ZINE 01 - Paragka by ma-rina

zine 1

to Amaryllis and Guillermo

index

περιεχόμενα Anna Rose Stefatou & Irini Stamatiadi

Ρομάν Zουέβ

17-18 _untitled

04, 15-16, 33-34 _άτιτλα λ.

24 _άτιτλο

Jack Wright

05-06 _A Lament, 07-09 _Hope & Patience, 30-32 _A dream

Marcjanna

11-12, 21-22 _untitled

Δάφνη Ποταμίτη

06-07, 13-14, 25 _άτιτλα

Μπαρμπούνι

10, 26, 39 _άτιτλα

Γιάννης Σιγλίδης

Ελένη Παππά

19 _Ευτυχία

Ζήνων

35-36 _THE CARPET

Κάλφας

Tzitzifriki

19, 20 _Το εξώφυλλο του Λάμπρου Φιλίππου 23 _’Ιδιο Μπάνιο, 24 _Πασχάλης, 27-28 _000009 it’s not the same grandmother, 29 _tesas mites yolatrs2, 37-38_ -

40 _kriti΅

I. A Lament

And as I search for delicate French pastry Wishing to seek authentic cultural experience

Let us go then, you and I

You are hacked to death by crazed bourgeois

For traipse through Lincolnshire mud

Catholic

Flee the brain sink of midday hangover

I return and gaze at your mutilation and take

With limited success

tearful bite from croissant

Though unbeknownst to me Hairy tapestry man has slipped

The croissant was a time warp and in eat-

His factory-made German ink

ing it I return to the present

Into my water bottle My hunger tickled now, but fragile croissant This has mildly hallucinogenic properties

incinerated in burst of interdimensional energy I recall and bring forth stale cheese and onion

So in the silence of misplaced company

pasty from depths of rucksack

I swig to sate my thirst

And as ancient skin ruptures it secretes a

And above me purple firmament bends and

deathly cold greasy thing

cracks

Lines my lungs like mustard gas and I vomit

And the stars form into the shape of a face

hard

Dear old Winstanley

Onto rich black earth within which

And his mouth yawns open and hot religious

Turnip crop of miserable gout-plagued farmer

blood splashes at my feet

broods

Which causes my rude Saxon nose to swell to

This product increasingly forced from my mouth

Ten times its natural size

Until entire lagoon of cheap cider and stomach lining and half-digested crap

I touch the flabby organ and at once we are

Covers fenland in monstrous recreation of fer-

transported to quiet Parisian cobbles

vent swamp-days Before my eyes new and varied eco system

The year is 1572 and bits of some unfortu-

emerges

nate Huguenot drip from the walls

Handsome mallards duck and dive in throbbing puke bog

Reeds whisper softly in gentle south-easterly wind The call of a lone heron above bubbling churning inchoate mass I sit on bank and nurse foul and wounded stomach Silvery fog descends veiling trees like mournful brides A suggestion of movement. There is an oarsman on the lake He paddles flat-bottomed boat with elegance and skill And with oaken forearm he casts aside shroud of mist Stout and proud English yeoman steps onto land Looks at me and I am crushed like power-loom beneath the strength of Luddite gaze He walks towards me and catches my crumbling body with masthead arm He calms my trembling mouth with kiss full of dignity and self-determination He tastes of topsoil and hewn granite He moves his thick noble lips to my unsteady ear and says “England was merry England was gay But the landlord he came And he took it away.”

