PULP: ISSUE 12 2024

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pulp.

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PULP is published on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community. We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders and Aboriginal people have passed down from generation to generation. We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations peoples. Australia’s many institutions, including the University itself, are founded on this very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations efforts towards decolonisation and that solidarity will be reflected in the substance and practice of this magazine.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Senior Editor Kate Saap Editors Huw Bradshaw Simon Harris Justine Hu Sonal Kamble Lizzy Kwok Lameah Nayeem Design Simon Harris Justine Hu Cover Justine Hu The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of the USU. The information contained within this edition of PULP was correct at the time of printing.

This publication is brought to you by the University of Sydney Union.

Issue 12, 2024

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I As yet another Valentine’s Day passes, we chose to reflect on the meaning of love. Love as a gesture, an item, a name. Love for oneself, lust, idolisation, fantasy, collection. More types of love than we could name or dream of.

Despite its eternal existence, love remains undefeated as the overarching theme that manages to enthral artists and audiences because what else is there to life but love? To seek it and feel it and love? A lifelong chase in the hopes we can hold it in our hands.

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Love is clearly one of the most multifaceted, and universal concepts that man has created. A feeling that, like all feelings, inherently resists translation into the material world. In attempting the task of communicating love we plunge into the depths of this feeling blindly, grasping for its shape like the blind men grab at the elephant. The works collected here are all impressions of love in this sense, each author sharing one part of an endless whole that flows between us all.

Our youth is marked by the search for love but loneliness and isolation seem to be common themes of our contemporary era, caused by quarantines and doomscrolling and the simple cost of existing. It’s easy to lose sight of who and what you love, and who and what loves you.

However, we hope you find love in the clean dishes of your house, in a friend’s clammy palms, in dog-eared library books, in a TikTok link or Twitter thread, in shared sickness, in old toothbrushes, in the 400 people at the beach on a 30 degree day, and in the moon that we all look up at together. We hope this collection of written and visual work reminds you that love is at your fingertips, with every page turn.

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Editorial

Editorial

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LOVE IS...

1. An Army of Lovers Must Not Die p. 3 2. Porous Romance, love through degrees of obliteration p. 5 3. Our lines meet and chat p. 7 4. My Satisfyer Pro (2) Situationship p. 9 5. Love Collage p. 13 6. Cherri Rype p. 15 7. Alien love letter p. 19 8. Love on bathroom walls p. 21 9. A kiss from me 2 u p. 23 10. Strepsils for a sore heart p. 25 11. Lichenisation in a Cloister of Gold p. 27 12. The Great Magpesis: On Unrequited Love p. 31 13. MY WARDROBE IS VERY VERY FULL BUT I CANNOT LET ANYTHING GO p. 35 14. Scalp p. 37

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submit your phone pictures for the issue 13 photo review. dm @pulp.usu email pulp@usu.edu.au

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Source: Wikimedia Commons, Carmen Fiano, https://www.flickr.com/photos/53812099@N04/14763863277/

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In July I was sparked into a fever to commemorate the Army of Lovers.

I started with a list of all the people who touched my sensual world and eclipsed my soul. I was inspired by American writer Larry Kramer who penned the saying, an army of lovers must not die. It was the title of his play he was writing before his death in 2020. I think about it a lot. The ‘Army of Lovers’ perhaps is a reference to Plato’s Symposium, in which the character Phaedrus uses the exact turn of phrase to refer to the Sacred Band of Thebes, an assembly consisting of pairs of male lovers that fought together as part of the Theban army. Rita Mae Brown speaks upon the army of lovers within her poem Sappho’s Reply; in this work Sappho speaks to the lesbians of the 20th century, she brings encouragement of survival “through thousands of years” assuring them that “an army of lovers shall not fail.” For Kramer, history is carrying the consequences and actions of lovers inside of you. Writing in 1981, The American People: A History, he reforms all of human history within his militant aesthetic vision, the founding fathers queening out and the Stone Age was a grand fantasia of titillation. Culture is a living organism that has input of spoken and written history animating it, and if you can’t contribute by remembering it or commenting on it you let all the violence and plagues go on and all the love will be for naught. I see this Army of Lovers as a resistance against suppression of eroticism, leveraging a war against the Great Ugliness. In times when you feel the crushing unattractiveness of the world you have the glittering images to comfort. We are overexposed to visual stimulation, sometimes in life you have to fight for mediation, one cannot see Bjorn Andersen in Death in Venice and continue on with regular life.

