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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. 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.

Editorial Lead Annabelle Bullock Editors Alex Butler Venusia Forcadilla Eden Witanowski Amelia Elliott Harriet McIlveen Ynes Fernandez Designed by Harriet McIlveen Ynes Fernandez

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 30, 2026 Instagram @pulp.usu Tiktok @pulp.usu Facebook @pulp.usu X @pulp.usu https://www.pulp-usu.com/ Email pulp@usu.edu.au

15Dirty Thirty Word Search

It Ends In Defeat ... Hugh Coffey

INTERVIEWER In terms of results Mick, one win in seventeen. It can’t go on like this, can it? MICK MCCARTHY (Manager of Blackpool F.C.) It can.

*** I have spent most of my life on the losing team. In year 4, I was the only kid in the Turtles swimming group that did not make the cut to move up to the Dolphins squad. In year 5, my rugby team played more games with the mercy rule (where the game switched from tackle to touch) than without. In year 10, I got subbed into a basketball game, received the ball off the in-bound and performed a textbook layup into the wrong hoop, increasing the deficit from 10 points to 12. As someone without significant natural sporting prowess, I learnt over time (with the occasional tears after chopping the ball onto my own stumps) how to deal with loss. Playing sport has filled a casual and social component of my life, while also providing the satisfying and humbling experience of incrementally improving at something you are astoundingly ordinary at. 11

What I am not mediocre at is watching sport. For the teams I follow with maddening loyalty, losses are not a small inconvenience. They are a weekly test of my emotional regulation—at any point in the season I can be hit with pride, anger, resentment, embarrassment, sadness, confusion, and frustration. You don’t always have to lose. If you are lucky, one day you will experience something like the 2026 New York Knicks playoff run—caught up in the never-ending melody of that ‘Empire State of Mind’, Mamdani mania, Brunson magic, Timothée Chalamet courtside hype montage—and you will fly. But for all these moments to happen, someone must have the reverse pulled on them. They must be crushed; dropped from the heights of mesmerising Jude Bellingham edits and the four-week course in ‘Wonderwall’ to a dark place where the beer tastes stale and the footballs that come home are deflated and covered in mud. *** At this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, the American Thai writer Tony Tulathimuttee spoke about his most recent work of fiction, Rejection (2024). As a collection of inter-connected short stories, the work, with depraved and comedic style, portrays characters who deal with rejection. In ‘The Feminist’ a self-proclaimed perfect male feminist cannot understand why he is being rejected in his dating life, and in ‘Pics’ a woman’s misunderstanding of a casual fling results in a destructive session of venting in her group chat. When we are rejected, we develop a counterfactual story for ourselves of what could have happened. The experience is replayed in our minds like rolls of unedited footage, where each internal revision forms a short film of your worst moments. Endlessly replayable without a subscription. These self-narratives become obsessive—trapping us in the thinking of what could be, why did I, why not me, what if this. Within this phase of the rejection lifecycle, Tulathimutte notices something intimate about this experience. In his complementary Paris Review essay ‘The Rejection Plot’, he explains how experiencing rejection preserves an alternative reality where everything works out. “The process of yearning”, Tulathimutte explains, involves the generation of a dream future that survives the rejection. In the aftermath, there is something wonderful forever out of reach. Rejection, in Tulathimuttee’s view, is not a roadblock in a character’s grand tour; it is a round-about in dreamland that they can never, and might not want to, leave. But at some point, nausea kicks in for the rejected, unable to handle it happening all over again, and they take the next 12

exit. Admittedly, taking time away is a natural response to personal pain. What is fascinating about Tulathimutte’s characters is that technology provides an escape for them. The feminist rejects society and becomes an admin on a ‘narrow shoulders/open minds’ forum, honouring a duty to educate a fellow subredditor about the structural injustice life throws at people like them. Conversely, in ‘Pics’ the internet is not a communal safety-blanket but becomes so over-used and thin that it provides no warmth at all. The protagonist’s overreliance on her group chat to process rejection has caused it to die, likely replaced with one without her. Instead of shouting into the void, she types into an unresponsive vacuum. Thus, ‘Pics’ concludes with a feeling of nothingness, “The swell of sobs she expects rises up to her stomach, then melts away. Somehow, she doesn’t feel the usual rewarding jab of righteous pain in her chest”, which is more painful than any rejection she faces. What Rejection proposes is a troublesome bind that the internet can manifest. For some, it has built vast spaces to shield oneself from life outside. For others, it has become so alienating and anonymous that vulnerability is an irrelevant and pointless exercise. If the struggle to push through shame is part of the journey to paradise, can the internet leave you stranded in a place all alone? *** In those weeks where Tottenham continued to lose, right up until that final game of survival, I asked myself why I kept following so closely. After all, it was devoid of any joy. To make it worse, kick-offs for Premier League games in Australian time zones can range from a generous 9:30pm to the week ruining 3am. For those games with less of a WOW-factor or because I just want to sleep, my knowledge of the result is the full-time post on Instagram. Opening Instagram feels like clicking the email with your semester results. Somehow the algorithm knows it is the first thing I want to see—a still image of a player in action, “Full-time” in the top left corner, the badges of each club in the bottom left, and the score emboldened and italicised in the bottom right. The caption, more often than not, was “It ends in defeat”. Those words capture a narrative of rejection. As a piece of flash fiction, the phrase suggests that a series of events has occurred, that the team did play a game of football, and that the unfortunate result of their inability to win was zero points. The team, and its fans, have been rejected—denied the thing they want and the future they think they deserve. After each game, I would wake in the late morning racking my brain with a headache and counterfactuals. Why did we start this slow midfield? Why did the winger not cross the ball earlier? Why did we not sign a left-back in January? Why, six years ago, did we decide not to back Pochettino? Why, at age eleven, did I make that incredibly bizarre decision to go for Tottenham? These questions, however, provide evidence that possibility still exists in this story. The dream of footballing perfection is alive and a vision of what should have happened still spins. Blind loyalty is important, but so is the 13

