PULP: ISSUE 18 2024

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 Hugo Anthony Hay Editors Kelly Caviedi Bipasha Chakraborty Joan de la Kagsawa Ashray Kumar China Meldrum Chinese Language Editor Lizzy Kwok Design Kelly Caviedi Bipasha Chakraborty Ashray Kumar The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of 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 18, 2024

Print Group

Content Warningg

This issue of PULP contains content that may be distressing to some readers.

Discretionary engagement with the following pieces is advised.

Neon Webs pg. 1 — mention of suicide.

Have you seen the Bangkok aquarium? pg. 9 — depictions of derealisation.

Handpicked pg. 17 — depictions of self-harm and body dysmorphia.

Play The Game pg. 21 — depictions of blood, gore, weapons and firearms.

I See Spots pg. 35 — depictions of derealisation and discussion of death.

President’s Foreword Dear PULP reader Welcome to PULP #18! A huge thanks to Hugo and his team for producing yet another magnificent edition for your reading pleasure. To all stupol hacks anxiously sweating over another inevitably mind-numbing RepsElect, to all the law library dwellers weighing up whether to starve to death or miss ten minutes of torts revision, to all the editors of USYD rants struggling to find the “post” button: relax, think about how fleeting life is, and turn to the next paragraph.

In all seriousness, this is a wonderful publication. It joins one of many items and events held by the USU following the midsemester break. The USU’s Glitter Gala was a huge success, and a big shoutout must go to our Student Programs team for all the work they do in planning, designing, and bringing to life one of the biggest celebrations of the year. This in conjunction with International Fest, the conclusion of another enthralling Revue season with Med Revue – I still don’t know what a Korotkoff sound is, but I digress – and many day trips, G’Day Gatherings, and markets, demonstrates the USU’s continued commitment to engaging students where they are and making the student experience the best it can possibly be.

On the topic of improving the student experience, I want to say a few words about the USU’s ongoing push to incorporate. Incorporation is aimed at improving the USU’s legal rights and operational certainty by establishing the USU as a legal entity. This will provide more options to us to tackle financial challenges and ensure consistent and enhanced student services. It will also strengthen our internal governance, allowing us to better serve you, dear PULP reader. The Board is committed to seeing this critical, once-in-a-generation project through, and we will ensure that it is done correctly and up to the standards and expectations of our members.

Once again, a big thank you to Hugo and his team for crafting this edition of PULP! I hope it inspires you as your creative companion through the final weeks of the semester, and reminds us of the importance of taking a moment to breathe and appreciate the artistry and vibrancy that surrounds us—even in our busiest moments.

Yours sincerely, Bryson Constable

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Senior Editor’s Note I am wrestling with my terracotta cotton sheets, forest green corduroy doona cover. I am restless, tying myself into a big knot. Tonight, I have not been able to find the comfort I normally do in my bed. Tonight, they are the cheesecloth and I am cheese. Tomorrow, I will wake up, rub the impressions of my pillow case from my cheek and inspect the sleep still left in my eyes.

Blue light hits my face. The special considerations portal spits at me, brutal and square. The campus crest, so sanitised, so gauche. I have been unable to sit myself down and make myself do any of the things I need to do. And I am terribly embarrassed. Even in my paralysis I wonder: Whose hands build the walls we put between each other? What else have these hands made? My hands continue to be dragged to my keyboard. Flat, plastic-y, and backlit. They stumble awkwardly; slapping together formal nothings for my student declaration. In the .docx it’s all a bit sloppy, too formal, then too crude. My housemate and his girlfriend are downstairs watching Dexter.

I wonder if student services think we’re all navel-gazing. I wonder if they dgaf. I wonder if I gaf. Funny how so much can happen so quickly. So much can change, so little too. I am now sick of my blue light, so I pull out my phone instead. 27 reels, 13 tiktoks, and four tweets I did not proofread has led me here. Downstairs, I hear the harpsichord of another episode.

I am grateful that you have given your time to me, have looked me in the eyes and spoken with genuineness, and held me tightly. Read this note.

There is much we have done to be proud of. There are also parts that we ought to regret. What should we do with what’s in between? Are there parts of us too significant to ignore but too fleeting to enshrine?

What will you do with them? I know what I will be doing with mine.

Long story short — who want me? who want PULP? Hugo

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Editorial

We have never listened to as much Weezer as we have in the PULP office.1 We have never drank as much three mint tea, or eaten as many paleo snacks from various on-campus eateries.

We have never played so much pool in the daytime or lamented as much about our office spoons that seem to venture into the abyss every three business days. On the whole, we are more joyous for it. When it comes to the slog period in the semester — when Ashray writes his essay in InDesign, when China’s inter-library transfer is taking its sweet time to arrive — we find some much-needed solace (or procrastination) in making this magazine. While taxing, we find fulfillment in editing, designing, re-editing, re-designing, and eventually, seeing the glossy pages, feeling both pride and a desire to do more next time.

Issue 18 is all about this process of creation. Whether your medium is Roblox’s ‘Draw and Donate,’ the camera, or the pen, we all are involved in a continual process of construction and reconstruction. Your interior design Pinterest board, your Instagram feed, and the hundreds of photos of clown-shaped amenities on your phone all constitute acts of creation. We implore you to find joy in this; while the act of creating is challenging and time-consuming, the exhilaration of having brought something into existence is inevitably worthwhile.

Flip through these pages, and you’ll find the creations of 13 dedicated contributors. We thank them for trusting us with their ideas. If this issue sparks some creative ideas, drop by the office. We always have an ear ready to listen and a three mint tea waiting for you. We will see you next year, ready to create some more. We hope you find as much solace (or procrastination) in reading this issue as we did in making it.

Lots of love, and stay hydrated, China, Kelly, Ashray, Bipasha, and Joan

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Except of course for Joan, a long time Weezer fan.

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Photo Review

Thank you Cleo Joan Florrie Kelly Bipasha Simon China Mahima Ashray Harry Christina v

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NEON WEBS Nothing and then something. Things coming out of the water. Growing legs. Walking with headphones on, listening to hyperpop. Listening to Malaysian baseball metal. Temu t-shirt that says ‘CRITICAL THINKER.’ Nutrient enhanced flavoured water paired with beef, cheese, and bacon pie.

Guided meditation on YouTube by a girl who spent six months in a monastery. The same dust and stuff as there always was, rearranged and uploaded to the internet in neon webs.

Arwen Beaumont-Lee 1

My friend has a finsta with 54 followers (@yung_ hikikomori). In the bio, it says “Thisistherealme”. There are 790 posts, dating back to January 10, 2021. Cats, family

photos, sushi, stockings, a weird chair, a meme that says “the joker is nothing but a party clown to me”, blue Takis, a Hunter Biden mirror selfie, a 100,000 year old Paleolithic stone tool, an empty bowling alley. She posted a picture of me on it once, holding a stack of 50 dollar bills in front of my face. Sometimes when we talk in person we end up staring mutely at each other, making our eyes big and then small and then big again.