Your own personal Army of Lovers is yours to decide. It does not need to be exclusively people living or dead, it can be objects, animals, songs, whatever that can stir this feeling of ecstasy in you. The process of recruiting your Army of Lovers is something that prompts one to dig around their inner world mapped by sensual images, pulling the cast of Cecil.B Demented out of the void by their polyester hair. Friends of mine who have taken on the drafting process come together to compare our infantry, I roll my eyes seeing every gay man in my life having John Waters and Madonna at the top of their list, I am no better.

An Army of Lovers Must Not Die

Estelle Vigouroux

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Swaddled in the down of sheep, a cocoon, I become larval, racked by spasmodic kneading and hypnic jerks.

Cellular rebellion, a riot through the synapses, a dream of you.

My reptilian brain gnaws on the echoes of your voice.

You move through the grain of closed eyes, calling through the undergrowth of my body.

The soil of flesh replies, pulsates with a chorus 10 trillion strong.

Bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and viruses stir from subdermal rest, migrate through plasma to the surface of myself.

Push against the boundary between I and everything, where skin flora blooms a cloud of spores.

Picked up in gusts of docile breath, I post portions of my body to you along an ocean breeze.

I reach you, powdered in a dust of pollen.

Respiratory cycles pull me inside of you, plucking me as a berry from the cold air above your face.

Through inhalation and exhalation, we settle into one another like sedimentary rock.

I coat the roof of your mouth, catching on webs of saliva and mucus.

I am obliterated, granulated, between your canines and molars.

I am diffused into blood, through the delicate lining of your lungs.

In a hypertensive communion.

We coarse through each other.

A chimera.

Pourous romance, love through degrees of obliteration

Jake Starr

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Our lines meet and chat

Simon Harris and Soleil Mistry

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Photography Bonnie Huang Every good rhythm is destined for an inevitable end. Whether it be in song, dance, suction, or situationship. Alas, it is always too soon, too late, and almost always in the wrong place at the right time. An unsatisfactory story for an unsatisfactory ending. Satisfaction: a state of contentment or an act of fulfilment. I am unsure as to whether I have ever entirely experienced such a sensation. I’ve come close. Everyone has once edged themselves toward the anticipation of contentment. I’d argue it occurs every evening for most. It is not uncommon, nor taboo. It’s rather the tools and vices we use to get us there that unveil the underlying urge within us.

As August appears every year, so does a discrete package at the footstep of my family home. Like a toy drive for the desperate, my best friend alms new toys annually for my birthday. This year brought me revolutionary air pulse technology equipped with waterproof fittings and the gentle reminder of yet another year alone.

So began my situationship with my Satisfyer Pro, the second.

My Satisfyer Pro (2) Situationship

Genevieve Ripard

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They treat me well, and I like their physical features (though I definitely like them more than they like me). And we aren’t exclusive — I’m actually eskimo sisters with most of my best friends, and a good percentage of the clitoris-owning population too.

These days there’s nothing sexier than sexual liberation. In fact, it’s all the rage. Sex-positive podcasts, Bellesa, vibrator earrings, and the likes of Abbie Chatfield. Of course I want in, we all do, I can’t help but feel like I’m running in a race without a head start.

The act of feminine self-pleasure was always sheltered in adolescence.

Hidden under the bed and stuffed in the sock drawer of the education system. While my brothers learned the innards of their ejaculatory ducts, I was matching the foetus to the fruit size. After hours, when the men opened private tabs and saved their session in Grand Theft Auto, I was opening another love-sick story and saving myself for something I wasn’t even sure was.

