Author: Sue

Fortnight Literary Press is sponsored both by the Undergraduate English Department and Arts at Michigan – a humble student-run publication from which collections of literary and visual art occasionally emerge on a canvas of pulped trees and bound with staples. From the submissions, selection, assembly, to the distribution – it has our handprints all over it. In the beginning of December, we released our first issue of the semester after weeks of careful deliberation (ie. discussion and a democratic voting session). The petite journal is available in both an online format as well as in print: a couple hundred, glossy faced hard copies were distributed by our members to lecture halls, cafés, and libraries prior to finals.

As one of the editors, I encourage any of you to submit snippets of your thoughts in whichever format is most natural to you to the journal. We’re quite open-minded here, and will try our utmost to accommodate any work of art in the limitations of 10”x10” paper or in its online incarnation. Thus, we are unique in that we’ve thrown that submissions guidelines approach out the proverbial window and emphatically ask everyone to delve into that subterranean parts of their minds and emerge with something they’d like to share with the community, in whichever manner that they choose. Submit anonymously (or not), submit your creative writing assignments, submit what you’ve been itching to articulate to the world. Who knows, perhaps you might be the next Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, or Colum McCaan?

Our website as well as our archive of issues is located here.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

It’s an adage pummeled into young elementary school students, a worn dictum whose extremity in triteness is likely to cause a self-conscious writer to hesitate using it even in irony. But in third grade, when the vast majority of us were unaware of the literary faux pas of clichés, I remember my class sitting and waiting to be turned loose among the shelves of children’s literature, or more accurately, wide expanses of Goosebumps, The Magic Treehouse and Animorphs genre of chapter books. In particular, I recall promising to myself I would never, in my life, ever, judge a book by its cover, lest I suffer a most unpleasant death by a swallowed watermelon seed (a recurring nightmare at the time, in which the seed germinated). I sat there legs folded, jaw clenched, and looking ambitious. If a shadow of desire to do the aforementioned crossed my consciousness, it was treated as a moral failure, and recompense, in the form of doubling all efforts to not judge, should follow promptly. I’d like to think that behind the hyperbolic sentiments towards inanimate objects was a somewhat misplaced effort of sympathy and an overshot desire for not letting preconceived notions get in the way of a good relationship. Or, it may have just been an early symptom of neurotic behavior. Regardless, in my eight-year-old mind, that’s what I believed. With that credo, I took it upon myself to deliberately find the ugliest, most ragged looking books I could dig from the shelves. I would read them, out of a mixture of pity and misguided moral rectitude. I did this for years, selecting amongst piles of books the ones that were most dog-earred, most sepia tinged (before nostalgia became an aesthetic), and truly most lamentable in terms of cover art. In the end, I can’t say for sure whether I have been better or worse for it. I realized much later that things shouldn’t be taken quite so literally, that books that were pretty did not disqualify them from being valuable, and that pretty is far too subjective.

Nowadays, if I’m browsing through an array of unfamiliar books, it is in fact the allure of its frame, its colors and shapes that initially draw me if its title or subject matter initially does not. The art of design has proliferated, and even old friends are getting renovated. Out of indulgence, I recently purchased a copy of Jane Eyre from Penguin’s hardcover classics collection, simply because I thought it was beautiful, crisp, and captured a lasting quality that would weather gracefully. The move to more abstract design, away from an artist’s depiction of a scene or character from the work, I believe, is a desirable change, as it does not put in place, before we can draw in our mind’s eye what is unfolding before us, a bias regardless how subtle. Interpretation, then, is left wholly to the reader. Salinger too, believed this to some degree, as he  insisted in the publisher’s contract that only the text of the title of the book and his name were to appear on any future editions of his work, with absolutely no images so as to not flaunt or broadcast itself unnecessarily for profit. This move towards a witty simplicity or minimalism resonates with me – geometric with a good-typeface can actually inspire me to pull it off the shelf and investigate further. Its gaping, unassuming initial impression leaves me to the duty of drawing out the complexities – it’s but a taste of what’s to come, an art that is incomplete until you delve into its counterpart.

