“Chapters 41 through 43 of Varney the Vampire do not exist. This is ostensibly a result of the many errors Penny Dreadful printers made; as far as mistakes go, misnumbering chapters is certainly better than misremembering your own characters’ names. Based on the content of the last few chapters, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if Chapters 41 through 43 existed and disappeared, but were so convolutedly repetitive that we don’t even notice.”
odysseus hijacking the odyssey and forcing it to go from third person omniscient to first person vs moby dick gradually slipping from first person to third to a chapter written as a play after which ishmael has to reintroduce himself in order to regain control over the narrative. Fight
Erica Baum, Nine Images from “Dog Ear”, (2011)
A dog-eared page — a folded corner — is the simplest memory system: it marks a stopping point, a favorite passage, a place to remember. Along with marginalia, underlining, and other notational strategies, dog ears map a history of reading and remind us that reading is a physical act: an encounter with words, to be sure, but also a tactile experience with paper and individual pages of a book. A dog ear is legible as a readerly engagement with the material text. Someone read this; someone stopped here.
Erica Baum’s book Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Press, 2011) makes this point and takes it further. In Baum’s rendering, the dog ear presents an activist readerly engagement: by folding a page, the reader creates a new site of meaning, a square of text to be encountered not as placeholder but as a rich cluster of words, selected (appropriated, deformed) by the reader’s hand.
Our dear friend Olivia rejoins us for another thrilling chapter of Varney the Vampire! Wherein Varney attempts to seduce literally any man who shows up on his doorstep.
Check out Olivia’s short speculative fiction and essays at ofcieri.com, and buy her spooky urban fantasy novel LORD OF THUNDERTOWN!
HAPPY PRIDE
*breaks down ur door* let’s talk about the social, religious, and economic structure of a genderless society and the transcendent love of two exiles on an eighty-six day wilderness journey in the ice age of an alien world
Honestly thought this was a shitpost, and went to the replies to say that I’m here for it, and it turns out that I need to read The Left Hand of Darkness
diversity loses! the gay revolutionaries from that book about parisian sewers are all dead!
Daphne De Maurier - Rebecca (Reader’s Digest edition), 1968
Artwork by Leo and Diane Dillon