ego of every rejected fan who thinks they know better. In Gameweek 17 (of 38), the admins realised things were turning from bad to diabolical. “It ends in defeat” was not appropriate anymore. After a 2-1 loss to Liverpool in December, the caption read “Defeat in N17”. Here the narrative gains a place (N17 being the London postcode of Tottenham) but loses the sense of action. By unwinding the story and saying less, there is an effort to minimise the pain. It is like the impulse the character in ‘The Feminist’ feels to shield a newcomer from the oncoming disappointment: “He remembers thinking: if a stranger can so accurately describe what I’ve thought without even knowing me, they must be right, and I should listen to them. Now he wants to do likewise for this online stranger.” Eventually, things got so bad that all that could be said was “Fulltime”. Seeing those words after humiliations from rivals Arsenal (a 4-1 loss at home in February) and Chelsea (a 2-1 away loss in May) was numbing. Over a 188-day period, where for 15 games Tottenham would not win, the Instagram page became a place where possibility was destroyed and loss was predetermined. It was an attempt at emotional manipulation arising out of a duty to protect my feelings, the same held by Tulathimutte’s feminist: “Words by themselves have no substance he realises, they are only ever meant to underscore acts. Being correct has been its own reward and no reward at all”. This use of language, reducing 90 minutes to a flash of nothing, highlights a tendency online to contain embarrassment and shame to some other physical domain. If I had watched the game and heard the final whistle, I would have felt the body become hollow as the winning possibility evaporated and left a vacant space inside. I would have had that feeling of searching through emptiness, clinging for whatever I could reach. Instead, social media can point your eyes in different directions, distracting you from the rejection of the thing you crave. You can make it seem like it does not even matter. The problem here was that it provided no way out. By throttling rejection, I began to lose hope, inverting my imagination towards the scenes of relegation and my inability to wear my insanely expensive jersey for another year. Comments sections, podcasts and TikToks saying the same things. Rejection is painful and embarrassing and can take time to get over. Online spaces are averse to this process, preferring to trap users in an empty room where experience is implausible. To my luck football games aren’t played in captions and Tottenham survived on the last day of the season: “A crucial win on the final day”. Yet, throughout this period, I kept thinking of this famous Tottenham quote that they should have been using instead— “the game is about glory”. As much as the losses can belittle and punch us, there has to be some belief in the beauty and wonder that is on the other side, if any of us want to survive. 14

THE REAL AND THE HYPERREAL www.jesse_carpenter.com.au www.jesse_carpenter.com.au

twitching finger, great dream of light streams out lucid in the dark, outside shut out, stays out, in the link of skin to ? in a great synaptic net, woven haptic kisses data-pure; in and out, in and out, flows like so; in and out, no delay, data dilates as it contracts: penetration and birth, in and out –– rebirth, she moans a little, or maybe she just breathes heavily, in and out, curled up in bed, in and out, arh akh har, dancing things like angels (clipped wings stuck back on, shivering warm), body lost while still inside it, dark whirring room and barred windows, pumping and shuddering, thoughtless pure presence, cool air turning, outside there are birds and a future distant and impossibly deep, endless even, it’s too early to say what fills it, pleasure or pain or something else, just feeling, but what ever it is goes on and on, it comes with the shedding of the body, unravelled or chewed apart by some great thing too big to see, swollen and swelling still, hiding out puffed up behind the horizon, too early to say, even the shadow is shapeless, so for now it’s only in and out, machine without a body, in and out, great free floating brain caressed, gentle movements across a neglected being, emaciated, feeble, shaking and quivering moanbreaths, in and out, thoughtless typing, in and out, pure reflex, psychobabble, prelinguistic language flies up out of the notbody, antigrammar sets in like fever, in and out, frantic movements to pure sound; music on music on rustling on clicking on beat on colour; yes, on colour; colour as sound, warped toned kreekirikree orange [vibrator get ready with me schizoidal bird feeding kabbalah meat grinder sports betting oiled tits bogo sephirot] and other ones too; violent purple saw tooth wave krsnagwvuu wvuuh ab wvvuu ab, and things like pure pus bass and anodyne blue little wind chimey titititi crystal pings and it’s bed squeaks and dub echoes while god is watching her out the web cam so quiet up there while she is moving through [snuff geese low waisted pants eating out charlie kirk neck wound discreet sex toy amputee in gaza only fans crack pipe ai jew trade truecel gay boy in his undies short film mutual aid] life so human so base yes this is it, this is it, behold your potential, and out the webcam she doesn’t even look foetal or prefoetal but something else, maybe tadpoley or egglike, what is crucial is a sense of hatching, of rending out the shell, and she lashes herself with perineal palantears as she gets off –– to the arrangements not the objects mind you, gets off to some bizarre latent kink in the thinking thing neglected that sends blood all through you at the thought of nCk or stars and bars, and naturally some austere moans trickle out, not breaths this time, fuck how good is a neoliberal orgasm, she sees poses doing bodies, not the converse, in and out, in and out, a thanaterotic virus is in the air, breathed in and out, and it’s spreading, hostless (but newly bluetooth transmissible) and sertraline and half a joint goes straight to the clit oh god, hymnpulses coming in and out, screen to screen, ekphrastes about tiktok twerk offs with two fingers inside [you have to try psychtrance breathplay israel drain gang young girl brain rot body dance outside icc local gig foid muscles chat gpt zohran mamdani agartha strip tease] and oh what shape hides behind the skyline or lurks underground or simply spread through; an anthill climbing up, luminous smog, tuberous fibrosity with a pulse, or nothing at all, a blank space charged with static, and the horizon shakes and shakes and shakes, and one could imagine the walls peeling away and all the light going out; quiet stars, stunted data centers, the neutering of every streetlamp, hospitals turned to crypts and bulbs sputtering and wailing before dark, yes one could imagine this, but the best is yet to come.

