Authenticity Is No Longer an Option

Also this

My darling, my thistle, my poppet, my own

Actual text-message conversation I had earlier today:

d: what is p-fanatics?

me: it’s a reading series. this sunday, at coles bar. generally pretty fun. you should come.

d: why does it stand for piss fanatic?

me: because mason johnson likes making people feel weird.

d: cool. I thought you were reading for piss fetishists

*

Anyway, I’m reading this Sunday. You should come.

Then suddenly it was everyone’s birthday

Then suddenly it was everyone’s birthday.

“How do you even know this many people?” Viola asked. Robert gave out birthday presents wrapped in tissue paper, usually gift certificates to restaurants downtown. He smiled at everyone at the party.

Viola realized that all of Robert’s friends were Leos. She looked up facts about Leos on the internet while her Introduction to Information Science students worked on group work. Leos are born leaders, blessed with many talents. They are optimistic, charming, and generous, though they occasionally get upset by change. Many Leos are Republicans. They are compatible with Aquarius, Sagittarius, and Aries. “Ms. Wilder?” “Yes?” “I have to take a phone call.” “Are you Marianne or Kaitlin?” “Marianne.” Viola checked her list of students. “Okay then.”

“Did you know that all of your friends are Leos?” Viola asked Robert, at the next birthday party.

“Tomás is more of an acquaintance,” Robert said.

Titles of Articles That Are Currently on My Computer Screen

Gene Ray, “Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime”

Judy Lochhead, “The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics”

James Robert Currie, “Postmodern Beauty and the Sublime Neighbor: A Response to Judy Lochhead’s ‘The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics’”

Rainer Stollmann, “Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism”

These + the fourteen or so books I have piled on my bed right now are going to become an article about the ethical/political possibilities of the sublime, I hope.

The only place to get coffee near the library is a brunch place called Demitasse. I got a latte to-go from a cute girl with a pronounced lisp. She was wearing bunny ears.

“Do you support the hunting of tigers?” she said.

“No,” I said. “This is just a band t-shirt.”

What should I eat

this is an actual question

Longinus may refer to

• Gaius Cassius Longinus (died 42 BC), usually known as Cassius, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar
• Saint Longinus, name ascribed to the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus Christ on the cross
• Longinus (literature), a Greek literary critic who may have lived in the 1st century, author of On the Sublime
• Cassius Longinus (suffect consul) (fl. 30–41), a Roman jurist and nephew of Gaius Cassius Longinus
• Cnaeus Pompeius Longinus, a Roman general
• Longinus (Roman governor) (fl. 158–161), a possible Roman governor of Britain
• Cassius Longinus (philosopher) (ca. 213–273), a Greek rhetorician, critic and chief counselor to Zenobia of Palmyra
• Saint Longinus (died c. 290) a companion of St. Victor of Marseilles
• Longinus (consul 486) (fl. 486), brother of Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno
• Longinus of Cardala (died 497), Isaurian leader during the Isaurian War
• Longinus of Selinus (died 498), Isaurian leader during the Isaurian War
• Longinus (prefect), the Roman Pretorian prefect of Italy from 569 to 574
• Bishop Longinus (fl. 6th century), a Christian missionary working in Alodia during Emperor Justinian I’s reign
• Johannes Longinus (1415–1480), Latin name of Jan Długosz, a medieval Polish historian

Waiting for the barrel to explode

Even though they’re pretty silly, I’ve been kind of obsessed with QR codes recently. I wanted to put the entire unformatted text of Artifice 4 into a QR code, but it turns out that they can’t hold that many letters.

Then for a while I was thinking about having stickers made of pieces from Artifice 4 in QR code, but it seemed like they were really trendy, in an already-jumped-the-shark way, I guess? Also, most of the QR codes I see now are ads for really douchey things, like colognes and men’s hair product.

Anyway, I went ahead and made QR codes for a couple of pieces from Artifice 4. Here they are.

Dan Brady, “from Sonnets to E—”

Marc McKee, “& What Shoulder, & What Art”

Joslyn Persh, “ships are not the only things in the sea”

I’m still kind of thinking about starting a side project journal that would be an entire journal on a QR code. QR codes can hold around 4000 characters, which works out to maybe 400 words? So very short pieces, max 40 words each.

I have another side project journal already started, which you can find out about here.

from being into having, from having into appearing

In The Future there are a lot of shots of Miranda July’s character looking at youtube, etc, on her computer screen and having various emotional responses to them. I don’t think I have any particular emotional responses when I stare at things on the internet. Mostly I just stare at things and feel completely empty. Sometimes I have a growing sense of anxiety at the vastness of it all, the internet. The incongruence between the frame and the content.

International pie day

I did some vulturing of my local Borders as it was going under. Got, among other things, a copy of High Tension for like a buck-fifty. For some reason I thought it was a zombie movie. I remember very distinctly a conversation in which my friend Diana, who saw it when it was in theaters, said that it was a French lesbian zombie movie that involved among other things a scene with an animated severed head.

There were 2 severed heads, but no zombies.

It was a pretty good/gut-wrenching movie though. I cared about the main character more than I think I’ve ever cared about a character in a slasher movie before.

And then the movie kind of screwed all that up with a knock-off Fight Club ending.

I’ve been thinking through what kinds of twist endings add to the pleasure of a movie, and what kinds detract from it. High Tension’s ending, unfortunately, belongs to the second category. I would also add in The Usual Suspects, which I think is ultimately marred by its twist ending (even though I seem to be in the minority on that one). In both cases, the twist in some way removes the drama of previous scenes, instead of enhancing or deepening it.

The twist at the end of Fight Club, on the other hand, makes the rest of the movie into a different, but still compelling movie. One focused quite a bit more on the character Marla (who “reads” completely differently before and after knowledge of the twist ending).

In other news, submissions are now open for this.

I don’t know anything about “Fatpaint.” Is Fatpaint good?

I have been considering writing one short essay a week, because I have realized that I get extremely anxious when writing nonfiction/factual essays. I don’t have a problem writing “creative nonfiction,” because I’m pretty sure that just means writing fiction where the main character has my name.

“Emotional truth,” etc.

I am considering a number of other projects.

I like the idea of starting a journal called “Secret Journal,” which would be a limited edition journal that I would then hide around Chicago. Contributors would get a contributor’s copy and a number of additional copies that they would be asked to hide around their town.

This idea is partially based on Mike Kitchell’s Journal of the Impossible and partially based on Michael Martone’s encouraging students to sneak their self-published work into libraries & bookstores.

I have a collaborative manuscript that I would like to start sending out.

I am starting to put together some short films based on recorded versions of pieces from Artifice 4.*

I am thinking about watching the Saw series and writing poems in which I recorded, as precisely as possible, my reactions throughout. I would write one poem during each movie, and only while the movie was on.

Someone pointed out to me, recently, that I have no real aesthetic justification for disliking torture porn. This is probably correct, but I haven’t really figured out what I think about it yet.

*if you are a film artist/filmmaker/work with moving images in some way & are interested in possibly making a short film for Artifice 4, contact editors AT artificemag DOT com for more information.**

**also you can pre-order Artifice 4 here. It is about apocalypse and letters from the dead and also a superhero named Sky Beard.