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Monthly Dispatch #17 — October 2024
A letter from the editor[s]
Letters have been circulating the last week or so. One laudable — to which you can add your name here —, the other cowardly, disingenuous, shaming.
Setting out here then to write our own little missive, nattering blithely about any other topic seemed unequal to the context.
It’s been 390-odd days and 75 years. There is little more one can do now than find ways to offer support, and little more we can say — and never stop affirming — than our love for and solidarity with the people of Lebanon and Palestine.
The Editor[s]
PARIS III: Earl Grey (Celestial Seasonings) — Charles March III
Charles J. March III is a field medic veteran currently living in California. His work has been put out by Atlas Obscura, datura, Misery Tourism, RIC Journal, The Babel Tower Notice Board, Overground Underground, Inverted Syntax, The New Post-literate, Expat Press, etc. More can be found at LinkedIn & SoundCloud.
PARIS IV: History of Lying — Mantra Mukim
“Passage Brady is an interesting experiment in lying. Like every other arcade in Paris, Brady spills over two different streets on either side: 22 Boulevard de Strasbourg and 43 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. Depending on which the side of the arcade one lives, one quickly starts believing that side to offer the one true opening into the arcade …”
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist based in Paris. His recent works have appeared in Georgia Review, Datableed, Spamzine, Almost Island, Poetry Review, and Rialto. His debut poetry collection, Reserve, will come out in 2025.
minor [i]ncident 2024
We held an event …
Red Marble Interplanetary Space Institute Archival Department – Vol. I – Rogue Satellite Transmissions — Daniel Beauregard
Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in tragickal, the Action Books Blog, ergot, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He’s the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry and his full-length collection, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics. Daniel’s existential horror novel Lord of Chaos is available from Erratum Press. Funeralopolis, his first collection of short stories will be available from Orbis Tertius Press in fall 2024. He can be reached @666ICECREAM
Baba Yaga Bi-Square — Corina Bardoff
“The bar stood on the outskirts, a gatehouse before things grew really strange, stood on its chicken legs, and then crouched to admit the Writer …”
Corina Bardoff is a writer and librarian currently living in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Exacting Clam, Storm Cellar, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @causeatiger
The Assassination of Enoch Soames by the Coward Eustace Tilley — Eric Williams
“Athanasius Kircher analogized the Earth with the human body — in his great work, Mundus Subterraneus, he filled the earth with veins of fire, arteries of water, and great gusting lungs. In his suppressed work, Mundus Tenebreus (originally published in a very limited edition in Amsterdam before being placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by Pope Clement X in 1670), Kircher took his analogy further, giving the earth a mind, a will, and a voice …”
Eric Williams lives on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. His collection of original weird fiction, Toadstones (2022) is available from Malarkey Books, and he has selected and edited a collection of the fiction-in-translation that appeared in the early 20th Century pulp magazine Weird Tales, titled Night Fears (Paradise Editions, 2023). Twitter: @Geo_Liminal
Gabrielle Wittkop: The Enigma of the Tiger — Nicole Caligaris (tr. Tobias Ryan)
“I intend here to pursue a couple of questions, taking up more attentively aspects of Gabrielle Wittkop’s writings liable to open avenues of research, and which offer an occasion to explain the extent to which I find her writing indispensable in a period bolted into its unthinking principles, of books for likes and smileys, and the literature of good causes offering redemption of all kinds …”
Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002), self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, was a writer and translator whose remarkable series of novels and travelogues are laced with sardonic humour and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, decay, disease, and decrepitude. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972. She committed suicide aged 82, following a lung cancer diagnosis.
Nicole Caligaris is a writer who has published numerous novels with Mercure de France, Éditions Verticales, Le Nouvel Attila and elsewhere, since she debuted in 1997 with La Scie patriotique. Her most recent novel, Carnivale, was published by Verticales in 2021. She also teaches on the Master Lettres et Création littéraire programme at L’Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen.
