In “Porn,” Nick Foretek’s Issue Sixteen short story, a trauma surgeon attends a pornographic fiction workshop, where she shares stories in which penetrative medical procedures substitute for literal sex. The other workshop participants are flummoxed by the narrator’s porn, but we promise you will be delighted, if no less surprised, by Foretek’s “Porn.”
Read the story online today, and be sure to subscribe to receive Issue Sixteen in your mailbox.
NICK FORETEK
A lot of the stories feature relationships that initially appear perfect, only to be undone by lust and temptation. Lust and temptation are usually personified by perfumed older men and lesbians. Happily, Marcel deviates from these tropes by writing about cannibalistic polycules.
“Surgery is the new sex,” a character remarks in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), a remark to which Foretek’s narrator would surely assent. A new batch of Mentions considers Cronenberg’s latest effort, The Shrouds, as well as an early work of autofiction and a liquidity services marketplace.
The Shrouds
FILM
David Cronenberg is the only working director who understands what the fuck is going on with technology right now. The Shrouds is post-late style, so stilted that it seems a cross between a filmed theater production and a dream. Silver fox Vincent Cassel, a clear Cronenberg stand-in, delivers his lines with an eerie intensity A.I. could never replicate. The Promethean hope of conquering death — an ambient obsession across Silicon Valley — is revealed to be a mere conduit for the expression of psychosexual hangups. The scariest moment of the film came with the reveal that Cassel’s character drives a Tesla. Beneath the intellectual carapace, Cronenberg has the heart of a comedian.
Mathias Fuelling
Autoportrait
BOOK
An early work of autofiction so effective that it renders its successors all but unnecessary, French artist Edouard Levé’s slim 2005 volume consists of nothing but statements about the author: “I sing badly, so I don’t sing. Because I am funny people think I’m happy. I want never to find an ear in a meadow.” The sentences, set down almost, though not entirely, at random, are detached and flat, but produce an almost miraculously coherent effect. As protagonist, Levé both surprises and grows into a familiar type: the artist struggling with despair. Levé took his own life in 2007, ten days after turning in his following book, Suicide, which elaborated on a story in Autoportrait. But here, you can see him puzzling through possible reasons to live. “Some day I will wear black cowboy boots with a purple velvet suit.”
Aaron Labaree
GovDeals.com
MARKETPLACE
This municipal auction platform with a bare-bones, Craigslist-style interface offers a welcome, albeit strange, respite from the excesses and pop-up ads that plague most online shopping experiences. The site describes itself as a “liquidity services marketplace,” providing a centralized portal for offloading government surplus, though it is impossible to know the true provenance of whatever item you’re buying, save for the seller and their location. (Whose 1.2-carat marquise diamond ring is this, and are they still looking for it?) Items up for grabs as of this writing include a pallet of years-old MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat); a half-dozen CPR dummies, clustered together as though languishing in a Boschian hell; and a little white church in rural Illinois with a positively post-apocalyptic interior (starting bid: $19,900).
Claire Christoff
OK, I'm down with the whole suspension-of-disbelief thing; I can buy the idea of vampires in Salem's Lot, or that Conan the Barbarian might have lived to the age of 35 without missing any of his teeth or fingers... But a porn-writing workshop?!? Seriously? Since there's only one parachute on this plane I'm sure nobody will mind if I just quietly slide out the loading door in the back-have a nice flight,
everyone....