by Joshua Wilbur 

I first encountered a Big Dumb Object (“BDO”) in an underfunded school library in rural East Texas. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, I held a battered paperback just a few inches from my face, periodically turning it over to inspect the image on the book’s cover.

Rama.

I was twelve years old—“the real golden age of science-fiction”—and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama captivated my imagination. The novel’s premise is simple: an alien starship, a massive cylinder of unknown origin and construction, has entered the solar system, and a crew of scientists must investigate. Thin on plot (and even thinner on characterization), Rama lingers in my memory not for what’s hidden within the vessel but for what’s kindled from without, from the mere suggestion of a colossus come from the stars. It stirred in me what sci-fi critics have called the “sense of wonder,” a feeling of awe that courses through the heart of the genre.

Nothing better epitomizes this sense of wonder than “Big Dumb Objects,” a term coined by Roz Kaveney and lovingly adopted by fans of the science fiction genre. BDOs, as you’ll have guessed, are really big, dumb in the old sense of “mute, silent, refraining from speaking,” and usually serve as a focal point for narrative action. Mysterious thing is discovered; mysterious thing is explored. In a Weird Things column for The Guardian, Damien Walter defines the BDO:

“ … the Big Dumb Object (BDO) is a unique selling point of the sci-fi genre. It can be a broad term – usually, they’re alien architectures, ranging from the man-sized to the planetary. BDOs either look extreme or unusual, and can often do extreme or unusual things: everything from lurking on a horizon to creating worlds. Usually, BDOs are plonked into plots to awe us with their majesty and mystery – really, they’re science fiction’s equivalent of a MacGuffin.” Read more »

by Max Sirak

Recently I embarked on an unexpected and enlightening adventure.

I went to Las Vegas with four of my oldest friends to see some music. The band, Phish, was playing for a four night run at the MGM Grand’s Garden Arena and we decided to meet up and attend. It also happened to be over Halloween.

For those unfamiliar, Phish is a four-piece band that owes its legacy to the Grateful Dead. Their fans are fiercely loyal and regularly tour with the band, traveling from location to location and seeing as many concerts as they can. This is because Phish shows are fun

They’re equal parts concert and carnival. Beach balls and balloons bounce around the room when the band plays. The fans are engaged. They dress up in costumes. They make signs in hopes of encouraging the group to play certain songs. At a peak musical moment, the crowd spontaneously begins throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of Glow Sticks around the venue. This is called a “Glow Stick War.”

The concerts are between three and four hours. There’s no opening act and always a set-break (intermission). The music is largely instrumental and is accompanied by one of the best light shows in the business.

In preparation for the trip, a group text emerged. There were all sorts of details to hash out. Flight times, hotel reservations, and Halloween costumes were all discussed. It was quickly decided we’d dress up differently for each evening. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

I stayed out late the night before I left for college, saying goodbye to friends whose future included institutions even more punitive than mine. My parents packed my belongings in two long, green army duffel bags purchased at “Sunny’s Surplus”, where you could buy Afro picks with folding handles, decommissioned grenades and a “knuckle knife”.

At Baltimore-Washington airport, I watched a young man carrying a black-leather trumpet case unload his luggage from a Rolls Royce. My parents thought he might be going to school with me. I doubted them. My throat burnt by cheap Mexican weed, trumpet kid looked as sullen as I felt. He boarded with me and we flew southwest. At Dallas-Fort Worth, we both headed to the baggage carousels, still avoiding eye contact. The area gradually cleared, leaving a cluster of freshman music students. A saxophonist unpacked a gleaming Yamaha alto and played scales with a windup, wooden metronome. He began them slowly and evenly, a proper music lesson, and ended each with a monsoon of notes whose velocity propelled his body backwards, a cephalopod in flight.

A few of us took out the letters promising shuttle bus service to our dorm in Denton. At the curb, unmarked vans pulled in, waited and left, sometimes without picking up passengers. They drove through a lattice of Texas sun and graphite shadow. It was one-hundred and fourteen degrees. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

November 9th was the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. In Leipzig, where I live, as all over Germany, a series of events took place to commemorate the victims of that night of Nazi-led pogroms.

