Dec 07: Emiland Kray, Even Robots Feel Sad Sometimes

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Even Robots Feel Sad Sometimes

Emiland Kray

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Emiland Kray, Robots Woah, diptych, ink on paper, 5.5”x4”, digitized into a gif, 2025

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In a bout of sleepwalking at 17, I was visited by a robotic child in my dreams. In a miraculous feat, while completely asleep I imagined following this child from my bedroom into the hallway. Her head had pulsating electrical charges beneath yellow plexiglass and I remember the clicking of her feet upon the tiled floor outside of my bedroom. Pressed up against the garage door, she extended her hand to me. As I reciprocated the gesture, a few things happened. To anyone who may have been watching, I collapsed. Completely breaking the sleep/wake trance and fading utterly into unconsciousness as a pile upon the garage floor. To the robot, I grabbed her hand and a part of me transcended humankind and my body transformed into a shimmering metal sheet unburdened by breath and sleep and food. And to me, I saw stars and my vision sparkled for a brief moment as our fingertips touched.
During this time in my life, I was dealing with the onset of generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and at the cusp of a drug addiction. It was routine that I would starve myself in my childhood room, chewing on the heads of my erasers to experience the mouthfeel of aluminum while drawing on my ceiling, walls, and floor. Matched only by amphetamines, my hand never slowed, aside from sleep, which was riddled with nightmares. My thoughts were like pistons as I spent several sleepless nights drawing simply because slowing down was mixed with a shame that came with mortality. Most of my mental breaks resulted in thoughts of wishing to be robotic, to simply work, unrelentingly, in an inevitable climb to production. And it seemed that very early on, this behavior was not only tolerated, but encouraged. Consistent positive feedback from academia and gallerists that were now expectant of that quantity of work from me fueled my now obsessive desire to draw and write and make.
     A year prior to my robotic sleepwalking experience, I remember scanning the clearance aisle in a Borders for crossword or sudoku books. Instead, I was immediately drawn to the last copy of a Taschen art book, H.R. Giger, for $14.98. A pittance really for the 240 page, color illustrated hardcover book about the Alien-Porno-King himself. I was introduced to Giger’s work, like most folks, through the iconic monster and set designs in the 1979 film Alien and perpetuated through that entire franchise. Simultaneously phallic and feminine, Giger’s aliens stalk spaces that are both android and organic. Before purchasing this book, I had never given any thought to his earlier career, or to how he was hauntingly like me and so many other artists: prolific to a fault, addicted to drugs, and sliding up and down from manic episodes. It seems as though Giger was also playing a balancing act between self-harm and artistic success.

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H.R. Giger, Head |||, 1969, Oil on cardboard, 54 x 63 cm

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Giger’s early work was pornographic and grotesque. It formally reflected a masturbatory speed and desperation within the quick quality of his marks, and the content that he drew was equally disturbing. His pen and ink work created in his twenties mostly depicted decapitation, fetuses, and/or inexplicable limbs. The speed that was prescribed to each mark coupled with the experimental nature of both composition and content consistently broke basic rules about anatomy and several social norms with his depictions of pornography and Satan. And it’s in that sweet spot where I see a glimpse of things that were special to me in moments of mania: a boldness to the ink, unified chimeric shapes, and the sheer fucking quantity of work. Did Giger want to be a robot too?

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H.R. Giger, Self Portrait, 1962, ink on paper, 15.3 x 20 cm

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The trope of the self-harming mentally-ill artist is a stylish framework within arts education and art history from which to view the art historical canon, and also to help define the avant-garde. Its edgy allure makes it easy for artists to feel pressured to suffer for their work in order to fit within that familiar narrative, but the consequences of this stereotype are terrible. In the winter of 1888 Vincent van Gogh had a manic episode after an argument and cut off his own ear, reporting the next day that he had no memory of the event. Amy Winehouse, one of the most unique jazz singers in our lifetime, battled alcoholism, drug addiction, and bipolar disorder until she died of substance abuse. In a letter to his father, Michelangelo Buonarroti said, “I lead a miserable existence and reck not of life nor honor—that is of this world; I live wearied by stupendous labors and beset by a thousand anxieties. And thus I lived for some fifteen years now and never an hour’s happiness I have had.” The list is seemingly endless, but when actual medical intervention is taken, it reflects an inept healthcare system. After Britney Spears’ public health emergency in 2007, she was prescribed Lithium and incorrectly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a tragic but not unique story how medicine and psychiatry control women rather than help them. The psychoactive drugs prescribed to Sylvia Plath to treat her depression are suspected of being the very substances that actually enabled her to take her own life. And when I sought mental health care after consistently having panic attacks in my studio, I was put onto a 6 week fast-track therapy program that resulted in no tangible change.
     Furthermore, it also seems like artists who make while manic, depressed, or while pushing through panic attacks are celebrated for doing so and that experience becomes a selling point and a status symbol. As an art student, two mentors of mine were open in their discussions with me about their drug abuse. One was a prolific draftsperson who continually blew out his shoulder after long hours in the studio and was prescribed Percocets for the pain. These opioids eventually made his drawings sloppy, but gallerists then described his work as ‘showcasing a truer anguish’. The second insisted that I try coding while high after describing his ideal cocktail of drugs containing fentanyl and mdma. A touring musician friend of mine whenever visiting town always asks me for an Adderall connection (to which I have none), and it’s situations like this where sometimes I ask myself which came first? The artist or the addiction? Because, it’s obviously both a behavior that is encouraged from the outside, purported by gallerists, art writers, and critics spinning a stereotype, but it’s also perpetuated from within through initially well intentioned treatment, but also through good old fashioned peer pressure.
     In an interview between Giger and Dan O’Bannon, a film screenwriter and effects supervisor most famous for the screenplay for Alien and The Return of the Living Dead, he confirmed Giger was an opium addict. Originally dosing opium to treat his night terrors, one of O’Bannon’s first accounts with Giger was at a hotel in Paris where Giger approached him with some tin foil and said bluntly, “Would you like to do some opium?”
     Dan: “Why do you take that?”
     Giger:”I am afraid of my visions”
     Dan: “It’s only in your mind”
     Giger: “That is what I am afraid of.”
     Maybe it’s prewritten, where those of us who use art to purge, must also treat the poisoned well with chlorine or fluoride. But it’s also those very moments where drugs blunt the hopeless life ahead of us, and sharpen a focus that delivers us to a flow state with ease. Again, interviews with Giger feel like a mirror as I am transported back to watching my dilated pupils flick back and forth in a mirror, or drawing portrait after portrait upon my friend’s printer paper after a night of dropping acid and watching the sunrise.
     The first time that I wanted to be robotic was actually before my sleep walking adventure in the garage. It was because of the pain that the developing calluses in my fingers were causing because of my rigorous drawing habits. I grip my drawing utensils between my middle finger and my ring finger and, growing up, it caused a noticeable divot in the tip of my ring finger. Even into adulthood the finger is misshapen around a now beloved callus. When this was developing, I was around 14 years old and was regularly filling up sketchbooks with ink and pencil drawings of robot dogs, and robot peacocks, and robots with scoliosis. The very mechanism that my body was building up to make it so I could draw more, was the very thing I sought to eliminate. My wrists were unyielding engines, but my finger muscles just couldn’t keep up. The more it hurt, the harder I gripped, and thus the more I wished for oil to flow through my veins.

