society that would be.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Take a poem you’ve found on the internet.
2. Copy and paste it into a blank word document.
3. On the first word, right click, (ctrl + click for mac users) select Synonyms and choose the third word down, if there are less than three words choose the final word in the list. If there are no synonyms simply move on.
4. Repeat Step Three on all words in the poem.
5. Congratulations, you have written a brand new poem.

- - -

here are some examples

‘Ode LXI’

Not limestone, nor the paint gold gravestone
Of princes, shall survive this authoritative nursery rhyme;
But you shall be good at intense in these innards,
Then unclean limestone, besmear’d with sluttish point in time.
When uneconomical warfare shall effigy tip over,
And riot source not in the job of building material,
Nor Mars his steel, nor warfare’s speedy bonfire shall be ablaze.
The living wage documentation of your recall
‘Gainst passing away, and all unmindful antagonism
Shall you swiftness forward; your extol shall unmoving, come across opportunity,
Smooth in the judgment of all posterity
That sport this globe out to the final lot in life.
So, till the finding that by hand take place,
You be in this world in this, and have your home in lovers’ judgment.

- - -

‘The Time Be Not Completely Adequate’

And the time be not completely adequate
And the dark be not completely adequate
And time loses your balance in approximating a grassland mouse
Not quivering the meadow.

- - -

Dissimilarity on an Idea by William Carlos Williams.

1
I slice downstairs the dwelling with intention, you have cutback to be in this world in the summer.
I am remorseful, excluding it was sunrise, I have nil to act
and its timber sunbeams were so alluring.

2
We giggle at the hollyhocks mutually
And afterward I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive and forget me. I merely do not be on familiar terms through what I am burdened with.

3
I give the left change that you have been cutting back to be in this world for the
then ten times.
The chap who solicited for it was ragged
and the rigid March wind speed on the portal was so thirst quenching and icy.

4
Preceding dusk we go hopping and I penniless your crutch.
Forgive and forget me. I be ungainly and
I sought after you now in the area, somewhere I am the doctor of medicine!

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The First Part of the Divine Revelation of St. John

When the Lamb opened the first of the seals I heard the noise of thunder, and one of the four beasts was saying, come and see, and I saw. Beholding a white horse and a man with a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth to conquer.

And when he opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, come and see, and I saw. Beholding a red horse and its rider, power was given to him to take peace from the earth, that man should kill man: and there was given unto him a great sword.

And when the lamb had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see, and I saw. Beholding a black horse and a rider with a pair of balances in his hand.

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see, and I saw. Beholding a pale horse and the name of the rider sitting upon him was Death. Hell followed with him, power was given unto him, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony that they held: they cried with a loud voice - ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ - white robes were given unto every one of them.

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake, the sun became dead and the moon became blood. The stars of heaven fell to the earth as a dying man casts away his love. The heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together. Every mountain and island was moved out of place.

The kings of the earth, the great men and the rich men, the chief captains, the mighty men, every serf and every free man, they all fled to the dens and hid in the rocks of the mountains. They cried out to the mountains and rocks - ‘fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sits upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb,’

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to withstand Him?

The Second Part of the Divine Revelation of St. John

After these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth so that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.

I saw another angel ascending from the east, bearing the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, - ‘hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have marked the servants of our God on their foreheads.’

And I heard the number of them that were marked: one hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.

Of the tribe of Juda and of Reuben. Of the tribe of Gad, Aser and Nepthalim. Of Manasses and of Simeon. Levi, Issachar and Zabulon. Of the tribe of Joseph and of Benjamin, one hundred and forty four thousand.

After this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number; of all nations, peoples, tongues and kindred’s, clothed with white robes, they all stood before the throne and before the Lamb. Crying with a loud voice, saying, - ‘salvation to our God who sits upon the throne, and salvation unto the Lamb.’

