Blackmailed By Grackles

An unwittingly perfect short story posted to a bird-related forum over the course of a week and discovered by a St. Drogo intern while in a sunstroke-induced haze, “Blackmailed by Grackles” is officially dedicated to Spurl readers Ashley and Gilda.

July 25, 2007

Hi, I am wondering if anyone has advice for me.

We recently started feeding the birds in our back yard, with a number of tube feeders from Wild Birds Unlimited. They seemed to be working well, a little too well in fact... now we are overrun with grackles, starlings, pigeons and sparrows. To cut a long story short, I noticed today that one or more of the grackles is actively attacking sparrows, killing them and proceeding to eat them. This happened three times so far today. I had earlier found a dead sparrow in the yard, but I put it down to nature at work.

Now to be clear, I know all about the arguments for letting nature run its course, but I truthfully just feel bad about this. I don’t particularly have anything against any of these birds on an individual level, but right now the grackles are just ruining it for everybody else. They are so hyper-aggressive... I was able to live with that, but now they have actually started killing my other “customers,” and my wife is quite distraught about it. I don’t know if it makes any sense, but we wouldn’t have such a problem if it was a hawk of some kind coming occasionally and grabbing a bird. It’s just that this is the last straw—these grackles already totally dominated my yard, and now they’re killing too. They aren’t even supposed to do that, I called the store and she told me she had been doing this for 30 years and never heard of a grackle killing a sparrow. Now I’ve seen it three times in one day, so obviously someone figured it out and others are maybe copying.

At any rate... I don’t feel good any more about this entire situation. I don't really want lectures on nature, please, this is just a simple request for help in fixing what is quite a distressing situation. Does anyone who feeds birds want to see this kind of thing on a regular basis? That’s not what we signed up for.

We got a couple of the cages that go around the tube feeders (again from WBU) and it was actually from inside one of these that the grackle grabbed the sparrow, dragged it out, carried it down to the ground, and proceeded to peck it to death.

I tried taking the cages away, thinking that perhaps this was just the grackle taking out its frustration and rage at not being able to get to the food, but very soon after I took the cages away, I observed a grackle (same one? no idea) doing it again, grabbing a sparrow sitting on top of the pole and going for its head. I banged on the window, which broke it up, and the sparrow got away.

Any ideas? Feeding the birds wasn’t supposed to be like this...

p.s. I also have a “Squirrel Buster” feeder that we just got today. The grackles solved that one quickly... if I adjust the spring tension so that cardinals can use it, then this is apparently enough for the grackle to be able to insert its beak into the crack and lever it up so it can get into the food. So it just keeps doing that.

p.p.s. We are feeding millet and no-mess blend in the two main tube feeders, and safflower/sunflower in the Squirrel Buster, along with a couple of open trays, one with striped sunflower and the other with safflower only. The grackles seem to like whatever we put out, safflower included, whatever, they eat it. And they have no problem hanging onto the perches on the tube feeders.

July 26, 2007

We went to PetSmart this evening and purchased a 48" dog crate, which happens to have wire mesh that is about 3.5 cm apart, exactly the same as the tube feeder cages from WBU. So that should be just wide enough for sparrow-type birds, but hopefully not wide enough for grackles. I put it up around the pole feeder we already had, resting on the ground, then hung two of the tube feeders inside the cage, away from the walls. So any birds on the feeders at least should be out of reach of the grackles on the outside. Yet to be determined: a) Whether grackles can figure out a way in, b) whether the squirrel will find a way to destroy it, and c) whether grackles will continue to target sparrows hanging around the periphery of the setup. I’ll post a picture of the thing as soon as I can, if it works...

We also moved the open trays (with striped sunflower and safflower) further away from the cage, hopefully to take some pressure off that small area. We also hung the Squirrel Buster, thistle seed feeder and a cage sunflower seed feeder on the three hooks on the main pole.

To placate the squirrels, who have now lost the two trays that were previously accessible to them, I’ll go get one of those squirrel feeders with the lid that opens (I think Wal-Mart has them, but haven’t found them anywhere else unfortunately). Thus, with a lid, this should keep the squirrel happy without having the birds steal it all before the tree rats get their chance...

Boy, I never thought bird feeding would feel like planning a military campaign... complete with casualties. Sigh.

July 27, 2007

Here’s a couple of pics of the new setup, with the dog crate. The wires are about 3.5 cm apart, which is just right for letting sparrow-sized-objects through but won’t permit access to grackle-sized-objects. Cowbirds and smaller grackles can get in, but they don't seem to cause a problem, maybe they are younger or whatever but I’ve been watching for a while and for whatever reason, the smaller grackle-like birds that can get in seem remarkably non-aggressive.

Currently I am thinking that a combined approach seems to work:

1. Protected sparrow area, à la dog cage with appropriate spacing for bars.

2. Separating feeders to different parts of the yard; not so much frenzy in one place.

3. Sacrificial feed (cracked corn, safflower and sunflower bought in bulk) on the ground in other parts of the yard to distract the grackles, pigeons and starlings.

This takes pressure off the sparrow area, which formerly had everything in close proximity (I have a pole with three hooks on the top, plus another three that could be hung off the body of the pole—too much in a small area, I think). I now have just the two feeders in the dog crate for the sparrows (with millet and no-mess), hanging from the detachable hangers on the pole itself rather than from the roof of the cage (which isn’t strong). The Squirrel Buster hangs by itself above all this, with safflower/black sunflower. One grackle at a time can use this, but it doesn't seem to be a problem. The cardinals like it early morning and late evening.

Then in other parts of the yard, we have the thistle feeder hanging on the tree, about ten feet away from the pole; a cage sunflower feeder on tree; three squirrel feeders on the tree (one with two corn spikes and two containers with the lid they push up to get in—this protects it from the birds, who otherwise always get to the nuts before the squirrels can). In these squirrel feeders I am thinking that the whole peanuts in the shell are good, since they seem to be a favorite (preferred to corn, it seems) and it’s easier for them to reach in and grab’n’go.

There are three bird baths scattered around the yard, which are refilled at regular intervals because so many birds (particularly grackles and starlings) seem to love bathing and emptying them out. That’s fun to watch.

The two hanging trays have been moved out from next to the tree to farther out, hanging from long string on a branch. The larger tray has striped sunflower, which the blue jay, pigeons and grackles seem to like, and the smaller tray has safflower, which the mourning doves seem to love, and of course the cardinals.

Finally, I sprinkle liberal quantities of cracked corn on the ground in an area far away from the sparrows, which keeps the grackles and pigeons busy far after there's none left (they seem happy rooting around). Safflower also seems to work well here.

The one mistake I made was that we got a bag of Purina Pigeon Checkers, which looked good in the store, but it turns out nobody will touch it at all—not even the pigeons (I know, rock doves really). Strange though, I thought at least they would eat just about anything, or the starlings. Nope. So I chucked that.

The best selection for bulk for my birds seems to be: Cracked corn (sacrificial ground offering), safflower (ditto, and on the small tray, and in the Squirrel Buster), black striped sunflower (everybody loves that), striped sunflower (large tray, ditto), and finally a 50lb bag of peanuts in the shell that should keep the squirrels busy for a while. They will be heartily sick of peanuts by the time we leave here, methinks. And, of course, millet and no-mess blend for the sparrow feeders.

Since we spread things out, I haven’t seen any more aggressive behavior on the part of the grackles. Fingers crossed. I think the spreading out, combined with the bigger space available inside the dog crate will give the sparrows more chance to get away should some grackle decide to go mean again. But I’ll try to keep enough sacrificial feed out elsewhere to keep everybody distracted... we’re a full service station, indeed.

July 28, 2007

I’ve been trying to pin down what it was that disturbed me so much about the grackle attack, given that I really have no such problem with a hawk plying its trade in my yard. I think it comes down to the fact that the grackle is usually a member of the backyard community, eating alongside everybody else, shoulder to shoulder. There is surely an element of trust there (I know I’m anthropomorphising, but bear with me). Sparrows know to run from hawks, but grackles are trusted, because they are (usually) “just one of the usual gang.” So this incident just struck me as kind of a treacherous betrayal, a mugging by someone that you hang out with on a regular basis. I mean, all the birds just sit out there and do this all day. Then this grackle turns around and kills one of his neighbors... just seems wrong to me. With the hawk, there is no pretense, it comes in and everybody knows what’s going on. That poor sparrow thought it was among friends.

Ok, now I’m psychoanalysing sparrows and it’s time to sign off.

August 2, 2007

Sadly, it appears the grackles are still at it. Today I tried cutting back a bit on the food around the yard, since it gets kind of expensive when they empty everything out so quickly. Later in the day, I found another dead sparrow underneath the hanging Squirrel Buster, which both grackles and sparrows frequent (currently has safflower seeds). The sparrow’s head was bashed in, which matches the modus operandi of the previous grackle attack. So what seems to be going on is that I am being blackmailed by grackles—if I don’t keep putting out plenty of food for the hoards, then they start killing sparrows. Nice.

People talk about replacing seed with safflower, but it seems that whatever you put out, the grackles love it. About the only thing that nobody seems too excited about is whole corn, I guess because it’s just too big. But anything else gets swamped with grackles, pigeons and starlings. It’s kind of depressing, and really makes you think about the whole concept of feeding the birds, to be honest. It’s not the idyllic scene that we were somehow expecting, of a few cute little critters flitting to our feeder occasionally. It’s a fricking mob scene out there, complete with murders. I don’t know what to do now, I can’t afford to keep buying 50lb bags of cracked corn, safflower, millet and sunflower seeds on a regular basis. Plus the backyard is starting to smell a little like a big bird cage, I think from the sheer number of customers and the fact that rain has been rare. But it would seem a little heartless to just cut everybody off, there are about a hundred or so young sparrows who seem to be being raised in our yard... plus young grackles, and young starlings...

sigh

August 3, 2007

I’m afraid I’ve admitted defeat for now, after finding yet another freshly killed sparrow next to the dog cage today. Apparently the grackles will kill whenever there is not abundant food, so they feel pressured (I guess) and get more aggressive. Even though the larger grackles cannot get into the cage, they still walk around on top of it, and I’ve seen them peck at any sparrows in their way. I guess that’s how the incidents get started—a sparrow gets in the way, or perhaps it’s just sheer frustration and rage. Grackles are extremely intelligent, so I wouldn’t put higher emotions past them.