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Emiland Kray, Call Me Mr. Bicycle Chain, chalk pastel on paper, 18”x24”, 2015

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There’s nothing in interviews or biographies about Giger wanting to be a robot, but it was in part because of his work that I knew I wasn’t alone in at least imagining it. In his middle and late career work, much of his figurative work includes androids. Somehow the human body transformed into a mechanical one. Leaning into monochromatic and analogous color palettes, his predominately airbrushed paintings give us the succulent repetition of a well oiled machine. In disgusting awe, Giger oftentimes reduced uniquely human behavior, like fucking, birth, and dying, into mechanized motion. Giger suspended death, and showed us a painless and grotesque world. Decapitation was still prevalent in his work, but the expressions were placid instead of stained and horrified – they were expressions of a robot suspended in the land of the living-ish. 

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H.R. Giger, Passage Temple (Life), 1974, acrylic and ink on paper on wood, 240 x 280 cm

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If we were robotic, then we wouldn’t have to turn to drugs to stay awake or to numb the pain. My mechanized esophagus could drink unleaded gasoline, no actually, I could drink leaded gasoline and be completely unscathed. I could harness the highest octane creative power, carpal tunnel be damned! EntireContribution84 asks Reddit: “What is the problem of becoming an emotionless robot?”, and here I am still wrangling that same question. Getting past two factor authentication may be a short-term issue, but thinking long-term, I could probably make 2-3 good fucking drawings per week. I wouldn’t need to take time to eat or sleep, but instead I could consistently be working. My calluses would go away along with my back pain and migraines. The biggest fear that I have though, is would the art then truly be mine?
     One of the main reasons that I haven’t taken hard drugs in over 5 years now was because it changed the quality of my artwork. Although it increased my productivity levels, the comedowns resulted in crippling impostor syndrome and hellish shame. The artwork felt dry, despite being expressive and opulent. Is this the consequence of being a robot? The marks looked feverish, the work seemed suspended, everlastingly pregnant with an ideal that was ultimately empty. Little information is known about Giger’s drug addiction, but it’s alluded to in his paintings. Heroin syringes for example are repeated motifs in several of his works, but whether or not the artist partook in those drugs is speculation. Even less information is known about any attempts at sobriety for the artist. There are several accounts from partners and friends about potential alcoholism, but nothing concrete and again no professional diagnoses. In a 1994 interview with Steven Cerio, Giger claimed that drugs are completely forbidden in Switzerland, but his romantic partner Li Tobler on multiple occasions has confirmed that drug use was ubiquitous within their relationship.

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Li-||, airbrush on board, 1974

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I cannot deny that something in his artwork reminded me of my years of dissociating while drawing under the influence. From a formal point of view, we share repetition, we share paper and canvas, and we share the robot. The external pressure to create and produce is an ongoing issue with horrific productivity trends like the 5-9 routine, and side hustles just to meet basic needs. Production at a high level has become a necessity for folks just to keep their heads above water, and having a healthy work-life balance is so rare that I am beginning to think that working under capitalism is really just a scam. Fueled by a desire to please an internalized quota at such a young age, I felt compelled to produce constantly. Not only did drawing quiet the pounding in my head, but it also seemed to please those around me and thus my quota got higher and higher. When looking at the late career of Giger, I can’t say for certain that he ever did slow down. Still filling sketchbooks with pornography while also working with industry monsters on projects like Dune, two covers for Heavy Metal magazine, he designed the entire architectural interior for a bar and lounge down to the detailing on furniture design and the patterns in the fucking tiles. The breadth of work that he produced is astonishing, and his signature style is still sought after by artists, make-up artists, screenwriters, and interior designers alike.

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Table, chairs, and tile designed by H.R. Giger for the Giger Bar

Giger Bar interior crop

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Now though, only one of us is still pumping out drawings. H.R. Giger lived until the age of 74 until he died from complications after a fall, and now I am alone to reflect on the high I get from making drawings until my calluses are rubbed raw or my eyes become bloodshot. Not even the Alien-Porno-King himself could keep his pedal to the metal forever with death being the final boundary. While I’m down here, dreaming of the dopamine rush of making 2-3 drawings a week, but realistically hitting my wall at 1, I still think about that little robot girl who visited me when I was a kid. A wordless, outstretched hand. Maybe, at 74, Giger had taken it, and he was the one now transcending in the circuitry. Maybe he’s basking in the joy of everlasting creation alongside his own robots. One day, I’ll be there too, and it won’t be Percocets or fentanyl or MDMA, but maybe it’ll be a fall, or maybe it’ll be the last breath of my iron lungs during a peaceful night in bed. 

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Works Cited

Boniface, Sadie. “Back to Black: Amy Winehouse Biopic Reviewed by an Alcohol Expert.” The Conversation, 11 Apr. 2024, theconversation.com/back-to-black-amy-winehouse-biopic-reviewed-by-an-alcohol-expert-227609. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Giger, H. R. WWW HR Giger Com. Taschen, 2008. 

“HR Giger - the Official Website.” HR Giger - The Official Website, HR Giger Museum, 12 Dec. 2012, www.hrgiger.com/biography. 

Madahi, Doha. “Britney Spears’ Allegation of Abuse by Doctor Unlikely to End Conservatorship, Experts Say.” NBC News, NBC, 13 July 2021, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/britney-spears-alleged-her-former-psychiatrist-was-abusive-it-probably-n1273769. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Poetry Foundation. “Sylvia Plath.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2016, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Rose, Steve. “Alien Designer HR Giger: “I Am Afraid of My Visions.”” The Guardian, The Guardian, 14 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/hr-giger-film-artist-alien-i-am-afraid-of-my-visions. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Vercillo, Kathryn. “Michelangelo Buonarroti: Art and Mental Health History.” Create Me Free, 2 Nov. 2023, createmefree.substack.com/p/michelangelo-buonarroti-art-and-mental. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Yashi Banymadhub. “The Tortured Artist Is a Dangerous Myth. It’s the Way Creative Workers Are Treated That Causes Breakdown.” The Independent, 10 Oct. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/voices/world-mental-health-day-tortured-artist-dangerous-myth-pain-art-depression-suicide-a8576971.html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

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Emiland Kray is a visual artist working primarily with book arts and game design. His work investigates the complexities of memories and dreams, by manipulating our attachment to nostalgic forms. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and in 2023 he received his MFA from the University of Arizona with a portfolio of traditional watercolor, book arts, and game design. Kray was the winner of a 2025 Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society, has work in notable special collections such as the Arizona Poetry Center, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections, and the Lilly Library in Indianapolis. Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and collaborative projects, through initiatives like Troctopus Press, The Octopus Anthology, and partnerships with several non-profits and public libraries throughout the American Southwest. With a focus on accessibility, you can find many of his books in libraries around the United States and find his games free to play online.

Play some games | Look at some books | Social some medias

Dec 06: Brooke Wonders, Nightmare in the Blood

 Nightmare in the Blood

Brooke Wonders

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My husband and I played Bloodborne together. For nongamers: Bloodborne is a critically acclaimed gothic-horror videogame put out by FromSoftware and developed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, arguably the greatest living game auteur. I say my husband and I played Bloodborne together, but that’s not true: my husband manned the controller while I watched from the couch, laptop perched on my knees as I researched every available quest chain in the game.
     At the moment, our Hunter was in a pit, wandering through darkness. Avatars in Bloodborne are called Hunters, and they resemble disheveled Victorian goths. Our Hunter wore a black tricorn hat, a jaunty black capelet, and a black bandana over her nose and mouth. Few of these features were currently visible.

     “I don’t think there’s anything in here,” my husband complained.
     “Keep walking. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
     A gray-pink mass emerged from the darkness: a brain, tall as our Hunter and covered in too many eyes, with a bouquet of tentacles blooming from its side. It stared at us. We’d found the dying body of the Brain of Mensis.
     “This is the thing that wrecked us?”
     The Brain of Mensis sits atop a tower in the Nightmare of Mensis region. When its gaze falls on you, you take damage—quickly and brutally. We’d spent most of the level hiding behind pillars to keep out of the Brain’s sightline, until finally we found a lever that dropped the Brain of Mensis down into the pit. Now, we hunted it.

