Editor's Note

By Lindsay Sorell

Issue 005, Volume Two | Summer 2016

three men and a maroon gondola
one man inside hooking up
yellow tractor parts
taken by a jitney and a
set of silvery wires
nothing else is moving
green water and a high blue sky
white nimbus clouds
over the brown pinhole hills
greed and red container ships at anchor
two tankers, long black and redlined
both anchored
yellow cleat tracks
lifted from the gondola by
the short silvery wires
nothing else is moving
only the driver on the jitney
and the man in the gondola
as the other man unhooks the tractor parts
near the orange flat-rack
near red straddlers gathering rust
outside an aluminum shed
rows of black corrosive drums
red labelled
under tall white poles with cluster lights
black traveller cranes at the container yard
white cranes at seventh street
nothing is moving
no red and white tour boat under the bridge
one gray seagull
on a piling
motionless
three men and a jitney
sorting parts from a
gondola.1

Make Beer Great AgainLindsay Sorell, 2016. Motorola photo. 

Photo Courtesy of the artist

Unmoored in the middle of nowhere. 

 

John finds himself stranded in the dirt-encrusted mining town of Bundanyabba on his way to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. He meets Doc, Jock, Joe, Dick, Tim—yes—even a Jim. He finds himself gambling away all his money. Getting shitfaced for days with the locals. Stabbing a wounded kangaroo to death. Tries to hitchhike out but is mistakenly brought back. Then abruptly, his holiday ends. He goes back to the even smaller rural town he came from. On to teach children for another semester.

The epigraph above comes from this book I picked up a couple years back, Going for Coffee: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Working Poems. It rakes you through labour, cyclicity, senselessness, exhaustion, ham, maggots, never-ending-ness. Senselessness—the desert, slasher films, chaos—this devolvement into the panic of arc-lessness, no beginning, middle, or finish, re-presentation with infinite iterations; doesn’t sound good, but this is Issue 005.

When Marilou Lemmens says, “…if you don’t have a goal when you act, there isn’t an end for an action. It can continue forever,” and Bogdan Cheta says: 

1)

what is the point to analyze

life when life itself seems to be

such a careless and unpredictable

performance?

and Carol J. Clover says, “slashers lie for all practical purposes beyond the purview of legitimate criticism,” and I turn to my co-worker behind the grocery counter I says, “You know, Lonnie, sometimes I just get tired of working all the time,” and he says, “You know man, I was just thinking that,” and we stand there side-by-side for a moment, looking out across the counter at the packaged nut section2

—we are left to wrestle with senselessness. I mean, on one hand: I believe the Final Draft is a capitalist notion. On the other, I strive for it. That cyclicity, questions of productivity, what is “worth” our time, what fits within our “purview,” is what Issue 005 returns to over and over again. We, members of the internet, wander, rendered helpless by the infinity of knowledge we are presented with—shocked by American politics, violence, the failure of democracy, the failure of the economy, trends in the art world, flailing, protesting—trying to figure out how to implement our beliefs as fast as we are asked to. We are wrestling with babelization, with the thoughtless blending of disciplines, cultures, and geographies, with our individuality, and most of all, with strandedness.

 

  1. George Benet, “Colours of Emptiness,” in Going For Coffee, ed. Tom Wayman (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishiing Co. Ltd., 1987), 50-51. 

  2. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press, 1992), 77.



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