I was in bed, doom scrolling, and eating strawberries when @didion_sunglasses posted a collage on her story with pictures of her mum. Her mum as a young girl, smiling in pigtails. Her as a teenager, standing against a brick wall. As a twenty-something-er, backpacking through Rome. A new mum and her baby in a dark living room. The caption was: “I’ve finally come to terms with my Freudian fate... Happy birthday mum, I love you” (white heart emoji<3 – pink heart emoji<3). Underneath that, a sparkly, pink Hello Kitty .gif.

There was no one tagged. Her mum probably doesn’t have an Instagram. Part of me thought “who is this for?”, but I still considered responding. Maybe with something like “Aww I feel the same way about my mum!” (white heart emoji<3 – double-sword emoji<3). I couldn’t be bothered to type out the message though, so I just liked it instead.

I used to follow a meth user from Adelaide called @Puppyloerd until his account got deleted. He had a beautiful, possum-like face that was covered in tattoos; a Star of David in the middle of his forehead, barbed wire crowning his hairline, and whiskers on either side of his nose. I have a few posts of his screenshotted in my camera roll. One of them is a photo of a page in his journal where he wrote “I get into online feuds and bcos I’m highly intelligent wiv words and have a sharp sense of humour the opps get epic pwnd and end up deleting their comments and blocking me :)”. Next to his black Sharpie scrawl is a drawing of a dog baring its teeth that sort of looks more like a sea lion.

I saved another one he did of Jesus riding a donkey, titled “The Underwhelming Entry of Jesus of Nazareth”. He once made a post about an NDIS trip to Adelaide Zoo with his support worker where he said the animals were “demented from being institutionalised”, pacing in circles around 10 by 10 cages, and “not even interested in sex”. He described a moment where a zoo worker threw a platter of dried lettuce and grain into the iguana enclosure, yelling ‘Ziggy Star!’, “as if these prehistoric reptiles actually feel an affectionate first name basis with her, a swine”. I wondered if he would feel the same way about me, admiring him through a screen when I would probably cross the street to avoid him in the wild.

We tripped at the beach on a warm day in August. My body went numb in the water as I swam out to the net. As I was drying myself off with my skirt, she asked me to take a photo of her. I could barely see the phone screen in my hands with the sun shining down on me, reflecting off the glass and the water. I pressed the button and took a dozen frames of her

silhouette as she shifted poses. While she flicked through the pictures, I went for a walk to fill our water bottles up, feigning dehydration as an excuse to be by myself for a minute. When I got back, she was face-tuning the photos I’d just taken of her. Zooming in on pimples, stretch marks, cellulite. Normal stuff that looks more intense when you’re high. She tucked her phone away when she saw me looking.

I didn’t say anything. It got worse when we went back to her house. A lot of looking in mirrors and trying to stop looking in mirrors. I didn’t realise I was spiralling until I’d already lost control. We took a shower together and she asked why my skin was turning so red. I said it happens all the time, don’t worry about it. She said no like I’m actually worried you need like medical help. I looked down at my hands and they were glowing. Whatever.

Sometimes I want to delete my account, but then I think about all the people I’d be leaving behind. No more boys sending me reels of men in foreign countries building swimming pools, or building automaton hands from scrap metal. No more progress pics from the girl I played soccer with in primary school who became a bodybuilder. And what about the guy I met at a rave who got my Instagram after I complimented his Underworld t-shirt that said “I’m invisible I’m invisible I’m invisible”? He posts about being suicidal at 4am every second Saturday when he’s coming down on the walk home through Marrickille. I haven’t responded to him yet but what if he needs my help one day?

I like looking at faces. I want to look into your eyes without you looking back at mine. Just give me a second to take all of you in. To imagine what your parents look like. To imagine what you’d look like as the opposite gender, as a 90-yearold, as a morbidly obese person, or a skeleton. Use a filter so I don’t have to imagine. Just don’t use the elf one because that’s my favourite and I want to keep it for myself. I like the way it raises my cheekbones, widens my eyes, sprays perfect freckles over my nose. I wish I looked like that all the time.

Sometimes I wish I had a million followers. I want people to listen to the songs I post. To think about the lyrics and how they might relate to me. Relate to me!!! So I can figure out who I am. I’ve been paying a girl from Philadelphia $16.50 a month to teach me how to manifest. She says I can attract whatever I want if I just have faith and meditate.

To recognise beauty is the fruition of good karma. It is within me. I hear running water in the background of her recording.

I feel doomed. I can’t remember the last time I went to the park. I wish to express the divine fully and completely. I feel like I don’t have enough time. My last to-do list said: Eat tuna salad, Edit reels, Call Centrelink. I don’t know how to let go. I get embarrassed when I blush. I don’t know what my mum does all day. I fantasise about melting into everything.

Some things look like they taste good but that doesn’t mean you should eat them. Like Tide Pods. Like snow.

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I created these pieces to comment on the social intricacies of virtual galleries, the dissonance between AI and artists’ labour, and how much funnier these images can be when the audience knows that hours of work were put into it.

I scrolled through the Roblox game gallery and found a game called ‘Draw and Donate’. In the game, you draw in an open gallery space alongside other people. I was inspired

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by some of the funnier artworks displayed on the walls, so I grabbed my phone and threw together some badly AI generated images from Pinterest, eventually landing on this specific shrimpy subject. I chose to replicate AI generated images because I wanted a translation of the human spirit to crack through the endless multitudes of soulless images online in the most ridiculous way possible.

Finley Anderson

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Search

Unreal Estate Chloe Atkinson

More ideas

Organize

People come to Byron Bay to die. They come many years before it will happen, but the idea is in the back of their minds, unburying itself through the weathering of the years. If the idea wasn’t with them always, they would never buy such tiny houses solely for the location. Sometimes, they buy without ever seeing in person the place they will live. This was the case for my Aunt and my Uncle, who, in 1989, achieved the Australian Dream: they bought a home.

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He didn’t die there, but close, in Byron Central Hospital. Flying to Ballina I became abruptly aware that I was unprepared for the environment I was walking into. I was stressed over the onslaught of emotion I was about to experience, but also, I didn’t know how we were going to navigate the drive to the hotel. The plane dropped like a fast stone and the small airport floated into view, white and remote.

Passing out of the air conditioning and into the car park, I was hit by the afternoon sun like a gong. Already, Byron Bay was different from what I had expected. I could see why my Aunt and Uncle had chosen it as the basis for their imagined life together. In Real Estate, looking down the barrel of life as a sixtyyear-old divorcee whose children have moved out, Deborah Levy fantasises about a home she would like to own. She adds and removes a fountain, pictures intimate gatherings with friends, and transposes her unreal estate onto various geographical backgrounds. Just like anyone else with a Pinterest board dedicated to vintage furniture, Levy’s mental exercise resonated with me. But I am an inheritor of a different world. For Levy’s generation, property ownership was seen as inevitable if you ‘worked hard’. For Gen Z, the notion is dreamlike.

What, if anything, can we really call our own?

