Julija Šukys, The Last Botanist: Of Garbage Plants and Archives | L*STS

    

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The Last Botanist: Of Garbage Plants and Archives

Julija Šukys

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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The Place: Heidelberg University Herbarium (Tiffin, Ohio) 

The Date: April 4, 2026

The Subject: Noel Mano, PhD and Duckweed Expert

Over two days in spring 2026, botanist Noel Mano and I explored the files of a neglected, poorly preserved, and incomplete collection of pressed plant specimens collected by students and faculty over decades and housed in an animal lab. Mano is likely the last of his kind at Heidelberg University. When we met, he had just accepted a new position at a different university. Botany, he told me, is no longer fashionable and the school was unlikely to hire someone interested and able to use the crumbling and idiosyncratic collection. As we read and examined specimen after specimen, seeds fell from the files and littered our worktable. I collected them in what Mano and I took to calling my “botanical debris bag.” I still have it on my desk at home. Thus far, I haven’t dared plant its contents.

After Mano’s departure the herbarium will likely either be donated or discarded. The archive contains more than plants; we found 1930s newspapers used for mounting. These featured personal and typewriter ads and newspaper articles about the Watergate scandal. We found many specimens collected by students during 1970s and ’80s field trips to a bog in West Virginia, the home state of a former faculty member, as well as duplicate specimens from Penn State’s herbarium (these are the oldest of the collection). Our favorite file came from a local landfill site, whose garbage plants fascinated us both. 

The Heidelberg Herbarium paints an idiosyncratic portrait of natural history, pedagogical legacy, social ephemera, and the resilience of both plant and human life. Over those days we spent together, Mano and I talked about botanical matter, archives, and the small dramas of academia. Once we’d finished our work, we hopped into Mano’s car and drove out to the Senecal Landfill site together. Although it is fenced off, it no longer takes in waste. On that April day, spring flowers stood in the pouring rain, poised to bloom.

Julija Šukys: Let’s describe what we have here.

Noel Mano: This is a folder from Seneca Landfill.

JŠ: This is my choice. I wanted to see what the garbage plants looked like. When we saw this file, I said this is kind of your jam because these are resilient and adaptable plants. Plants that can grow literally on a garbage dump.

NM: Yes.

JŠ: Duckweed, you were telling me, can grow in sewage.

NM: It can grow in polluted waters, up to and including sewage and animal manure runoff.

JŠ: And you’ve tested it in what is—what is the, the active ingredient in Roundup?

NM: Glyphosate.

JŠ: Right. Okay, so what else do we have here?

NM: We have Solomon’s seal, which is a showy little flower.

JŠ: It’s a false Solomon’s seal, though, which is interesting.

NM: Oh, yes, I missed that. Yes, thank you. They all look to be collected by the same person on a single day, in May 1993.

JŠ: May 12th, 1993. Obviously, this person went out to the landfill with…I don’t know…a pair of scissors or shears or something and uprooted some stuff. This looks like a trillium. In Ontario, of course, it’s illegal to pull these out of the ground or to even pick them. Growing up, trilliums were sacred flowers that we were not allowed to touch.

NM: But would you enforce that in the garbage dump? 

JŠ: I would have! I was a trillium fascist as a kid. I was very protective of them because we had been told— I don’t know if it’s true—that if you picked a trillium, it wouldn’t bloom again for seven years. Our forest floors were full of white trilliums. This looks like one of the purple ones that grow in the US. I’m surprised to see a trillium. They’re fussy and hard to grow. You can’t just pop a trillium in randomly into whatever ecosystem and expect it to thrive. So, what does this tell you?

NM: This trillium here is growing in or has been collected alongside wild geranium, wild ginger…stuff that we think of as weeds. Now, I wonder if the fact that this is happening in a landfill has to do with the fact that no one is going to landscape a landfill. You dump whatever trash, then put soil on it, and whatever grows, grows.

JŠ: People aren’t trampling it either. Nobody’s going for walks in a landfill.

NM: Exactly. I think that’s why. No one’s managing it; no one’s cultivating it; and it is just allowed to do its own thing. When I was on a job interview, one of my sessions was with a microbiologist and who had this sign on the door. It was a meme with two dogs, two shibas. One’s a sad, crying shiba and the other’s a strong one. The strong one is like, “I will grow anywhere!” But the little crying dog is like the bacteria you want to cultivate but if the pH is off by .0001, then forget it. 

JŠ: That’s the trillium. I have tried to grow these. That’s totally the trillium.

NM: Exactly. 

JŠ: I’ve had two. I think I planted...I don’t know...12? And only two of them survived.

NM: You do all these things, it doesn’t grow. And then… 

JŠ: Then you go to the garbage dump, and there it is. So, it’s a plant that just needs to be left alone by humans.