     Mensis sounds like menses. Hunters chug blood vials instead of health potions—where’d that blood come from? Toward the end of the Nightmare of Mensis, the thin wail of a baby leads players to a woman dressed in white, her front stained with blood. Beyond her is Mergo’s Wet Nurse, a four-limbed, black-shrouded angel of death who fights beside a rusted pram. Once Mergo’s Wet Nurse has been defeated, the baby’s cries stop. The Lovecraftian Great Ones who rule the benighted world of Yharnam have stillbirths, attempt surrogacy, and even babysit—despite continuous failure to achieve parenthood, they keep trying. Bloodborne’s imagery evokes the discomfort and silence surrounding reproduction and the female body. 

     “This walkthrough says to use the Make Contact gesture,” I told my husband.
     “How did anyone ever figure this out?” he grumbled, but complied. Our Hunter bent her arms into a 90-degree angle. “Now what?”
     “Don’t touch the controller.”
     A minute is forever in videogame time, especially when shadows usually hide beasts who try to murder you. We waited in the dark for Make Contact to make contact. At last, the brain rewarded us with loot: a rune that increased the blood echoes we won by killing things. Even Bloodborne’s currency has a gothic name. 
     “Now what?” my husband asked again.
     “The internet says to kill it, but you don’t have to.”
     We sat in silence for a moment. The brain’s sad eyes watched us. Then my husband hacked it to death, a mercy. 

     I hate being the girl who watches boys play videogames, but I wrecked my wrists playing World of Warcraft in the aughts, and my hands go numb and stop working whenever I game. This chronic pain had recently been overshadowed by a more acute agony, however. Elizabeth McCracken, in her memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, refers to her stillbirth as “the calamity,” and there is no better word. At the time of my miscarriage, everything I knew about pregnancy loss came from McCracken’s book, and though stillbirth is not miscarriage, I’m grateful she shared the gory details, as they were all I had to go on. My husband and I played Bloodborne because I lost a pregnancy, and immersing ourselves in body-horror fantasy felt easier than talking about it.
     My husband held my hand as the ultrasound tech told us she couldn’t find a heartbeat. I laughed in shock, and my husband gave me a worried smile. I was in the eleventh week of my pregnancy and about to exit the first trimester, or so I thought. The OB/GYN told us I had a blighted ovum, and that based on its size, the being inside me had ceased to be at nine weeks. Instead of suggesting a D&C, the usual procedure for a miscarriage occurring after week ten, the OB/GYN said, “I’m so sorry,” and sent me home to pass it naturally. A D&C, or dilation and curettage, is the same surgical procedure used for medical abortion, and women receiving one after a miscarriage usually recover in two to three days. I did not receive this care.
     I ended up in the OB/GYN office because I’d started to bleed. I was about to get on a plane to fly from my home in Iowa to Washington, D.C. for a writing conference, and I knew so little about miscarriage and had received so little information, I thought I could still take part in panels while passing a nine-week-old fetus. I was a 35-year-old woman raised by a feminist mom who’d pressed Our Bodies, Ourselves into my hands the day I got my first period. I should have known, but I didn’t.
     I wish miscarriage, stillbirth, and pregnancy loss were discussed more openly, especially the gore. I passed massive clots, bleeding through maxi pads faster than any period I’ve ever had. In two days, the shock wore off, and I fell into depression. My body expelled tissue while my mind mourned the baby I hadn’t been sure I wanted, until I learned she wasn’t to be. I went to the clinic for blood draws each week like a good girl. I never received results from these blood draws, nor was I given any information about why I had to endure them; I’d had only two appointments before losing the pregnancy. These doctors didn’t know me. After eight weeks of blood draws by inept phlebotomists, my inner elbows bloomed purple; I looked like an addict. During the busy month of April, I stopped going. No one followed up.
     A baby can survive outside the womb at twenty-five weeks. I carried my miscarriage for twenty-three. This harrowing process is referred to as an incomplete miscarriage, but it usually ends after around four weeks. Mine lasted for four months of erratic, heavy periods and random contractions that felled me. I didn’t know they were contractions; I thought I’d developed a strange muscle spasm in my midsection—perhaps an exercise-related injury, or maybe indigestion? Finally, I grew concerned enough to return to the OB/GYN. She scheduled me for a D&C the next day.
     That night, the contractions quickened, leaving me strung out on my bathroom floor. My fever spiked and I couldn’t keep water down. My husband debated taking me to the emergency room, until a 4am ice bath cooled me down enough to get through the night. On May 13th, 2017, the day before Mother’s Day, I received a D&C. “You fell through the cracks,” the OB/GYN said before the anesthetist put me under. The surgery lasted seven minutes. My cousin, a nurse-anesthetist, called the next day. “You were at how many weeks? That’s unbelievable. You’re lucky you didn’t die of sepsis.”
     I received the D&C in May. My husband and I played Bloodborne in June, July, and August, then started over again with a new character build and weapon. We bought the expansion and played that. As the grief ebbed, we cut back to fewer hours of gaming. We took up weightlifting. We went to therapy. I wanted to write about the miscarriage, but the usual nerve pain limited my ability to type, so my husband offered to be my hands. In the same way he moved our Hunter through abandoned universities and haunted cathedrals, now he typed while I dictated.

     I lose my mind, so my husband goes hunting for it. We wander around in the dark.
     “I don’t think there’s anything in here,” my husband says.
     “Keep walking. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
     A gray-pink mass emerges from the darkness: a brain, or maybe a fetus, a gothic horror either way. This is the thing that wrecked us. The reason we’re down here in the pit. 

     When the phlebotomists checked my blood each week, they were searching for the echo of my lost pregnancy: the hormone hCG. When that hormone left my bloodstream, it would be evidence my body no longer believed itself pregnant. The number didn’t go to zero until a doctor dilated my cervix to scrape and suction the stubborn tissue away.

     Bloodborne’s three endings become available after you’ve defeated Mergo’s Wet Nurse. A gate opens in the Hunter’s Dream, allowing you entrance to a graveyard where Gherman, the first Hunter, awaits in his wheelchair, an 18th-century contraption of wicker and metal. Gherman offers you a choice: awaken from the Hunter’s Dream and end your hunt. Or, stay asleep to dream of blood. If you choose to awaken, you come to in a cathedral. A bell rings in the distance, heralding the sunrise—the first ending. If you choose to remain asleep, Gherman rises from his chair and a boss battle begins. If you defeat him, however, a new horror appears: the Moon Presence. The scythe-wielding Moon Presence resembles a thorn bush crossed with an anorexic Giger alien, and she can’t be fought. In this second ending, she cradles you like a mother, then confines you to Gherman’s chair, where, it is implied, you will continue his work of mentoring new Hunters in the ways of the hunt. 
     The third ending triggers only if you’ve collected three “One Third of Umbilical Cord” items. One drops off Mergo. Another can be found in an abandoned workshop. The third can be won in several ways, but here is the path we used. We rescued a pregnant NPC named Arianna and sent her to a chapel safe haven, where she remained. She helped us by donating vials of her powerful blood, a consumable item that increased stamina. Until the time we went back for more Arianna blood and found her weeping and no longer pregnant. “This is a nightmare,” she told us. At her feet, a pink abomination cheeped pitifully. It had a fetal look to it, labial, but with hooked claws for hands. Arianna’s sobs transformed into maniacal laughter, but for a few seconds, the two sounds were indistinguishable.
     We acquired the third umbilical cord segment by murdering Arianna’s newborn monstrosity. Killing the Brain of Mensis takes multiple strikes, but the Celestial Child dies from one hit. 

