CCLaP Weekender
From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
September 11, 2015
New Fiction by Oliver Zarandi Photography by Yi Sung Tsai Chicago Literary Events Calendar September 11, 2015 | 1
THIS WEEK’S CHICAG
For all events, visit [cclapce
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 6pm AMFM Magazine Presents: Twice Exposed Cultura in Pilsen / 1900 S. Carpenter www.amfm-magazine.com/
A photography exhibition of Chicago artists showcasing a mixture of documentary work. In this show, we will explore the genre of visual story-telling. Throughout time, these photographers have dedicated their work to discover the world around us, what affects us, molds us, and to know the world inside and out.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 3pm Paper Machete The Green Mill / 4802 N. Broadway / Free, 21+ thepapermacheteshow.com
A “live magazine” covering pop culture, current events, and American manners—part spoken-word show, part vaudeville review—featuring comedians, journalists, storytellers, and musical guests. Hosted by Christopher Piatt. 8pm Blackout Diaries High Hat Club / 1920 East Irving Park / $10, 21+ blackoutdiaries.info
A comedy show about drinking stories, a “critic’s pick” at Red Eye, MetroMix, and Time Out Chicago. Comedians share the mic with “regular” people, such as cops, firefighters, and teachers, all recounting real-life tales about getting wasted. Hosted by Sean Flannery.
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GO LITERARY EVENTS
enter.com/chicagocalendar]
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 10am
Sunday Morning Stories Donny's Skybox Studio Theatre / 1608 North Wells / Free
We performers are pre-booked. We feature novice as well as seasoned storytellers. On or off paper. 7pm Uptown Poetry Slam The Green Mill / 4802 N. Broadway / $6, 21+ greenmilljazz.com
Featuring open mike, special guests, and end-of-the-night competition. 7pm Asylum Le Fleur de Lis / 301 E. 43rd / $10 lefleurdelischicago.com
A weekly poetry showcase with live accompaniment by the band Verzatile.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 8:30pm Kafein Espresso Bar Kafein Espresso Bar / 1621 Chicago Ave., Evanston kafeincoffee.com
Open mic with hosts Chris and Kirill.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 7:30pm Homolatte Tweet Let's Eat / 5020 N. Sheridan homolatte.com
This month's show features Nic Kay and Desiree Galeski. Hosted by Scott Free. Enter through Big Chicks at the same address. September 11, 2015 | 3
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 3pm Lyricist Loft Harold Washington Library / 400 South State / Free youmediachicago.org
“Open mic for open minds,” presented by Remix Spoken Word. Hosted by Dimi D, Mr. Diversity, and Fatimah. 9pm
In One Ear Heartland Cafe / 7000 N Glenwood https://www.facebook.com/pages/In-One-Ear/210844945622380
Chicago's 3rd longest-running open-mic show, hosted by Pete Wolf and Billy Tuggle.
To submit your own literary event, or to correct the information on anything you see here, please drop us a line cclapcenter@gmail.com
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Know thyself and nothing in excess. Just as the doomed sailors of Homer’s Odyssey fail to heed one or the other of these maxims, and end up getting turned to swine or lured to their peril by the singing sirens, so too do the doomed characters in Joseph G. Peterson’s new collection of stories fail idiotically in one way or another and end up, like those ancient sailors, facing the prospect of their own mortal twilight. Set mostly in Chicago and by turns gruesome, violent, comic, lurid and perverse, these stories are suffused with a metaphorical light that lends beauty and joy to the experience of reading them.
CCLaP Publishing
Download for free at cclapcenter.com/twilightidiots
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Flaws The family loved Millard, despite his flaws. We were forgiving people, the Cleveland’s. I, for example, forgave my wife for what she did. I was exiled. We were once the great American family. Though you can’t really call us a family, because it’s just Millard and I left now. We hadn’t spoken in ten years. But then I got a call from him. I couldn’t sleep, so I picked up.
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ORIGINAL FICTION
“Fig” by Marc Kjerland [flickr.com/marckjerland]. Used under the terms of her Creative Commons license.