NM: Exactly.

JŠ: The other thing about the collector who put this together...these are very detailed notes. They’re specific about exactly what these plants are, where they were found. The names are precise. Both the Latin and common names are present. 

I like this file. It’s not just about species and variety. Instead, this is a portrait of one person on one day. It tells a story of resilience. It also tells us something about the collector. I’m not sure what, but it tells us something.

NM: I think someone is very interesting if their idea of how to spend a day in May is at the landfill. Here’s another trillium. And we have Jack-in-the-pulpit over here.

JŠ: I don’t know this one.

NM: This is sometimes considered a weed, and you can see why.

JŠ: No, what do you mean? What should I see when you say that? You mean it doesn’t have attractive leaves?

NM: Right. It’s sort of scrubby.

JŠ: Hard scrabble. Oh, it’s a ranunculus.

NM: Yeah, so it belongs to that buttercup family, and it’s dwarfed by some of its more charismatic members. This is kind of like an oddball collection of just whatever is growing at the landfill on a May day in 1993. 

JŠ: To me, this is a form of portraiture. Of place, of time. Of people. Of human-plant interactivity.

NM: Yeah.

JŠ: Of human shittiness, too. You’re just dumping your garbage…and here are plants!

NM: (laughs) 

JŠ: I was describing this collection to a friend, and I said, “Well, the herbarium itself doesn’t tell a single story. It tells you several different stories.” And one of those stories is local. It’s about Seneca County, Ohio. It’s a story of pedagogy, mentorship, and of a bunch of guys, botanists, who taught at a tiny college and took their students out on amazing excursions to collect plant specimens. 

But you and I keep talking about why one or another specimen is not botanically useful. Some don’t have roots. Others have been cut from a plant of unknown height. Some are mislabeled or undated.

NM: And then, the herbarium shows the tension between doing science and teaching science. Because if you were this very serious scientist, you would tell your students, “All right, we’re going to be really systematic, so all of you go and collect from this place or from this group of plants or this something.” Right? But in the interest of getting students invested in their work, it seems to have been, “well, collect what interests you.” And so, people have collected all sorts of things. It’s not systematic in any way.

JŠ: In fact, this herbarium is mostly a record of professor-student interaction, It’s about mentorship, faculty life, and a lost tradition of botanical pedagogy. I don’t know what scientific value it has, but as an object, this landfill collection tells a story. For me, this is a story of archives and hands-on learning. It’s strangely beautiful in its decaying state.

NM: Unfortunately, I’m leaving this position shortly. And, you know, it’s unlikely that a botanist will be hired in my stead. Back in the day, the argument for keeping the herbarium might have been, “Well, here, a biologist could use that.” But now it is unlikely to be used or even kept after I go. 

Look at all these seeds that have come out of those files… 

JŠ: We could grow all kinds of things.

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Over a weekend in April 2026, a botanist guided essayist Julija Šukys through his university’s herbarium. It was the last time such a tour would be possible: Noel Mano had accepted a new position and suspected his soon-to-be-former institution would either donate or destroy the collection after his departure. Šukys recorded their conversations as they worked their way through file after file of pressed and crumbling plant matter. The collection tells the story of community, pedagogy, and discovery: of professors and generations of students, their forays into nature, and the collective years-long project of documenting the flora of the surrounding region. Heidelberg’s herbarium is a poignant if crumbling record not only of plant life but also of a lost tradition of mentorship, pedagogy, and a shared intellectual passion now considered retrograde. 

Julija Šukys, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007).

Thomas Dai, On Gray Matter | L*STS

   

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On Gray Matter

Thomas Dai

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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1. While driving to work, I listen to a podcast about Pantone’s color of the year, “Cloud Dancer,” which the voices on the radio deride as a “nothing” sort of color, as apparently lifeless as the gray northwestern skies I am currently driving under.
   
   
2. Googling the color later, I see that Cloud Dancer is really just a shade of white—not a bright “optical” white, nor a creamy off-white, but a cool-toned, “natural” white, a few nickels less silver than gray. I like gray. I like it a lot. If I had to begin an essay the way Maggie Nelson begins Bluets, by falling in love, piecemeal and then all at once, with a color, I would have to write about Pantone no. 13-4302: “Skywriting.” This is not an ashy charcoal gray or a shiny fish scale gray or a landlord-approved millennial gray. It is a gray akin to Cloud Dancer, more a tint than a color. Staring at it, one feels a bit bored, like the eye could flow in any direction.  
   
   
3. Writing can be like that, abstract in its pallor. Writing is gray to me, and it also comes from the sky. These gray skies over Pullman, over Chengdu, over Boston and other gray-cast cities I’ve lived in whilst writing.  
   
