"Catch & Release"
Featuring endless loops, alleged names, multiple Earths (prodigious, hungry), unfamiliar searches, eccentric technologies, and a Very Happy Robot Birthday to us all
/ Now at AC: Nam Hoang Tran, “Seriatim”
An ideal work of video poetry, in our opinion, is one that couldn’t exist & be effective in any other form. In “Seriatim,” Nam Hoang Tran offers a short, formally precise work which, looping endlessly, seems to push against the viewer’s attempts to exhaust it. View “Seriatim” here.
/ From the Archives: Jane Liddle, 3 Fictions
I WAS RIGHT
But before all this, I was seventeen. I was invited to a party by a woman I had met in an ice cave. Her name was Ivy. I drove over the ridge to get to her house. I had just gotten my driver’s license and this was my first time going over the mountain alone. The sharp turns and bends did not make me nauseous, and I did not shut my eyes when the drop-off was steep and the guardrail presented insufficient. The moon washed out the stars.
Ivy’s house was all white and confused angles, like her. I went up to what I assumed was the front door, though there were two other doors that were runners-up. Ivy opened the door before I could knock. She wore so much jewelry. I walked into the house and it was full of women, well, eight women, and one kid, who I later learned was nine years old, who I soon learned was named Dove. I learned all the women’s names, or rather, alleged names, because what are the chances their names would be Holly, Maple, Laurel, Olive, Hazel, Daisy, Flora.
I was seventeen, so I didn’t make sense of their names until years later when I was browsing the local bookstore for some field guides.
Three connected short-short stories about drunks and dead dads and stoned ceramicists. Read “Paloma’s,” “I Was Right,” & “And Now for Some Plot” here.
/ Elsewhere
“Women are still asked to hold back, despite the point of art: to venture to the darkest places, to reach the very edge of normality and leap.” AC contributor Danielle Chelosky writes about Olivia Rodrigo and Annie Ernaux1 at Off Chance.
“Both the victim and any hope of solving the crime give way to less familiar searches”: At Heavy Feather Review, AC Issue 3 contrib Joe Sacksteder reviews Eric Blix’s novel The Prodigious Earth.
Carrion Bloom Books recently announced the forthcoming publication of AC contrib Cat Ingrid Leeches’ I Wander the Earth, Hungry for Semen.
&&& AC contrib Daniel Beauregard’s novel Lords of Chaos is, as of yesterday, officially OUT IN THE WORLD.
In non-contributor news, Minor Literature[s] essays editor Frank Garrett writes about accidentally meeting Victor Orbán in the heady days just prior to 9/11:
It was as if all the malevolence and ill will that he had been stockpiling in his soul for future use erupted right then, viscerally stunning me. I had a physical reaction to his evil. I saw a scorched earth, cities in ruins, and bloated carcasses of large farm animals. We quickly pulled away from each other, so I know that he too knew what I had seen inside him. Either that, or my acute and uncompromising near weapons-grade homosexuality had sent his gaydar off the charts.
& we’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about AI, both its potential for making the world more interesting, as well as its potential for making the world both shittier and more boring. Sean Michaels’s recent(ish) essay in The Baffler argues that the problem is less the existence of AI and more the attempt to create a single, authoritative AI (boring, dangerous) rather than a multitude of obviously dumb but interesting AIs (interesting, less likely to be put in a position where they could blow up the planet):
Instead of an AI that’s singular, optimized, and versatile, we should be calling for technology that’s eccentric, customized, and plural. Not one or two or five AIs, like drugged and tranquil genies—but a thousand different familiars, heterodox and helpful and odd. This is the landscape of Star Wars, where disparate droids quip, grieve, and spin records; it’s the universe of author Iain M. Banks, where spaceship-sized Minds save planets and build sculptures; but it’s a galaxy far, far away from the product suite of OpenAI, where the only model is generic.
/ Today’s Soundtrack
It really does seem like September 9 comes faster every year, doesn’t it? Happy Robot Birthday to all who celebrate.
“Blah blah blah I don’t like Annie Ernaux, something something boring memoir” you say. Have you read Possession? No? Go read Possession and then let’s talk. Annie Ernaux kicks ass.