Book cover design is often an overlooked art shadowed by the immensity of the text. Regardless, there’s a coterie of appreciators online; the following are a few interesting links to websites that treat them as the main attraction.

The Archive of Book Cover Design and Designers

The Pelican Project

Twenty Classic Novels’ First Covers

Lovely Book Covers

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to the slats of moon light patterning across my sheets, and it strikes me, a bold and lucid flash against the crags of stupor that accompany the half-consciousness of the half-night, that I’m quite technically an adult already. It was last Wednesday, that I walked back home from class on campus listening to the episode of This American Life entitled “Fear of Sleep”, Act Five: A Small Taste of the Big Sleep. You can probably guess what the title intimated but here are a few excerpts taken from the transcript online:

“I can feel time whizzing by. And I’m trying to hold on to something generally. So I usually start grabbing the walls or like clinging to the pillow. And I’m like this isn’t going to go away. I need to hold this. I need to hold on to time. I need to stand in this river and just not move.”

“Like it’s a kind of very primitive feeling. You have to just, like, flee from this totally horrible thing that’s happening to you. But there is nowhere you can flee. And understanding at the same time that what you’re fleeing and trying to run away from is the complete cessation of you.”

A procession of public disclosures detailing early morning revelations, of the sort that only a good rousing from delta waves sleep can elicit, passes on by. The trail of stories ends with a woman articulating her sad resignation and an eventual amorphous and non-committal acceptance. I’m disoriented when I stare at the darkened ceiling, and while I can empathize and on other nights sense all too well for myself that utter suffocation of this done deal of life and its stony indifference, as I become cognizant in degrees, what my mind wanders to is something on a slightly smaller scale, a sub-category of this larger motif. It’s a rude awakening nonetheless, as my thoughts circle on to the fact that I’ve passed the threshold of twenty and now I must be quite serious if academia is what I want to pursue. That I must think responsibly, deeply from now onwards until I can no longer. Sylvia Plath was precociously serious, I had realized earlier that night; I hopelessly browsed through a few of her published journal entries, all eloquently wrought on paper by the tender age of 18, to remind myself of the deliberation, the self-doubt, and the nerve that it takes to procure decent writing. Thoreau’s journal too, is trenchant by the time adulthood overtook him – succinct bursts of wit and honesty that would herald Walden and Civil Disobedience. And then an influx of young but promising women and men parade in my mind’s eye, apparitions like Macbeth’s dead kings all suspended with their portfolios bursting with talent while I think on the day ahead, a schedule penciled in with a series of urgent nothings. They all began at some discrete moment in time on an ordinary day, not particularly unlike any other, a smudgy event that only in retrospect we identify as the first star that formed in their life’s constellation. Yet they wrested their discontent with the world into some comprehensible form – either shimmering and snapping prose or unabashed and seismic visual forms. While Ira Glass’ interviewees flee from the scythe, budding artists and/or the young persons of our generation seem to shudder at the thought of insidious mediocrity. In a plaintive tone, Plath expresses that to be a round peg struggling in a round hole “with no awkward or painful edges – no space to wonder or question in”, you might as well be finished. It has been a constant debate in my head and at least a million others: Is melancholy and frustration or the glow of high spirits the better catalyst? For me at least, I’ve been more of a member of the former camp – needing some sense of dissatisfaction to light the proverbial flame and get things a’rolling.

Alternatively, it doesn’t take very much for unconsciousness to take over once more – there’s no struggle to fall back into the warmth of slumber, only that dreaded contentness that Plath makes mention of. It’s just a flash in the pan, these unsolicited midnight “insights”, that under the afternoon sun, seems to wither in consequence.