I couldn’t buy a home in Byron Bay, but I could still have control over a piece of it. Climbing up the hill towards the lighthouse, our hire car lurched past stunning ocean vistas. There was a rainbow which had doubled itself by the time we got right to the top. “Stay there,” I said to my sister, taking a photo where she was underneath them. I took photos looking out from every side: towards Wategos Beach, down the hill, and across the flat expanse of the ocean. I thought about posting one or two on my Instagram story. I thought also about how I might be perceived, taking a spontaneous trip to Byron Bay, and having the freedom to do it. It wasn’t the same as owning a home. It was the next best thing; the belief of others that you could.

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Tastlicht Table Lamp - Marianne Brandt

Modern Silver Leaf Metal and Glass Etagere - Greg Natale When speaking of her rented writing studio, Levy suggested that although it wasn’t hers, she “owned its moods.”

By building my online space, maybe I was asserting my control over moods of my own — my personality, and how I wanted others to see it. I could still be the curator of my own space. Every Spotify screenshot, tableside story, and book cover flatlay revealed my digital self from a new angle. She felt less like an uncanny double and more like a role I could step into, anytime I wanted.

Lounge Chair - Michael Boyer

Wassily Chair - Marcel Breuer

Havana - Michael Eastman

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Chloe Atkinson At my Uncle’s funeral, the eulogies were long. Friends spoke of days spent swimming, where he would be in the pool looking up at the house, or else in the house looking out to the pool. Outside and inside are both intimate spaces, and the boundary between them is less rigid than it seems. I didn’t belong in Byron Bay, but I didn’t feel outside of it, either. I had been worried about coming to the funeral, but I could deal with death now that I was amongst it. Without me noticing, I had entered some other realm. The idea reminded me of air travel — passport queues, security screenings, and liquid limits. Questions of yes or no, of being or non-being, and of death or life aren’t so much binaries as destinations to be passed through. It seemed to me that owning a home, having a place in the world, allowed a person to travel freely. My Uncle’s reading glasses were still folded on top of his nightstand; he could return at any time. It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t. His home belonged to him, but he also belonged to it. In any case, I could still say that I was going to Byron Bay to visit him, couldn’t I? All the evidence for his life was there.

The Bauhaus Lamp

Leather GS195 Sofa - Gianni Songia

Butterfly Stool - Sori Yanagi

Desso Rug

When reflecting on her life and her imagined home, Levy concludes that she doesn’t own it, but she owns herself. Looking to her body of work, her children, and even a banana tree, she decides that real estate can encompass more than just a house to be all of these things. Touching down back in Sydney, I turned my phone off aeroplane mode and sent a text to my boyfriend. “I’ve landed.”

When I spoke of wanting a home, I meant that I wanted a place to belong, a place that was mine. Losing someone forced me to reflect on my own place in the world. I knew I was home: I was back with people who knew me, for more than my Instagram feed. Wasn’t that what I wanted? A place that kept me?

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Have you seen the Bangkok aquarium?

MeredithWang It’s easy to explain why the Bangkok aquarium was where my bond with the city began.

It gleams like a mirror, shimmering, and resplendent. Aan emblem of Asia’s famed Buddhist aquariums. Nestled in the urban centreer, on the LG floor of Thailand’s largest mall, Siam Paragon, it holds the city’s essence — a kaleidoscope of colours, pulsing with its own heartbeat.

Yet, as I poured my gaze upon it, I uncovered another side — a side in disrepair, commercialised and tainted, marred by the clicking of shutters and the tyires of tour buses. In those splintered corners, amidst flickering lights, I raised my camera, seeking to capture what could be real.

But instead of leading me out, it pulled me deeper into the mire. I became entangled, using these images as anchors in a desperate attempt to affirm my place — the place of that initial gaze towards unfamiliarity. Tthe boundary between illusion and reality frayed, and I found myself constantly wandering the streets, photographing people, imagining the lives they led. My identity teetered between that of a fleeting visitor and a watchful observer. I drifted.

led only to awkward smiles and my inevitable retreat — an act of escape that became a familiar refrain in my solitary wanderings.

But I do not resent such scrutiny and gaze. Iit unravels my senses and makes me tear up. I am lucky enough to be exploring the bizarreness of the world, much the shock I felt when a local confided in me that they would send money to wandering souls, lost in the aether. The jolt of this cultural collision, profound and disorienting, took hold of me as I walked, adrift, across the Chao Phraya River’s bridge in the quiet of night.

This place is a world apart from where I come from — here, devout bows to Buddha are extensive, more frequent than a prayer every three steps. Yet, beneath the surface, it feels familiar — the streets, the currents of thought. Eeverything feels somehow known. This is a tourist’s sense of feeling.

Confirmed by the excitement I get from my images, which reconfigure the real and the unreal, serving as a medium for me to express my inner self, taking root in something new.

To situate myself within the vast, exhilarating, and exotic waves of this grand tourist city was to engage in a mercurial pursuit — a perilous, ambiguous dance.

However, as I revisited those images, their significance waned. It occurred to me that even though I hadn’t fully grasped them, that sense would always linger. I laid down the camera letting it become my resolution. I breathed in, and felt the city move, hearing it whisper.

In one breath, I was elated, plunging headlong into the unknown, exploring its every crevice, reaching out as if to clasp its hand.

In the next breath, I was seized by a wave of desolation, a sense of alienation, as the city suddenly grew distant. I was ensnared in the routines of strangers, my existence reflected in countless eyes. I felt this keenly when my halting attempts at Thai, buying street food from a mildly serious uncle,

So, have I actually really been to the Bangkok aquarium or not?

Perhaps.

I might have been there, or maybe I just drifted by. And I might just have made everything up. But if you ask me, if I did go, I don’t have a single image of it.

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我在曼谷的时候，住在离暹罗百丽宫几百米的 旅馆里。 每天早上七点准时下楼，买咖啡，跑步，跑完 步跟路边摊的阿姨买一包糯米饭，边走边把塑 料袋撕烂，到房门口的时候袋子已经空了。 离开曼谷的前一天我还在跑步，每天早上都要 遇见的咖啡店门口的爷爷说，今天又来了呀。 是的，今天是我在这的最后一天。 那送你这杯咖啡好了，他笑笑。 我接下他的咖啡，想到了三毛笔下描绘她住在 沙漠里去赶那市集。刚开始的时候，赶上了是 赶，没赶上就当是跟人聊个五毛钱天。那种愉 悦地奔赴陌生领土的感受，那种一切未知飘荡 在空气里的自然感觉。 天真而烂漫的，我是一名看什么都无比新鲜的 中国游客。 我用相机记录下了所有，这座城市跳动的脉 搏，它市中心富丽堂皇，车流的混乱与川息。 富丽的另外一边，大概不到五十米的距离，映 衬着城市的黑暗面，贫富差距，商业化，残破 不堪。 我们对于游客身份认知，是对流浪本质的探索 和解构， 这像一场反复无常的追逐，是一种危 险而暧昧的关系。： 在那些破碎的角落和断断续续的光影里，我 的主体角色逐渐变得虚幻；拿起相机确定真实 的感受。当我通过镜头观看世界，虚拟和现实 变得模糊。我的身份在游客和观看者中游离不 定， 我在这里变得迷茫。 前一秒，我愉悦地奔赴这片陌生领土的各个角