Concupiscence Oscar Lawrence

Dirty Girl Hymn

Pretty On The Inside - Hole Spit - Show Me the Body, Princess Nokia Dark Angel - Lalleshwari (Katie Jane Garside) Excruciating Death - Machine Girl Window Shades - U.S. Girls Pansy - Crim3s K234YS0NIXZ - Kreayshawn Bad Bad Thing - Spalding Rockwell Stick It To The Pimp - Peaches No Girl So Sweet - PJ Harvey Monster In You - The Femcels Fetish (Extended Mix) - Vicious Pink makeout - NEW YORK Graffiti Girls - Parallel Dance Ensemble Roll the dice - Smerz All Mine - Portishead Motion - Boy Harsher Sour Switchblade - Elita desire machine - spirit blue I’m Your Man - Leonard Cohen She’s Not There - The Zombies Ecstasy - PJ Harvey Blood Bitch - Cocteau Twins Bend over, I’ll Drive - The Cramps Speed Heart - Bikini Kill Little Trouble Girl - Sonic Youth Macbeth (Alternative Mix) - Sonic Youth Computered Love - Carol Rich Primal - Slowdive I Know What Boys Like - The Waitresses No G.D.M. - 7” Edit - Gina X Frozen - Love Object Serpentskirt - Cocteau Twins I Think That I Would Die - Hole Char - Crystal Castles Kill V. Maim - Grimes

I’m Gonna Catch Me A Rat - Fabienne DelSol gg- NEW YORK Remix - Lolina, NEW YORK Don’t Fall In Love - Still Corners Devastation - Suicide Run - Air Knife Play - Coco & Clair Clair Piece of Me - Briteny Spears Do I Look Like a Slut - Avenue D Nasty - Tinashe It Girl - Bladee Fuck The Pain Away - Peaches For All The Boys In The World - Chicks On Speed A/B Machines - Sleigh Bells My Dirty South - Avenue D Kleiner Dicker Junge - Electrocute, Paul Pim Waiting - Madonna Pluto - Bjork Smoking Kills (?) - SebastiAn Doggg - SebastiAn Ceremony - Chromatics, Glass Candy Midnight Express - Soldout Break Up Girls! - The Ravonettes Dissolved Girl - Massive Attack, Sarah Jay Hawley Nosferatu Remix by the Flower Pistols - Air, The Flower Pistols Hustler - Simian Mobile Disco Argument - Robots in Disguise Bye Bye Bayou - LCD Soundsystem Undress Me Now - Morcheeba Running From The Cops - Phantogram Bad Girls - Donna Summer Leather Queen - Mary Jane Girls Rude Boy - Rihanna Club De Vampiros - French Police Bruja - Arca White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter - Lana Del Rey Look at These Hoes - Santigold Wolves Howling - Bassvictim Don’t You Feel - Snow Strippers Alien In My Heart - LA Vampires, Maria Minerva i wanna - sweet93 Fake French - Le Tigre Leather Forever - Miss Kittin, The Hacker

i am

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I hope you’re hungry... it’s photo review time. As always thank you my loyal contributers, I am so grateful I have actually written you a LOVE poem, with a phony glass eye that *shutters* you extend to me the fleshy branch of intimacy and knowing we poke that stinking eye together, itch it’s flaking mascara making something gnarly and confused, little, sole contibuter star in my opacity toggle sky you live eternally amongst these colour-halftone ombres anyways...

The Official Pulp Photo Review Totally Not a Drinking Game*** Game This little drinking game works in the same vein of something in a similar name.

Guess Who’s Ever! A game that is a mix of both the famous and well loved Never have I Ever and Guess Who. To play, have two players or teams sitting opposite eachother (we’re getting intimate). Place the magazine face up up in in the middle.

Instructions: 1. Pick one of the images on your side of the board (this will be your character). 2. Using never have I ever questions try to decipher the character chosen by your opponent eg. never have I ever spent more than three hours lying down, never have I ever been the sexual subject of a Cronenberg movie, never have I ever mainfested the same energy as a male dating advice podcast. 3. Everytime your opponent asks a question you are personally guilty of take a wellness shot of choice, regardless of the stance of the character chosen. Get it?.... haha I hope so. Good Luck. Love PULP.

The Flight of the Femcel Perhaps led by Rowan and Gabriella or just a tired discontent from women, the notion of the femcel is one that is exasperating. Despite this sudden influx, it is a cause that has lived tucked tightly and secretly within the ventricles of my heart for a longggg while. Long before my only ever half boyfriend at 15 (I readily escaped the relationship after one month on an early school morning via text. I knew I never really liked him because he sent me messages that said ‘sweat dreams,’ and once accidentally fingered a girl’s bum). I’m self-aware enough to acknowledge my own femcel inclinations were aptly harvested from the bone of rampant insecurity (a consequence of our androcentric standards of beauty, something I remember feeling as early as 7). Although this femcel feeds most ardently off solipsism. wink.

Like any almost adolescent chubby girl with glasses – a roaring-teetering-toward grating voice and an attitude that frequented an awkward meanness – people did not seem to like me much. Especially not romantic conquests or myself (I point to these details not for sympathies but a culmination of valuables that have led to my way of being so we can follow these developments precisely and together). I’ll spare the gritty details of my adolescent friendship attempts – truth or dare snap stories, and eventual sending semi-nudes foibles – and jump to a direct manifestation of these trials (note that I have overcome many).

