Australian culture has never been particularly well looked after in its home country. Decades of poor funding and even worse management has led to Australian’s creative traditions being devoured by American and European traditions. Few ordinary Australians could name an Australian painter or writer, possibly they could name a film or an actor. It’s a special kind of tradition that began almost as far back as the 1950’s and was described then as ‘the Cultural Cringe’ (Phillips).

Our uniquely Australian perspective is like a stubborn plant occasionally treated with liquid fertilizer, more often than not it’s casually sprayed with weed killer. It has not exactly thrived but managed to find a couple of patches of dirt in which its roots can grow and a few flowers can perhaps not bloom but at least reach maturity. 

Melbourne in particular, is a UNESCO City of Literature but has been let down on the state and  federal level by politicians who see the Arts as simply another financial wing of the Australian  economy: a profitable export. 

What I thought I might do is give you a list of some superb examples of Australian writing that you may be missing out on. I really do think that Australian culture is ill defined in its native country and internationally as well. If I can get you to do anything after reading this it is to read something Australian. 

Acute Misfortune, Erik Jensen (2014) 

If you can be bothered to read reviews, Acute Misfortune has been described extensively if a little  bit dismissively as being ‘novella sized’ and having a ‘gimlet eye’. As if the book was too small and  stuffed with bitter scrutiny to really be worth five stars. It is small and laser focused but it is also  capable of being a biting study of Australian identity to the attentive and sensitive reader. 

Acute Misfortune is the true story of Erik Jensen’s four-year friendship with the Australian painter  Adam Cullen set shortly before Cullen’s death in 2012. It doesn’t hold back. It uses real names and  tells the story as honestly as it can. It analyses why Cullen felt so pressured to behave the way he  did. Drugs, violence, guns and paintings. Substance abuse and shocking behaviour became crutches  holding up Cullen’s life and artistic career. 

Personally I blame former Prime Minister John Howard for all of this. I blame John Howard for a great deal actually. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Paul Keating (John Howard’s predecessor) was determined to create a modern, aspirational Australia identity. A nation more in connection to Asia than America or the UK. A thousand, unique blossoms bloom in the garden kind of thing. Howard fundamentally disagreed with this idea. He argued that Australian identity was decisively western, conservative and collective. It was Australia Day, the idea of a fair go, the British Commonwealth and a general distrust of those who  aspire to rise above their station. It was what sat in your gut ,and that your first instinct is your best one.

I see the struggle of Adam Cullen’s life through that clash in Australian ideology. Cullen’s toxic masculinity was a facade, demonstrated to him by the country he inhabited. His rejection of the multifaceted, sophisticated life and his whole-hearted embrace of petty, uncomplicated Australiana is as much the fault of John Howard as it is the artistic landscape of the time. A time of high economic growth and stifled political debate both of which benefited those establishment figures who already possessed both wealth and prestige. What Howard argued was that the ‘Lucky Country’ became instead the ‘Frightened Country’. Scared of immigrants, change and in some cases the reality of the wider world (Marr).

Acute Misfortune is a fantastic and essential read for those people willing to look beyond just the beautifully constructed words on the page. For me, the book reads as a state of the nation in the early 2010’s. Still struggling to emerge from the shadow of Little Johnny Howard and the ignorance of our own cultural output he instilled in generations following his leadership of our large island nation.

Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe (2014)  

Dark Emu, in my opinion, is probably one of the most interesting books on Australian history you could read today. The intention behind Pascoe’s work is to provide an alternative perspective to Aboriginal history and challenge preconceived ideas of first settlers as primitive and technologically backward.

I’ll be honest with you, Pascoe’s work is by no means utterly faultless; there is arguably a cherry picking of sources and a focus on non-Aboriginal sources. But you have to understand how fascinating both the intention and the effect of Dark Emu had on Melbourne and Australia as a  whole.  

Pascoe argues that in pre-contact times, Australian Aboriginal people weren’t just hunter gatherers; they were agriculturalists who changed their landscape to benefit  their communities. Examples of this include aquaculture in rivers, more permanent kinds of  settlements, and the spreading of seeds. He also contends that this evidence of pre-colonial  Aboriginal societies was often deliberately erased by early colonisers. For some in Australia, the  idea of our enormous continent being anything other than a sunburnt wasteland drove people  literally insane with rage.  

If you read most reviews of Dark Emu, the perception of it is considered mixed. Reviewers talk  about the book’s popularity or use gentle, academic phrases like ‘sparked debate’ and  ‘generated controversy’. This language does not go far enough to convey the tangible effect of the book’s release. People were sincerely upset by this book: media personalities called the whole thing a sham and a  waste of paper. The book tore open holes in the minds of many Australians. Some individuals could  find no academic way of absolutely discrediting Pascoe, so they critiqued his standing as an Aboriginal person instead.  

People who I personally thought of as uninterested in Aboriginal rights, or just non-readers on the  whole, were outraged by Dark Emu at the dinner table. For some, it confirmed their greatest fears,  that Australians had invaded and destroyed a society that already existed here long  before we rocked up and started telling ourselves this was all grass and kangaroos.  

Pascoe doesn’t fall into the quagmire of elaborate language, he writes simply for what is ostensibly an academic book. A big reason why I recommend Dark  Emu is that it is designed to be easy to read and digest.  

More so than any other piece of fiction or nonfiction published in the last decade, Dark Emu has brought a discussion of Australia’s colonial history into the mainstream, and we are all the better for it.  

This House of Grief, Helen Garner (2014)

Helen Garner’s work is the chicken parmigiana of the Australian literary landscape. Her work is fundamental much in the same way the chicken parma is to the traditional pub landscape. Just as every  pub must have a chicken parma special during the week, so too must every Melbourne bookshop  have at least a couple Garners out the back. Much like the parma, she is a reliable seat-filler.

This true crime book is a heart breaking story of a father, Robert Farquharson destroying his family, by murdering his three sons, because he is a broken man. Garner contends that perhaps all men are capable of reaching their breaking point and committing such an act. To do something totally unforgivable. I think Garner hints in this book at the idea of Australian identity being a fragmented thing. An artificial construct designed to shield most people from the harsh realities of living in Australia. More than 95% of Australians are non-indigenous, with no real understanding of why we are here and our short-lived traditions are designed to shield us from that fact rather than help us embrace and overcome it. It helps to come to this land pre-broken, with some kind of family chip on your shoulder. We fight for, purchase and build upon broken, colonised land that was never ours to begin with. It makes sense as to why people and communities who live here can end up perhaps even just a little bit broken. Garner uses the story of Robert Farquharson as a kind of warning, we can all, in different ways, be pushed to a breaking point. 

Garner’s insight and perspective is razor focused. She provides a fascinating examination of Robert Farquharson’s female relatives, and the effect of the children’s deaths on Cindy Gambino and her family. Garner  offers a unique perspective on the world around her by drawing attention to her role as author and  witness rather than trying to blend invisibly in the background. 

Her familiarity with Australian life is why she has had such tremendous success. 1 in every 100 Melburnians claims to have actually met Helen Garner. At swimming pools, super markets, university lunches, book shops and out the front of flinders street station. She is a kind of special literary ghost. I suspect 1 in every 1000 actually has met her.

I saw her speak most recently in 2025 about her most recent book The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder, to a packed house at the Melbourne Town Hall. Her words have the ability to transfix and unify, and just as everyone has their favorite pub parma, everyone has their favorite Garner work. This House of Grief is both mine and my mothers.

Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, Ryan  O’Neill (2016) 

They are not real authors, the book is a clever work of fiction. 

Now that I’ve got the headline out of the way. My comments and thoughts. Their Brilliant Careers tells the story of 16 fictional yet highly realized Australian authors, comprising 16 individual but interconnected short stories.

O’Neill was most obviously inspired by Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, who in  turn was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges. However O’Neill does so much more than simply mimic  Bolaño or Borges. He gives each of his chosen subjects a unique Australian flair: some cling to the  city, others flee to the regions or the suburbs. There is a restlessness about these characters that the  author captures perfectly with a clean and crisp prose. There is a stylised exactness about this  collection that makes it one of my favourites. Of the individual authors my favourites would  probably be Francis X McVeigh, Vivian Darkbloom and Helen Harkaway. There is a precision and emotion in each of these characters that touches me deeply and personally. I feel like given the right (or wrong) mix of choices I could end up just like them. 