落；但下一 秒就变得失落，疏离，因为它突 然变得陌生。我在陌生人的日常里出现，被无 数陌生的目光凝视着。这种凝视充满了我的轨 迹，在路边买炸串时，在嘴里蹦出几句生涩的 泰语时，在用异样的目光打量着满街道的佛像 时。 天真而烂漫的，我逐渐变成这座城市上方游荡 的客体。我属于这里也不属于这里。 我很难定义流浪，但或许我是一种形式的流 浪。带着文化上的冲击，与后知后觉它撕扯着 感受的边界，它是好的也是坏的, 它是具体的也 是抽象的, 把游离的我扯回现实的边缘。 这里与我生活的地方太不一样了，“‘举头三 步有佛像’’。 但是这里与我家又太相像了， 它的街区，人们说话交流的模式，都携带着故 乡的痕迹。 我重新审视这些影像，他们似乎不 那么重要了，于是放下相机变成我与割裂的身 份和解的方式。，我呼吸着感受它，让它呼唤 我的名字。 20多岁之后我的生活一直在全世界地理位置徘 徊不定着，我很不明白我到底属于哪里。当我 回到悉尼，这个曾经生活过四年的地方，熟悉 的陌生感还是会扑面而来。 但或许是因为这种无法名状的流浪感，我想我 会去慢慢接受它，不再感到失落和迷茫。

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Big Bird Blog With recent experiments in Indesign, I have been enjoying “using it wrong”. With the overlay of personal images of family photos taken as a child in the 2010s, I have reconnected with a sense of childhood play through reminiscing over my first interactions with technology in primary school computer class. Here, the screenshots appear as a disinterest in skill and lack of curation, yet the design’s resolutions speak to the unique position Gen Z finds themselves in. Where we are inescapably fused to digital media, software and platforms, with our fingers progressively morphing into letter keys with every digital exchange encountered, there is also an opportunity and a drive to ‘opt out’, play and discover new ways of approaching traditional formal constructs of design.

Lauren Maccol

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Hand picked This memory I’m sieving through is polluted with hard clumps of soil. I run a knuckle along the strainer of my memory. I’m combing through the inconsistencies, but they’re heavy, tough.

The vegetable patch of my childhood backyard was small, rectangular, and bordered by planks of bleached, bone wood.

Splinters bloomed wherever you touched them. This patch boasted an array of herbs and some scarce carrot deliveries that were almost as bony and leggy as my ten-year-old body.

The patch was also home to beetroots. One evening, my mother found a recipe for a beetroot dip in the Better Homes and Gardens to accompany some macadamia-cashew-cheesebutter for the bread with our pumpkin soup. She had amiably tasked me with retrieving the beetroots. She loved setting me little jobs, and I loved meeting her standards.

I suppose this task had an ulterior motive, in that odd way motherhood tends to delicately mould its subjects into something shiny and resilient and presentable. I was horrified by the dark. I couldn’t sleep with my back turned to the window, where the darkness let itself in and overstayed its welcome between those blinds. I couldn’t venture out into the hallway for fear of strange things lurking where I couldn’t locate them in the dim.

It was winter. I remember the frost blanket on the first layer of the earth, chilling as I dug fingertips into the powdery soil. The night was thick with a membrane-like quality that cocooned me inside the bitter Australian cold. A moon hung languid in the trees, inert in the quiet abyss. I stood there, bare toes blanketed by the icy dew, and felt, oddly, separated from the rest of the world. Indeed, I was severed from everything outside myself and the veggie patch.

A kookaburra cackled in the distance. The sound was muffled by the otherworldly tissue that enclosed the night and I. Blinded by the density of the dark, I felt my way into the dirt, fumbling amongst clutches of leafy greens and carrot tops.

Candles wept wax a few more times. I’m older now.

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Last night I occupied the bathroom and its blue fluorescence, soaking it up like a greedy phantom. My reflection taunted me

Cate Chapman in this harsh light. Impurities glistened, eager landmines. My nettling fingernails made quick work of them before I realised the pain: not in my face, but in my back. I stretched as I leant over the sink, transfixed by a constellation of clogged pores.

Twin faces pressed close. One satisfied, empty of the clawing dread. One a copy, clawing at herself. The mirror held its membrane taut, keeping the twins from meeting.

I plunged my fingers knuckle-deep into the spongy earth.

Beneath the surface, the soil was hot, insulated. One palm gripped the stalk while I unearthed the lumpy sphere. The beetroot sprung free of its moist nest and landed, steaming,

in my lap, as I knelt in the wet grass. My spine curled over the vegetable patch as crudely as the arch of my budding cupid’s bow. My flannelette pyjamas were cold and the little pink bunnies that adorned them warped as they clung to my legs.

I saw the cracks begin to splinter, scars peeling like bark from a paperbark. I see it when my makeup starts to pill and melt. Tears leaked from my mascara-rimmed eyes and met the congealed blood that stained my skin, staining my cheeks a sickly rose. Gooseflesh pebbled over my porcelain arms like honeycomb.

I wandered back inside without patching over the hole I’d made in the veggie patch, wondering what I’d done. It felt wrong, popping a bone out of the socket and leaving it unsettled.

This morning I woke to burgeoning scars dotting my nose and cheeks.

Memories of childhood scattering themselves indiscriminately across my consciousness, shoes tracking dirt over a carpet. I’d tried to dig up each vegetable cradled in my pores.

From there, my memory wanes, that odd liminal moment giving way to mundane scenes of domesticity. I scrubbed the vegetable and peeled it painstakingly into the sink. I shaved every stray hair and exfoliated it until the pollutants were stripped and fingers dove into the spherical gash encrusted with dried earth and blood flowed. Pure, raw crimson.

I bought a new lip stain yesterday. I exfoliated my lips with a coarse, cruelly pink bubblegum sugar scrub. Then, I peeled off the dead skin that remained with a small cotton cloth.

I diced the beetroot roughly into large chunks and fired up the food processor. I seasoned and ladled the dip into a little white bowl, smoothing the surface with the underside of the spoon. I licked my lips clean and dried them roughly with a bath towel. Carefully, I let a few drops of the stain wriggle into the little lines that web across my lips, spreading and clawing its way across my mouth.

I stained my palms.

I smoothed the tint with a cotton bud, attempting to colour inside the lines.

Mouth split wide. Smile missing.

We sat around the dinner table, the shrill laughter of my sisters tinkling like lightly shattering glass. The beetroot dip was delicious.

It carried a strong, sweet, earthy bitterness. The slathered bread met my tongue. Bile rose in my throat.

My lips tingled for hours afterwards from the exfoliation. When I stepped back from the close interrogation of the mirror, my cupid’s bow shone a glistening beetroot.