     If you manage to collect all three cords, when the Moon Presence appears, you can kill her, and in place of the usual Prey Slaughtered message, the words Nightmare Slain fill the screen. In a final cutscene, the Doll—the game’s combo girlfriend/mother figure—discovers a newborn monster on the path leading away from Gherman’s graveyard. It looks like an eggplant with tentacles. The Doll scoops it into her arms and coos, “Are you cold? Oh, good Hunter,” suggesting this helpless creature will grow into you, or someone like you. The Great Ones have successfully reproduced, and you end the game proud parent to a baby eldritch horror.

     I grieved the fantasy of parenthood in the early weeks of my miscarriage, but as it stretched on, grief persisted in my body outside my conscious awareness, thanks to the hormones in my blood. In the most material way I can conceive, I couldn’t let go of my pregnancy. It took years for my husband and I to work through the terror and horror of those four months enough to try again. Bloodborne’s land of Yharnam reconnected us—a nightmare, slain. And eventually, we completed every available ending, including the one where we became parents.

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Dr. Brooke Wonders is an Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa, where she teaches courses in speculative and experimental nonfiction, as well as fantasy and horror. Her writing has appeared in The Dark, Brevity, and Clarkesworld, among others. Heloise & Wulf, a gothic-horror videogame she cocreated with Annah Browning and Paracat Games, is free to play at Black Warrior Review.

Dec 05: Joni Tevis, Float and Trowel, Barrow and Lantern (Eight Craftsmen, ca. 1910)

Float and Trowel, Barrow and Lantern (Eight Craftsmen, ca. 1910)

Joni Tevis

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Mud on the ramp and the toes of their boots. These men are masons, but of brick or stone I can’t tell. They pose on the granite steps of what could be a bank, courthouse, church. The silvery sheen of the photograph dates it around 1910. It came to me in a box lot at an auction. I don’t know who took it, or where.
     All eight men wear hats, are white. One man stands with his leg propped on a barrow’s handle. Two of them bite unlit pipes. Only one is empty-handed—no stick, float, trowel. Look at their clothes. Chaffed and mud-marked, creases set by days of work. Moth holes in the placket of this fisherman’s sweater, buttoned top to bottom.
     What you learn first: how to carry. Load the hod with bricks or blocks and carry it to the job site. Unload it and do it again, again, again. Here’s the youngest, his overalls snapped over a heavy coat, work shirt, crooked tie. All of it spattered with slurry. A star on the wrist of his glove. Apprentice.
     Then learn the tools: mash hammer, mell, dummy, pitching hammer. Chisel and mallet should match. Use a boaster for fine finishing work. Learn the habits of stones. Sandstone, limestone, granite, marble. You can spend your life testing their moods and tasting their dust. This man, neck stretched and seamed, must be the oldest. He’s the only one with spectacles, the only one with a mustache, the only one seated. Knees wide apart, lantern before him: light-bringer.
     Look at their hands. Four men wear mitts or gloves, but every bare hand shows signs of hurt, fingers splayed or flattened at the tips, a ring finger awry and stiff from an old break. Only one, third from left, has his name preserved: Jim, written in pencil above his head. Jim’s eyes look tired. His jacket pocket bulges and his pants have two little holes torn in them. The buttons on his coat don’t match, but someone sewed them on tight.
     And this man, in a tie and fedora, tucks his left hand behind his back. Stares at the camera with a look on his face like worry. He’s the one for me. Why does he hide his hand? Who taught him his trade, and where? Did he help to lay the granite he stands on? Who loves him? Where is he from—Ireland, Spain, Sicily, Pittsburgh? How much is he paid? What will he eat for lunch? I know his face better than those of many of my kin. How can what we make with our hands last longer than we do?
     This is a break, not the end of the job. The windows behind them sealed off with frames of stretched burlap or screen. A work entrance of raw planks with a hasp and padlock snapped to secure the site. But against the solid blocks of stone, it all looks as temporary as it must be. The job is ongoing, and could be for some time. Maybe you start what someone else will finish.
     For example, look at Washington National Cathedral in D.C. Teddy Roosevelt set the foundation stone, or pretended to, on September 29, 1907. A Sunday. Strange to work on a church on a Sunday. But this was a ceremony—a big event with crowds and hoopla. It’s work, but work with a difference.
     Then for the next eight decades, the work continued, without spectators or speeches. Masons like the ones in my photograph laid the great building, one course at a time, squared and precise. I read an interview with Joe Alonso, the Cathedral’s head stone mason, who’s worked there since 1985. Asked about the masons of the past, he mused, “Just seeing their work, the work itself speaks to me….When you’re walking way back on the apse, or the great choir”—remember, this is atop the building, better than two hundred feet in the air—“built back in the 1910s and ’20s, and seeing the work they did, they actually set the standard for us as we were building the last portions of the cathedral. At least I felt that when I was up there. It had to be as good as their work.”
     In September 1990, eighty-three years to the day after work began on the cathedral, Alonso set its final stone. He told a writer from the Smithsonian’s Folklife magazine that he “felt like all the other masons were up there with him, ‘maneuvering that big finial into position, checking it, making sure it was level and true.’”
     That was a ceremony, and ceremony matters, but I prefer the daily work of it. A day like today. You can see what you’ve made. How I love to run my hand across the brick foundation of my own home and admire the skill behind it. There’s a fundamental earnestness in me. I want to build something that will last. Something that gives shelter and lifts the eyes to heaven.
     They’re in the process of something. Not finished. The camera flashes, and the men scatter. I examine the photograph under a duoscope and up close, silver specks fleck the men’s coats and overalls, constellations of bright pips from the halide emulsion the unnamed photographer used.
     Break’s over. The masons get back to work. People will climb up and down these steps for years to come, not thinking of the ones who laid them. Wars come, they know, and earthquakes. Stone today could be rubble by nightfall. No wonder that masons are given to ritual, secret belief, relics stashed in hollow cornerstones. Me too. When Alonso set the last spire, a sprig of boxwood cut from the bishop’s garden hung from the hook of the crane. Evergreen, more or less, a symbol that says Let this live on after I’m gone.

*

Joni Tevis is the author of two books of essays, including The World Is On Fire. Her work has been honored with two Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Dec 04: Wyatt Williams, "Arnold"

Arnold

Wyatt Williams

(This essay is reprinted from You May Now Fail to Destroy Me, edited by Ken Baumann and Blake Butler, which you may preorder here.)

*

*

Blockbuster Video. Friday evening. Omaha, Nebraska. Corner of College and Airline Drive. 1991. On the shelves, an elaborate arrangement of VHS tapes meant to announce the arrival of the latest hit, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Tapes displayed facing out, five tapes per shelf, six shelves per rack, three racks devoted entirely to Terminator 2. A total of ninety identical VHS covers bearing the cold blue stare of Arnold in black leather jacket, black sunglasses, black t-shirt, black gun, black motorcycle. An impossible muscular refinement of his body that makes the distinction of his detailed flesh from the machines accompanying him if not indistinguishable, then at least irrelevant. This is the tape my father and I are here for.
     Earlier that day, the bus dropped me off from school and my father picked me up for the weekend at his farm. It was not long after I turned seven years and not terribly long after my mother moved out of the farmhouse and into an apartment, but sometime before the day my parents finalized their divorce. It is unclear where my mother and older sister were this weekend, maybe a Girl Scouts trip? It may have been the first weekend I’d ever spent with my father alone.
     He ordered delivery pizza along with two three-liter bottles of Coke. We ate in front of the television, the volume turned up to a level that she never would have approved of. I remember him saying, before he pressed play on the remote, “Just don’t tell your mother.”
     When he dropped me off at her apartment a couple of days later, she asked what we’d done and I burst out that we’d seen Terminator 2. I had loved the movie—the robots and Edward Furlong’s hair had moved me—and was excited to tell anyone who would listen, but as the words came out of my mouth I saw the expression on her face, which turned away to anger at my father. I don’t remember the exact problem, something along the lines of me being too young for “violent movies.” When I looked to my father, in the moments before this turned into another one of their typical fights, I could see my transgression clearly in his face. He made no attempt to hide his disappointment in me. He had offered, however briefly, to induct me into the group of men, a fraternity of silence and unspoken agreements, and I had declined his offer. For the first time, I had betrayed him.