And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, all fell before the throne on their faces and worshipped God.
Crying - ‘Amen: Blessing and glory, wisdom, and thanksgiving, honour, power and might be unto our God for ever and ever.’
And one of the elders said unto me – ‘What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’
And I said unto him – ‘Sir, thou knowest.

And he said unto me – ‘These are they that came out of great tribulation, they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. They are before the throne of God because they serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, thirst no more.’

For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

The seventh seal is opened. There was silence in heaven. Only seven angels standing in the presence of God.

And the angels cast the fire of the altar upon the earth, there were thunders and voices, there was lightning and a great earthquake. Hail and fire mingled with blood was cast on the earth. And the third part of the earth was burnt up: and the third part of the trees was burnt up: and all green grass was burnt up.
A great mountain, burning with fire was cast into the sea. And the third part of the sea became blood. A great star fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch.

And I beheld – the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound the trumpet.

And I heard – the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice: ‘Woe, Woe, Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, by reason of the voices of the angels, who are to sound the trumpet!’

And he that sat on the throne, said – ‘Behold, I make all things new. I am Alpha and Omega: the Beginning and the End. To him that thirsteth, I will give of the fountain of the water of life. Write. For these words are most faithful and true.’

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I stand at the point at which the river passes away from the ancient concrete walls designed to trap it in place as it winds its way through the metropolis. Turning my back on the rising spires of the cityscape and keeping the decaying industrial zone to my right, I look out towards the river as it laps the mud banks to the east. Laid out on the mud is a museum of artefacts, dripping, rotting, covered in years of dirt and algae, left to remain as the waters bay and retreat, dredged in a process of solipsist submission; each object becoming a vessel for the scum of history to travel within; each a conduit to the chemical make up of three hundred years of vicious unyielding growth, the birth of technologies and their death through progress.

Immediately to my right are the high walls of power station two; a mighty five-sided structure of concrete, clad with ribs of steel. The flatness of its northern face, the section closest to my position on the bank, is broken by three dark orifices five or six metres above the base of the riverbank, these pipe-ways once carried the effluence produced in the energy creation process which fed the older areas of the inner city. Once alive with a gaze of colourful spew, the portals are now more like the permanently closed eyes of some massive beast, shut fast, sealed by hydraulic shutter mechanisms and heavy-duty steel gates. Power is no longer needed for these parts of the city; the few that are scratching out an existence in those areas have to generate their own supplies now.

The population of the city has fallen by seventy percent in the previous four years; in the last year thousands more have fled to make their way in the regions beyond the rising concrete spires of the metropolis. After the first year of the migration there weren’t enough engineers left to maintain the crumbling roadways or creaking bridges, let alone men or women with the specific technical knowledge of high flux reactors to keep such generators alive. Power generation for the wealthier areas of the metropolis is now almost exclusively housed in locally situated substations. These electric oases provide around ten percent of those who remain with power enough for energy during the darker hours of the day. The substations, ramshackle in their construction, operation and output, generate charge through the burning of organic materials. In the early days they were piling up the unused detritus and the scraps of packaging abandoned by the citizens of the polis as they themselves moved out to safer areas of the country.

As with all resources, these supplies were limited. Of those who remained some consumed rapidly, bathing themselves in heat and light in the short term, others stockpiled their combustible assets waiting for a jump in their value as they became harder to come by. As throw-away-fuel became harder to come by, local energy stations developed different strategies to cope with the demand against the shortfall in fuel; some rationed what they had out amongst their consumers, others started to raid apartments, flats and houses, ripping out anything that would burn, torching one house so another hundred could remain. Finally, substations in communities where the denizens weren’t willing to destroy their habitats turned instead on municipal libraries burning books, magazines, pamphlets and records in exchange for heat and light.