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For a while now, I have been interested in the lives of artists. Compared to the milliona German writer (despite living some and-wan imitations of Rilke’s letters spawning in every online cultural magazine, twenty years in Berlin), nor is he seen biography lays out the whole creative process in exemplar. It’s comforting to find as an American writer. Nonetheless, the small excerpts of failed drafts, long periods of writer’s block, lost friends or lovers, United States as an idea, especially as a and exile. The last of these is the subject of James Joyce’s one flirtation with ‘free’ country, dominates his later novels. playwriting. Published in 1918, Exiles was rejected by W. B. Yeats’ Abbey Theatre More recently by comparison, Marjane and performed in Munich to unfavourable reviews. Although it was revived Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis and Azar

by Harold Pinter in 1970 with some success, it remains on the periphery of Nasifi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran have been discussions about Joyce. Much like the künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as criticised by some for glorifying Western a Young Man, it is semi-autobiographical. The play deals with tensions between conceptions of Iranian culture and history, two couples: Richard and Bertha, libertine lovers recently returned to Ireland and failing to deconstruct Orientalist and from Rome, and Robert and Beatrice, a married couple in Dublin, with oppressive structures in Western culture. For Robert, an old friend of Richard’s. Although Richard “allows Bertha complete these writers, the West and the United States freedom” — which she also tacitly allows him after Robert makes a serious seem a model for ‘free’ countries and yet, as advance on her — Richard cannot help himself but feel jealous even as his the criticism reflects, it is not that simple. In principles force him to consent to the affair. this context, we find the cosmopolitan, liberal ideals of exile in Joyce inverted.

It is easy to see why Exiles was not staged at the Abbey. Cosmopolitan, with sprinkles of philosophy, Italian vocabulary, and knowing social But it is worth remembering that an author is an commentary, the play is nothing like the earthy, wild plays of John individual, and wherever their location, they do Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, or the Irish Literary Revival. Exiles is, possess the ability to make original works. As Josef however, a significant work, even if it pales in comparison to something Brodsky, himself an exile from Soviet control, said like Ulysses, published in its entirety four years later in 1922. The on a 1982 talk show “A poet, like a bird, will start play is an exploration of the mental exile that proceeds to and from to chirp on any branch he alights on.” It is unfair to physical exile. As Robert and Bertha attempt to explain to Richard reduce an artist to a visa. their budding affair, the sound of a fisherwoman shouting “fresh Dublin Bay herrings” echoes throughout the room, homely Ireland And what about Australia? As Patrick White saw it appearing and constricting them. in 1957, there was a Great Australian Emptiness at the heart of our cultural life, an “exaltation of the average.”

Although the romantic events of the play are fictional, the situation Although this criticism is no longer fair, partially as a is not dissimilar to Joyce’s own life. He met Nora Barnacle in 1904 result of White and his colleagues, Australian literature and they were unmarried for many years, and also had a son remains isolated from the international scene. In some abroad. Joyce, much like next generation figures Samuel Beckett ways this is even advancing. Until the admittance of US and Thomas MacGreevy, found the literary establishment in writers into the Booker Prize, Australians had featured Ireland frigid and stifling. It seems a logical step then, that prominently (think Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, all three left the country just as their literary ambitions were and Aravind Adiga) but Charlotte Wood’s longlisting beginning. Joyce and MacGreevy met in Paris in 1927, while this year was the first since the naturalised J. M. Coetzee both Beckett and MacGreevy were teaching at the École in 2016. Of course, one award is no indication of cultural Normale Supérieure, where MacGreevy introduced Beckett life, but to be frank, it is not healthy for us to be read only to Joyce. Notably, this meeting took place in France, then by ourselves. When that happens there is always the risk of considered by many as the centre of the artistic world. It is stagnation and insularity. Consider that one of Australia’s easy to see the development of these artists historically ­— best innovators, Gerald Murnane, has mostly stayed out of they found themselves in the ‘unique’ freeing atmosphere the cultural world, and lives in Goroke, a small town west of 1920s Paris and formed opposition to their old country. of Horsham in Victoria. There is nothing unusual in writers Exiles seems to be a response to this backward, repressive living away from the cities, but for some reason Murnane’s Ireland, and a danger is that we might be tempted to existence has been characterised as exile. Unlike the famous define it this way. After all, modern technology renders recluse Thomas Pynchon, who famously said that “‘recluse’ is a exile itself almost obsolete now, right? codeword generated by journalists…meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’,” Murnane has given plenty of interviews, including It seems easier to characterise exile now as an to ABC News in 2018. One way of thinking about this is that inherently political part of a contemporary writer’s Australia has a very strict understanding of what a ‘good writer’ development. In the last century this was mostly should do and be and Murnane simply does not feel comfortable in observed within Latin America and the Soviet that kind of existence. bloc. Yet even these examples illustrate how difficult it is to define something or someone, Perhaps this example reflects our own desire to ground ourselves especially an artist, historically. Soviet exiles in notions of place and belonging. It seems better to be loved inside were at first White Russians, and their writing a box than free but alone, especially before success. But art, if I can often reflects a yearning for an idealised Tsarist join the mass of Rilke’s imitators, cannot exist in submitting to what is Russia, with strong details and romance, as already there. One way or another, an artist must make something of in the case of Nabokov. But compared to the the world. Exile is ultimately what a gaoler calls freedom, and we are far Irish exiles, Nabokov was never considered too often our own prisoners.

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PLAY THE GAME

​​The ruling class implore us to “play the hand we’ve been dealt”, but here’s your opportunity to reshuffle the deck and deal your own cards.

These suits of cards depict prominent political and social figures in their truest forms.

From war crimes to ecocides, some of socalled Australia’s finest shed their outer layers to join a deck of incompetent leaders.

This set has been inspired by the long history of political playing cards circulating since the 9th century, balancing the important roles of entertainment and commentary. With each card played, the hands dealt are stained with blood.

Poker, Blackjack, Bridge, Bluff, Spoons.

Take these figures that play the people, and in turn, play them.

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BIPASHA CHAKRABORTY

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BIPASHA CHAKRABORTY

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PULP CAUSES #SWAG

Pitch

for PULP

PULP CAUSES #SWAG

WARNING

Pitching for PULP will make you cooler, will make everyone want you, and is known to increase your social position dramatically.

Pitching for PULP is known to cause irreversible increases in the steeze of yourself and your loved ones. This is known as pulpification. Those who are exposed to the effects of pulpification are known to have pitched their work online beforehand. These pitches are irreverent, silly, spooky, funny, or over-analysing. They have been to known to come from anyone.

You CAN pitch for PULP. Follow @pulp.usu on instagram now, talk to your local PULP editor or visit www.pulp-usu.com.

Have you ever wanted to remove someone from your social group? Be rid of someone so distasteful to your person that you cannot stand to be in their presence? Perhaps you are not alone in your assessment of this person, but talking shit about this person to others puts you at a lot of risk to your social standing: What if they’re well-liked? What if you’re just being a dick? What if you could make this gossip anonymous and vote this person out of the social group? If this sounds good to you, then look no further than the late fifth-century BC Athenian practice of ostracism!

The practice of ostracism involved Athenian citizens writing or carving the name of their target (almost always a politician) on an ostrakon (pl. ostraka) — a broken pottery shard. Each year in mid-January an assembly was called and the people asked to vote, by show of hands, whether they wanted to hold an ostrakophoria 1. If a majority voted in favour, the ostrakophoria was held around two months later. Then, citizens would enter the agora with an ostrakon

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in tow and cast it into the centre, creating a pile of ostraka.