The western part of Leipzig is a former industrial wasteland. Now rapidly gentrifying, it is still home to those who wear their counter-culture cred on their sleeve, sometimes literally—punks, students, artists, and dreadlocked parents walking the streets barefoot with toddlers strapped on their backs. Here, on the trendy Karl-Heine boulevard, on the night of November 9th, “Stolpersteine” became little ground-level shrines. Stolpersteine are small square brass plates inscribed with the names and life-dates of victims of Nazi extermination or prosecution, installed on the sidewalk where these victims last lived or worked. To raise public awareness of Kristallnacht, flowers and candles were placed on the Stolpersteine, drawing attention to their presence as memorials, their normally subdued existence. A private initiative led by German artist Gunter Demnig since 1992, Stolpersteine can be found in towns throughout Germany and Europe.

Some in the Jewish community have objected to this form of commemoration, viewing as disrespectful the notion that remembrance plaques are placed where they can be treaded on—indeed, the reality and explicit purpose of Stolpersteine. The long grid in Thessaloniki shown above seems the exception rather than the rule, for in most cases, Stolpersteine are not aesthetically prominent. On regular days here in Leipzig, Stolpersteine do not command much attention. This kind of incessant yet unobtrusive, subliminal reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime seems like an apt counterpoint to the way many Israelis (such as myself) view their relationship with Germany. In the last two decades or so, more and more Israeli Jews have moved to Germany, to work or permanently live here, including those whose ancestors were direct victims of the Nazis. Our relationship with the past seems reflected in the kind of commemoration the Stolpersteine enact: the Holocaust is a fact. It happened right here. Sometimes, we pause, the mere thought of it knocking the wind out of us. But most of the time, we move on. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

“Beware of literature!” This warning occurs in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea as an entry in the diary of the narrator, Antoine Roquentin. In context, it concerns the way that literary narratives falsify our experience of events by investing them with an organization and structure that our experiences in themselves, as we live them, do not have. When Bilbo Baggins finds the ring in The Hobbit, Tolkein tells us that although Bilbo didn’t realize it at the time, this would turn out to be a turning point in his life. When married couples recall their first meeting, their account inevitably packages the event as a “beginning,” even though they may have had no inkling of this at the time.

There is, of course, some self-conscious irony in the fact that the warning to “beware of literature” appears in the middle of a literary work. Shades of the liar paradox, in fact. If we should be suspicious of literature, then we must be suspicious of the work that tells us to beware of literature: in which case we should perhaps trust literature, including works that advise us not to…..and so on.

The warning goes against an idea often touted that literature is a vehicle for expressing and revealing Truth. Perhaps not truth of the scientific variety, but some sort of insight, wisdom, or moral lesson concerning human nature, human relationships, and the human condition, that is best communicated through art rather than by means of discursive argument, and which resists reduction to a simple formula. This idea is naturally appealing to the literati, especially at a time when the onus seems to be on anyone not working in STEM fields to justify their existence, or at least their salary.

Recently, though, I have been struck by a particular problem with such claims, at least insofar as they pertain to fiction. Read more »

Coincidence

last night as I went in to bed
I threw the switch to kill the light
and as if I’d thrown
the breaker of the universe,
every light was doused,
every light below … behind  … above  … beyond
was dead except the light inside my head

the window did not show
the steadfast street-lamp’s
amber glow

the tiny stars strewn below
of town, always lit at night
as I looked out and down,
were gone

the range clock light
did not blink

the red dot toaster
LED was fully bled

so there we were
myself and me
power out
in deepest night
instead

unmoored

still seeing still being
by the light inside
my head
.

Jim Culleny
11/11/18

by Thomas R. Wells

Suppose a company wants to fill a job. They would advertise it together with the requirements for any successful candidate. HR would screen out all the applicants not good enough to do the job and everyone else’s name would go into a lottery.

Do you find this prospect upsetting? Perhaps you think it is unfair for someone to get a job without a good reason for why they deserve it rather than anyone else. Perhaps you think such a system would decrease your chances of getting the job you want. If so then you may be under the influence of the cult of excellence.

Excellence is the false religion of our time. Like all cults it fosters unhealthy and delusional behaviour, and benefits only a handful of insiders. We need to throw it out, reconcile ourselves to the essential truth that none of us is particularly special, and build a society fit for that.

The first problem with excellence is that we use it in a purely relative sense, to rank ourselves against each other to decide for who gets what. This turns society into a race in which we are trained to see each other as competitors for scarce resources rather than as fellows in a community of equals. Over time the race to the top takes over more institutions and more of our lives. In education, for example, cramming schools appear to help kids get into the right preschools, while a whole industry of consultants exists to help rich high-schoolers write their Ivy League application essays. In such a toxic meritocracy no one has the time or compassion to help the less fortunate. Winners congratulate themselves on their wonderfulness, as proven by their salaries, but retain an existential anxiety about their position. Losers blame themselves for not running faster. Inequality rockets. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

If you listened closely to the songs of praise in honor of Stan Lee, the man who is taken to be largely responsible for the present superhero-mad moment in popular culture, you might have heard an undertone of discord.