This decade’s exponential incline toward celebrating female self-pleasure has shed the belief system that once lined my mind. I want to embrace it, I want to run through the ribbon of contentment. It’s just that every finish leaves only a bittersweet reminder of the race not won, and the sheets to be cleaned. I cannot blame my Satisfyer Pro. They never wanted anything serious, this was always meant to be casual. Love is an inability to accept casualties. So, whilst I wait for the recharge and the delivery of another brown box on my birthday, I will keep looking.

All in the effort to become my own, certified, satisfyer.

My Satisfyer Pro (2) Situationship

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Love

Soleil Mistry

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the cry, the mandamus: “begin slowly.” the boy watches, and what I do not realise is voyeurism is an affair of the mouth,

he watches with so much desperation

so much dread so much terror

I realise, he wants a taste

the ardour of sweet spit that taunts the tip of the tongue and the tantalising touch of teeth

before I realise what’s happened, he’s taken a bite —

he salivates. I eat.

— and there is the entry wound through which the sugar, the chocolate, the bitter fruit poisons the gut

starvation turns words into skinwalkers cherries in a chocolate hide are nothing but an easy high

it is my turn to be afraid

but my, what a pathetic body he has,

is this the surrender of reason, of mortality in the face of something so short-lived we convince ourselves it is beauty?

unable to bear the full-bodied blood of a fruit shaped like a tumour without his throat collapsing, his fingers swelling, he watches me eat a cherry ripe instead does the sight of it tempt him? gums flecked with crimson fingertips rich and muddy

Cherri Rype

god, he is an animal before me a mistake of a quivering gaze, swollen lips, blushing cheeks the sound of rasping breaths as his throat collapses boy, what has tempted you? your heart is your own judas. are you haunted by the same feeling? the burning delirium that makes a suffocating face pleasurable?

Lameah Nayeem

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18 how can I lie and pretend I am horrified by the fury of life, the dying call of the body, the self-effacing nerve of youth that calls you to what ends you when I have never felt more awake it’s so damning, so unnervingly human to teach the body passion in such a way; the alchemy by which curiosity makes masochists of us he writhes, he begs — my, is this the face of ecstasy? shall I be so generous to suck the poison out as if there were a snakebite, leaving imprints of teeth and circles of red in my wake perhaps lean into his breath to warm my neck as proof of life place a finger against the weakening pulse to feel the carnal drum in stasis, I watch and I learn how easy it is to commit treason against the body.

Cherri Rype

Lameah Nayeem

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Alien love letter

Khira Bel Eisenberg

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Over the course of the year, I have examined countless scribbles on the walls of club bathrooms. I found love everywhere: above the locks of cubicles, across bathroom mirrors, in between the toilet roll and the sanitary bin. I found love all over. Something about those four walls brings out the hopeless romantic in us all… making us reconsider a love of the past, or hyper-fixate on a current situationship that really isn’t that deep.

And on the walls of the club bathrooms that night, I found splinters of you.

Your stupid little scribbles were all over, and I couldn’t scrub them off.

I found love in many forms on those walls. It was romantic, it was platonic, it was love at the hands of a shared hatred. Little hand drawn hearts were everywhere, each characterised by their artist’s personality. The word ‘love’ was sprinkled all over; unavoidable as soon as you stepped foot inside the four-walled castle of the dilapidated porcelain throne. Love was obvious, love was subtle. I found it over and over again: those happy little scribbles on the walls.

The words were all silly, and they didn’t make much sense to my friends.

But I knew. I knew you had been there. And I knew the love was one sided, that you hadn‘t thought of me when you picked up that red sharpie and put it to the tile.

Love on bathroom walls.