Tobias Ryan is an English teacher and translator, based in Paris. Twitter: @tobiasvryan
Taking It — Bradley David
“I don’t want to hear it. Don’t want to write it, nor read it. I’m tired of bodies as the tough meat of easy prey. Don’t want to describe how my insecurity has been insidious and debilitating, strangely motivating …”
Bradley David‘s poetry, fiction, essays, and genre-blending works appear in Terrain, Allium, Identity Theory, The Los Angeles Review and numerous other publications. Pieces have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies. He earned his master’s in social work and is interested in the intersection of creative expression, trauma, and mental state. www.bradley-david.com
Morisot Making Me Sincere — Micaela Brinsley
“I’m looking for astonishment, but I’m landing on contradictions …”
Micaela Brinsley is a Tokyo-born writer, editor, and independent researcher of art and performance. Recent work can be found in Tenement Press, Strings Magazine, Antiphony Journal, Horizon Magazine, and Asymptote. She writes ekphrastic essays about women artists of the surrealistic and abstract periods for A Women’s Thing and is the co-editor-in-chief of the arts and literary magazine, La Piccioletta Barca. She lives in Buenos Aires. Online she can be found on IG at @mic_brinsley or at her website micaelabrinsley.my.canva.site
retrocede — Michael McAloran
“…in silence of/ shadow bound by the never having been other than the slash-mark intent of never having been or otherwise/ tidal as blood stone cold as the reflect of rat as the pupils glaze over given to stitch the skin of it where in darkness the malign is a clarity of null a speech …”
Michael Mc Aloran is the author of over 40 titles of prose poetry, poetry, aphorisms, also a few art books & two plays. He has been published in book form by Editions du Cygne, Erratum Press, Oneiros Books, Incunabula Media, Infinity Land Press, Veer Books, VoidFront Press, amongst others. He was born in Belfast in 1976 & lives in Ireland. His blog can be found here & some of his artwork can be found here.
“Weird Tales continues to dominate pop culture to this day; Lovecraft, horror, science fiction, comics, those people all have Weird Tales in their DNA.”: An Interview with Eric Williams — Cristina Politano
Eric Williams is a writer from Houston, Texas, who recently took on the formidable task of curating the most exemplary among several decades’ worth of short stories from the pulp magazine Weird Tales, an American publication that specialized in horror and fantasy fiction from 1923 until 1954. The fruits of his labor are compiled in Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation, a collection of short stories that draws heavily from the nineteenth-century European storytelling tradition and features tales from canonical writers like Honoré de Balzac and Ivan Turgenev. I sat down with Eric Williams to discuss Night Fears, the etymology of the term “weird,” and the enduring appeal that nineteenth-century European literary luminaries hold for contemporary Weird Fiction writers.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter: @monalisavitti
Querido Genet — Lara Alonso Corona
“Querido Jean Genet,
Te conocí por primera vez a través de la saliva el hermoso rostro de un muchacho a quien sus compañeros (¿bullies? ¿amantes? ¿redentores ángeles de crueldad?) bañaban en escupitajos …”
Lara Alonso Corona es un escritore queer del norte de España. Ha estudiado Cine y TV antes de tomar la decisión de escribir en un segundo idioma e irse a vivir a Londres. Su ficción ha sido publicada en varios lugares como Literary Orphans, Whiskey Island, Betty Fedora y la antología de Pilot Press sobre enfermedad queer, entre otros. Es editor de reseña para la revista literaria minor literature[s]. Ahora vive en Madrid. Twitter: @lalonsocorona
Normal/Hunger (part 1) — Tomoé Hill [13/09/19]
“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.
My hunger is larger than my heart.
Larger than—to exceed: ‘to go beyond what is allowed’, says the dictionary. What is allowed in hunger? I have asked myself this since I was young …”
Tomoé Hill’s work has appeared in such publications as Socrates on the Beach, Exacting Clam, and The London Magazine, as well as the anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University), and Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health (Dodo Ink). Her book Songs for Olympia, in which enters into dialogue with French author and ethnologist Michel Leiris, in contemplation of Manet’s infamous painting, came out with Sagging Meniscus last year. Twitter: @curiosothegreat
Coming in November …
Extracts from books by Julian George and Hilary White; new fiction from Brian Muraya, E.N. Diaz, and Lion Summerbell, as well as a Desperate Literature Prize short-listed story by Preeti Vangani; experimental works from Louis Armand and Duncan Stuart; non-fiction from Jonathon Larson, and an interview with Vanessa Saunders …