The first time I read the book the individual stories were entertaining, but I didn’t fully appreciate the specifically Australian position of the work. It is a warm and comforting read the second time around. It’s a literary Kath and Kim. A humorous and gently affirming experience that enhances your perspective on what Australian culture can be. 

Their Brilliant Careers works so well because O’Neill is commenting on an absence. There is no  tangible literary landscape in the capital cities or the regions of this country. There are no libraries, cafes or restaurants or small towns famous for its cultural inhabitants. There are small clubs, reading circles and communities scattered like warts on a beautiful face. These blemishes are networking events rather than actual meaningful places of conversation and discussion. Culture is not something ingrained into our society. It has latched on like a parasite. The art, music, theatre, literature and creativity on our continent clings desperately to a hulking beast with Australia branded across its backside.

I enjoy Their Brilliant Careers because of the cultural absence it identified in Australia. There are no real literary cults set up around our writers or journalists in the way they are in America (see Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison or Truman Capote for more details). Their Brilliant Careers uses imaginative prose and compact storytelling to explore a kind of literary what if in Australian culture.

The Henson Case, David Marr (2008) 

This non-fiction selection is a hard find, but that, to me, is part of the experience of enjoying a really good book. It’s light and easy to read. The book explores the cultural fallout surrounding the 2008 raiding of a Sydney gallery.

The ‘case’ was a simple one. Bill Henson had been a professional, practising photographer since the mid-1970s.  He had cultivated institutional as well as social support for his work and had several major exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. Marr recounts the photographer’s exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, and the public media furore  that emerged from its invitation. The author takes a certain delight in naming and shaming those who first  brewed this storm of scandal.

The uproar around Bill Henson’s photos rose to such a level of outrage that the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd,  described the photos by Henson as “absolutely revolting”. This, for Marr, was the final betrayal. A failure of leadership from a politician who had promised change, who had advocated for the arts when it was convenient, but chose to deliver populist scorn instead. This is the main thrust of Marr’s argument: if we live in the free democracy promised to us, we should have the right to express ourselves,  and to do so without being immediately strung up for crossing unspoken social taboos. Marr takes a refreshingly moderate approach in his criticism and acknowledges that his work is not for everyone. His position is that of strict anti-censorship. 

I think this book reminds its readers of modern events and foreshadows the  cultural quagmire some feel themselves sinking into. First and foremost for me, it would be the removal and reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice  Biennale. Sabsabi was controversially dumped only to then be quietly reinstated as Australia’s representative. His ‘crime’ was depicting Palestinian political figures in his paintings (Jefferson). The fact that Sabsabi, a professional artist has to justify his political perspective and how it relates to his work is an insult to any artist, but particularly to an Australian creative landscape who applauds the socially-aware work of Kaylene Whiskey because it appears harmlessly inoffensive (Silcox).

Interestingly, the title, The Henson Case, also hints at the resolution. Because there was no ‘Henson  Trial’ or ‘Oxley9 Trial’. No charges were ever issued against anybody for these images. Something  happened, some vein was pressed too tightly in the hearts of ordinary Australians.

If Helen Garner is to be a chicken parma, I would argue David Marr is to be a Vodka Soda with Lime. His writing is fundamental. On the surface, you imagine it to be something cheap and simple. Beneath that, you have something that kicks the back of your throat (or the mind, in Marr’s case) when you  really need it to. He is one of the few Australian authors I can think of who will argue with you as a reader and actively try to work you over to his side. He writes convincingly of how individual cases of censorship like this one can cause lasting damage to the Australian cultural landscape. 

These are all really excellent books and well worth a read. Even if you only read one you  will be doing yourself a tremendous favour. If these reviews do anything they should inspire you to support and visit Melbourne. It’s a literary landscape desperate for your attention. It’s in my opinion the greatest city in the world and beyond reproach. I would know because I have never lived anywhere else.

My hope is that, in the future, we see a recognition of Australia as a really unique and special place deserving of cultural attention. We live in what can feel like the perfect beginner’s level to life. Artists like Kaylene Whiskey, Brett Whiteley and Adam Cullen. Writers like Helen Garner, David Marr and Henry Lawson. These are established individuals who I feel have long gone unrecognized for their skill and talent because of their identity. If I want you to do anything I would encourage you to read and embrace something Australian, before it vanishes in a puff of poorly-funded air.

Citations

Jefferson, Dee. After a turbulent year, Australia’s Khaled Sabsabi will present two works at the Venice Biennale. Sydney, The Guardian, 2026. The Guardian Newspaper

Marr, David. His Master’s Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard. Quarterly Essay 26 ed., Melbourne, Black Inc., 2007. Accessed 17/5/2026.

Phillips, A. A. The Cultural Cringe. 4th ed., Brisbane, Meanjin, 1950, https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-cultural-cringe-by-a-a-phillips/. Accessed 16/4/2026.

Silcox, Beejay. The joyful world of Kaylene Whiskey: the Indigenous artist pulling Dolly Parton and Wonder Woman into the outback. Melbourne, The Guardian Newspaper, 2025

The post 5 Aussie Reads appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Cole left his desk and stood in the office doorway. “You doing okay, buddy?” he asked.

Imad regarded him with eyes that seemed too big for his face. “I’ve been under the weather,” he replied. “Too much reading. You know how it is.”

“I’m more of an audiobook man myself.” Cole cleared his throat. “Listen, Imad. I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t look so great. Do you want to sit down before you head out? I’ve still got some soda from the graduation party in the minifridge. You’d be doing me a favor if you took one.”

A wan smile surfaced on Imad’s face. He took a step toward the office, but his expression twisted into a grimace as his laptop bag shifted against his side. “Thanks, but I’d better get going,” he muttered.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone? Like a Lyft or something?” Cole offered, but Imad shook his head and slipped through the door to the stairs. 

Cole watched as he left. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the corridor, but he could have sworn he saw a sheen of sweat on Imad’s forehead. It was probably nothing more serious than a summer cold, but Cole wondered what Imad could have read to make his face so pale. 

As he indulged in speculation, Cole’s imagination got the better of him. Miskatonic University was famous for housing a large collection of books once deemed heretical by the large universities in Boston. Even today, books bound in human skin occupied a substantial division of the library archives. What if Imad had gotten sick from contact with one of the books in the special collections?

A story about a forbidden book would make a great podcast episode. The most downloaded episode on Cole’s feed was a story about a cursed doll he’d found on Etsy. Creepy dolls were a dime a dozen, but the pink mildew poking out of this doll’s cracked porcelain scalp was something special. The listing said the seller was local, so Cole sent her a message and requested an in-person viewing of the doll. The seller immediately replied with her address.

When Cole drove over, he found the doll perched on the edge of the rotting concrete porch of an abandoned wastewater plant. It sat in a puddle of something that wasn’t quite liquid. Cole was painfully aware that he’d walked headlong into a prank, but he didn’t touch the doll. He had no interest in mucking about with the neon fungus infesting its hair, but he was more than happy to take a photo. 

Cole invented a lurid story about the doll for his podcast. Sure enough, listeners loved it. He resented the popularity of such obvious clickbait, but it served its purpose. For a time, at least. As was so often the case with online content, interest waned quickly. He needed another hit. Cole fancied himself to be a literary horror specialist, and he used his show to discuss writers like M.R. James and Elizabeth Gaskell alongside twentieth-century film noir. An episode about a cursed book had the potential to draw an audience, and it would be a much better ambassador for the show than a fabricated story about a cursed doll.

When he introduced himself at department parties, Cole didn’t hesitate to tell new acquaintances that he hosted a podcast. He’d even printed a business card on handsome matte black cardstock with his name and website. Most people accepted the card, but very few asked him what he meant when he described his field as “dark academia.” Perhaps they assumed he was complaining about grad school. 

To be fair, Cole had tried his hand at a graduate program, but only briefly, and only at a small department at a state school in Ohio. The college’s fluorescent-lit cinderblock buildings didn’t contribute to a scholarly state of mind, and Cole dropped out after his first semester. He took the opportunity to relocate to Boston, where he found a job writing copy for the alumni magazine of a liberal arts school. 