Zara Ishka Stewart

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a kiss from me to you

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Strepsils for a sore heart

Jessamine Lobb

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a mycobiont cannot find home it exists within body i exist as a being singular for too long i function well enough

respiring in

another

out my

contact

weed

our way through a clumsy pollination i could survive alone have my sweat leak through the mycelium under my feet have my growth measured finitely

exist

as

a precursor pre-contact

to

a inchoate

i cannot who how it was Lichenisation in a Cloister of Gold

know

now

like

the

kinder did

slamming action of warp and

steeping not try

the gold ring of mouth which shined when me across the stretch of

nectar

have my breath liquified be the most beautiful colours and petrify the tongue

you

was it weft or a i hope they burnish

and

feeling the sand lick lungs i let anyone drink from the of my neck I and they tumble

i before

for

it

begins collision my good use

to

your you a

fighting

ring

with

hands can finally

it looks like first my haustoria reaching often mistaken for leading me similarity we strength

came to

be put

to

it hurts in pathogenic

you is needed both have a

for

at

into plurality praiseworthy

that we have been punished pushed underneath let me in

properly please please is it they thought hierarchical

not nice we

Eloise Goodhew

to be held were

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me above you you commanding me but a baptist understood that we are in service to each other we throw parts of ourself on top of each other until we form a thallus finally indistinguishable from one another we become the braid in an old beard the

perfume the health

lung

millennia

we

right under cover six their bodies those who

mans

of persistent skin of a can

exist

their percent lack a

heightened

of micromatter ignorant to the indignity their vastness but we

for

noses of awareness

of

who can be fruticose foliose filamentous leprose squamulose crustose defying facile categorization will hang like cardboard orchestrating a child’s mobile Lichenisation in a Cloister of Gold

Eloise Goodhew

above stars beckoning

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S [exasperated]: John! It’s always been about JOHN! Fine. I love John.

B: John, really? You’re being serious?

S nods solemnly. B raises an eyebrow.

B: Last time we spoke about him you said you wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole.

S: Yes, well…he didn’t even sense my manifestations!

B sets down the teapot, looks at it seriously and thinks for a moment.

B: Do you feel like you’re missing out on some greater thing with him? A love that should be yours?

A tea party for two is set up under an old willow tree. Girl laying on the picnic blanket, resting on her elbows with two dolls in front of her. She talks through them.

Beatrice [doll, left] is pouring cups of tea for everyone. Sally [doll, right] sighs.

S: I mean, not necessarily, but I just don’t see why he doesn’t…or worst case why he won’t…love me back. I hate how he makes me feel. I- You won’t get it.

S puts her head in her hands. B takes a sip of tea and stares into the cup, unsure how to console her friend. [pause]

Sally: Did you see Clare with her boyfriend last week?

B: I’m going to need you to keep an open mind, because what I’m about to say will make me sound like an asshole. Some philosophers say that unrequited love can be a misnomer; we don’t feel love, we’re obsessed or infatuated. Real love is about reciprocation, it’s nothing without the other party.

S: I can’t stand to see them look so happy together…

S rolls her eyes.

Beatrice: John?

S trails off, expecting a sympathetic remark from Beatrice — who does not indulge her.

S: What would you do if someone you’ve been in love with was flirting with other people in front of you? Wouldn’t that make you insane? How should I get over it? It’s clearly never going to happen and— B: What are you on about?

S: A few months ago, before John and Clare got together, we went out for coffee. John asked me, you know; of course I was going to say yes. I thought he was cute. He was very invested in what I had to say, made great eye contact, and we got on like a house on fire. John even paid the bill at the end which he didn’t have to. I thought he really liked me…I’m just so embarrassed. Like, genuine despair.

S: You’re salting my wound.

B: That’s not my intention, I swear I’m only trying to help…What I mean to say, is that we seem to think that our place on the spectrum between divinity and mayhem comes down to how loved we are. Love makes you crazy, manic even. DBC Pierre says something like: ‘love and its temperature can’t actually be chosen’. There is no other feeling that is as awful or tragic, yet incredible all at once. People go to the ends of the earth, sacrifice their lives, just to feel loved.

S: Right…

B: Have you ever wondered if he owes you affection?

S lifts her head up from her hands and cocks it to the side.

S: Pardon?

S huffs and falls back in her seat.

The Great Magpesis: On Unrequited Love

Kate Saap

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B: Well, does he have to love you back?