*

*

On the day that I was born in November of 1984, sixty years ago, The Terminator was the number one movie in America.
     In that film, two hitmen—one a human, one a machine—travel back in time to 1984. The machine played by Arnold is there to kill Sarah Connor and her unborn son; the human, Kyle, has been sent to kill the machine, but also to fall in love with Sarah and father the child that the machine wants to kill. This is complicated by the fact that Kyle has been sent from the future by John, the child he is meant to father, through a time machine that is destroyed after its single use. Kyle fathers John with Sarah but is killed before John is born. If this chain of death and birth sounds vaguely biblical, I would argue that is not accidental. The Terminator is a creation story, one that attempts to explain our universe with the same totality as any sacred text. What makes this variation distinct from the old stories is that a machine enables a son to both orchestrate the circumstances of his fathering and the murder of his father in the same action.
     The second Terminator film is complicated by the return of the Terminator, who we believed to be dead at the end of the first but is now miraculously reborn. He is not John’s father, but he has been sent as a representation of a father made from flesh and machine, to protect Teenage John and show him the way. Teenage John is resistant at first, but eventually accepts the idea that a messenger sent by his future self, the invention of a machine-father, is better than no father at all. They become bonded. Key to this arrangement, though, is that the machine-father self-immolates at the end of the film, killing himself so that John can live.
     I am aware that there are other Terminator films but the work I’m doing here does not concern them, primarily because I did not see them during the formative years of my brain development. This is neither a work of criticism nor memoir, though I would allow that maybe it is the work of theology. What I’m trying to do, the only thing I’ve ever known to do, is disassemble the parts of a powerful machine—stories are powerful machines I’ve learned—and understand what it does. I am using my own body and mind to show what it is capable of doing, what it has done.
     Though I am bringing myself to this text, it is not to recount the events in my memory. What I am interested in is how the machine of this story is part of my brain; if those two are not fully indistinguishable, then the distinction is at least irrelevant. As with all writing, I am doing this because I believe I am not alone.
     I am writing this to you now in my barn. It is a useless building that once served some purpose to the fields around it, but the machines were improved and made more efficient and now the tractors no longer even need a driver. The plowing is all done by satellite now and so this barn, filled with old broken pieces of now-useless machines, is useless to the world, as well. I find this an appropriate place to do my writing.
     I have my papers spread out on the old workbench. There is a vice and a set of files and metric and imperial socket sets, two tanks of oxygen and acetylene for brazing and a 200 amp welder for TIG, spools of brass and silver. There is a diesel powered drill press, a lathe, and, fixed to the far corner, a bench grinder. Any machine could be made in this barn, fabricated from scrap, unless it needs a computer. There isn’t anything that could survive in here, either, if you opened those oxy-acetylene tanks and knew how to make them explode. 

*

*

Arnold exists in both the machine of the story as well as the fleshy dimension outside of it. It is impossible to watch the Terminator move through a scene and forget that you are watching Arnold simultaneously. His flesh story is, too, about transformation of man into the facsimile of a machine.
     Arnold explains his relationship to his body in the documentary Pumping Iron in 1977:

I don't have any weak points. I had weak points three years ago. My goal always was to even out everything to the point that everything is perfect. Which means if I want to increase one muscle a half inch, the rest of the body has to increase. I would never make one muscle increase or decrease, because everything fits together now, and all I have to do is get my posing routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know? It's perfect already.

     Arnold is the last man on this planet to have believed that he had a perfect body. Future historians will understand this as a major moment in the trajectory of what went wrong: That machines were made to enable the perfection of a body and that once that perfection was finally achieved, it became inaccessible again. The cycle of machine improvement leading closer and closer to perfection and then creating a new and more complicated problem: That is the problem of our time.
     In the same documentary, Arnold describes his relationship to his father:

You cannot have any kind of outside negative force coming in and affect you. If I get emotionally involved, that can have a negative effect on my mind and therefore destroy my workout. So therefore I have to cut my emotions off and be cold. If someone steals my car right now, I don’t care. I can’t be bothered by that. The only thing I would do is have my secretary call the insurance agency. I have trained myself for that, to be totally cold and not let things go in my mind. 

My mother called me on the phone and said, “Your dad died.” She says, “You coming home for the funeral?” I said, “No. It’s too late. He’s dead. There’s nothing to be done.” I didn’t bother with it. I never did talk about it again. 

     That the relationship between our bodies and our fathers and our ability to construct the machines of our desires may have something to do with one another is a significant detail in my papers here. Arnold is saying that the ability to turn the warm flesh of his being down to the cold operating level of a machine is possible through the removal of his father from his mind. He has replaced his father with the machine-father of his body.
     There was a time when I felt proud to share my name with Arnold. That when someone said my name, they thought of me but also of him, a man with a perfect machine-body. I was a child. Eventually, I came to realize that the association was unflattering, that it was embarrassing to have my body and be mentioned in the same name as him. My own name produces this shame.
     I have spent the majority of my life in search of a machine that will make me less human. The specifics of which machines I have personally tried—which vehicles, which drugs, which philosophies of self-improvement—seems irrelevant and minute in a society that has so obviously embraced the belief that a new machine, the next one we make is the one that will save us, that we only ever need to make the next machine, the next machine will fix me, the next machine will save my time, the next machine will grow more soy, the next machine will optimize my health, the next algorithm will fix the way I think, the next machine will make things faster or sooner and finally end this interminable waiting and rid me of the thoughts that race while having to be patient.
     Those fools and their false promises! I’m certain of their delusions because they are my same delusions, from my workbench surrounded by my tools to make more machines I know I can never escape them. My head knows where we have gone wrong while my heart still only wants for another machine, still believes in their beauty. I can’t shake that false faith in my heart. I still believe that I could create a machine-father to replace my own, a work of mechanical perfection that would erase the flaws of this flesh. I know this is how it is for so many of us. I will not give you the specific history of my machines, which ones I built, which ones I bought, what speed I was going when the first machine I built almost killed me, how exactly it was I went from inhaling steroids to injecting them before the side effects began, the farm implements I built thinking it would give me an edge over my competition, the amount of money I put into my operation before the farm went under, when I started finding that I could take apart a story the way I do an engine block, how it was that things began to be so disorganized for me. I’m not getting into any of that.
     I need to explain how the belief in a machine can make a heart feel. The specifics of my own memories get in the way. What I can tell you instead is how to join one round metal tube to another round metal tube. Square tubes are easier because you can cut them flat and straight; there is nothing flat and straight in the human heart, which is why square tubes are irrelevant here. Joining one round metal tube to another is key to any engine, any frame that moves, any motorcycle, any plane, any tractor, any oil rig, any machine that untethers us from the limitations of our bodies and movement, that improves us beyond what a body can do alone. The angle of the joint must be determined by the purpose, which dictates shape and therefore angle. And the cutting must be done with a round blade—we call this a miter—that matches the diameter of the tube that it is being joined to. The miter is mounted to a mill and the tube secured with a jig set to an angle that is determined through a simple subtractive equation from the desired angle. Is it possible that an angle, which hides within the structure and purpose of a thing, may have some similarity to an angel that hides within the structure and purpose of all things? The mill turns the blade, spinning and shaving away through the hard steel and leaving thin flakes below until the cut has been made. The two tubes may be held together by hand to confirm the correctness of the blade. And if the correctness has been confirmed, the area of the joint to be created may be cleaned with acetone to ensure a sterile and unpolluted fusion. The cleanest torch is an electric one, pulsating amps, miniature lightning strikes only a few millimeters tall that melt the base and joining tubes along the thin gap made by the cut of the miter. Argon gas pumping in behind each lightning strike. Molten red turning to iridescent metallic rainbow blooming across the surface of the weld. The cooling metal pooled in teardrops of steel, stacked one after another until the round cut has been made whole, complete, and formed in a new creation: A machine. 
     I have gone everywhere in search of this feeling. Creation! The intoxication of using one machine to make a new and better machine than the last. It is burdened by hope that this machine will be the one to work, to improve over the life of the last. How blinding—how blinded I am by the torch and the glow, my eyes full of spots that float and glow as if my eyes were always set by the sun—the feeling is. Please do not mistake this for machine apologia. Any of us can see what they have done to our world, but what I am trying to understand is what they have done to our hearts, how in my heart I want a machine-father to solve the problem of machines. 
     What did my father want? What didn’t he want? I’ve never been able to write about him. I write about The Terminator instead.