GO
BY OLIVER ZARANDI September 11, 2015 | 7
We were once the great American family. Though you can’t really call us a family, because it’s just Millard and I left now. We hadn’t spoken in ten years. But then I got a call from him. I couldn’t sleep, so I picked up. Millard was always difficult to speak to. He had a habit of starting sentences and not finishing them. He’d get stuck in a mire of tics and end up sounding like Porky Pig. We are family, Millard and I, despite everything. Presidents Millard weighed three pounds when he was born. The whole family was there: my father, my two sisters, and me. He was premature. My memory of Millard’s birth is of him being uprooted from my mother’s stomach like a turnip being wrenched from the ground. My father had a camcorder aimed straight at my mother’s pussy, and I remember thinking how it looked like two red snappers or two giant candy lips. He kept on laughing and jumping around my mother, and saying, “Get in there and have a look! Oh boy!” My father was a little overzealous in situations like this, but the fact was that he cared too much. My father’s name was Lincoln. His family had this habit of naming their sons after presidents and the tradition was well and truly alive in us. My name, for example, is Grover. We called our pet labrador Obama, but it got ran over in its second term. Shit Millard never stood a chance. I excelled at school. We were sent to the John Milton XI Boarding School, where all the tables and teachers were made of mahogany. We learned about bullshit writers and dead languages. I excelled even more then my two sisters. They were, unfortunately, carried off by polio. From then on, it was just Millard and I, duking it out for the crown of best child. Millard was slow. I was embarrassed to be near him at school and outside of school. He didn’t walk properly because of his clubfoot. I used to tell him that he had feet like two croquet mallets. He had glasses too, and he had a birthmark that covered his entire face. He never really shook that turnip look. A neighborhood girl I liked at the time, I think her name was Sandra, asked, “Is that your brother?” “No.” 8 | CCLaP Weekender
“If you love me, you’ll put that dog doo-doo in his face.” She pointed to a piece of dog shit in the park. It was a fresh one. “Okay. I mean, are you sure?” “Do you love me?” “Yes?” “I’ll show you my poon poon if you do.” “Okay.” And I did it. I did it good and proper. I scooped up the dog shit with a stick and shoved it in Millard’s face. The shit got right in his eyes. I remember that he was screaming and screaming, running in circles, trying to get the shit out of his eye and mouth. The shit was sticking his eyelids together. Sandra kissed me, showed me her snatch for about two seconds, and said that it was over. Logic Millard resented me. Added to which, he couldn’t count for shit, he couldn’t spell for shit, and he had trouble with logic tests. Logic tests were the bread and butter of our school. We did them every week. Millard, though, he just couldn’t do them. He’d always cry because he found them so difficult. “Perhaps he is too clever,” my father suggested at the dining table. He was buttering granary toast with a lump of cold margarine. “Logic tests are absurd anyway. Don’t you think so, my dear?” He was talking to my mother. She was slumped in a Barcelona chair, her eyes glazed over like a dead cow, her breasts low-hung and freckled brown, like two cannons in a red hammock. She’d lost her looks somewhere in her thirties when she started growing hair above her top lip. Her lips were two red blooms of flesh, surrounded by a moat of powdered hair. She was horrifically self-conscious and usually just sat in silence in different rooms, pouting and trying to catch her reflection in windows, forks, knives, and watch faces. Of course, Millard wasn’t too clever. He just couldn’t comprehend how life worked. Death It was my father who died first. He was a man obsessed by poisons and parties. He threw a native Indian garden party where people dressed in culturally inaccurate clothing and carried around blowpipes. My father was showing some kids a blowpipe that had a dart inside of it. He was miming for them September 11, 2015 | 9
to blow their little pipes and they did. The kids wore crude face paint and improvised costume: red circles on their cheeks and potato sack tunics. Father handed his blowpipe to some dribbling shit bag and said, “Blow.” The child blew; my father died. The blowpipe still contained a poisonous dart. Mother, on the other hand, she went slowly and was eventually seen off by the amount of plastic surgery she had done to her. I think her face fell off at the morgue. My mother’s funeral was a dull affair. I cried. Millard cried too. Only a few people turned up. Arnaud, our interior designer, stood right there with Millard and I. He was dressed in an orange tuxedo and said, “Tres, tres sad.” He was camp as boots, old Arnaud. When she was lowered into the ground, I realized that I was now the first in line to inherit the mansion. Millard shuffled up to me and asked me something. I think I ignored him and he shuffled away again. Figs The problem was the fig trees. It was an anniversary present from my father to my mother. Father said, the day all the trees were planted, that the fig is a symbol of life. He’d planted about a thousand fig trees around the perimeter of the mansion for my mother. “The fig,” he continued, “is also our legacy.” “I thought the mansion was our legacy,” I said. “The fig trees are too,” I remember him saying. According to Arnaud, the fig trees my father had planted had grown roots underneath the mansion’s foundations. “The tree destroy the house, darling,” said Arnaud. “The house fall down.” Arnaud’s grasp of the English language wasn’t bad, but he didn’t have a grasp of future time. Arnaud led me outside to inspect the fig trees. He tried to hold my hand. Actually, he did hold my hand. I thought, “Why not?” He picked a fig off the tree and flung it against the sandstone. It burst all over the wall. “Your legacy,” said Arnaud.