As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos noted, Lee’s notoriety in the popular imagination as the originator of many of the most beloved characters of the Marvel Comic Universe was matched within the narrower comic book community by his reputation for failing to give adequate credit to the artists and writers with whom he worked.

Abad-Santos points to a 2016 piece in Vulture by Abraham Riesman, in which Riesman painstakingly documents the ways that Lee maneuvered to divert credit from his comic hero co-creators – most notably perhaps Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko – to foster the legend that Lee was single-handedly responsible for Marvel Comics’ biggest successes. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

When the father of your child is in jail, pray even if you don’t believe in God. Pray even though in your head of heads you know it won’t do shit. Stop staring at the walls, at the clock, at the phone. At your baby, now eight, sleeping next to you, his sneakers, caked with mud, still tied to his feet. Pray because it will distract you from what’s coming, from a conversation millions of mothers have already had with their sons. You are not different, not an exception to some rule. Start praying instead of feeling sorry for yourself. Buck the fuck up because he will need you.

When the father of your child is in jail, think back to the beginning. When just being in the same room with him made you feel dizzy, made every cell in your body turnover. That crazy-ass, lightning speed chemistry, that undeniable force forever pushing then pulling you apart.

He wasn’t always the father of your child. Before that he was your friend then your boyfriend then someone neither here nor there. Now he’s the person you worry most about when you wake-up in the middle of the night.

When the father of your son is in jail, the details will haunt but not surprise you. How he got involved with the wrong person, a toxic relationship, an unhealthy situation. How he was blamed for things he couldn’t possibly have done. You’re scared for him in ways you’ve never been before. You’ve watched enough episodes of Orange is the New Black to think you’d know how to handle life on the inside. You could shank a bitch if you had to. But he never could. It’s just not in him. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

Actors come to each role in a new film bearing the stamp of their old ones so they are richer and more interesting in the new incarnation—the whole more than the sum of the parts. Just last week one saw Nargis as the innocent and naive mountain girl pining away for the love of the ‘shehri babu’, and today she is the femme fatale, all hell and brimstone, plotting the downfall of her rival. Or, as Mother India, upholding principles of honesty and justice, shooting her favorite son dead for raping a village girl.

Most of the time the female protagonists in our local films were uneducated but good, pious women seemingly knowing little of the world’s evil. They existed in a limited space, physically and mentally circumscribed by a patriarchal society, sheltered and protected by ‘their’ men and dependent on them for validation. They could cook up a storm, look after the household, sweep and clean, tend to animals and sick husbands, all in a day, without getting tired or complaining.

But they remained submissive women who suffered silently and deferred endlessly to their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, and society. What would people say? What would make the family lose face? The family ‘honor’ was always tied to a woman’s behavior, to her desires, and no one was allowed to forget that. Conforming to those norms secured women a place in the community, credibility and status, and the more they suffered and sacrificed themselves the more they were lauded as role models. Such lessons were not lost on young girls and boys and went a long way in shaping expectations for their futures and standards of acceptable behavior. Read more »

“In erratic times one cannot be too attentive, too
ready to stand or duck.” —A. Skutočné

Politics

what’s real depends upon where a thing lands—
how far along it is from ultraviolet to infrared
(from invisible to invisible), but on the
spectrum of real, it might be said

if it’s a matter of life-or-death I’m inclined to think
whatever’s coming at me now is most real,
so I move, I snap to

but if, instead, I’m lost in the contours
of the coming bumper that will ice me,
lost in chiaroscuro,
lost in its seductive curves,
lost in the way fenders sleek and silver slice air,
lost in the hood’s patina,
in the way its lacquered finish
creates a bright steel mood,
if I’m gone in its pricey logo
cast in chrome
……………. …… — if at that moment
my real is just beauty, then realities collide,
aesthetics gives way to physics (the most
essential real of the moment) and the
reality of beauty dies

then too, but late, the meaning of distraction
would’ve suddenly been real, suggesting a deeper take
on the meaning of lies

joy and sorrow
are both real

some say money is real
and it is, the way it wrenches things—

anything with that much clout,
anything that so shapes the mind of the world,
anything that so pummels and rips the fabric of love
is surely real

but what’s real is ephemeral as mist:
thin       thick       opaque      divine
depending upon where and when it lands
on the spectrum of real

real is different
at different times

Jim Culleny
11/6/18