*

*

The films begin with male nudity. The Terminator is unclothed, Kyle is unclothed, and, suddenly as a crack of blue lightning, they find themselves in a world that requires they cover themselves. As it was in the Garden.
     The world around them is fallen. Trash litters the ground as if it were leaves from a forest of trees. The frames direct our attention to the relationship between industry and military; the tread on a construction vehicle moving earth becomes the tread of a tank crushing skulls. These are, more than anything, films about machines, the intoxicating beauty of them and the possibility that the most beautiful and dangerous machine is one that cannot be distinguished from a human male. This is accomplished through a simple difference in the mechanisms: Making them more round than square. When a machine approaches nature’s roundness, we begin to see the serpent.
     The terrible future appears only in dreams, visions, the fleeting seconds when someone who knows what is coming closes their eyes and for a little while we are allowed to see what they can see. It is redundant now to say that is also how it is in the Bible, that overwhelming visions of truth are one of the few ways for God to communicate with prophets. Sarah becomes one—a prophet of the truth who is deemed crazy for it—and the men around abuse her for it. John knows her truth but cannot believe it, can only dismiss it, until the reborn Terminator returns, the machine-father, to make him believe. The father is necessary but also impossible: If the father stays, even an imitation father, then John will die. The father must die for John to live.
     How many men do I know who believe a machine will allow them to outrun the sound of their father’s voice? When one machine fails to achieve that impossible speed, they believe the problem is with that specific machine, not with their false beliefs? That hidden in the secret fraternity of men is the silence on this exact subject of escaping our fathers? How is it these men have made the whole world around us in the image of their machine pursuit, so that not even the field or sky is free from their obvious failures, the failures that will kill us all eventually, and yet I am alone in my knowledge and visions, isolated in this barn with my useless tools and useless pages, and in the fields around me I can see the wreckage of the rusting and rotten whole history, one useless machine given up for the machine useless machine, and all that is left for me to do is my watching and rewatching, making my notes and doing my theology, and the only resolution I have found, the only message I can glean from our creation story is the clear and apparent knowledge that another machine will not save us but killing our fathers could.
     I have had to isolate myself here among my junkyard of the useless to see clearly this vision of the truth, but I cannot be alone in it, I know I am not alone, I believe I am not alone, and it is through action that we will discover that we are not alone, those of us that can see the vision clearly.
     I am standing out in the field now. I am recording this with my phone, which types the words as I speak them. It is night and I can see my barn in the distance with its single bulb hanging from the rafters, rays of light glowing in the cracks between the boards. I can see the red and green oxy-acetylene gas tanks and how I have arranged them for this moment.  In other direction, I can see my father’s barn, which is only a single light on the flat, far horizon. When was the last time we talked? If I called at this hour, I know that he would answer. It is only a short drive and I am well aware of exactly where he would park his truck. He would not notice the tanks or the way that I have arranged them. I am standing in the rows of soy and all above me I can see the rows of satellites moving in a line and I know what I need to do. 

*

Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating. His essays appear in Harper's, The Believer, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Dec 03, 2025: Michael Martone, ...All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Eight Memoirs on Wearing Words

 …All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt:

Eight Memoirs on Wearing Words

Michael Martone

*

Magic Marker

There was an empty box printed in black ink on the white T-shirt you were given when you registered for the Fort Wayne Basketball Camp. Fort Wayne Basketball Camp, in all caps, a picket fence of letters bordering the blank box. I was thirteen, would attend my first classes at Franklin Junior High that fall. I would play basketball there for the 7th grade team and then the 8th grade and 9th. A forward, I was growing fast. Of course I wanted to play in high school, North Side, whose coach, By Hey, had led a team to state a few years before. All the high school and junior high school coaches coached at this summer camp. Now I had the uniform, the T-shirt with the blank blank across the chest. I was instructed to take the shirt over to a table and with a felt marker, a Magic Marker, print my last name, MARTONE, in block letters in the empty space. There were many tables set up all over the outdoor courts and many boys bent over them printing their names on puckered and wrinkling cotton cloth. I remember thinking that this might be the first drill of the summer camp. The sense of where you are in a bounded space was an essence of the game we came here to learn. The ink was permanent of course, would not wash off, and the shirts would be washed each night of the two-week session. The letters faded but not enough to prevent the various coaches manning the indoor and outdoor courts from calling out the names as we dribbled or passed or picked or shot. The camp was held at the Concordia Theological Seminary, a beautiful campus designed to mimic villages of Northern Germany on Fort Wayne’s outskirts. I didn’t know it then but the architect was Eero Saarinen and the campus buildings were high mid-century modern. All the rooflines ran east to west. All the roofs pitched at exactly 23.5 degrees, the tilt of the earth on its axis, the architect signature. I wore the shirt off the courts until I out-grew it, an advertisement of a self.

TTTTTTTT

*

Sandwich Man

You hardly ever see them anymore, sandwich signs. I am thinking specifically of the billboard placards, front and back, worn over the shoulders by a person walking back and forth on the sidewalk near the business advertised. The Sandwich Man. Charles Dickens himself coined the term, “a piece of human flesh between two pieces of paste board.” You see the remnants of the devolved sandwich sign on sidewalks still, the A-board, a wedge with hinges, static. It folds up and is carried out the front door to be deployed all day and then carried back inside at closing. And there are the human billboards who dance twirling, spinning signs on street corners. One near me comes out during tax season for a company called Liberty Tax dressed as the statue doing a kind of tango with an oversized arrow. And there is the robot replacement of the body by the air dancing tube man, tall boy balloon. But the Sandwich Man has mostly disappeared for reasons that have to do with the changing target audience—the automobile now (catching the eye of people in a passing car) instead of sidewalk traffic. The elasticity of public and private space is constantly twitching. The private space inside a car now moves through a deserted public space. Businesses now stake their claims in jump-cutting video billboards miles from their front doors. The human body itself and its very scale expands and contracts like the air-dancing tube man tall boy. Back when the sandwich men shuffled back and forth, I wonder what they wore beneath their cuirass of words. I imagine that they still dressed in the suit of the day, shabby probably, or why take on the task of being a sandwich man? Not casual dress, I imagine. In the public space, sans sandwich, the man would be camouflaged with coat over a shirt, collarless or collared with some kind of tie. The layers of dressing, dressed for the sandwich. Only in our day would we venture out in our own camouflage of casual attire, the undershirt not hidden under that outer shirt. The words of the sandwich sign transferred onto comfortable clothing, now a second skin, on the chest and back, now spelling out our own small business, our own logos, our catchy catch phrases that now go with us everywhere.