   
4. I remember the frigid gloam outside our kitchen window in Providence. I remember a time, too, when to be in a gray city was a symptom of having “made it” out of my green and gold Southern childhood, her sunburnt and adobe Southwest. 
   
   
5. What is the origin story to the brain magnet inscribed with the words “gray matter” on my fridge? All I know is my ex bought it for me, because she understood my aesthetic. 
   
   
6. According to recent data-gathering efforts, I own twelve gray sweaters and sweatshirts, three gray blazers, one gray overcoat, and four pairs of gray slacks. The Internet will tell you that gray clothes show sweat stains easily, but I have not been to a gym since 2013. Showing sweat easily is not something I consider when dressing to meet my days. 
   
   
7. These days, I like gray because it makes all the colors around it more vibrant in contrast, or perhaps because I am a city person still playacting at urbanity while residing in a landscape of brown and yellow hills. (I do not believe in the evolutionary gospel of adapting to one’s surroundings.) 
   
   
8. Gray is concrete to me: the softest hard thing I know. The architecture of concrete is known as brutalism. In Brutalism, materials are left unadorned, nothing more or less than what they are. Form without ornament. Design undistracted by color.
   
   
9. My ex and I went to Montreal in 2018. It was time I thought to go and see a pyramid of concrete cubes set down by the frozen St. Lawrence, also known as Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, an icon of brutalist design. The cubes are not just for show; they’re inhabited, though we wondered how the plumbing worked inside such a jumble of boxes. 
   
   
10. I prefer the less dizzying grays of Tadao Ando, an architect known for his direct and dogmatic approach to construction. A building outside Osaka called The Church of Light is possibly his most famous structure. The last time I was in Japan, I could not visit the Church of Light. Demand had exceeded supply; these grays were reserved for the congregants.  
    
    
11. For Ando, a building is just a container, a threshold we cross and recross until the circulatory system stops, until it all fades to gray. His best designs give a home to that fading. 
    
    
12. I have been accused, mostly by myself, of seeing and writing and thinking and feeling in too many shades of gray. Perhaps the grays of Ando and Safdie call with an alto blandness to people like me who reside in the straits between certainty and doubt, clarity and occlusion. Perhaps these people would do well to decorate with more color. 
    
    
13. The Arctic grayling is a fish. I do not know why I know this. Earl Grey is the tea I drink, named for a British man who helped abolish slavery across her majesty’s empire. 
    
    
14. I’m shocked to hear that my old favorite show, Grey’s Anatomy, is on its twenty-third season. For ten of those seasons, until Sandra Oh’s character left Seattle for even greyer pastures (Zurich), I thought I’d wake up one day a doctor. 
    
    
15. I’m skating around the more personal and piercing grays—grays like my ex’s eyes, which were greenish in the light, but gray before coffee. Gray was the day I walked down to the beachhead and gave it all away. Gray were the birds—petrels, I want to say—that watched as I unraveled what up to that point had been our life. These grays, too, were brutalist. 
    
    
16. Afterwards, there was no question about who would keep the cat. She is gray, and so she is mine. We had named her Ando; we had taught her how to sit; we had adored, for a time, the concrete softness of our life together.
    
    
17. The couches we picked up off the street, the first building we lived in, the car we used to split, the smoke that passed between us for years until it didn’t. All so gray. When my ex decided to spray paint some of our furniture turquoise, I should’ve known it was over.
    
    
18. To capitulate to someone else’s aesthetic is one way to show love. I have to believe there are so many others.  

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This little piece emerged from a prompt I always assign in undergrad nonfiction classes: "pick a color, one with intense personal significance for you, and let it dictate the terms of your essay." I always enjoy this week because the students and I get to nerd out about color theory, synaesthesia, Pantone's silly color codes, and the chromatic spectrum of feeling blue, bleeding red, yearning for green, etc. My students would probably identify gray as a millennial color, and I righteously agree. Recently, I learned that I was born one year after the narrow band of time (1990-1991) in which the greatest number of millennial babies were ushered into the world. Having just missed the boat on being "peak millennial," I like to think my gray-fixation is related to my lifelong (and rather millennial) desire to "get in" with the right crowd, to wear the right clothes, and sing the right political tune. But liking a color in earnest is more personal, an individualist's sport. Gray diverts my mind to so many things, including things (heartbreak, lost love, lost time) that transcend, or cut down to size, issues of taste and aesthetic. Whether the grays I'm elegizing here are "true" colors is debatable, but these grays have suffused me: I can't unsee their paleness or unfeel their chill. This snapshot-style essay is my attestation to that effect. 