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything…
— Richard Feynman

One of my psychology professors this fall semester, with humor, flourish — a savoir-faire that crystallized in his not-quite-tangential ambles into anecdotes of: psychological history, his obesity-stricken dog, and the meaning of life… and back again — spoke on two types of hormones that differentially affect monogamous behavior in male and female prairie voles. Eager to take in the conclusions that he appeared to be paving a discussion toward, we dug into the research papers that, with the structure and vernacular that is so characteristic of efforts of scientific rigor, elegantly allowed certain “rules” between brain and behavior to be teased out of the daunting complexity of the nervous system. After all, grant money thrown at the altar of science is for the express purpose of generating results, is it not? It’s in this scientific process, in cleverly controlled laboratory conditions that we can begin the ambitious endeavor of chipping away at the monolith of The Unknown for some shape of the truth. Taken together, the two papers, each on a neurohormone for a particular sex in Microtus ochrogaster, appeared to strengthen the male/female dichotomy – oxytocin facilitates pair-bonding in the girl voles, vasopressin in boys. Ok. I wrote it in my summary and reiterated it in my notes, scribbled definitive-sounding descriptors like “social” and “asocial”, underlined them for good measure.

And then, with an abruptness that was so well executed that its own spontaneity was somewhat suspect, he declared, “But, people love to oversimplify.”

Surely, this thought has crossed our minds before, but that day during that class was one of those moments where that axiom (which in itself is problematic for its meta-simplification) was thrown into sharp relief. The inclination for simplification to become ossified and dogmatic over time is apparent in every aspect of our lives. Headlines, for one, to no fault of their own since they inherently must simplify for constraints of space, are especially prone to pare off complexity in order to offer a good, coherent story. We eat facts up, we love a one trajectory narration and graspable and workable principles so day-to-day living can bear onwards to whatever we like without too much hindrance. Solid anchors of knowledge that we can reliably expect to exist offer traction for our interactions with the world to persist; we must cut the Gordian knot. It’s with no invective that this professor brought up the subject, just a moment set aside to appreciate one more quality, for better or worse, that identifies us as Homo sapiens. He merely cautioned the class to differentiate pragmatic, useful simplifications from the more reckless sort (the line between the two is not as crisp and unwavering as one would like), causing the 30 of us to begin wondering what the take home message was or if we had fallen into a recursive loop that the take home message was that take home messages are no good.

This inevitably brought forth a branching chain of thoughts, some more panicked than others, and terminated quietly on a memory of this video:

Ray Carney, in a very similar vein says, “Art is not about making gorgeous images, but about revealing things that matter. Don’t confuse beauty and prettiness. Real beauty is not pretty. It is scary or disorienting, because it threatens everything we think we know.” And truly, Feynman felt utter reverence for the complexity of the world, going as far as asserting that complexity was in fact, unadulterated beauty. And perhaps it’s at this juncture of “complexity,” rather than the familiar simplicity that we are biased towards, that the humanities and the sciences can brush shoulders and see eye to eye. Why science and theory in any humanities field is challenging is the utter depth of it – at that many fathoms down, at the threshold of what is known and unknown, nothing is certain and knowledge is not intuitive. There isn’t one answer to a query without adequate context and qualifications. Consider how difficult it is to pass a course in a subject versus actually being a productive member of the field; one requires you to memorize facts, the other asks you to challenge or affirm their validity. Beauty, art, and the brain is as complex as the electron is small, as the universe is large.

The big, hot mess of the world might be the greatest art of them all.

Planes are monstrous and magnificent things. When you’re buckled in one, idly glancing towards the stewards making the rounds with their carts teeming of individually wrapped pretzels – the stewards whose carefully pressed linen look is asserted with a fresh knotted kerchief, undulating to its owners’ deceptively therapeutic voice — habituation from the utter mundaneness of their motions, their comportment, is but trickery to the mind. The sheer ordinariness instilled by the moderate prevalence of flights in the cultural narrative – this insane ritual that provides a strong sense of order — prevents the conception of what is actually occurring.

