Several hundred copy editors descended on Providence, Rhode Island, this past weekend for the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), now trending on Twitter as #ACES2019. (We can dream, can’t we?) If you have ever been a copy editor among copy editors, you know the joy of being in the company of your fellow-nerds, and hearing them speak out loud of things that normally stay inside your head: arguments about singular “they,” musings about whether or not to capitalize a proper name that begins with a lowercase letter (d’Anjou, for instance) if it occurs at the beginning of a sentence. (I say yes, but perhaps I am insensitive.) When I first became aware of ACES, in 2014, the organization was holding its conference in Las Vegas, and I pictured copy editors at play, pulling the arms of slot machines that featured rows of commas instead of cherries. At this year’s opening reception, the entertainment was a pencil embosser—both a machine and a man feeding it handfuls of pencils, which came out saying things like “I THINK, THEREFORE I EDIT.”
My first exposure to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill.
Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and apparitions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt.
One complicating factor when it comes to creating art about suicide is the fact that many of the features that make for a “good story” are also those known to contribute to suicidal behaviors: heightened emotions, heroic or sentimental portrayals of suicidal characters, and, above all, depiction of the suicide itself. The worry—of public-health officials, researchers, doctors, and parents—is that when works embrace these elements, fiction might bleed into reality.
Putting words down in a certain way allowed me to breathe a little better for a while. It is not to be underestimated. I find breathing difficult. It is as if my sense of entitlement really was so far out that I didn’t always know how to do it as a wee kid. Having such an extreme upbringing means it’s a physical legacy that has stayed with me. I will inflate my lungs like a puffer fish. I’ll do it like I’m reading a manual that tells you how to do so. I’ll often be reduced to breathing through my mouth. It is my least favorite way to obtain oxygen.
Weary city workers will have a new way of passing the time on their commute once the UK’s first short-story vending machines are installed at Canary Wharf this week.
Tokyo Ueno Station is a social novel, but in more of a magical than a strictly realist sense. History can’t be reduced to dates on the calendar, but is grasped at elliptically. The text is full of line breaks, as if with each new paragraph Kazu is making a new attempt to understand the past, and with every new line it slips further away.
In Brown’s poems, the body at risk — the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros — is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all: “So the Bible says, in the beginning, / Blackness. I am alive.”
What’s most important about Spectacle is not the spectacular events that drive Steinberg’s narrators toward a kind of vivisection (by way of self-scrutiny). Instead, the spectacle is introspection itself — an internal magnification like reading glasses for the psyche. It is precisely what these women choose to focus on, and what they willfully ignore, that makes Spectacle such an interesting and powerful read.