I took down all the other feeders, to try to get rid of the grackle population and pigeons who have started hanging around all the time. I’ve left the bird baths out, since water would seem to be in short supply this time of year, and I don’t think it causes the same kind of frenzy that food does.

But then I saw that there were literally around 100 or more sparrows in and on top of the cage, completely covering it. That is just too much. I took down all the feeders, including the ones in the cage, even the thistle feeder. I’m going to try to let things cool down for a while before (slowly) re-introducing food into the garden. I will probably not put food on the ground again—it just attracts the grackles, pigeons and starlings, who then proceed to harass any other feeders in the area if you don’t keep their food plentiful. That gets very expensive very quickly, and the yard starts to look like a huge bird cage, quite unpleasant and smelly too. So screw this. I think I need to rethink this whole concept.

Courtesy of BirdForum

Fall 2023 Events

Our newest Spurl writers are coming out of hiding! So come hang out! Meet the “people” behind “Spurl”; we promise you won’t be kidnapped immediately.

Here are the upcoming events:

Oct 18 - Camp Street Studios, New Orleans - Michael Jeffrey Lee

Oct 28 - The Writer's Block, Las Vegas, 7pm - Michael Jeffrey Lee & M. S. Coe

Oct 29 - Stories Books and Music, Los Angeles, 7pm - Michael Jeffrey Lee & M. S. Coe

Nov 1 - Green Apple Books, San Francisco, 7pm - Michael Jeffrey Lee & Joseph Bradshaw

Nov 8 - Sundance Books and Music, Reno, 6pm - Michael Jeffrey Lee

Dec 9 - Hopscotch Books, Berlin - Michael Jeffrey Lee

Michael Jeffrey Lee’s My Worst Ideas is publishing November 1, and M. S. Coe’s The Formation of Calcium is out now!

Spurl Editions Communiqué No. 5

Exile of the Imposters

Man suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Illustration from Kranken-Physiognomik / by von K. H. Baumgärtner / 1929. Credit: Wellcome Collection

As the Spurl Editions Board of Directors has long known, St. Drogo has been ill. Contrary to the rumors spreading from village to village, it is a physical malady that eats away at the legendary editor-in-chief, turning his tongue yellow, making his teeth dusty, and causing the skin on his elbows to flake off and bleed buckets; there is nothing the matter with his mind or editorial acumen (and there never has been). Naturally, the apprentices have taken on more and more responsibilities, which has led to inter-organizational friction, but with protocol changes and a swift ramping up of apprentice supervision and discipline, it was believed that much of that friction was in the past. All have now rallied behind St. Drogo, who for the last six months has not left his cave-room as he has focused on his physical recovery, but who nonetheless has not hesitated to make his opinion known to the apprentices and the Board when necessary via messages he has scrawled on ruined paper in his own elbow blood.

Thus, one of St. Drogo’s dictates was silence. Total, complete, absolute silence. It has been the rule from the beginning, a few hastily penned communiqués notwithstanding. The books are to speak for themselves, St. Drogo explains. In fact, St. Drogo insists that Spurl Editions’ future publications bear no words or images on their covers at all. The books are to be jacketed in a sheet of thick rough paper of some nondescript and unappealing color, maybe the greenish-brown of swift excrement, but certainly no more lurid yellow or orange meant to draw crowds in the square. The books are also to have no more descriptions, and obviously no blurbs, which are widely considered (at least in the academic literature) to be demeaning to the intellect, the spirit, and the body. That was St. Drogo’s vision, which, contractually, Spurl Editions can do no more than execute.

But on Saturday, March 25, of the year 1452, a group of imposters presented a false face of Spurl Editions to the world. These imposters appeared before an audience of dedicated, earnest book-printing afficianados and defrauded them, lying to them without a care. The event was purportedly a discussion between a Spurl Editions “editor” and the Spurl Editions author M. S. Coe. The “editor” betrayed her ignorance of the nature of Spurl’s project almost immediately, discoursing freely with the author on irrelevant literary topics rather than giving thanks to St. Drogo for his visionary approach to paper production. The event was done in collaboration with various other imposters connected to the press Sublunary Editions, a printing house based in a northern village that, day in and day out, must struggle against the rain that seeks to soak their paper and render their text blurry and unreadable, without any Board of Directors to institute apprentice-labor protocols to save their paper from ruin. And given that Sublunary has been in the midst of this concerted effort to stave off the rain and expand to new villages—these efforts surely taking up all their time—it can only be assumed that the individuals masquerading as the editor-in-chief, and author and translator of the new Sublunary book The Whore at this “event,” were imposters too.

The Board of Directors having interviewed every apprentice and convened internally for a full report and accounting, it is clear there is only one path forward. Although Spurl Editions is proud of its new publication of The Formation of Calcium, and believes the book’s author bore no ill will toward St. Drogo when she appeared at the “event”—perhaps not realizing the gravity of the calamity that was unfolding—the press must now destroy all copies of the book. All those who seek a copy must obtain it now, before they are burned. There are still a few copies that are not too sun-damaged available through the usual means. After the current stock is destroyed, the apprentices will create a new version of the book with a St. Drogo-approved cover: unidentifiable, bearing no name, no author, and no description. The book is to speak for itself, and the Spurl Editions imposters are to be exiled, or shot.

Spurl Editions Communiqué No. 4

A Novel Discovery, a Grueling Triumph

I was hired as an associate editor at Spurl Editions toward the beginning of the year, the board of directors insisting that it was time for the “bedraggled press” (their words) to make a fresh start. Having cut my teeth as an editor at various children’s magazines, I had never read a Spurl publication, and looking over the book descriptions that they posted around the village, on random street corners, always either too high or too low for my 4’6” frame, they frankly did not appeal to me. The seemingly adventurous Arthur’s Whims came close to the type of book I might acquire an excerpt of for my children’s journals, but then I saw that the book bore chapter titles like “Pornography” (that’s it, just “Pornography”) and “Children’s Podiatry,” and that was the end of my interest in that. I wasn’t shy with the board about my misgivings about joining this press, but they were so persistent; and of course, who amongst us hasn’t heard of the legendary editorial giant St. Drogo? When he came to wine and dine me, taking me out for avocado carpaccio and tomato seeds dusted with cumin, I couldn’t resist the opportunity. Over espresso dregs I agreed to a six-month editorship, writing my six-page list of wage-and-hour conditions on various napkins, as St. Drogo’s eyes widened. I am proud to say that I am both the youngest and by far the highest paid worker Spurl Editions has ever had, and between my new salary and all the decreases in my monthly expenses that have come with moving to this tiny awful village (close neither to the ocean nor to my friends, with nothing to do here but climb mountains despite the endless heat), I am on my way to a well-earned early retirement after three grueling years of work.

But the point is not to inspire you readers with my financial acumen. It is to make an announcement. I have succeeded in steering the focus of this small press to what are sure to be fertile grounds. During my first weeks as associate editor, the apprentices would bring me manuscripts every day that were nearly unreadable. These manuscripts were all written by authors long dead, or were works long out of print, and they were uniformly hideous. “The discarded tales of Giovanni Boccaccio!” one apprentice cooed, pressing a 1,200-page manuscript toward me. “Who?” I picked up the pages and tossed them at the apprentice (a signature St. Drogo move). Another came in boasting that he had uncovered the true identity of the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes, had tracked down his last remaining descendant, and through torture had obtained from that person a never-before-seen picaresque left behind by the dead Spanish author about a blind, mad prisoner. After my Boccaccio outburst, a single withering look at this second apprentice was all I needed for the apprentice to gather his things, mumble a thousand apologies, and scurry away.

With the apprentices banished to their corners, I was on my own, just as I liked it. I went down to the mail hut where the apprentices received the submitted manuscripts. I shooed the workers out of there and got down to business. I tore open the packages and looked for one thing in the wrinkled, worn pages: a sign of life. Actually, not figuratively. I wanted living authors.

At last I found them. In a stack of hundreds of packages, there were two manuscripts whose authors were unmistakeably alive. I let out a tiny shriek-laugh of excitement. Both were written in sparkly colored gel pen on lined paper—already a sign of youth and freshness. The authors had also clearly sprayed the pages with some kind of lavender-opium smell, which I found deeply satisfying, and had pressed wildflowers here and there in the books (one of the flowers was poisonous, alas, and caused me to faint and hit my head against the wall; but I refuse to believe the author intended this result). Anyway, they were doing all they could to stand out, the poor souls, surely not realizing the change that had happened at Spurl Editions.

After skimming the two manuscripts and finding them to be fresh and youthful, I tucked them under my arms and took them straight to the board of directors. I presented them to the board: the first, a novel, The Formation of Calcium, by M. S. Coe, which followed a lunatic woman as she abandoned her family and established an inspiring new life for herself in the Americas, all told from her unusual perspective. The second, a short story collection by Michael Jeffrey Lee, describing various drifting characters whose thoughtless optimism in the face of so many metaphors for death (there were rivers, burned-out houses, inhospitable new towns) was bracing in an era of so much negativity. I concluded my presentation to the board by stressing that these authors were living, and this was a once-in-a-century opportunity.

The members of the board of directors were concerned, of course. They could not understand how we could publish two authors with the first initial M. But I was ready for this backlash. I explained that Michael Jeffrey Lee would absolutely not go by M. Jeffrey Lee, or even M. J. Lee, but would maintain his full name. Similarly, I explained that M. S. Coe would not disaggregate her name. So, our readers would not be confused, or at least not overly so.

That seemed to placate the board. But they wanted to know, why these two authors?

They are brilliant, I explained. The works are exceptional. There’s nothing like them in the canon of the dead.

The board members mumbled unhappily amongst each other.

At last one member wanted to know who were the other living contenders.

I shook my head to indicate that these were the only two. This is a true opportunity for us, I said. This is what you hired me to do!

At that point, all eyes turned to St. Drogo, who had sat hunched over himself in the corner, silent this whole time, patting his grotesque pet (that ferret-, rat-, lamb-, dog-like thing). He motioned for me to give him the manuscripts, which I did; I was calm, happy, indifferent to those feelings of anxiety that plague so many of the older generation. And I remained calm, happy, and indifferent for the next thirty-six hours as St. Drogo painstakingly read every page.

Until at last he looked up, put the pages neatly back together, and nodded yes.

---

Check out M. S. Coe’s forthcoming novel The Formation of Calcium now, with more information about Michael Jeffrey Lee’s upcoming short story collection coming soon!