II. Hope & Patience A real treat for our readers now, as we present an exclusive extract from Shelby S. Sears’ latest book on the American Civil War, The Sundered Nation; Tales from the Post-War South. As Sherman’s army continued to devastate the South, and the prospect of a total defeat moved from likely to inevitable, many citizens of the confederacy developed strange and illogical systems of belief. Take, for example, the small town of Hope, Georgia. Obed Jefferson, a long-time resident there, was in many ways a typical Georgia farmer; he spent his days tending to his crops and livestock, worshipping according to the customs of his Presbyterian faith, and looking after his family, which by now contained only his wife Nancy, his two sons, Beauregard and Theophilus, having lost their lives earlier in the war. Yet, for all his small-town respectability, as he went to feed slop to his hogs on November 15th 1864, Obed Jefferson saw, or thought he saw, something both incredible and profane. We can pick up the story in the Hope & Patience Herald, which reported the very next day; ‘A disturbance in the centre of Hope yesterday morning has proved to be the major topic of local gossip. Obed Jefferson, 55, the proprietor of a homestead roughly a mile from the town, was seen to be marching onto the steps of the town hall and raving about some miraculous occurrence which he said he had observed in his pigsty. A woman lodged a complained at the sheriff’s office, claiming that the old farmer was scaring her children with his wild and outrageous assertions. When apprehended by local law enforcement, Jefferson relayed what he had seen. He alleges that, on the occasion that he went to feed his animals that very morning, one swine had risen onto its hind legs, placed a trotter onto Jefferson’s shoulder and uttered the words ‘I am the farmer now.’ The beast was said to resemble Abraham Lincoln. Now, we trust that that the more respectable and less hysterical Hope residents, as enlightened and reasonable citizens, will attribute this episode to Old Jefferson’s nervous exhaustion, on account of the proximity of the Union army and the loss of his two sons at 1st and 2nd Bull Run. Still, there is bound to be speculation and idle chatter at the lack of a declaration from the sherriff’s office, and the taciturnity of those officers who had escorted Jefferson back to his property. The Herald demands that, for the maintenance of public order, morale and spirit, the proper authorities denounce Jefferson’s ramblings as the deluded derangements of an excitable lunatic, in order that social cohesion is not threatened in these days of terrible war.’ It is a testament to the lasting paranoia of that same ‘terrible war’ that the mania in Hope lingered long after Sherman’s march to the sea had reached its conclusion and his shells had ceased to fall. The incident seems to have sent poor Obed Jefferson quite mad, for he began to insist on the divine providence manifest in his speaking pig. There is evidence of religious complaints made to parish authorities about his lay preaching, which seems to have grown all the more ferocious and incoherent as the years went by; it was his belief that if the pig were to speak again, it would issue

forth instruction on the imminent days of revelation, and that it was the duty of true believers in Christ to await and then follow these directives. Despite the absurdity of these declarations, it seems that he obtained some devoted acolytes, particularly amongst the rural poor, and certainly we can observe a marked decline in the size of traditional congregations in Hope church records for the years immediately after the conclusion of the Civil War, though it is difficult to prove that Jefferson’s evangelisation was a causal factor in this.

In January 1868 the pig was offered as a candidate in the mayoral elections for Hope & District. Campaign literature stated that its goal was to ‘use the levers of government to best prepare for the oncoming day of judgement.’ At rallies Jefferson would typically offer an impassioned speech, before the pig was paraded whilst a string band played the popular song Dixieland, a spectacle which one anonymous diarist called ‘a thing of exquisite and rare beauty.’ In spite of these efforts, the candidature was not a success, the pig finishing a distant fourth with 638 votes. Jefferson and his supporters reacted with fury, swearing that they had been swindled by a rigged system. Moderate followers suggested demanding a rerun of the elections or a possible legal challenge, whilst the radical wing began to investigate the possibility of armed insurrection. Jefferson, fearing a split amongst his disciples, called a secret convention of the Eschatological Order of Sus Scrofa Domesticus, as they were now calling themselves. Whether there was careless talk or someone leaked the details of the meeting, the local authorities were made aware, and when police stormed Jefferson’s barn they found a quantity of stockpiled pitchforks and muskets. Both Jefferson and the pig were arrested on charges of sedition and treason. The trail was a short affair, with the judge declaring that ‘these outrageous events are an affront to the Christian morality of a great nation,’ before recommending that both defendants be hanged; ‘Such acts of heathen savagery must be punished with the full force of our legal authority. Mr Jefferson and his beast are foul and bitter seeds in the garden of civil society. Should we allow them to flourish, the liberty, prosperity, human dignity and indeed yes, the immortal soul of each American would be threatened immeasurably. I say again; it is our patriotic duty to tear a cancer like this from the body of our politics.’ We see here two factors at play; firstly, the desire of the legal infrastructure of the defeated South to reintegrate itself as part of the Union, but also the desperate, schizoid search for identity amidst the cowed and humiliated citizenry. For Jefferson and his followers this retreat into the absurd was surely a response to the deracinating restructuring of Southern society. Sus Scrofa Domesticus was only an especially radical and outlandish manifestation of a series of violent reactionary groups through which especially young, white and male Southerners could express their wounded pride and reassert what they saw as a pre-war identity. The white Southerner no longer knew who he was; Jefferson could offer that sense of self, all the more seductive in its madness. The slaves were free, the world turned upside down, nothing seemed impossible anymore. The Herald captured the sombre mood at Jefferson’s execution date, 28th February 1868; ‘A piteous affair was brought to a close today with the hanging of Obed Jefferson. We at the Herald can only offer our thanks that the town courts did not insist on the ridiculous charade of executing his animal alongside him, and we hope that the community can put these regrettable events of the past few years behind it.’ This is not, however, the end of the story, and old Jefferson’s hog had a still more profound role to play in the mythology of the South. There are those who will insist to this day that the pig’s