B leans forward on the table.

S shrugs.

B: I’m not making it up, I swear! I went to the gallery the other day and saw Sarah McEwan’s new exhibition: Unrequited Love (The Great Magpesis). It was all about how unreciprocated love makes us experience three main feelings: mania, agape, poiesis. Mania, you’ll know; but agape and poiesis I tried to explain earlier. They’re the Greek words for charitable, spiritual love and the act of bringing something new into the world. Put all those feelings together, you get magpesis. I seriously had never been so moved by artwork before in my life; I could feel the yearning and heartbreak oozing from her little abstract figures on the wall.

This feeling…it was entirely relatable. I sat in that room and stared at her art for hours, I bet the staff thought I was insane.

B: What you’re looking for is this spiritual, unconditional, reciprocal love. Having a true connection with someone means that you care for them for their own sake, not from the pleasure or utility gained from the relationship. There’s a chapter in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics about that. Some other Ancient Greek philosophers wrote about unconditional love specifically, it’s called agape. In any case, you shouldn’t love someone because of who they are or their relationship to you; you love them simply because they are.

B takes another sip of tea. S looks at B with glazed eyes.

B: What do you want from him?

S [pointedly]: To be in love with me.

B: As much as I don’t agree with Robert Nozick on some of his political views, what he has to say about love might be relatable. The love you want is two people coming together and creating a new shared identity.

Nozick calls it ‘we’. He talks about how in the full intimacy of love, the person is known and cleansed and accepted to form we with the other partner. Poiesis, from the Greeks, is contingent on the other person feeling the exact same way, it means to bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. There is a mutual knowing, a mutual eagerness to be with the person. Unrequited love does not have this feature — you’re trying to make we out of thin air.

S scoffs.

B: Just let me finish, please. When we is unbalanced or unhealthy, our whole world falls apart. I’m sorry to be brutal but you can’t make lemonade out of strawberries, you need lemons. All I’m saying is that you won’t ever be able to have poiesis with John, when his we is with Clare.

S: Go fuck yourself.

The two sit in silence for a while. S glares at B, who tries to avert her gaze by stirring the teacup in front of her. [pause] B: Sounds like you’re suffering from magpesis.

S crosses her arms.

S: Don’t say words like that to try to sound smart. I know you, asshole.

The Great Magpesis: On Unrequited Love

S: What does this have to do with me?

B: I think if you want to stop feeling this way, you need to tell John how you feel.

S gasps.

S: Are you serious? That could ruin his relationship, I’m not a homewrecker!

B: No, no, I’m not encouraging that. I reckon the easiest way to get over magpesis is to confront it head on. It’s only gotten this bad because you’ve allowed yourself to get caught up in some delusion rather than accepting the truth. And, if he’s secure in his relationship with Clare — I believe he is — then he will just acknowledge your feelings and you can let it go. It’s always best to be honest. That’s me saying that, not any dead philosophers.

S: I think you need a hobby.

S gets up and storms off.

There’s a voice in the distance that calls the girl into the house, lunch is ready.

Recommended Reading Book 8, Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, translation by Roger Crisp I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Love’s Bond by Robert Nozick The honeycake horse by DBC Pierre, in The New Philosopher Issue #35

Kate Saap

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LOVE IS… The opening of overstuffed drawers and doors, now bared to the world.

My style, my signature, my imagined history — articulated through my careful curation and an irrepressible shopping habit. My clothes are beyond the microtrend of the moment, or a successfully shared Outfit Of The Day. They are the expression of a sentiment held to myself and to others, the connective tissue between the wider world and an innermost feeling. My clothes are interwoven and overlocked with a deep love of beauty, stories, and ideas.

More naked than nakedness, to dress is an invitation to reflect on these personal positions; spaced in the memories and meanings different pieces hold, unless I am rushed of course.

For now, a warm, syrupy afternoon is settling with anticipation, beckoning me through my bedroom window. It is that special time of year, before the real heat kicks in, where everything feels more important than ever before, and important memories are yet to be made. A sun fuelled delirium of cool drinks and new mouths, of loud moments shared laughing and urinating with friends in the same bathroom cubicle. All these potentialities are in my mind as I stand before my wardrobe, trying to decide what I will wear to carry these imagined memories with.

