"The misfires of adult transmission"
Fiction from Owen Park; five extremely abbreviated reviews
In Owen Park’s Issue Fifteen short story, two friends make an unexpectedly arduous trip up to Poughkeepsie after receiving bad news. “The news was like a gas, a non-substance,” the narrator reflects. “What I mean is it did not seem to be made of language.” Check out the story online now. You can also hear Park read an excerpt at our Issue Fifteen launch party tomorrow. We hope to see you there!
OWEN PARK
“I was imagining the news standing beneath one of the skinny street lights like a figure in some noir film, the weathered brim of a fedora extending over its eyes and a cigarette on its lips. At every one of those lights, I saw it leaning there in its trench coat and it saw me.”
Life, as Park’s story reminds us, is unpredictable and brief, much like the following Mentions.
Headshot
FICTION
In McSweeney’s Quarterly editor Rita Bullwinkel’s story of eight women boxers, a finalist for both the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes this year, the human body is described with the precision of a butcher: we hear about a “toned cut of meat” and a “thin smashed cutlet.” Bullwinkel is herself a former competitive water polo player, and her characters’ honed forms prove exacting both in their ability to land punches and to move the plot forward at a rapid clip. Meditations on God, motherhood, family, death, and ambition are nestled among hopes dashed and dreams realized in this lean, excellent novel — no Rocky, all Bullwinkel.
Page Berger
Aptos
FONT
This typeface, which replaced Calibri as the default font for Microsoft 365 in late 2023, is supposed to be friendlier, more trustworthy, and better suited to high-resolution screens. But to my semiprofessional eye, it looks like a squashed version of its predecessor, as if someone dropped an anvil on all those humanist letterforms. (The characters are certainly wider; Aptos fits roughly thirty fewer words on a page.) The font’s recent success coincides with a change in its name. Rechristened for a town in Northern California that apparently “epitomizes the font’s versatility,” Aptos follows in the footsteps of fellow name-changers Norma Jeane Mortenson, Ralph Lifshitz, and even the British royal family, who became the Windsors only after ditching “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” for being too German. “Too German” might also have been a problem for this typeface, formerly known as “Bierstadt.”
Zoe Guttenplan
The Light Phone III
COMMUNICATION
The third generation of this not-quite-dumb phone is purportedly smart enough to give directions, but not smart enough to send an email. Some skeptics have questioned the smartphone price ($799, or $599 for preorders), while others find the introduction of a camera and the promise of an optional digital wallet function to be a Bay Area bridge too far. The company, Light, has pointed out that its commitment to privacy means it doesn’t use cash from data collectors to defray costs; apparently, the uncompensated sale of personal information translates to consumer discounts. Or maybe the anti-tech tech guys are fleecing us. In any case, I’m willing to part with my Motorola RAZR V3 Pink (super rare) for $149 or best offer.
Kate Petsche
“People, Let Me Get This off My Chest”
PATTER
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Alive!, the career-making live album by glam metal giants KISS. But it’s likewise an opportunity to celebrate an alternative archive of the band’s theatrical stage presence: this bootleg compilation of frontman Paul Stanley’s delirious stage banter. With dubious sourcing but quality audio, presumably compiled far outside the purview of the band’s notoriously maximalist approach to copyright enforcement, it provides over sixty minutes of ’70s time travel experienced through groan-inducing double entendres, repetitive song intros, and goofy local call-outs. The guitarist otherwise known as “the Starchild” delivers it all in a glorious, demented Noo Yawk drag queen register, punctuated by strangely multisyllabic “Woos!” and “Alrights!” that defy both transcription and good taste. Stanley, a supposed Knight in Satan’s Service, turns out to be something more like a cock-rock politician, delivering a stump speech by turns mundane and electric.
Aaron Gonsher
Into Great Silence
DOCUMENTARY
The cloistered Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery are best known for their eponymous liqueur, but spend far more time sitting in contemplative silence than collecting herbal ingredients for your next cocktail. In 2005, the filmmaker Philip Gröning distilled six months of footage from the charterhouse into an intimate record of this “communion of solitaires,” scored only by the sounds of monastic life: deliberate steps thumping on wooden floors, electric clippers buzzing at the in-house barber. The result — appropriately austere and quite seductive — lulls the viewer into a peaceful certainty much like the monks’ own. And if you’d rather not wait sixteen years (as Gröning did) for permission to visit, fret not: a former charterhouse at nearby Sélignac offers a silent retreat in the mode of the “Carthusian lifestyle.” Those monks have made at least one concession to modernity: sign-ups are accepted via Google Form.
Chris Phillips