Traits I mark as official femcel criteria:

Official Femcel Criteria:

Sensitive to touch, PDA, embarrassment and affection Independant Fascinated/consumed by clutter, hoarding and dust, can involve mould, grime and sludges Cool, has some kind of niche skill, e.g. sewing or drawing and has great music taste Not strictly heterosexual Masturbates Usually depressed of some kind and has a relationship with self harm, self-deprecation and hate of their body Very selfish/ isolated Sensitive to the universe, spirituality and destiny Showers less than they are supposed to Simultaneously smart and stupid Treats female friendships like romantic relationships

My first interaction with incel media was Dazai’s No Longer Human. The narrator, in a very Joker-eque fashion, dwells on his carefully tended fake smile saying it was “not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance... merely a blank sheet of paper,” womp womp… He spends the entire novel inflating his monstrous traits, how awful and unloving and evil he is, cementing the difference between his coaxing self and the ‘rest’. This is my incel. ‘Oh how horrible I am, how disgusting the world is,’ — it involves ego and killing and repression, being the unwanted ‘other’ by way of the American Psycho. Though most importantly, it involves a resentful malleability of character. As the modern-day ‘incel’ has progressed and warped into discord mods, facesmushed streamers and man living in one’s parent’s basement, it has only gotten worse. They are self-deprecating, aware of their despicability (they froth over it) and resolute with their entitlement to romance, a right that comes with being alive and wielding a sexual organ of course. Femcels, however, are not formed of this same clay. Yes, the term may be a portmanteau but this ‘involuntary celibacy’ does not stem from not being desirable or able to finesse romantic attention. It is a definition (incel/femcel) and larger culture that I will loudly claim with not much tact or viable merit as false. The sexual repression of the femcel is self-inflicted, directly manifested from our fears and complexes exactly like The Castle of Busirane. Women will always be desired, eroticised and fetishised by a man. Femcels were never running around in the fashion of damning all men as evil cretins of unfair persecution. It has never been about fashioning attention: we are all too cursed by being objects of desire. It was always about us, the misandry is formed asexually, born from our understanding of self and the relationship that is fostered between mind and body. That is the femcel way… it’s quite spiritual really. Stark Difference 1: A Femcel can, and likely will be, passing the Bechdel test at all times of the day. Billy in Buffalo ‘66’s incel functioned , by my definitions, in a femcel mode of being. Ignoring the Vincent Gallo of the circumstance, his character in all its abnormality was something I saw a lot of myself in. He is seemingly unbothered by any actual prospect of sex or a woman, yet he assumes all the behavioural characteristics of the persona. To be a femcel or a billycel there must be a slight tinkering toward the possibility of a very angry asexual. The quick quips, ‘don’t fucking touch me’, the rising anger, and his nonsensical, almost spasming frustration. How his eyes skewed and bulged as if constantly sniffing. And the jittering look of being uncomfortable in his skin, ostensibly made of itchy yarn, waiting, and waiting and waiting to scratch. Sooo me right?

Exit the Femcelesphere Exit the Rowan

Femcelesphere Femcelesphere

Enter the void... Stark Difference 2: Celibacy as an ambivalent consequence, not a motivator.

Enter the void...

Similar to Billy, May is celibate though she is bursting with desire, to touch, and even more so to be

acknowledged. When I first watched May, its aesthetics pointed to early 90s—2000s charm, the grain, the kind of muted look that has something effervescent and inexplicably rom-com about it. It has all the discomfort of the rotting chicken carcasses under Daisy Randone’s bed and the awkward misguided romantic determination as Doki Doki Literature Club or Yandere Simulator. May is weird and beautiful. I had to pause the movie several times (which does not happen often) as the screeching clawed through my ears, scrunched my limbs and congealed my cringing eyes. May wears glasses like me, she has a lazy eye like me. The movie starts with our shared bone of rampant insecurity, her eye-patch, our glasses. The other day walking down Enmore Road, gelato in hand, I was reminiscing on the kinds of relationships I thought I’d be capable of when I got older, that eventually I’d find love in someone who would love me as a fetish. The ‘I don’t know why I love her but I need her,’ where my glasses and height, my face, side profile, ugly, ugly, weird, strange, annoying self would be exactly what some person wanted so badly and struggled to admit to themself, they’d LOVE me. I guess that’s what happens to May. She had to be someone’s fetish to be loved, until she out-freaked those prospects and through abjection her world collapsed very very bloodily. Stark Difference 3: Femcel cannot be loved as fetishcel. Stark Difference 4: Femcel gore is actually funny.

There is one other way I observe femcel sexuality unfolding. The fate of getting everything wrong. Explored in both Wel-

come To The Dollhouse and The Piano Teacher, somewhat even in Belle De Jour. Each protagonist listlessly knits an ever-growing blanket of trying to understand the interstice between desire and their ability to engage in any sort of idyll. Like me, convinced that I could only be loved as a fetish, they believe they can only be loved at the hand of violence. For these women, the concrete is laced with endowed self hate: Dawn thinks she is utterly lame and angry, Erika, trapped in her repressive maternal comeuppance hates almost everything about herself (mostly her lack of control) and Séverine hates that she is not content. They inevitably land on the fact they ‘want’ to be hurt and deviant, that galling ‘love’ would be the only way for them (gruesome ladies) to engage with such relationships. They believe their desire itself is depraved — thus their answer, and their fulfilment, must be the same. When I watched The Piano Teach-

er for the first time it reminded me a lot of how I felt when I first read No Longer

Human at 3am in my messiest room, at my highest screentime and my luteal peak. I have convinced myself that I want and that I am things of similar gravity. Stark Difference 5: The violence of a femcel is always ultimately egocentric AND femcel sex is always evil.

Fly, Femcel, Fly! Fly, Femcel, Fly!

Anyways… femcels are cool. I am one myself by my own measures and definitions. That’s what really

matters. The details of its implications on my life I’ll keep private for now. But femcel, to me, is a transient state, not finite. It is an intermediary that you eventually escape via some major tribulation (like stabbing oneself in the chest or murdering several people??). I see that the movement continues to grow alongside other things, like the rise of pseudo-intellectualism (which I could be contributing to right now. I do hope it doesn’t come across like that). Regardless, femceldom is not a club everyone can join nor diss, more something that exists for weird girls – and not weird in an Addison Rae way, weird in the Frankenstein way (and, yes, one may even identify with Victor over the monster). I do

believe more and more femmes will turn to this plight. I’m not sure if we (femcels) can understand the stolen bits of brick that make our (my) foundation, how it swells with water and breathes under the pressure of a bouncing step.