Let me sift through the colours, shapes, and images… denims, polyblends, natural fabrics… patterns, solids, florals… and connect these memories to both my mirrored and real self.

Behind these doors is the materialisation of precious days spent trawling through thrift stores and websites in pay-day glory. This time is guided through the imagined world of clothing, the ideas that pertain to their conception and their wearer. Flickering images and ten second videos grouped through a hashtag on social media create nostalgic histories, devoid of violence, that I am able to participate in through my outfit. A frenzied Y2K where Iraq and Afghanistan are left alone, a grown-up girlish coquette allowed to be forever innocent, a post #MeToo indie sleaze hipster, a clean girl that requires no more than a centre part.

Then, there are the hours spent yearning for plastic packages and a knock at the door. Just like the ache felt in the awaited arrival of a lover, a never ending sequence of a ripped parcel and perfectly fitted item reels through my mind, my sanity only sustained through updates on the AusPost app.

“Your delivery is coming today” rings with the excitement of flirtation, and a certainty that fantasies of wanting fingertips needing to know where this is from will soon be realised.

Clothing is my means of connection, both to myself and the world around me. They are objects created with the desire to possess and display, their fibres embedded into visions of time and place. Tonight, I will stretch the arms of the top I finally decide on wearing to hold the people who might understand me for who I am, of who I want to be, of who I am trying to be. At the very least, we can all agree it makes my boobs look great.

MY WARDROBE IS VERY VERY FULL BUT I CANNOT LET ANYTHING GO

Audrey Nesdale

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Last winter mum had her hair shaved. Her gentle head held by doctors as strands kissed the hospital floor. A shiny new scalp ready for surgical incision.

A month later, I shaved my hair. Head held by my housemate on our living room floor, a shiny new scalp ready to be decorated.

One by one, friends gloved their hands and got to work; my ridged, lumpy canvas morphing and shifting, follicles taking on new forms every fortnight.

Each dye date was time spent just for two. We became active practitioners in intimacy as they reached inside my brain, leaving a trail of dye streaks, bleach marks, paint shapes, outlines, and colours in their wake.

By the time mum was able to walk again, her hair had grown out in the shape of a tulip.

“You look like Faye Wong in Chungking Express,” I told her.

She didn’t know who that was.

“Vương Phi,” I translated.

“Oh, she’s really pretty. That’s OK then.”

“What’s wrong with your head? Are you healthy?” she asks, mistaking the splotches of red in a grown-out Van Gogh as bruises.

“It’s just dye, just for fun. Don’t worry about me.” I know she will. “How are your legs feeling?”

“I can walk fine now. Don’t worry about me.”

She knows I will.

Scalp

Long Huynh

39Source: Wikimedia Commons, Pablo Alfredo De Luca,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMOR_NA_GRAMA.jpg#/ media/File:AMOR_NA_GRAMA.jpg

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Contributors Estelle Vigouroux Audrey Nesdale Soleil Mistry Jake Starr Zara Stewart Long Huynh Jessamine Lobb Khira Eisenberg Eloise Goodhew Genevieve Ripard

Kissers (p.23-24) Joe Brizuela Green Almarinez Josh Chen Rachel Low Sofia Manilla Andrea Mitrovic Janella Francis Scarlett Thompson Jack Aldo Emilysue Bentancort Carbajal Hugo Anthony Hay Izzy Gee Arnav Gupta Jo Staas Carmen Ratnaviraiwatana Isabelle Laxamana

Who’s in your Army of Lovers?

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A new exhibition by HOSSEI

Feb 15 – March 28

 Live performances...  Feb 14 at 11am  Feb 15 at 6:30pm  Feb 22 at 6:30pm Verge Gallery Jane Foss Russell Plaza, 154 City Road follow us @pulp.usu

verge-gallery.net Photo credit: Jacquie Manning

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