Spurl Editions Communiqué No. 3

A forthright account of St. Drogo’s return

Three Hunting Dogs, by Konrad Witz, circa 1440/1445

You asked me to report about the current state of Spurl Editions. I believe you thought to do this because you believed I would have positive things to say, now that St. Drogo is back, and thus you could communicate positive news to the shareholders. You could issue platitudes like, now that St. Drogo is back at the helm, Spurl Editions is looking forward to its best season yet. And Spurl Editions has put its controversies with the interim editor behind it. St. Drogo is making top-notch acquisitions. Etc. Of course I am an honest person and I will only tell you the truth, which is that the St. Drogo who returned is not the same St. Drogo who left. I was St. Drogo’s apprentice for many years before he went into the desert. He abused me on a regular basis and called me the harshest names. Of course he blamed me for the mishap with the copyright page of Thomas Bernhard’s The Cheap-Eaters. (It is by now well-known that there is a glaring omission on the page; the words printed on acid-free paper are nowhere to be seen.) He told me every day that I would never be anything more than an incompetent apprentice because he personally would never recommend me for another job. No matter what I did, he was unhappy. He was a glum, ugly little man. In his letter of resignation he complained about being kept in a cave and forced to eat the strictest diet, but he couldn’t have lived any other way, as everything made him miserable, even the wood carving of a sea-monk that I made and gave him to decorate his area, which he refused to accept because it would be a distraction to him, so he said. Still, I loved him. If it weren’t for him, I would have had no intellectual job at all. I would have been working at the stables or cobbling shoes, not proofreading literary fiction deep into the early morning hours. He took me under his wing and sustained me. He told me to cut off my family and my friends, to never speak to them again, because he was my family and friends now. And he became all of those things to me. I dedicated myself to him and I never regretted it until he returned.

He has a gruesome little animal with him now. I can only describe it as a cross between a ferret, a rat, a lamb, and a dog. It is skinny, jittery, bald in spots, and has an incredible overbite and bloody gums. He thinks that in this awful creature he has found his symbol, just as St. Jerome has his lion and St. Christopher his little child. But a lion is a beautiful animal, and this hideous thing of St. Drogo’s climbs up his arms and perches on his shoulder, licking the inside of his ear and making horrific semi-sexual whimpering sounds. St. Drogo does not correct the thing and in fact takes the creature everywhere with him. He claims that the creature sustained him while he lived in the desert. He says the creature went out every morning and killed some other animal, surely even more disgusting than it, and brought the carcass back to him, wholly untouched, to St. Drogo’s amazement, and that this was how he survived those many days and nights out there. When the cold set in, the creature would go out and find a place to nestle in, then lead him there. When he became thirsty and, hallucinating, went rambling through the sand dunes, the creature would find him an oasis. He never calls the creature by the same name twice, but always refers to it as some fruit or vegetable; my sweet pea, my little banana, blueberry shortstacks; it is all equally nauseating. And of course, with such a distraction circling him at all times, yawning and gnawing its scabs, St. Drogo hardly works. It is as though he is not responsible for a publishing company at all. Instead I do all the work of responding to the increasingly hateful correspondence we receive. I package our books to be shipped to the nearby villages, although our shipping materials are growing low, as St. Drogo has not arranged for them to be replenished. I man the one book stall we have left by the river, which no one visits anymore because they don’t find my conversation appealing. Now I hear rumors that the board of directors would like to expand my role even more. But unless I am finally given a position with the corporation, I want no more responsibilities. This apprenticeship has gone on long enough, and today all I feel toward St. Drogo is the deepest resentment.

Spurl Editions Communiqué No. 2

Mea culpa from the Board of Directors

“Stoned.” An illustration from Fuzz Against Junk by Akbar Del Piombo.

We want to take this opportunity to recognize that our decision-making these last few months has at times strayed from the standard you rightly expect. As members of the board of directors our goal is to increase the valuation of this corporation while marginally enhancing the state of literature (we say marginally because literature is static, like history, neither improving nor worsening, but shifting imperceptibly and incoherently; everything has already been written, and if it has not been written, it has been said, and if it has not been said, it has been thought). It is obvious to us now that we placed too much pressure on Saint Drogo, our former editor, that we did not understand what he was going through, given his yearslong confinement to a stone cell and strict dietary and recreational regimen, and we regret that we did not take the time to find out. Saint Drogo served as perhaps the shrewdest editor this village press has seen, bringing us a study of refection by the preeminent Austrian documentarian Thomas Bernhard. But due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, he felt compelled to resign, and the interim editor who replaced him has made a series of costly decisions whose harm we acknowledge.

It is by now well-known that the interim editor acquired a work of true debauchery that is not fitting for this high-minded press. That is Arthur’s Whims, by Hervé Guibert, translated by Daniel Lupo. His decision was made alone; he consulted no one; and, we are told, he made this decision having read only a thirty-page excerpt that was delivered to him by a sea monk, so he says, while he lay on the beach excessively sunning himself and contemplating the mysteries of the sun (whose rays, he says, control the growth of his yellow-green toenails). The book had never appeared in English before, so he gambled. Thus he did not know there were chapters lustily depicting the podiatrist’s profession or fleeting pornographic scenes, nor of course did he know that the work would deviate so far and in such a grotesque fashion from the usual and respected literary depiction of the saint. Nonetheless this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Our surveillance team informs us that the interim editor urinated on book galleys and had to be physically restrained from doing the same on books en route to be distributed, that he drank and used root intoxicants to such excess that he was unable to proofread although he signed the solemn proofreading acknowledgement (“SPA”), that he submitted hundreds of lewd cover designs which he scribbled himself on the paper provided for him to draft contracts (all of which were immediately rejected and burned), that he kept small misshapen dogs and other animals and assigned to them the highest ranking editorial roles, that he vomited into clear jars that he arranged on the bookcase where our titles once stood (from the darkest to the lightest colored jars), and that in fact he exposed himself during a meeting at which a decision was made with which he disagreed. That decision, of course, was to terminate him.

We hope that our mea culpa will be read not only by our shareholders, readers, and workers, but also by Saint Drogo. We believe he has vanished into the desert to focus on his journey to rectitude. No one has heard from him, not even his youthful surveillance companion who returned to the village alone, and who has since taken a hallowed vow of muteness. Thus perhaps it will be some time before he reads this communiqué. Nonetheless we are hopeful, knowing what an illuminated and illuminating thinker he is, what a hardworking person he is, and refusing to believe that he has left Spurl Editions forever behind.

Printed on acid-free paper.

Spurl Editions Communiqué No. 1

An awful lacuna: Saint Drogo’s letter of resignation

Illustration from Thesaurus thesaurorum, ca. 1775, France

I would like to first make it clear that I had no intention for my tenure as editor-in-chief to be as short as it was. When the townspeople—all corporate shareholders to some degree of Spurl Editions—approached me and asked me to take on this responsibility, I was delighted. As is by now well-known, to protect the townspeople from viewing my hideous appearance, I had moved into a small cell and have been subsisting there on the most rancid barley and the cloudiest water that is provided to me through an opening in the stone wall by a goblin of a man who I am sure only means me harm. Confined to this cold hole, my sole occupation for a decade was studying religious texts, and these texts, by the way, had been seeming more and more hollow to me. By taking on the editorial direction of the town’s publishing house, my day-to-day life would become rich, or so I believed. I was provided pen, paper, and the many manuscripts that had been delivered to the town but had gone unread by a previous editor whom I shall not name. Among these manuscripts I made a sublime discovery: The Cheap-Eaters, a novel by Thomas Bernhard, describing a man who regularly eats lunch and walks through parks. I did not hesitate: I made the acquisition and worked diligently on its production. The handsome volume was soon shipped to towns, villages, and hamlets throughout the southern foggy region.

Yet it was not long after this that the majority shareholder of Spurl Editions, who happens to be a trustee and reports directly to corporate counsel, came to my cell for a meeting. The shareholder held a slim volume that a press in the next town had recently published. I immediately recognized its name and design, but I could not fathom why this book would be a subject for our meeting. The shareholder slipped the book to me through the opening in my cell and asked me to turn to the copyright page. He asked if the page disturbed me, to which I candidly answered no. Then I saw it. Five words, or four, if two words that are hyphenated are to be counted as one word.

Printed on acid-free paper.

“As an editor, your responsibility is the copyright page, correct?”

I nodded, although this gesture was absurd, given that the shareholder could not see me through the stone, and I was not so short that I would be visible through the opening.

“I never thought to add this language. I have to deeply apologize. What does it even mean?”

The shareholder snapped back, “That’s neither here nor there.”

I remained silent for some time, hoping that my apology would resonate with this important person who held so much of my life in his hands. I did not want to return to a life of studying religious texts. It was clear that I had made a grave error, and that the shareholders would soon be meeting to discuss my fate; corporate counsel was likely aware of the error, too.

“We will need to consider this further,” he said. “The workers have been instructed to cease production until this is corrected. Goodbye.”

I looked at the copyright page again. Printed on acid-free paper. My head swam; I wanted to vomit. My thoughts began to spin out. Would this painful absence hurt readership? This awful lacuna. Surely there was something superior about acid-free paper compared to acidic paper. What kind of person would go from stall to stall, picking up and comparing books, and ultimately choose the book printed on acidic paper and not the one printed on acid-free paper? Only a madman, only a person who wanted to flout convention and stain his fingers with acid. As an editor I did not want this kind of reader. The shareholders of Spurl Editions did not either. When I took on this role, I envisioned clean, healthy readers, their hands spick-and-span, their minds ready for wholesome reflection. Not filthy greedy fingers whose skin was peeling off.

The book, The Cheap-Eaters, entered my mind again. Obviously I had failed it. The man who ate economical lunches and walked through various parks would be misunderstood now. I knew this. It had reached the wrong readers. They would ascribe a nasty quality to it: call a logically ordered book “obsessive.” Sympathize with insignificant minor characters. This was bad enough, but on top of this misery was the fact that my failure would allow the other towns’ presses to flourish. This was a year when my town needed every bit of help. Our doctor had been fatally mauled by a beast from the mountains, and the townspeople were falling ill with strange diseases, so that they could not work in the same diligent spirit as in years past. In trying to make our situation better, I had made it worse.

Well, there was no choice then. I did not want to wait in agony for the shareholders to meet, for corporate counsel to explain to them what I had done wrong. For them to vote.