Thomas Dai is the author of Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays, which won the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for best Gay Memoir/Biography. He currently serves as the critic-at-large for The Georgia Review, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Scholar, Electric Literature, New England Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in a city named Moscow and teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. 

W. Todd Kaneko, 3 Essays about Fallout 4 | L*STS

  

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3 Essays about Fallout 4

W. Todd Kaneko

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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GOD BLESS THE CHILDREN OF THE BLAST

God bless the body, the way it’s full of eels and vicious grief. God bless the video game, this post-apocalyptic echo of the worst things in the real world. God bless the way radiation worms its way into the body, into every crevice and fracture, into lung and bone and heartache. The version of your father in your head is the image you see in the mirror at night, the boy you saw back before the cancer remade him in its image: the hawk’s talons, the wolf’s snarl, the fire’s feral misery. God bless the children of the dark. God bless the children of the dead prairie. God bless the children of the guard tower, of the barbed wire, of the broken highway running from all those places you dream about when you just want to dream of home. God bless this video game, a fun dream about waking up and living in a broken world. Your son makes up stories about his life before he was born into the body he wears now—he had a lot of friends and a son of his own, he says, and now they are all dead. He asks you if he is going to die one day because he knows your father is dead. I miss my Ji-chan, he says and you say that you do too because God bless the ghosts that live in our houses the way salt inhabits the ocean, the way breath inhabits a kiss, the way the memory of living in a concentration camp inhabited your father’s body, his father’s body, your body—you search your son’s eyes for a sign that he is haunted. You tell your son, yes—he will die one day, but hopefully not for a long time. God bless the shadow of the bomb. God bless the survivors of the blast, the only ones left after the end came and went and left you to figure out how to live after death by yourself. God bless the children who grow old before they die. God bless this video game, the real world disguised as clusters of pixels arranged to look like bursts of blood. God bless the children who learn to live with death inside them, as well as the ones who death eats from the inside out.

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SHACKS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

One day this place we call home will turn to rubble, the skies dark like the crow’s song, the ground strewn with the viscera of everyone we love. We know this because we see it on the news at night in between the shows our children watch before bedtime, in the doomscroll while we wait for them to fall asleep. But in this video game, I can build a shack from plywood shards and rubber to protect us from the end. When the radiation storms infuse our skins with unholy glow, when the bandits arrive with their makeshift firearms and Molotov cocktails, when the zombies shamble out from under the overpass and gather in our yard, the rickety walls I have built will keep our family from harm. And not just us, but our neighbors too—I can build a shelter out of some busted up swing sets and leaky rain barrels. I can build an apartment building with some broken pallets and scraps from a rusted-out school bus. The mechanic is simple: activate the workbench, then collect trash and debris to convert into construction materials. Yes—in this video game, I can rebuild America out of garbage, street by street, settlement by settlement. I can build water purifiers in puddles and plant crops by the side of the road and the people will come from miles around, whole families seeking shelter from the death storm. And I always give it to them because on the news, we saw that a gunman murdered eighteen schoolchildren in Texas while the police waited outside. Like a gunman murdered two people last week outside a high school football stadium in Michigan. Like a woman fired twelve shots at a school bus in Louisiana two weeks ago. Like a dude with a rifle just shot up the university in the next town. There are authentic dangers everywhere and we will never be ready for them because if our children were murdered, that would be the end, right? Because we can keep them safe, right?

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LOAD SCREEN

You carry over five thousand rounds of ammunition in this video game: shotgun shells, laser cells, bullets that explode into beautiful showers of sparks and blood—all of it ready at the push of a button, none of it weighing you down as you glide past the hardware store and away from the gang of super mutants you just slaughtered and left in the rubble. Running low on supplies, you spot the ruins of a convenience store on the next block. You ready your sniper rifle and step through the door toward whatever new fight awaits you inside. The game pauses to load the next area, the screen shifting to a picture of an enormous pistol, all ruby and chrome and aimed straight at your head. While you wait, you get a stream of factoids running across the screen to help you succeed: There is no criminal justice system in post-apocalypse America other than the path a bullet makes through the body and a shallow grave behind the courthouse. Shotguns deal more damage closer to your target and automatic weapons fire continuously with a single pull of the trigger. If you listen close, you think you can hear your son upstairs talking in his sleep, maybe something about watching cartoons or staying out of the lava at school. A school shooting is an assault at an academic institution by an attacker with a firearm. There isn’t a universal definition of mass shooting, but it is commonly understood that the United States has suffered the most mass shootings of any country in the world. Your son is not good at picking up his toys after he is done playing with them—at your feet lie a plastic tiger, a rubber dinosaur, and a limp spaceman. Your son says he wants to grow up to be a firefighter or a ninja, maybe a combination of the two. You have never owned a gun, but you keep a tee ball bat by the front door. Everything seems so real in limbo, the neighborhood’s wreckage outside, the gunfire in the distance, the star-spangled banner shredded across the wasteland. It continues loading, the game, the gun, America—everything.