Far from being the ancient and shadow-blighted city he’d read so much about, Boston was a textbook case of gentrification, especially the neighborhood around the university. After a year of mounting debt with nary a Gothic spire in sight, Cole found a listing for an administrative assistant at the Classics Department of Miskatonic University in Arkham. There wasn’t much charm or prestige out in the Essex County suburbs, but it was hard to deny the lure of cutting his rent in half. 

Cole was interviewed by the department chair, a harassed-looking elderly gentleman in a threadbare blazer. The chair informed Cole that there were no other applicants, and that the position was his if he wanted it. He would be working under the head administrator, a cheerful red-faced woman named Peggy who introduced herself with a wave. The chair didn’t seem overly concerned with how the department was run, and Cole suspected that Peggy had acquired the blush on her cheeks from a liquid lunch. He accepted the job on the spot.

The Classics Department was like any other office, equipped with outdated computers and furniture straight from wholesale. The industrial wall-to-wall carpeting bore the stains of years of department parties, and a neglected snake plant struggled valiantly by the lone window. Cole didn’t see much of the professors, and the grad students were an uninspiring bunch interested primarily in gossip. 

Imad was different. As far as Cole could tell, he was the only person who made use of the shared grad student office. He came in every afternoon, and he always stopped by the department office to say hello before disappearing into the small room at the end of the corridor.

Imad told Cole that he was working on his dissertation, a comparison of Near Eastern gnostic texts from the seventh and eighth centuries. He more properly belonged to the Religious Studies department, he’d explained, but it was dissolved the same semester he finished his coursework. Cole didn’t follow his breakdown of the situation, which had something to do with falling enrollments and shrinking budgets, but he understood that Imad had been taken in by the Classics Department as a courtesy. 

Cole asked about the progress of Imad’s work every afternoon, and Imad was always ready with a concise and practical explanation. It didn’t escape Cole’s notice that Imad was blessed with a mellow yet resonant voice that would sound excellent on tape.

Cole gradually developed a casual friendship with Imad over the course of the spring semester, and he came to look forward to Imad’s visits to the office. Once classes ended and the students disappeared from campus, however, Imad started to change. He lost weight, and his cheeks became so hollow that his eyes seemed to bulge from his face. The golden tan of his skin faded to a sickly olive. His beard was patchy and uneven. 

And there was another thing. Imad had begun to smell. The odor that lingered behind him wasn’t unpleasant, but it was odd. The smell reminded Cole of wet asphalt drying in the sun after the rain. Or like an antique doll sitting in a puddle of creosotic slime outside an abandoned water treatment plant in the twilight of rural Ohio. 

Cursed book or not, something was going on, and Cole figured that he owed it to himself to get to the bottom of whatever was troubling Imad. With almost no work over the summer and a boss who only rarely bothered to show up to the office, it’s not as if he had anything else to do. 

There weren’t many students on campus during the summer. Truth be told, there weren’t many students on campus during the school year. Cole was given to understand that Miskatonic’s enrollments had been falling with each successive semester. This didn’t surprise him. The campus was filled with stately old buildings, but none of them had been maintained for years. The gym had been built in the 1970s, and the dorms a decade earlier. It wasn’t the sort of place that attracted students. 

Regardless, Cole was required to be in the office until the end of working hours. He replied to emails in the morning and spent the afternoon in comfortable solitude searching for stories online. 

He’d recently started researching the Theosophical Society Lodge next to campus. The Lodge had supposedly held seances well into the twentieth century, but they apparently stopped on the eve of the Great War. The building now housed a library that served as a stage for public lectures on world religions, some of which had been recorded.  

Cole had just downloaded the most recent lecture when Imad walked into the office. He looked even worse than usual. His face had gone from olive to yellow, and the sheen of grease on his forehead was unmistakable.

Cole swallowed his shock as he greeted Imad. “Hey, so,” he began. “I was reading about modern Gnosticism. Not much to do here over the summer, right? And I was wondering. How would you pronounce, ah, Mandaeism?”

“Mandaeism? You pronounced it correctly. The Arabic is al-Mandāʾiyya, but Mandaeism is fine for general use. Why do you ask?”

“I was fishing for material for my podcast. I read that a lot of Iraqis moved to the suburbs of DC during the early 2000s. Apparently, one community brought lead amulets written in a form of Aramaic that no one at the Smithsonian can read.” 

“I wouldn’t say that no one can read them,” Imad replied. “Even if the ganzibria priests couldn’t transliterate the written text, they’d be able to recite the historiola.”

“The historiola? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that term.”

“A historiola is a short story about a ritual. The act of reading the story functions as a performance of the ritual itself, like a magic spell.”

“How does that work?” Cole asked. 

Imad shrugged. “It’s magic. Who can say how it works? Still, it’s probably for the best that no one at the Smithsonian can read the amulets. You wouldn’t want to pronounce the Aramaic with too much accuracy. If the divine creator brought this world into existence with a word, it stands to reason that another word might open the gates between worlds. That’s a metaphor for the expansiveness of spirituality, of course,” he added with a smile, “but one can never be too careful.”

“Interesting,” Cole said, and it was. The idea that the act of reading could serve as a magic ritual was intriguing. “So what are you translating this afternoon?”

“Well,” Imad started to say, but he winced as he leaned against the waist-high counter separating the office from the faculty mailboxes. It could have been a trick of the light, but something seemed to ripple under his layers of sweaters.

Imad caught the look of concern on Cole’s face. “Sorry,” he said as he turned toward the door. “I might have had too much tea with lunch. I’m going to visit the bathroom and head to my office.”

Cole nodded and returned his eyes to his computer screen, hoping that he’d staged a decent performance of polite interest. He hesitated to cross the line of professional distance with the members of his department. He couldn’t afford to move back to Boston, and he needed this job. Arkham wasn’t the most prosperous suburb, and the only other paying work he’d be likely to find here was at the fulfillment center warehouse by the highway. 

Still, he liked Imad. Professionalism be damned. 

Later that afternoon, he brewed two bags of mint tea in paper cups and carried them down the hall to the graduate student office. When Imad answered the door, Cole was struck by the wet smell that emerged from the room. It was as if something spilled on the carpet and never dried properly. 

“So I was thinking,” he said, “no one is using the department chair’s office over the summer. I was planning to air it out a bit. Care to join me?” 

The chair’s office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and equipped with the sort of grommeted furniture that populated movies about gentlemen explorers. It smelled like fine paper and old leather, and the sunlight that filtered through the cloudy panes of glass in the mullioned windows was bright but gentle.

 “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re working on?” Cole asked as he sat down. 

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it,” Imad replied. He sank back in his chair as he took a long sip of tea. “At the moment I’m working on a translation of the Kitab al-Azif. This is a gnostic text that originated somewhere in the vicinity of Yemen in the early eighth century. It was believed to have potent magical properties, and it was translated into several languages over the centuries. 

“Manuscripts of the Azif managed to travel around the world, but they’re remarkably rare. When I was doing research for my MA thesis, I’d see one translation or another cited in various papers, but I could never find the original source. It turns out that the only physical copies in the United States are held by the Miskatonic library, which is why I applied to do my PhD here. 

“I thought it might be interesting to compare the versions to understand how key phrases were translated by different cultures. When I spoke to the head of Special Collections here at our library, she was happy to share a PDF of a tenth-century Arabic manuscript held by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The file isn’t the best quality, to be honest. The manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy, and the source is badly damaged. I’m doing the best I can with what I have available. 

“I’d like to write a grant to go see the original in person, but I’m not at that stage yet. Maybe next spring? I could use a vacation.” Imad shrugged and took another sip of tea. Cole was relieved to see the color returning to his face. 

“So this Kitab al…”

“Azif. It’s a poetic word that refers to the chirping of nocturnal insects.”

“So this Kitab al-Azif, what’s it about? If that’s the right question.”

“No, that’s a great question. The book holds that there’s a deeper truth to the universe, and the author – we don’t know his true name – tells a remarkably coherent story as he explains what this supposed truth is. He claims that our universe is like the thin film on the surface of a bubble, and he believes that there are all manner of things outside the bubble we can’t see. 

“This isn’t an original idea, but what’s interesting about the Azif is that its author provides a history of our planet long before humans lived here. Most creation myths describe humans as being brought into existence shortly after the universe itself, but the Azif speaks of genesis in terms of cycles. People that weren’t human inhabited the planet before us, and people who aren’t human will live here after us.”

“That sounds kind of Buddhist,” Cole cut in.     