I would rather step aside. It has been a humbling and gratifying experience to be editor-in-chief of Spurl Editions from April 1183 to August 1184. If there is one positive thing that I can express about these recent events, it is that they have brought me closer to God. No longer do I dread my existence. I am a “cheap-eater” too. I embrace eating what the goblin serves me through the wall, whatever it is. It is a sign of the goblin’s love for me. I embrace my religious study, for it keeps my fingers clean. My failure will not define me.

I will end by expressing my sincere apologies to all who were affected.

Saint Drogo

On Vampirism (Fiction)

On Vampirism
By Prosper Mérimée
Translated by Laura Nagle

Celestograph by August Strindberg

[excerpt]

In 1816, I had set out on foot for a journey around Vrgorac, and I was staying in the little town of Vrboska. My host was a Morlach who was quite rich by local standards: a most jovial man—and, not incidentally, a bit of a drunkard—by the name of Vuk Poglonović. His wife was young and still pretty, and his sixteen-year-old daughter was quite charming. I wanted to spend a few days at his home so I could sketch some ancient ruins in the area, but I found it impossible to rent a room from him in exchange for money; he insisted on having me as a guest. The price of my lodging, then, was a rather onerous display of gratitude, inasmuch as I had to hold my own with my friend Poglonović for as long as he wished to remain at the table. Anyone who has dined with a Morlach will understand what a trial that can be.

One evening, about an hour after the two ladies had left us, I was singing some local tunes to my host (as a ruse to avoid drinking any more), when we were interrupted by dreadful shrieks coming from the bedroom. Generally speaking, there is only one such room in the house, and it is shared by everyone. We ran, armed, to the bedroom, where a ghastly spectacle awaited us. The mother, pale and frenzied, was holding the body of her daughter. The girl, having fainted, was paler still than her mother and was laid out on the bale of straw that served as her bed. The mother cried out, “A vampire! A vampire! My poor daughter is dead!”

Together, we managed to help Chava come to. She told us that she had seen the window open and that a pale man wrapped in a shroud had thrown himself upon her and bitten her while attempting to strangle her. When she cried out, the specter fled and she fainted. However, she believed she recognized the vampire as a local man named Wiecznany, who had died more than a fortnight earlier. She had a small, red mark on her neck; I didn’t know whether it was a beauty spot or if she had been bitten by some insect while she was having her nightmare.

When I hazarded this conjecture, the father dismissed it abruptly. His daughter was crying and wringing her hands, repeating endlessly, “Alas! to die so young, to die unmarried!” The mother insulted me, calling me an infidel; she assured us that she, too, had seen the vampire with her own two eyes, and that she recognized him as Wiecznany. I resolved to keep quiet.

Every amulet in the house—and, indeed, in the village—was soon hung around Chava’s neck, as her father swore to go disinter Wiecznany the next day and to burn him in the presence of all his relatives. In this manner the whole night went by; there was no calming them.

At daybreak, the entire village was stirring: the men were armed with rifles and daggers; the women carried red-hot horseshoes; the children had sticks and stones. We made our way to the cemetery, as shouts and insults were hurled at the deceased. With great effort, I emerged from the raging throng and went to stand beside the grave.

The exhumation took a long time. Everyone wanted to have a share in the effort, and so people were getting in one another’s way; indeed, there would surely have been some accidents had the old men not given the order that only two men were to disinter the corpse itself. As soon as they removed the cloth that had covered the body, a frightfully high-pitched scream made my hair stand on end. The sound came from the woman beside me, who shouted, “It’s a vampire! The worms have not eaten him!” All at once, a hundred mouths repeated her words, even as the corpse’s head was being blown to pieces by twenty rifles shooting at point-blank range. Chava’s father and relatives continued to assail the body with heavy blows of their long knives. Women used linens to soak up the red liquid that gushed from the mutilated body so it could be rubbed on the victim’s neck.

Despite the riddled state of the corpse, several young men removed it from the grave and took the precaution of tying it securely to the trunk of a fir tree. With all the children following behind them, they dragged the body to a small orchard facing Poglonović’s house. There, a heap of firewood and straw had been prepared in advance. They set fire to it, then threw the corpse on the pile and began to dance around it, each of the men shouting louder than his neighbor, as they continuously fanned the flames. The stench that emerged therefrom soon forced me to leave their company and return to my lodgings.

The house was filled with people; the men were smoking pipes, and the women were talking all at once and peppering the victim with questions, as she, still terribly pale, barely managed to reply. Wrapped around her neck were scraps of fabric saturated with the revolting red liquid that they took to be blood, which made for a ghastly contrast with poor Chava’s bared shoulders and neck.

Alice Eis in The Vampire (1913)

Little by little the crowd dispersed, until I was the only remaining visitor in the household. The illness was prolonged. Chava dreaded nightfall and wanted someone to watch over her at all times. Her parents, fatigued by their daily work, could scarcely keep their eyes open, so I offered my services as an overnight companion, which they gratefully accepted. I knew that, from a Morlachian perspective, there was nothing improper about my proposal.

I shall never forget the nights I spent at that unfortunate girl’s bedside. She shuddered at every creak of the floor, at every whistle of the north wind, at the faintest of sounds. When she dozed off, she saw ghastly visions; all too often, she awoke with a start and screamed. Her imagination had been stricken by a dream, and now all the old busybodies in the countryside had managed to drive her mad with their frightening tales. She often said to me, as she felt her eyelids growing heavy, “Do not fall asleep, I beseech you. Hold a rosary in one hand and your dagger in the other; watch over me.” On other occasions, she would not sleep unless she could hold my arm between her hands, clutching so tightly that the outline of her fingers was visible on my arm long afterward.

Nothing could distract her from the dismal thoughts that hounded her. She was terribly afraid of death, and she believed herself lost and helpless, despite all our efforts to console her. Within a matter of days, she had grown shockingly thin; all the color had drained from her lips, and her large, dark eyes looked glassy. Truly, she was a dreadful sight to behold.

I attempted to influence her imagination by pretending to see matters as she did. Alas, having initially mocked her credulity, I was no longer entitled to her trust. I told her that I had learned white magic in my country and knew a very powerful spell against evil spirits; if she wished, I said, I would take the risk upon myself and utter the spell, out of love for her.

At first, her inherent goodness made her fear the consequences for my soul. Before long, however, her fear of death overpowered her concern for me, and she bade me try the spell. I had committed a few passages of Racine to memory; I recited the French verses aloud before the poor girl, who believed she was hearing the devil’s own tongue. Then, repeatedly rubbing her neck, I pretended to remove from it a small red agate that I had hidden between my fingers. I solemnly assured her that I had removed it from her neck and that she was saved. But she looked sadly at me and said, “You are lying; you had that stone in a little box. I saw you with it. You are no magician.” Thus my ruse had done more harm than good. From that moment on, her condition did not cease to decline.

The night before she died, she said to me, “If I die, it is my own fault. A boy from the village wanted to elope with me. I refused. I told him I would go with him only if he gave me a silver chain. He went to Makarska to buy one, and while he was away, the vampire came. But if I hadn’t been home,” she added, “perhaps he would have killed my mother. So it is for the best.” The next day she called for her father and made him promise to cut her throat and legs himself to keep her from becoming a vampire; she did not want anyone other than her father committing these useless atrocities upon her body. Then she kissed her mother and asked her to go bless a rosary at the tomb of a man considered holy by the people of the village, and bring it back to her afterward. I admired the sensitivity shown by that country girl in finding such a pretext to prevent her mother from witnessing her last moments. She asked me to remove an amulet from around her neck. “Keep it,” she said to me; “I hope it will be of more use to you than it was to me.” Then, with great piety, she received the sacraments. Two or three hours later, her breathing grew heavy and her eyes grew still. Suddenly she grasped her father’s arm and attempted to fling herself against his chest; and then she was dead. Her illness had lasted eleven days.

A few hours later, I left the village, vehemently cursing vampires, revenants, and all those who tell tales of such things.

---

Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) was a French writer, archaeologist, and architectural historian. Best remembered for his novellas, including Carmen and Colomba, he was a major figure in the Romantic movement. “On Vampirism,” a faux travel narrative, is part of the framing device of Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, La Guzla. 

Laura Nagle is a freelance translator and writer based in Indianapolis. She was named a 2020 Travel Fellow by the American Literary Translators Association and holds American Translators Association certification (French into English and Spanish into English). Twitter: @LauraLNagle | Website: www.LNLanguage.com

Voyage and Shipwreck of the Great Ship São Paulo (Non-Fiction)

Excerpt from
Voyage and Shipwreck of the Great Ship São Paulo

Ocean by Vija Celmins

Prologue

Being about to write down the disastrous voyage of this great ship, it occurred to me how rash men are in their undertakings, chief among which, or one of the greatest, was confiding their lives to four planks lashed together, and to the discretion of the furious winds, with which they live in such wise that we can rightly say quia ventus est vita mea [my life is like a wind], and thus they traverse the vast expanse of the watery element, encompassing the whole earth. This enterprise they undertake so unmindful of their consciences, and of what they are beholden to God, that where they should be most devout, which is in the worst dangers wherein they find themselves, there they are most negligent and careless, committing a thousand different sins, whereby they provoke the wrath of the Lord to descend on them, as it did on those who were aboard this great ship. And withal He is so merciful that He never strikes so harshly but that He recalls his ancient mercy, for the amendment of the guilty and as an example to those who would mock at them. All those who read the narratives of this history will be able to do this, and so it will help to amend each and every heart, placing their ultimate fate in Him, as being the beginning and end of all things. And in this narrative I will not relate anything other than what I actually saw, as briefly as possible, so that by avoiding a prolix story I will also avoid wearying the reader.

The Work Begins

This great ship was on the point of sailing from Santa Catarina de Ribamar when one night a violent cross-wind severed one of the two cables which she had laid out to seawards, and we were within an ace of being driven ashore, because the ship was anchored in only three and half fathoms. We were urgently compelled to ask help and aid by firing off our great guns all night, so that they could hear and help us with anchors and cables, as did all the officers of our lord the king at Belém, with the boats of the other ships in our company. They worked throughout the night in making us fast and leaving us secure and out of danger. It is certain that the great care taken that night was the salvation of the ship and the reason why she was not beaten to pieces at the door of the house, which would to God she had been and thus the end of her. It seems that He did not wish this to happen because we did not deserve it, on account of the sins of many of us who were in the ship. For even though this would have involved losses both for the royal treasury as for private individuals, yet it would have subsequently saved us from so many days and months of weary voyaging, with the people exhausted and wasted away from most deadly diseases, famines, and the most frightful misadventures imaginable; for we saw and tasted death so many times and in such figures, guises, and manners, and finally we nearly all lost our lives in a place where no great ship of Christians, Muslims, or heathen had ever been. And those of us who survived the fury and misfortune of this shipwreck, I think may be considered as the most unhappy of all, for most of us were and are the victims of such strange and extraordinary diseases that I doubt if our miserable existence can properly be termed life.