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I like video games, but I don’t really qualify as a gamer. I have kids so my play time is limited to the middle of the night while they sleep, a few hours a few times a week at the cost of mental sharpness the next day. I don’t have time to experiment or immerse in a variety of games, so I mostly play Fallout 4 over and over again. It’s an open world exploration game so while my kids dream about whatever they are dreaming about, I wander the post-nuclear ruins of video game Boston with my video game dog fighting video game bad guys to bring stability and safety back to video game America. Some nights, I tell myself that I am playing the game in order to write about it, and I have been writing a few flash essays here and there because often, when I am playing Fallout 4, I can’t not think about real life: gun violence, racism, the rise of fascism, being a parent, things like that. Honestly, though—the hours logged with the game controller greatly outnumber the hours logged with the word processor when it comes to Fallout. I imagine that one day I might have a whole bunch of these little essays about Fallout 4, enough to collect into a little book or something that someone somewhere might like to read, but tonight there is a ruined boathouse where a bunch of wastelanders have gathered and I am supposed to save them from super mutants and build them a place to live.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition (New Michigan Press 2023). He is co-author of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash (Diode Editions 2021). His writing can be seen in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

Lydia Paar, The Exclusive Silver Linings Collection | L*STS

   

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The Exclusive Silver Linings Collection

Lydia Paar

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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1. You had pneumonia when you were born (but you got to be the biggest baby in the NICU). A hospital wristband is an appropriate accompaniment.
   
   
2. Your dad drank too much, so your parents got divorced (and you got to move from Kentucky back to Portland). Pair with a sweet little floral country dress and combat boots.
   
   
3. You got stuck going to Catholic school all the way through (but knew all your graduating classmates by name.)
   
   
4. (And were only bullied once).
   
   
5. (And then you made friends with her). Pair with pleats, collared shirt, and cardigan. Perhaps a thong.
   
   
6. You lived in your grandma’s tiny wood-paneled attic room in Portland (but got to hear all your grandparents’ stories). Pair with a farm horse, a Turkish scarf, an airforce captain’s hat, and a midcentury kitchen with flour on every visible surface.
   
   
7. Your dad drank too much (but then he stopped, and you got to go to your first AA meeting with him as a pre-teen). Pair with coffee, cigarettes, and a vat of communal forgiveness.
   
   
8. You broke four bones in basic training and ended up going AWOL (but didn’t get deployed to Iraq). Works well with an easy-breezy set of desert fatigues (shirt bleached out blue for disguise as a civilian).
   
   
9. Embarrassingly, you filed bankruptcy at age 23 (but went to Scotland thrice beforehand). Pair with haggis, a kilt, and bagpipes.
   
   
10. You suffer (or used to) from Seasonal Affective Disorder (and so moved to Arizona). Works well with turquoise and silver. And silence.
    
    
11. In Arizona, you were cheated on a bunch by that one ex-bf you really had a soft spot for (but didn’t marry him).
    
    
12. You didn’t marry that cheater guy (and was mad enough about it afterward to march downtown and pick up your now-husband within two weeks). Pair with a wine glass and kitten heels.
    
    
13. You never got to study abroad as a student even though you took two semesters of German to be able to compete and not win a specific fellowship to Tubingen (and so were extra motivated to go as a teacher, to a medieval town in Italy). Looks especially right with a cone of gelato.
    
    
14. You throw up if you have much gluten anymore (so you don’t). Pair with…not pizza/bread/pastry. Unless in Italy, wherein only heartburn occurs.
    
    
15. You had to sell that little piece of land up in Valle where you envisioned opening an art residency someday, because you needed cash to replace your collapsing back porch roof (and now, your roof will not collapse). Accompanies a giant serving of adult responsibility and newfound realism.
    
    
16. Along with some other annoying mid-life and menopause things: your body seems a machine for making little fibroids. It filled up your uterus with them. It was a big, expensive operation (but now, you have the coolest-ever open-cavity surgery photos for impressing your friends!). Pair with loose sweatpants and a medical stomach binder.
    
    
17. Because of these missing parts, the PT people advise you not to run. You risk prolapse. Your mom’s had three. (So you walk, now, and see the world more slowly). Pair with reverence.
    
    
18. And when you were recovering, your husband and your mom (your nurses) had to cut the bandage tape, together, out of your pubic hair. This was embarrassing for everyone involved (though now, you all know how well you all work together). Pair with gratitude, high-waist briefs, and more trips home to visit your family.
    