“Exactly! There’s a great deal of Eastern thought incorporated into these ideas. All times exist at once, simultaneously, and in different dimensions. The borders between dimensions can be weakened by magic, supposedly. By the act of reading the Azif, the creatures occupying other dimensions can be invited into our own world.” 

“I’d love to meet them,” Cole remarked. “I wonder what they look like?”

Imad stared at his tea as he shifted the paper cup between his hands. “They’re probably not what you expect. I think we’ve gotten used to the strange creatures that appear in movies. When you finally see the monster on the other side of the door, it becomes familiar, like a type of mascot. We can see horrible things online whenever we want, from deep sea fish to the microorganisms that live inside our bodies, and we’ve learned to love them. But maybe there are things out there that are so alien that we’ll never be able to process them, either intellectually or emotionally.

“Gnosticism seems so natural in the twenty-first century, doesn’t it? Of course there’s a deeper truth to the universe. All we have to do is use science to figure it out. People publish their findings, and what they learn becomes real to us in the form of technological innovation. But the modern Western world didn’t invent science. Other cultures studied the stars and the principles of chemistry and physics long before Aristotle began giving lectures at his Lyceum. So why did gnostic ideas fall out of favor? Why did people stop thinking about the universe as a malleable series of experiential planes? I wonder if perhaps someone saw the monster on the other side of the door and decided that it would be better if the truth remained hidden.”

“Wow. I wish I could have recorded that.”

  Imad looked up from his tea. “What do you mean?”

“That would have been a fantastic interview for my podcast. You have a great voice for audio.”

“Do I?” Imad laughed, but his mirth vanished as his face twisted into a grimace.

Cole frowned. “Listen, Imad. You’re really not looking so great.”

“I’m fine.” As Imad rose to his feet, Cole couldn’t help notice the awkward movement of his body. The way his sweaters bunched around his torso was decidedly odd. Something like a thick strip of cloth hung from the back of the layers of fabric. As Cole watched Imad leave the room, he could have sworn that it twitched.

Cole returned to campus later that evening. He unlocked the department office and sat at his desk without turning on the lights. He considered making a show of checking his email, but the performance would be for no one’s benefit but his own. As long as he was here, he might as well get this over with. 

Cole wanted to tell himself he was sneaking around for Imad’s own good. That was true, to a certain extent, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He’d always regretted not investigating the waterlogged doll, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like that again. Still, as he set off down the dim corridor of faculty offices, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. The grad student office wasn’t a private space, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t violating Imad’s trust. 

There was no strange smell when he opened the office door, just the lingering aroma of bergamot tea. The two cubicles closest to the door were empty. Imad had claimed the cubicle by the window, and he’d dragged a table next to the wall behind his chair. It was covered in library books.

There was nothing unusual on Imad’s desk – a bottle of aspirin, a jumble of cheap pens, and a spare phone charger. He hadn’t pinned any photos to the corkboard cubicle divider, but a collection of thank-you cards from students was propped in a corner. Several manilla folders were stacked on top of each other in the opposite corner, each neatly labeled in Arabic.

Cole opened one of the folders. The paper inside was covered in dark smudges. This must be a copy of the manuscript scan Imad told him about. Cole didn’t know anything about Arabic, but even he could tell how bad the image quality was. It was amazing that Imad could read this at all. Interleaved between the photocopies were pages torn from a yellow legal pad. The loose papers were covered with annotations surrounding a handwritten English translation.

 Cole scanned what Imad had written, but none of it made sense to him. As far as he could tell, this particular passage had something to do with constellations. The next page was a clean photocopy of what must be a Latin translation, and the next was a translation of the Latin into severely antiquated English. Under that was a printed copy of the Wikipedia page about the sky quadrants used by medieval astronomers.

Something seized in Cole’s chest as he flipped through the pages. This was exactly the sort of academic work he once imagined himself doing. A lone scholar sitting at a quiet desk with nothing but paper and a pen as he studied ancient texts, taking careful notes while excavating the meaning of words written in centuries past. There was a certain romance to the idea, and Cole wasn’t at all surprised to find that Imad’s handwriting was as beautiful as his voice.

He picked up the legal pad sitting at the center of the desk and flipped to the last few pages. A word written in capital letters immediately caught his attention: SHOGGOTH. Under it, Imad had written: “What is formless will be given form. The shoggoth will heed the call of its creator, if called in a [dream??] voice speaking its proper name. That which hides in the deathless gap between hours can be retrieved by a shoggoth, grasped within its hands without hands.”

The next page contained a series of vectors that Imad had labeled with numbers and overlaid with pencil sketches of constellations. Cole recognized the Big Dipper of Ursa Major, as well as the three stars of Orion’s Belt, but something about the angles formed by the connected lines felt wrong. Looking at them too closely made his head hurt. 

The next page was a photocopy of an illuminated manuscript written in Latin. Cole didn’t understand Imad’s annotations, many of which were crossed out, but a square yellow sticky note appended to the bottom of the page caught his attention. Almost without being aware of it, he read the note out loud. “The hands without hands, fhtagn ph’nglui.”

As the words left his mouth, the image of the thick pale thread emerging from Imad’s sweaters jumped into Cole’s mind. He was struck by the smell of water. Roiling seas under an endless expanse of sky, stars and constellations without number, pinpricks of light fitting together into an intricate matrix of impossible geometry.

Something unpleasant rose in his throat. He barely made it to the bathroom in time.

Cole couldn’t leave the building quickly enough. He was sick again in the bushes beside the parking lot.

It was only sitting in his car, with the air conditioning blasting in his face, that his nausea dissipated. As he clutched the wheel, Cole chided himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. A cursed book was all well and good, but the notion of a cursed photocopy was absurd. He’d managed to spook himself for no reason. Whatever was going on with Imad had nothing to with star charts or Latin manuscripts. A section of the roof of Whateley Hall had collapsed during the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, and Cole wouldn’t be surprised if it had resulted in extensive water damage to the building. The insulation in the walls was more than likely riddled with mildew.  

Someone should get Imad set up in a different office. That someone, as it happened, was him. He’d bring it up tomorrow, Cole resolved as he backed out of his parking space. Still, he was troubled by the word Imad had written in rough letters at the top of his legal pad. What the hell was a shoggoth? 

Cole woke up the next morning haunted by a lingering sense of shame. What had possessed him to drive back to campus and sneak into Imad’s office? That was creepier than any cursed book could ever be. He needed to talk to Imad. Really talk to him. Maybe even ask him out to dinner.  

Cole washed his hair for the first time in a week and trimmed his beard as it dried. His apartment occupied the top floor of an old Queen Anne house, and the morning sun streamed through the tall windows under the peaked gambrel roof. Songbirds chirped in the branches of the stately ash tree growing beside the house. Cole had been toying with the possibility of moving back to Ohio, but he couldn’t deny that there was a certain charm to summer mornings in New England.

In the department office, he chatted with Peggy as he handled the visa paperwork of an incoming grad student, all the while feeling a sort of secondhand pride that someone would come all the way from abroad to study at Miskatonic. He ate lunch on the outside patio with the two elderly women who ran the office of the Modern Languages department. They showed him photos of their cats on their phones and told him stories about their grandchildren as they enjoyed the sunshine. Afterward, they brushed their teeth together in the women’s bathroom on the second floor, which they agreed was the nicest in Whateley Hall.

 Cole waited for Imad to come to the office. He waited so hard that he couldn’t read Wikipedia, not even the entry about the mysteriously nondescript warehouses used to house banks of internet servers. Everything he saw on social media annoyed him. Eventually he gave up on trying to do anything productive and opened a website that emulated screensavers from the 1990s.

After spending half an hour watching digital fish float through an overbright coral reef, Cole realized that he was being silly. It was a beautiful summer day. There was no need for him to kill time in an empty office while Imad was making himself sick looking at crusty photocopies of wizard nonsense for the sake of a dissertation that no one would ever read. 

Cole’s palms were sweaty as he knocked on the door of the grad student office. What if Imad had noticed that his research notes had been disturbed? 

“Imad?” he called out, but there was no answer. He wiped his hands on his pants before grasping the doorknob. At best, he’d have to apologize to Imad for going through his papers. At worst, he’d have to drive him to the hospital. 

