IDEAS

SCP FOUNDATION

the strange site of society, language games, and rules

By Pierce Parker

Figure this Out

What are the rules you play by in your life? Of course, you have to eat, drink, and sleep. Those rules are simple. If you don’t play by them, then you won’t last long. Nearly all of us also play by society’s rules. We dress ourselves, obey traffic laws, get a job to make money, and buy things. After that we have some choices. When you log into your social media of choice to consume and post, you play by a similar, but different set of rules (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). When you read a post, you understand what's happening because of the rules. You know the top left shows who posted it, you know underneath is the main image or video, you know underneath that are the creators’ description or thoughts on what they posted, and finally you know under that are comments from other users. These are rules that you follow in order to play in an online game or society.

LITERATURE

THE UNLIKELIEST ART TWINS IN THE WORLD

Hipster Director Martin McDonagh and Flannery O'Connor believe in a quite interesting God

By Zonghao Mo

Look at what that movie character is reading

We tend to think in differences, both big, small, and in-between, and this goes for artists, countries, people, everything. And so, we can miss connections that are sometimes staring us right in the face. On the surface, there could be no greater distance than that between Martin McDonagh and Flannery O’Connor. He’s a cosmopolitan Londoner, married to the equally cosmopolitan Phoebe Waller-Bridge and O’Connor was a hyper-religious Southerner from deep rural Georgia. You won’t find these two at the same party, but there are more than a few, fascinating connections between them, and they have to do with how they understand God and Man.

LITERATURE

MISINTERPRETATIONS ABOUND AROUND YU HUA'S THE SEVENTH DAY

Or, what Chinese and American critics get wrong

By Kellie Wu

In comparing the American and Chinese reviews of Yu Hua's The Seventh Day, we can see a number of interesting problems. One, there's something about Yu's novel that has the quality of a strange mirror. It reflects the world back at the reader, but what the reader gets is not a true reflection of the world, but one distorted by ideas of justice and care. It is a powerful literary vision, but one that generates misinterpretations, both in Yu’s home country of China and in America, and those misinterpretations say more about the critics and their countries than about Yu’s brilliant work.

ART AND LITERATURE

JUNJI ITO'S UZUMAKI IS THE NEW TERROR

or the horrible truth of the uncanny

By Starlyiana Osias

Junji Ito’s Japanese manga Uzumaki (published in 1998) like most Japanese horror leans toward the psychological, rather than the violent or monstrous. Although it is categorized as psychological horror, it employs several other sub-genres, including mystery, the supernatural, suspense/thriller, and the most important of them all, Lovecraftian cosmic psychological despair. Uzumaki is about a town, Kurozucho, plagued by the curse of the spiral. Through a series of short stories, we gradually learn about the town, the scope of the plague, and how it all relates to the two main characters, Kirie Goshima and Shuichi Saito. Is it frightening? Yes, sometimes, but not in a there’s-a-monster-in–the-house way. What’s scary is how the normal becomes inexplicable, and the characters can’t truly grasp and/or explain what they are seeing. And we as readers become similarly confused about what’s right before us.

LITERATURE

IS THIS DEVOTION?

Keigo Higashino's dismantling of a beautiful impulse

by Chunxu Ma

X marks the Devotion

The Devotion of Suspect X is not your standard mystery novel, where there is a crime, an investigation, and a solution. Instead, Keigo Higashino practically tells you in the first chapter who the killer is, why he did it, and how he’ll be caught. You’re probably asking yourself, why bother reading a mystery when there’s no mystery at all. To your surprise, the next 17 chapters will prove you wrong: there is a mystery and it’s quite unnerving and complex. And if you’re alert you might ask, “devotion to whom? And what’s with the X?” That’s the most brilliant part of Higashino’s design: the X is more than a little scary, and it’s scary because of how worthy and laudable it is, even for a murderer.

LITERATURE

THE SMART DUMB CAT WRITES TOP CAT POETRY

an appreciation of James Gendron's Sexual Boat (Sex Boats)

By Zoe Brezsny

Go to the Amazon and buy!

“Where are you tonight, my personal party?” asks author James Gendron in his first full-length book, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats). It’s the poetry book of our generation, if only our generation liked poetry and reading. It’s devastating and comic, each poem a reminder that everyone else is as twisted and lonely as you. It’s also more than that, making paradoxical associations that most of us never think of: the afterlife with alcoholism or angel sweat with the odor of corpses. Gendron enters a consequence-free zone where language can be dumb and all the better for it. Transcendence rises out of the most banal moments and in the best of poetry makes it sing.

LITERATURE AND INTERVIEW

A SUBTLE REVOLUTION

an interview with Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Interview and introduction by Zoe Brezsny

We never really know when a piece of art will change the landscape of what’s possible. If you asked me a month ago whether a sentimental, postmodern novel would open up new ground in American fiction, I would’ve laughed, especially when you added that it starts off with a dying American actress escaping to a small Italian fishing village. Nonetheless, that’s what Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins does and in none of the clichéd and predictable moves that we’ve come to associate with artistic revolutions. There are no taboos broken here, no values assaulted, no screaming out at the injustices of the world, but a much more assured and gentle mind at work. One of the shocking aspects of Beautiful Ruins is just how adult it is.

LITERATURE

AIMEE BENDER AND THE REALISM OF THE FANTASTIC

a review and overview of the work of Aimee Bender

By Vanessa Hernandez

In Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Joseph, a teenage boy, becomes a chair and it is not a bit of fantasy, or sci-fi, or an allegory about puberty, but a horrible, painstaking reality.

I don’t even know how to describe it, what I saw. There was no blood at all, and how good it would’ve been, to see blood—to see it pouring out of his leg, and the surgery he would’ve needed, the painkillers, the beige rug soaking through… Instead there was only that shimmer of a human leg around the leg of a chair, a soft fading halo of humanness.

In both style and structure, Bender achieves a perfect balance between the real and surreal that gives Joseph’s transformation an eerie resemblance to a child slowly and painfully dying. Like any one who suffers from a terminal disease, he becomes less animate, less able to communicate, less able to understand his debilitating situation and less a part of the living world. Finally, he becomes just a symbol, although a very realistic one at that.

LITERATURE

BEN MARCUS ROARS A FLAME ALPHABET

a review of Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet and more!

By Nathan Gale

The Flame Alphabet erupts like a tale straight from the Old Testament. Set in a suburban community of “Forrest Jews” in upstate New York, our protagonist Sam, and his wife Clair and their daughter Esther, a family of Forrest Jews, (I just wanted to write that because it sounds neat) are beset by a plague that is spread through children’s voices. The plague causes adults to wither and shrivel, dying of sores, blackouts, diarrhea and vomiting. Like all healthy tweens Esther is resentful of her parents for merely being alive, and abuses them with the sound of her voice, nearly killing her own mother.