If 6000 ostraka were cast, then the citizen with the most votes was asked to leave the city for ten years, after which they were able to return while maintaining all rights to their property 2. The goal of ostracism was to “transform a dangerous or treacherous politician into a safe member of the Athenian community” by giving them a time-out 3..

This practice may sound absurd to modern readers, and in many respects it is. It was a political ritual whose aim was against tyranny and power-grabs, a way for Athenians to express their civic unity 4. “The violent gesture that broke up a ceramic vessel transformed a single, smooth-surfaced, and in some cases beautiful container into a multitude of sharp, jagged-edged sherds. The smashing was an audibly brittle and visibly immediate crash. It was irreversible.”

5 Ostracism wasn’t just an archaic practice, but a ritual with real physical consequences. Friendships are like steel rebar: strong and flexible. But social groups are more like

concrete: liable to cracks.

Given that a social circle is smaller than a city-state, we may need to adjust the rules for our purposes. Here’s how it could work: At the next PULP launch, older editions will be ripped up and attendees can print the name of the person they want to exile. Then, cast the paper-scraps into the centre of the event. At the end of the night, the votes are counted and the person with the most votes is banished from PULP launches for the rest of the semester. Wouldn’t this be nice? You wouldn’t even have to tell your friends who you’re voting for or tell the person directly that you don’t like them: problem solved. It could give the victim a chance to reflect on their behaviour and return to the next semester welcomed back into the fold!

As a philosophy student, coming across as arrogant is something I am deeply afraid of. We’ve all probably met that one guy who studies philosophy (or some other humanity) who makes you feel like you’re just a wall for him to bounce what he already knows off of. Fooling you into thinking you’ve had an engaging conversation, or like he’s just itching to tell you about how much he likes — and very easily understood — Hegel. Sometimes I worry that I’m him. But I’m not really.

I’ve mastered authenticity. So have you.

Well, maybe you don’t like this person because they’re kind of fake. This poser has fooled everyone into thinking they’re genuine. Isn’t that unfair? You’ve put a lot of effort into being you, your style, your twitter page, and people like you for you. Don’t they? Does their gloating grate against your eardrums like a cotton swab stuck in too far? You’re too humble to gloat like that, even though you could. Whatever your problem with them, democracy can solve it. Voting this person out of your circle would make for a nicer circle, and you wouldn’t have to dread the inevitable conversation where you remember exactly why you don’t like this person.

But why don’t you like them? Are they really that bad?

Could it be that the reason you don’t like them is because they kind of remind you of yourself? Maybe they were bullied, and now seek attention. Maybe you were, and do the same thing. But you hate that you do that. Why don’t they? When you speak about your goals and achievements, it feels like you’re being arrogant and overstating your ability. Why don’t they feel arrogant? When they make a joke and it doesn’t land, they take it in their stride. Why

don’t they feel embarrassed? They dance terribly, letting their arms flail around like wet spaghetti. You know you can’t dance, so you save everyone else the eye-sore. Why don’t they? But if you’re perceptive enough to see how terrible they are, then maybe others are able to do the same for you.

Oh no...

Telling the difference between this feeling of selfreflecting dislike in others and genuine dislike is hard.

People can be awful. They could actually just be a dick.

But notwithstanding really bad people, it’s probably worthwhile reflecting on why we dislike people, rather than taking it on face that our dislike of them is just some immutable fact about the world. It can give us a chance both to understand our own insecurities better and to understand them better. I am not saying to accept bad people into your life — that’s obviously bad for you.

But I am saying that we should be more reflective about why we dislike some people. It can give us clarity about ourselves. Chances for connection are everywhere, and being aware that we’re all more similar than different can help us realise that chance.

1

Kosmin, Paul J. “A Phenomenology of Democracy: Ostracism as a Political Ritual.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 34, no. 1, 2015, pp.

121-162, https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2015.34.1.121. Accessed 10 September 2024. p. 122.

2

3 4 5

Ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., p. 123.

Hunter Finigan 30

Observation in Memory Jason Ocampo

This series looks at painting with light through photography, incorporating shutter drag with intentional movement to create dream-like visuals with impressionist textures. I used this style to depict the temporality associated with memory and its susceptibility to blur with time.

It’s our human instinct to constantly observe people, behaviours, and the lived environments that are ever-changing. I find myself in these moments as the observer, unaware of people’s motives and the surrounding environment. I’m never aware of the full picture, only vague figures, shapes, and colours remain. Countless moments pass by me, blurring and distorting themselves from realistic form.

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Jason Ocampo

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I SEE SPOTS James Wily In every waking moment, I hallucinate a million little spots.

A million little dots that spoil my eyes. A million little spasms of oblique blackness, like untextured static, flickering in and out of existence without a care in the world. Spawns of the million little holes inside of my head caved out by sickness, injury and anxiety – all leaks that pollute my speckled fantasy world. A world where the contours of reality are increasingly reshaped beyond belief. Where the edges of surfaces, and things, and people, and ideas shake with

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factual indetermination – vibrating at the frequency of my own incessantly failing nature.

In every waking moment, The world dithers with these inconsistent surges of delusion. With every blink I change channels in hopes of finding something clearer – I’m in the eye of the storm drowning beneath the weightofmyownoversaturation

Drowningbeneaththeweightof ..;’;;’;; .; ;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````,;.;.’` ‘```;;;.;.’;’. `` ‘```;;`;;’’’.’;`’`;`.`,`;`’`.`;’;;;’’;;’’’. ‘```;;;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;`. ;’.’;.;;````;.;. ;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;```’;;;’’;;’’;’;;;’’;;’’’’.,.’.;’.,,;...;’.spots. .;’.’;````,`;`’`.`,;.;.’`;;;` ;`,`;`’ ;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;; ;`;;’’`;’;;;’’’’’.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;```` ‘```;;;````,`; `’`.`,;.;.’`;;;`;;’ ’.;’.,,;..’..;’.’;.;;``;‘```;;`;;’’``’`.`;’;;;’’;;’’’.;’..`,;.;.’` ‘```;;;.;.’;’.’ .,,;..’..;’.’;.;;```` ;.;.’;’.; ;`;;’’`;’;;;’’;;’’’’.`;;’’`;’;;;’’;;’’’’., `;`,;.’;’.;’..;’..;.’`;.;;```` ‘```;;`;;’’` ;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;; ````;.;.’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;silence is verboten ’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’There is no stillness anymore.; .;.’;’.;’..;’.’; ;’;;;’’.:’;;.,.,’;’.;’..;’.’;.;;````;.;.’;’.;’..; ’No quiet,`;.;.not from the spots.’.. ;’.’ ;.;;``` `;.;.’;’.; I cannot even close my eyes’.’;.;;````;.to hide`;.;.’;’.;’..;from them. Like optic suffixes;.’’’’.`;;’’`spots append themselves to the back of my eyelids;.’;’–;’..;’.’;. wholly insistent upon a world unto themselves.;’’;’.`there is no silence to be found anywhere.

Partiality accentuates the reality they deny me: blank walls, clear skies, and quiet thoughts have all become static nightmares that I am forbidden to awake from until my death.