Millard called me in the dead of night. I picked up, and at first, it was just breathing.
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Call Millard called me in the dead of night. I picked up, and at first, it was just breathing. Millard had a habit of breathing, you could say. My father, who is now in his grave, has a habit of not breathing, as do most of my family who have passed away. Millard and I discussed life and the past and what had happened, etc. It was good to hear his voice, I guess. He still sounded like Porky Pig. But it was about halfway into our conversation that he told me that Paulson Taha had contacted him. “Who is Paulson Taha?” “He is our lawyer.” I had to tell Millard that we didn’t have a lawyer. Millard had been contacted by a spam bot/scam artist from Togo. This was just another example of Millard’s ineptitude. I invited Millard over to the crumbling mansion. I said he could come and talk about things, about life. It was my way of saying that I’m sorry, a way of thrashing things out between us both. Millard asked if he could bring his yellow labrador and I said yes. Togo The letter, which Millard received, was this: Dear Good day, I am Mr. Paulson Taha, an account manager to late Dr. Cleveland business consultant and major subcontractor in Togo. On the 27th December, 2009, my client, his wife, and their two kids were involved in an auto crash and it was unfortunate that they all lost their lives. For years now, I have done a lot of research to locate his relations to claim his estate fund value, all to no avail. I contacted you because both of you comes from the same country. I want to use you as next of kin to claim his estate fund valued $4.8 million, then transfer it to your country before our government confiscate it or declared it unserviceable by the finance firm. I will provide the necessary document for your back up since I am his personal account manager before his death. Note: 100% will be for you. If you are interested, do kindly get back to me urgently with your banking detail. Regards, Mr Paulson Taha September 11, 2015 | 11
I filed this along with all the other examples of spam emails that I found to be hilarious but secretly wished were true, if only to keep our house alive. Exile My wife left me because of circumstances compliqué. There was money involved, yes. There was another woman involved too. There always is, don’t you think? For a man who was renowned for his theater work, my life is terribly clichéd. I am the man who can’t feel anything for a woman. I have been inside many women, but I haven’t particularly cared for my time in there. I lie there like a rock, mostly. So my wife; she took my children. She changed their names, I believe— or at least, that’s what I want to believe. She was so disturbed by my behavior, by my lack of morals, that I thought she had altered her own self. I found a certain joy believing that my wife changed her face, her name, and had all my children put under the knife, genders changed, changed forever. And then I think of other exiles. Ovid, the poet. He said that the reason for his exile was ‘carmen et error.’ A poem and a mistake. Or even Hemingway, someone closer to home. They said he’d lost touch with the soil. Questions Millard, have we lost touch with the soil? What caused our fall from grace? Why are we the way we are? Why is our house falling down? Why are we going to be homeless? What can we do to save ourselves? Answers Figs. Figs. Figs. Figs. Figs. Togo. History Millard arrived on a Friday evening. He arrived with his yellow labrador. Even I had to admit, it was a beautiful dog. Millard gave me a hug. The feel of his torso in my arms: large, portly, excessive. Can you call a body excessive? Probably not, but if you had a chance to hold Millard, you would surely think of this word. 12 | CCLaP Weekender
We had dinner. Arnaud joined us. We spoke of old times. What a history us Cleveland’s had. “History,” Millard said, “is a bitch.” “Millard, don’t speak with your mouth full,” I said. He swallowed his food. The table was cleared and I realized that the table was big enough to seat an entire family—just not our family. I had an idea that perhaps I should put out an advert for family members. It was lonely in the house, I admit it now. I gave Millard a tour of the house that our father had left us. Millard remarked how wonderful the statues in the garden were. I took him inside to see the ballroom. Strangely, I cared what Millard would think. Would he appreciate the introduction of multicolored fairy lights in the ballroom? Would he appreciate the appearance of several plastic pineapples, which were actually containers, in the kitchen? Would he appreciate the blackamoor statue in the boot room? It’s not meant to be racist, but Millard will probably see it that way. And finally, we came to a room of portraits. “Are these family?” Millard asked. He