There was another possibility: a void, a vacuum, a tear in the fabric of reality. A window opening onto an oceanic abyss trapped beneath sheets of ice for millennia. A silent city suspended under lightless stars. A multitude of insectile eyes focused on the present moment: a miniscule oasis in the ever-expanding desert of time and space. 

Cole opened the door. The office was empty.

The window was open, and a faint breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass into the room. A ceramic mug of tea sat on the table next to a laptop with a burnished copper finish. 

Cole closed the door and stepped back into the corridor, where he was greeted by a strange but familiar smell. The odor wasn’t unpleasant, just unusual. It reminded him of the lake shore where his uncles had hosted cookouts when he was a kid. He’d spent most of his summers indoors, reading his way through the local library’s paltry stock of fiction. His isolation made the outings to the lake with his cousins all the sweeter. In truth, Cole loved the smell of water, and he had a good idea of where it was coming from. 

He retraced his steps down the corridor until he arrived at the bathroom by the elevators. With no hesitation whatsoever, he went inside. 

At first, Cole didn’t understand the sight that greeted him. He recognized Imad’s face, but it took a few seconds to process the rest of him. Five fleshy appendages ringed with red patches of irritated skin emerged from Imad’s naked torso. The tentacles were limp but twitched spasmodically. 

Beads of sweat pooled on Imad’s forehead as he stared at Cole in horror, his sweaters clutched in his hands. “Listen, I don’t… I mean, I can explain,” he stammered. 

“You can explain later,” Cole replied, his concern for Imad’s discomfort winning out over his shock. “Just sit tight. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

Cole dashed to the department office, hoping against hope that Imad didn’t flee. He grabbed a can of ginger ale from the office minifridge and rushed back to the bathroom.

He found Imad sitting on the bench by the door. His face was utterly forlorn, and his tentacles waved listlessly in Cole’s direction. 

“Buddy, you’ve got to hydrate,” Cole said, popping the tab on the can of ginger ale.  

Imad accepted the can with a curt nod and drank. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The words of the ritual,” he muttered. “The book was a historiola, but I got the words wrong. I couldn’t read them correctly.”

“Maybe you can get them to send you a better photocopy next time,” Cole replied. “For the time being, you need to take better care of yourself. Your, uh… Tentacles? Can I call them that? Whatever’s going on there. It looks like they’re irritated by your clothing. Peggy has a giant bottle of hand lotion on her desk. I’m sure she won’t mind if you use it.” 

“This doesn’t bother you?” Imad asked.  

“It’s not making you evil or anything, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” Imad’s shoulders sagged. “It’s just a lot to get used to. And sometimes I see things I’m not sure are actually there.”

“What type of things? Anything fun?”

Imad managed a weak grin. “Why? Do you still want to interview me for your podcast?”

“Forget the podcast. But I’d love to talk with you. I’m not busy right now. Do you want to take a walk? Maybe go out for coffee or something?”

Imad’s tentacles perked up at the question. “Are you asking me out?” 

“I… yes. I’m sorry if that’s not appropriate. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“You don’t want to make me uncomfortable.” Imad stared at Cole in disbelief before breaking into laughter. His tentacles undulated with good cheer. 

Cole returned his smile. He’d been worried that something was terribly wrong with Imad, but this wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Imad’s tentacles were kind of cute. Perhaps they would have been more horrific if they’d come directly from a cursed book, but there wasn’t much damage a grainy photocopy could do. Whatever this Kitab al-Azif was, he and Imad could handle it together, preferably after they’d gotten something to eat. And who knows, it might even make a good episode for his podcast. 

The post The Annotated Kitab al-Azif appeared first on The New Absurdist.

We all know why we’re here: our country is being stolen. They’re here to take our food, they’re  here to take our jobs, and they’re here to take our homes. They think they’re entitled to our  healthcare. They think they’re entitled to our wealth. They think they’re entitled to our possessions.  We know what’s going on: they think they can be the new us. 

For too long, we have suffered this injustice. I say, no more! No more to their lack of morals! No  more to their terrible English! No more to their sucking on our women’s breasts! It’s time to act.  Babies will not replace us! 

Look around! Babies are everywhere: in our pre-schools, in our playgrounds, even in our maternity  wards! And they’re disgusting. They don’t even look like people. Their heads are gigantic, their  hair doesn’t grow right, and — and — Excuse me. It’s just so unnatural — no real human is that  short. We should not have to share our air with these aberrations.  

And have you ever talked to one of these monstrosities? It’s impossible. Many of them just make  noises. Not a word of English! And the rest are even worse. They need you to read to them. Can’t  do it themselves! No education! And they don’t even listen if you try. They refuse to understand.  You read about green eggs and ham and they talk about “gween eggs anam.” You read about three  little pigs and they go on about “free yidduw bigs.” And don’t get me started on Peter Piper picking  peppers! If they won’t hear us, why should we tolerate their presence? They have to go! 

Now, I know some say we should love babies. “Babies are God’s creatures,” they say. But I’ve  read the Bible. Look at Genesis! It’s right there. God created one man and one woman. Where are  the babies? Nowhere. It’s Adam and Eve, not Mommy and me. “We were all babies once,” they  say. But we’re not anymore. We left that behind. We’re better than them. “We need babies to keep  the population up,” they say. But what about the immigrants? Our beautiful immigrants need space  to live. Their accents are so musical and their cultures are so vibrant. We don’t need babies and  they don’t deserve our compassion! 

So what can we do? Well, first, deportations. The babies have to go. All of them. Back to where  they came from. Back to women’s bellies. It will take determination, but if we do enough chopping,  and grinding, and maybe seasoning, our women, our capable, capable women, can eat all the babies  within a year. Then they’ll be gone. And then? Then we make sure no more of those minuscule  abominations enter our great country ever again: We need new laws to defend ourselves. Our  schools must teach the dangers of heterosexual sex. Free contraception must be available to the entire population. And abortions — abortions, our God-sent panacea! — abortions must be  mandatory. Everywhere. For everyone. The character of our country is at stake.  

We can’t wait any longer to save ourselves from being replaced. We must act. And we must act  now! Vote for me and I promise to do everything in my power to save our way of life. Down with  the babies and up with the flag! Make our country grown again! Now is our time! 

Thank you. God bless you and God bless our great nation. 

The post The Growth of a Nation appeared first on The New Absurdist.

I start this not to suggest that there is anything I feel against this motif. I, too, am a lover of Wendy Cope’s The Orange, or Gary Soto’s Oranges, or even Roisin Kelly’s poem by the same name. My favorite rendition of this is JP Infante’s Yasica, Puerto Plata. 

“When I saw my great-grandmother peel a tangerine with her bare hands while men used knives for oranges, she became god.  I imagined what she could do with the sun.” (excerpt from Yasica, Puerto Plata) 

There is an endearment to writings like these, I think, that a lot of people find. That idea of someone taking you, the orange, in two gentle hands, tearing your skin to find what is truly you, pulpy and tender and hidden away. But why? Where does this come from? Why detach from our human selves and find understanding in citrus? 

Among the many opinionated literary folks of the world, there are some people who are completely exhausted by this idea, even calling it a cliché. Some string it alongside the common writings on pomegranate, a fruit that had come to have symbolism for feminism and love but has since become a sort of indicator for ‘bad,’ ‘performative’ TikTok poetry. The same has begun to happen with figs, after Sylvia Plath’s fig tree concept. 

But I am not here to discuss pomegranates or figs. Rather, I see oranges tumbling down into the same rabbit hole of dilution. 

For one, even as oranges find their way into language and writing time and time again, they can also be found in metaphor and phrases, like in Spanish. The phrase ‘mi media naranja’ or ‘my orange half’ refers to the idea that every person has another half that they are constantly in search of, suggesting a kind of destiny or generational connection that goes far beyond what we see in this one life we see presently. This is often linked back to the Greek myth recorded by Plato in The Symposium, where the idea that every soul is missing its other half is also expressed, claiming that Zeus caused this divide out of the arrogance of humans.

With this origin, I found a sort of poetry alone in the fact that oranges and many citrus fruits are the only fruits to be naturally subdivided, while usually for these orange metaphors the focus is primarily on the peel. You split one open — with a knife, maybe, like JP Infante’s poem — and half the work has been done for you, politely waiting with the segments in their expected places. 

I believe part of our exhaustion with oranges can be found in this. We give them surface level meaning, as surface level as the 3mm vivid, aromatic peel. The irony in this is that part of the symbolism we are always creating with oranges is about seeing things beyond their simplicity, like the orange peel theory; the idea that how or if someone peels an orange for you can indicate affection or care. 