    
19. Flying home is expensive. Healthcare is expensive. Eating whilst flying, getting healthcare, or doing anything or nothing at all is expensive. Everything is expensive right now (but at least no one will be fighting over your will). We offer a budget-friendly option so that everyone can share in the magic of the Silver Linings Collection. It’s slightly lower carat but sparkles just as bright.
    
    
20. All of these pieces can be stackable for a layered look, and you can add more anytime you like!

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I find myself frequently in awe of how events I first found frustrating or even tragic in my life have led me to some of the most illuminating and interesting places in my thinking. I found the need, here in this form, to be a little cheeky about it all in order to avoid being cheesy. I suspect this list will grow up, someday, into a book, and the last item on this list reminds me so. I also want to say that I think lists are a great way to start unraveling one’s thoughts about anything, into anything larger and eventually actionable: if we can do nothing else in the face of seemingly insurmountable complexity, we can start simply by gathering.

Lydia Paar teaches at the University of Arizona, and is an advocate for stories. The fancier info is here: www.lydiapaar.com.

Leah Mensch, Magic the Gathering Ad Disguised as a Discarded Draft of My Wedding Vows | L*STS

 

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 Magic the Gathering Ad Disguised as a Discarded Draft of My Wedding Vows

Leah Mensch

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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after Matthew Olzman & for Geramee Hensley

Ok, I’m weeping about the shape of the Rincon Mountains & how we thought briefly, we were moving to Ohio last year & all the love clutching at us here, in this place we once thought we’d leave as fast as we could. I’m driving home from the pharmacy on Speedway Boulevard (winner of the 1970 Life Magazine Ugliest Road In America award, and rightfully so), and the clouds are bleeding coral against the Circle K. At the light, I go to text you sky, but you have already texted me sky. I’m crying also about that scene from the end of Arrival, when Louise realizes time is not linear, and she can see the entire circumference of her life, that her daughter will get sick and her husband will leave her as a result, and she says to him, if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things? I’m feeling disgustingly sentimental this week, I say, though I fear this is almost my chronic state now. I can feel my ribs cracking. I tell my friend Margo that sometimes I cry about how well she loves her daughter, and Margo says this is fine, that anyone who has ever thought seriously about ending their life may cry with as much tenderness as often as they wish & make it everyone’s problem. I don’t make the rules, though lately I’m unsure I was ever serious at all. Maybe I just forget the texture of those years or maybe I’ve been inducted into the club by way of adjacent early-20s psychiatric achievements. It’s like an honorary PhD for writing a smashing rap album or like how marrying me makes you, my beautiful Catholic Schoolboy, impossibly Jewish. Speaking of marriage, here’s an argument as to why I think ours will work: because you hate my favorite pants and waited three years to tell me. Because you bench press 300 & cut your pinkie finger (stitches needed) with a butter knife. Because we both have stomach issues but have made do with one bathroom. Because you write about grief but talk mostly about joy, and cooking, and sometimes farts. Once someone told me I was so lucky to be partnered with a writer because we must talk about writing all the time! Yesterday we did not talk about writing at all but discussed the 3 oz gold bar at Costco, and also, time. (Is “a month from June 30” July 30th or July 31st? One argument is numeric, the other is syntactic). Because once, we resorted to playing rock paper scissors to decide who had to be on top, and you always go paper first, and I always, somehow, still lose. Because you are impossibly gentle, and the most violent things I’ve ever heard you say are about people who drive like they have a branch up their ass & you remain silent when I have to shift into reverse during a U-Turn. Because you clean the crock pot when I’m too tired & won’t admit when you’re pity laughing at my jokes. Because you get out of bed to kiss me goodbye when I leave for a run. Because that one time you drank six Diet Dr. Peppers in a row (wife don’t need to know about soda, you said) & stayed up till 3 AM & I was so upset I wrote myself a note on the back of the Tucson Electric Power bill. I am never not afraid you’re going to die. And this is true. It consumes me, the way joy and sorrow and love all echo each other, some exploding star at the center of my life, which has become yours, too. And yeah, I am crying about Arrival again. The next day you sent me a photo of the pimple on your chin (did it look infected, you wanted to know) & a meme that lamented having a good partner is weird: what do you mean all I have to do is worry about them dying and what Magic deck they building next? & goddamn it, I thought. Maybe there really are no original experiences left. Tucson Electric Power makes a billing error so it turns out I actually do need that paper I defaced with my feelings. Dear Carl Philips, I too walked the plank backwards, so steadily I was sure I was not moving at all, but now my love & I are digging through the recycling on a 108 degree day and I know what they’re going to say—stop recycling our bills, or at least tear them up first! But instead, they just start laughing. 