Rowan

Start! 39

Start!

I’m not sure we (I) know what we (I) actually want and what our (my) mind(s) tell(s) us (me) we (I) do, if anyone (me) truly and honestly wants anything or if desires are some dream we (I) just tell our(my)sel(f)ves about, like the dreams that Wendy’s father locks away in the box by his bedside table and visits just before he closes his eyes before bed (with his really leng wife ofc). It’s hard to really be sure of anything knowing that half of it we sell to ourselves, tying narratives together with the bits of hair that have been falling out in stringy cotton candy masses making some kind of half ugly half lovey story. Finally, you cannot be a femcel and be banging or have over 2000 followers or if you haven’t grown up in a perpetual very severe awkward phase. I have attributed myself both gatekeeper and key master or whatever. Sorry Rowanpls you’re kicked out of the club to which I just denied existence (it’s an ephemeral club). Good luck my femcels, and sorry if this was your way of finding out you’re one of us, sincerely. Stark Difference 6 : Femcel sexual derivatives are always allegorical to self-realisation. Stark Difference 7: More hope in recovery, no hope of an idea.

Freedom

d n a e l a P d e k a N

Jonathan Han

I met a Vampire last night.

And said without speaking Come to me let us dance let us sing I was in the woods, let us play let us kiss and hug and spin around around and I will release you and you me and we shall Sludging through mud. It was a delight in each other pleasure in damp night; each other and be free and gone Dark, dewy, amongst deciduous de- and everything else will you allow lights of spruce, shrub, and soil. me to relieve you all you need to do is agree you needn’t even open your I was mid-mud when I heard his mouth to say yes all you need to do hymn. is nod yes just a simple nod will do, A shrill, low whistle. There was something in it that pleased me. And as I parted my lips to speak, I wish I could properly describe this the Vampire had already grabbed feeling to you, me But from then on Into his arms My head was light His frigid hands at my neck. And I was compelled to follow. O listener, It led me into a clearing If only you could feel He stood in the centre. How his tongue glided underneath He was pale and naked. my jaw Frost white hair How his saliva drippped Moon-kissed skin Down the V of my collarbone, Cavernous eyes. How it trailed down my chest, splitting me in two. He glanced at me His bite

His bite Him whispering stories in my ear So sudden, violent, gentle while I giggled, light How I gasped. And free. How I felt my blood, My blood, my sweet blood, Coarse, thick, blood Out and Undulated pulses of fluid leaving In me. Till I had no more. How he held me tighter and tighter My eyes fluttered, As my legs grew weak. My heart and Veins emptied. His tender fingers Prodding my forehead He flew me back Phasing through my skin and skull. To my bedroom He fingered at my brain and showedLaid me me There, feeble little me, while I How delicious I was. grasped at his arm. I tasted it, He smiled, Felt on my tongue Pecked my cheek Raspberry and gin, And exited through the window. And I sucked and sucked and sucked. I awoke the next day. He showed me other people he’s I sat up. My limbs had been spent. had and Something had left me. I tasted them as well. I felt as if everything had left me. A Duke, a Vincent, a Caveman, a I feebly stretched out my neck. I Sarah. was sore and limp and hungry. He was in me And I him. My blood sloshing Down his Throat Through his Lungs Caressing his Stomach Every part of him.

I looked down and Stared at my arm. I raised the slab of flesh to my mouth, Teeth clenching onto sponge Tentatively biting to taste Metal.

We started to rise. Up I winced. Up to the moon, I tried again. My arms outstretched by his. I gagged a little We swayed across the sky in an Ar- Then tried again. gentine tango, I cried. Gliding past the woods And cried some more Past the lights And more To the Pyramids, ravines, towers. We spun,

Window Water Baby Moving, Stan Brakhage, (1959) You cannot understand anything at age one, except maybe your own birth! If you have forgotten, please be reminded: thank you Stan Brakhage.

The Sick Kitten, George Albert Smith, (1903) This particular short is historically relevant because it one of the first cases the camera emphasises a subject completing a particular action through zooming on the moment where the kitten is being fed, then zooming out, back to its original point of view. At two years old, you are learning new actions, you are experimenting, learning to walk…ultimately this one minute short would be quite legible for a two year old.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, (1974). A friendly childhood tale able to imbue a genuine sense of morality throughout the early, turbulent years of toilet training. Like a soothing cold rag upon a boiling strip of flesh, Hooper’s masterpiece is a relieving, moralistic journey! zooming out, back to its original point of view. At two years old, you are learning new actions, you are experimenting, learning to walk…ultimately this one minute short would be quite legible for a two year old. The Last Unicorn, Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., (1982) This animated masterwork follows a unicorn on a journey to search out other members of her kind. As one’s social skills develop around age four (for the purposes of both survival and company), I believe all children become little mobile unicorns, searching out the others.

The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton, (1955) Charles Laughton’s only feature film follows an archetypal trickster-priest who hunts a stash of money hidden by two children. Perfect for age five because it is fable-like with its warning against the “evil white-van stranger” underscored by a consistent, unbearable tension.

The General, Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton (1926) Goes incredibly hard, watch with the Joe Hisaishi score for ultimate whimsy. A necessary step-up within the locomotive genre from Thomas the Tank Engine.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Roy Rowland, (1953) Dr. Seuss considered this film—his only attempt to write for the live action screen—a disappointment, not having lived up to what he envisioned. I think this is hardly the case, not only because I personally relate to the main character’s plight (being transported to a nightmarish world where he is tormented by his autocratic piano tutor), but because of the arrestingly wacky/wonderful music, costuming, set, and production design.

Deliverance, John Boorman (1972) At age eight, I tried to run away from home—I think if I had seen Deliverance, I would have been too scared of the wilderness to even try. This film, beyond its portrayal of “masculine bonding”, showcases precisely what happens when humanity does not show deference to nature (Like another one of my favourites, Clouzot’s 1953 The Wages of Fear). When I ran away, I returned the same day.

Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich, (1973) Every time I think of Paper Moon a soft smile overwhelms my face and my nostalgic heart swells and opens up. Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal—real-life father and daughter (obviously)—masterfully reprise their relationship through their tragicomic performances. I would have loved for Tatum to be my role model at nine.

Pixote, Héctor Babenco, (1980) Heavy, visceral, and intense. If you are reading this and are currently tenyears-old do not watch this one. Pixote examines juvenile delinquency in Brazil, exposing both institutional and social failures. This film really drains you, though it is incredibly emotionally stirring, revealing the extent of resilience and determination children are capable of. The Flying Luna Clipper, Ikko Phno, (1987) Letterboxd reviewer Scumbalina summarises the film: “The Flying Luna Clipper is an 8-bit computer animation about an airplane that flies a bunch of anthropomorphic fruit and one snowman around the world so they can fulfil their dreams”. This is more than just a silly animation, it is a true reflection of my deep connection to the internet and hauntological thirst for 1980s aesthetics during this time in my life; I guess a desire for something simpler and sweeter that may have never even existed at all.

Bird, Andrea Arnold, (2024) Twelve-year-old Bailey lives with her single Dad and though she is forced to mature fast, she distracts herself from her problems through using her imagination to create adventure elsewhere. Bird is extremely earnest and imitates how I remember experiencing the world as a pre-teen, re-shaping the less-desirable “real” into something more magical.

Christiane. F, Uli Edel, (1981) For me, age thirteen was a year of evil friends and mistakes like Catherine Hardwicke’s 2003 film Thirteen. Christiane. F recreates the teenage spirit of “loitering”, while also showing the darker sides and consequences of drug-laden scenes. Watch for a taped 80s Bowie concert in Berlin, or watch with squinted eyes (either to avoid what is happening on screen or to cry). Blue, Hiroshi Ando, (2002) I discovered this film at the perfect time: I was fourteen trapped in the throes of an intense limerent crush on someone at school. This is the age I felt desire begin to operate, and I wanted to discover cinema that reflected these intense emotions I was experiencing. Blue is not intense in its delivery, but in its emotional undercurrents. It’s like an unripe pear; appears perfect but is hard to swallow. This one holds a special place in my heart.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki, (1997) After being driven crazy and listless by both my wants and failures (which were amplified by obsessive journaling), one does wonder how they can dissolve themselves into a mass of orange goo, returning to the primordial soup that is the origin of all human life…

Four Nights of a Dreamer, Robert Bresson, (1971) One of two amazing adaptations of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights (the other directed by Visconti!) Bresson reflects the experience of an artist desperately trying to find inspiration through connecting with others. This inspiration ultimately refracts onto the street, making Four Nights of a Dreamer a fitting tale for any flâneur, which I certainly considered myself to be at sixteen.

A Moment of Innocence, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, (1996) Seventeen was the year I fell head-first in love with cinema. Though I only watched this film for the first time last year, Makhmalbaf utilises cinema as a repository for history and emotion, playing with traditional narrative structure to rehearse moments of recollection. It’s perfect, it’s dreamlike, it’s incredibly engaging and makes you believe in life again. Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, Sarah Jacobson, (1996) Main character Mary Jane works at a movie theatre (something I did in both my early and late teens), she hangs around and either criticises or gets involved with a bunch of her twenty-something slacker co-workers. Brilliantly captures the awkwardness of early sexual experiences and their frequent coupling with angst and/or wistfulness.

The Sweet East, Sean Price Williams, (2023) It is both a zoomer odyssey and a loopy commentary on post-covid American society. Like Alice in Wonderland, Price-Williams takes you down a referential rabbit-hole that you never really want to climb back out of. Extra points for this one as it was a very memorable cinema experience for me watching it for the first time in 2024.

Night of Cups, Terence Malick, (2015) You are wading through life like Rick (played by Christian Bale), you stop to notice the sunset, the dew shining off small blades of grass, you take a breath. Every outcome feels as though you have pulled a card from a tarot deck: random and charged.

News From Home, Chantal Ackerman, (1976) Although almost everything is lost with distance and time, Ackerman reminds us it can be rebuilt and immortalised through film. Watching News From Home feels like growing up, growing distant from your family, fading away, almost becoming invisible in the cityscape. However, there can be comfort in watching everything ceaselessly move forward.

Céline, Jean-Claude Brisseau, (1992) Twenty-two year old Céline inherits most of her dead father’s estate and is taken care of by nurse Genevieve who assists as Céline struggles with mental illness. The two women intensely love each other. This film translates love as something mystical—almost intangible, it is the movement of grace throughout this world: something we all need to notice or harness.

Bad Timing, Nicholas Roeg, (1980) Purple tossed sheets, antique ceramics, theatre masks…Bad Timing is about obsession, which it ultimately warns against, while examining the spiritual weight that secrecy places upon relationships. I really hope I don’t ever have to relate to this one any further.

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman (1973) This is how I want to feel reaching my mid-twenties, something close to steady; with a fun job, a cat, maybe a bit of action here and there. The Long Goodbye is the perfectly pol-

Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, (1982) Sometimes you need to be reminded that it is possible to push a boat up a mountain, if you really try. Though sometimes, there is a dark side to achievement…

Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders (1991) A five-hour-epic international cat and mouse chase, capable of spurring philosophical reflections on memory, family, and the purpose of it all really! Though a commercial failure, Until the End of the World is both towering and intimate, expanding across time in all ways as it sketches a spiritual apex.