TTTTTTT

*

Primeval Emoji

I was there then. There for the first sighting of the Smiley Face—two black dots and a curving line on a yellow circle. I can insert, pressing a few keys here, an illustration and illustrate that illustration with a string of variations now, the mouths and eyes tweaked and twisted, all the shades of emotions, the gestures of gestures, wink and nod, tears and teeth. But in the beginning, it was simply the Smiley Face. It emerged, or prototypes did in the 1950s and 60s, a New York radio station, an insurance company in Worcester. But the ball really got rolling in 1971 when a Franklin Loufrani trademarked and licensed the design. That summer I went to a high school journalism camp held at Indiana University and the Smiley was everywhere there. There were pin-backed buttons as well as the Smiley design was a natural fit for the thriving ecosystem of such buttons, often political, generated by the protests of the late sixties. But the buttons were accessories, add-ons, punctuation to the statement being made by the overall ensemble of fringed vests and bell-bottomed pants. But here I am trying to return to those days when the T-shirt transmuted. Today, of course, something printed on a T-shirt has been naturalized, is transparent, has always been there. Yes, the winged cross of the peace sign also was finding its way onto shirts and jerseys. But the peace sign was somber, subdued. The graphic seemed more a sketch, impromptu, distressed, in contrasted to the bright yellow hard edge of the Smiley Face. The shirts themselves were the blank slates that sported imperatives masked as a mere suggestion. The war raged on. Riots in the wake of assassinations. Killings on campuses. Protest posters and placards in dorm rooms. The Smiley faced T-shirt was nice. Nice. If words framed the image at all there was also the tattoo of “HAVE A NICE DAY.” It was a new kind of bloody shirt that pled: HAVE A NICE DAY.

TTTTTT

*

“Book” Store

I was back in Bloomington forty some years after I graduated from IU, and I headed over to the Memorial Union and the bookstore there. I loved that bookstore when I was a student and all the times I have returned through the years. I admit I wasn’t going there for books. I was on the hunt for postcards. I wasn’t hopeful. A postcard is a kind of analog tweet and digital tweets had pretty much quashed the paper medium. I knew too from other visits to other campus bookstores that their traditional function of selling textbooks for classes had disappeared. Digitized, textbooks had gone online as well. But trade books, book club books, best-sellers, political biographies, university press books, books written by faculty and visiting speakers seemed to be holding on. The Memorial Union Bookstore had two floors and a mezzanine. Once, back in my day, there were books of all kinds in every nook and cranny of its limestoned academic gothic layout. Some sundries too, of course, stationary goods—paper, pens, and pencils—art supplies, and racks of greeting cards and postcards, and stamps for the letters home. There was a US Post Office in the building. The PO was gone, I noticed going into the hotel lobby, the mailbox by the elevators shut up. This did not bode well. I wouldn’t be surprised then when I asked the clerk in the bookstore if they had postcards when the answer would be no. What did surprise me was that the clerk did not know what a postcard was. I turned around slowly scanning the main floor of the store and up into the open mezzanine above, and all I could see were T-shirts. Racks of T-shirts. T-shirts on mannequins, splayed on hangers to display telegraphic (there are no telegrams anymore) messages—Hoosiers, Indiana, the trident of IU—and/or numerals. Yes, there were hats as well, also in crimson, cream, and jackets on the walls, even red and white striped overalls. But T-shirts dominated. I asked the bookstore clerk who confirmed that they had no postcards once I described what a postcard was, if the bookstore carried any books anymore. And the clerk was pretty confident that no, there were no books. I thought I’d browse I told the clerk. I could always use another T-shirt. I liked getting a T-shirt or two from the college or university bookstores, a souvenir, when I visited campuses to give readings or classes. Most of those bookstores did not have postcards, and they all had T-shirts. Still, the bookstores had books. Sometimes, even my books. And sometimes the clerks at those colleges or universities wanted me to sign the books of mine they had. But now at Indiana University’s bookstore the metamorphosis had been complete. Not a book in the bookstore. Or so I thought. I did find a half dozen poetry titles in a mezzanine nook behind some black-on-black T-shirts on clearance. They looked to be leftover volumes from that summer’s writing conference. They were signed. I took a couple back down to the clerk along with one of the marked down black on black shirts. I found some, I said. “Wow!” the clerk said, not “ringing” me up, of course, but indicating where I should tap my card.

TTTTT

*

Super Man

Years ago, I read a comic story about comic books that played with the conventions of the superhero story of Superman. It took seriously the described powers of the character and teased them out to their logical end. Take x-ray vison. In the “real” comic Superman could see through anything with his x-ray vision though everything except for lead. Lead would block the penetrating sight. In the parody, this Superman would use his x-ray vision and he would see through everything until the x-ray of the vison came to something made of lead. There it would stop. Hilarious. In this world x-ray vison was only good for seeing lead. So, Superman was also invulnerable to everything (save kryptonite) under a yellow sun. And in this other version even the letters, the words that appeared in the comic’s hero’s thought and speech balloons were also permanent, impervious. They did not disappear in the next panel but stuck around. Still sensitive to the force of gravity, however, they fell from the clouds of thought and speech, a rain of letters and exclamation points, and adhered to the shirts and suits of mortal characters, staining everyone’s clothing with layers of text, palimpsest of paragraphs. It turns out that the precipitation of Superman’s uncatchable speech was his ultimate strength, his most deadly weapon, his enemies enveloped by his immortal words. So many heroes in comic books don a kind of spandex T, sporting their logos or initials on their chests like hairy heralds. But in this alternate universe, the bad guys were bound up in graphic fabric—nets woven of expositions, exhortations, explanations. They were defeated by wreaths of writing, writhing under the weight of words. I think of that satire, but also think of the static and graphic letters in just the regular comic book. In the “real” comic world, the way the bodies and the words dance around each other. How they wrestle. How they overlap. How you can see though the language. How the stories become transparent film, peeled away like the layers of skin and instructions found in the laminated pages of anatomy texts. 

TTTT

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I’m With Stupid

Tagged T-shirts have evolved into their own Linnaean taxonomy. The messages break down into specific genera or at least accents of fragmentary grammar and syntax. There are cartography shirts that broadcast a place or team or a school, a zip or airport or area code. There is merch that is straight-up advertisement and merch that serves as souvenir advertising, an intersection of time and place and person inhabiting the shirt. The T-shirt as consolation or participation or cheap trophy. When I watch championship games—all the major sports—the winners are doled out a shirt inscribed with the team’s name and the game they just won, donning the gear before the real hardware is awarded—I always think that somewhere in the backrooms of the stadium or arena are boxes of shirts preprinted with the now losing opponents’ details. Those shirts ready to go if things had gone the other way will never see the light of day. Oddly, if they did, they would be much more valuable than the “winning” shirt, a rare misprint, an inverted Jenny. There are other kinds. The team building shirts that serve also as uniforms, the uniforms that promote a brand. The flag embossed political candidate shirt. But I am thinking here of the novelty T-shirt, camouflaged with the slippery shading of language itself, double taken double-entendre. BULLSHIRT in bold sans serif or DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD kerned in curves on a safety yellow shirt. There is the formula I Went to BLANK and all I got was this Lousy Shirt, the blank filled in with a place or action. This formula so wide spread that you can now get the Blank left Blank of the whole first clause replaced by an ellipsis. …AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT. I like the meta quality of these messages. The wall of text often volleys a set up line in a large point size and the punch line reduced so you have to lean in, refocus. DO NOT READ THE NEXT SENTENCE—big and bold (and again language that meta, self-conscious of the artifice) and then the fine print: you little rebel. I like you. Or I HAVE ABS— and then this in tiny print—soluty no idea what I am doing. I like the what? Novelty of these shirts that play with not only the conventions of language and figures of speech but the conventions of printing. The play takes place in some space between the oral and the written as well as what can and cannot be spoken, what can and cannot be read. Who wears these shirts where pick-up lines are etched on the body not whispered in the ear? The famous pair of novelty shirts worn by a couple, side by side: I’M WITH STUPID says the first with an arrow pointing to the other wearing STUPID. It made me think just now of Romeo and Juliet and their introductory meeting printing out a formal sonnet in dialogue. T-shirts like these mine the joke in language, in communication. The humans who wear these novelty Ts are so quiet, deadpan, a kind of mime, waiting to see what you will say in the face of gesticulating words.

