Contents
- Until You Return, Lincoln Hirn
- Prosopagnosia, Beatriz Seelaender
- Contingency and Disobedience, Lucy Ives
- Vicious, Angela Santillo
- A Truth Bursting to be Spoken, R. Russell Magee
- In The Fall, Nathan Greene
- Lip Service, J. T. Townley
- The Deluded and the Disengaged, Kat Meads
- A Conversation with Kat Meads
- The Cross-Out, Martin Rayburn
- JR to AI: William Gaddis and Technology, Adrian Howlett
- Tomorrow is Tomorrow, Paul Perilli
- Fragments on Mystery, Joachim Glage
- Needles, Trevor Patterson
- Confinement, Departure: Paris, 1790, Mandira Pattnaik
- Toujours Au-Delà, D. W. White
L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume III Issue II
D. W. White, Editor
Jessica Denzer, Editor
MMXXIV
in mediam mentem
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Prosopagnosia
One of my greatest fears has always been witnessing a crime — not so much being the victim of one, but rather having to identify the culprit from a lineup. How overcome with anxiety I become even watching procedural whodunnits where the witness sits down with a sketch artist. These police sketches can hardly be as accurate in real life, certainly?
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Vicious
Hello? Hi Mom. You’re calling late. I got laid off today. What? Why? Because I have a strong vagina. What did she say? Dad, I have a strong vagina. I need to get up early tomorrow. Bye Angela.
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A Truth Bursting to be Spoken
Jouissance, that French-inspired term reclaimed and reinvented by famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the mid-twentieth century, today remains a puzzling point of intrigue among students and scholars alike, if not an infuriatingly impenetrable critical concept to grasp.
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The Deluded and the Disengaged
On assignment for McCall’s magazine, for three days in May 1965 in hot and stormy Texas, author Jean Stafford interviewed Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, the dead, accused assassin of John F. Kennedy. The interviews took place in Marguerite Oswald’s Fort Worth home, one half of “a tidy, unexceptional little house, on an unexceptional block of similar houses” that Stafford deems “seedy, but … not squalid.”
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JR to AI: William Gaddis and Technology
There is a direct lineage from Sumerian tablets to the abstractions of the Semantic Web. It can be argued that writing is the ultimate technology, so there is a real irony in realising that most writing from the most technologically fixated society of all time, modern America, is rather technophobic. This attitude often extends from writing to writers, but in the case of William Gaddis, things are not so simple.
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Fragments on Mystery
One needn’t be Hegel to wonder if contradictions lie at the heart of everything good. At the very least one might hypothesize that all artworks—and all aphorisms, too—have the same contradictory goal: to be lucid and mysterious at once.
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Toujours Au-Delà
Of the great moments in literature, perhaps no other is as closely identified with pure language as much as Modernism, that incessant revolution of the word. The Modernists took as their clarion call the unabridged and unfiltered machinations of language, a joyous elegy marking the death of the lineal and the grammatical. There is no small irony, then, that much of what the Modernists were after was beyond the immediate purview of language itself.
in mediam mentem // issue five
L'Esprit Literary Review 