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This essay started as a list of things I cry (tenderly) about on the way to work, to which Geramee said, "you know there's a word limit, right?" The other half of this essay was a love poem I started writing after reading Matthew Olzmann's Mezzanines. I couldn't find my way to the end of either project, until I realized they fit together. 

Leah Mensch loves her spouse and Kate Braverman. She occasionally throws away important things, but not on purpose. More, if you dare, at leahmensch.com.

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, A Problem of Shape: (In) Accessibility | L*STS

  

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A Problem of Shape: (In) Accessibility

Gretchen Ernster Henderson

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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What is the Shape of this Problem?

—Louise Bourgeois (1999)

Imagine a door or window. A passport or online password. An icecap or sea trench. A painting or song or dance.

Shape implies proportion and dimension, form and contour. Problems puzzle, like a riddle or difficulty seeks to be solved. 

This is one point. 

Two points make a line.  

Line by line, poems are measured.

This is (not) a poem rather a problem: the shape of accessibility. A changing shape in a changing world.

To access accessibility harks back to Middle French (meaning “that can be reached or entered, available, obtainable”), rooted less in access than accede, as in approach, accept or agree to, draw near, resort to, join, assent to, accrue, attain a dignity, perform or fulfill.

What does it mean to perform (in)accessibility? 

“There exists still another force which develops not within the point, but outside of it,” writes Wassily Kandinsky (1926), “and a new being arises out of it which leads a new, independent life in accordance with its own laws. This is the Line.”

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Another point, another line:

In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), William Hogarth claims that beauty arises from serpentine lines. To which William Hay responds in Deformity: “Since I finished this Essay, I am in Doubt whether I ought not to change the Title. For I have heard of a very ingenious Performance, called The Analysis of Beauty, which proves incontestably, that it consists in Curve Lines.”

Is the shape of this problem Curved? 

1. Refer to history of “Deformity.”
2. Refer also to “(de)Form.”
3. Refer also to “(mis/over/under)Representation.” 

A metaphor for _______.

Sentences feign legibility and linearity, reverberating as an echo chamber, an architecture of acoustics, using the pretext of prose.

Poetics of space inhabit architectures like houses, nests and shells, according to Gaston Bachelard (1964).

I am (not) the point. You are (not) the point.

Another point, planted among planets: our round little house called Earth.

(in)accessible echoes across poetics to politics, libraries to technologies, Universal Design across the Web across a wider world of shifting shapes, ramping access to clean water, food, shelter, education, human rights.

A metaphor for _______.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even a vacuum. 

Amid other etymological branches of accede, active and arcane, lie hints of “burning.” 

What heats up the heart of this shape? Can this problem boil down to a molten mass underfoot, the heat of this living planet?

If you are (not) the point, and I am (not) the point, then:

If, then: together we can (not) make a line. We can make a line in or from this essay or poem or whatever you want to call this shape, this problem, part of a web, unraveling and spun from what appears bound as a book. 

Note: For instructions on “How To Make This Book More (In)Accessible”: see Galerie de Difformité (2011), page 221.

Time and space affect our relationship with points and lines and beyond, as we grope into shifting shapes, probing this problem, which isn’t static or defined, or even singular. Is this a problem or a possibility? 

“After it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to the Books of the Accessible Poets,” writes Charles Bernstein (2008), “I persisted.”

Two more points: a timeline. 

Something is burning. Something is melting. Not everything boils down to an equation. Points and lines are more than conceptual.

“When a disabled body moves into a social space,” writes Tobin Siebers (2004), “the lack of fit exposes the shape of the normative body for which the space was originally designed.”

Accessibility shifts inter/sections/actions. X approaches A. door, B. computer, C. poem-fiction-essay-crossing-the-line at D. with another checkpoint at E. and can/not access A, B, C, D, E. X becomes confounded, discouraged, inspired, hurt, moved, ________ (fill in the blank). X is moved to confront what fits and what doesn’t. X is moved to think: What is the point? Another point? Can I draw a line?

According to John Muir (1911), “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

R. Buckminster Fuller wrote (1970), “Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

A metaphor for _____. 

X wants to understand A, B, C, D, E. And more. X senses limits and knows she can/not exist as a point because so many other points are at stake. X wants to connect more dots. X wants to make new lines, to try to understand the shape of this problem. X wants to move beyond lines.

(Listen:)

     “If the sound is in ‘M’ and the listener in ‘N,’ the sound will be believed to be in ‘S’ if the court is enclosed at least on 3 sides against the listener,” according to Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). [1]

Can our writings set up atmospheres and acoustics to interpret, more than linear or literal readings, re-sounding? What is the shape of this problem? 