non-appearance at the gallows beside his master was not in fact an act of mercy from the local authorities, and that it had instead been smuggled out of the county jail by a band of rugged and faithful loyalists. The theory contends that these outlaws fled to Boston, in order to continue to spread their portentous message and worship in whatever abominable ways that they saw fit. Of this, there is no real evidence beyond vague newspaper reports of unusual preaching around Boston harbor and a single police report detailing the frightening experience of an aged Italian immigrant, who claimed to have seen a porcine figure stalking the streets at night, wearing a cloak and a top hat. Neither is it possible to corroborate rumours that John Wilkes Booth himself fell in with the pig cult of Hope, but the persistence of whispers on the subject adds a certain intrigue. Could it be that Lincoln’s assassin was a devotee of this unsettling, blasphemous religion? What horrors might he have seen, what terrible promises might have been bewitchingly whispered into his ears? And what of tales of the witnesses in the theatre on that fateful night, reasonable men who swore that the murderer of America’s greatest president yelled the words ‘PORCO DIO’ as he puled the trigger? What of the fitful piggish grunting which can still be heard on a clear night in Boston harbor, echoing down the rickety streets of the dockside? Why will no Boston café or restaurant offer bacon on its menu? Why is the mayor of that town never heard to speak, and is only seen in public in a long black veil? The rumours of arcane churches and rituals of unspeakable horror persist, why, why? OH GOD WHAT DID THEY TELL HIM? WHAT DID HE SEE? WHAT THINGS DID THAT YOUNG MAN SEE? We hope that you, our readers, found this masterful work of history as interesting and entertaining as we did here at Παράγκα. Professor Sears’ book is out soon, and can be pre-ordered from his website, www. deusmortuusestergopraeceptasexdecim.com. We wish to offer Professor Sears our sincere thanks and to say I am the farmer now. I Am The Farmer Now

Ευτυχία Το κορίτσι δεν μασούλησε από το σανό που στεκόταν στο κεφάλι μου, μονάχα πέταγε πλαγιαστά πέτρες στη θάλασσα. Μου είπε “πάω να κάτσω στον ήλιο” και έφυγε, όπως φεύγει κανείς από κάπου που δεν έχει καμία υποχρέωση. Όπως πέταγε τις πέτρες μία-μία υδατοβάμονες - κατάλαβα πως ήμουν και γω μία απ’αυτές και τι σήμαινε να περπατώ στο νερό.

χερια ΣΙΧΑΙΝΟΜΑΙ ΤΡΩΩ ΜΕ ΤΑ ΔΥΟ ΧΕΡΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΠΕΦΤΟΥΝ ΖΟΥΜΙΑ ΚΕ ΠΑΣΑΛΙΒΟΜΑΙ ΟΛΟΚΛΗΡΟΣ ΜΕ ΓΚΡΙΖΟ. ΑΠΟ

ΤΑ

ΕΞΑΤΜΙΣΜΕΝΑ

ΜΟΥ

ΧΕΡΙΑ.

δεν ειμαι εγω αυτος που ειμαι κοιμαμαι και ιδρωνω. και ξυπναω και ευχομαι να μη κοιμαμαι ακομα. αλλα ο υπνος δε με παρ’ολο που ειναι ολα

περνει, σκοτεινα.