. . .

Thus it was that when we were in the position for doubling the Cape, there were great arguments between the captain, the pilot, and the master, with others who understood navigational problems, over whether it was better to make the voyage via the outer or the inner passage. And they finally decided that it was best to take the outer passage, for reasons which then seemed best and most forceful to them. And this decision was the cause of the ship sailing so far away beyond India to end her days in a land which cost so dear to the wretched sailors and passengers on board, due to the cruel shipwreck which we suffered, which began on 20 January, on a very dismal, dark, and terrifying morning, when we sighted an island on about the latitude of the equator or a little below it, as we guessed, and we were bearing down on it from a distance of about seven or eight leagues. And as soon as we sighted it, anyone can imagine how nervous our hearts and souls felt after all the trials we had undergone and with the wind blowing with gale force from the west, and on a lee shore, and heavy showers and thunderstorms, for when one stopped another began with greater force and fury. The seas were very big and running so high that we nearly foundered owing to the hawseholes which were still open, and which we had great difficulty in closing with coverlets and mattresses that we stuffed in them, as we had no time to do anything better. And our pilot, instead of tacking out to seawards on a southerly tack, continued on a northernly course until eleven o’clock, thinking to clear the island by holding on this course, which he could not do with the west wind. And if when he had sighted the island in the morning he had stood off on the other tack, he would have had more sea-room, and we could have sailed on and not been wrecked. But when he wanted to do this, it was too late, for it was blowing harder than ever and getting stronger all the time, and the ship was well among the many islands which lie offshore along the southern coast of Sumatra with its great bays. As we went thus sailing along on a southern tack, a sudden gust of wind struck us so heavily that we were unrigged in a trice, the partners of both masts being carried away at the same time together with all the shrouds, leaving all the sails torn and loose and we ourselves in manifest peril for our lives. And while we did not fail to work hard in this emergency, we first had recourse to the divine aid, and placed on the poop the banner of the holy relics, which our lady the queen gives to these great ships so that they can seek help therefrom in all their trials and tribulations, as we had done in all the past storms. And when this banner had been hoisted in position, everyone fell on their knees and prayed to it with many tears and sighs, imploring Our Lord for mercy and the pardon of our sins. Having done this, we tried everything possible to help ourselves, unpicking a hempen cable from which we made cords to take the place of shrouds and sustain the masts. We also worked at fixing a jury-sail for the foremast. And thus we lay a-hull all day, without sails, nor would any of the seamen do a hand’s turn, because as soon as they had sighted land, most of them had given themselves up for lost. And the first one was the pilot, who for his previous philosophizing now turned out to be absolutely useless, and his heart failed him and he never said a word. Quite different was the behavior of the second pilot, who was an outstanding seamen and sailor, who until the ship ran ashore and stuck fast, never lost his presence of mind nor ability to command. In this way we lay a-hull during the rest of the day, off the shore, and comforting ourselves with the daylight.

At nightfall the wind began to abate somewhat, but the sea lost nothing of its rage and fury. As soon as the wind dropped, we had a succession of violent thunderstorms in the gloaming, and then a most dark and stormy night supervened, during which time each thunderstorm left us waterlogged in the trough of the waves which devoured and battered us to pieces. While we were in this state, and completely hopeless, thinking all our previous work in vain, the father took leave of the son, and brother from brother, and the messmate from his comrade, each one asking the other’s forgiveness, everybody making it up with everyone else during the whole night to the accompaniment of shrieks and cries. Miraculously, in a night like this with such a storm, and with our snouts towards the shore in the trough of the waves, we still did not run aground. And we passed over without seeing or knowing how, several shoals half a league long, on which the sea broke most terribly, which we subsequently were hardly able to negotiate in broad daylight, serene sky, and a favorable stern breeze, in a very small ship. At dawn we anchored with one cable off the shore, comforting ourselves with the light of day, and commending ourselves to the mercy of God.

. . .

We cut away the masts to prevent the ship breaking up completely, and they floated out to sea with the yards, all mixed up with the rigging. And so this miserable, pitiful, broken and torn great ship was wrecked on this obscure and uninhabited land, on Tuesday 21 January of the year 1561.

As soon as the ship struck and began to list on the seaward side, some men, thinking that she would turn turtle and frightened of being trapped below, made themselves ready and swam ashore in the surge of the furious waves that were breaking on the island a league away. And although they were strong swimmers, twelve or thirteen of the first were dashed to pieces, and others were severely hurt and very badly injured, so that some of them subsequently died. And the loss would have been much heavier if the captain had not asserted himself and forbidden anyone to throw himself into the sea, giving them hope that with the help of God they might yet be saved. And at this moment they succeeded in launching the skiff which was on the deck, and the storm was rapidly moderating and the weather improving, as if it was no longer desirous of completely destroying us; because as it had beaten us, it now relented, and within a couple of hours was quiet and calm, as if there had never been a storm at all.

Excerpt from The Tragic History of the Sea, edited and translated by C. R. Boxer (University of Minnesota Press)

Interview with John Brian King (Photography)

Interview with John Brian King
In conversation with Gabriel H. Sanchez
From .jpg, a newsletter by Buzzfeed News

Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs by John Brian King

$30.00

Softcover, 112 pages (99 color photographs), 21 cm x 19 cm. ISBN: 9781943679119.

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Excerpt from Riviera (Photography)

Excerpt from “Riviera”
by John Brian King

Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs by John Brian King

$30.00

Softcover, 112 pages (99 color photographs), 21 cm x 19 cm. ISBN: 9781943679119.

Quantity:

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Among the [Eutropheon] restaurant’s most dedicated patrons, conversation likely turned to musings about leaving the city behind for good. The Richters knew of a certain German vegetarian hermit living about 100 miles to the east, in a hut near Palm Springs. [William] Pester must have embodied a shining ideal, a vision of what was possible should city dwellers choose to fully immerse themselves in the natural life.

The sparsely populated desert appealed to the Nature Boys, who often headed out to the arid mountains and their hidden canyons. Tahquitz Canyon was a preferred oasis, a refuge from the heat where a rocky trail led to the rarest of sights: a thin waterfall rushing over massive gray boulders into a pool. It was an ideal place to camp, or even live for several months. [Gypsy] Boots later recalled a conversation there with [eden] ahbez as they took in the calming beauty of the canyon, where red-tailed hawks carved into the clear sky. “Someday there will be a million beards,” ahbez predicted. It took nearly twenty years, but he was right.

“Hermits in the Canyons,” from Sun Seekers: The Cure of California, by Lyra Kilston.

---

Riviera documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed Riviera from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic. King depicts a city that is frozen in a visually arresting state of decline, cataloguing the totems of an absurd civilization. “I wanted to photograph the Palm Springs that I lived in and interacted with every single day,” King writes, “the beautiful, the mundane, the ugly, the hot desolate nature of Coachella Valley. I wasn’t interested in the tourism-board view of Palm Springs, of martinis by the swimming pool and candy-colored, Instagram-ready desert art installations. I was interested in the debris – architectural and natural – left behind by generations of people who lived in or visited Palm Springs to escape, to exist, to die.”

John Brian King is a photographer, filmmaker, designer, and writer. His two previous photography books — LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles, 1980-84 and Nude Reagan — were also published by Spurl Editions. His photography has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Buzzfeed, Lenscratch, Amadeus, Flavorwire, AnOther, WeHeart, L'Œil de la Photographie, Impose, KCET’s Artbound, and Yet Magazine.

Spurl Editions Editor Eva Richter in Conversation with Michael Subialka on Pirandello

Eva Richter in Conversation with Michael Subialka on Luigi Pirandello
Pirandello Society of America

Reprinted from the Pirandello Society of America online

William Weaver’s compelling translation of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, was first published in 1990 and has since gone out of print, becoming increasingly difficult to find. But in October 2018, a new press based in California, Spurl Editions, re-issued Weaver’s translation, bringing the unforgettable voice and sometimes disturbing vision of Pirandello’s protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, back to English readers again.

In November of 2018, PSA’s Michael Subialka sat down with the editor of Spurl Editions, Eva Richter, to discuss the press’s recent publication of William Weaver’s translation. You can find the rest of this conversation in the PSA journal’s recently-published 31st edition.

MS: We can’t help but point out the cover image you’ve chosen for the new edition, featuring Filippo Balbi’s painting “Testa anatomica.” Can you tell us more about what made you opt for this image?

ER: I came across this painting even before starting Spurl Editions. I thought it was beautiful, with the muted green-brown background accentuating the odd stretching men’s bodies that form the bodiless head. I thought it would make an eye-catching book cover; when I read Pirandello’s novel, it seemed to fit it perfectly. The multiple figures that make up the painted portrait call back to the novel’s theme that a person does not have one identity that is fixed in time, but rather multiple identities, based on who the person is with, where he is, how he perceives things around him, how he sees himself at that moment, and, further, the inevitable multiplicity of identities that any fictional character (such as Moscarda) takes on, based on who is reading the novel. The head itself, since it has no eyes or body, also seems somehow empty in the way that Moscarda ultimately seems to have emptied himself in the end.

MS: This connection between the image and Moscarda’s experience of multiplicity and self-dissolution seems compelling and speaks to a major theme across Pirandello’s works. In his famous essay from 1908, On Humor (L’umorismo), Pirandello argues that the self is indeed multiple and changing and that we need to be able to see ourselves from outside in order to jar ourselves out of our static self-conception toward a more vital one – much in the way that Moscarda’s journey of self-rediscovery begins with his estranged experience of seeing his own face. I think lots of us can probably relate to seeing ourselves in the mirror and feeling detached, or hearing someone else’s description of us and not recognizing ourselves. Do you think we’re meant to relate to this experience, or is Pirandello drawing something more like a limit case, something that we recognize but that also far exceeds our own, usual experiences?