TTT

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RKO

(This photo was taken in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1977, by Jennifer Jones.)

Fifty years ago, between the classes I was taking at IU, my senior year, I walked around the campus and downtown Bloomington asking people on the street if they would like me to write poems for them then and there on the spot, on any subject they wanted. I had a yellow legal pad and a Bic ballpoint. I think I thought of it as performance art, a satire directed at the other student poets in my poetry workshop prefacing their poems with patter about how difficult it was to write this poem, how long it had taken. I think I thought then that those confessions of difficulty were another kind of performance piece but in the classroom. I don’t know. It was a fun challenge to play against type—the poet locked away in a garret, waiting for inspiration. I think I thought too about the audience question as well. Who reads poetry? Are there people outside my workshop who would read poetry, read the poetry I was writing for class? And what was the poet’s job? And what about the cash nexus. What was a poem worth? All the question you should ask, I think, when you find yourself with the luxury of time and space to play around with words and language. In any case, it was fun to do, and a way to deescalate for a moment the anxiety of the future. What would I do when I graduated? A few of my dormmates also wanted to join in and the four of us would hang around high traffic areas offering our services. Writing the poems was not that difficult. The hard part was approaching the customer/collaborator to get the poem going. We soon knew we needed some way to break that ice, and we quickly realized uniform T-shirts were the way to go. There were shops that catered to the fraternities and sororities all around campus. That year they were filming the movie Breaking Away in Bloomington—our little group sold poems outside the stadium to the extras watching the bike race. In the movie you can see the four protagonists have made special shirts for their team: CUTTERS in red letters on white T-shirts. We had gone to the same shop as the movie company had used. You had a choice of application, silkscreening or heat-transferred, iron-on letters. We went with silkscreen as we had some graphics as well and white ink on a black shirt. We had come up with calling ourselves RKO Radio Poets, a nod to the logo of RKO Radio Pictures with a pulsing antenna. We had all just seen Citizen Kane in a film class. On the back was an old car radio dial the different scales labeled AM, FM, and POEM. We had a slogan too: A POEM MUST NOT MEAN BUT BE 25¢. The shirts worked. We had metamorphed into performance poets instead of panhandlers. The T-shirts redefining the proximity of personal space. “Would you like a poem today?” By wearing the words, we cracked a code, had stumbled into Saussure’s semiotics. We were signs, embodying the theoretical ecosystem blooming in the linguistic classrooms of Ballantine Hall on the Bloomington campus. We had no idea from “Signs,” let alone what poems were or poetry. Clad in our T-shirts, we were animated signifier and signified, scratching on yellow legal pads, making a little scratch.

TT

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Letter Man

I lettered. I lettered in high school, Fort Wayne North Side. Not in football, basketball, or track. I lettered in speech and debate. I like to say I was in the NFL. Not that NFL but the National Forensic League. The actual athletes were not too keen on the speech and debate team sporting letters. I didn’t have the big bold block “N” they had but I did have two—a script “N” for speech and a gothic “N” for debate. Back then, in the seventies, there were hard copy catalogues from companies that specialized in selling letters. They sold and shipped patches as well that pictured mascots or tabs where names could be embroidered, chevrons and stripes, fleece stars or lower case “C” s for a captain trim. I loved looking through the catalogue with the “official” decorations that presented not as a general store available to anyone, but as something else, proscribed merchandise that somehow one needed to earn, not simply purchase. These letters needed to be awarded, presented, displayed on the body that had been a crucible. Honored hagiography! Initiated initials! What was the actual proprietary “N” of my high school? The athletes were quite certain their teams’ letters counted. The letters of the speech and debate teams, they believed, not so much. Nothing was said and the various cliches and clubs always side-eyed each other as they circulated through the hallways and classrooms. The administration couldn’t be bothered as it was concentrated then on the length of hair and skirts.

Later, in college, I didn’t letter. Well, not exactly. At Butler University where most of the residental students were “organized,” living in sororities or fraternities, I wasn’t. I was living in the one dorm on campus and working as a “house boy” at the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. My mother, who graduated from Butler, had been a Kappa Apha Theta (The Oldest Greek Letter Fraternity Known Among Women) there, had been the president of the Beta Chapter house. She was very disappointed that I didn’t pledge. I did go through “rush” to please her. I was rushed by Tau Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Chi, Lambda Chi, Sigma Nu, Phi Kappa Psi, and Delta Tau Delta (the Delts). The Delts really wanted me to pledge. My mother, the Theta at Butler twenty-five years before, had been on the debate team there. And her debate team partner had been a Delt! The Greeks were so organized they leveraged any connection to woo new members. The Delts hoped the card they held would do the trick persuading me. It didn’t. And I didn’t pledge there or anywhere. Nor did I join Butler’s debate team. I probably could figure out how to reset this keyboard to type Greek letters instead of typing out their names. The Greek alphabet has that mix of mystery and familiarity. And The letters look like letters that would be chiseled in stone as they started out there. But, you know, I never signed up, and I am typing this up quickly, thinking about the next thing I am going to type. You’ll just have to imagine the look of the Alpha, the Omega. Those that did become brothers or sisters displayed their letters all the time. There was jewelry for wrists, necks, ear lobes and decals for the car windows. But the letters were also worn on clothing and hats. Most striking were the letters printed on plain T-shirts, an understated overstatement. The shirts would be in-house colors (there are always colors as well), the letters printed bold and black mostly unless the color of the shirt could backup white ink. I liked the mountain range of Tri Delt and how the “X”s of all the “Chi”s looked like kisses or cartooned eyes of the unconscious. As a houseboy at Kappa Kappa Gamma, I had a Kappa Kappa Gamma shirt. I didn’t want to serve the formal dinners. For that one wore a coat and tie. Gloves even! I washed the dishes, scrubbed pans and pots, stored the silverware in the back wearing my Kappa Kappa Gamma branded work shirt and rubber gloves. I have worked for colleges and universities my whole life since then. On the periphery of every campus there are these little boutique factories, a kind of type house, manufacturing Greek letters and applying them to apparel. At Butler, I did end up getting my own Greek letter shirt at a nearby custom shop in Indianapolis. Gamma Delta Iota. It stood for something. Not Kappa Kappa Gamma’s “Keys to the Kingdom of God” but for unorganized men’s dorm, “God Damn Independent.” I fled then to Indiana University, IU, and finished my degree there, an AB in English Literature. And then onto Johns Hopkins for a graduate degree. My mother told all her sorority sisters that I had gone on to Hopkins, letting them assume I was there for an MD. But there, I took a degree in creative writing. I have an M but also an A. An MA as I am a master of arts, a man of letters.

T

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Michael Martone's newest books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and Table Talk and Second Thoughts: A Memoir in Flashes and a collaboration with Matt Baker, An Interview With Michael Martone. Retired after forty years of teaching, Martone lives in Tuscaloosa, Below the Bug Line, and putters in his gardens.