και βλεπω ονειρα οτι εχω χερια, αλλα μετα σαν μωρο που ειμαι ξεχναω ποσο αδυναμα ειναι που ουτε φαγητο δε μπορουν να συγκρατησουν. Γιαυτο

ξυπναω

βουτηγμενος.

αδυμωνω για ανασεσ. βηχω απο το κρυο ενω ζεσταινομαι. που ειναι τα χερια για να με γιατρεψουν;

grew warlike and m e a n ;

But it felt strange in my belly

And it bore no fruit That brazen fat ape had established Monopoly control of all Industry and commerce

If anything else scuttled out from the sea I would say; “GO BACK! Its miserable here on the land,” But I had found a grove of peach trees And secretly gorged myself on their fruits With their juice on my face And their flesh in my belly I was happy

So that all that I could buy with my money Was ape-brand cola and mousepads That said “APES ARE GREAT” I thought that apes were stupid But there was no cultural space For the expression of this thought I told my neighbour that I was feeling down And he reported me to the authorities

And then some fat ape called Charlemagne Swung down from the trees He had a crown on his head Which he said the pope had given him I said “OK nice,” He proposed a deal I would give him all my peaches In return he wouldn’t tear me apart with his giant ape arms I said “OK,” This went on for some years And I was fed up A bird brought me a rifle “What is your name?” asked I “Liberty” replied she So I shot her Because I needed the practice I went up to the fat ape I said “because you are a tyrant I will shoot you And then maybe eat you.” He said “no. What if I buy your peaches with money instead?” So I ate money

They feared that I was becoming seditious So they cut off my head My body, dejected, decided that It’d had enough of land-dwelling And slunk back into the sea

They put my head in a museum

Behind this glass

For liberal-minded apes to gawp at No one hears me scream

A blasted imbecilic academic Named a monthly journal In my honour The festering open wound At my neck still hurt But I learned to live with it

What happened here? I woke up, brushed my teeth And went to work Nothing, I told myself Nothing at all

Serves him right, I suppose. I’ve been so good at spending time with him lately and this is how he returns my affection. As I get up to find the mop, the days blend into grey goop, the dog pisses on the rug. My grandmother’s rug, hand- sown in Persia, shipped half-way around the world and passed down from mother to daughter to dog. I really should know better than to keep rugs out with a dog in the house. Sure, one could always take him for walks in the park but I have important things to do with my life and anyway I have to draw the line somewhere or he’ll walk all over me. Shit. Mother is going to smell that when she comes. Hot water and vinegar should help. I should go shower and get ready. My people are waiting for me. But I have nothing to wear and too many spots on my face I need to cover. Maybe stay at home then. My dog is looking at me. What are you going to do about it?

THE CARPET

My dog had diarrhoea today.

Fabulous end to a Friday that- wiping your dog’s shit from all over the living room floor. My otherwise pristine ancestral wooden floor, that requires special cleaning hacks I’ll need to google. I didn’t feed him for three days. It’s not that I forgot exactly; I didn’t. I remember thinking I should buy him his dog stuff. Freshly prepared duck, venison and various game meats, cut to bite- sized pieces and seasoned to perfection, the label says. It’s not that I ran out of money either; I just chose to invest on crappy food, which I generously shared with the dog.

I don’t know. Stop being so demanding. It’s too complicated and I don’t want to think anymore. Enough with the staring. Let’s watch something on YouTube instead. 35

The phone is ringing. I look at the screen. Press silence, turn it over. My thoughts are too loud and having the dog is too distracting. I remain empty, vapid, numb. My bed is so comfortable.

I hug the duvet around my body. Reach for the dog. Slide my head under warm oblivion. Finally bliss. I really should go get that hot water and vinegar.

https:// soundcloud.com/otosili/kriti

Το τεύχος 01 δημιουργήθηκε και δημοσιεύτηκε το Φεβρουάριο του 2019 στα πλαίσια ανοιχτού καλέσματος συμμετοχής. This 01 issue was created, edited and published in February 2019, through an open call for submission.