From soon after his founding the Republic until the end of his tumultuous tenure as President of Indonesia, Sukarno was widely known as the dalang, or puppet master, of Indonesian politics. “Bung Karno” skillfully played off militarists, Islamists, and communists in a manner reminiscent of the puppeteer’s balancing of competing forces to maintain order in the […]
Nonfiction
Public Action Art and Performative Interventions in the Chinese Public Sphere: an article by Maya Kóvskaya
If the expansion of the public sphere in Western history was transformative and essential in the creation of democratic, participatory polities, the character and role of the public sphere under socialism (from the former Soviet Union, to Eastern Europe, to China, North Korea and Cuba) has been radically different. In all these places, the power […]
QUARK’S ATTIC by Chuck Richardson
Triumph at last—you’re in. Mowing the lawn brings this into focus. His father has no time to squander nor his mother any space. She enjoyed it. She kissed you goodbye. Overrunning a rock, the blades halt. The scent of barbecue and fresh cut grass balances his stinging eyes and pinkened neck. The phone rings. Her […]
LOVE IS A BLACK HOLE by Chuck Richardson
He’s losing the lot all over again. New routines do not exist. It is mature. Everything chiseled into stone gets digitized, perhaps. Logarithms asexually inhabit the whole thing—nonplussed. The unnamable becomes ineffable as It’s damaged. We are the fabric, stitched together in storms to be torn asunder, too fast and weak for immortality. At one’s […]
ZENO’S PARADOX a previously unpublished entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
An arrow, and so a harpoon, is stopped while it is moving. Sprung from bow, or hurled from hand, the weapon speeding through the air is frozen “in the Now.” Aristotle solves the problem pragmatically. Time, like space, is infinite in two ways: infinite in extremity and infinite in division. Though nothing finite can approach […]
WOUND an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
Ahab is not driven by pride; he is a man guided by wound. This wound is worth meditating on, for it can explain more than anything else the nature of the relationship between an I and a You. When Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick’s scythelike jaw, he simultaneously struck out with a dagger […]
TZIMTZUM an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
Behind Creation another story lurks, explains, complicates. The first question of the world is Form. The question does not begin with “what,” but with “how.” What philosophical and theological theories may gloss when considering ex nihilo as a creative crux is that Nothing must first exist for creation to occur in it. Tzimtzum, in midrashic and kabbalistic thought, […]
TIME an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
Time grants us the simple goodness of life, but also takes it away. We change and we witness change in the world, and both types of flux occur within time. While we live the world exists for us, and though none can say if the world ceases to exist when we’ve ceased to exist, there […]
THE AVOIDANCE CANON RECENTLY RELEASED documents conceived by Jared Schickling
—these two worlds are transcendental, that is, beyond consciousness. they cannot be perceived “in themselves” but only by the traces which they leave in the field of our consciousness. 1 no problem, like fiction: by Jared Schickling April 1, 2009 Office of Legal Counsel Contest Oversight Committee National Poetry Council Memorandum for R izzo, wise Mouth for the National Endowment Pure poetry is […]
MARK WALLACE’S RESPONSE TO “SOME DARKER BOUQUETS”
A call for “necessarily skeptical” reviews sidesteps the issue of what makes for the best reviews: that they are informed, descriptive, substantive, insightful, and make plain the values of the reviewed text and the values of the reviewer. I read reviews to decide whether to read a book. I like reviews best that describe a […]