ER: I agree that Pirandello is drawing something like a limit case, which is bound to exceed our own experiences. It is interesting to me that the narrative expressly acknowledges this—there are multiple instances where Moscarda remarks that although his thought processes may seem familiar to any reader, there is something essentially different about where Moscarda’s thoughts are taking him. Maybe, in this way, the reader is meant to become more alienated from him/herself through reading the novel. Those thoughts that the reader has, over many years, become accustomed to now seem strange, grotesque, and extreme, when viewed through the refracted lens of this narrative. The reader is forced to look at their own seemingly benign self-reflection as only the half-formed beginning of an idea that must lead to a total revolution of the self.

MS: This idea of a total revolution of the self speaks to what you mentioned before about Moscarda ending up “empty” by the end of the novel. Can you say more about that? Do you think that the ecstatic kind of immersion that he experiences with nature in the closing part of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand should be taken seriously, or do you think he has lost his mind? And, in turn, do you think this novel is ultimately positive or negative or neither or both?

ER: I think that those ideas or interpretations exist in an interesting tension with one another. To me, the notion that Moscarda is “empty” by the end of the novel has to do with the narrative’s ultimate rejection of all those things that make a typical fictional character a “character.” Moscarda rejects language, discourse, and human relationships for the “wordless” sphere of nature. This may be a positive development, especially because he has gone past the more solipsistic thoughts that obsessed him in the beginning—but, of course, there is also something a little sickening in Moscarda’s withdrawal. And, because Moscarda’s withdrawal marks the end of the novel, it is like witnessing this character’s death.

MS: Maybe since we’re talking about the disappearance of the novel’s protagonist, now is a good time to change topic and ask a bit more about the specific translation and some of its nuts and bolts. For example, we noticed that you thank Bard College for its support of the publication. Could you say more about their involvement?

ER: William Weaver, who translated One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, as well as other works by Pirandello, was a professor of literature at Bard College for many years. Bard College licensed the rights to publish his excellent translation to us.

MS: Weaver’s translations of Pirandello and other Italian authors are by now “classics,” and he played a huge role in helping to bring modern Italian literature to English-language audiences. Are there any aspects of his rendering of this novel that you particularly like or find compelling, or any things that you would have liked to see done differently?

ER: I think Mr. Weaver did a wonderful job with this translation, as well as with his translation of The Late Mattia Pascal. His use of modern, generally conversational vocabulary helps to imbue Moscarda with a personality that feels genuine; conversely, Mr. Weaver’s use of syntactically complex sentences and structures conveys that sense of an increasingly vertiginous philosophical analysis.

MS: Vertiginous is such a good way of describing the feeling of the novel’s conceptual development, and it reminds us of Pirandello’s earlier novel, The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904), which Weaver also translated into English. That novel begins with a “philosophical” preface in which the narrator depicts the world spinning in the void of space, making its inhabitants lurch here and there, pointlessly, until they die. A somewhat bleak, existentialist kind of outlook. The Late Mattia Pascal is still in print, recently re-released in the New York Review Books series of Italian titles. But of course many of Pirandello’s works are no longer available – or were never available – in English. Honestly, we find it somewhat baffling that despite his international fame, his Nobel Prize, and everything else, Pirandello’s works have still not been completely translated into English. As someone in the business, we wonder if you have any thoughts about what kinds of obstacles might have held that process up. Is this a specifically “American” problem (there is, for example, a “complete works” translation in German, which was edited by the prolific Pirandello scholar Michael Rössner)?

ER: We find it baffling as well! Yet this seems to be a fairly widespread issue in American publishing. In other countries (such as Germany, France, etc.), you regularly see the complete translated works of an author published by the same publisher. I am not sure if there is something about the American market that discourages this kind of thing, if maybe American readers just want to read the “one classic,” instead of a writer’s full life’s work. Hopefully translators and publishers will continue to bring Luigi Pirandello’s works into English, so that we non-Italian readers can have access to the range of his fascinating work.

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One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, by Luigi Pirandello

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A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy (Non-Fiction)

A Journey Round My Skull
Frigyes Karinthy

Frigyes Karinthy

The mirror opposite me seemed to move. Not more than an inch or two, then it hung still. In itself, this would never have worried me. It might have been a mere hallucination, like the roaring trains. But what was happening now?

What was this—queer feeling—coming over me? The queerest thing was that—I didn’t know what was queer. Perhaps there was nothing else queer about it. Yet I was conscious of something I had never known before, or rather I missed something I had been accustomed to since I was first conscious of being alive, though I had never paid much heed to it. I had no headache nor pain of any kind, I heard no trains, my heart was perfectly normal. And yet…

And yet everything, myself included, seemed to have lost its grip on reality. The tables remained in their usual places, two men were just walking across the café, and in front of me I saw the familiar water-jug and match-box. Yet in some eerie and alarming way they had all become accidental, as if they happened to be where they were purely by chance, and might just as well be anywhere else. But—and this was the most incredible of all—I did not feel certain I was there myself, or that the man sitting there was I. There seemed no reason why the water-jug should not be sitting in my place on the seat, and I standing on the tray. And now the whole box of tricks was starting to roll about, as if the floor underneath it had given way. I wanted to cling on to something. But what was there to cling to? Not the table or the seat, for they, too, were rocking about like everything else. There wasn’t a fixed point anywhere…. Unless, perhaps, I could find one in my own head. If I could catch hold of a single image or memory or association that would help me to recognize myself. Or even a word might do. “There’s something wrong,” I stammered convulsively. “Ss-something—wr-wrong….” And then I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It had gone as white as chalk. Good God, then…!

“A stroke!” The words flashed through my mind. I must have burst a blood vessel somewhere. At once came the realization that I had pictured it otherwise. I had always heard and, parrot-like, had repeated that a sudden death was infinitely easier and better than a long, painful illness. One moment and all is over—as cleanly as a man shot down. I did not know what I was talking about. Although the sensation lasted only a moment, that moment seemed longer than my whole previous lifetime. I was still only half-way through it, and the agony of waiting for its second half seemed more ghastly than the suspense of a prisoner who is to die at dawn. Men are not good at measuring time. They have only one standard—their tempo of experience, as in Wells’s Time Machine, where six months were compressed into a minute by manipulating the speed of impressions.

No one could possibly call such a death desirable, or prefer it to pain. Though I had no pain whatever, I felt that there could not be any tortures in comparison with which it would not be worse. Outside, the sun was shining and I could see its light, but in my head everything suddenly went dark. I had only one idea now. By hook or by crook, I must hang on and keep above water during the second half of that moment. If I failed, the next instant would see me no longer captain of the ship. No more should I be in command of the myriads of tiny atoms, cells and organs over which I had been king since my birth. All that rebellious multitude, having shaken off my despotic rule, would become an inert mass again and would return to its effortless, natural position under the sway of gravity. In plain English, I should collapse on the floor. That miserable rag, my body, being only common matter, would soon adjust itself, but what was to become of me, the lost rules of the empire? It was a ghastly moment—surely worse than the tortures of the Inquisition, I said to myself, as I began slowly to recover. This time it had not been a stroke, but I was the poorer by one more illusion. Never again should I long for a sudden death….

The experience had been an appalling one. Yet, on thinking it over, I asked myself if this was only because I had no real faith to uphold me? I had had a ghastly, giddy sensation that it was only here, on this side, that I could keep my hold. If that began to give, I should be helpless. Never could I throw my line on to the farther shore. Out yonder I saw nothing. And yet this was not all. I felt that something else had let me down. Past and future, as I had imagined them, did not exist. Reality was ever present. The indivisible moment was reality—the one moment unique and eternal. The moment that exists could neither be long nor short—it was the only possible mode of being. And from this magic circle which is the prison of the moment no escape was possible. When it came the moment of my death would be as immediate as that in which I was now struggling to pull myself together. It, too, would occur in the present and not at some time in the future, as I had always assured myself for my greater peace of mind. The future, save as a figure of speech, did not exist.

The doctor whom I called to consult shortly afterwards did not even examine me. Before I could describe half my symptoms he lifted his hand. “My dear fellow, you’ve neither aural catarrh nor have you had a stroke. And, for the time being, we needn’t worry about your psycho-analyst friend either. Nicotine poisoning, that’s what’s the matter with you.” His orders were for me to leave off smoking at once.

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An excerpt from A Journey Round My Skull, by Frigyes Karinthy, translated from Hungarian by Vernon Duckworth Barker.

Excerpt from In the Midst of Things (Photograph)

Excerpt from “In the Midst of things”
by Sarah Hiatt

In the Midst of Things by Sarah Hiatt

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Photographer Sarah Hiatt captures a side of adolescence that we only murkily remember: a feeling of weariness with the present moment, terror of the future, the awkwardness of being in between. Over the course of six years, Hiatt photographed her younger niece and nephews around their home as they grew up in the small town of Joplin, Missouri, for her series In the Midst of Things. The images serve as a coming-of-age story, a visual narrative created through their personal experiences and shaped by the photographer’s struggles with guilt, loss, and loneliness. As their aunt, Hiatt was able to depict the formation of memories and the sad passage of time in a uniquely intimate way.

Hiatt writes, “The photographs of my niece and nephews reflect the formation of identity, and the relationship the children have to one another, to their environment, to their bodies, and to me. They live in a rural, predominantly white area of the Ozarks. In this series, they are often seen in quiet spaces, isolated and surrounded by darkness. Their internal lives emerge through subtle gesture and expression. Their home seems a safe space as identities and relationships are built and nurtured within a domestic, womb-like environment. Children often physically and emotionally mature beyond those boundaries. Time extends while pushing us forward, upward, and out.”

As a native of the Ozarks, Hiatt brings a nuanced and honest perspective on rural America that is so often lacking in contemporary photography. In the stillness of Hiatt’s images, becoming an adult means growing out of, or growing into, one’s family, religion, society, gender role, and place. Hiatt’s photographs ask: Do we inevitably accept this place, these obligations, this repetition? Do we reject these constraints? Would anyone know the difference?

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Sarah Hiatt earned her BFA from Missouri State University, and her MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Hiatt currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.

Excerpt from “Death to the Fascist Insect” (Non-Fiction)

Excerpt from “Death to the Fascist Insect”
The Symbionese Liberation Army
Edited by John Brian King

IN THE BELLY OF THE FASCIST BEAST
APRIL 3, 1974

[transcript of audio tape]

[a Polaroid photograph of Patricia Hearst posing as “Tania” with a gun in front of the SLA flag is enclosed with the tape]

the voice of Patricia Hearst (Tania) 

To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.

