Welcome to our museum! Please seat yourself there and let me connect you to this thing. We call it mind-expanding machine. Visually, it resembles an ancient phonograph, doesn’t it? Assuming you know what a phonograph is. Assuming such things still exist in your constellation. If not, there is one example in the next room within the same dimension. You may check it out later. Not the real one, of course, just a reflection in a controlled time curve.
Continue reading “Keep Your Voices Low”
The One Arrested and Later Left at Our Doorstep
The missing one is restored to her apparition,
disoriented, oozy-blood,
smelling like a marsh; two days’ve passed
since the protest fired up from the gully to the alcázar.
Editor’s note: In September of this year, Steven Moore’s new book, Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes, will be released by Zerogram Press. Among other things, I hope this interview whets your appetite for Theroux’s books and that you spend a healthy part of the year reading or rereading him in preparation for Moore’s book. Here is a description of Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes: “Since the publication of his first novel in 1972, Alexander Theroux has won great acclaim for his dazzling style and forceful intellect. That first novel, Three Wogs, was named Book of the Year by Encyclopedia Britannica, and his second, Darconville’s Cat, was nominated for the National Book Award. Since then he has gone on to publish 20 more books and has been the subject of several interviews and academic studies. This is the first book-length study of Theroux’s complete body of work-novels, fables and short stories, nonfiction books, poetry, journalism-concluding with a chapter on his contentious relationship with his best-selling brother Paul Theroux. Critic Steven Moore, who has known Theroux for nearly forty years and helped with the publication of some of his books, illuminates Theroux work in a scholarly yet accessible style. While appreciative of most of what Theroux has written, Moore doesn’t shirk from what he regards as some of his weaker efforts in order to provide a balanced evaluation of this unique writer. Moore’s book will appeal to Theroux’s fan base as well as to students of modern American literature”
Continue reading “Giants in the Earth: An Interview with Steven Moore”
Handmaid’s Tail
Continue reading “Handmaid’s Tail”
George Salis: You’ve been working on an ambitious project, a 1000 story cycle titled Pandora’s Bluff that you’ve nearly finished. What can you tell me about it? It’s one story less than the Arabian Nights. Do the Nights have any influence on this project?
Continue reading “One Thousand and None Nights: An Interview with Rhys Hughes”
Chromosomes
Continue reading “Chromosomes”
Blazing Hot with Sartre’s Last Note
A prisoner isn’t a man
yawning with teeth painted
by decayed food eaten to live;
a prisoner isn’t a man
seeking the eye of the sun
through age-eaten brick walls;
a prisoner is a man condemned
to the fate of shapes.
The hurricane has been upgraded to Category E or Level Orange or to the Fifth Tier or Echelon or Whichever Unit They’ve Invented to Measure the Combination of Wind Speed and Irrationality. At this point evacuations are highly recommended which makes you actually consider evacuating which would never happen if the evacuation were mandatory because what word inspires defiance quite like the word mandatory? This storm is undeniably strong however, so strong that every channel on TV is showing the Yule Log. You actually like the windows all boarded up. It’s comforting. The eye of the storm will not look down upon you until early tomorrow morning and so you decide to devote this time to doing something responsible like catching up on emails.
Continue reading “Catching Up on Emails”
Some things are fashionable, others not. Those things that are fashionable now might not be fashionable later on today, around teatime. It is generally objects that are or are not fashionable, but sometimes it is attributes, ethics, definitions. Language is at the moment rather fashionable. I am talking to you and you understand. You slowly nod your head, your fashionable head. Your nod is benign. Heads are still fashionable. An assegai, less so. Electricity is currently fashionable. Mammoths, unfortunately not. I am walking on the central reservation of a busy road and I ask myself: how stylish is this? Trucks pass, fashionable and not gauche.
Continue reading “Some Things Are Fashionable”
Eye
I opened suddenly, like a crack
of dawn, golden, molten, running
over the flat desert vista.
The Collidescope 