Editor’s Introduction, Issue 2

Spring 2024

Six months from the debut of Lenticular, I present Issue 2. While putting together this issue, I moved apartments, began the process of returning to school, dealt with burst radiators and broken floorboards, got sick, got well, got sick again. In spite of it all, I still think this project is worth it, and on multiple levels, I find the process rewarding. Corresponding with authors and reading vital, unpublished work far outweighs the hassles of tedious web formatting and layout. There’s something liberating about a small outlet that eschews the need to write for algorithms or the dictates of social media likes. It’s also a pleasure to work with a multinational cast. Contributors weigh-in from Australia, Mexico, Israel via the UK, Canada, China by-way-of-Brooklyn, from all over the US.

The Shangri-La of Service Stations

This issue’s essay, Hogan’s “Witness at the Altar of the Beaver,” provides a snapshot—or maybe it’s an autopsy—of an integral part of current-day USA. Hogan takes a trip to the world’s largest Buc’ees, the roadside barbecue chain. “Witness at the Altar” makes the unreality of the Buc’ees experience real. Pitched battles for scarce parking, cheap trinkets and military insignia on display, the pervading sense of emptiness and alienation in the atrophied belly of the beast. And then there’s the piped-in classic rock, the sounds of the workers moaning: “…while the content of these cries is simple and commercial in nature, their form is that of a wounded animal’s howls, an expression of proletarian anguish which forms a critical part of the ambience in this pandemonium.” It takes a special kind of scribe to wrest true literature from the American miasma. Hogan pulls it off admirably.

As Hogan mentions, Ron DeSantis referred to Buc’ees as “the Shangri-La of service stations.” Interesting choice of words, Shangri-La. We don’t get much talk of utopia from our politicians; when we do, you can be sure it’s promising new levels of nightmare. Aside from book banning, prison expansions and low-wage service jobs, what else do DeSantis and his ilk have to offer the great expanse of traffic jam stretched between mass shootings and fentanyl deaths? Why, freedom, of course. The American paradox of “rugged individualism” grafted atop mass conformity. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Nugent at the MAGA rally. All the psychotic imbeciles, armed to the teeth, invoking freedom and liberty as they call for rounding up an ever-growing list of enemies.

Freedom? Anarchism, Israel-Palestine, war, etc. (This issue’s interview)

We hear lots about freedom in commercials. It’s a credit card, it’s the car breaking the sound barrier on a non-existent mountain road. Like “revolution,” the term is meaningless in ad parlance. In what the prophets call a plate of shrimp moment, while I was reading a draft of this introduction on the subway, I encountered an ad using both “freedom” and “revolution” together (see image above). But why is it that only the crazies and con artists use terms like freedom and liberty? To make sense of this, I sought out Uri Gordon, one of the more-interesting contemporary anarchists. Gordon believes people are capable of running their own lives, outside of “all forms of domination in society and all of the intersecting regimes that shape hierarchical society.” Gordon articulates his type of anarchism against the various right-wing elements, the “libertarians,” and “anarcho-capitalists.” These “propertarian impostors,” as he refers to them, believe in a world of endless wealth accumulation and freedom for the very rich to do whatever they please at the expense of any notion of community or society.

Gordon, who is Israeli, also provides an interesting anarchist perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, I wanted clarity from someone who opposes both the terrorist madness of Hamas and the Israeli response. The war has left nearly 2 million people displaced and on the verge of starvation, without sufficient water or medical supplies. At this rate, when Israel finally withdraws from Gaza, the remaining Israeli hostages and much of Gaza’s civilian population will be dead and only Hamas’s leadership, down in the tunnels, will remain. Gordon sees the current war in the much-larger context of ecological and political collapse. This anarchist isn’t pushing a far-off, utopian solution to the conflict. His suggestions are much more practical, and oriented toward immediate survival, including outside pressure from the US and EU, hostage and prisoner exchange, ceasefire. I really enjoyed doing the interview, and I’m glad to include it in Lenticular. More than one friend of this project encouraged me not to wade into “divisive” waters. I think the Lenticular readership is smart enough to engage with ideas that fall outside of mainstream discourse. My own political development has been greatly influenced by anti-authoritarian thinking, especially writers like Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman. I think anarchism, and even some variants of heretical marxism can provide a good starting point for making sense of the various systems of coercion and control that dominate our lives. The trick is to not hold any text or idea to be infallible.