Dare I say this theory has watered down the juice. To stop at the peel is to lose so much of the magic that can be found here! Dig a little deeper into the bright sun of it and find, perhaps, Amy Schmidt’s Abundance, in memory of Mary Oliver. 

“It’s impossible to be lonely 

when you’re zesting an orange. 

Scrape the soft rind once 

and the whole room 

fills with fruit. 

Look around: you have 

more than enough. 

Always have. 

You just didn’t notice 

until now.” 

This poem follows Mary Oliver’s Oranges, which I think also seeks further into the idea. 

“Cut one, the lace of acid 

rushes out, spills over your hands. 

You lick them, manners don’t come into it. 

Orange−the first word you have heard that day−”

(excerpt from Oranges) 

I think what often happens with poetry as it circulates online is a gradual misunderstanding of meanings. This present day loves to take a concept and spin it into one specific thing, keep it contained in a box that doesn’t allow further critical thinking or creativity (like orange peel theory!). We consume things quickly, in small rushes of dopamine that fade as quickly as they come. The same has happened to oranges.

When do the mundane things become beautiful, and vice versa? How does the repetitive nature of our modern day prevent us from being able to enjoy these poetic motifs? Sometimes things must be taken deeper than they are, looked at from a new angle, given new life. What I mean to say is sometimes you can’t garner the meaning from the simplest of explanations or viewpoints. Take a dip into another set of eyes, find the angle. 

To be able to absorb these ideas with a grain of salt — seeing past the misuse and confusion caused by modern day media — is to be able to peel past the skin, find the segments, see what more there is to something mundane.

The post In Defense of Wendy Cope, Gary Soto, Roisin Kelly, etc. appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Before Vlad had time enough to imagine his own mirthful tableau, the receptionist  beckoned him to enter the office.  

“Ah, Prince Țepeș!” Mr. Apate smiled, shaking his hand. “It is so good to meet you,” 

“Good day Mr. Apate.”  

“Please, call me Dolus. All my friends do.”  

“Then you must call me Vlad,” the prince replied.  

Dolus motioned Vlad to sit on a leather chair in front of a mahogany desk, as he seated himself on the other side.  

“So Prince Țepeș…I mean Vlad, how can I be of service?”  

“I want to change my image. When people think of me they see a bloodthirsty monster.  It’s not helpful for my day-to-day transactions.”  

Dolus grinned.  

“You’ve come to the right place. Here at Mirage Media we specialize in…how shall I put  it? Image softening.”  

“I don’t want to seem soft,” Vlad explained. 

“Of course not!” Dolus replied. “You will still be you. Powerful in every way. Just kinder, gentler.”  

“But I fear it’s too late.”  

“Nonsense! At Mirage Media time is a malleable concept. Tell me Vlad, who has been tarnishing your reputation?”  

“Don’t you first need to know what’s being said?” Vlad asked.  

Dolus chuckled.  

“Not at all. To dismiss an accusation, you must first discredit the accuser.” 

“Sensible,” Vlad nodded in agreement. “There is a man. An Irishman by the name of  Stoker who writes monstrous things about me.”  

Dolus took notes.  

“Tell me everything you know about this Stoker.”  

“I don’t know much. We’ve never met.”  

“No?” Dolus asked. “Then how does he write about you?”  

“He reads reports about me and speaks with my Translyanian compatriots, peasants really.”  

“So his accusations are based on rumors,” Dolus noted. “Does he claim any facts?” 

“How could he? He’s never even visited my country.”  

“Fake news!” Dolus exclaimed. “It will be an easy thing to dismiss this gossip monger.” 

“But what of the reports? Can you dismiss these as well?”  

“Ah, yes,” Dolus cleared his throat. “Here we will require some details. Tell me what are the accusations against you.” 

“Well first, there’s my nickname,” Vlad suggested bashfully. “You know — Țepeș —  meaning the Impaler.”  

With his right hand, Vlad mimed holding a stick and thrusting it upward. 

Continuing to explain, he added, “I know it sounds bad but it wasn’t just me, everyone was impaling. Honestly, we were at war with the Ottomans and they did it too.” 

Dolus waved his hand in the kind of motion you might use to stop a small child’s whining.  

“Vlad there is no need for justifications. Mirage Media is a judgment free zone. Tell me about these Ottomans.”  

“Yes, they were bad ones. They came from Turkey. They attacked us!”  

Dolus’s face lit up.  

“These Ottomans, are they by chance Muslim?”  

“Yes.”  

“Terrific! That’s the angle we’ll play. You were merely defending against Al Qaeda agents. Going tit for tat or…as the case may be, spike for spike with these terrorists to defend your homeland. You’re a hero, not a monster!”  

Vlad smiled.  

“So Vlad is that all the dirt or is there anything else?” Dolus asked.  

“Well…” Vlad cast his eyes downward.  

“Tell me Vlad. We can’t have any secrets.” 

“There were some bad people in my country, a nasty lot. I found out they betrayed me, so I got a little angry. I wanted to teach them a lesson. Not slaughter them mind you, but just make sure they’d be too afraid to ever defy me again.”  

Dolus impatiently tapped his fingers on his desk.  

“And?” he coaxed.  

“Well, I kind of roasted their children and fed them to these people for supper.” 

Dolus made no sound. He propped his elbows on the desk, closed his eyes and placed both hands under his chin.  

“I didn’t kill all the children, just a few,” Vlad clarified.  

For one minute and twelve seconds Dolus remained in complete motionless silence. Then he opened his eyes.  

“How were there reports of this? Did you make any announcement?”  

“Not at all. I suppose the story was spread by servants. They really are a chatty group, my servants.”  

“So these reports were based only on what they saw?”  

“I suppose so,” Vlad replied.  

“And what they saw were a bunch of roasted babies?”  

“Not a bunch, just a few.”  

“Wonderful!” Dolus proclaimed. “They only have the proof that their eyes have shown them and that is no proof at all.”  

“But the babies looked like babies. It was cute. My cooks placed little apples in their mouths—” 

“Listen,” Dolus interrupted. “Have you tasted those “Inconceivable Burgers”? They’re amazing! No one could distinguish them from real beef. They look and taste just like a  hamburger. Now they’re making the Inconceivable Chicken. It’ll be exactly like the roast bird itself.”  

“What does this have to do with me?” Vlad asked.  

“We’ll just run a story that you were testing out a new vegan product. It’s 100% soy based and flavored to taste like human flesh for vegetarians who want to indulge in the cannibal experience.”  

Vlad felt giddy.  

“These ideas are fabulous…but…”  

Vlad’s expression began to sour.  

“As I tried to explain earlier, it’s too late.”  

“It’s never too late.” Dolus declared. “Mirage Media has worked throughout the ages,  supporting nobles, presidents, and celebrities of all sorts. We provide our clients with insurance  that the masses will have the correct interpretation of history.”  

“But I’m dead!” Vlad exclaimed. “I don’t exist. There is no substance to me, I’m merely an apparition.”  

Dolus Apate smiled.  

“That’s not a problem. All of our clients could say the same.” 

The post A Kinder, Gentler Impaler appeared first on The New Absurdist.

“Do you like it?” she asks, her torso draped over the jewelry counter from the strain of reaching over to place the ring on my finger. The counters are designed to mitigate physical interaction between the cashiers and customers, but her determination to outfit me in her homemade bling took precedence over the layout of the register counter.

“I do,” I reply. She points a finger adorned with a blue acrylic gem at the tray of green-stoned
jewelry.

“Let me see those.” Her eyes peer up at me from underneath the bang that runs across the front
of her harsh black bob.

She’s imposing, despite her petite stature at four-foot-nine. She doesn’t even need to bend down to see what’s in the jewelry case. She’s a televangelist on a Korean-language prayer hour broadcast on local cable in a less-than primetime slot. She comes in once a week to pass out her handwritten business cards and paw through the secondhand jewelry. She is a blinged-out Virgin Mary, a neon fresco cast in flesh, a disciple of Tammy Faye.

The televangelist holds up a necklace with a large gem in an opaque lime neon color: a faceted octahedron dangling from a chain coated in green residue formed from the neck sweat of its previous owner. It likely belonged to a small time drag queen who pivoted careers to a desk job when their dreams of stardom didn’t find them before they were booted from their parents’ health insurance.