I would like to begin this statement by informing the public that I wrote what I am about to say. It’s what I feel. I have never been forced to say anything on any tape. Nor have I been brain­washed, drugged, tortured, hypnotized, or in any way confused. As George Jackson wrote, “It’s me, the way I want it, the way I see it.”

Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to sup­posedly secure my safety. The People in Need giveaway was a sham. You attempted to deceive the people, the SLA, and me in statements about your concern for myself and the people. You were playing games, stalling for time, time which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements which guarded me. You continued to report that you did everything in your power to pave the way for negotiations for my release. I hate to believe that you could have been so unimagi­native as not to have even considered getting Little and Remiro released on bail.

While it was repeatedly stated that my conditions would at all times correspond with those of the captured soldiers, when your own lawyer went to inspect the hole at San Quentin, he approved the deplorable conditions there, another move which potentially jeopardized my safety. My mother’s acceptance of the appointment to a second term as a UC regent, as you well knew, would have caused my immediate execution had the SLA been less than together about their political goals. Your actions have taught me a great lesson, and in a strange kind of way, I’m grateful to you.

Steven, I know that you are beginning to realize that there is no such thing as neutrality in time of war. There can be no com­promise, as your experience with the FBI must have shown you. You have been harassed by the FBI because of your supposed connections with so-called radicals, and some people have even gone so far as to suggest that I arranged my own arrest. We both know what really came down that Monday night, but you don’t know what’s happened since then. I’ve changed, grown. I’ve be­come conscious and can never go back to the life we led before. What I’m saying may seem cold to you and to my old friends, but love doesn’t mean the same thing to me anymore. My love has expanded as a result of my experiences to embrace all peo­ple. It’s grown into an unselfish love for my comrades here, in prison, and on the streets. A love that comes from the knowledge that “no one is free until we are all free.” While I wish that you could be a comrade, I don’t expect it. All I expect is that you try to understand the changes I’ve gone through.

I have been given the choice of one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all op­pressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight. One thing which I have learned is that the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power in order to maintain their position of control over the masses, even if this means the sacrifice of one of their own. It should be obvious that people who don’t even care about their own children couldn’t possibly care about anyone else’s children. The things which are precious to these people are their money and power, and they will never willingly surrender either. People should not have to humiliate themselves by standing in lines in order to be fed, nor should they have to live in fear for their lives and the lives of their children, as Tyrone Guyton’s mother will sadly attest to.

Dad, you said that you were concerned with my life, and you also said that you were concerned with the life and interests of all oppressed people in this country, but you are a liar in both areas and, as a member of the ruling class, I know for sure that yours and Mom’s interests are never the interests of the people. Dad, you said that you would see about getting more job oppor­tunities for the people, but why haven’t you warned the people what’s going to happen to them, that actually the few jobs they still have will be taken away?

You, a corporate liar, of course will say that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I ask you then to prove it, tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do, warn black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman, and child. If you’re so interested in the people, why don’t you tell them what the energy crisis really is. Tell them how it’s nothing more than a manufactured strategy, a way of hiding industry’s real intentions. Tell the people that the energy crisis is nothing more than a means to get public approval for a massive program to build nuclear power plants all over the nation.

Tell the people that the entire corporate state is, with the aid of this massive power supply, about to totally automate the entire industrial state, to the point that in the next five years all that will be needed will be a small class of button pushers. Tell the people, Dad, that all of the lower class and at least half of the middle class will be unemployed in the next three years, and that the removal of expendable excess, the removal of unneeded peo­ple, has already started. I want you to tell the people the truth. Tell them how the law-and-order programs are just a means to remove so-called violent, meaning aware, individuals from the community in order to facilitate the controlled removal of unneeded labor forces from this country, in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of the Jews from Germany.

I should have known that if you and the rest of the corporate state were willing to do this to millions of people to maintain power and to serve your needs, you would also kill me if nec­essary to serve those same needs. How long will it take before white people in this country understand that whatever happens to a black child happens sooner or later to a white child? How long will it be before we all understand that we must fight for our freedom?

I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia for the people of Bolivia. I embrace the name with the determination to continue fighting with her spirit. There is no victory in half-assed attempts at revolution. I know Tania dedicated her life to the people, fighting with total dedication and an intense desire to learn, which I will contin­ue in the oppressed American people’s revolution. All colors of string in the web of humanity yearn for freedom!

Osceola and Bo, even though we’ve never met, I feel like I know you. Timing brought me to you and I’m fighting with your freedom and the freedom of all prisoners in mind. In the stren­uous jogs that life takes, you are pillars of strength to me. If I’m feeling down, I think of you, of where you are and why you are there, and my determination grows stronger. It’s good to see that your spirits are so high in spite of the terrible conditions. Even though you aren’t here, you are with other strong comrades, and the three of us are learning together, I in an environment of love and you in one of hate, in the belly of the fascist beast. We have grown closer to the people and become stronger through our experiences. I have learned how vicious the pig really is, and our comrades are teaching me to attack with even greater vicious­ness, in the knowledge that the people will win. I send greetings, to Death Row Jeff, Al Taylor, and Raymond Scott [prisoners]. Your concern for my safety is matched by my concern for yours. We share a common goal as revolutionaries knowing that com­rade George lives.

It is in the spirit of Tania that I say, “Patria o muerte, venceremos.”

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Death to the Fascist Insect is a compilation of the writings and transcribed recordings of the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973–75), a radical left-wing group based in the Bay Area of California. This publication chronicles the militant, if half-baked, political theories that inspired the SLA, as well as the ways that the SLA used violence and manipulation of the media to further the group’s goal of provoking armed revolution from the underground.

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Photography by Julian Lucas

Photography by Julian Lucas

From Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes:

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents. One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discovery in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a “detective” anguish (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went to the photographer’s show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself.

No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. The noeme of language is perhaps this impotence, or, to put it positively: language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in reverse: like Cassandra, but eyes fixed on the past, Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence. Impotent with regard to general ideas (to fiction), its force is nonetheless superior to everything the human mind can or can have conceived to assure us of reality—but also this reality is never anything but a contingency (“so much, no more”).

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Julian Lucas (b. 1974, Chicago) is an American photographer living in Los Angeles who has been photographing since the mid ’90s. Julian became interested in photography while studying sociology at Portland State University. His photographic works range from the fine art nude to an exploration of human behavior and challenging social norms. Julian is an inquisitive viewer and incisive photographer of the human condition. Fascinated by identities that exist within society, his portraits attempt to define an innocence of personalities. His most recent study, Apt #31, chronicles everyday life within an intimate interior of a one-bedroom apartment. The photographs featured here are from his series “Vanglorious” and “The Color of Deficiency.” Visit his website here.

St. John of Kuttenberg (Short Story)

St. John of Kuttenberg
Ryan Napier

His father owned a silver mine in Kuttenberg. John was the second son—a good, obedient child. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and John studied law at the University of Prague.

One Christmas, he returned to Kuttenberg to celebrate with his family. As always, there was a great feast—rabbit and venison, rich sauces, pastries and pies, barrels of wine. Before the meal, John’s father rose and prayed, thanking God for the feast and for their wealth. “We offer God our prayers,” said his father, “and in return, he blesses us. Our great faith is greatly rewarded.”

The dishes were passed, and the barrels of wine were tapped, but John did not eat or drink. The prayer had turned his stomach. For his father, John realized, faith was just another transaction, no different than a bargain with the butcher or the wine merchant: I pray to you, and you bless me. This was no faith at all.

That night, John dreamed that he was at an enormous feast, chained to his chair. He ate and ate until he was sick, but the feast would not end. Dishes were stacked on dishes, sauces dripped and congealed, flies buzzed and swarmed—and still the food kept coming. John woke before dawn, slipped out of the house, and rode back to Prague.

He tried to resume his studies, but the nightmare tortured him. Night after night, he sat at the endless feast. He began to read the gospels, and when he found Christ’s words to the rich young man—“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”—he feared for his soul.

Soon, he understood what he had to do. He wanted a pure faith—faith for its own sake, not for any benefit or reward. But only if his faith gave him nothing could he know that he truly believed. And so he decided to renounce the world.

He explained his decision in a long letter to his father, and his father replied, saying that if John became a monk, he would lose his inheritance. John was glad. In August, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, he joined the Cistercian brotherhood at Sedlec Abbey.

The brothers lived simply, tilling their fields and brewing their ale. Shoulder to shoulder with them, John sowed and plowed and prayed, and his soft white hands grew cracked and brown. He loved his life at the abbey—the dignity of the work, the satisfaction of his sweat, the low chants of the evensong, the fellowship with his brothers. He had renounced the world, and he was happy.

But as the years passed, he began to worry. If he was happy, how could he know if his faith was pure? He had renounced the world, but did that mean that he loved God? Perhaps he only loved life at the monastery. Had he made his own exchange, sordid as his father’s, trading earthly riches for this happiness?

The nightmares returned. The endless feast piled higher and higher.

John knew what he had to do. It was more painful to him than the break with his father, but that was how he knew it was right. After seven years, he left Sedlec Abbey.

With only the white robe on his back, he wandered east, into the forest. These were the lands of Count Czernin, famous for their white deer. John lived there alone, sleeping in the mud beside the river, eating acorns and grass.

He found himself thinking about the abbey, so he broke a branch from a wild rose bush and wrapped it around his thigh, and the thorns tore his flesh. Every morning, he twisted the branch to keep the wound from healing. He thought of little but his pain, and his faith became purer and purer.

The summer ended, and the leaves fell from the trees, and John grew weak and gaunt. His cheeks sank; his eyes bulged; his teeth dropped from his mouth one by one. Soon, his thigh was too thin for the circle of thorns; he twisted it tighter. The white deer no longer fled from him: he no longer seemed to be a living thing.

On New Year’s Day, the forest shone with frost. Count Czernin offered shelter in his castle, but John refused. He dug a hole in the snow-bank near the frozen river and pulled his robe around his body. The blood from his thigh stopped flowing, and the tips of his fingers turned black. He had never been more miserable, and he thanked God.

The sun set, and the wind screamed, and John wondered if he would survive the night. In a few hours, he might be in paradise.

At that thought, his soul sank. Paradise—that would be the reward for his faith. All his suffering would be exchanged for eternal bliss. It was yet another transaction. It had been there all along, tainting his faith, and he had not seen it.