This issue’s fiction

A sense of things being off runs through the fiction in this issue. In Robert Penner’s Incantation, the daily lives of a young couple and their social circle, the playgrounds, the parties all appear as part of a hermetically constructed apparatus that nearly suffocates Jessica. Sofi, the new mother in Alma Mancilla’s First Chrysalis has a bit in common with Incantation’s Jessica. Mancilla, like Penner, gives the sense that the moorings have given way. Or perhaps Sofia is being gaslit and there is something off with her new baby. One thing that is not off here is the prose. A different kind of offness permeates Tauno Biltsted’s Space. Is offbeat Paul a genius on the verge of something big, or just a demanding artist drunk on his mad visions? Finally, Robbi Overbey, a Lenticular repeat offender provides a counter to the heaviness. Twirlesque is classic Overbeyian, packed with tight language that moves the story along nicely. I’m a sucker for sentences like: “Hot in the face, a smidge dizzy, but with a current, some energy—a tingle in their seats.”

And the poetry

An admission: I’m not crazy about writing about poetry. I prefer to let the work stand on its own. And how it stands! It’s an honor to have such a quality roster of poets on board. To tie this all back to where we started, these poets embody the exact opposite of the no-place landscape littered with Burger King and Buc’ees and the attendant urinal cake aesthetics. Nolo Segundo laments a world of instant access to too much information that doesn’t inform, the

knowledge the wise men

of history never had, and

ease, lots of ease to save

us time and trouble. Soon

we cannot live without them

A familiar theme surfaces in John Paul Davis’s Upgrade Blues. The immense power of technology, which not long ago…

…would have sounded like a utopian daydream

yet I'm still sad reading the news from 1000 newspapers

I can now access which all say the world's getting worse

& sliding my thumb across the jewel mirror face

of the thing only allows me to reload the same page or tweak

the settings which is only useful if you want to keep

using this system but if you want another one entirely

then adjusting the preferences changes absolutely nothing.

While assembling this issue I recognized this dormant feeling I knew many years ago, encountering old New Directions anthologies for the first time. There was this sense of something special, an assemblage of writers saying and doing interesting things. Take Smith Nash’s precise conjuring: “sky glittered w/implications; our expectations are reversed not flocked w/doves they’re barren of long-stemmed roses & inspired invention of text this painterly surface watered in mental construct; illusory however visual and flat-lying…” Mellifluous is a word that comes to mind.   

Here’s where we get into the nitty gritty, the stuff that helps make life a bit more bearable when things are bleak. Like good music, good poetry can make things alright for a while. It’s the “small mystery” in Tamra Carraher’s Hawk Feather. It’s Dylan Willoughby subtly evoking, as if rain:

Senescent neon signs

Professed their garish nihilism,

Ridiculed by the rain, the street, us,

And you said, as if rain:

The moon in the half-muddied pool 

That one made me shudder a bit. I don’t want to ruin the specialness by dissecting all the work contained herein. It’s better to just read it for yourself.   

Take in C.E. Hoffman’s flamethrower aesthetics. Chris Shen’s wails. Matthew Dube’s ruminations. Or take Mark Young, an excellent writer who has published hundreds, possibly thousands of writers. 

This issue has been greatly enriched by the work of visual artists Chris Shen, Elancharan Gunasekaran and Michael Moreth.

DEATH BEFORE DEAD LANGUAGE

—R Cleffi

E. Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY

March 2024

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