Caché, Michael Haneke, (2005) Haneke is one of the best at allowing particular moods to dominate the products of his filmmaking. Here, he creates a subtle, persistent atmosphere of torment and paranoia through his manipulation of the film’s diegesis, shifting between mysterious voyeuristic VHS tapes and the objective camera. Get lost in the eerie. Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg, (2012) Main character Eric Packer is a twenty-eight year old businessman. He is slick, he is sigma, he is not at all aspirational. As we grow up, perhaps we grow busier even as we become more aimless. The lasting message of Cronenberg’s weaponised pretentious drivel is that everything is quickening, and losing meaning even quicker.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh (2008) As my friend Ronan said in his review, a cheat code to life is watching this movie whenever you are sad or stressed. If you need to feel the touch of a feminine, maternal presence: Sally Hawkins is here! She has a huge smile on her face! She is fun! She is silly! She takes pride in herself! You should too! If you act like her you will never be upset again! La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), Paolo Sorrentino (2013) Nothing else could end this list on such a perfect note: Jep Gambardella is the selfish, wandering, befriendable heathen who I desperately want to encapsulate as I enter my next decade. Nothing is subtle and beauty is everywhere. What is the point of any personal reflection when you can stare into the holy contours that reveal themselves in your visual surroundings every day? Your eyes can be wider and more adoring than any camera lens.

BuWeriendy Lewd

Only between the hours of 2 and 4 pm, those awkward hours between the lunch and dinner rush, am I able to engage in my favorite pastime. The doors haven’t swung with the echo of departing customers in at least an hour. I’ve done my tasks. I’ve cut my limes into wedges and lemons into slices. I’ve polished countless wineglasses. There is no one to watch me, or to tell me to get back to my job. I can stand in front of the ice well, shifting side to side on my aching feet, and stab at the ice with my scoop. I chip away at the cubes. The ice machine spits them out in sheets, perfect, slick, shiny. Long divots crosshatch their surface, making it easy to smash them into neat cubes. In my well, only the stubborn pieces stick together in chunks. When I hit the ice at the perfect angle, little pricks of cold spring from the crack and land on my cheeks. There’s a purpose in it, reaching the bottom, reaching something. The pub was hot during the lunch rush. I smiled at everyone, willing them not to see the sweat beading on my forehead, on my upper lip. Now the ice is a salve. I want to stick my hand in, twist my fingers into the crevices and leave them there, let it get cold and numb, keep going until I find what is hidden at the bottom. Every morning, I go to the machine in the back that makes the ice, scoop as much as I can

carry into a bucket, take it back to the well. The machine whirs, always active, always full. I can never scoop enough to discover the bottom. Once one of my coworkers commented, “There could be a dead body at the bottom, and none of us would know.” I think about that a lot. I wish I could know for sure, that I could dive in, swallowed by ice, swallowed by that sensation of being so cold that it feels hot. Maybe then the body would be me. Dead. Preserved in the freezing ice. At least that would mean there was something there. There is a pointlessness to my determined digging that I always ignore. There is something there. I know it. I can prove it. Even when the metal of my scoop hits the bottom of the ice well, I think I can go deeper. I need a drill. Sometimes, I feel like I don’t exist. Standing over the ice well. Standing in this pub. My face is not a face, it’s a smooth fleshy mass. I was a human child once, but now I’m something else. Something that cannot leave, my shoes sticking to the bar mats that I’m meant to clean, a mix of spillage, sweet lime cordial, and sodas and spirits. It’s strange to be a thing that can remember its humanity. The warmth used to feel good, when I laid on my back on the hot sand at the beach, the sun beating down on my face,

the sky a pale blue, the confectionary dots of white clouds. The fine grains under my fingers as I buried them deeper. I could almost sink in. When I tired of looking up, I tilted my chin downwards, fixed my gaze on the ground. Drew an X with my finger, the lines shaky, imprecise. X marks the spot. The spot, the buried treasure, the things just waiting to be found under the surface. I would dig furiously, both hands pulling up sand, feeling the grittiness of it between my teeth, watching the sweet gold of the sun warmed sand transition into something darker, colder, wetter. Fistfuls that once slipped effortlessly through my fingers, no matter how tight I tried to hold on, becoming firmer shapes. It was easy to imagine myself doing that for my entire life. The joy, the anticipation coursing through my body, straight to my fingertips. I would find something. A pot of gold to make me rich, a map to send me on an adventure, never-discovered fossils that would rocket me to archeological fame. Then the amorphous future that lay ahead slipped away, fantasies going stale and hardening into the concrete present. Now I just want to be cold. The scoop buries itself pointlessly in the ice.

It’s useless, not when my hands could do better. Could grip, squeeze, sink in and feel the sharp stab of the broken edges I’ve been breaking. If I pretend, it looks a little like glass. When I press my palms to the ice, it feels like glass too. Not so transparent, not so perfect. The warmth of my hands melts the ice imperceptibly. It’s wet. The further I plunge, the harder it is to stop. I attack the ice with a ferocity that flings cubes around, behind me, in front. The initial sting of glass is gone. It feels right to feel nothing, and keep going. I do not have hands. They’re not meant for pouring beers and shots and mixing glasses of lemon lime bitters and pink lemonades. All they can do is search. The ice is past my wrists, creeping up my forearms. Cubed canyons of clear and white parting their way for me. My fingertips brush something hard, unyielding, and I press on. I hunch myself over the ice well, curved over, shoulders tense, hair slipping from a braid and reaching down in tendrils. The pain is back as I jam my fingers against the bottom. I pull back, and slam my hands down as hard as I can, making a clatter and rattle of ice.

A pink red blooms in the ice, like I’ve poured raspberry cordial into the well by mistake. “Excuse me?” It’s a woman, my age, her brow furrowed. I yank my hands out, still gripping fistfuls of jagged ice, pressing sharp pins of a numbing chill into the raw flesh of my palms. “What can I get for you?” I ask. I drop the fistfuls of ice to the floor, and they scatter on the ground, before clasping my hands behind my back, twisting my reddened fingers together. She stares at me. I smile.

You, the sexless beast.

You hold the dirtiest, most lurid – dare it be described as perverse – secret. A guttersome, guttersnipish, shameful manifestation of desire: a double-want. The want to want.