— breath, heartbeat, touch, light, balance, pain, shock, orgasm, heat, cold, hearing, thought, smell and taste become the unconscious cogs that trammel up my conscious self. To remain removed from the world that I dwell in is to languish in the perceived arbitrariness of its construction. To become arbitrary myself.

I’m convinced we didn’t exist before spots, I think that we used to just be. When we craved ourselves into existence, the spaces for spots grew too — the places we must have missed.

At some point then — there must’ve been one — I must’ve been a spot too, unconceived, fragmented, yet invincible. So, when spots project themselves into my vision from a failing place inside, it seems that I’m really seeing myself. In every waking moment, I think, a million little spots hallucinate that they are me.

Spots signify a pure kind of repulsive nothing [ ].

Possessing a type of purity that cannot be subsumed by any desire. Invincible artefacts of my cognitive collapse, inviolable holes in reality, failures of imagination and memory – reminders that these structures can rot and collapse like any great empire.

I think I’m thinking myself to death. Like a sky that will always fall on your head, the spots latch onto any unattended thought or dream – casting their antumbral shade over my psyche, a fly-screen blindfold from the world of meaning – “I’m about to go nuts”.

Unfortunately, the mind is not a unitary thing. To discern spots is to force my gaze into this conceived dysfunction of the mind. Which, under a certain kind of obsession, under a certain kind of selfishness, causes the fractured, spotty world to slip away quietly, and be replaced by a belief in a fractured m;.,’i;’;.,nd.

When something becomes fractured, distance becomes its most salient quality; a sensory detachment measured by the leaps and bounds of imagination required to recover its original form. Where the faraway dream of what’s been left behind can become even more compelling than the fantasy of what’s actually there. It is this distance that I measure in the dark seams that striate my eyes – the distance that dissimulates my senses – this distance from me, to myself, and I. In this state, the mind becomes increasingly confused and disorientated by a suffocating awareness of its own impulses

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SH

AP E S2 Aidan Pollock

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Four fat wheels under a stink-hot sun. A dust-blue bus running like a beetle from a rock upturned. And he doesn’t recognise you. He gave you a once-over when he got on, felt you were good enough to sit next to, better than the pensioner counting out coupons behind you. Bead of sweat on his upper lip. Book he’s reading looks vintage, old, and well-used.

Now out the window. These shrubs passing like mile-markers, same as ever, feeling like you’re on a record player. Shaped like brains, green against sand, got this lyrical quality, a refrain the desert keeps whispering. He turns the page, shifting a bit, getting comfortable, and you’re back in the bus. Back in your seat again. Back with him, feeling your clothes on your body and your body in your clothes.

Old-mate behind you found a good one, you can hear him whipping it in the air in silent, lonely excitement. You’re sneaking peeks at Stephen again and again, your eyes your new mouth. Look back look back look back. You’re screaming Just give me one look. At the perfect moment he sighs.

“You alright, kid?” You need a moment to translate your words from vision to vocal.

You nod.

“You sure?” Silent. He clicks his tongue and leaves his gaze on the chair in front of you, the cream-suede fuzzy in the periphery. He waits. Then, he goes back to his book.

“You don’t know me but I know you.”

“Oh, Yeah?” Eyes flash on you. Book goes down.

“Funny. And I’m guessing you want to talk to me? I got something you want?” He reads your mind and you don’t even know him. He takes a good pause, and sighted down the aisle. “I remember when I took buses like this all the time, man, going across this country over and over again. Like cut-marks.” He smiles, you don’t. You want to grab his head and scream that you know he took those buses, you read his work, you saw his short story, Shapes, and it made you want to scream. Scream because he compressed sadness, pain, grief, shame, and loss into so few pages and, worst of all, he didn’t give you any happy ending.

Instead you say “I’m not doing so good” and hope he just knows. But you hope he doesn’t know you’ve stolen his style, that you’re so creatively bankrupt you’ve lifted the way he and David Wojnarowicz wrote and got an HD for it with no one the wiser. But then all art is just communication, so we have to learn from each other because a language with only one speaker is nothing. But now he’s getting bored and that hand is testing that bookmark.

“Do you know when this bus stops?”

“A few hours, maybe”, he says. It might be that he can see how you’re feeling and so he gives you a kind.

“What are you on this bus for, kid?” An opening.

“I don’t think I had any other choice.”

“What’d you mean?” His bookmark gets its nose wiped.

“Someone forcing you here?” His fingers twisting the denim on his leg.

“No.” You say, quickly, “Nothing like that, nothing like-” Breathe. “I just don’t know. Really, I mean. I just – where else would I be? Whatever version of myself that isn’t on this bus doesn’t exist, I’m here because I’m not anywhere else.”

“Shit,” he laughs, like you made a joke, “makes sense to me.” You’re glad you’ve made him laugh. “I get that feeling sometimes too.” There’s a warmth in the air now where before there was a heat. Could be smart to just let him keep going.

“I feel like such a dick saying this, but I wrote a lot about this kinda place, this kinda way you’re describing. I felt like Sylvia Plath or something, just absolutely riddled with nothing. And that writing, all that, it helped let some of it out.” Thirty-four shrubs blitzed the window since you spoke. You ask if he still feels that way. He doesn’t know. He asks if you think you’ll always feel that way. You don’t know. You thought he could tell you. “Me?” You. He tells you he can’t. “Y’know how you’re sitting in that seat and I’m sitting in this seat, but we’re on the same bus? It’s kind of like that. I can’t fix what isn’t mine.” A family cradled in a red sedan overtake. You wonder if Stephen knows he’s in a story, if he’s being coy about this whole operation. Time passes. He’s not even dead, you know. You could actually talk to him. You push it down.

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A red skateboard wheel. That’s what he called the sun, right? A nice image, creative. You want to be like that, to constantly make things be other things. At least for a little while. Stephen melts into the seat next to you, does a face that says the bathroom smelt like shit. The sun, which did look like a red skateboard wheel before, now looks more like an egg yolk, spilling itself into the frying pan sky. You want to ask him about being a gay man, how you’re just like that sun, always called something other than what you are. What would he say if you suggested the word gay be scrubbed from the books? If we just did a do-over? No more Stonewall. No more Harvey Milk. No more Brokeback Mountain. No more Maurice. No more Stephen. No more Simon. No more Elio. Instead, “What got you on this bus?”

Smile like an open window, shrug.

“I guess I just got on it. You know?”

You say you do.

“Though I’ve had this feeling, kind of a gut thing that I can’t shake. Hard to describe, sort of just like all this is just some sleepwalk fantasy. Like I’m a kid again.”

You ask how that feels. It’s hard to describe, he says. He talks about feeling cracked like a pavement, like a rain-water tank with a hole. When did it stop? Did it? He asks, it’s rhetorical. He tells you about how he started writing shit down, how this acrid plume swept him into himself and out. You wonder if he wonders if all his talent was just one big thing to understand himself, if all this was just him stammering mad so he had some evidence he ever spoke.

“I did it all for what? To be heard? To be a name?”

A sideways bit of guilt shifts into your stomach. You brought Stephen here, got him in this desert heat to help you out and he’s gone strange, uncontrollable. Like a frog bouncing up right after its dissection. You say something cheap about writing, connection. He waves your words away.