And then very steadily, as not to betray my not quite fully realized fear, the eyes move to peer through the double-paned windows, landing on the turbines whose diameters span at the very least two full-grown adults across. As I, with a perfunctory smile, accept the coffee from the attendant, continuing with this exchange of charades, the turbulence can’t help but etch itself on to the surface of the drink, and thoughts, in one fell swoop, latch back on to the very real turbines drowning in their white noise immensity, whisking cloud to cumunolimbic dust. And it’s only then that I let myself become the inconvenient victim of the “intraocular effect”. It hits me. Between the eyes. With the light of a thousand suns.

I have full faith in science: Bill Nye held a significant place in my childhood during my most impressionable years; he was always there, unfailingly adorned with bow tie, to explain what’s happening in a way that a seven-year-old could understand. Nowadays, one can find me in a lab, Feynman’s books in my bags and dotingly following Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter. Hobbies include physics problems. I could diagram the aerodynamic description of lift on an exam. In spite of all this, it just seems impossible for this plane, currently encapsulating my body and a hundred or so others, to be able to do with any ounce of grace or swiftness what paper planes slicing classroom air can do. Under the proper circumstances, I simply don’t care what Bernoulli or Newton say – that moment when the wheels lift from the ground and the wings take over with the roar of the engine knocking every neuron between my ears to the brink of a neurological disaster, my palms invariably get sweaty. It’s all very antithetical. The climb both excites and disturbs me greatly; my autonomic nervous system’s wires are crossed – am I in fight or flight? – I watch the city shrink, as the machine works a geometrically sensible upward arc. The earth falls away to trim and neat Euclidean shapes, almost indistinguishable from a circuit board, copper wires for luminescence. Life on the ground begins to look like an elaborate plaything, toiling away as determinedly as ever, and the moon peeks out from under the swooping wing. I tend to remain seated, my sole focal point centered squarely on the seatbelt light, hands flexing aimlessly, masochistically reminding myself this is indeed a live show and there really are thousands of cubic feet of air beneath me — interrupted perhaps by only, a flock or two of birds — that those really are glaciers and glaciers are truly quite cold and we’re bearing cloud. And it really isn’t until the seatbelt light turns off that the sweat glands in my hands return to default productivity and I can muster up some other facial expression that isn’t tainted with distress.

There are times when I can’t quite feature certain tendencies in human behavior, our endearing follies crystallized by our own devising. It’s egregious to me that global warming or evolution is even a contentious issue. I can’t, with logical might, convince the dogmatic to consider a spectrum of options or alternative views. Reason, no matter how watertight, is dashed to bits by the solidified sediments of fear. With feet cemented to ground, gazing upwards at the plane’s chalk-like traces thrown into sharp relief again the tresses of blue, it’s easy to proclaim without hesitation how formidable modern technology is, that we can outwit our own anatomical limitations, or make some fine and heart-ravishing poetic gestures. But buoyed by thin air, in the culmination of elegant equations into a tangible craft, I look down a narrow vista with bated breath.

A consequence of interweaving oneself with the world is the realization of how differently everyone perceives reality. The thought processes behind any particular work follow a specific pathway or logic that is simply intuitive to that person, and may be intuitive to that person alone. I often wonder at how others make sense of daily realities, how others ruminate, what other people’s thoughts even structurally look like. Are they as convoluted as mine? (Surely.) Do those that specialize in the same field have a different methodology than those in others? My attempt at looking in on the inarticulacy of something so common as a ‘thought’ is below, although I can only say this is true for my own experiences. (How would you describe a ‘thought’ in your own terms?)

For me, the unconstruction of my thought has always presented me with the challenge of projecting an idea. I have concluded, later to be re-concluded, that this stream of consciousness is not circular or linear like that of the stream, but spherical. Approaching and re-approaching the infinite points in space of questioning, understanding, ideas at various dynamic axes. The thought presents itself with an extreme clarity at the time but becomes impossible to revisit with any accuracy of what was before. The dynamic relatives constantly presenting themselves to me put my mind into a liquid state (very much like a stream) as well as a spherical state (very much un-like a stream). I have concluded my mind is in likeness with Europa. A large amount of water surrounded by a substantial shell of broken ice.