Misprision and Feeling Mystical Part One: Entering the Immateria

Christopher Lirette
4 Min Read

Misprision and Feeling Mystical

Over the last few years of me reigniting an obsession with superheroes and superheroines and crossover events and cosmic crises and time travel and kung fu skills (etc. etc.), I keep coming back to a certain sort of comics creator. Generally, they are occultists, from the British Isles, and have some sort of iconic hair situation. And by these writers, I mean Alan Moore, Grant Morrison Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis. This interest has led me into a new approach to my own work (the work of writing poems, I mean) and has colored my engagement with the world of texts outside of my head. Here’s the beginning of a several part series about mysticism, superhero universes, the imagination, and misprision.

Christopher Lirette, Comics

REPLAY. In Defense of Fast Food

Steve Carter
4 Min Read

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared September 8, 2011.

A Prologue

by

Alton Reece

 

 

There’s been a lot of writing about food lately. Three-hundred-page love letters on the glories of sun-dried tomatoes and porcini this and pine nut that. You wouldn’t think anyone could make Italy boring except for Henry James and Thomas Mann, but now they’ve got competition. Of the twenty or so food books I read before starting my own, I discovered they were not unlike erotica: an overblown significance attached to something actually so prosaic it’s laughable. I’m guessing the popularity of food books stems in part from us becoming such a fat country. However, except for muckraking exposés and an article in Consumer Reports every two or three years, little has been written about fast food. I think that’s snobbish and needs to be remedied.

Before I go further, I should say that all the bad things that have been said about fast food are true. It’s full of fat and sugar and flavorings, and, passing health department ratings aside, a typical fast food kitchen is less hygienic than your own bathroom at home. And, as we all know, the typical franchise is staffed by teenagers: just how often do you meet one of those (God love them) that you’d trust with anything that mattered much? Such as what’s in the hidden part of your burrito.

Okay, so what are the glories of fast food? What is there to write about? Is there really a difference between a Wendy’s Single and a Quarter Pounder?

Fiction, Steve Carter

REPLAY. JUROR NUMBER 38

Gerald Cannon
2 Min Read

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared August 1, 2011.

It was the last day of jury duty for this particular cattle call. No one wanted to be chosen – especially for the murder case requiring a voir dire that day. Maybe an additional month! Maybe sequestered in an Airline Highway motel! Oh, god, how bad could this semiannual nightmare get?

One hundred and fifty people were called for voir dire on the Big Murder Case. He was one. Almost the entire pool had their immediate futures on the line. The courtroom seated the whole group. A sub-set of fourteen was called in each round for questioning in the jury box. The usual. “Do you know the defendant?” “Have you been a victim of crime?” and – wait a minute! “Would you be reluctant to return a verdict of guilty knowing that several witness feel too intimidated to testify in court?” Why is everyone saying no to what seems to me a pretty important little question? A small window opened.

Gerald Cannon

REPLAY. PK5

Derek Bridges
3 Min Read

Note: This post originally appeared August 29, 2010. I thought it might be relevant to run again in light of the encroaching demise of the Times-Picayune.

We were supposed to have a garage sale on Sunday, August 28, 2005.   We had recently moved into a house we bought in Central City and had cleaned out our old Broadmoor apartment and planned to sell the odds and ends that didn’t make it to our new home.  It was to be the final hurrah of our move.  Suffice to say we evacuated the night before and the garage sale never happened.  I didn’t get back into town for another three weeks, but there on the second floor of our old apartment’s stoop was our last Times-Picayune, still in the plastic and dry.  I tossed the paper in the car and drove back to Houston.  I finally pulled that newspaper out of its plastic bag this weekend.

Derek Bridges, New Orleans

REPLAY. I Survived…I Survived…I Survived…

G Bitch
6 Min Read

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared July 1, 2011.

cross-posted at The G Bitch Spot

Bear attacks. Shootings. Stabbings. Airplane crashes. Rapes. A lot of rapes. Kidnappings and hostage situations. Random violence and planned lunacy or evil. Horrific child abductions. Serial killers. Leftist guerillas. I am addicted to “I Survived…” on Biography, sneaking in bits and chunks and back-to-back episodes when no one else is home. I call attackers “animals” outloud and curse them and cheer survivors and marvel that the man who survives a bear attack mourns the bear being killed “for safety reasons.” I cringe as women, in various states of physical distress and injury, do anything to save their children or quietly acquiesce to evil to stall for time, think a way out, or just not die right away. The common threads—I survived because I didn’t want my parents to have to bury me, I survived because God had a different plan for me/knew my work on earth wasn’t done, I survived because I stayed calm and alert, I survived because I didn’t want to die there, I survived because I didn’t want him/them/to win, I survived…I don’t know why, I just did.

G Bitch

We’re on the Road to Volo

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Tom Long
4 Min Read

I love the smell inside my helmet. A lingering mixture of exhaust, lubricant, Simple Green, Nivea aftershave, blooming trees and asphalt awakens my senses every time I hit the starter button, put on my lid and secure the chin strap.

I don’t drive much. Haven’t had the need to in the past 15 years since I commute to work via the L. My 2002 VW Beetle only just turned 36,000 last week. Driving in these parts is for suckers. Relegated to a grinding task, usually in the worst times of the day, nobody gets pleasure out of driving anymore. Sure, you can have a Maserati, but there’s nowhere you can’t drive 185. So, what’s the point? But riding is almost nothing but pleasure — especially once you get outside the city boundaries.

Seeing as how I am generally antisocial and such, I usually don’t go riding with other people very often. I got into riding long after all my friends outgrew it, broke body parts or had families, so I’ve always felt a bit at a disadvantage hanging with tuners and thus kept my distance. But every now and then I get together with my buddy Kevin in Geneva and we hit the road from there. Scooter rides a BMW RS1100 and I keep pace on my Ducati Monster 620.

Traffic was light Sunday morning as I headed south down Western Avenue to I-290 on my way out to Geneva. I pulled up to the light at the six corners of Elston, Diversey and Western as a flash mob — I think that’s what the kids call them  —  of about a dozen hipster nerds in unitards performed a dance with water bottles. And me without my camera. I said to myself, “Lou, it’s the beginning of a great adventure.”

Tom Long

REPLAY. Seafaring Stories from the Sea green Sea

Grant Bailie
1 Min Read

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared August 13, 2011.

1.

Sundry ships are crossing the seas, bringing us to the new wild shores. On each ship a cook, a baker, a captain, a whore. I swab the deck—wiping the footprints of each away in what I hope is a fluid and efficient motion. I love the whore but she is above my class.

Fiction, Grant Bailie
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