John crawled out of his hole and put his forehead to the snowy earth. The tears froze on his cheeks. A prayer began to form in him: he feared it, but he knew that he had to pray it.

He shut his eyes and asked God to exclude him from paradise. For the purity of his faith, he renounced heaven.

He lay there for a long time. A strange warmth suffused him. Now that he had made his prayer, he was no longer afraid. He would be tortured forever in hell, but he was satisfied. It was finished. His faith could not be purer.

Finally, he raised his head, and there before him was Christ. The savior stood knee-deep in the snow.

“O Lord,” cried John, “see your servant! I have given up everything for your sake.”

But Christ frowned.

“What else can I give?” asked John. “I have renounced it all—even heaven! I have made my faith pure.”

“You must give up even that.”

Christ lifted John from the ground, untwisted the branch from his thigh, and kissed the black flesh of the wound. John fainted, and when he woke, the wound was closed, and he was alone. But a white stag stood on the opposite bank of the river. John crossed the ice and followed the stag to the edge of the forest. It began to run, and he lost it in a blinding field of snow.

On a hill, far in the distance, was Sedlec Abbey. John returned and lived a long life there among the brothers, content that God had taken everything from him.

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Ryan Napier is the author of Four Stories about the Human Face (Bull City Press, 2018). His stories have appeared in Entropy, Queen Mob's Tea House, minor literature[s], and others. He lives in Massachusetts. Twitter: @ryanlnapier – Website: https://ryannapier.net/

I Will Follow In Your Tracks by Laure Pubert (Photography)

I Will Follow in Your Tracks
Laure Pubert

When I left for Norway.

It was a quest.

An absence. The possibility of a link that might not have disappeared.

Leaving in search of someone whose shadow I had glimpsed in a novel – The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas.

This journey met an urgent need: to hold on to the trace of a possible encounter inspired by a fictional character.

I had to understand the loneliness of this lost soul.

A voiceless, faceless, ageless man.

I visited his land.

I searched for him in my investigations of what I saw. Provoking encounters he might have had, trailing furtive incarnations. Signs.

Fragments of reality displaced by a meeting or a place, gradually forming the sediments of a story behind the story, the tipping point of a shared memory.

— Laure Pubert

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Laure Pubert is a photographer based in Paris. She started out as a public international law researcher before devoting herself to photography full-time in 2014, driven by the desire to find her place through her creative work. Her Book Je marcherai sur tes traces (I will follow in your tracks) was published by Editions Arnaud Bizalion in June 2018. Her work was recently exhibited at Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau in France and has been included in group exhibitions and slideshows. You can buy her book here and visit her website here.

Concerning My Health by Girolamo Cardano (Non-Fiction)

Concerning My Health
Girolamo Cardano
An excerpt from The Book of My Life

My bodily state was infirm in many respects: by nature; as the result of several cases of disease; and in the symptoms of weakness which displayed themselves.

My head is afflicted with congenital discharges coming at times from the stomach, at times from the chest, to such an extent that even when I consider myself in the best of health, I suffer with a cough and hoarseness. When this discharge is from the stomach, it is apt to bring on a dysentery and a distaste for food. More than once I believed I had had a touch of poison, but I shortly and unexpectedly recovered.

Another trouble was a catarrh or rheum of the teeth, through the effects of which I began to lose my teeth, several at a time, from the year 1563 on. Before that I had lost but one or two. Now I have fourteen good teeth and one which is rather weak; but it will last a long time, I think, for it still does its share.

Indigestion, moreover, and a stomach not any too strong were my lot. From my seventy-second year, whenever I had eaten something more than usual, or had drunk too much, or had eaten between meals, or eaten anything not especially wholesome, I began to feel ill. I have set forth a remedy for the foregoing in the second book of my treatise On Guarding the Health.

In my youth I was troubled with congenital palpitation of the heart, of which I was absolutely cured by medical skill. I had hemorrhoids, also, and the gout, from which I was so nearly freed that I was more frequently in the habit of trying to call it back when it was not present, than of getting rid of it when I had it.

I ignored a rupture, another weakness, in its early stages; but later, from my sixty-second year on, I greatly regretted that I had not taken care of it, especially since I knew it to be an inheritance from my father. In the case of this rupture, something worthy of note occurred: the hernia had started from either side, and although it was neglected on the left side, was eventually healed completely in that part by natural processes. The right side, more carefully treated with ligatures and other attentions, grew worse. A cutaneous itching annoyed me constantly, now in this part, now in that.

In 1536 I was overtaken with — it scarcely seems credible — an extraordinary discharge of urine; and although for nearly forty years I have been afflicted with this same trouble, giving from sixty to one hundred ounces in a single day, I live well. Neither do I lose weight — that I wear the same rings is evidence of this; nor do I thirst inordinately. Many others, seized that same year by a similar disease, and who did not seek a remedy, held out much longer than those who sought medical aid.

The tenth of these infirmities is an annual period of sleeplessness lasting about eight days. These spells come in the spring, in the summer, in the autumn, and in the winter; so that almost a whole month, rarely less, is spent yearly, and sometimes two. This I am wont to cure by abstaining from certain kinds of food, especially heavy food, but I do not diminish the quality. This insomnia has never missed a year.

Several actual cases of sickness overtook me during my life. In the second month of my life I had the plague. The next serious illness occurred in or about my eighteenth year; I do not recall the exact date, other than that it happened in the month of August. I went almost three days without food, and spent the time wandering about the outskirts of the town, and through the gardens. When I returned home at nightfall, I pretended that I had dined at the home of my father’s friend Agostino Lanizario. How much water I drank in those three whole days I cannot truthfully say. On the last day, because I was not able to sleep, my heart palpitated wildly and the fever raged. I seemed to be on the bed of Asclepiades in which I was incessantly swung upward and downward until I thought I should perish in the night. When at length I slept, a carbuncle, which covered the upper false rib of my right side, broke, and from it, at first, there was a scanty black discharge. Luckily, owing to a dose of my father’s prescription which I swallowed four times a day, such a copious sweat broke out upon me that it drenched the bed and dripped down from the boards to the floor.

In my twenty-seventh year I was taken with the tertian fever. On the fourth day I was delirious, and on the seventh as well; on that day, also, I began to recover. Gout attacked me when I was at Pavia in my forty-fourth year, and when I was fifty-five I was troubled with daily fevers for forty days, at the crisis of which I was relieved of one hundred and twenty ounces of urine on October 13, 1555. In 1559, the year I returned to Pavia, I was taken with colic pains for two days.

The symptoms of weakness which attended my state of health were varied. To begin with, from my seventh year until I was almost twelve, I used to rise at night and cry out vaguely, and if my mother and my aunt, between whom I used to sleep, had not held me I often should have plunged out of bed. Likewise, my heart was wont to throb violently, but calmed down soon under the pressure of my hand. To this was due the peculiarity of my breathing. Until I was eighteen, if I went out in the wind, particularly a cold wind, I was not able to breathe; but if I held my breath as soon as I became aware of the difficulty, normal respiration was quickly restored. During the same period, from the hour of retirement until midnight I was never warm from my knees down. This led my mother, and others as well, to say that I would not live very long. On some nights, however, when I had warmed up, I became entirely drenched with a sweat so abundant and hot that those who were told of it could scarcely believe it.

When I was twenty-seven, I took double tertian fever, which broke on the seventh day. Later, I had daily fever for forty days when I was fifty-four years old.

In November of my fifty-sixth year, from drinking a mild draught of squill wine, I was taken with dysuria, very acute in form. First I fasted thirty-four hours; later, twenty more. I took some drops of pine gum and cured myself.

It was my custom — and a habit which amazed many — when I had no other excuse for a malady, to seek one, as I have said, from my gout. And for this reason I frequently put myself in the way of conditions likely to induce a certain distress — excepting only that I shunned insomnia as much as I could — because I considered that pleasure consisted in relief following severe pain. If, therefore, I brought on pain, it could easily be allayed. I have discovered, by experience, that I cannot be long without bodily pain, for if once that circumstance arises, a certain mental anguish overcomes me, so grievous that nothing could be more distressing. Bodily pain, or the cause of bodily distress — in which there is no disgrace — is but a minor evil. Accordingly I have hit upon a plan of biting my lips, of twisting my fingers, of pinching the skin of the tender muscles of my left arm until the tears come. Under the protection of this self-chastisement I live without disgracing myself.

I am by nature afraid of high places, even though they are extensive; also, of places where there is any report of mad dogs having been seen.

At times I have been tormented by a tragic passion so heroic that I planned to commit suicide. I suspect that this has happened to others also, although they do not refer to it in their books.

Finally, in my boyhood, I was afflicted for about two years with indications of cancer. There appeared, by chance, a start upon the left nipple. The swelling was red, dark, hard, and eating. Some swollen veins seemed to remove this toward my young manhood, and in that period a palpitation of the heart — before mentioned — succeeded the varices. From this cancerous growth came blood-blisters, full of blood, and an itching and foulness of the skin; and subsequently I was healed, contrary to all hope of any relief, by a natural sloughing of the mass of diseased skin, although I had removed some of the affections by means of medication.

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Translated from Italian by Jean Stoner. Available from the New York Review of Books.

Atomic Rooms by Antonio Faccilongo (Photography)

Atomic Rooms
Antonio Faccilongo

Mao, obsessed with the possibility of a nuclear attack, made a law on housing policy. When the builder wanted to build new buildings, they also had to build large anti-atomic shelters where people could live for months – that meant basements had to be fitted out with electricity, plumbing, and sewer pipes.

A half-century after the buildings’ construction began, parts of this underground city in Beijing have been converted into living quarters; until 2010, it was perfectly legal to live in these spaces. In fact, people are still living in these places, but in recent years some of these have become activity centers where people share convivial moments.

Usually migrant workers, they can't afford private housing and, without the official resident permit known as the “hukou,” they have no access to low-cost government housing, so they find themselves living underground. Estimates suggest there may be more than one million people living underneath the Chinese capital. —Antonio Faccilongo

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Antonio Faccilongo is an Italian documentary photographer based in Rome. After studying communication, he obtained a Master’s in Photojournalism. He then focused his attention on Asia and the Middle East, principally on Israel and Palestine, covering social, political, and cultural issues. His long-term projects have been exhibited internationally at numerous shows and festivals, including Les Rencontres d’Arles and the Buenos Aires Biennial, as well as screened at Visa pour l'image Perpignan and included in the global campaign #WomenMatter. Visit his website here.