The central grid is now dead and with it went many other tools that we had become so dependent upon. We now find ourselves in a period of learning. A re-enlightenment. The corporations that had inhabited the glass buildings to the west would have called it a re-skilling of the work force, it would have been an easier process had there been free access to what was left of the internet - that domain remains locked off from most of the world. I myself employ new strategies to pass time. I learn what I can about the environment that changes around us. I watch the people, chart the rise and fall of those who seek control of the various districts of the city. Constantly repositioning itself in ebb and flow, authority resides for one moment with an old family who are eventually dispossessed by some gang who are in turn crushed by a tidal wave of citizen action taking control of the area for a short period before some natural calamity robs them of this unity. I keep a journal of what I see and hear, I talk to citizens, listen to rumours, make recordings and keep an archive.

I aim to capture the world in its greatness and its horror.

By D N Charlesworth

Art is sex.

It is the mystery and the solution, the extreme moment a light is switched on. It’s the cure for something but I forget what.
Education is the intangible, the endless beginning of life, the enjoyable method that does not reach a goal, though we strive as artists to achieve this inexplicable feeling of complete fulfilment and genius.
You are never sated and everything always seems to end.
Does this switch even work?

How come if you only gave me two, I’ve got four left?
…and have you noticed how everyone orders their puddings here like they’re ordering wine?
You’ve got to keep drinking through your generation.

Literature, music, art, photography, theatre, film can all be non-starters.

*Click*
*Boom*

Is this an everlasting climax?
You are the sort of person who’ll only enjoy the whole progression.
You’re also the sort of person who really shouldn’t be drinking at this time but that’s a different matter entirely.

Give me static art.
Your paintings, your sculptures. I’ll pretend i care about yours and not just mine.
Consider the abstract as timeless and paint my portrait from there. I’ll lie on the bed.
And you’ll paint me whole and at my peak. Potential, commencement, rising/running, conclusion and thrill. It’s all bound up in this moment.

*Click*
*Boom*

Remember it.

A single photo, one suggesting movement for instance, can begin an idea or a feeling without evolving, but a series or a montage of photos can suggest a narrative, open up a journey, and spur you on to an end.

“We’ll go down on the morning of the 17th, that way we can be back in time for Jake’s on the 21st and that gives us two good days in Savannah.”
“I’d like that, as will Edie. What do you reckon about Davis?”
“If it’s just me and you.”
“Not Edie?”
“And not Davis.”
“It’s too complicated?”
“Similar.”
“But two days in Savannah?”
“There’s a good crowd down there.”

Consider the situation when that waitress comes over.
What if you saw death in her eyes? What if you fall in love all over again?
Can you handle the choice?

“Theatre and film can afford the loss of ending or beginning,”
“You have always hated a steady plotline, a narrative arc. That’s just you. Your understanding doesn’t breed a hip dialogue.”
“I’m not saying that, it doesn’t matter whether is goes ad infinitum or reaches a crescendo. As long as it retains its cathartic quality.”

*Cut*

The novel still has the tendency to begin and fulfil, Modernism introduced in part the timeless aspect static art has benefited from through cyclical themes, parallel and déjà-vu (no more spoon-fed passionless skip-to-the-end plots), or the Imagist way of using non-analogous metaphors which broaden feeling and break from the logical and the expected.
Choose one photograph to be remembered by.

Though I’m not sure if I agree with art at all right now. Art is not actually sex, it is displacement, it is avoiding life. How can the abstract ever be represented; made concrete? The moment I feel, i have felt, it is gone. Just calling it a feeling, just calling it an it, does not seem (seem?) right (right?) anymore. Yes, yes, I should just get over semiotics. But what a blow that was. To see the world as only surface. Art is communication though, you say. It is to understand. Art is not the fact, it is a representation of the memory. So we see the young man nod and cry as he hears that speech from our sofa on the TV.
But the camera is in soft focus, and the man is framed by two smiling people to enthuse a contrast, and the lighting from the stage is shining across his sweaty face.

It is artistic.

Do I want to be the observing artist?
Maybe I don’t want to hold the camera any more.
Maybe I want to be that crying nodding man

by Gordon Macrae and Jen Calleja