                     A                B                 C                D                E

           F                 G                H                 I                 J

  K                L                M                N                O                P

           Q                R                 S                 T                U                V

                    W                X                Y                Z

Better to leave you not with one point, but many. You can draw whatever lines.

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Works Cited

“accessible” and “accede.” OED Online. March 2013. Oxford UP. 5 June 2013. Web.

Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Orion, 1964. Print.

Bernstein, Charles. “Recantorium.” Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 279. Print.

Flake, Gary William. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998. 129. Print. 

Hay, William. Deformity: An Essay. London: Dodsley, 1754. 82. Print.

Henderson, Gretchen E. Galerie de Difformité. Chicago: Lake Forest College P, 2011. 221. Print.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. Trans. Hilla Rebay. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1979. 54. Print.

Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. Boston: Houghton, 1998. 157. Print.

Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 8. Print.

von Rotenhan, Christina. “Louise Bourgeois: Between the Lines.” Art in Print 2.6 (Spring 2013): 18. Print.

Winternitz, Emanuel, ed. Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. 117. Print.

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NOTES

[1] Analogy may be made with the Galerie de Difformité: if a sound is made in one Exhibit while Gentle Reader resides in another, she may seek out additional Exhibits to coordinate orchestrations. For a contemporary point of access, which in future years will become inaccessible, scan the QR (Quick Response) codes at this essay’s beginning and end to investigate “What is a Page?” and “How to Read?”

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A Lost List: This list-ish essay from 2013 was lost when The Volta's online presence ended. "A Problem of Shape: (in)Accessibility" was an outgrowth of my long-hibernating, genre-bending Galerie de Difformité (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Being inadvertently lost, this essay unwittingly reflects how many digital-borne works become inaccessible or fossilized as media change over time.

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is the author of five books, most recently Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea and Ugliness: A Cultural History. She is an ecowriter, artist, librettist, educator, and the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. 

 

Brittany Crosse, How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old | L*STS

   

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How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old

Brittany Crosse

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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1. Download Duet and Hinge. Create a profile for the former. Start to create a profile for the latter but give up halfway through. You’re not that desperate, besides, you’re busy enough as is. You’ve been skeptical about dating apps in the past, but then again, look at the men you’ve met the old-fashioned way. Even if the next one turns out to be a serial killer, at least he’ll just murder you instead of send you into a weeks-long deep depression. That shit was worse than death.   
2. Speaking of old-fashioned, don’t listen to your father whenever he tells you to not have sex with the next man, that if he really loves you, he’ll marry you. Your father will never say it outright, but he believes that everything that happened with **** happened because you slept with him. Not because he’s in a perpetual state of arrested development (hey, that’s the name of the show!) and changes his mind almost as fast as he comes. Your mother believes this as well. 
3. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t fall for the same bullshit (I really, really like you, you’re important to me, I’m going to ask you to be my girlfriend) you fell for in the past. You’re not a naive 26-year-old anymore.  
4. Don’t expect things to work out right away, or even at all. Life doesn’t always happen the way it does in books and movies. You know this better than most. 
5. Remember that even if things don’t work out, there’s a 50% chance you won’t die alone because you promised your best friend that you’d move in together if you were both still single at 40. Only 13 and a half more years to go. Tick tock, bitch. 
6. Swipe left on guys with four-letter names AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck 13, 4’s the new unlucky number.   
7. Keep going to therapy and puppy yoga (which is itself a form of therapy), taking your medication (not that it helped much when you were depressed), doing schoolwork, writing your novel. Consider volunteering at an animal shelter. Keep yourself as busy as possible, but also don’t forget to indulge in self-care.
8. Convince yourself that you will not let the next man you meet walk all over you and/or want you exclusively for your body. 
9. Realize that this is the same thing you said after ****, and look at what happened with **** not even a year later.
10. Realize that perhaps you are simply cursed.
11. Realize that it is more possible you are simply too kind, too forgiving, too weak.   
12. Realize that you are approaching 13 steps.  
13. Realize that perhaps you should stop at 13, because it’s not unlucky. You are.

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This is basically me reflecting on the mistakes I made in my previous two "relationships" (in quotes because they could hardly even be called that) and how to not repeat them in the future. Without getting too personal, my previous two "relationships" were very one-sided in that they were all takey and no givey. My piece is essentially a how-to guide on how to break the cycle of being used by men. This was deeply therapeutic for me to write, as not only was I able to poke fun at one of my previous partners, I was able to poke fun at myself as well. The names of my previous partners have been censored partly for privacy, but mainly because they don't deserve mentioning.  

Brittany Crosse was raised in the Chicago suburbs and currently lives near Miami, where she attends Florida International University's Creative Writing MFA program. Her work has been featured in The Bond Street Review, Maudlin House, and more. She is working hard or hardly working on a novel, depending on the day.