Her vanity—her total disregard for anything that won’t sparkle on camera—is refreshing. That’s
the televangelist in her.

She sets aside the pendant and nods to me, the signal to set it aside for purchase. She picks up a necklace made of green plastic beads. Costume jewelry is difficult to sell; the consumer mindset it appeals to is one of theatricality, of the self-conscious performance of glamor. The wearers of kitsch like this, tacky even by the standards of their years of manufacture, take pleasure in the effacement of modern tastes. In their shared simulacrum of wealth, they create the images of the culture of unapologetic plastic overflow they grew up in: the intentional kitsch of Dynasty, the series. An untrained eye would discount it as camp. The costume-jewelry buyers’s covetousness is paradoxical: the sheen of something like costume jewelry implies the kind of richness that is frowned upon in the Bible: “Proverbs 25:16: If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.” But the actual value is little more than the materials it’s made of; they buy to invent the glamorous image that they feel represents them. Overconsumption, the performance of it, is a vice that they can only afford at a secondhand store.

The televangelist settles on the neon green necklace and a pair of earrings with resin stones dyed off-aquamarine. Four dollars. She walks out after promising to return next week. The bejeweled gift was accompanied by her business card. It’s a small piece of green cardstock with her name and channel number printed on the front and the words “Read Romans 5” printed on the back, followed by the word “sin” in parentheses.

I read the passage a few hours later in the breakroom. It serves as a short introduction to finding salvation from humanity’s inherent sin, with familiar characters like Adam and Jesus Christ, even to someone not raised in the church—any church—like myself. “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope,” declares the passage. This is the gospel that her rings symbolize: if trash can be made into something beautiful, so can the wearer.

That’s the ethos of this charity shop, named after Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, which serves a hospital on the West Side of Chicago bearing the same name. The store has resold the donated items of Chicagoans since it opened in the 1980s. The televangelist is one of the neighborhood oddities who traffic through the charity shop: day roamers like trust fund babies, night janitors, social security pensioners, and anyone else without a place in the normal working hours of the workday. These people are older in age. The youngest of the charity shop evangelists, as I have taken to calling them, are sixty.

Most of them have accrued the physical afflictions that come with age: liver spots, wrinkles, pallor, cataracts, varicose veins, and other signs of the body’s denigration. Many of them show signs of more extreme maladies. In the case of the lifelong smokers, they have blackened gums and missing teeth—much too expensive to replace at the same rate as they fall out (they just keep them out and stick to soft foods). Some have tumors hanging from the side of their larynx. Benign, suspended in a brief moment of inactivity like the life of the body it’s grown from. For now, we are together. And then one day we won’t be.

The unstoppable march of modernity has left these folks in an alien culture, a space-age landscape run on technology too sleek to have been created by human hands. While the world around them strives towards the future they, the oldest, have been left behind by digital payments and Instagram stories. They have been left behind by trend cycles in a culture of constant novelty. So as an expression of their style, for their unbridled confidence in old age, as a protest
against the sidewalk treaders who would rather ignore them, they dress boldly.

The women favor loudly patterned blouses adorned with shiny brooches. Sometimes they wear animal prints: leopard and zebra like the wealthy of yesteryear. Their furs aren’t real. The prints that adorn these archetypal church ladies, signal a love for the personal expression of glamor; a word that has come to mean very little when used to describe clothing made to order en masse from thin pleather, polyester, and wall insulation. The men dress in business casual, accessorize with feathers, rings, and uniquely-rimmed eyeglasses. If they require an aid for their mobility, they will often opt for a wooden walking stick, updated dressings of a Biblical prophet costume. Style is a lost art in the age of convenience, wherein an outfit can be made to order and shippedfrom overseas in minutes. But in a place like a charity shop, the customer must hunt for their purchases. The sensibility persists in those that the age of convenience is not convenient for.

Most are religious. Not as religious as the televangelist, but religious enough to make an occasional reference to God at the checkout counter: “God bless your customer service!” Every day they come, willing to trade their allotted spending cash from their Social Security for tchotchkes, jewelry, clothing, even electronics past their obsolescence in this economy of reduced capacity. Here, we all gather under the denomination of trade. The gospel of the manufacture of goods is recited: “Hardwood furniture really isn’t what it used to be,” and “It’s so hard to find clothing without any plastic in it nowadays.” Their belief in an unchanging higher power is hand-in-hand with the persistence of objects that have resisted obsolescence. True believers may find evidence of a higher power in the endurance of the trappings of a world that once welcomed them; a person may find evidence of God in a bakelite Mah-jong set.

The whole thing occupies a rented warehouse with enough donated furniture to give extreme home makeovers to the entire population of a small township. Once through the front doors, customers walk down the center aisle through the heaping piles of vintage furniture in the front to the cash register planted in the middle of the sales floor: the functional altar helmed by someone like me who has been in the store long enough to know them by name. Behind the checkout counter is everything else: the clothing racks, the shelves of books, the piled home goods. They stay, sometimes for hours, in the makeshift pews assembled from secondhand dining sets and office chairs (and at one time, an actual pew donated by a now-defunct Baptist Church in West Chicago). They’ve been coming for years, some since the store opened, during the daylight hours when the rest of the city is working or in school.

Items are donated to the charity shop for lack of need, lack of love, lack of life. The largest donations are from deaths. Sometimes the death is inferred, like in a shipment that contained a marked up copy of the book “Live Free of Cancer” and the remnants of a last meal putrefied on the surface of an unwashed dinner plate. Other times it’s more obvious, such as when the previous owner’s belongings are shipped alongside the person’s ashes in an urn. The disembodied connection between donor and customer is like the relationship between saint and reveler. The continued subsistence of the store and those that depend on it comes from gifts of these deities of outgrown paraphernalia; and thus we are rewarded with shipments from the Patron Saints of Neiman Marcus Cashmere and Nabokov literature.

A young woman bought a night light in the shape of the Virgin Mary for three dollars. It was an opaque piece of plastic molded in the shape of the Madonna holding a baby, from the crook of her swaddling arms up to a halo around her head. A lightbulb was placed inside her cranium via an opening in the back and when the figure was plugged into an electric socket, a glow emitted from her halo, casting light onto the open wall beyond her. It had likely been donated by another Christian who had found enough comfort in the Lord’s protection that they no longer needed the light while they slept.

Religious objects are bought quickly. These are things like wall crucifixes, Jewish prayer books, even a tee shirt from the extreme end of the evangelical spectrum that said “Vaccinated in the Blood of Christ” (which, unless owned ironically, likely arrived as part of a death shipment). As it functions in America, religion is an institution that the masses participate in by buying the pieces of their own shrines at home: small fetishes made from the reappropriated artworks of the Romantic Period, endowed with no ephemeral divinity other than the shared belief held by buyers—the essence of the American free market.

The American spirit of self-determination claims that the spirit of God can reside within everyone, but is best shown outwardly by purchasing. Most of the modern empires of faith have had less to do with the holiness of their geographic location and more to do with the naivete of the surrounding people who live there. Many have crumbled beneath the weight of the crimes perpetrated by the con artist behind the gilded desk at its megachurch headquarters: the Falwells, the Bakkers, the Shamblins. And evangelical sites that aren’t taken down through the conventional method of prosecution for white-collar crimes often dissolve after an FBI raid and a classification of their beliefs as a cult.

That was the version of religion that I saw growing up: a cult of hypocrisy that used the image of an omniscient creator to hide behind their bigotry about the things that they did not understand. And as I got older and grew into myself as a queer man, my disdain for their way of thinking only festered. I was raised in an atheist household. I had no conception of a higher power at a young age except for my parents, who I knew were responsible for bringing me into the world. I was a product of love—not divine love but mortal infatuation un-entwined with any sense of cosmic destiny. I was a product of hormones and a honeymoon in Eastern Europe. There was comfort in the simplicity of my birth—I navigated the world without residual guilt of the suffering of any saints at the behest of my inherent sin. I felt nothing at the sight of the crown of thorns, at the figure of Jesus emaciated on the little cross jewelry that my classmates wore. But when I felt lonely I had nothing to turn to for comfort.