“Writing a story, man, that’s just talking to yourself. Like the Golden Record we sent into space. Do you think we give a shit if any aliens read that? That wasn’t what it was for, all that was just for ourselves.” Just one insecure species trying to get an A+ at intergalactic show and tell. For as long as we can remember we’ve been left home alone and God we just wish our neighbours would drop by with some food and a hug. That’s all this is. That’s all I was.

That’s all this fucking bus is.

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Sorry, he says. You get it, you say. The sun has fully set now.

A few heads who have spotted the depot rustle amongst the headrests. A general noise of arms scoop games, and books, and makeup, and newspapers back into backpacks and briefcases and purses.

Both of you step out into the night. Old-mate stepping behind you hocking spit the colour of a nine-hour bus ride into the dusty desert floor. You ask him the time and he looks at the sky and says night-time before heading into the depot, red thong lapping his feet like tongues. Stephen smiles and asks which way you’re going. You do your thumb one way.

He nods and does his another. He clasps your shoulder, his pointer finger softening in the space between skin, singlet, and backpack-strap. He looks you square in the eyes, gives one final bit of advice, and brings your bodies together. His body warming yours before disappearing altogether.

You watch him small into the mouth of another bus. Its yellow eyes blink and open as the driver turns the ignition, swinging it like a golf-club onto the highway. It’s a couple of hours until yours gets here, you think. It’s not so cold so you sit on the creamy carpet sand. A press of wind moves across you like a palm, coming from the direction Stephen’s going. It tangles in the cortex of a bush a few metres away. You watch it wrestle a moment, rise back up. Your mouth a circle you help it along, guiding it back the way it came.

Aidan Pollock 40

These artworks depict a sense of catharsis in confronting chaos. Up close, there is a rigidity to the artworks - vertical parallel hatching in ranging thicknesses provide structure and order. Yet, when viewed from afar, high contrast areas detract from the focal point, drawing attention to the haphazard arrangement of composition.

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The drawings allow for a representation of turmoil within a controlled, imaginary space.

There is a visual dissonance in this piece; amongst the pandemonium lies quiet order.

Emma Qi

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Emma Qi

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Sydney is often described as a city bereft of amusement. Lock out laws and our quiet nightlife is the silver bullet residents point to as why our southern neighbours seem to be having way more fun. But there’s something else, one that strikes at the hearts of the populace old and young, or young at heart: the closures of our various amusement parks. Wonderland, the Manly Fun Pier, SEGA World, African Lion Safari, and Old Sydney Town — the amusement parks of yesteryear have all shut down, and Sydneysiders have had to make do, catching a flight up north to the Gold Coast or waiting it out till the Summer months to enjoy a dip at Wet n’ Wild, Jamberoo, or Manly Waterworks.

And yet, like a beacon of hope, a smile shining brightly across the harbour, Luna Park extends its welcoming jaw for all of us to walk through and become gobbled up inside. Luna Park’s history is one of tumult, various openings and closures, deaths, and noise complaints; it’s never been able to reach the popularity of its heyday in the 1930s, but its heritage listing ensures it will stick around for many more decades to come.

The last time I remember visiting, I was waiting in line for the Tango Train. The queue wraps around behind the ride, allowing guests to catch a glimpse of what a passersby won’t usually see if they decide to give the Tango Train a miss. Unsurprisingly, it is just a barren area with a painted wall, the ground a harsh concrete that makes it hard to stand on for too long. What caught my eye was a long air ventilation shaft that distended up into the sky along the wall, painted yellow with red polka dots.

This shaft was clearly one of many devices used in the upkeep and maintenance of the park, and yet it had been infected by its surroundings, forced to blend in and hide its purpose from the unsuspecting guests. It had been clownified, made to look like the garb a clown might wear, in order to maintain some sort of artifice.

Once I noticed this, I began seeing all sorts of things essential for the running of a park made goofy, cartoonish, and strange. Rubbish bins were turned into hungry jesters with their mouths agape looking to consume garbage, back doors are painted over with circus tent curtains, smiling moons, or pinstripes. We’re told it’s locked — STAFF ONLY — but these cartoonish displays open up to whole new worlds, ones that look so inviting. Cables and wires are obscured as giant wall plugs, guests are pointed in various directions by disembodied gloved hands. It’s like you’ve entered another world, transported through the looking glass, except it was a funhouse mirror and you’ve just joined the circus.

Umberto Eco coined the term ‘hyperreal’ to describe this immersion in another world in Travels in Hyperreality (1973), in which “American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show”.

Discussing hyperreality in the American context of Disneyland, Eco goes on to suggest that the boundaries of the amusement park, with “[t]he surrounding city context and iron fencing (as well as the admission ticket) warn us we are entering not a real city but a toy city”.

The North Shore high rises and swimming pool on the periphery give way to circus tents and miniature castles once we step through the precipice of the Luna Park face.

Regarding Disneyland, Eco goes on to say that “Main Street — like the whole city, for that matter — is presented at once absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic, and this is the advantage [...] of Disneyland over other toy cities. [...] In this sense Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.”

Main Street is an amalgamation of nostalgic neighbourhoods of

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Walt Disney’s past. Similarly, the circus tents and vintage layout of various attractions at Luna Park reproduce a fantasy of older amusement parks of the 1940s. At the same time, while there is this verisimilitude, there is an admittance that what we are seeing is not real. We understand that this air shaft is merely painted with polka dots and not actually some remnant of the past coming bursting into the present.

Eco continues to assert that “once the ‘totally fake’ is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real.” Luna Park, must too maintain its illusion. The park must not give up its ruse, and so air vents and rubbish bins are clownified to protect this illusion, despite everyone’s awareness that this is not real.

One must wonder where the boundaries of the park start and end. Are the residents of these apartments harlequins for making noise complaints about the Big Dipper ride despite choosing to take this real estate? Does the clownery extend its way to Parliament from the residency of Kirribilli House only a short distance away? Do the white clothed gloves hang over Sydney and all its failed developments, looney lock out laws and various other tomfoolery? Has the Harbour Bridge been a coat hanger this whole time?

What these clownified objects do, for certain, is obscure the labour that goes into the park. We don’t have to think of the person who empties and refills the rubbish bins because, well, there are no rubbish bins, only silly clowns waiting to digest our scraps. We don’t have to care for the electrician who takes care of a broken down ride, we can simply unplug the giant socket and put it back in again. We don’t have to care, we’re at the circus.

Beyond the gates, clownification has taken effect in every facet of our society.

Politicians plaster smiling liberal faces while cutting taxes for the uber wealthy and benefits for the vulnerable and oppressed. Along the streets, hostile architecture encircles us. A bench may be painted fun colours or have a wacky design, but made with handles sprouting between to prevent unhoused peoples from having a place to rest. In our restaurants, robots and tablets are used for convenience, but distance patrons from staff. New superhero films flood our cinemas, with hours of intense unpaid labour going into making Deadpool make fart jokes across our screens. Life has become a cavalcade of distracting, bright colours, and smiling faces, and we are told to forget about what we can just see peaking out along the borders. Luna Park sent in the clowns, but they’re already here.

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