You engage in the Great Pretend. You script and readjust moment-by-moment to ensure that they (the date-haver, the party-goer, the club-clubber) do not sense the well-practised facade. You pause after a touch on the arm, a touch on the thigh – your reaction must differ in some subtle way, but by how much and for exactly why is always a gamble. In a dimly lit room, your ears are pricked to the hitch of a breath, finding something to echo. There is a shameful deceit to this intimacy, something intrusive about experiencing this moment without a haze of lust. An ethnographer of sexual relations, you are.

You engage in repeat experiments which deliver the same data. You watch porn with a passive, somewhat analytical eye: cross-legged in bed; laptop on full brightness; chin resting on a closed fist, elbow on knee. You may as well be holding a pencil and pen, taking minutes. This does little to incite a sexual awakening. You bring your face closer to the screen and scrutinise the twitching muscles of a built bicep, determining the moment the chosen position moves from tenable to a shaky inconvenience. There is a too-whiteness to the lighting, a relative lack of plumpness of the left pillow from the right.

You observe the world with a gaze more sexually charged than those who truly possess such lust. You watch the way a hand cups an ass, make note of it. Fingers creeping up the back of a shirt, commit that to memory. The unconscious affection elicited by the rundown cinema, the supermarket checkout. Absent the comparative emotions of desire, intimacy of any kind is charged; nothing represents sex and so everything represents sex. To take a temperature with the back of your hand is to unzip a fly. At a bar, you overhear the pleasure you must perform. The women at the neighbouring table hold their heads close, conveying with raised voices and finger-puppet reenactments the process by which one has recently engaged in life-altering sex (penetrated in many ways it seems, the consensus being that this was an all-round pleasant experience). You wonder if this is some elaborate plot, an actor being fed lines, an audience fed by your discomfort. You, the bargainer. You pray without hope of being heard. You’ll sacrifice any hope of the missionary-appreciating, kiss-on-the-neck-wanting kind of want if only you may be bestowed with some niche, never-tobe-spoken-aloud kink. You’ll take being turned on by the blowing of a nose (a thing – it would make flu season exciting at least), you’ll opt for wanting to have sex with a car (a thing, of course), you’d even go as far as the whole falling down the stairs thing (which is a thing, what isn’t?). It’s not ideal but at least you can be ashamed about something, rather than nothing; this non-feeling between two thighs cannot be borne indefinitely. You consider the vast swathes of compromises made. Continental barriers, intermittent attention to hygiene, and carefully ignored sports-betting addictions are sacrifices swallowed for the great union between consenting adults, yet sexual fulfilment forms an irreplaceable tenet of romance it seems. You harbour that unfixable flaw, incongruous with a world built on pleasure. You, possesser of that sordid desire to be wanted and loved. Your detached eroticism is musically pornographic, is it not? Your commitment to the worship of what you cannot feel admirable and steadfast, no? You, who moans and gropes, humiliated, for the sake of shared warmth, and conversation. One toothbrush next to the other. You wish for scheduled date nights on a shared calendar and held hands and memories created and kept by two. You want nothing more than the thing you do not want at all, that great overbearing prerequisite of being touched and prodded and spread, the adorned and pearly archway to fulfilment. You are no stoic soldier; you think of love. You, sexless beast, undress one more time.

Perhaps this time it will be different. No groin-pulling horniness nor libido-led decision-making has brought you here; pure mental clarity fuels this act. The stakes of the ordeal make you shiver. To stutter, to misplace a hand, to allow a fleeting expression of discomfort is to reveal your perverse charade, is to ensure your innocent partner feels acutely unwanted. You touch your feelingless body to theirs and wait for salvation.

c o n c u p i s c e n c e

You, the

Sexless Beast Oscar Beardsley

send can’t

that

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to germa tt

I hung my head and told the man that the hamper was a 21st birthday present for my best friend, who had moved to Berlin to live with two Persian cats. He poked curiously through the hamper, inspecting the 24 pack of Duracell batteries and World War One-era ammunition I’d found on Facebook Marketplace. “You’d better find something to do with all this, it’s not going to Germany.”

The perishables in the hamper ought to be eaten, I thought to myself. I unwrapped the portable stove (prohibited item 10: Electric Machinery) from its cellophane and ribbon and cooked up a meal, mindful of possible contamination from the twenty-odd vials of lab-stolen chemicals lying loose in the hamper. I handed the post office man a serving of Trout (prohibited item seven: Fish) with a drizzle of Manuka honey and a side of warm milk and boiled eggs (prohibited item six: Dairy Produce, Birds Eggs, Natural Honey). Tentatively, he took a bite, paused, nibbled. In a murmur barely audible, he remarked he’d never encountered fish with such an unusual yet decadent flavour.

He passed his plate to the white-haired man he’d been serving. The customer glanced across at me, then took a small bite. His expression changed. He was somehow lighter: his eyes closed in bliss as a small smile cracked across his face. Within the hour a queue had formed around the block just to get a taste of my fish. The post office was full of customers munching away and picking through the hamper for items they thought useful to themselves. An elderly woman took the listening device, a young boy pocketed the coins and medals. I stood back and watched the community prosper.

My fish had won the post office man’s trust. I hooked up the Xbox I’d included in the hamper to the second monitor on the counter and spoke to him about limerence while I played Assassin’s Creed. “We are born of love; Love is our mother”, I announced. He reminded me that love and limerence are not the same. The post office man asked me if he could keep the imitation Louis Vuitton purse from the hamper for his wife. I said that would be fine. I offered him the glass bottle of absinthe too, as a token of friendship, but he declined on account of his sobriety.

any

“Your friend is into this sort of stuff?” he asked me as he inspected the AK47 and old Playboy magazines.

“You could say that. She’s pretty strange. It’s why I love her so much.” “Sounds like you two have a good thing going.” I’m sorry I couldn’t get the hamper to Germany. What’s left of it is still here at the post office; we can pick it up together when you’re back.

ISSN 3038-2411