"He Was Embarrassed to Be in Front of Me While Dead"

featuring an intrinsic acceptance of the other, editorial resistance to parenthetical wordplay, hollow challenges to Stephen King, a brief but sincere defense of artistic plagiarism, carp

/ Now at AC: excerpt from Imaginary Affairs, Daisuke Shen & Thom Hawkins

I almost went to bed with Osamu Dazai. He asked me, Is it okay to kiss you? I said, Yes of course, why not? We were standing by the river. There were no cherry blossoms. I hadn’t spoken Japanese in months. I was embarrassed because my grammar was coming out all wrong and he was embarrassed to be in front of me while dead. I think that both of us felt an intrinsic acceptance of the other. We laid down by the river and he took my hand, and told me that while I was very beautiful, he preferred that we not continue past this point (though whether or not anything had even started, who could say, the kiss hadn’t even been performed). 

I pulled out a box of Lucky Strikes and he said, These are good American cigarettes. 

I said, The best. My gums are fucked, I shouldn’t be doing this, but I believe one should have at least one vice that life cannot take away from them. He nodded in agreement.

As we smoked cigarettes by the rushing water, we began to speak a little on the nature of pain. Or rather I guess he felt the need to still explain to me why he didn’t want to bed me, though I didn’t need one. Regardless he began to tell me of his involvement in various affairs and intense romances and how they left him more confused each time.

A beautiful, hallucinogenic work reminiscent of Kathy Acker’s collages and artful plagiarisms¹. It also includes the line “And writing is a shameful profession,” which is something we could all probably bear to keep in mind more often (I could, certainly).

Read excerpt from Imaginary Affairs here.

/ From the Archive

The lucky girl has to know all about flying—
I don’t know the moment, headed down exhaustion,

a dreamy voice wondering overnight, some half-remembered
ill. And beneath all that, a swelling inside the terror of half an hour.

             Panic—

Speaking of hallucinatory collages, how about some erasures—three of them, in fact, from AC favorite E. Kristin Anderson, all taking Stephen King’s Firestarter as their source material. YOU HEAR THAT, KING?? COME AND GET US.²

You can read three of Anderson’s Firestarter erasures here.

/ Elsewhere

Lots of contributor news this round. There’s a conference of some sort happening soon, maybe in Kansas? Or Missouri? Are those the same place? AC contrib Mary Biddinger will be reading there. As will AC contributors Catherine Gammon and Michael Martone. AC contrib Jessica Alexander will be featured on a panel, “Supporting Small Press Authors.” AC contrib Vi Khi Nao, who collaborated with Jessica Alexander on “MANGOS LACK MOST MEANS OF SELF EXPRESSION,” will be featured on the panel “Whose Line Is It Anyway? The Ecstasy & Agony of Collaborative Books.” AC contrib Tyler Gillespie is going to be reading for Autofocus in “a very fancy basement bar.” Probably I’m missing something. Look, there’s a lot going on.

Elsewhere, new work from AC contrib Never North appears at Broken Antler: “The journey on the raft was quick, but it took them far. They landed on a beach and Onion Flower pulled out a copy of Cloudbird 69 and an expired membership card from the Indiana University Alumni Association. Using these, she skillfully laid out six identical lines of sand on the magazine and a short section of a recycled paper straw.”

Switchback Books is publishing AC contrib Jill Khoury’s collection earthwork: “Khoury's Plathesque battle tones, brilliant formalism, and attention to a white hot star of pain show the speaker taken apart and reassembled in multiple gazes including her/their own.”

“I’ll confess that I’ve been looking at a lot of white paintings lately”—AC contrib Kelly Krumrie interviewed at Etcetera.

/ Today’s Soundtrack

1. I almost got all postmodern and wrote “pla(y)giarisms,” but held back because a, I’d be doing it so that everybody doesn’t yell at us about plagiarism being bad, and fuck that, somebody has to support the possibilities of intelligent plagiarism as an art form; and b, it annoys the hell out of me when people make puns involving parentheses. It comes across as a little smarmy, doesn’t it? “Pla(y)giarism”—see? You’re rolling your eyes, aren’t you?

2. Please do not come and get us. We are a literary magazine. We’re not even connected to a university, or the Kochs. We have like, no actual money.