went up to one painting and stroked the contours of the oil on the canvas. He was stroking the bridge of an old man’s nose. “These are not family,” I told Millard. It took a lot of guts to actually tell him who they were. They were paintings of nobodies. I told Millard that after the fig trees had taken root, the house was falling down. The upkeep on the house was astronomical. I’d sold all of our family portraits for food money. Arnaud and I had survived off my family’s history for some months now. “But in a way, they are a sort of new family for me, Mill,” I said. “I’ve given them all names.” I told Millard about some of my conversations with the portraits. Millard didn’t say anything. He didn’t look surprised. Later that evening, Millard and I went swimming. He told me his plans for life. “I’m going to Togo,” Millard said. “I’m going to find Paulson Taha and bring the treasure back to you.” “Millard.” “Grover, we are family. Does that not mean anything to you?” It seemed like Millard had lost his Porky Pig tics. “Family is important,” I said to Millard. These were just words coming out my mouth. I thought of words as solid things, things you could spit out of your mouth. Words usually mean something, like you’re spitting out gold or silver. But when those words came out of my mouth, it was like I’d spat out a tumor. “I’m going to leave in two days, Grover.” “It’s not a good decision, Millard. What if something happened to you? Then what? What family would I have left?” September 11, 2015 | 13
“Arnaud. And I won’t get h-h-h-hurt anyway.” We sat in the pool and floated there like seaweed. I went over to the side and picked up a flute of champagne. Later that night, I went to sleep in my parents’ old bed. One could say this was terribly Norman Bates of me. But I didn’t care. I fell asleep immediately and dreamed about Togo, about what it would be like for Millard out there. I saw a landscape of clay and dark blue men and women and dusty trail roads. I saw Millard disappearing into a forest and there were orange eyes glowing in the darkness. Millard didn’t come back out of this wilderness. I thought of going into that forest and finding Millard. I didn’t bother. C
Oliver Zarandi is the managing editor of Funhouse and a writer. His work has recently appeared in Hobart, The Quietus and Potluck Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @zarandi or @funhousemag.
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Yi Sung Tsai
PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURE
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I’m a 22 year old medical student living in Taiwan. I’ve been taking pictures for about two years. I use Nikon FE2 and Yashica T3. For me, photography is a living proof of my real existence in the world, the medium which indicates that I am truly here. I’m also in hope of recording my life through photography, recording people around me to seal motion and memory at certain moments into my photos.
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yisungtsai.tumblr.com cargocollective.com/yisungtsai flickr.com/jeremytsai312
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CCLaP Publishing
It’s 2039, and a political faction called the Lifestyle Party has risen to power under the Presidency of Deepak Chopra. The new government bans scientific innovation and introduces a set of policies focused entirely on maximizing personal happiness. So why is Grady Tenderbath so unhappy? Believing that he’s fallen short of his professional potential, he buys a personal robot muse to nurture his talent and ego, while his wife Karen, a genetic scientist, becomes more entrenched in her lab. But just when Grady seems on track to solve his career crisis, he discovers a new problem: he’s swooning for the empathetic yet artificial Ashley. Not only that, he’s distracted by haunting visions of Karen transforming into...something else. Half speculative fiction and half marriage thriller, Rise of Hypnodrome explores how future generations might draw from the realm of epigenetic engineering to eventually control their own biology. Whether human or robot, the characters in this cutting-edge science-fiction novella have one thing in common: an irrepressible desire to evolve.
Download for free at cclapcenter.com/hypnodrome
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The CCLaP Weekender is published in electronic form only, every Friday for free download at the CCLaP website [cclapcenter.com]. Copyright 2015, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. All rights revert back to artists upon publication. Editorin-chief: Jason Pettus. Story Editor: Behnam Riahi. Photo Editor: Jennifer Yu. Layout Editor: Wyatt Robinette. Calendar Editor: Taylor Carlile. To submit your work for possible feature, or to add a calendar item, contact us at cclapcenter@gmail.com.
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