LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Reader,

Here, as promised is your content: 144 pages Husky Smooth Book White (both the 50- and 80-pound variety) trimmed to 6.8 by 9 inches, creased, and PUR Perfectbound, unpacked and packed again, bulk-shipped media-mail to your mailbox or to a retail location from where they will soon be refunded at our expense and destroyed as per the affidavit agreement. Essays, stories, poems, letters, art, and art writing acquired and edited and sold against advertising. Some also appear online, although we can assure you that they are not the only pieces available online.

The rights and permissions process is labyrinthine and honestly quite dull; if (when!) you post photos of our content, please tag us, the writers, your friends, their friends, your teachers, your students, your enemies. You know do what feels right.

We would also like to remind you that we are always grateful for submissions. On page 117 you will find a PO Box address to which you can send your most closely guarded regrets, your fears, the notes from your analyst. We will make of it what we will.

Just Kidding, The Editors

FOR THOSE who are natural contrarians, certain substantial writers like Cendrars, Borges, or Nabokov constantly stimulate and entertain (especially if they respect cats). My current literary hero, Giacomo Donis, a Venetian writing in English, having long renounced his US citizenship (see The Empty Shield, 2020), has no living peer. An Abyss of Dreams, described as a ‘meta-memoir,’ amiably proposes Plato as the father of modern totalitarianism. With a mixture of Vian’s absurdism, Benjamin’s intellectualism and Iain Sinclair’s defiant eclecticism, two substantial novellas and commentaries attempt to confront Freud and pretty much every major thinker since Aristotle. Stunning!

— MICHAEL MOORCOCK, New Statesman Books of the Year 2022

In phantasmagoric representations night presses in from all sides; suddenly a bloody head darts out—there another white form, and just as suddenly they vanish. We see it when we look a human being in the eye—entering a night that becomes terrible. What is it? What is reaching out from this eye? I see it! It is the night of the world.

— G.W.F. Hegel

Shearsman Books www.shearsman.com

A decision. Thinking. Imagining. An idea just pops into my head. Fine. No problem. The problem is that then I start to chase it. Like a cat chasing her tail. OK. But, then, this idea I’m chasing leads me to another idea. And I chase it. From one idea, another. Another. Another again. Free association. How free? What association.

— The Empty Shield, epigraph to An Abyss of Dreams it’s the abyss that keeps us all alive, only the abyss, — Thomas Bernhard facing page:

Eteocles ‘bad decision’ at the 7th Gate of Thebes. Putin’s ‘bad decision’ at the Great Gate of NATO. In The Empty Shield I do not stop at the surface of facts, as [practically] all political writing does. People have gotten tired of the ‘Ukraine facts.’ But this book is radical, and radical is important, and much needed, and badly missing, if not missed, because no one [else] asks what a political decision is in and for itself.

Tishan Hsu

Detail of Watching 2, 2021

UV cured inkjet, acrylic, silicone on wood, 72 x 48 x 3 inches above:

Tishan Hsu

Biocube, 1988

Plywood, ceramic tile, stainless steel, acrylic, rubber, 35 1/2 x 44 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

A little over a decade ago, the government peered into Open Mike Eagle’s brain. The rapper from Chicago’s South Side had seen that the National Institutes of Health was studying live MRI scans of improvisatory keyboard players and, along with a producer friend, he offered to design and co-author a study of rappers as they freestyled. He served as the test case. The findings (e.g., “Lyrical improvisation appears to be characterized by altered relationships between regions coupling intention and action”) were released in the journal

“Through a thorough philosophical accounting of the moral imperatives of living in a globalized society, Butler makes a rousing case for pushing progressive policies as a response to the disruptions of the pandemic. Thoughtful and profound, this hits the mark.”

—Publishers Weekly

“From one of our finest critics, an elegant and deftly argued contribution to our appreciation of the great and glorious Preston Sturges. Stuart Klawans teases out inspired connections in the culture surrounding the director—the books, paintings, and legends that fed the artistry of a man who refused to call himself an artist. The kind of book that makes you want to dive back into the films for fresh stimulation and delight.”

Molly Haskell, film critic and author

“Gibson pushes past both eyerolling dismissals of Franzen and the uncritical accolades of Oprah and Time magazine and takes the novels seriously as complex, if flawed, works of fiction that inspire and reward immersive and close reading.”

Briallen Hopper, author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“Absolutely fascinating, and a terrific lesson in how to tell good stories. Whether you seek instruction, or simply to know why some podcasts are better than others, this book is for you.”

Olya Booyar, head of radio, Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union

“Finally! I have been waiting for years for someone to give The Last Samurai, the most inventive and delightful novel of the twentyfirst century, the critical attention it deserves. Lee Konstantinou has done it, and he has done it with amazing insight, clarity, and humor.”

Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker

Scientific Reports from academic publisher Springer Nature, then aggregated by blogs and news sites. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the vitriol,” Eagle says over coffee at a restaurant in Leimert Park. “The common idea among the people in these comment sections was that there was nothing inside the brain of a rapper. ‘What are you looking for?’”

Ironically, Eagle has made the goodfaith version of that question central to his work. After moving to Los Angeles in 2004, he became part of the second wave of rappers at Project Blowed, the open-mic workshop that was founded in Leimert 10 years prior and has served ever since as the hub for the city’s underground and avant-garde MCs. In the 2010s, Eagle’s solo albums including 2011’s Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes, his 2014 national breakthrough Dark Comedy, and 2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, a rumination on the demolished Chicago housing project where his relatives lived probed his psyche and the machinery, often self-operated, designed to grind it into something consumable.

In 2019, The New Negroes, a series of standup performances and high-concept music videos hosted by Eagle and the comedian Baron Vaughn, premiered on Comedy Central. It was canceled after one season. On the day before the release of his eighth solo album, A Tape Called Component System with the Auto Reverse, Eagle and I spoke about seeing his face on billboards, dodging voicemails from his loved ones, and being lied to by Viacom.

Paul Thompson: It still makes me laugh: the image of scientists standing around in lab coats, squinting at a monitor, going,

“Do you think that was written?”

Open Mike Eagle: [Laughs.] That’s the funny thing though: part of what they did was make sure you went in with a memorized rhyme first.

As a control. Exactly.

You have a song called “No Selling,” which is named for the practice from wrestling, and from battle rap, of acting as if your opponent isn’t fazing you, even if he is. But on your records, you’re often seeming to exaggerate the effort, the strain, the sense that you’re running out of breath or ideas. On “Multi-Game Arcade Cabinet,” you really spiral out toward the end.

With that verse, before I even wrote a bar, I had the energy I wanted in my head. And so, there was this very conscious choice of where the space went between the bars: “Secret history … it was all me and Mitski.” The way that stretches across it’s three rhymes: phase three, paisley, and Count Bass D but the way that that evolves, the energy there is between the words.

So that verse is completely written —

But the energy is freestyled.

Exactly. I associate the way each new rhyme and each new reference and idea is this trump card that can only exist if it tops the last one. That comes from the thousands and thousands of hours of freestyling, right?