‘Against each wall stands an ornate throne—junk, dark Victorian junk, pulled by crowbar twenty years ago from the old lodge in the doomed downtown. Sitting on each is a battered looking Elk in a frayed tuxedo or black suit, his shoes cracked as the skin around his eyes. You feel sure they will sleep, and soon.’
Some Elks Lodges glitter like country clubs; this one used to be a motel with a pancake house attached. In the parking lot, stretching after the hot drive, there is a pretty girl in a black dress. Not one of you. But she must be, no one but your party, the party assembled for your uncle’s funeral,…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Americans, speaking of foreign lands, often say, 'It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.'
‘ My stunningly crummy apartment–there were big holes in the walls and I lay awake nights worrying about how they got there’.
‘None of these high-falutin pansy-ass would-be 'technologies' are going to save literature.’
‘North by Northwest isn't a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it's about what happens to his suit.’
‘I truly hate food, I said to Isidor. I just can’t take it any more. F*** food!’
‘It was given to her by her Japanese captors after the Fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 to pack the few possessions she was allowed to take with her to prison.’