Belief in a higher power was an immaterial concept, a shared falsehood I couldn’t comprehend during my developmental years. Because the way that evangelical religion functions in America rests on tiny acts of divine intervention. These were any happenings before the eyes of the congregation that gently stretched the laws of physics: bursting stage lights, speaking in tongues, the face of Jesus inscribed in toast. The faith I was an outside observer to was merely an audience captivated by sleight of hand magic. No matter how hard I squinted, the browning on my toast remained absent of even minor gods.

Without experiencing the devotion that is built out of religious rituals, there was little for an outside observer like myself to find appealing. Every interaction I had with prayer, every time my skin prickled at the utterance of the word “God” was colored by the fact that I thought I was too smart to fall into the mindset of religiosity. But could I be blamed? There is little appeal in modern Christianity: the brash, bulldog ideology that was created from the attempt to merge the New Testament with American mass culture. I had, and have no interest in erudition from Mark Wahlberg or the crucifixion pageant performed by Marvel superheroes.

The current world shaped by the Industrial Revolution has begun to rapidly depreciate as it reaches the limits of what can be gutted. Paradoxically, the Bible preaches against loving the world in place of the higher power that created it: “John 2:15: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Yet there is an innate desire of the world’s inhabitants to find meaning, even pleasure in the state it has been left
in, in lieu of reverence to a higher power. The garbage is already here. It can be enjoyed at least.

In the case of entirely secondhand decadence sold at a charity shop like this one, the items have already been consumed and discarded. With a new owner, the synthetic undergoes a resurrection, which offers a different way to interpret the definition of “decadent.” For a culture like America’s, one that shrugs off the principles upon which it was founded in favor of perennial modernity, lots of waste is left behind. So when confronted with photographs of landscapes decimated by chemical runoff and sea life asphyxiated on shoelace aglets, a rational person would feel compelled to clear out their Amazon cart and rescue some pre-loved items from their destiny as trash, to thrift. Overconsumption isn’t the problem, it’s hyper-metabolization, the secular shame of fetishized novelty.

Despite its service, desire for new things has reached such a fever pitch that the store has begun to fall into obsolescence. Most of the clothing that has been donated displays the tags of already-defunct fast fashion retailers, made from more plastic than actual cloth. The housewares have more frequently come from the shelves of Walmart and Home Goods which the original buyer tired of after a few uses. Though they’re returning to the economy, these things weren’t meant to last very long anyways. The line between donations and tax-deductible waste disposal has begun to blur.

The cash register receipts must be wound by hand now that the gears of the machine no longer turn. The clothing racks sway with every shove of the hangers, thrown off balance from the weight of the load they bear. And when a counter drawer collapsed beneath the weight of miscellany, doomed to otherwise be forgotten among safety pins and sticky notes, a small piece of paper inscribed with the Virgin Mary was revealed, shoved between the cabinet wall and the drawer slide. It was a flier given by a Catholic Church with the Memorare prayer: “Remember, O most compassionate Virgin Mary,” it read, “that never was it known that anyone who fled your protection, implored your assistance, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

The store’s inventory grants customers intercession, a deliverance from the weight of a necessity that can only be alleviated with a purchase. “Things tend to find people here,” is what my boss told me when I started, “so don’t worry about trying to push people to buy things. If they want something, they’ll buy it.” But in order to complete the transaction, to receive the offering made, they must actually buy it at the cash register, the altar equipped with altar people like myself to aid them. And while I do not believe in divine providence, I believe in the power of a salient community united in the religious-adjacent belief that if they revere the charity shop, it will return blessings unto them. I am a part of an intangible network that is much larger than myself. I receive from them for my servitude to their holy site, most often loose cigarettes, even though I tell them I don’t smoke: “Let this humble gift bring you a little bit closer to Heaven in exchange for your kindness.”

The televangelist comes back one evening, within the hour of the store’s closure.

“I’ll be quick,” she says. “I want to see that.” Her bejeweled finger hovers over a necklace of warm-toned glass beads like a string of hard candies.

“That’s pretty,” I say.

“I know,” she replies. “I’ve got good taste. You see what I buy.”

“Are you going to make it into rings?”

“Yes.”

“Can you save one for me?”

“Maybe. There are some people at a jewelry store over there—” she gestures eastward, “that want to buy some.” She winks at me and leaves. She will be back for more supplies soon, just like the rest of the sidewalk roamers that find themselves drawn back to the store each day. 

They, the practitioners of the secondhand gospel, will tread the sidewalk every week until their hip, or heart gives out. And when it does, their estate will send a truckload of their leftover belongings to the shop, which I will sell to another wanderer, just like them.

The post Charity Shop Evangelists appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Since I don’t want to be a physical girl I’d settle for being an intangible idea. A symbol of a girl. The thought that my physical form simply represents a girl, a girl that signifies some greater principle or dogma, is attractive and cathartic. A girl so singular yet all-encompassing, free from the burden of constructing a complex identity. To be treated as a religious or political symbol, rooted in the Earth and its history, would mean to be treated with the dignity and respect of a perfect representation. Whenever I pass by a mirror I think of my dog, and I don’t look myself in the eyes. I pretend I’m a universal girl, on the cover of a newspaper or a missing person’s poster. I pretend I’m a vessel for communicating the decay of society, or a new mascara brand. Only looked at for what I symbolize. 

I was reading The Name of the Rose, and found a passage that stuck out to me concerning singularity and universal ideas. Eco writes: “I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. And in any case, what I knew of the universal horse had been given to me by those traces, which were singular. I could say I was caught at that moment between the singularity of the traces and my ignorance, which assumed the quite diaphanous form of a universal idea.” I stopped to picture myself as a horse, as Adso of Melk, as a girl. My skin clasped around my bones tightly. I was caught up in the dissonance between universal symbols and individual meanings. 

I remember my trip to Istanbul, when I stepped into a mosque that was not a mosque at all, but a coalescence of holy worship. Half mosque, half church, remnants of conquest were vivid and visceral on the walls of the Hagia Sophia. Its religious purpose had always been dictated by whoever ruled over Constantinople, and to the current Turkish government it was undoubtedly a mosque. Christian and Islamic paintings blurred into each other, ending abruptly in destroyed ruins. They were erased and painted over by hand; the symbol transformed at the whim of men. On metro walls in Vienna, I saw how swastikas became grids for tic-tac-toe, passerby filling in the X’s and O’s as the symbol slowly deteriorated in form and meaning. Originally, the swastika was a cultural and religious symbol implying fortune and well-being. I somehow felt its development was buried deep within the metro walls, until it finally succumbed under a graffiti artist’s hand. 

In the dawn of Yugoslavia, my great-grandfather embraced the atheist label. An aspiring academic, he had studied theology in Sarajevo as a young man. To him, religious scripture was merely a text to be critically studied. His wife, on the other-hand, adorned the hijab; a label of staunch resistance to his intellectualism. Obviously, he could not be an intellectual with a covered wife, as these two universal ideas had no point of intersection. When friends visited their home or they attended public events, they reached a compromise: my great-grandmother would wear a wig, so that he could maintain his reputation and she could maintain her faith. Their identities meant virtually nothing in relation to each other only a few years prior. The symbols seemed stronger than the very individuals that created them. Engulfing them in false universality, strict and unforgiving. 

I believed symbols are so entrenched in history and connotation that I forgot they are so malleable. I watched them break, bend, and stretch, yet still had faith in their durability. “A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays in town for 3 days, then leaves on Friday. How did he do it?,” my grandfather asked me when I was a child. He still loves to ask me riddles, and always the most ridiculous kind. The horse’s name was Friday. I know that now. Back then, I wouldn’t have fathomed that response. It’s instinctive to always assume the name ‘Friday’ denotes the fifth day of a week, a symbol of time passed. The riddle shows how hesitant we are to accept the fallible nature of symbols, that Friday is the fifth day of a week but it can also be the name of a horse. There is nothing essential about the name ‘Friday’ to the passing of time; ‘Friday’ can be changed by governments and drawn over with spray paint. Much like Eco’s horse, the horse in my grandfather’s riddle is far from a representation of a universal idea. It’s only our ignorance that gives it such a form. 

Perhaps becoming a symbol would not be very different to what I am already. Perhaps the vulnerable flesh of a living, breathing girl is not very different to the vulnerability of an obsolete symbol. Both require theatrical fabrication, and elaborate myths about their supposed power. I look in the mirror once more, smiling. I am not a universal girl. The horse’s name was Friday.

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